Please see the Transcriber’s Notes at the end of this text.

Drawn by Experience

Engraved by Sorrow

a Man Loaded with Mischief, or Matrimony.
A Monkey, a Magpie, and Wife; Is the true Emblem of Strife.

Large image (263 kB)

THE
HISTORY OF SIGNBOARDS
From the Earliest Times to the Present Day

BY JACOB LARWOOD AND
JOHN CAMDEN HOTTEN

“He would name you all the signs as he went along”

BEN JONSON’S BARTHOLOMEW FAIR

“Oppida dum peragras peragranda poemata spectes”

DRUNKEN BARNABY’S TRAVELS

Cock and Bottle

TWELFTH IMPRESSION
WITH ONE HUNDRED ILLUSTRATIONS BY J. LARWOOD

LONDON
CHATTO & WINDUS
1908

To
Thomas Wright, Esq., M.A., F.S.A.,
the Accomplished Interpreter of English Popular Antiquities,
this
Little Volume is Dedicated
by
THE AUTHORS.

PREFACE.

The field of history is a wide one, and when the beaten tracks have been well traversed, there will yet remain some of the lesser paths to explore. The following attempt at a “History of Signboards” may be deemed the result of an exploration in one of these by-ways.

Although from the days of Addison’s Spectator down to the present time many short articles have been written upon house-signs, nothing like a general inquiry into the subject has, as yet, been published in this country. The extraordinary number of examples and the numerous absurd combinations afforded such a mass of entangled material as doubtless deterred writers from proceeding beyond an occasional article in a magazine, or a chapter in a book,—when only the more famous signs would be cited as instances of popular humour or local renown. How best to classify and treat the thousands of single and double signs was the chief difficulty in compiling the present work. That it will in every respect satisfy the reader is more than is expected—indeed much more than could be hoped for under the best of circumstances.

In these modern days, the signboard is a very unimportant object: it was not always so. At a time when but few persons could read and write, house-signs were indispensable in city life. As education spread they were less needed; and when in the last century, the system of numbering houses was introduced, and every thoroughfare had its name painted at the beginning and end, they were no longer a positive necessity—their original value was gone, and they lingered on, not by reason of their usefulness, but as instances of the decorative humour of our ancestors, or as advertisements of established reputation and business success. For the names of many of our streets we are indebted to the sign of the old inn or public-house, which frequently was the first building in the street—commonly enough suggesting its erection, or at least a few houses by way of commencement. The huge “London Directory” contains the names of hundreds of streets in the metropolis which derived their titles from taverns or public-houses in the immediate neighbourhood. As material for the etymology of the names of persons and places, the various old signs may be studied with advantage. In many other ways the historic importance of house-signs could be shown.

Something like a classification of our subject was found absolutely necessary at the outset, although from the indefinite nature of many signs the divisions “Historic,” “Heraldic,” “Animal,” &c.—under which the various examples have been arranged—must be regarded as purely arbitrary, for in many instances it would be impossible to say whether such and such a sign should be included under the one head or under the other. The explanations offered as to origin and meaning are based rather upon conjecture and speculation than upon fact—as only in very rare instances reliable data could be produced to bear them out. Compound signs but increase the difficulty of explanation: if the road was uncertain before, almost all traces of a pathway are destroyed here. When, therefore, a solution is offered, it must be considered only as a suggestion of the possible meaning. As a rule, and unless the symbols be very obvious, the reader would do well to consider the majority of compound signs as quarterings or combinations of others, without any hidden signification. A double signboard has its parallel in commerce, where for a common advantage, two merchants will unite their interests under a double name; but as in the one case so in the other, no rule besides the immediate interests of those concerned can be laid down for such combinations.

A great many signs, both single and compound, have been omitted. To have included all, together with such particulars of their history as could be obtained, would have required at least half-a-dozen folio volumes. However, but few signs of any importance are known to have been omitted, and care has been taken to give fair samples of the numerous varieties of the compound sign. As the work progressed a large quantity of material accumulated for which no space could be found, such as “A proposal to the House of Commons for raising above half a million of money per annum, with a great ease to the subject, by a TAX upon SIGNS, London, 1695,” a very curious tract; a political jeu-d’esprit from the Harleian MSS., (5953,) entitled “The Civill Warres of the Citie,” a lengthy document prepared for a journal in the reign of William of Orange by one “E. I.,” and giving the names and whereabouts of the principal London signs at that time. Acts of Parliament for the removal or limitation of signs; and various religious pamphlets upon the subject, such as “Helps for Spiritual Meditation, earnestly Recommended to the Perusal of all those who desire to have their Hearts much with God,” a chap-book of the time of Wesley and Whitfield, in which the existing “Signs of London are Spiritualized, with an Intent, that when a person walks along the Street, instead of having their Mind fill’d with Vanity, and their Thoughts amus’d with the trifling Things that continually present themselves, they may be able to Think of something Profitable.”

Anecdotes and historical facts have been introduced with a double view; first, as authentic proofs of the existence and age of the sign; secondly, in the hope that they may afford variety and entertainment. They will call up many a picture of the olden time; many a trait of bygone manners and customs—old shops and residents, old modes of transacting business, in short, much that is now extinct and obsolete. There is a peculiar pleasure in pondering over these old houses, and picturing them to ourselves as again inhabited by the busy tenants of former years; in meeting the great names of history in the hours of relaxation, in calling up the scenes which must have been often witnessed in the haunt of the pleasure-seeker,—the tavern with its noisy company, the coffee-house with its politicians and smart beaux; and, on the other hand, the quiet, unpretending shop of the ancient bookseller filled with the monuments of departed minds. Such scraps of history may help to picture this old London as it appeared during the last three centuries. For the contemplative mind there is some charm even in getting at the names and occupations of the former inmates of the houses now only remembered by their signs; in tracing, by means of these house decorations, their modes of thought or their ideas of humour, and in rescuing from oblivion a few little anecdotes and minor facts of history connected with the house before which those signs swung in the air.

It is a pity that such a task as the following was not undertaken many years ago; it would have been much better accomplished then than now. London is so rapidly changing its aspect, that ten years hence many of the particulars here gathered could no longer be collected. Already, during the printing of this work, three old houses famous for their signs have been doomed to destruction—the Mitre in Fleet Street, the Tabard in Southwark, (where Chaucer’s pilgrims lay,) and Don Saltero’s house in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. The best existing specimens of old signboards may be seen in our cathedral towns. Antiquaries cling to these places, and the inhabitants themselves are generally animated by a strong conservative feeling. In London an entire street might be removed with far less of public discussion than would attend the taking down of an old decayed sign in one of these provincial cities. Does the reader remember an article in Punch, about two years ago, entitled “Asses in Canterbury?” It was in ridicule of the Canterbury Commissioners of Pavement, who had held grave deliberations on the well-known sign of Sir John Falstaff, hanging from the front of the hotel of that name,—a house which has been open for public entertainment these three hundred years. The knight with sword and buckler (from “Henry the Fourth,”) was suspended from some ornamental iron-work, far above the pavement, in the open thoroughfare leading to the famous Westgate, and formed one of the most noticeable objects in this part of Canterbury. In 1787, when the general order was issued for the removal of all the signs in the city—many of them obstructed the thoroughfares—this was looked upon with so much veneration that it was allowed to remain until 1863, when for no apparent reason it was sentenced to destruction. However, it was only with the greatest difficulty that men could be found to pull it down, and then several cans of beer had first to be distributed amongst them as an incentive to action—in so great veneration was the old sign held even by the lower orders of the place. Eight pounds were paid for this destruction, which, for fear of a riot, was effected at three in the morning, “amid the groans and hisses of the assembled multitude,” says a local paper. Previous to the demolition the greatest excitement had existed in the place; the newspapers were filled with articles; a petition with 400 signatures—including an M.P., the prebends, minor canons, and clergy of the cathedral—prayed the local “commissioners” that the sign might be spared; and the whole community was in an uproar. No sooner was the old portrait of Sir John removed than another was put up; but this representing the knight as seated, and with a can of ale by his side, however much it may suit the modern publican’s notion of military ardour, does not please the owner of the property, and a fac-simile of the time-honoured original is in course of preparation.

Concerning the internal arrangement of the following work, a few explanations seem necessary.

Where a street is mentioned without the town being specified, it in all cases refers to a London thoroughfare.

The trades tokens so frequently referred to, it will be scarcely necessary to state, were the brass farthings issued by shop or tavern keepers, and generally adorned with a representation of the sign of the house. Nearly all the tokens alluded to belong to the latter part of the seventeenth century, mostly to the reign of Charles II.

As the work has been two years in the press, the passing events mentioned in the earlier sheets refer to the year 1864.

In a few instances it was found impossible to ascertain whether certain signs spoken of as existing really do exist, or whether those mentioned as things of the past are in reality so. The wide distances at which they are situated prevented personal examination in every case, and local histories fail to give such small particulars.

The rude unattractive woodcuts inserted in the work are in most instances fac-similes, which have been chosen as genuine examples of the style in which the various old signs were represented. The blame of the coarse and primitive execution, therefore, rests entirely with the ancient artist, whether sign painter or engraver.

Translations of the various quotations from foreign languages have been added for the following reasons:—It was necessary to translate the numerous quotations from the Dutch signboards; Latin was Englished for the benefit of the ladies, and Italian and French extracts were Anglicised to correspond with rest.

Errors, both of fact and opinion, may doubtless be discovered in the book. If, however, the compilers have erred in a statement or an explanation, they do not wish to remain in the dark, and any light thrown upon a doubtful passage will be acknowledged by them with thanks. Numerous local signs—famous in their own neighbourhood—will have been omitted, (generally, however, for the reasons mentioned on a preceding page,) whilst many curious anecdotes and particulars concerning their history may be within the knowledge of provincial readers. For any information of this kind the compilers will be much obliged; and should their work ever pass to a second edition, they hope to avail themselves of such friendly contributions.

London, June 1866.

CONTENTS.

PAGE
CHAPTER I.
GENERAL SURVEY OF SIGNBOARD HISTORY, | 1
CHAPTER II.
HISTORIC AND COMMEMORATIVE SIGNS, | 45
CHAPTER III.
HERALDIC AND EMBLEMATIC SIGNS, | 101
CHAPTER IV.
SIGNS OF ANIMALS AND MONSTERS, | 150
CHAPTER V.
BIRDS AND FOWLS, | 199
CHAPTER VI.
FISHES AND INSECTS, | 225
CHAPTER VII.
FLOWERS, TREES, HERBS, ETC., | 233
CHAPTER VIII.
BIBLICAL AND RELIGIOUS SIGNS, | 253
CHAPTER IX.
SAINTS, MARTYRS, ETC., | 279
CHAPTER X.
DIGNITIES, TRADES, AND PROFESSIONS, | 305
CHAPTER XI.
THE HOUSE AND THE TABLE, | 375
CHAPTER XII.
DRESS; PLAIN AND ORNAMENTAL, | 399
CHAPTER XIII.
GEOGRAPHY AND TOPOGRAPHY, | 414
CHAPTER XIV.
HUMOROUS AND COMIC, | 437
CHAPTER XV.
PUNS AND REBUSES, | 469
CHAPTER XVI.
MISCELLANEOUS SIGNS, | 476
APPENDIX.
BONNELL THORNTON’S SIGNBOARD EXHIBITION, | 512
INDEX OF ALL THE SIGNS MENTIONED IN THE WORK, | 527

PLATE I.

BAKER. (Pompeii, A.D. 70.) | DAIRY. (Pompeii, A.D. 70.)

SHOEMAKER.
(Herculaneum.)

WINE MERCHANT. (Pompeii, A.D. 70.) | TWO JOLLY BREWERS. (Banks’s Bills, 1770.)

CHAPTER I.
GENERAL SURVEY OF SIGNBOARD HISTORY.

In the cities of the East all trades are confined to certain streets, or to certain rows in the various bazars and wekalehs. Jewellers, silk-embroiderers, pipe-dealers, traders in drugs,—each of these classes has its own quarter, where, in little open shops, the merchants sit enthroned upon a kind of low counter, enjoying their pipes and their coffee with the otium cum dignitate characteristic of the Mussulman. The purchaser knows the row to go to; sees at a glance what each shop contains; and, if he be an habitué, will know the face of each particular shopkeeper, so that under these circumstances, signboards would be of no use.

With the ancient Egyptians it was much the same. As a rule, no picture or description affixed to the shop announced the trade of the owner; the goods exposed for sale were thought sufficient to attract attention. Occasionally, however, there were inscriptions denoting the trade, with the emblem which indicated it;[1] whence we may assume that this ancient nation was the first to appreciate the benefit that might be derived from signboards.

What we know of the Greek signs is very meagre and indefinite. Aristophanes, Lucian, and other writers, make frequent allusions, which seem to prove that signboards were in use with the Greeks. Thus Aristotle says: ὡσπερ επι των καπηλιων γραφομενοι, μικροι μεν εισι, φαινονται δε εχοντες πλατη και βαθη.[2] And Athenæus: εν προτεροις θηκη διδασκαλιην.[3] But what their signs were, and whether carved, painted, or the natural object, is entirely unknown.

With the Romans only we begin to have distinct data. In the Eternal City, some streets, as in our mediæval towns, derived their names from signs. Such, for instance, was the vicus Ursi Pileati, (the street of “The Bear with the Hat on,”) in the Esquiliæ. The nature of their signs, also, is well known. The Bush, their tavern-sign, gave rise to the proverb, “Vino vendibili suspensa hedera non opus est;” and hence we derive our sign of the Bush, and our proverb, “Good Wine needs no Bush.” An ansa, or handle of a pitcher, was the sign of their post-houses, (stathmoi or allagæ,) and hence these establishments were afterwards denominated ansæ.[4] That they also had painted signs, or exterior decorations which served their purpose, is clearly evident from various authors:—

“Quum victi Mures Mustelarum exercitu
(Historia quorum in tabernis pingitur.)”[5]

Phædrus, lib. iv. fab. vi.

These Roman street pictures were occasionally no mean works of art, as we may learn from a passage in Horace:—

“Contento poplite miror
Proelia, rubrico picta aut carbone; velut si
Re vera pugnent, feriant vitentque moventes
Arma viri.”[6]

Cicero also is supposed by some scholars to allude to a sign when he says:—

“Jam ostendamcujus modi sis: quum ille ‘ostende quæso’ demonstravi digito pictum Gallum in Mariano scuto Cimbrico, sub Novis, distortum ejectâ linguâ, buccis fluentibus, risus est commotus.”[7]

Pliny, after saying that Lucius Mummius was the first in Rome who affixed a picture to the outside of a house, continues:—

“Deinde video et in foro positas vulgo. Hinc enim Crassi oratoris lepos, [here follows the anecdote of the Cock of Marius the Cimberian] . . . In foro fuit et illa pastoris senis cum baculo, de qua Teutonorum legatus respondit, interrogatus quanti eum æstimaret, sibi donari nolle talem vivum verumque.”[8]

Fabius also, according to some, relates the story of the cock, and his explanation is cited:—“Taberna autem erant circa Forum, ac scutum illud signi gratia positum.”[9]

But we can judge even better from an inspection of the Roman signs themselves, as they have come down to us amongst the ruins of Herculaneum and Pompeii. A few were painted; but, as a rule, they appear to have been made of stone, or terra-cotta relievo, and let into the pilasters at the side of the open shop-fronts. Thus there have been found a goat, the sign of a dairy; a mule driving a mill, the sign of a baker, (plate 1.) At the door of a schoolmaster was the not very tempting sign of a boy receiving a good birching. Very similar to our Two Jolly Brewers, carrying a tun slung on a long pole, a Pompeian public-house keeper had two slaves represented above his door, carrying an amphora; and another wine-merchant had a painting of Bacchus pressing a bunch of grapes. At a perfumer’s shop, in the street of Mercury, were represented various items of that profession—viz., four men carrying a box with vases of perfume, men occupied in laying out and perfuming a corpse, &c. There was also a sign similar to the one mentioned by Horace, the Two Gladiators, under which, in the usual Pompeian cacography, was the following imprecation:—Abiat Venerem Pompeiianama iradam qui hoc læserit, i.e., Habeat Venerem Pompeianam iratam, &c. Besides these there were the signs of the Anchor, the Ship, (perhaps a ship-chandler’s,) a sort of a Cross, the Chequers, the Phallus on a baker’s shop, with the words, Hic habitat felicitas; whilst in Herculaneum there was a very cleverly painted Amorino, or Cupid, carrying a pair of ladies’ shoes, one on his head and the other in his hand.

It is also probable that, at a later period at all events, the various artificers of Rome had their tools as the sign of their house, to indicate their profession. We find that they sculptured them on their tombs in the catacombs, and may safely conclude that they would do the same on their houses in the land of the living. Thus on the tomb of Diogenes, the grave-digger, there is a pick-axe and a lamp; Bauto and Maxima have the tools of carpenters, a saw, an adze, and a chisel; Veneria, a tire-woman, has a mirror and a comb:—then there are others who have wool-combers’ implements; a physician, who has a cupping-glass; a poulterer, a case of poultry; a surveyor, a measuring rule; a baker, a bushel, a millstone, and ears of corn; in fact, almost every trade had its symbolic implements. Even that cockney custom of punning on the name, so common on signboards, finds its precedent in those mansions of the dead. Owing to this fancy, the grave of Dracontius bore a dragon; Onager, a wild ass; Umbricius, a shady tree; Leo, a lion; Doleus, father and son, two casks; Herbacia, two baskets of herbs; and Porcula, a pig. Now it seems most probable that, since these emblems were used to indicate where a baker, a carpenter, or a tire-woman was buried, they would adopt similar symbols above ground, to acquaint the public where a baker, a carpenter, or a tire-woman lived.

We may thus conclude that our forefathers adopted the signboard from the Romans; and though at first there were certainly not so many shops as to require a picture for distinction,—as the open shop-front did not necessitate any emblem to indicate the trade carried on within,—yet the inns by the road-side, and in the towns, would undoubtedly have them. There was the Roman bush of evergreens to indicate the sale of wine;[10] and certain devices would doubtless be adopted to attract the attention of the different classes of wayfarers, as the Cross for the Christian customer,[11] and the Sun or the Moon for the pagan. Then we find various emblems, or standards, to court respectively the custom of the Saxon, the Dane, or the Briton. He that desired the patronage of soldiers might put up some weapon; or, if he sought his customers among the more quiet artificers, there were the various implements of trade with which he could appeal to the different mechanics that frequented his neighbourhood.

Along with these very simple signs, at a later period, coats of arms, crests, and badges, would gradually make their appearance at the doors of shops and inns. The reasons which dictated the choice of such subjects were various. One of the principal was this. In the Middle Ages, the houses of the nobility, both in town and country, when the family was absent, were used as hostelries for travellers. The family arms always hung in front of the house, and the most conspicuous object in those arms gave a name to the establishment amongst travellers, who, unacquainted with the mysteries of heraldry, called a lion gules or azure by the vernacular name of the Red or Blue Lion.[12] Such coats of arms gradually became a very popular intimation that there was—

“Good entertainment for all that passes,—
Horses, mares, men, and asses;”

and innkeepers began to adopt them, hanging out red lions and green dragons as the best way to acquaint the public that they offered food and shelter.

