Chicken missing from the Richard Jefferies Museum found in pub

After this morning's sad news about a duck race, here is a happier fowl-related story. A chicken missing from the Richard Jefferies Museum at Coate Water, Swindon, was found in the pub down the road.

As the Swindon Advertiser puts it:

On a sunny Sunday, staff at the Sun Inn pub near Coate Water were shocked when an unusually feathered customer paid them a surprise visit, bringing an altogether different type of hen party to the one they might be used to. 

Bewildered at the arrival of the runaway bird and trying to find out where it had come from, the pub posted a picture of it onto its social media and asked 'anybody lost a chicken'. ...

The chicken was called Maxima and had taken a quick trip down the road from the nearby Richard Jefferies Museum. 

Her owner, Suzie Simmons made her own post on the Swindon Community Notice Board Facebook page, thanking the boozer for its hospitality. 

And here is Richard Jefferies, illuminating as ever, in his 1874 essay The Farmer at Home:

The brewhouse was an important feature when all farmers brewed their own beer and baked their own bread. At present the great majority purchase their beer from the brewers, although some still brew large quantities for the labourers' drinking in harvest time. 

At a period when comparatively little ready money passed between employer and employed, and the payment for work was made in kind, beer was a matter which required a great deal of the attention of the farmer, and absorbed no little of his time. 

At this day it is a disputed matter which is cheapest, to buy or to brew beer: at that time there was no question about it. It was indisputably economical to brew.