We have 82 Ale House Licence records covering the pubs in the Old Town 1754 –1770. The Woodward Survey includes the names and locations of The George Inn, the Red Lyon, the Crown and the Kings Arms. We know that the tenants of other buildings in the Old Town held licences before that, particularly on the market place. Most unfortunately there are then no more Ale House Licence for Milton Abbas parish before 1821. We do not know if this is because the records are missing or Lord Milton did not allow “any inn or alehouse or place of public entertainment” in the new village. We know that Lord Milton did not allow this from deeds dated 1780 and 1787 to tenants of the “new building” in the new village.
A building appears on the site of the present Hambro Arms on the Jennings Survey map of the new village in 1806 but is not named as a pub or inn. Subsequently there was an inn on the site known first as The Earl of Dorchester Arms until 1829 and then the Portarlington Arms until 1852. An innkeeper, John Pearce, appears for the first time in the new village on Land Tax records in 1811. There was also an inn in the parish at the Milton End of Winterborne Whitechurch on the London Road from before 1770 until very recently, known for most of the eighteenth century and nineteenth centuries as The Kings Arms. There was a malthouse in the new village at Milton Abbas from its very beginning in the 1780s and some villagers may have brewed beer for their own use.
Milton Abbas Local History Group, Dorset, UK 