Still, as long as civilisation was only at a low ebb, the so-called open-houses few, and competition trifling, signs were of but little use. A few objects, typical of the trade carried on, would suffice; a knife for the cutler, a stocking for the hosier, a hand for the glover, a pair of scissors for the tailor, a bunch of grapes for the vintner, fully answered public requirements. But as luxury increased, and the number of houses or shops dealing in the same article multiplied, something more was wanted. Particular trades continued to be confined to particular streets; the desideratum then was, to give to each shop a name or token by which it might be mentioned in conversation, so that it could be recommended and customers sent to it. Reading was still a scarce acquirement; consequently, to write up the owner’s name would have been of little use. Those that could, advertised their name by a rebus; thus, a hare and a bottle stood for Harebottle, and two cocks for Cox. Others, whose names no rebus could represent, adopted pictorial objects; and, as the quantity of these augmented, new subjects were continually required. The animal kingdom was ransacked, from the mighty elephant to the humble bee, from the eagle to the sparrow; the vegetable kingdom, from the palm-tree and cedar to the marigold and daisy; everything on the earth, and in the firmament above it, was put under contribution. Portraits of the great men of all ages, and views of towns, both painted with a great deal more of fancy than of truth; articles of dress, implements of trades, domestic utensils, things visible and invisible, ea quæ sunt tamquam ea quæ non sunt, everything was attempted in order to attract attention and to obtain publicity. Finally, as all signs in a town were painted by the same small number of individuals, whose talents and imagination were limited, it followed that the same subjects were naturally often repeated, introducing only a change in the colour for a difference.

Since all the pictorial representations were, then, of much the same quality, rival tradesmen tried to outvie each other in the size of their signs, each one striving to obtrude his picture into public notice by putting it out further in the street than his neighbour’s. The “Liber Albus,” compiled in 1419, names this subject amongst the Inquisitions at the Wardmotes: “Item, if the ale-stake of any tavern is longer or extends further than ordinary.” And in book iii. part iii. p. 389, is said:—

“Also, it was ordained that, whereas the ale-stakes projecting in front of taverns in Chepe, and elsewhere in the said city, extend too far over the King’s highways, to the impeding of riders and others, and, by reason of their excessive weight, to the great deterioration of the houses in which they are fixed;—to the end that opportune remedy might be made thereof, it was by the Mayor and Aldermen granted and ordained, and, upon summons of all the taverners of the said city, it was enjoined upon them, under pain of paying forty pence[13] unto the Chamber of the Guildhall, on every occasion upon which they should transgress such ordinance, that no one of them in future should have a stake, bearing either his sign, or leaves, extending or lying over the King’s highway, of greater length than seven feet at most, and that this ordinance should begin to take effect at the Feast of Saint Michael, then next ensuing, always thereafter to be valid and of full effect.”

The booksellers generally had a woodcut of their signs for the colophon of their books, so that their shops might get known by the inspection of these cuts. For this reason, Benedict Hector, one of the early Bolognese printers, gives this advice to the buyers in his “Justinus et Florus:”—

“Emptor, attende quando vis emere libros formatos in officina mea excussoria, inspice signum quod in liminari pagina est, ita numquam falleris. Nam quidam malevoli Impressores libris suis inemendatis et maculosis apponunt nomen meum ut fiant vendibiliores.”[14]

Jodocus Badius of Paris, gives a similar caution:—

“Oratum facimus lectorem ut signum inspiciat, nam sunt qui titulum nomenque Badianum mentiantur et laborem suffurentur.”[15]

Aldus, the great Venetian printer, exposes a similar fraud, and points out how the pirate had copied the sign also in his colophon; but, by inadvertency, making a slight alteration:—

“Extremum est ut admoneamus studiosissimum quemque, Florentinos quosdam impressores, cum viderint se diligentiam nostram in castigando et imprimendo non posse assequi, ad artes confugisse solitas; hoc est Grammaticis Institutionibus Aldi in sua officina formatis, notam Delphini Anchoræ Involuti nostram apposuisse; sed ita egerunt ut quivis mediocriter versatus in libris impressionis nostræ animadvertit illos impudenter fecisse. Nam rostrum Delphini in partem sinistram vergit, cum tamen nostrum in dexteram totum demittatur.”[16]

No wonder, then, that a sign was considered an heirloom, and descended from father to son, like the coat of arms of the nobility, which was the case with the Brazen Serpent, the sign of Reynold Wolfe. “His trade was continued a good while after his demise by his wife Joan, who made her will the 1st of July 1574, whereby she desires to be buried near her husband, in St Faith’s Church, and bequeathed to her son, Robert Wolfe, the chapel-house, [their printing-office,] the Brazen Serpent, and all the prints, letters, furniture,” etc.—Dibdin’s Typ. Ant., vol. iv. p. 6.

As we observed above, directly signboards were generally adopted, quaintness became one of the desiderata, and costliness another. This last could be obtained by the quality of the picture, but, for two reasons, was not much aimed at—firstly, because good artists were scarce in those days; and even had they obtained a good picture, the ignorant crowd that daily passed underneath the sign would, in all probability, have thought the harsh and glaring daub a finer production of art than a Holy Virgin by Rafaelle himself. The other reason was the instability of such a work, exposed to sun, wind, rain, frost, and the nightly attacks of revellers and roisters. Greater care, therefore, was bestowed upon the ornamentation of the ironwork by which it was suspended; and this was perfectly in keeping with the taste of the times, when even the simplest lock or hinges could not be launched into the world without its scrolls and strapwork.

The signs then were suspended from an iron bar, fixed either in the wall of the house, or in a post or obelisk standing in front of it; in both cases the ironwork was shaped and ornamented with that taste so conspicuous in the metal-work of the Renaissance period, of which many churches, and other buildings of that period, still bear witness. In provincial towns and villages, where there was sufficient room in the streets, the sign was generally suspended from a kind of small triumphal arch, standing out in the road, partly wood, partly iron, and ornamented with all that carving, gilding, and colouring could bestow upon it, (see description of White-Hart Inn at Scole.) Some of the designs of this class of ironwork have come down to us in the works of the old masters, and are indeed exquisite.

Painted signs then, suspended in the way we have just pointed out, were more common than those of any other kind; yet not a few shops simply suspended at their doors some prominent article in their trade, which custom has outlived the more elegant signboards, and may be daily witnessed in our streets, where the ironmonger’s frying-pan, or dust-pan, the hardware-dealer’s teapot, the grocer’s tea-canister, the shoemaker’s last or clog, with the Golden Boot, and many similar objects, bear witness to this old custom.

Lastly, there was in London another class of houses that had a peculiar way of placing their signs—viz., the Stews upon the Bankside, which were, by a proclamation of 37 Hen. VIII., “whited and painted with signs on the front, for a token of the said houses.” Stow enumerates some of these symbols, such as the Cross-Keys, the Gun, the Castle, the Crane, the Cardinal’s Hat, the Bell, the Swan, &c.

Still greater variety in the construction of the signs existed in France; for besides the painted signs in the iron frames, the shopkeepers in Paris, according to H. Sauval, (“Antiquités de la Ville de Paris,”) had anciently banners hanging above their doors, or from their windows, with the sign of the shop painted on them; whilst in the sixteenth century carved wooden signs were very common. These, however, were not suspended, but formed part of the wooden construction of the house; some of them were really chefs-d’œuvres, and as careful in design as a carved cathedral stall. Several of them are still remaining in Rouen and other old towns; many also have been removed and placed in various local museums of antiquities. The most general rule, however, on the Continent, as in England, was to have the painted signboard suspended across the streets.

An observer of James I.’s time has jotted down the names of all the inns, taverns, and side streets in the line of road between Charing Cross and the old Tower of London, which document lies now embalmed amongst the Harl. MS., 6850, fol. 31. In imagination we can walk with him through the metropolis:—

“On the way from Whitehall to Charing Cross we pass: the White Hart, the Red Lion, the Mairmade, iij. Tuns, Salutation, the Graihound, the Bell, the Golden Lyon. In sight of Charing Crosse: the Garter, the Crown, the Bear and Ragged Staffe, the Angel, the King Harry Head. Then from Charing Cross towards ye cittie: another White Hart, the Eagle and Child, the Helmet, the Swan, the Bell, King Harry Head, the Flower-de-luce, Angel, the Holy Lambe, the Bear and Harroe, the Plough, the Shippe, the Black Bell, another King Harry Head, the Bull Head, the Golden Bull, ‘a sixpenny ordinarye,’ another Flower-de-luce, the Red Lyon, the Horns, the White Hors, the Prince’s Arms, Bell Savadge’s In, the S. John the Baptist, the Talbot, the Shipp of War, the S. Dunstan, the Hercules or the Owld Man Tavern, the Mitar, another iij. Tunnes Inn, and a iij. Tunnes Tavern, and a Graihound, another Mitar, another King Harry Head, iij. Tunnes, and the iij. Cranes.”

Having walked from Whitechapel “straight forward to the Tower,” the good citizen got tired, and so we hear no more of him.

In the next reign we find the following enumerated by Taylor the water-poet, in one of his facetious pamphlets:—5 Angels, 4 Anchors, 6 Bells, 5 Bullsheads, 4 Black Bulls, 4 Bears, 5 Bears and Dolphins, 10 Castles, 4 Crosses, (red or white,) 7 Three Crowns, 7 Green Dragons, 6 Dogs, 5 Fountains, 3 Fleeces, 8 Globes, 5 Greyhounds, 9 White Harts, 4 White Horses, 5 Harrows, 20 King’s Heads, 7 King’s Arms, 1 Queen’s Head, 8 Golden Lyons, 6 Red Lyons, 7 Halfmoons, 10 Mitres, 33 Maidenheads, 10 Mermaids, 2 Mouths, 8 Nagsheads, 8 Prince’s Arms, 4 Pope’s Heads, 13 Suns, 8 Stars, &c. Besides these he mentions an Adam and Eve, an Antwerp Tavern, a Cat, a Christopher, a Cooper’s Hoop, a Goat, a Garter, a Hart’s Horn, a Mitre, &c. These were all taverns in London; and it will be observed that their signs were very similar to those seen at the present day—a remark applicable to the taverns not only of England, but of Europe generally, at this period. In another work Taylor gives us the signs of the taverns[17] and alehouses in ten shires and counties about London, all similar to those we have just enumerated; but amongst the number, it may be noted, there is not one combination of two objects, except the Eagle and Child, and the Bear and Ragged Staff. In a black-letter tract entitled “Newes from Bartholomew Fayre,” the following are named:—

“There has been great sale and utterance of Wine,
Besides Beer, Ale, and Hippocrass fine,
In every Country, Region, and Nation,
Chiefly at Billingsgate, at the Salutation;
[10] And Boreshead near London Stone,
The Swan at Dowgate, a tavern well knowne;
The Mitre in Cheap, and the Bullhead,
And many like places that make noses red;
The Boreshead in Old Fish Street, Three Cranes in the Vintree,
And now, of late, Saint Martin’s in the Sentree;
The Windmill in Lothbury, the Ship at the Exchange,
King’s Head in New Fish Street, where Roysters do range;
The Mermaid in Cornhill, Red Lion in the Strand,
Three Tuns in Newgate Market, in Old Fish Street the Swan.”

Drunken Barnaby, (1634,) in his travels, called at several of the London taverns, which he has recorded in his vinous flights:—

“Country left I in a fury,
To the Axe in Aldermanbury
First arrived, that place slighted,
I at the Rose in Holborn lighted.
From the Rose in Flaggons sail I
To the Griffin i’ th’ Old Bailey,
Where no sooner do I waken,
Than to Three Cranes I am taken,
Where I lodge and am no starter.
...... Yea, my merry mates and I, too,
Oft the Cardinal’s Hat do fly to.
There at Hart’s Horns we carouse,” &c.

Already, in very early times, publicans were compelled by law to have a sign; for we find that in the 16 Richard II., (1393,) Florence North, a brewer of Chelsea, was “presented” “for not putting up the usual sign.”[18] In Cambridge the regulations were equally severe; by an Act of Parliament, 9 Henry VI., it was enacted: “Quicunq; de villa Cantebrigg ‘braciaverit ad vendend’ exponat signum suum, alioquin omittat cervisiam.”—Rolls of Parliament, vol. v. fol. 426 a.[19] But with the other trades it was always optional. Hence Charles I., on his accession to the throne, gave the inhabitants of London a charter by which, amongst other favours, he granted them the right to hang out signboards:—

“And further, we do give and grant to the said Mayor, and Commonalty, and Citizens of the said city, and their successors, that it may and shall be lawful to the Citizens of the same city and any of them, for the time being, to expose and hang in and over the streets, and ways, and alleys of the said city and suburbs of the same, signs, and posts of signs, affixed to their houses and shops, for the better finding out such citizens’ dwellings, shops, arts, or occupations, without impediment, molestation, or interruption of his heirs or successors.”

In France, the innkeepers were under the same regulations as in England; for there also, by the edict of Moulins, in 1567, all innkeepers were ordered to acquaint the magistrates with their name and address, and their “affectes et enseignes;” and Henri III., by an edict of March 1577, ordered that all innkeepers should place a sign on the most conspicuous part of their houses, “aux lieux les plus apparents;” so that everybody, even those that could not read, should be aware of their profession. Louis XIV., by an ordnance of 1693, again ordered signs to be put up, and also the price of the articles they were entitled to sell:—

“Art. XXIII.—Taverniers metront enseignes et bouchons. . . . Nul ne pourra tenir taverne en cette dite ville et faubourgs, sans mettre enseigne et bouchon.”[20]

Hence, the taking away of a publican’s licence was accompanied by the taking away of his sign:—

“For this gross fault I here do damn thy licence,
Forbidding thee ever to tap or draw;
For instantly I will in mine own person,
Command the constables to pull down thy sign.”

Massinger, A New Way to Pay Old Debts, iv. 2.

At the time of the great Civil War, house-signs played no inconsiderable part in the changes and convulsions of the state, and took a prominent place in the politics of the day. We may cite an earlier example, where a sign was made a matter of high treason—namely, in the case of that unfortunate fellow in Cheapside, who, in the reign of Edward IV., kept the sign of the Crown, and lost his head for saying he would “make his son heir to the Crown.” But more general examples are to be met with in the history of the Commonwealth troubles. At the death of Charles I., John Taylor the water-poet, a Royalist to the backbone, boldly shewed his opinion of that act, by taking as a sign for his alehouse in Phœnix Alley, Long Acre, the Mourning Crown; but he was soon compelled to take it down. Richard Flecknoe, in his “Ænigmatical Characters,” (1665,) tells us how many of the severe Puritans were shocked at anything smelling of Popery:—“As for the signs, they have pretty well begun their reformation already, changing the sign of the Salutation of Our Lady into the Souldier and Citizen, and the Catherine Wheel into the Cat and Wheel; such ridiculous work they make of this reformation, and so jealous they are against all mirth and jollity, as they would pluck down the Cat and Fiddle too, if it durst but play so loud as they might hear it.” No doubt they invented very godly signs, but these have not come down to us.

At that time, also, a fashion prevailed which continued, indeed, as long as the signboard was an important institution—of using house-signs to typify political ideas. Imaginary signs, as a part of secret imprints, conveying most unmistakably the sentiments of the book, were often used in the old days of political plots and violent lampoons. Instance the following:—

“Vox Borealis, or a Northerne Discoverie, by Way of Dialogue, between Jamie and Willie. Amidst the Babylonians—printed by Margery Marprelate, in Thwack Coat Lane, at the sign of the Crab-Tree Cudgell, without any privilege of the Catercaps. 1641.”

“Articles of High Treason made and enacted by the late Halfquarter usurping Convention, and now presented to the publick view for a general satisfaction of all true Englishmen. Imprinted for Erasmus Thorogood, and to be sold at the signe of the Roasted Rump. 1659.”

“A Catalogue of Books of the Newest Fashion, to be sold by auction at the Whigs’ Coffeehouse, at the sign of the Jackanapes in Prating Alley, near the Deanery of Saint Paul’s.”

“The Censure of the Rota upon Mr Milton’s book, entitled ‘The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth,’ &c. Printed at London by Paul Giddy, Printer to the Rota, at the sign of the Windmill, in Turn-again Lane. 1660.”

“An Address from the Ladies of the Provinces of Munster and Leinster to their Graces the Duke and Duchess of D——t, Lord G——, and Caiaphas the High Priest, with sixty original toasts, drank by the Ladies at their last Assembly, with Love-letters added. London: Printed for John Pro Patria, at the sign of Vivat Rex. 1754.”

“Chivalry no Trifle, or the Knight and his Lady: a Tale. To which is added the Hue and Cry after Touzer and Spitfire, the Lady’s two lapdogs. Dublin: Printed at the sign of Sir Tady’s Press, etc. 1754.”

“An Address from the Influential Electors of the County and City of Galway, with a Collection of 60 Original Patriot Toasts and 48 Munster Toasts, with Intelligence from the Kingdom of Eutopia. Printed at the sign of the Pirate’s Sword in the Captain’s Scabbard. London, 1754.”

“The C——t’s Apology to the Freeholders of this Kingdom for their conduct, containing some Pieces of Humour, to which is added a Bill of C——t Morality. London: Printed at the sign of Betty Ireland, d——d of a Tyrant in Purple, a Monster in Black, etc.”

In the newspapers of the eighteenth century, we find that signs were constantly used as emblems of, or as sharp hits at, the politics of the day; thus, in the Weekly Journal for August 17, 1718, allusions are made to the sign of the Salutation, in Newgate Street, by the opposition party, to which the Original Weekly Journal, the week after, retaliates by a description and explanation of an indelicate sign said to be in King Street, Westminster. In 1763, the following pasquinade went the round of the newspapers, said to have been sent over from Holland:—

“HÔTELS POUR LES MINISTRES DES COURS ETRANGÈRES AU FUTUR CONGRESS.
De l’Empereur,
À la Bonne Volonté; rue d’Impuissance.
De Russie,
Au Chimère; rue des Caprices.
De France,
Au Coq déplumé; rue de Canada.
D’Autriche,
À la Mauvaise Alliance, rue des Invalides.
D’Angleterre,
À la Fortune, Place des Victoires, rue des Subsides.
De Prusse,
Aux Quatre vents, rue des Renards, près la Place des Guinées.
De Suede,
Au Passage des Courtisans, rue des Visionaires.
De Pologne,
Au Sacrifice d’Abraham, rue des Innocents, près la Place des Devôts.
Des Princes de l’Empire,
Au Roitelêt, près de l’Hôpital des Incurables, rue des Charlatans.
De Wirtemberg,
Au Don Quichotte, rue des Fantômes près de la Montagne en Couche.
D’Hollande,
À la Baleine, sur le Marché aux Fromages, près du Grand Observatoire.”

On the morning of September 28, 1736, all the tavern-signs in London were in deep mourning; and no wonder, their dearly beloved patron and friend Gin was defunct,—killed by the new Act against spirituous liquors! But they soon dropped their mourning, for Gin had only been in a lethargic fit, and woke up much refreshed by his sleep. Fifteen years after, when Hogarth painted his “Gin Lane,” royal gin was to be had cheap enough, if we may believe the signboard in that picture, which informs us that “gentlemen and others” could get “drunk for a penny,” and “dead drunk for twopence,” in which last emergency, “clean straw for nothing” was provided.

Of the signs which were to be seen in London at the period of the Restoration,—to return to the subject we were originally considering,—we find a goodly collection of them in one of the “Roxburghe Ballads,” (vol. i. 212,) entitled:—

“LONDON’S ORDINARIE, OR EVERY MAN IN HIS HUMOUR

THROUGH the Royal Exchange as I walked,
Where Gallants in sattin doe shine,
[14] At midst of the day, they parted away,
To seaverall places to dine.

