 The name was spelt in various other ways such as Bosom's Inn.These names were either a corruption of "blossom" or, perhaps, a fanciful alternative meaning as Deloney's "Thomas of Reading" says "Our jolly clothiers kept up their courage and went to Bosom's Inn, so called from a greasy old fellow who always went nudging with his head in his bosom..." Ben Jonson used this spelling in "Christmas, His Masque" with the lines, "But now comes Tom of Bosom's Inn, and he presenteth Misrule".When the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, visited Henry VIII in 1522, the inn was recorded as having twenty beds and stabling for sixty horses.