What kind of building was it, in Arnold's 'Thyrsis', which bore 'Sibylla's name'?

Question

Matthew Arnold's elegy for his friend Arthur Hugh Clough, 'Thyrsis' is full of cryptic references to the landscape around the city of Oxford, as it was in the poet's lifetime. It begins:

How changed is here each spot man makes or fills!
In the two Hinkseys nothing keeps the same;
The village street its haunted mansion lacks,
And from the sign is gone Sibylla's name,
And from the roofs the twisted chimney-stacks—
Are ye too changed, ye hills?
See, 'tis no foot of unfamiliar men
To-night from Oxford up your pathway strays!
Here came I often, often, in old days—
Thyrsis and I; we still had Thyrsis then.

What kind of building is it whose absence Arnold seems to regret? The term the poet uses, 'mansion', is perhaps a bit misleading for a modern reader. I would imagine that what he had in mind was closer to one of the definitions found in Johnson's Dictionary: either 'The lord’s house in a manor', or, more likely, simply 'Place of residence; abode; house'.

My initial suspicion was that Arnold is referring to a pub named The Sibylla (or something similar), and this seems to have been confirmed by some recollections of The Rev George King:

My father was born in the village street which lacked its haunted mansion. The old twisted hollow tree of the Scroggs legend, the ferryboat, the swing gate, all are gone; the Fishes Inn remains. Sometimes on pleasant summer Sunday evenings the family would walk through the wheatfields to the other Hinksey, whose inn even in Arnold's time no longer bore Sibylla's name. Arnold disliked change. What would he think now his beloved fields have become thickly populated housing estates.

But the more I think about that explanation, the less sense it makes:

1. King's contention that the building was a pub/inn seems to be an inference, rather than being based on any direct evidence.
2. Sibylla is a very odd name for a pub.
3. Perhaps Sibylla is a lady whom Arnold once knew, whose family once ran the pub/owned the house, the name of which thus included Sibylla's surname?
4. Perhaps Sibylla is a classical reference, 'Thyrsis' being a wonky retelling of Theocritus' Idyll I with some of Virgil's seventh Eclogue VII mixed in?

Who was Sibylla? And what sort of building bore her name?

Answer 1

Francis Wylie explains that the “haunted mansion” and the tavern whose sign bore “Sibylla’s name” were two different buildings in two different villages:

Sibylla! Not just the name you would expect to find on a tavern sign-board. But Arnold was not inventing. The hostess of the Cross Keys in South Hinksey in Arnold’s time was, in sober fact, one Sybella Curr. She died in 1860, as you can read on her tombstone in the churchyard, a few steps from the gate; and her name would have disappeared from the sign shortly before Arnold revisited this countryside, after Clough’s death, ‘accumulating stores’† for the new poem he had in mind. But you must not take the present Cross Keys inn, with its imposing signboard, for Sybella’s; that, it seems, was on the other side of the road.

If the twisted chimney stacks were also in this village, Arnold lamented their disappearance prematurely, for two of them were still there as late as 1904, as is noted by a writer in the Oxford Magazine of that date. But they may just as well have been in the sister Hinksey—North Hinksey; for in that village too Arnold must certainly have been when he came to wander about this country and revive old memories. The changes he notes so sadly are, after all, in ‘the two Hinkseys’; and in fact the ‘haunted mansion’ was not in South Hinksey, but in North—and where it stood is known.

_{† Letter to his mother, April 25, 1863.}

_{Francis Wylie (1940). ‘The Scholar-Gipsy Country’. In C. B. Tinker and H. F. Lowry, editors (1940). The Poetry of Matthew Arnold: A Commentary, pages 355–356. Oxford University Press.}

This corroborates the memories of George King quoted in the question. King says that his “father was born in the village street which lacked its haunted mansion”. This village was most likely North Hinksey, because his father’s funeral in 1916 was at the “little Norman Church at North Hinksey”. Then he adds that “on pleasant summer Sunday evenings the family would walk through the wheatfields to the other Hinksey, whose inn even in Arnold's time no longer bore Sibylla's name” (my emphasis). So the inn was in South Hinksey as claimed by Wylie.

Top: the Cross Keys pub in South Hinksey after it closed in 1990 (source: IMS Vintage Photos). Middle: the same building (16 Manor Road) after some renovation, on Google Street View (image capture: July 2023). Bottom: the building across the street (15 Manor Road), possibly the Cross Keys known to Arnold?