The Gentrie went to the King’s Head,
The Nobles unto the Crowne:
The Knights went to the Golden Fleece,
And the Ploughmen to the Clowne.

The Cleargie will dine at the Miter,
The Vintners at the Three Tunnes,
The Usurers to the Devill will goe,
And the Fryers to the Nunnes.

The Ladyes will dine at the Feathers,
The Globe no Captaine will scorne,
The Huntsmen will goe to the Grayhound below,
And some Townes-men to the Horne.

The Plummers will dine at the Fountaine,
The Cookes at the Holly Lambe,
The Drunkerds by noone, to the Man in the Moone,
And the Cuckholdes to the Ramme.

The Roarers will dine at the Lyon,
The Watermen at the Old Swan;
And Bawdes will to the Negro goe,
And Whores to the Naked Man.

The Keepers will to the White Hart,
The Marchants unto the Shippe,
The Beggars they must take their way
To the Egge-shell and the Whippe.

The Farryers will to the Horse,
The Blackesmith unto the Locke,
The Butchers unto the Bull will goe,
And the Carmen to Bridewell Clocke.

The Fishmongers unto the Dolphin,
The Barbers to the Cheat Loafe,[21]
The Turners unto the Ladle will goe,
Where they may merrylie quaffe.

The Taylors will dine at the Sheeres,
The Shooemakers will to the Boote,
The Welshmen they will take their way,
And dine at the signe of the Gote.

The Hosiers will dine at the Legge,
The Drapers at the signe of the Brush.
The Fletchers to Robin Hood will goe,
And the Spendthrift to Begger’s Bush.

The Pewterers to the Quarte Pot,
The Coopers will dine at the Hoope,
The Coblers to the Last will goe,
And the Bargemen to the Sloope.
[15]

The Carpenters will to the Axe,
The Colliers will dine at the Sacke,
Your Fruterer he to the Cherry-Tree,
Good fellowes no liquor will lacke.

The Goldsmith will to the Three Cups,
For money they hold it as drosse;
Your Puritan to the Pewter Canne,
And your Papists to the Crosse.

The Weavers will dine at the Shuttle,
The Glovers will unto the Glove,
The Maydens all to the Mayden Head,
And true Louers unto the Doue.

The Sadlers will dine at the Saddle,
The Painters will to the Greene Dragon,
The Dutchmen will go to the Froe,[22]
Where each man will drinke his Flagon.

The Chandlers will dine at the Skales,
The Salters at the signe of the Bagge;
The Porters take pain at the Labour in Vaine,
And the Horse-Courser to the White Nagge.

Thus every Man in his humour,
That comes from the North or the South,
But he that has no money in his purse,
May dine at the signe of the Mouth.

The Swaggerers will dine at the Fencers,
But those that have lost their wits:
With Bedlam Tom let that be their home,
And the Drumme the Drummers best fits.

The Cheter will dine at the Checker,
The Picke-pockets in a blind alehouse,
Tel on and tride then up Holborne they ride,
And they there end at the Gallowes.”

Thomas Heywood introduced a similar song in his “Rape of Lucrece.” This, the first of the kind we have met with, is in all probability the original, unless the ballad be a reprint from an older one; but the term Puritan used in it, seems to fix its date to the seventeenth century.

“THE Gintry to the Kings Head,
The Nobles to the Crown,
The Knights unto the Golden Fleece,
And to the Plough the Clowne.

The Churchmen to the Mitre,
The Shepheard to the Star,
The Gardener hies him to the Rose,
To the Drum the Man of War.
[16]

The Huntsmen to the White Hart,
To the Ship the Merchants goe,
But you that doe the Muses love,
The sign called River Po.

The Banquerout to the World’s End,
The Fool to the Fortune his,
Unto the Mouth the Oyster-wife,
The Fiddler to the Pie.

The Punk unto the Cockatrice,[23]
The Drunkard to the Vine,
The Begger to the Bush, there meet,
And with Duke Humphrey dine.”[24]

After the great fire of 1666, many of the houses that were rebuilt, instead of the former wooden signboards projecting in the streets, adopted signs carved in stone, and generally painted or gilt, let into the front of the house, beneath the first floor windows. Many of these signs are still to be seen, and will be noticed in their respective places. But in those streets not visited by the fire, things continued on the old footing, each shopkeeper being fired with a noble ambition to project his sign a few inches farther than his neighbour. The consequence was that, what with the narrow streets, the penthouses, and the signboards, the air and light of the heavens were well-nigh intercepted from the luckless wayfarers through the streets of London. We can picture to ourselves the unfortunate plumed, feathered, silken gallant of the period walking, in his low shoes and silk stockings, through the ill-paved dirty streets, on a stormy November day, when the honours were equally divided between fog, sleet, snow, and rain, (and no umbrellas, be it remembered,) with flower-pots blown from the penthouses, spouts sending down shower-baths from almost every house, and the streaming signs swinging overhead on their rusty, creaking hinges. Certainly the evil was great, and demanded that redress which Charles II. gave in the seventh year of his reign, when a new Act “ordered that in all the streets no signboard shall hang across, but that the sign shall be fixed against the balconies, or some convenient part of the side of the house.”

The Parisians, also, were suffering from the same enormities; everything was of Brobdignagian proportions. “J’ai vu,” says an essayist of the middle of the seventeenth century, “suspendu aux boutiques des volants de six pieds de hauteur, des perles grosses comme des tonneaux, des plumes qui allaient au troisième étage.”[25] There, also, the scalpel of the law was at last applied to the evil; for, in 1669, a royal order was issued to prohibit these monstrous signs, and the practice of advancing them too far into the streets, “which made the thoroughfares close in the daytime, and prevented the lights of the lamps from spreading properly at night.”

PLATE II.

BUSH. (MS. of the 14th century.) | BUSH. (Bayeux tapestry, 11th cent.)

CROSS.
(Luttrell Psalter, 11th century.)

ALE-POLE. (Picture of Wouwverman, 17th cent.) | BLACK JACK AND PEWTER PLATTER. (Print by Schavelin, 1480.)
NAG’S HEAD. (Cheapside. 1640.) | BUSH. (MS. of the 15th cent.)

Still, with all their faults, the signs had some advantages for the wayfarer; even their dissonant creaking, according to the old weather proverb, was not without its use:—

“But when the swinging signs your ears offend
With creaking noise, then rainy floods impend.”

Gay’s Trivia, canto i.

This indeed, from the various allusions made to it in the literature of the last century, was regarded as a very general hint to the lounger, either to hurry home, or hail a sedan-chair or coach. Gay, in his didactic—flâneur—poem, points out another benefit to be derived from the signboards:—

“If drawn by Bus’ness to a street unknown,
Let the sworn Porter point thee through the town;
Be sure observe the Signs, for Signs remain
Like faithful Landmarks to the walking Train.”

Besides, they offered constant matter of thought, speculation, and amusement to the curious observer. Even Dean Swift, and the Lord High Treasurer Harley,

“Would try to read the lines
Writ underneath the country signs.”

And certainly these productions of the country muse are often highly amusing. Unfortunately for the compilers of the present work, they have never been collected and preserved; although they would form a not unimportant and characteristic contribution to our popular literature. Our Dutch neighbours have paid more attention to this subject, and a great number of their signboard inscriptions were, towards the close of the seventeenth century, gathered in a curious little 12mo volume,[26] to which we shall often refer. Nay, so much attention was devoted to this branch of literature in that country, that a certain H. van den Berg, in 1693, wrote a little volume,[27] which he entitled a “Banquet,” giving verses adapted for all manner of shops and signboards; so that a shopkeeper at a loss for an inscription had only to open the book and make his selection; for there were rhymes in it both serious and jocular, suitable to everybody’s taste. The majority of the Dutch signboard inscriptions of that day seem to have been eminently characteristic of the spirit of the nation. No such inscriptions could be brought before “a discerning public,” without the patronage of some holy man mentioned in the Scriptures, whose name was to stand there for no other purpose than to give the Dutch poet an opportunity of making a jingling rhyme; thus, for instance,—

“Jacob was David’s neef maar ’t waren geen Zwagers.
Hier slypt men allerhande Barbiers gereedschappen, ook voor vischwyven en slagers.”[28]

Or another example:—

“Men vischte Moses uit de Biezen,
Hier trekt men tanden en Kiezen.”[29]

In the beginning of the eighteenth century, we find the following signs named, which puzzled a person of an inquisitive turn of mind, who wrote to the British Apollo,[30] (the meagre Notes and Queries of those days,) in the hope of eliciting an explanation of their quaint combination:—

“I’m amazed at the Signs
As I pass through the Town,
To see the odd mixture:
A Magpie and Crown,
The Whale and the Crow,
The Razor and Hen,
The Leg and Seven Stars,
The Axe and the Bottle,
The Tun and the Lute,
The Eagle and Child,
The Shovel and Boot.”

All these signs are also named by Tom Brown:[31]—“The first amusements we encountered were the variety and contradictory language of the signs, enough to persuade a man there were no rules of concord among the citizens. Here we saw Joseph’s Dream, the Bull and Mouth, the Whale and Crow, the Shovel and Boot, the Leg and Star, the Bible and Swan, the Frying-pan and Drum, the Lute and Tun, the Hog in Armour, and a thousand others that the wise men that put them there can give no reason for.”

From this enumeration, we see that a century had worked great changes in the signs. Those of the beginning of the seventeenth century were all simple, and had no combinations. But now we meet very heterogeneous objects joined together. Various reasons can be found to account for this. First, it must be borne in mind that most of the London signs had no inscription to tell the public “this is a lion,” or, “this is a bear;” hence the vulgar could easily make mistakes, and call an object by a wrong name, which might give rise to an absurd combination, as in the case of the Leg and Star; which, perhaps, was nothing else but the two insignia of the order of the Garter; the garter being represented in its natural place, on the leg, and the star of the order beside it. Secondly, the name might be corrupted through faulty pronunciation; and when the sign was to be repainted, or imitated in another street, those objects would be represented by which it was best known. Thus the Shovel and Boot might have been a corruption of the Shovel and Boat, since the Shovel and Ship is still a very common sign in places where grain is carried by canal boats; whilst the Bull and Mouth is said to be a corruption of the Boulogne Mouth—the Mouth of Boulogne Harbour. Finally, whimsical shopkeepers would frequently aim at the most odd combination they could imagine, for no other reason but to attract attention. Taking these premises into consideration, some of the signs which so puzzled Tom Brown might be easily accounted for; the Axe and Bottle, in this way, might have been a corruption of the Battle-axe. The Bible and Swan, a sign in honour of Luther, who is generally represented by the symbol of a swan, a figure of which many Lutheran Churches have on their steeple instead of a weathercock; whilst the Lute and Tun was clearly a pun on the name of Luton, similar to the Bolt and Tun of Prior Bolton, who adopted this device as his rebus.

Other causes of combinations, and many very amusing and instructive remarks about signs, are given in the following from the Spectator, No. 28, April 2, 1710:—

“There is nothing like sound literature and good sense to be met with in those objects, that are everywhere thrusting themselves out to the eye and endeavouring to become visible. Our streets are filled with blue boars, black swans, and red lions, not to mention flying-pigs and hogs in armour, with many creatures more extraordinary than any in the deserts of Africa. Strange that one, who has all the birds and beasts in nature to choose out of, should live at the sign of an ens rationis.

“My first task, therefore, should be like that of Hercules, to clear the city from monsters. In the second place, I should forbid that creatures of jarring and incongruous natures should be joined together in the same sign; such as the Bell and the Neat’s Tongue, the Dog and the Gridiron. The Fox and the Goose may be supposed to have met, but what has the Fox and the Seven Stars to do together? And when did the Lamb and Dolphin ever meet except upon a signpost? As for the Cat and Fiddle, there is a conceit in it, and therefore I do not intend that anything I have here said should affect it. I must, however, observe to you upon this subject, that it is usual for a young tradesman, at his first setting up, to add to his own sign that of the master whom he served, as the husband, after marriage, gives a place to his mistress’s arms in his own coat. This I take to have given rise to many of those absurdities which are committed over our heads; and, as I am informed, first occasioned the Three Nuns and a Hare, which we see so frequently joined together. I would therefore establish certain rules for the determining how far one tradesman may give the sign of another, and in what case he may be allowed to quarter it with his own.

“In the third place, I would enjoin every shop to make use of a sign which bears some affinity to the wares in which it deals. What can be more inconsistent than to see a bawd at the sign of the Angel, or a tailor at the Lion? A cook should not live at the Boot, nor a shoemaker at the Roasted Pig; and yet, for want of this regulation, I have seen a Goat set up before the door of a perfumer, and the French King’s Head at a sword-cutler’s.

“An ingenious foreigner observes that several of those gentlemen who value themselves upon their families, and overlook such as are bred to trades, bear the tools of their forefathers in their coats of arms. I will not examine how true this is in fact; but though it may not be necessary for posterity thus to set up the sign of their forefathers, I think it highly proper that those who actually profess the trade should shew some such mark of it before their doors.

“When the name gives an occasion for an ingenious signpost, I would likewise advise the owner to take that opportunity of letting the world know who he is. It would have been ridiculous for the ingenious Mrs Salmon to have lived at the sign of the trout, for which reason she has erected before her house the figure of the fish that is her namesake. Mr Bell has likewise distinguished himself by a device of the same nature. And here, sir, I must beg leave to observe to you, that this particular figure of a Bell has given occasion to several pieces of wit in this head. A man of your reading must know that Abel Drugger gained great applause by it in the time of Ben Jonson. Our Apocryphal heathen god is also represented by this figure, which, in conjunction with the Dragon,[32] makes a very handsome picture in several of our streets. As for the Bell Savage, which is the sign of a savage man standing by a bell, I was formerly very much puzzled upon the conceit of it, till I accidentally fell into the reading of an old romance translated out of the French, which gives an account of a very beautiful woman, who was found in a wilderness, and is called la Belle Sauvage, and is everywhere translated by our countrymen the Bell Savage.[33] This piece of philology will, I hope, convince you that I have made signposts my study, and consequently qualified myself for the employment which I solicit at your hands. But before I conclude my letter, I must communicate to you another remark which I have made upon the subject with which I am now entertaining you—namely, that I can give a shrewd guess at the humour of the inhabitant by the sign that hangs before his door. A surly, choleric fellow generally makes choice of a Bear, as men of milder dispositions frequently live at the Lamb. Seeing a Punchbowl painted upon a sign near Charing Cross, and very curiously garnished, with a couple of angels hovering over it and squeezing a lemon into it, I had the curiosity to ask after the master of the house, and found upon inquiry, as I had guessed by the little agrémens upon his sign, that he was a Frenchman.”

Another reason for “quartering” signs was on removing from one shop to another, when it was customary to add the sign of the old shop to that of the new one.

“WHEREAS Anthony Wilton, who lived at the Green Cross publick-house against the new Turnpike on New Cross Hill, has been removed for two years past to the new boarded house now the sign of the[22] Green Cross and Kross Keyes on the same hill,” &c.—Weekly Journal, November 22, 1718.

“THOMAS BLACKALL and Francis Ives, Mercers, are removed from the Seven Stars on Ludgate Hill to the Black Lion and Seven Stars over the way.”—Daily Courant, November 17, 1718.

“PETER DUNCOMBE and Saunders Dancer, who lived at the Naked Boy in Great Russell Street, Covent Garden, removed to the Naked Boy and Mitre, near Sommerset House, Strand,” &c.—Postboy, January 2-4, 1711.

“RICHARD MEARES, Musical Instrument maker, is removed from y’ Golden Viol in Leaden Hall Street to y’ North side of St Paul’s Churchyard, at y’ Golden Viol and Hautboy, where he sells all sorts of musical instruments,” &c.—[Bagford bills.]

To increase this complexity still more, came the corruption of names arising from pronunciation; thus Mr Burn, in his introduction to the “Beaufoy Tokens,” mentions the sign of Pique and Carreau, on a gambling-house at Newport, Isle of Wight, which was Englished into the Pig and Carrot; again, the same sign at Godmanchester was still more obliterated into the Pig and Checkers. The sign of the Island Queen I have frequently heard, either in jest or in ignorance, called the Iceland Queen. The editor of the recently-published “Slang Dictionary” remarks that he has seen the name of the once popular premier, George Canning, metamorphosed on an alehouse-sign into the George and Cannon; so the Golden Farmer became the Jolly Farmer; whilst the Four Alls, in Whitechapel, were altered into the Four Awls. Along with this practice, there is a tendency to translate a sign into a sort of jocular slang phrase; thus, in the seventeenth century, the Blackmoorshead and Woolpack, in Pimlico, was called the Devil and Bag of Nails by those that frequented that tavern, and by the last part of that name the house is still called at the present day. Thus the Elephant and Castle is vulgarly rendered as the Pig and Tinderbox; the Bear and Ragged Staff, the Angel and Flute; the Eagle and Child, the Bird and Bantling; the Hog in Armour, the Pig in Misery; the Pig in the Pound, the Gentleman in Trouble, &c.

Some further information, in illustration of the different signboards, is to be obtained from the Adventurer, No. 9, (1752:)—

“It cannot be doubted but that signs were intended originally to express the several occupations of their owners, and to bear some affinity in their external designations with the wares to be disposed of, or the business carried on within. Hence the Hand and Shears is justly appropriated to tailors, and the Hand and Pen to writing-masters; though the very reverend and right worthy order of my neighbours, the Fleet-parsons, have assumed it to themselves as a mark of ‘marriages performed without imposition.’ The Woolpack plainly points out to us a woollen draper; the Naked Boy elegantly reminds us of the necessity of clothing; and the Golden Fleece figuratively denotes the riches of our staple commodity; but are not the Hen and Chickens and the Three Pigeons the unquestionable right of the poulterer, and not to be usurped by the vender of silk or linen?

“It would be useless to enumerate the gross blunders committed in this point by almost every branch of trade. I shall therefore confine myself chiefly to the numerous fraternity of publicans, whose extravagance in this affair calls aloud for reprehension and restraint. Their modest ancestors were contented with a plain Bough stuck up before their doors, whence arose the wise proverb, ‘Good Wine needs no Bush;’ but how have they since deviated from their ancient simplicity! They have ransacked earth, air, and seas, called down sun, moon, and stars to their assistance, and exhibited all the monsters that ever teemed from fantastic imagination. Their Hogs in Armour, their Blue Boars, Black Bears, Green Dragons, and Golden Lions, have already been sufficiently exposed by your brother essay-writers:—

‘Sus horridus, atraque Tigris,
Squamosusque Draco, et fulva cervice Leæna.

Virgil.

‘With foamy tusks to seem a bristly boar,
Or imitate the lion’s angry roar;
Or kiss a dragon, or a tiger stare.’—Dryden.

“It is no wonder that these gentlemen who indulged themselves in such unwarrantable liberties, should have so little regard to the choice of signs adapted to their mystery. There can be no objection made to the Bunch of Grapes, the Rummer, or the Tuns; but would not any one inquire for a hosier at the Leg, or for a locksmith at the Cross Keys? and who would expect anything but water to be sold at the Fountain? The Turkshead may fairly intimate that a seraglio is kept within; the Rose may be strained to some propriety of meaning, as the business transacted there may be said to be done ‘under the rose;’ but why must the Angel, the Lamb, and the Mitre be the designations of the seats of drunkenness or prostitution?

