While the Royal Stag is by far the oldest pub in the village, both as a building and an inn, there have been at least six others at various times in the past, of which only two are still in business. None of them has ever had the status of a major coaching inn like those on the Bath Road in Colnbrook and Slough, and Datchet was not one of the main staging posts where new teams of horses would be provided for hire. However, the Manor Hotel was probably the most prestigious inn by the late 1800s and the only one, apart from the Royal Stag, with a continuous history from the 1750s to the present.

The Lord of the Manor owned the whole range of houses on the south side of the Green, from the Old Council Offices, the Manor Houses, Manor Cottages, the Manor Hotel and the site of the Wine Rack on the opposite corner at the top of the High Street. In the past, all of these would have been dwelling houses of varying grandeur rented out, and the present hotel probably began its life as a fairly substantial cottage. It was first licensed in 1753 and although it may have operated as an alehouse before that time there is no record of it being one. The Lord of the Manor's other 'pub', on the off licence's site opposite, was much older. It was called the White Hart and was first mentioned by name in 1565, but it was rebuilt as a shop in the 1880s.

The core of the Manor Hotel building probably dates from the 1600s but has been added to and remodelled many times since then, most comprehensively in 1888. In that year the corner block was extended and the whole was given a mock-timbered façade in a style similar to the Manor House. Perhaps this was the point when it was decided to do away with the dilapidated old White Hart and concentrate on one more 'up-market' hotel. The earliest known name for the Manor Hotel is the Half Moon (from 1753), followed by the Horse and Groom (from 1766) and then the present name from sometime between 1853-1877. Having said that none of the inns were substantial coaching inns, the Royal Stag and the Manor Hotel would certainly have made provision for stabling horses, and the change of name to Horse and Groom suggests that this was an inn rather than a humbler alehouse.

Two stories are told about this pub, of which one is true and one is not. It has been said that it used to be a prison for Windsor Castle, but this is a virtually impossible idea, probably arising from a mis-reading of a letter written in 1648 during the Civil War by Lady Winwood of Ditton Park. The other story, that the pub was a mortuary, is true and not at all unusual. When an inquest had to be held, after an accidental or suspicious death, the body would be viewed by the coroner at the chief inn of the place where the victim was found.

This is one of Datchet's youngest pubs, although parts of the building itself are very old. The right-hand half of the house probably dates back to the early 1700s as a private house, and it was extended and remodelled in fashionable Georgian style in about 1780 by its owner, the landlord of the next-door White Hart. The panelling in the left-hand bar may date from the original building, half the size of the present one. In the 1850s Charles and Mary Brightwell opened a beer-shop there - this being the least respectable category of licensed premises. Its name, the Morning Star, ws recorded then and has not been changed since.

The late Queenie Sams had many stories to tell about her father's tenure as publican there from 1933 and then hers, with her husband, from 1949 to 1962. In 1941 she was entrusted with a secret which she kept faithfully for fifty years: One day Queenie served a glass of beer to a stranger, a middle-aged lady, who was then collected by Commander Thomas Holden of the Admiralty Compass Observatory at Ditton park. They left, as Holden later told Queenie, for Heathrow airport where the lady was to be dropped by parachute over France to meet members of the resistance movement. It wasn't until 1991 that Queenie's stranger was identified as Josephine Butler, the only woman member of Churchill's secret circle of spies, who won the George Cross for her wartime exploits.