“Some regard should likewise be paid by tradesmen to their situation; or, in other words, to the propriety of the place; and in this, too, the publicans are notoriously faulty. The King’s Arms, and the Star and Garter, are aptly enough placed at the court end of the town, and in the neighbourhood of the royal palace; Shakespeare’s Head takes his station by one playhouse, and Ben Jonson’s by the other; Hell is a public-house adjoining to Westminster Hall, as the Devil Tavern is to the lawyers’ quarter in the Temple: but what has the Crown to do by the ’Change, or the Gun, the Ship, or the Anchor anywhere but at Tower Hill, at Wapping, or Deptford?

“It was certainly from a noble spirit of doing honour to a superior desert, that our forefathers used to hang out the heads of those who were particularly eminent in their professions. Hence we see Galen and Paracelsus exalted before the shops of chemists; and the great names of Tully, Dryden, and Pope, &c., immortalised on the rubric posts[34] of booksellers, while their heads denominate the learned repositors of their works. But I know not whence it happens that publicans have claimed a right to the physiognomies of kings and heroes, as I cannot find out, by the most painful researches, that there is any alliance between them. Lebec, as he was an excellent cook, is the fit representative of luxury; and Broughton, that renowned athletic champion, has an indisputable right to put up his own head if he pleases; but what reason can there be why the glorious Duke William should draw porter, or the brave Admiral Vernon retail flip? Why must Queen Anne keep a ginshop, and King Charles inform us of a skittle-ground? Propriety of character, I think, require that these illustrious personages should be deposed from their lofty stations, and I would recommend hereafter that the alderman’s effigy should accompany his Intire Butt Beer, and that the comely face of that public-spirited patriot who first reduced the price of punch and raised its reputation Pro Bono Publico, should be set up wherever three penn’orth of warm rum is to be sold.

“I have been used to consider several signs, for the frequency of which it is difficult to give any other reason, as so many hieroglyphics with a hidden meaning, satirising the follies of the people, or conveying instruction to the passer-by. I am afraid that the stale jest on our citizens gave rise to so many Horns in public streets; and the number of Castles floating with the wind was probably designed as a ridicule on those erected by soaring projectors. Tumbledown Dick, in the borough of Southwark, is a fine moral on the instability of greatness, and the consequences of ambition; but there is a most ill-natured sarcasm against the fair sex exhibited on a sign in Broad Street, St Giles’s, of a headless female figure called the Good Woman.

‘Quale portentum neque militaris
Daunia in latis alit esculetis,
Nec Jubæ tellus generat, leonum
Arida Nutrix.’—Horace.

‘No beast of such portentous size
In warlike Daunia’s forest lies,
Nor such the tawny lion reigns
Fierce on his native Afric’s plains.’—Francis.

“A discerning eye may also discover in many of our signs evident marks of the religion prevalent amongst us before the Reformation. St George, as the tutelary saint of this nation, may escape the censure of superstition; but St Dunstan, with his tongs ready to take hold of Satan’s nose, and the legions of Angels, Nuns, Crosses, and Holy Lambs, certainly had their origin in the days of Popery.

“Among the many signs which are appropriated to some particular business, and yet have not the least connexion with it, I cannot as yet find any relation between blue balls and pawnbrokers. Nor could I conceive the intent of that long pole putting out at the entrance of a barber’s shop, till a friend of mine, a learned etymologist and glossariographer, assured me that the use of this pole took its rise from the corruption of an old English word. ‘It is probable,’ says he, ‘that our primitive tonsors used to stick up a wooden block or head, or poll, as it was called, before their shop windows, to denote their occupation; and afterwards, through a confounding of different things with a like pronunciation, they put up the parti-coloured staff of enormous length, which is now called a pole, and appropriated to barbers.’”[35]

The remarks of the Adventurer have brought us down to the middle of the eighteenth century, when the necessity for signs was not so great as formerly. Education was spreading fast, and reading had become a very general acquirement; yet it would appear that the exhibitors of signboards wished to make up in extravagance what they had lost in use. “Be it known, however, to posterity,” says a writer in the Gentleman’s Magazine, “that long after signs became unnecessary, it was not unusual for an opulent shopkeeper to lay out as much upon a sign, and the curious ironwork with which it was fixed in the house, so as to project nearly in the middle of the street, as would furnish a less considerable dealer with a stock in trade. I have been credibly informed that there were many signs and sign irons upon Ludgate Hill which cost several hundred pounds, and that as much was laid out by a mercer on the sign of the Queen’s Head, as would have gone a good way towards decorating the original for a birthday.” Misson, a French traveller who visited England in 1719, thus speaks about the signs:—

“By a decree of the police, the signs of Paris must be small, and not too far advanced from the houses. At London, they are commonly very large, and jut out so far, that in some narrow streets they touch one another; nay, and run across almost quite to the other side. They are generally adorned with carving and gilding; and there are several that, with the branches of iron which support them, cost above a hundred guineas. They seldom write upon the signs the name of the thing represented in it, so that there is no need of Molière’s inspector. But this does not at all please the German and other travelling strangers; because, for want of the things being so named, they have not an opportunity of learning their names in England, as they stroll along the streets. Out of London, and particularly in villages, the signs of inns are suspended in the middle of a great wooden portal, which may be looked upon as a kind of triumphal arch to the honour of Bacchus.”

M. Grosley, another Frenchman, who made a voyage through England in 1765, makes very similar remarks. As soon as he landed at Dover, he observes,—

“I saw nothing remarkable, but the enormous size of the public-house signs, the ridiculous magnificence of the ornaments with which they are overcharged, the height of a sort of triumphal arches that support them, and most of which cross the streets,” &c. Elsewhere he says, “In fact nothing can be more inconsistent than the choice and the placing of the ornaments, with which the signposts and the outside of the shops of the citizens are loaded.”

But gaudy and richly ornamented as they were, it would seem that, after all, the pictures were bad, and that the absence of inscriptions was not to be lamented, for those that existed only “made fritters of English.” The Tatler, No. 18, amused his readers at the expense of their spelling:—“There is an offence I have a thousand times lamented, but fear I shall never see remedied, which is that, in a nation where learning is so frequent as in Great Britain, there should be so many gross errors as there are, in the very direction of things wherein accuracy is necessary for the conduct of life. This is notoriously observed by all men of letters when they first come to town, (at which time they are usually curious that way,) in the inscriptions on signposts. I have cause to know this matter as well as anybody, for I have, when I went to Merchant Taylor’s School, suffered stripes for spelling after the signs I observed in my way; though at the same time, I must confess, staring at those inscriptions first gave me an idea and curiosity for medals, in which I have since arrived at some knowledge. Many a man has lost his way and his dinner, by this general want of skill in orthography; for, considering that the paintings are usually so very bad that you cannot know the animal under whose sign you are to live that day, how must the stranger be misled, if it is wrong spelled as well as ill painted? I have a cousin now in town, who has answered under bachelor at Queen’s College, whose name is Humphrey Mopstaff, (he is akin to us by his mother;) this young man, going to see a relation in Barbican, wandered a whole day by the mistake of one letter; for it was written, ‘This is the Beer,’ instead of ‘This is the Bear.’ He was set right at last by inquiring for the house of a fellow who could not read, and knew the place mechanically, only by having been often drunk there. . . . I propose that every tradesman in the city of London and Westminster shall give me a sixpence a quarter for keeping their signs in repair as to the grammatical part; and I will take into my house a Swiss count[36] of my acquaintance, who can remember all their names without book, for despatch’ sake, setting up the head of the said foreigner for my sign, the features being strong and fit to hang high.”

Had the signs murdered only the king’s English, it might have been forgiven; but even the lives of his majesty’s subjects were not secure from them; for, leaving alone the complaints raised about their preventing the circulation of fresh air, a more serious charge was brought against them in 1718, when a sign in Bride’s Lane, Fleet Street, by its weight dragged down the front of the house, and in its fall killed two young ladies, the king’s jeweller, and a cobbler. A commission of inquiry into the nuisance was appointed; but, like most commissions and committees, they talked a great deal and had some dinners; in the meantime the public interest and excitement abated, and matters remained as they were.

In the year 1762 considerable attention was directed to signboards by Bonnell Thornton, a clever wag, who, to burlesque the exhibitions of the Society of Artists, got up an Exhibition of Signboards. In a preliminary advertisement, and in his published catalogue, he described it as the “Exhibition of the Society of Sign-painters of all the curious signs to be met with in town or country, together with such original designs as might be transmitted to them, as specimens of the native genius of the nation.” Hogarth, who understood a joke as well as any man in England, entered into the spirit of the humour, was on the hanging committee, and added a few touches to heighten the absurdity. The whole affair proved a great success.[37]

This comical exhibition was the greatest glory to which signboards were permitted to attain, as not more than four years after they had a fall from which they never recovered. Education had now so generally spread, that the majority of the people could read sufficiently well to decipher a name and a number. The continual exhibition of pictures in the streets and thoroughfares consequently became useless; the information they conveyed could be imparted in a more convenient and simple manner, whilst their evils could be avoided. The strong feeling of corporations, too, had set in steadily against signboards, and henceforth they were doomed.

Paris, this time, set the example: by an act of September 17, 1761, M. de Sartines, Lieutenant de Police, ordered that, in a month’s time from the publication of the act, all signboards in Paris and its suburbs were to be fixed against the walls of the houses, and not to project more than four inches, including the border, frame, or other ornaments;—also, all the signposts and sign irons were to be removed from the streets and thoroughfares, and the passage cleared.

London soon followed: in the Daily News, November 1762, we find:—“The signs in Duke’s Court, St Martin’s Lane, were all taken down and affixed to the front of the houses.” Thus Westminster had the honour to begin the innovation, by procuring an act with ample powers to improve the pavement, &c., of the streets; and this act also sealed the doom of the signboards, which, as in Paris, were ordered to be affixed to the houses. This was enforced by a statute of 2 Geo. III. c. 21, enlarged at various times. Other parishes were longer in making up their mind; but the great disparity in the appearance of the streets westward from Temple Bar, and those eastward, at last made the Corporation of London follow the example, and adopt similar improvements. Suitable powers to carry out the scheme were soon obtained. In the 6 Geo. III. the Court of Common Council appointed commissions, and in a few months all the parishes began to clear away: St Botolph in 1767; St Leonard, Shoreditch, in 1768; St Martin’s-le-Grand in 1769; and Marylebone in 1770.[38] By these acts—

“The commissioners are empowered to take down and remove all signs or other emblems used to denote the trade, occupation, or calling of any person or persons, signposts, signirons, balconies, penthouses, showboards, spouts, and gutters, projecting into any of the said streets, &c., and all other encroachments, projections, and annoyances whatsoever, within the said cities and liberties, and cause the same, or such parts thereof as they think fit, to be affixed or placed on the fronts of the houses, shops, warehouses, or buildings to which they belong, and return to the owner so much as shall not be put up again or otherwise made use of in such alterations; and any person having, placing, erecting, or building any sign, signpost, or other post, signirons, balcony, penthouse, obstruction, or annoyance, is subject to a penalty of £5, and twenty shillings a day for continuing the same.”[39]

With the signboards, of course, went the signposts. The removing of the posts, and paving of the streets with Scotch granite, gave rise to the following epigram:—

“The Scottish new pavement well deserves our praise;
To the Scotch we’re obliged, too, for mending our ways;
But this we can never forgive, for they say
As that they have taken our posts all away.”

After the signs and posts had been removed, we can imagine how bleak and empty the streets at first appeared; how silent in the night-time; what a difficulty there must have been in finding out the houses and shops; and how everybody, particularly the old people, grumbled about the innovations.

Now numbers appeared everywhere. As early as 1512 an attempt had been made in Paris at numbering sixty-eight new houses, built in that year on the Pont Nôtre-Dame, which were all distinguished by 1, 2, 3, 4, &c.; yet more than two centuries elapsed before the numerical arrangement was generally adopted. In 1787 the custom in France had become almost universal, but was not enforced by police regulations until 1805. In London it appears to have been attempted in the beginning of the eighteenth century; for in Hatton’s “New View of London,” 1708, we see that “in Prescott Street, Goodman’s Fields, instead of signs the houses are distinguished by numbers, as the staircases in the Inns of Court and Chancery.” In all probability reading was not sufficiently widespread at that time to bring this novelty into general practice. Yet how much more simple is the method of numbering, for giving a clear and unmistakable direction, may be seen from the means resorted to to indicate a house under the signboard system; as for instance:—

“TO be lett, Newbury House, in St James’s Park, next door but one to Lady Oxford’s, having two balls at the gate, and iron rails before the door,” &c., &c.—Advertisement in the original edition of the Spectator, No. 207.

“AT her house, the Red Ball and Acorn, over against the Globe Tavern, in Queen Street, Cheapside, near the Three Crowns, liveth a Gentlewoman,” &c.

At night the difficulty of finding a house was greatly increased, for the light of the lamps was so faint that the signs, generally hung rather high, could scarcely be discerned. Other means, therefore, were resorted to, as we see from the advertisement of “Doctor James Tilbrogh, a German Doctor,” who resides “over against the New Exchange in Bedford Street, at the sign of the Peacock, where you shall see at night two candles burning within one of the chambers before the balcony, and a lanthorn with a candle in it upon the balcony.” And in that strain all directions were given: over against, or next door to, were among the consecrated formulæ. Hence many dispensed with a picture of their own, and clung, like parasites, to the sign opposite or next door, particularly if it was a shop of some note. Others resorted to painting their houses, doors, balconies, or doorposts, in some striking colour; hence those Red, Blue, or White Houses still so common; hence also the Blue Posts and the Green Posts. So we find a Dark House in Chequer Alley, Moorfields, a Green Door in Craven Building, and a Blue Balcony in Little Queen Street, all of which figure on the seventeenth century trades tokens.[40] Those who did much trade by night, as coffee-houses, quacks, &c., adopted lamps with coloured glasses, by which they distinguished their houses. This custom has come down to us, and is still adhered to by doctors, chemists, public-houses, and occasionally by sweeps.

Yet, though the numbers were now an established fact, the shopkeepers still clung to the old traditions, and for years continued to display their signs, grand, gorgeous, and gigantic as ever, though affixed to the houses. As late as 1803, a traveller thus writes about London:—“As it is one of the principal secrets of the trade to attract the attention of that tide of people which is constantly ebbing and flowing in the streets, it may easily be conceived that great pains are taken to give a striking form to the signs and devices hanging out before their shops. The whole front of a house is frequently employed for this purpose. Thus, in the vicinity of Ludgate Hill, the house of S——, who has amassed a fortune of £40,000 by selling razors, is daubed with large capitals three feet high, acquainting the public that ‘the most excellent and superb patent razors are sold here.’ As soon, therefore, as a shop has acquired some degree of reputation, the younger brethren of the trade copy its device. A grocer in the city, who had a large Beehive for his sign hanging out before his shop, had allured a great many customers. No sooner were the people seen swarming about this hive than the old signs suddenly disappeared, and Beehives, elegantly gilt, were substituted in their places. Hence the grocer was obliged to insert an advertisement in the newspapers, importing ‘that he was the sole proprietor of the original and celebrated Beehive.’ A similar accident befell the shop of one E—— in Cheapside, who has a considerable demand for his goods on account of their cheapness and excellence. The sign of this gentleman consists in a prodigious Grasshopper, and as this insect had quickly propagated its species through every part of the city, Mr E—— has in his advertisements repeatedly requested the public to observe that ‘the genuine Grasshopper is only to be found before his warehouse.’ He has, however, been so successful as to persuade several young beginners to enter into engagements with him, on conditions very advantageous to himself, by which they have obtained a licence for hanging out the sign of a Grasshopper before their shops, expressly adding this clause in large capitals, that ‘they are genuine descendants of the renowned and matchless Grasshopper of Mr E—— in Cheapside.’”[41]

Such practices as these, however, necessarily gave the deathblow to signboards; for, by reason of this imitation on the part of rival shopkeepers, the main object—distinction and notoriety—was lost. How was a stranger to know which of those innumerable Beehives in the Strand was the Beehive; or which of all those “genuine Grasshoppers” was THE genuine one? So, gradually, the signs began to dwindle away, first in the principal streets, then in the smaller thoroughfares and the suburbs; finally, in the provincial towns also. The publicans only retained them, and even they in the end were satisfied with the name without the sign, vox et præterea nihil.

PLATE III.

MERMAID. (Cheapside, 1640.) | ALE-GARLAND. (Wouwverman, 17th cent.)

CRISPIN AND CRISPIAN.
(Roxburghe Ballads. 17th century.)

TRUSTY SERVANT. (Circa 1700.) | HOG IN ARMOUR.

In the seventeenth century signs had been sung in sprightly ballads, and often given the groundwork for a biting satire. They continued to inspire the popular Muse until the end, but her latter productions were more like a wail than a ballad. There is certainly a rollicking air of gladness about the following song, but it was the last flicker of the lamp:—

“THE MAIL-COACH GUARD.

At each inn on the road I a welcome could find:—
At the Fleece I’d my skin full of ale;
The Two Jolly Brewers were just to my mind;
At the Dolphin I drank like a whale.
Tom Tun at the Hogshead sold pretty good stuff;
They’d capital flip at the Boar;
And when at the Angel I’d tippled enough,
I went to the Devil for more.
Then I’d always a sweetheart so snug at the Car;
At the Rose I’d a lily so white;
Few planets could equal sweet Nan at the Star,
No eyes ever twinkled so bright.
I’ve had many a hug at the sign of the Bear;
In the Sun courted morning and noon;
And when night put an end to my happiness there,
I’d a sweet little girl in the Moon.
To sweethearts and ale I at length bid adieu,
Of wedlock to set up the sign:
Hand-in-hand the Good Woman I look for in you,
And the Horns I hope ne’er will be mine.
Once guard to the mail, I’m now guard to the fair;
But though my commission’s laid down,
Yet while the King’s Arms I’m permitted to bear,
Like a Lion I’ll fight for the Crown.”

This was written in the beginning of the century, when eighteen hundred was still in her teens. A considerable falling off may be observed in the following, contributed by a correspondent of William Hone:—

“SIGNS OF LOVE AT OXFORD.
By an Inn-consolable Lover.

She’s as light as The Greyhound, as fair as The Angel,
Her looks than The Mitre more sanctified are;
But she flies like The Roebuck, and leaves me to range ill,
Still looking to her as my true polar Star.
New Inn-ventions I try, with new art to adore,
But my fate is, alas, to be voted a Boar;
My Goats I forsook to contemplate her charms,
And must own she is fit for our noble King’s Arms;
Now Cross’d, and now Jockey’d, now sad, now elate,
The Checquers appear but a map of my fate;
I blush’d like a Blue Cur, to send her a Pheasant,
But she call’d me a Turk, and rejected my present;
So I moped to The Barley Mow, grieved in my mind,
That The Ark from the Flood ever rescued mankind!
In my dreams Lions roar, and The Green Dragon grins,
And fiends rise in shape of The Seven Deadly Sins,
When I ogle The Bells, should I see her approach,
I skip like a Nag and jump into The Coach.
She is crimson and white like a Shoulder of Mutton,
Not the red of The Ox was so bright when first put on;
Like The Holly-bush prickles she scratches my liver,
While I moan and die like a Swan by the river.”

But tame as this last performance is, it is “merry as a brass band” when compared with a ballad sung in the streets some twenty years later, entitled, “Laughable and Interesting Picture of Drunkenness.” Speaking of the publicans, who call themselves “Lords,” it says:—

“If these be the Lords, there are many kinds,
For over their doors you will see many signs;
There is The King, and likewise The Crown,
And beggars are made in every town.

There is The Queen, and likewise her Head,
And many I fear to the gallows are led;
There is The Angel, and also The Deer,
Destroying health in every sphere.

There is The Lamb, likewise The Fleece,
And the fruit’s bad throughout the whole piece;
There is The White Hart, also The Cross Keys,
And many they’ve sent far over the seas.

There is The Bull, and likewise his Head.
His Horns are so strong, they will gore you quite dead;
[34] There’s The Hare and Hounds that never did run,
And many’s been hung for the deeds they’ve done.

There are Two Fighting Cocks that never did crow,
Where men often meet to break God’s holy vow;
There is The New Inn, and the Rodney they say,
Which send men to jail their debts for to pay.

The Hope and The Anchor, The Turk and his Head,
Hundreds they’ve caused for to wander for bread;
There is The White Horse, also The Woolpack,
Take the shoes off your feet, and the clothes off your back.

The Axe and the Cleaver, The Jockey and Horse,
Some they’ve made idle, some they’ve made worse;
The George and the Dragon, and Nelson the brave,
Many lives they’ve shorten’d and brought to the grave.

The Fox and the Goose, and The Guns put across,
But all the craft is to get hold of the brass;
The Bird in the Cage, and the sign of The Thrush,
But one in the hand is worth two in the bush.”

There is an unpleasant musty air about this ballad, a taint of Seven Dials, an odour of the ragged dresscoat, and the broken, ill-used hat. The gay days of signboard poetry, when sparks in feathers and ruffles sang their praises, are no more. Our forefathers were content to buy “at the Golden Frying-pan,” but we must needs go to somebody’s emporium, mart, repository, or make our purchases at such grand places as the Pantocapelleion, Pantometallurgicon, or Panklibanon. The corruptions and misapplications of the old pictorial signboards find a parallel in the modern rendering of our ancient proverbs and sayings. When the primary use and purpose of an article have fallen out of fashion, or become obsolete, there is no knowing how absurdly it may not be treated by succeeding generations. We were once taken many miles over fields and through lanes to see the great stone coffins of some ancient Romans, but the farmer, a sulky man, thought we were impertinent in wishing to see his pig-troughs. In Haarlem, we were once shewn the huge cannon-ball which killed Heemskerk, the discoverer of Nova Zembla. When not required for exhibition, however, the good man in charge found it of great use in grinding his mustard-seed. Amongst the middle classes of to-day, no institution of ancient times has been more corrupted and misapplied than heraldry. The modern “Forrester,” or member of the “Ancient Order of Druids,” is scarcely a greater burlesque upon the original than the beer retailers’ “Arms” of the present hour.

Good wine and beer were formerly to be had at the Boar’s Head, or the Three Tuns; but those emblems will not do now, it must be the “Arms” of somebody or something; whence we find such anomalies as the Angel Arms, (Clapham Road;) Dunstan’s Arms, (City Road;) Digger’s Arms, (Petworth, Surrey;) Farmer’s Arms and Gardener’s Arms, (Lancashire;) Grand Junction Arms, (Praed Street, London;) Griffin’s Arms, (Warrington;) Mount Pleasant Arms, Paragon Arms, (Kingston, Surrey;) St Paul’s Arms, (Newcastle;) Portcullis Arms, (Ludlow;) Puddler’s Arms, (Wellington, Shropshire;) Railway Arms, (Ludlow;) Sol’s Arms, (Hampstead Row;) the Vulcan Arms, (Sheffield;) General’s Arms, (Little Baddon, Essex;) the Waterloo Arms, (High Street, Marylebone,) &c. Besides these, a quantity of newfangled, high-sounding, but unmeaning names seem to be the order of the day with gin-palaces and refreshment-houses, as, Perseverance, Enterprise, Paragon, Criterion.

Notwithstanding these innovations, the majority of the old objects still survive, in name at least, on the signboards of alehouses and taverns. Their use may still be regarded as a rule with publicans and innkeepers, although they have become the exception in other trades. Occasionally, also, we may still come upon a painted signboard, but these are daily becoming scarcer. Not so in France; there the good old tradition of the painted signboard is yet kept up. We get a good glimpse of this subject in the following:[42]—“But it is the signs that so amuse and absolutely arrest a stranger. This is a practice that has grown into a mania at Paris, and is even a subject for the ridicule of the stage, since many a shopkeeper considers his sign as a primary matter, and spends a little capital in this one outfit. Many of them exhibit figures as large as life, painted in no humble or shabby style; while history, sacred and classical, religion, the stage, &c., furnish subjects. You may see the Horatii and Curiatii—a scene from the ‘Fourberies de Scapin’ of Molière—a group of French soldiers, with the inscription, A la Valeur des Soldats Français, or a group of children inscribed à la réunion des Bons Enfants,[43]—or à la Baigneuse, depicting a beautiful nymph just issuing from the bath; or à la Somnambule, a pretty girl walking in her sleep and nightdress, and followed by her gallant.[44]

“In ludicrous things, a barber will write under his sign:—

‘La Nature donne barbe et cheveux,
Et moi, je les coupe tous les deux.’[45]

‘A toutes les figures dédiant mes rasoirs,
Je nargue la censure des fidèles miroirs.’[46]

“Also a frequent inscription with a barber is, ‘Ici on rajeunit.’ A breeches-maker writes up, M——, Culottier de Mme. la Duchesse de Devonshire. A perruquier exhibits a sign, very well painted, of an old fop trying on a new wig, entitled, Au ci-devant jeune homme. A butcher displays a bouquet of faded flowers, with this inscription, Au tendre Souvenir. An eating-house exhibits a punning sign, with an ox dressed up with bonnet, lace veil, shawl, &c., which naturally implies, Bœuf à-la-mode. A pastry-cook has a very pretty little girl climbing up to reach some cakes in a cupboard, and this sign he calls, A la petite Gourmande. A stocking-maker has painted for him a lovely creature, trying on a new stocking, at the same time exhibiting more charms than the occasion requires to the young fellow who is on his knees at her feet, with the very significant motto, A la belle occasion.”[47]

Though it is forty years since these remarks were written, they still, mutatis mutandis, apply to the present day. Even the greatest and most fashionable shops on the Boulevards have their names or painted signs; the subjects are mostly taken from the principal topic of conversation at the time the establishment opened, whether politics, literature, the drama, or fine arts: thus we have à la Présidence; au Prophète; au Palais d’Industrie; aux Enfants d’Edouard, (the Princes in the Tower;) au Colosse de Rhodes; à la Tour de Malakoff; à la Tour de Nesles, (tragedy;) au Sonneur de St Paul, (tragedy;) à la Dame Blanche; à la Bataille de Solferino; au Trois Mousquetaires; au Lingot d’Or, (a great lottery swindle in 1852;) à la Reine Blanche, &c.[48] Some of these signs are remarkably well painted, in a vigorous, bold style, with great bravura of brush; for instance, les Noces de Vulcain, on the Quai aux Fleurs, is painted in a style which would do no discredit to the artist of les Romains de la Décadence. Roger Bontemps is still frequent on the French signboard, where he is represented as a jolly rubicund toper, crowned with vine-leaves and seated astride a tun, with a brimming tumbler in his hand; this is a favourite sign with publicans. At the tobacconist’s door we may see a sign representing an elderly Paul Pry-looking gentleman enjoying a pinch of snuff. The Bureaux des Remplacements Militaires particularly excel in a gaudy display of military subjects, where the various passages of a soldier’s life are represented with all the romance of the warriors of the comic opera. Here can be seen the gallant troopers now courting Jeanette or Fanchon; now charging Russians, Cabyles, or Austrians, according to the date of the picture. Elsewhere a lancer on a fantastic wild horse; a guide, walking with a pretty vivandière, or an old grenadier with the Legion of Honour upon his breast;—“all the glorious pomp and circumstance of war” portrayed to entice the French clodhopper to sell himself “to death or to glory.” More pacific pictures may be observed at the door of the midwife; there we see a sedate-looking matron in ecstasy over the interesting young stranger she has just ushered forth into the world, whilst paterfamilias stands with a triumphant look in the background. Then there is the Herculean coalheaver at the door of the auvergnat, who sells coals and firewood; and landscapes with cattle at the dairyshops. But amongst the best painted are those at the doors of the marchands de vins et de comestibles, where we see frequently bunches of fruit, game, flowers, glasses, hams, fowls, fish, all cleverly grouped together, and painted in a dashing style. There is one, for instance, in the Rue Bellechasse, and another in the Rue St Lazare, that are well worth inspection. These paintings are generally on the door-posts and window-frames; they are painted on thin white canvas, fixed with varnish at the back of a thick piece of plateglass, and so let into the woodwork.

And now a few words concerning the painters of signs. Their head-quarters were in Harp Alley, Shoe Lane, where, until lately, gilt grapes, sugar-loaves, lasts, teapots, &c., &c., were displayed ready for the market. Here Messrs Barlow, Craddock, and others, whose names are now as completely lost as their works, had their studios, and produced some very creditable signs, both carved and painted. A few, however, were the productions of no mean artists. The Spectator, January 8, 1743, No. 744, says:—

“The other day, going down Ludgate Street, several people were gaping at a very splendid sign of Queen Elizabeth, which by far exceeded all the[38] other signs in the street, the painter having shewn a masterly judgment and the carver and gilder much pomp and splendour. It looked rather like a capital picture in a gallery than a sign in the street.”

Unfortunately the name of the artist who painted this has not come down to us.

Those who produced the best signs, however, were not exactly the Harp Alley sign-painters, but the coach-painters, who often united these two branches of art. In the last century, both the coaches and sedans of the wealthy classes were walking picture galleries, the panels being painted with all sorts of subjects.[49] And when the men that painted these turned their hands to sign-painting, they were sure to produce something good. Such was Clarkson, to whom J. T. Smith ascribed the beautiful sign of Shakespeare that formerly hung in Little Russell Street, Drury Lane, for which he was paid £500.—John Baker, (ob. 1771,) who studied under the same master as Catton, and was made a member of the Royal Academy at its foundation.—Charles Catton (ob. 1798) painted several very good signs, particularly a Lion for his friend Wright, a famous coachmaker, at that time living in Long Acre. This picture, though it had weathered many a storm, was still to be seen in J. T. Smith’s time, at a coachmaker’s on the west side of Well Street, Oxford Street. A Turk’s head, painted by him, was long admired as the sign of a mercer in York Street, Covent Garden.—John Baptist Cipriani, (ob. 1785,) a Florentine carriage-painter, living in London, also a Royal Academician.—Samuel Wale, R.A. (ob. 1786) painted a celebrated Falstaff and various other signs; the principal one was a whole length of Shakespeare, about five feet high, which was executed for and displayed at the door of a public-house at the north-west corner of Little Russell Street, Drury Lane. It was enclosed in a most sumptuous carved gilt frame, and was suspended by rich ironwork. But this splendid object of attraction did not hang long before it was taken down, in consequence of the Act of Parliament for removing the signs and other obstructions in the streets of London. Such was the change in the public appreciation consequent on the new regulations in signs, that this representation of our great dramatic poet was sold for a trifle to Mason the broker in Lower Grosvenor Street, where it stood at his door for several years, until it was totally destroyed by the weather and other accidents.[50]

The universal use of signboards furnished no little employment for the inferior rank of painters, and sometimes even to the superior professors. Among the most celebrated practitioners in this branch was a person of the name of Lamb, who possessed considerable ability. His pencil was bold and masterly, and well adapted to the subjects on which it was generally employed. There was also Gwynne, another coach-painter, who acquired some reputation as a marine painter, and produced a few good signs. Robert Dalton, keeper of the pictures of King George III., had been apprenticed to a sign and coach-painter; so were Ralph Kirby, drawing-master to George IV. when Prince of Wales, Thomas Wright of Liverpool, the marine painter, Smirke, R.A., and many artists who acquired considerable after-reputation.

Peter Monamy (ob. 1749) was apprenticed to a sign and house-painter on London Bridge. It was this artist who decorated the carriage of Admiral Byng with ships and naval trophies, and painted a portrait of Admiral Vernon’s ship for a famous public-house of the day, well known by the sign of the Portobello, a few doors north of the church in St Martin’s Lane.[51]

Besides these, we have the “great professors,” as Edwards calls them, who occasionally painted a sign for a freak. At the head of these stands Hogarth, whose Man loaded with Mischief is still to be seen at 414 Oxford Street, where it is a fixture in the alehouse of that name.

Richard Wilson, R.A., (ob. 1782,) painted the Three Loggerheads for an alehouse in North Wales, which gave its name to the village of Loggerheads, near the town of Mould. The painting was still exhibited as a signboard in 1824, though little of Wilson’s work remained, as it had been repeatedly touched up.

George Morland painted several; the Goat in Boots on the Fulham Road is attributed to him, but has since been painted often over; he also painted a White Lion for an inn at Paddington, where he used to carouse with his boon companions, Ibbetson and Rathbone; and in a small public-house near Chelsea Bridge, Surrey, there was, as late as 1824, a sign of the Cricketers painted by him. This painting by Morland, at the date mentioned, had been removed inside the house, and a copy of it hung up for the sign; unfortunately, however, the landlord used to travel about with the original, and put it up before his booth at Staines and Egham races, cricket matches, and similar occasions.

Ibbetson painted a sign for the village alehouse at Troutbeck, near Ambleside, to settle a bill run up in a sketching, fishing, and dolce-far-niente expedition; the sign represented two faces, the one thin and pale, the other jolly and rubicund; under it was the following rhyme:—

“Thou mortal man that liv’st by bread,
What made thy face to look so red?

Thou silly fop, that looks so pale,
‘Tis red with Tommy Burkett’s ale.”[52]

David Cox painted a Royal Oak for the alehouse at Bettws-y-Coed, Denbighshire; fortunately this has been taken down, and is now preserved behind glass inside the inn.

The elder Crome produced a sign of the Sawyers at St Martins, Norwich; it was afterwards taken down by the owner, framed, and hung up as a picture.

At New Inn Lane, Epsom, Harlow painted a front and a back view of Queen Charlotte, to settle a bill he had run up; he imitated Sir Thomas Lawrence’s style, and signed it “T. L.,” Greek Street, Soho. When Lawrence heard this, he got in a terrible rage and said, if Harlow were not a scoundrel, he would kick him from one street’s end to the other; upon which Harlow very coolly remarked, that when Sir Thomas should make up his mind to it, he hoped he would choose a short street.

In his younger days Sir Charles Ross painted a sign of the Magpie at Sudbury, and the landlady of the house, with no small pride, gave the informant to understand that, more than thirty years after, the aristocratic portrait-painter came in a carriage to her house, and asked to be shewn the old sign once more.

Herring is said to have painted some signs. Amongst them are the Flying Dutchman, at Cottage Green, Camberwell, and a White Lion at Doncaster; underneath the last are the words,—“Painted by Herring.”

Millais painted a Saint George and Dragon, with grapes round it, for the Vidler’s Inn, Hayes, Kent; and we learn that a sign at Singleton, Lancashire, was painted by an R.A. and an R.S., each painting one side of it; on the front was represented a wearied pilgrim, at the back the same refreshed, but the sign was never hung up.

Great men of former ages, also, are known to have painted signs; in the museum at Basle, in Switzerland, there are two pictures of a school, painted by Holbein when fourteen years old, for a sign of the schoolmaster of the town. The Mule and Muleteer in the Sutherland collection, is said to have been painted by Correggio as a sign for an inn; a similar legend is told about the Young Bull of Paul Potter, in the museum of the Hague, in Holland, which is reported to have been painted for a butcher’s signboard. The Chaste Susannah (la chaste Susanne) was formerly a fine stone bas-relief in the Rue aux Fèves, Paris; it was attributed to Goujon, and bought as such by an amateur. A plaster cast of it now occupies its place. Watteau executed a sign for a milliner on the Pont Nôtre-Dame, which was thought sufficiently good to be engraved. Horace Vernet has the name of having produced some signs in his younger days; and there is still at the present time a sign of the White Horse, in one of the villages in the neighbourhood of Paris, which is pointed out as a work of Guéricault.

Besides these, there are, and have been at various times, excellent signboards in Paris, the artists of which are not known. Thus there was, in the beginning of the eighteenth century, a sign at the foot of the Pont Neuf, called le Petit Dunkerque, which was greatly admired; and in the reign of Louis XV. an armourer on the Pont Saint Michel had a sign, which was so fine a work of art that it was bought as a cabinet picture by a wealthy citizen. In the beginning of this century there was a much admired sign on the shutters of a glass and china shop in the Rue Royale St Honoré, which unfortunately was destroyed during some repairs that took place upon the building passing into other hands. In 1808, the sign of la Fille mal gardée, (a vaudeville,) at a mercer’s, attracted great attention. About this period the Rue Vivienne was very rich in good signboards; there were la Toison de Cachemire; les Trois Sultanes; le Couronnement de la Rosière, and la Joconde, all very good works of art. There was a gay Comte Ory on the Boulevard des Italiens, and la Blanche Marguerite, most comely to look upon, in the Rue Montmartre. All these are now gone, but many good specimens of French signboard painting may yet be met with.

Before closing this general survey of signboard history, we must direct attention to the number of streets named after signs, both in England and abroad. A walk down Fleet Street will give, in a small compass, as many illustrations as are to be met with in any other thoroughfare in town, for there nearly all the courts are named after signs that were either hung within them, or at their entrance. Not only streets, but families also have to thank signs for their names.

“Many names that seem unfitting for men, as of brutish beasts, etc., come from the very signes of the houses where they inhabited; for I have heard of them which sayd they spake of knowledge, that some in late time dwelling at the signe of the Dolphin, Bull, White Horse, Racket, Peacocke, etc., were commonly called Thomas at the Dolphin, Will at the Bull, George at the White Horse, Robin at the Racket, which names, as many other of like sort, with omitting at the, became afterwards hereditary to their children.”—Camden’s Remaines, p. 102.

As examples of such names we have, “Arrow, Axe, Barrell, Bullhead, Bell, Block, Board, Banner, Bowles, Baskett, Cann, Coulter, Chisell, Clogg, Crosskeys, Crosier, Funnell, Forge, Firebrand, Grapes, Griffin, Horns, Hammer, Hamper, Hodd, Harrow, Image, (the sign originally in honour of some saint perhaps,) Jugg, Kettle, Knife, Lance, Mallet, Maul, Mattock, Needle, Pail, Pott, Potts, Plowe, Plane, Pipes, Pottle, Patten, Posnet, (a purse or money-bag,) Pitcher, Rule, Rainbow, Sack, Saw, Shovel, Shears, Scales, Silverspoon, Swords, Tankard, Tabor, (a drum,) Trowel, Tubb and Wedge, and a good many others.”[53]

And now, having taken a passing glance at signboard history, from the earliest times down to the present day, we may not improperly conclude this chapter with an enumeration of the inn, tavern, and public-house signs which occur most frequently in London, in this present year of grace, 1864:—

12 Adam and Eves, 13 Albions, 5 Alfred’s Heads, 13 Anchor and Hopes, 18 Angels, 8 Angels and Crowns, 3 Antigallicans, 5 Artichokes, 13 Barley Mows, 9 Beehives, 31 Bells, 7 Ben Jonsons, 5 Birds in Hand, 5 Black Boys, 16 Black Bulls, 5 Black Dogs, 29 Black Horses, 10 Black Lions, 6 Black Swans, 19 Blue Anchors, 5 Blue Coat Boys, 6 Blue Lasts, 14 Blue Peters, 27 Bricklayers’ Arms, 5 Bridge Houses, 22 Britannias, 15 Brown Bears, 8 Builders’ Arms, 17 Bulls, (some combined with Bells, Butchers, &c.,) 22 Bull’s Heads, 4 Camden Heads, 6 Capes of Good Hope, 14 Carpenters’ Arms, 19 Castles, 6 Catherine Wheels, 7 Champions, 5 Chequers, 5 Cherry-trees, 8 Cheshire Cheeses, 11 City Arms, 18 Cities of London, and other cities, (as Canton, Paris, Quebec, &c.,) 52 Coach and Horses, 12 Cocks, 16 Cocks in combination with Bottles, Hoops, Lions, Magpies, &c., 6 Constitutions, 17 Coopers’ Arms, 7 Crooked Billets, 5 Cross Keys, 61 Crowns, 18 Crown and Anchors, 5 Crown and Cushions, 11 Crown and Sceptres, 17 Crowns, combined with other objects, as Anvils, Barley Mows, Thistles, Dolphins, &c., (in all, 112 Crowns; certainly we are a loyal nation!) 12 Devonshire Arms, 2 Devonshire Castles, 10 Dolphins, 6 Dover Castles, 34 Dukes of Wellington, 32 Dukes of York, 6 Dukes of Sussex, 16 Dukes of Clarence, 7 Dukes of Cambridge, 26 other Dukes, (including Albemarle, Argyle, Bedford, Bridgewater, Gloucester, &c.,) 7 various Duchesses, (as Kent, York, Oldenburgh, &c.,) 14 Duke’s Heads, 18 Earls, (Aberdeen, Cathcart, Chatham, Durham, Essex, &c.,) 6 Edinburgh Castles, 5 Elephants and Castles, 9 Falcons, 21 Feathers, 4 Fishmongers’ Arms, 4 Five Bells, 5 Fleeces, 6 Flying Horses, 5 Fortunes of War, 24 Fountains, 8 Foxes, 12 Foxes, combined with Grapes, Hounds, Geese, &c., 8 Freemasons’ Arms, 8 various Generals, (Elliott, Hill, Abercrombie, Picton, Wolfe, &c.,) 52 Georges, 14 George and Dragons, 19 George the Fourths, 31 Globes, 6 Gloster Arms, 7 Goats, 5 Golden Anchors, 5 Golden Fleeces, 15 Golden Lions, 6 Goldsmith’s Arms, 56 Grapes, 15 Green Dragons, 4 Green Gates, 24 Green Men, 9 Greyhounds, 7 Griffins, 5 Grosvenor Arms, 8 Guns, 4 Guy of Warwicks, 6 Half-moons, 4 Hercules, 2 Hercules Pillars, 5 Holes in the Wall, 5 Hoop and Grapes, 4 Hop-poles, 12 Hopes, 11 Horns, 21 Horses and Grooms, 7 Horseshoes, 5 Horseshoe and Magpies, 6 Jacob’s Wells, 5 John Bulls, 16 various “Jolly” people, as Jolly Anglers, Caulkers, Gardeners, &c., 12 Kings of Prussia, 10 Kings and Queens, 89 King’s Arms, 63 King’s Heads, (loyalty again!) 8 Lambs, 3 Lambs and Flags, 4 Lion and Lambs, 55 different Lords, amongst which, 23 Lord Nelsons, 4 Magpie and Stumps, 3 Mail-coaches, 3 Men in the Moon, 2 Marlborough Arms, 6 Marlborough Heads, 18 Marquis of Granbys, 6 Marquis of Cornwallises, 14 various Marquises, 9 Masons’ Arms, 17 Mitres, 4 Mulberry-trees, 15 Nag’s Heads, 3 Nell Gwynns, 7 Noah’s Arks, 7 Norfolk Arms, 4 North Poles, 9 Northumberland Arms, 3 Old Parr’s Heads, 6 Olive Branches, 6 Oxford Arms, 10 Peacocks, (1 Peahen,) 5 Perseverances, 5 Pewter Platters, 10 Phœnixes, 3 Pied Bulls, 5 Pine Apples, 9 Pitt’s Heads, 15 Ploughs, 6 Portland Arms, 5 Portman Arms, 19 Prince Alberts, 5 Prince Alfreds, 3 Prince Arthurs, 15 other Princes, (mostly of the Royal Family,) 43 Princes of Wales, 12 Prince Regents, 6 Princess Royals, 3 Princess Victorias, and a few of the younger Princesses, 2 Punchbowls, 3 Queens, 3 Queen and Prince Alberts, 17 Queen Victorias, 23 Queen’s Arms, 49 Queen’s Heads, 8 Railway Taverns, 8 Red Cows, 4 Red Crosses, 73 Red Lions, 26 Rising Suns, 9 Robin Hoods, 5 Rodney Heads, 10 Roebucks, 14 Roses, 48 Rose and Crowns, 4 Royal Alberts, 28 various Royal personages and objects, as Champions, Cricketers, Crowns, Dukes, Forts, &c., 8 Royal Georges, 26 Royal Oaks, 13 Royal Standards, 7 Running Horses, 23 Saints, (3 Saint Andrews, 4 St Georges, 3 St Jameses, 3 St Johns, 2 St Luke’s Heads, 2 St Martins, 2 St Pauls, &c.,) 5 Salisbury Arms, 2 Salmons, 4 Salutations, 6 Scotch Stores, 4 Seven Stars, 8 Shakespeare Heads, 2 Shepherds and Flocks, 2 Shepherds and Shepherdesses, 53 Ships, (23 in combination, on launch, aground, &c.,) 3 Ship and Stars, 2 Ships and Whales, 19 Sirs, (including 4 Falstaffs, Sir John Barleycorn, Middleton, Newton, Wren, Abercrombie, Pindar, Peel, Raleigh, Walworth, &c.,) 5 Skinners’ Arms, 4 Southampton Arms, 4 Sportsmen, 3 Spotted Dogs, 14 Spread Eagles, 3 Stags, 3 Staghounds, 11 Stars, 17 Star and Garters, 8 Sugar-loaves, 19 Suns, 19 Swans, 9 Talbots, 4 Telegraphs, 3 Thatched Houses, 5 Thistles and Crowns, 21 Three Compasses, 8 Three Crowns, 3 Three Cranes, 3 Three Cups, 3 Three Kings, 19 Three Tuns, 8 Tigers, (1 Tiger Cat,) 10 Turk’s Heads, 28 Two Brewers, 5 Two Chairmen, 4 Unicorns, 10 Unions, 2 Union Flags, 11 Victories, 5 Vines, 3 Waggon and Horses, 10 Watermen’s Arms, 9 Weavers’ Arms, 3 Westminster Arms, 20 Wheat Sheaves, 15 White Bears, 63 White Harts, 44 White Horses, 25 White Lions, 35 White Swans, 3 Whittington and Cats, (1 Whittington and Stone,) 16 William the Fourths, 11 Windmills, 12 Windsor Castles, 4 Woodmen, 8 Woolpacks, 10 York Arms and York Minster, 12 Yorkshire Greys.

[1] Sir Gardiner Wilkinson’s Ancient Egyptians, vol. iii. p. 158. Also, Rosellini Monumenti dell’Egitto e della Nubia.

[2] Aristotle, Problematum x. 14: “As with the things drawn above the shops, which, though they are small, appear to have breadth and depth.”

[3] “He hung the well-known sign in the front of his house.”

[4] Hearne, Antiq. Disc., i. 39.

[5] “When the mice were conquered by the army of the weasels, (a story which we see painted on the taverns.)”

[6] Lib. ii. sat. vii.: “I admire the position of the men that are fighting, painted in red or in black, as if they were really alive; striking and avoiding each other’s weapons, as if they were actually moving.”

[7] De Oratore, lib. ii. ch. 71: “Now I shall shew you how you are, to which he answered, ‘Do, please.’ Then I pointed with my finger towards the Cock painted on the signboard of Marius the Cimberian, on the New Forum, distorted, with his tongue out and hanging cheeks. Everybody began to laugh.”

[8] Hist. Nat., xxxv. ch. 8: “After this I find that they were also commonly placed on the Forum. Hence that joke of Crassus, the orator. . . . On the Forum was also that of an old shepherd with a staff, concerning which a German legate, being asked at how much he valued it, answered that he would not care to have such a man given to him as a present, even if he were real and alive.”

[9] “There were, namely, taverns round about the Forum, and that picture [the Cock] had been put up as a sign.”

[10] The Bush certainly must be counted amongst the most ancient and popular of signs. Traces of its use are not only found among Roman and other old-world remains, but during the Middle Ages we have evidence of its display. Indications of it are to be seen in the Bayeux tapestry, in that part where a house is set on fire, with the inscription, Hic domus incenditur, next to which appears a large building, from which projects something very like a pole and a bush, both at the front and the back of the building.

[11] In Cædmon’s Metrical Paraphrase of Scripture History, (circa A.D. 1000,) in the drawings relating to the history of Abraham, there are distinctly represented certain cruciform ornaments painted on the walls, which might serve the purpose of signs. (See upon this subject under “Religious Signs.”)

[12] The palace of St Laurence Poulteney, the town residence of Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, and also of the Dukes of Buckingham, was called the Rose, from that badge being hung up in front of the house:—

“The Duke being at the Rose, within the parish
Of St Laurence Poultney.”—Henry VIII., a. i. s. 2.

“A house in the town of Lewes was formerly known as The Three Pelicans, the fact of those birds constituting the arms of Pelham having been lost sight of. Another is still called The Cats,” which is nothing more than “the arms of the Dorset family, whose supporters are two leopards argent, spotted sable.”—Lower, Curiosities of Heraldry.

[13] Rather a heavy fine, as the best ale at that time was not to be sold for more than three-halfpence a gallon.

[14] “Purchaser, be aware when you wish to buy books issued from my printing-office. Look at my sign, which is represented on the title-page, and you can never be mistaken. For some evil-disposed printers have affixed my name to their uncorrected and faulty works, in order to secure a better sale for them.”

[15] “We beg the reader to notice the sign, for there are men who have adopted the same title, and the name of Badius, and so filch our labour.”

[16] “Lastly, I must draw the attention of the student to the fact that some Florentine printers, seeing that they could not equal our diligence in correcting and printing, have resorted to their usual artifices. To Aldus’s Institutiones Grammaticæ, printed in their offices, they have affixed our well-known sign of the Dolphin wound round the Anchor. But they have so managed, that any person who is in the least acquainted with the books of our production, cannot fail to observe that this is an impudent fraud. For the head of the Dolphin is turned to the left, whereas that of ours is well known to be turned to the right.”—Preface to Aldus’s Livy, 1518.

[17] The number of taverns in these ten shires was “686, or thereabouts.”

[18] “The original court roll of this presentation is still to be found amongst the records of the Dean and Chapter of Westminster.”—Lyson’s Env. of London, vol. iii. p. 74.

[19] “Whosoever shall brew ale in the town of Cambridge, with intention of selling it, must hang out a sign, otherwise he shall forfeit his ale.”

[20] “Art. XXIII.—Tavernkeepers must put up signboards and a bush. . . . Nobody shall be allowed to open a tavern in the said city and its suburbs without having a sign and a bush.”

[21] A Cheat loaf was a household loaf, “wheaten seconds bread.”—Nares’s Glossary.

[22] Froe—i.e. Vrouw, woman.

[23] This was in those days a slang term for a mistress.

[24] i.e. Walk about in St Paul’s during the dinner hour.

[25] “I have seen, hanging from the shops, shuttlecocks six feet high, pearls as large as a hogshead, and feathers reaching up to the third story.”

[26] “Koddige en ernstige opschriften op Luiffels, wagens, glazen, uithangborden en andere tafereelen door Jeroen Jeroense. Amsterdam, 1682.”

[27] “Het gestoffeerde Winkelen en Luifelen Banquet. H. van den Berg. Amsterdam, 1693.”

[28]

“Jacob was David’s nephew, but not his brother-in-law.
All sorts of barbers’ tools ground here, also fishwives’ and butchers’ knives.”

[29]

“Moses was pick’d up among the rushes.
Teeth and grinders drawn here.”

[30] The British Apollo, 1710, vol. iii. p. 34.

[31] Amusements for the Meridian of London, 1708, p. 72.

[32] Bell and the Dragon, still to be met on the signboard.

[33] Addison is wrong in this derivation, (see under Miscellaneous Signs, at the end.)

[34] From Martial and other Latin poets, we learn that it was usual for the bibliopoles of those days to advertise new works by affixing copies of the title-pages to a post outside their shops; but whether this method obtained in the last century, the history of Paternoster Row does not inform us.

[35] For the Three Balls of the Pawnbrokers, see under Miscellaneous Signs; for the Barber’s Pole, under Trades’ Signs.

[36] Probably John James Heidegger, director of the Opera, a very ugly man.

[37] For a full account of the “Exhibition,” see in the Supplement at the end of this work.

[38] The last streets that kept them swinging were Wood Street and Whitecross Street, where they remained till 1773; whilst in Holywell Street, Strand, not more than twenty years ago, some were still dangling above the shop doors. In the suburbs many may be observed even at the present day.

[39] Laws, Customs, Usages, and Regulations of the City and Port of London. By Alexander Pulling. London, 1854.

Under the 72d section of the 57 Geo. III. ch. 29, post. 315, Mr Ballantine, some years ago, decided against a pawnbroker’s sign being considered a nuisance, notwithstanding it projected over the footway, unless it obstructed the circulation of light and air, or was inconvenient or incommodious.

[40] Trades tokens were brass farthings issued by shopkeepers in the seventeenth century, and stamped with the sign of the shop and the name of its owner.

[41] Memorials of Nature and Art collected on a Journey in Great Britain during the Years 1802 and 1803. By C. A. G. Gœde. London, 1808. Vol. i. p. 68.

[42] Mementos, Historical and Classical, of a Tour through part of France, Switzerland, and Italy, in the Years 1821 and 1822. London, 1824.

[43] Un bon enfant is in French “a jolly good fellow,” as well as a “good child.”

[44] Taken from the Opera “La Somnambula.”

[45]

“Nature provides man with hair and beard,
But I cut them both.”

[46]

“I devote my razors to all faces,
And defy the criticism of faithful mirrors.”

[47] A sort of pun, “la belle occasion” implying the same idea that our shopkeepers express by their “Now is your time,” and similar puffs.

[48] Similar instances may also be occasionally met with in London; for instance, the Corsican Brothers, (Coffee-house, Fulham Road.)

[49] Two or three good examples are to be seen in the South Kensington Museum.

[50] Edwards’s Anecdotes of Painters, 1808, p. 117.

[51] J. T. Smith’s Nollekens and his Times, vol. i. p. 25.

[52] Tommy Burkett was the name of mine host. The painting is now gone, but the verses remain.

[53] M. A. Lower’s Essay on Family Nomenclature, vol. i. p. 201.

CHAPTER II.
HISTORIC AND COMMEMORATIVE SIGNS.

The Greeks honoured their great men and successful commanders by erecting statues to them; the Romans rewarded their popular favourites with triumphal entries and ovations; modern nations make the portraits of their celebrities serve as signs for public-houses.

“Vernon, the Butcher Cumberland, Wolfe, Hawke,
Prince Ferdinand, Granby, Burgoyne, Keppel, Howe,
Evil and good have had their tithe of talk,
And fill’d their signpost then, like Wellesley now.”

As Byron hints, popular admiration is generally very short-lived; and when a fresh hero is gazetted, the next new alehouse will most probably adopt him for a sign in preference to the last great man. Thus it is that even the Duke of Wellington is now neglected, and in his place we see General Havelock, Sir Colin Campbell, Lord Palmerston, and Mr Gladstone, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, not omitting the fair Princess of Denmark. We will not now dwell upon these modern celebrities, but rather direct our attention to those illustrious dead upon whom the signboard honours were bestowed in bygone ages.

Many signboards have an historic connexion of some sort with the place where they are exhibited. Thus the Alfred’s Head, at Wantage, in Berkshire, was in all probability chosen as a sign because Wantage was the birthplace of King Alfred. So the Canute Castle, at Southampton, owes its existence to a local tradition; whilst admiration for the great Scotch patriot made an innkeeper in Stowell Street, Newcastle, adopt Sir William Wallace’s Arms. The Cæsar’s Head was, in 1761, to be seen near the New Church in the Strand,[54] and, in the beginning of this century, was the sign of a tavern in Soho, which afterwards removed to Great Palace Yard, Westminster. Even at the present day, his head may be seen outside certain village alehouses; but this we may attribute to that provincial popularity which the Roman hero shares with Oliver Cromwell; for as the Protector gets the blame of having made nearly all the ruins which are to be found in the three kingdoms, so Cæsar is generally named by country people as the builder of every old wall or earthwork the origin of which is unknown.

Notwithstanding the popular censure, Cromwell is still honoured with signboards in places where his memory has lingered, as at Kate’s Hill, near Dudley.

In most cases, however, signboard popularity is rather short-lived; “dulcique animos novitate tenebo” seems to be essentially the motto of those that choose popular characters for their sign. Had this modern tribute of admiration been in use at the time of the Preacher, it might have afforded him one more illustration of the vanity of vanities to be found in all sublunary things. Horace Walpole noticed this fickleness of signboard fame in one of his letters:—

“I was yesterday out of town, and the very signs, as I passed through the villages, made me make very quaint reflections on the mortality of fame and popularity. I observed how the Duke’s Head had succeeded almost universally to Admiral Vernon’s, as his had left but few traces of the Duke of Ormond’s. I pondered these things in my breast, and said to myself, ’Surely all glory is but as a sign!’”[55]

Some favourites of the signboard have, however, been more fortunate than others. Henry VIII., for instance, may still be seen in many places; indeed, for more than two centuries after his death, almost every King’s Head invariably gave a portrait of Bluff Harry.

Older kings occasionally occur, but their memories seem to have been revived rather than handed down by successive innkeepers. If we are to believe an old Chester legend, however, The King Edgar Inn, in Bridge Street of that city, has existed by the same name since the time of the Saxon king. The sign represents King Edgar rowed down the river Dee by the eight tributary kings. The present house has the appearance of being built anterior to the reign of Elizabeth, and the sign looks almost as old, but it would be unwise to give the place or the sign a much higher antiquity. King John is the sign under whose auspices Jem Mace, the pugilist, keeps a public-house in Holywell Lane, Shoreditch. The same king also figures in Albemarle Street and in Bermondsey; whilst the great event of his reign, Magna Charta, is a sign at New Holland, Hull. John of Gaunt may be seen in many places; and we may surmise that his upholders are stanch Protestants, who value his character as a reformer and supporter of Wicliffe. The Black Prince may not unlikely have come down to us in an uninterrupted line of signboards; so little was his identity sometimes understood, that there is a shop-bill in the “Banks Collection”[56] on which this hero is represented as a negro!

There is a Queen Eleanor in London Fields, Hackney, probably the beautiful and affectionate queen of Edward I., buried in Westminster Abbey, 1290, in honour of whom Charing Cross, Cheapcross, and seven other crosses, were erected on the places where her body rested on its way to the great Abbey. What prompted the choice of this sign it is hard to say.

At Hever, in Kent, a rude portrait of Henry VIII. may be seen. Near this village the Bolleyn or Bullen family formerly held large possessions; and old people in the district yet shew the spot where, as the story goes, King Henry often used to meet Sir Thomas Bolleyn’s daughter Anne. Be this as it may, years after the unhappy death of Anne, the village alehouse had for its sign, Bullen Butchered; but the place falling into new hands, the name of the house was altered to the Bull and Butcher, which sign existed to a recent date, and would probably have swung at this moment, but for a desire of the resident clergyman to see something different. He suggested the King’s Head; and the village painter was forthwith commissioned to make the alteration. The latter accepted the task, drew the bluff features of the monarch, and represented it as other King’s Heads, but in his hands placed a large axe, which signboard exists to this day.

As for Queen Elizabeth, she was the constant type of the Queen’s Head, as her father was of the King’s Head; and, like him, she may still be seen in many places. It is somewhat more difficult to ascertain who is meant by the Queen Catherine in Brook Street, Ratcliffe Highway; whether it be Queen Catherine of Aragon, or Queen Catherine of Braganza. Queen Anne, in South Street, Walworth, has evidently come down to us as the token of that house since the day of its opening, just as the Queen of Bohemia, who, until about fifty years ago, continued as a sign in Drury Lane.[57] This was Elizabeth, daughter of James I., married to Frederic V., Elector-Palatine, who, after her husband’s death, lived at Craven House, Drury Lane, and died there, February 13, 1661, having been privately married, it is thought, to Lord Craven, who was foremost in fighting the battles of her husband.

Of King’s Heads, Henry VIII. is the oldest on authentic record. But this does not prove that he was the first; for, as there lived great men before Agamemnon, so most kings during their reign will, in all probability, have had their signs. Among Henry’s successors, we find the head of Edward VI. on a trades token; whilst Charles the First’s Head was the portrait hanging from the house of that scoundrel Jonathan Wild, in the Old Bailey. Even at the present day there is a sign of Charles the First at Goring Heath, Reading. The Martyr’s Head in Smithfield, 1710, seems also to have been a portrait of Charles I.; so, at least, the following allusion gives us to understand:—

“May Hyde, near Smithfield, at the Martyr’s Head,
Who charms the nicest judge with noble red,
Thrive on by drawing wines, which none can blame,
But those who in his sign behold their shame;”[58]

which seems to be an allusion to Puritanical water-drinkers. To this unfortunate king belongs also the sign of the Mourning Bush, set up by Taylor the water-poet over his tavern in Phœnix Alley, Long Acre, to express his grief at the beheading of Charles I.; but he was soon compelled to take it down, when he put up the Poet’s Head, his own portrait, with this inscription:—

“There is many a head hangs for a sign;
Then, gentle reader, why not mine?”

This “Poeta Aquaticus,” as he sometimes called himself, was a boatman on the Thames, and alehouse-keeper by profession, besides being the author of fourscore books of very original poetry. At the same time that he put up his new sign of the Poet’s Head, he issued a rhyming pamphlet, in which occur the following lines:—

“My signe was once a Crowne, but now it is
Changed by a sudden metamorphosis.
The crowne was taken downe, and in the stead
Is placed John Taylor’s, or the Poet’s Head.
A painter did my picture gratis make,
And (for a signe) I hang’d it for his sake.
Now, if my picture’s drawing can prevayle,
‘Twill draw my friends to me, and I’ll draw ale.
Two strings are better to a bow than one;
And poeting does me small good alone.
So ale alone yields but small good to me,
Except it have some spice of poesie.
The fruits of ale are unto drunkards such,
To make ‘em sweare and lye that drinke too much.
But my ale, being drunk with moderation,
Will quench thirst, and make merry recreation.
My book and signe were publish’d for two ends,
T’ invite my honest, civill, sober friends.
From such as are not such, I kindly pray,
Till I send for ‘em, let ‘em keep away.
From Phœnix Alley, the Globe Taverne neare,
The middle of Long Acre, I dwell there.

“John Taylor, Poeta Aquaticus.”

PLATE IV.
EAGLE AND CHILD. (Banks’s Bills, circa 1750.) | ROBIN HOOD AND LITTLE JOHN. (Roxburghe Ballads, 1600.)
GRIFFIN AND CHAIR. (Banks’s Bills, 1790.) | BOLT-IN-TUN. (Fleet Street).
BOAR’S HEAD. (Eastcheap.) | BULL’S HEAD. (Longhborough, Linc., 1806.)

The Mourning Crown was afterwards revived, and in the last century it was the sign of a tavern in Aldersgate, where, on Saturdays, when Parliament was not sitting, the Duke of Devonshire, the Earls of Oxford, Sunderland, Pembroke, and Winchelsea, Mr Bagford the antiquary, and Britton the musical small-coalman, used to refresh themselves, after having passed the forepart of the day in hunting for antiquities and curiosities in Little Britain and its neighbourhood.

Not only was the Crown put in mourning at the death of Charles I., but also the Mitre. Hearne has an anecdote which he transcribed from Dr Richard Rawlinson:—“Of Daniel Rawlinson, who kept the Mitre Tavern in Fenchurch Street, and of whose being sequestered in the Rump time, I have heard much. The Whigs tell this, that upon the king’s murder he hung his sign in mourning. He certainly judged right; the honour of the mitre was much eclipsed through the loss of so good a parent of the Church of England. Those rogues say, this endeared him so much to the Churchmen that he soon throve amain, and got a good estate.”

Charles the Second’s Head swung at the door of a “music-house” for seafaring men and others, in Stepney, at the end of the seventeenth century. In a great room of this house there was an organ and a band of fiddles and hautboys, to the music whereof it was no unusual thing for parties, and sometimes single persons,—and those not of very inferior sort,—to dance. At the present day, that king’s memory is still kept alive on a signboard in Herbert Street, Hoxton, under the name of the Merry Monarch.

To his miraculous escape at Boscobel we owe the Royal Oak, which, notwithstanding a lapse of two centuries and a change of dynasty, still continues a very favourite sign. In London alone it occurs on twenty-six public-houses, exclusive of beerhouses, coffee-houses, &c. Sometimes it is called King Charles in the Oak, as at Willen Hall, Warwickshire. The Royal Oak, soon after the Restoration, became a favourite with the shops of London; tokens of some half a dozen houses bearing that sign are extant. What is rather curious is that, not many years since, one of the descendants of trusty Dick Pendrell kept an inn at Lewes, in Sussex, called the Royal Oak.

There is a trades token of “William Hagley, at the Restoration, in St George’s Fields;” but how this event was represented does not appear. At Charing Cross it was commemorated by the sign of the Pageant Tavern, which represented the triumphal arch erected at that place on occasion of the entry of Charles II., and which remained standing for a year after. This was evidently the same house which Pepys calls the Triumph. It seems to have been a fashionable place, for he went there, on the 25th May 1662, to see the Portuguese ladies of Queen Catherine. “They are not handsome,” says he, “and their fardingales a strange dress. Many ladies and persons of quality come to see them. I find nothing in them that is pleasing; and I see they have learned to kiss and look freely up and down already, and, I believe, will soon forget the recluse practice of their own country. They complain much for lack of good water to drink.” The Triumph is still the sign of a public-house in Skinner Street, Somers Town.

Queen Mary was in her day a very popular sign, as may be gathered from many of the shop-bills in the Banks Collection; whilst William and Mary are still to be seen in Maiden Causeway, Cambridge. The accession of the house of Brunswick produced the Brunswick, still very common, particularly in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Then come the Georges, of whom George III. and George IV. still survive in nearly as many instances as their successor, William IV.; with them a few of the royal Dukes of Clarence, Suffolk, and, above all, “the Butcher Cumberland;” until at length we come to Princess Victoria, and, finally, the Queen Victoria, the British Queen, Island Queen, &c. Under one of her signs at Coopersale, in Essex, is the following inscription:—

“The Queen some day
May pass this way,
And see our Tom and Jerry.
Perhaps she’ll stop,
And stand a drop,
To make her subjects merry.”

Among the foreign kings and potentates who have figured in our open-air walhalla, the Turkish sultans seem to have stood foremost. Morat (Amurat) and Soliman were constant coffee-house signs in the seventeenth century. Trades tokens are extant, in the Beaufoy and other collections, of a coffee-house in Exchange Alley, the sign of Morat, with this distich:—

“Morat  .  ye  .  Great  .  Men  .  Did  .  Mee  .  Call
Where  .  Ere  .  I  .  Came  .  I  .  Conquer’d  .  All.”

On the reverse: “Coffee, tobacco, sherbett, tea, and chocolat retal’d in Exchange Alley.” The same house figures in advertisements of the time, giving the prices of those various articles:—

“At the Coffee-house in Exchange Alley is sold by Retail the right Coffee-powder, from 4s. to 6s. per pound, as in goodness: that pounded in a mortar at 3s. per pound; also that termed the right Turkie Berry, well garbled, at 3s. per pound—the ungarbled for less; that termed the East India Berry at 20d. per pound, with directions gratis how to make and use the same. Likewise, there you may have Tobacco, Verinas and Virginia, Chocolatta—the ordinary pound-boxes at 2s. per pound; also Sherbets (made in Turkie) of Lemons, Roses, and Violets perfumed; and Tea according to its goodness, from 6s. to 60s. per pound. For all of which, if any Gentleman shall write or send, they shall be sure of the best as they shall order; and to avoid deceit, warranted under the House Seal—viz., Morat the Great,” &c.—Mercurius Publicus, March 12-19, 1662.

The Great Mogol also had his share of signboards, of which a few still survive; one, for instance, in New Bartholomew Street, Birmingham. Kouli Khan we find only in one instance, (though there were probably many more,) namely, on the sign of a tavern by the Quayside, Newcastle, in 1746.[59] This house had formerly been called the Crown, but changed its sign in honour of Thomas Nadir Shah, or Kouli Khan, who, from having been chief of a band of robbers, at last sat himself on the throne of Persia. He was killed in 1747. One of the reasons of his popularity in this country was the permission he granted to the English nation to trade with Persia, the most chimerical ideas being entertained of the advantages to be derived from that commerce. Hanway, the philanthropist, was for some time concerned in it, but died before he could carry out the scheme; ultimately, the death of Nadir Shah himself put an end to it.

The Indian King, which we meet with so frequently, is an extremely vague personage, which various Indian potentates might take for themselves as the cap fitted. It was generally set up when some king from the far East visited the metropolis, and for a short time created a sensation. Thus, in 1710, there were four Indian kings from “states between New England, New York and Canada,” who had audiences with Queen Anne, and seems to have been a good deal talked about. (See Spectator, No. 50.)

Again, in 1762, London was honoured with the visit of a Cherokee king, and thus many before and after him have created their nine days’ wonder.

Visits of European monarchs were also commemorated by complimentary signs. One of the oldest was the King of Denmark, and few kings better than he deserved the exalted place at the alehouse door; yet, such is the ingratitude of the world, that he seems now completely forgotten. The sign originated in the reign of James I., who married a daughter of Christian IV., King of Denmark. In July 1606, the royal father-in-law came over on a visit, when the two kings began “bousing” and carousing right royally, the court, of course, duly following the example. “I came here a day or two before the Danish king came,” says Sir John Harrington, “and from that day he did come till this hour, I have been well-nigh overwhelmed with carousal and sport of all kinds. I think the Dane has strangely wrought on our English nobles; for those whom I could never get to taste good liquor, now follow the fashion and wallow in beastly delights. The ladies abandon their society, and are seen to roll about in intoxication,” &c.[60] So late as thirty years ago, not less than three of these signs were left, the most notorious being in the Old Bailey. It used to be open all night for the sale of creature comforts to the drunkard, the thief, the nightwalker, and profligates of every description. Slang was the language of the place, and doubtless the refreshments were mostly paid for with stolen money. On execution nights, the landlord used to reap a golden harvest; then there were such scenes of drunkenness as must have done the old king on the signboard good to survey, and made him wish to be inside. The visit of another crowned votary of Bacchus is commemorated by the sign of the Czar’s Head, Great Tower Street:—

“Peter the Great and his companions, having finished their day’s work, used to resort to a public-house in Great Tower Street, close to Tower Hill, to smoke their pipes and drink beer and brandy. The landlord had the Czar of Muscovy’s Head painted, and put it up for his sign, which continued till the year 1808, when a person of the name of Waxel took a fancy to the old sign, and offered the then occupier of the house to paint him a new one for it. A copy was accordingly made of the original, which maintains its station to the present day as the Czar of Muscovy.”[61]

The sign is now removed, but the public-house still bears the same name. Prince Eugene also was at one time a popular tavern portrait in England, more particularly after his visit to this country in January 1712. It is named as one of the signs in Norwich in 1750,[62] but is now, we believe, completely extinct in England; in Paris there is still one surviving on the Boulevard St Martin.

The Grave Maurice is of very old standing in London, being named by Taylor the water-poet as an inn at Knightsbridge in 1636; at present there are two left, one in Whitechapel Road, the other in St Leonard’s Road. Who this Grave Maurice was is not quite clear. Grave (Ger. Graf, Dutch Graaf, i.e. Count,) Maurice of Nassau, afterwards Maurice, Prince of Orange, was, on account of his successful opposition to the Spanish domination in the Netherlands, very popular in this country. In Baker’s Chronicles, anno 1612, we read that:—“Upon St Thomas-day, the Paltzgrave and Grave Maurice were elected Knights of the Garter; and the 27th of December, the Paltzgrave was betrothed to the Lady Elizabeth. On Sunday the 7th of February, the Paltzgrave in person was installed a Knight of the Garter at Windsor, and at the same time was Grave Maurice installed by his deputy, Count Lodewick of Nassau.” The Garter conferred on the Grave Maurice was that which had been previously worn by Henri Quatre, King of France and Navarre. The Palzgrave was Grave Maurice’s nephew, the Palatine Count Frederick, by whose marriage with King James’s daughter were born the brothers Rupert and Maurice, (the latter in 1620,) who distinguished themselves in England during the civil wars. It was this Prince Maurice’s great uncle, the Grave Maurice of Nassau, whose counterfeit presentment still gives a name to two of our taverns. Another Maurice, about this period, was very popular in England—viz., Maurice Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, who “carried away the palm of excellency in whatever is to be wished in a brave prince.”[63] Peacham, enumerating this prince’s qualifications, says that he was a good musician, spoke ten or twelve languages, was a universal scholar, could dispute, “even in boots and spurs,” for an hour with the best professors on any subject, and was the best bone-setter in the country. He gained, too, much of his popularity by his adherence to the Protestant religion during the Thirty Years’ War.

The Paltsgrave became a popular sign at the marriage of Frederick Casimir V., Elector and Count Palatine of the Rhine, King of Bohemia, with Elizabeth, daughter of James I. Trades tokens are extant of a famous tavern, the sign of the Palsgrave’s Head, without Temple Bar,[64] which gave its name to Paltsgrave Court, whilst the Palatine Head was an inn near the French ’Change, Soho. Prince Rupert, the Palsgrave’s son, who behaved so gallantly in many of the fights during the Civil War, was no doubt a favourite sign after the Restoration. We have an instance of one on the trades token of Jacob Robins, in the Strand.

One of the last foreign princes to whom the signboard honour was accorded, was the King of Prussia. This still occurs in many places. After the battle of Rosbach, Frederick the Great, our ally, became the popular hero in England. Ballads were made, in which he was called “Frederick of Prussia, or the Hero.” “Portraits of the hero of Rosbach, with his cocked hat and long pigtail, were in every house. An attentive observer will at this day find in the parlours of old-fashioned inns, and in the portfolios of printsellers, twenty portraits of Frederick for one of George II. The sign-painters were everywhere employed in touching up Admiral Vernon into the King of Prussia.[65]”

These words of Macaulay remind us of a passage in the Mirror, No. 82, Saturday, February 19, 1780, bearing on the same subject. In 1739, after the capture of Portobello, Admiral Vernon’s “portrait dangled from every signpost, and he may be figuratively said to have sold the ale, beer, porter, and purl of England for six years. Towards the close of that period, the admiral’s favour began to fade apace with the colours of his uniform, and the battle of Culloden was total annihilation for him. . . . The Duke of Cumberland kept possession of the signboard a long time. In the beginning of the last war, our admirals in the Mediterranean, and our generals in North America, did nothing that could tend in the least degree to move his Royal Highness from his place; but the doubtful battle of Hamellan, followed by the unfortunate convention of Stade, and the rising fame of the King of Prussia, obliterated the glories of the Duke of Cumberland as effectually as his Royal Highness and the battle of Culloden had effaced the figure, the memory, and the renown of Admiral Vernon. The duke was so completely displaced by his Prussian majesty, that we have some doubts whether he met with fair play. One circumstance, indeed, was much against him; his figure being marked by a hat with the Kevenhuller cock, a military uniform, and a very fierce look, a slight touch of the painter converted him into the King of Prussia. But what crowned the success of his Prussian majesty, was the title bestowed upon him by the brothers of the brush, ‘The Glorious Protestant Hero,’ words which added splendour to every signpost, and which no British hero could read without peculiar sensation of veneration and of thirst.

“For two years, ‘the glorious Protestant hero’ was unrivalled; but the French being defeated at Minden, upon the 1st of August 1759, by the army under Prince Frederick of Brunswick, the King of Prussia began to give place a little to two popular favourites, who started at the same time; I mean Prince Ferdinand, and the Marquis of Granby. Prince Ferdinand was supported altogether by his good conduct at Minden, and by his high reputation over Europe as a general. The Marquis of Granby behaved with spirit and personal courage everywhere; but his success on the signposts of England was very much owing to a comparison generally made between him and another British general of higher rank, but who was supposed not to have behaved so well. Perhaps, too, he was a good deal indebted to another circumstance—to wit, the baldness of his head.”

That crowned heads, as well as other human beings, were subject to the law of change on the signboard, is amusingly illustrated in an anecdote told by Goldsmith:—

“An alehouse keeper near Islington, who had long lived at the sign of the French King, upon the commencement of the last war, pulled down his old sign, and put up that of the Queen of Hungary. Under the influence of her red nose and golden sceptre, he continued to sell ale, till she was no longer the favourite of his customers; he changed her therefore, some time ago, for the King of Prussia, who may probably be changed in turn for the next great man that shall be set up for vulgar admiration.”[66]

Of all great men, “bene meriti de patria,” military men appear at all times to have captivated the popular favour much more than those men who promoted the welfare of the country in the Cabinet, or who made themselves famous by the arts of peace, and the more quiet productions of their genius. We find hundreds of admirals and generals on the signboard, but we are not aware that there is one Watt, or one Sir Walter Scott; yet, what glory and pleasure has the nation not derived from their genius! Booksellers formerly honoured the heads and names of great authors with a signboard; but that custom fell into disuse when signs became unnecessary. At present, the publicans only have signs, and they and their customers can much better appreciate “the glorious pomp and pageantry of war,” than a parliamentary debate. A victory, with so many of the enemy killed and wounded, and so many colours and stands of arms captured, awakens much more thrilling emotions in their breasts than the most useful invention, or the most glorious work of art.

The sea being our proper element, admirals have always had the lion’s share of the popular admiration, and their fame appears more firmly rooted than that of generals. Signs of Admiral Drake, Sir Francis Drake, or the Drake Arms, so common at the water-side in our seaports, shew that the nation has not yet forgotten the bold navigator of good Queen Bess. Sir Walter Raleigh has not been quite so fortunate; for though he also came in for a great share of signboard honour, yet it was less owing to his qualities as a commander, than to his reputation of having introduced tobacco into England, whence he became a favourite tobacconist’s sign; and in that quality, we find him on several of the shop-bills in the Banks Collection. Signs being frequently used in the last century for political pasquinades, advantage was taken of a tobacconist’s sign for the following sharp hit at Lord North:—

“To the Printer of the General Advertiser:—

“Sir,—Being a smoaker, I take particular notice of the devices used by different dealers in tobacco, by way of ornament to the papers in which that valuable plant is enclosed for sale; and that used by the worthy Alderman in Ludgate Street, has often given me much pleasure, it having the head of Sir Walter Raleigh, and the following motto round it:—

‘Great Britain to great Raleigh owes
This plant and country where it grows.’

“To which I offer the following lines by way of contrast; the truth thereof no one can doubt:—

‘To Rubicon and North, old England owes
The loss of country where tobacco grows.’

“I suppose no dealer will chuse to adopt so unfortunate a subject for[57] their insignia; but perhaps, when you have a spare corner in your General Advertiser, it may not be inadmissible, which will oblige.—Yours, &c.,

“Feb. 1, 1783.

“A Smoaker.
General Advertiser, March 13, 1784.”

Brave old Admiral Benbow, who held up the honour of the British flag in the reign of William III., is still far from uncommon. Admiral Duncan, Howe, and Jervis still preside over the sale of many a hogshead of beer or spirits; whilst Admiral Vernon seems to have secured himself an everlasting place on the front of the alehouse, by reason of his dashing capture of Portobello; the name of that town, or sometimes the Portobello Arms, being also frequently adopted, instead of the admiral’s name. Admiral Keppel is another great favourite. There is a public-house with that sign, on the Fulham Road, where, some years ago, the portrait of the admiral used to court the custom of the passing traveller, by a poetical appeal to both man and beast:—

“Stop, brave boys, and quench your thirst;
If you won’t drink, your horses murst.”

But, above all, Admiral Rodney seems to have obtained a larger share of popularity than even Nelson himself. In Boston there is the Rodney and Hood; and in Creggin, Montgomeryshire, the Rodney Pillar Inn, with the following Anacreontic effusion on a double-sided signboard:—

“Under these trees, in sunny weather,
Just try a cup of ale, however;
And if in tempest or in storm,
A couple then to make you warm;
But when the day is very cold,
Then taste a mug a twelvemonth old.”

On the reverse:—

“Rest and regal yourself, ’tis pleasant;
Enough is all the present need,
That’s the due of the hardy peasant
Who toils all sorts of men to feed.
Then muzzle not the ox when he treads out the corn,
Nor grudge honest labour its pipe and its horn.”

The last addition to this portrait gallery, before Sir Charles Napier, was the head of the gallant besieger of Algiers, Lord Exmouth. In 1825, there was one at Barnstaple, in Devon, with the following address to the wayfarer:—

“All you that pace round field or moor,
Pray do not pass John Armstrong’s door;
There’s what will cheer man in his course,
And entertainment for his horse.”

Finally, there is still one sign left in honour of that deserving but unfortunate commander, Captain Cook, murdered by the natives of Owhyhee in 1779. His name is preserved as the sign of an alehouse in Mariner Street, London.

Though the fame of generals seems to be more short-lived than that of admirals, yet a few ancient heroes still remain. Amongst these, General Elliott, or Lord Heathfield, the defender of Gibraltar, seems to be one of the greatest favourites; perhaps his popularity in London was not a little increased by the present which he made to Astley, of his charger named Gibraltar; who, performing every evening in the ring, and shining forth in the circus bills, would certainly act as an excellent puff for the general’s glory. This hero’s popularity is only surpassed by that of the Marquis of Granby. Though nearly a century has elapsed since the death of the latter, (Oct. 19, 1770,) his portrait is still one of the most common signs. In London alone, he presides over eighteen public-houses, besides numerous beerhouses. The first one is said to have been hung out at Hounslow, by one Sumpter, a discharged trooper of the regiment of Horse Guards, which the Marquis of Granby had commanded as colonel.

Among the generals of a later period, are General Tarleton, (or, as he is called on a sign in Clarence Street, Newcastle, Colonel Tarlton,) General Wolfe, General Moore, and Sir Ralph Abercrombie. At a tavern of this last denomination in Lombard Street, some thirty-five or forty years ago, the “House of Lords’ Club” used to meet, not composed, as might be expected from the name, of members of the peerage, but simply of the good citizens of the neighbourhood, each dubbed with a title. The president was styled Lord Chancellor; he wore a legal wig and robes, and a mace was laid on the table before him. The title bestowed upon the members depended on the fee—one shilling constituted a Baron, two shillings a Viscount, three shillings an Earl, four shillings a Marquis, and five shillings a Duke; beyond that rank their ambition did not reach. This club originated early in the eighteenth century, at the Fleece in Cornhill, but removed to the Three Tuns in Southwark, that the members might be more retired from the bows and compliments of the London apprentices, who used to salute the noble lords by their titles as they passed to and fro in the streets about their business. One of their last houses was the Yorkshire Grey, near Roll’s Buildings. At present they are, we believe, extinct. In Newcastle, also, there was a House of Lords, of which Bewick the wood-engraver was a member. They used to hold their meetings in the Groat Market of that town.

The Duke’s Head, and the Old Duke, are signs that, for the last two or three centuries, have always been applied to some ducal hero or other, for the time being basking himself in the noontide sun of fame. One of the first to whom it was applied, was Monck, Duke of Albemarle after the Restoration; then came Ormond, Marlborough, Cumberland, York, and, at present, Wellington and the Duke of Cambridge. The Duke’s Head in Upper Street, corner of Gad’s Row, Islington, was the sign of a public-house kept by Thomas Topham, the strong man, who, in 1741, in honour of Admiral Vernon’s birthday, lifted three hogsheads of water, weighing 1859 lb., in Coldbath Fields.[67]

The Duke of Albemarle figured on numberless signboards after the Restoration; but at the same period, there existed still older signs, on which his grace was simply called Monck; as for instance, that hung out by “Will. Kidd, suttler to the Guard at St James’s,”[68] which was the Monck’s Head. Kidd had probably followed the army in many a campaign in former years, and was much more accustomed to the name of General Monck than that of his Grace the Duke of Albemarle. Of the Duke of Ormond there is still one instance remaining in Longstreet, Tetbury, Gloucester, under the name of the Ormond’s Head. A very few Dukes of Marlborough are also left. In the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Duke of Marlborough’s Head in Fleet Street, was a tavern used for purposes very similar to those which we are accustomed now-a-days to behold at the St James’ and the Egyptian Halls. Among the Bagford Bills, and in the newspapers of the time, it is constantly mentioned as the place where something wonderful or amusing was to be seen—panoramas, dioramas, moving pictures, marionnettes, curious pieces of mechanism, &c., &c.[69]

The Lord Craven was once a very popular sign in London. It occurs amongst the trades tokens of Bishopsgate Street Without, and even at present there is a Craven Head and two Craven Arms in London. These signs were in honour of William Craven, eldest son of Sir William Craven, knt., (Sheriff of London temp. Queen Elizabeth.) This nobleman passed the greater part of his life abroad, serving the Protestant cause in Holland and in Germany. During the Civil War, he at various times gave pecuniary assistance to King Charles II., who at the Restoration created him Viscount Craven of Uffington, &c. He is said to have been privately married to Elizabeth, daughter of James I., the Queen of Bohemia. He died, April 19, 1697. Though his public and military career had certainly been brilliant, yet he owed his popularity probably more to his civic virtues, shewn during the plague period, when he and General Monck were almost the only men of rank that remained in town to keep order. He even erected a pesthouse at his own expense in Pesthouse Field, Carnaby Market, (now Marshall Street, Golden Square.) His assistance during the frequent London fires, also tended to make him a favourite with the Londoners.

“Lord Craven, in the time of King Charles II., was a constant man at a fire; for which purpose he always had a horse ready saddled in his stables, and rewarded the first that gave him notice of such an accident. It was a good-natured fancy, and he did a good deal of service; but in that reign everything was turned to a joke. The king being told of a terrible fire that was broke out, asked if Lord Craven was there yet. ‘Oh!’ says somebody by, ‘an’t please your majesty, he was there before it began, waiting for it, he has had two horses burnt under him already.’[70] On such occasions he usually rode a white horse, well known to the London mob, which was said to smell the fires from afar off.”

The Earl of Essex, Elizabeth’s quondam favourite, might have been met with on many signs long after the Restoration. There are trades tokens of a shop or tavern with such a sign on the Bankside, Southwark, and tokens are extant of two other shops that had the Essex Arms. In the last century there was an Essex Head in Essex Street; in this tavern the Robin Hood Society, “a club of free and candid inquiry,” used to meet. It was originally established in 1613, at the house of Sir Hugh Middleton, the projector of the New River for supplying London with water. Its first meetings were held at the houses of members, but afterwards, the numbers increasing, they removed to the above tavern, and its name was altered into the “Essex Head Society.” In 1747 it removed to the Robin Hood in Butcher Row, near Temple Bar. The society attained a position of so much importance, that a history of its proceedings was published in 1764, giving an account of the subjects debated, and reports of some of the speeches. Seven minutes only were allowed to each speaker, at the expiration of which the Baker, or president, summed up. Many a young politician here winged his first flight.[71]

In 1784, the year of his death, Dr Johnson instituted at this house a club of twenty-four members, in order to insure himself society for at least three days in the week. He composed the regulations himself, and wrote above them the following motto from Milton:—

“To-day deep thoughts with me resolve to drench
In mirth which after no repenting draws.”

The house at that time was kept by Samuel Greaves, an old servant of Mrs Thrale. Each night of non-attendance was visited on the members by a fine of threepence. Members were to spend at least sixpence, besides a penny for the waiter. Each member had to preside one evening a month.

That the Earl of Essex, who had taken up arms against his queen, should have continued more than a century after his death, is easily accounted for by the immense popularity he enjoyed, exceeding that of any of his cotemporaries. More difficult to explain is the presence on English signboards of the Dutch Admiral van Tromp; yet we find him in Church Street, Shoreditch, and in St Helen’s, Lancashire. His countryman, Mynheer van Donck, would certainly make a much more appropriate public-house sign.

Names of battles and glorious faits d’ armes have also been much used as signs,—thus, Gibraltar, Portobello, the Battle of the Nile, the Mouth of the Nile, Trafalgar, the Battle of Waterloo, the Battle of the Pyramids, are all more or less common. The Bull and Mouth is said to have a similar origin, being a corruption of Boulogne Mouth, the entry to Boulogne Harbour, which grew into a popular sign after the capture of that place by Henry VIII. The first house with this sign is said to have been an inn in Aldgate. In less than a century the name was already corrupted into the “Bull and Mouth,” and the sign represented by a black bull and a large mouth. Thus it appears on the trades tokens, and also in a sculpture in the façade of the Queen’s Hotel, St Martin’s-le-Grand, formerly the Bull and Mouth Inn. Of the same time also dates the Bull and Gate, a corruption of the Boulogne Gates, which Henry VIII. ordered to be taken away, and transported to Hardes, in Kent, where they still (?) remain. The Bull and Gate was a noted inn in the seventeenth century in Holborn, where Fielding makes his hero Tom Jones put up on his arrival in London. It is still in existence under the same name, though much reduced in size. There is another in New Chapel Place, Kentish Town; and a few imitations of it were carried to distant provincial towns by the coaches of old times.

Another sign of the same period, although not commemorative of a battle, was the Golden Field Gate, mentioned by Taylor the water-poet, in 1632, as the sign of an inn at the upper end of Holborn. It was put up in honour of the Champ du Drap d’Or, where Henry VIII. and Francis I.,

“Those suns of glory, those two lights of men,
Met in the vale of Arde.”—Henry VIII., a. i. s. 1.

The signs of great men who have distinguished themselves in the civil walks of life are much more scarce. Archimedes we meet with as an optician’s sign. He had been adopted by that class of workmen on account of the burning lenses with which he set the Roman fleet on fire at Syracuse. Various implements of their trade were added as distinctions by the several shops who sold spectacles under his auspices, such as Golden Prospects of Perspectives, (i.e., spectacles or any other glass that assisted the sight,) Globes, King’s Arms, &c. Among the Bagford Bills there is one of John Marshall, optician on Ludgate Hill, “at the sign of the Old Archimedes and Two Golden Spectacles,” which represents Archimedes taking astronomical observations, a huge pair of spectacles being suspended on one side of the sign, and on the other a lantern.[72] Archimedes and Three Pair of Golden Spectacles was the sign of another optician in Ludgate Street, 1697, who evidently had adopted Marshall’s sign with the addition of one pair of spectacles, in the hope of filching some of his customers. Sir Isaac Newton was another telescope-maker’s sign in Ludgate Street circa 1795.[73] At the present day he occurs on a few public-houses; but it is somewhat more gratifying for our national pride to see a coffee-house in the Rue Arcade, Paris, named after him. Lord Bacon’s Head was the sign of W. Bickerton, a bookseller, without Temple Bar, in 1735; Locke’s Head, of T. Peele, between the Temple Gates, 1718; James Ferguson figured at the door of an optical instrument maker in New Bond Street in 1780.[74] No doubt this optician was a Scotchman, who had given preference to a national celebrity. Just so, Andrew Miller, the great publisher and friend of Thomson, Hume, Fielding, &c., took the Buchanan Head for the sign of his shop in the Strand, opposite St Catherine Street, the house where the famous Jacob Tonson had lived, in whose time it was the Shakespeare’s Head. But Miller preferred his countryman, and put up the less known head of George Buchanan, (1525-1582.) Buchanan was author of a version of the Psalms, and at various times of his life tutor to Queen Mary Stuart, Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, Principal of St Leonard’s, preceptor to James I., director of the Chancery, Privy Seal, &c.

Cardinal Wolsey occurs in many places, particularly in London, Windsor, and the neighbourhood of Hampton Court. Andrew Marvel is still commemorated on a sign in Whitefriargate, Hull, of which town he was a native. Thomas Gresham, the founder of the Royal Exchange, was a favourite in London after the opening of the first Exchange in 1566; and Sir Hugh Middleton, the projector of the New River, is duly honoured with two or three signs in Islington.

There exists a curious alehouse picture, called the Three Johns, in Little Park Street, Westminster, and in White Lion Street, Pentonville. The same sign, many years ago, might have been seen in Bennett Street, near Queen Square, in the former locality. It represented an oblong table, with John Wilkes in the middle, the Rev. John Horne Tooke at one end, and Sir John Glynn (sergeant-at-law) at the other. There is a mezzotinto print of this picture (or the sign may be from the print) drawn and engraved by Richard Houston, 1769. John Wilkes, on whom the popular gratitude for writing the Earl of Bute out of power conferred many a signboard, still survives in a few spots. In a small Staffordshire town called Leek-with-Lowe, there is a stanch re-publican, who to this day keeps the Wilkes’-Head as his sign, whilst another one occurs in Bridges Street, St Ives. Sir Francis Burdett is also far from forgotten, and may still be seen “hung in effigy” at Castlegate, Berwick, in Nottingham, and in a few other places.

In 1683, we find Sir Edmundbury Godfrey on the picture-board of Langley Curtis, a bookseller near Fleetbridge. Being the martyr of a party, he undoubtedly for a while must have been a popular sign. Lord Anglesey was, in 1679, adopted by an inn in Drury Lane. This, we suppose, was Arthur, second Viscount Valentia, son of Sir Thomas Annesley, (Lord Mountmorris,) and elevated to the British peerage by the title of Earl of Anglesey in 1661; he died in 1686. One of the acts which probably contributed most to his popularity was that he, with the Lord Cavendish, Mr Howard, Dr Tillotson, Dr Burnet, and a few others, appeared to vindicate Lord Russell in the face of the court, and gave testimony to the good life and conversation of the prisoner.

The bulky figure of Paracelsus, or, as he called himself, Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Paracelsus Bombastus von Hohenheim, used formerly to be a constant apothecaries’ symbol. From an advertisement in the London Gazette, July 22-26, 1680, about a stolen horse “with a sowre head,” we gather that there was at that time a sign of Paracelsus in Old Fish Street. Information about the horse with “the sowre head” would also be received at a house in Lambeth, with no less a dignitary for its sign than the Bishop of Canterbury, his grace having been thus honoured from a neighbourly feeling.

Doctor Butler, (ob. 1617,) physician to James I., and, according to Fuller, “the Æsculapius of that age,” invented a kind of medicated ale, called Dr Butler’s ale, “which, if not now, (1784,) was, a few years ago, sold at certain houses that had the Butler’s Head for a sign.”[75] One of the last remaining Butler’s Heads was in a court leading from Basinghall into Coleman Street.

PLATE V.

SPINNING SOW. (France, 1520.) | TWO STORKS. (Antwerp, 1639.)

THE COMPLETE ANGLER.
(Banks’s Bills, 1780.)

HELP ME THROUGH THIS WORLD. (Banks’s Bills, 1812.) | CROOKED BILLET. (Harleian Collection, 1710.)

That singularly successful quack, Lilly, though he ought not to be placed in such good company as the king’s physician, was also a constant sign, in the last century, at the door of sham doctors and astrologers. Not unfrequently they combined the Balls (a favourite sign of the quacks) with Lilly’s head, as the Black Ball and Lillyhead, the sign of Thomas Saffold, “an approved and licensed physician and student in astrology: he hath practised astronomy for twenty-four years, and hath had the Bishop of London’s licence to practise physick ever since the 4th day of September 1674, and hath, he thanks God for it, great experience and wonderful success in those arts.” He promised to perform the usual tours de force.

———“foretell what s’ever was
By consequence to come to pass;
As death of great men, alterations,
Diseases, battles, inundations,
Or search’d a planet’s house to know
Who broke and robb’d a house below.
Examined Venus and the Moon
To find who stole a silver spoon.”

Butler’s Hudibras.

This address was “at the Black Ball and Lilly Head, next door to the Feather shops that are within Blackfriars gateway, which is over against Ludgate Church, just by Ludgate in London.”[76]

Classic authors also have come in for their share of signboard popularity in this country, which, at the time they flourished, was about as little civilized as the Sandwich Islands in the days of Captain Cook. These signs were set up by booksellers; thus Homer’s Head was, in 1735, the sign of Lawton Gilliver, against St Dunstan’s Church, publisher of some of Pope’s works, and in 1761, of J. Walker at Charing Cross. Cicero, under the name of Tully’s Head, hung at the door of Robert Dodsley, a famous bookseller in Pall Mall. In a newspaper of 1756, appeared some verses “on Tully’s head in Pall Mall, by the Rev. Mr G——s, of which the following are the first and the last stanzas:—

“Where Tully’s bust and honour’d name
Point out the venal page,
There Dodsley consecrates to fame
The classics of his age.
..... Persist to grace this humble post,
Be Tully’s head the sign,
Till future booksellers shall boast
To sell their tomes at thine.”

About the same time, the favourite Tully’s Head was also the sign of T. Becket, and P. A. de Hondt, booksellers in the Strand, near Surrey Street. Horace’s Head graced the shop of J. White in Fleet Street, publisher of several of Joseph Strutt’s antiquarian works; and Virgil’s Head of Abraham van den Hoeck and George Richmond, opposite Exeter Change in the Strand, in the middle of the last century. Of Seneca’s Head two instances occur, J. Round in Exchange Alley in 1711, and —— Varenne, near Somerset House, in the Strand, at the same period.

A few of our own poets are also common tavern pictures. As early as 1655 we find a (Ben) Jonson’s Head tavern in the Strand, where Ben Jonson’s chair was kept as a relic.[77] In that same year it was the sign of Robert Pollard, bookseller, behind the Royal Exchange. Ten years later it occurs in the following advertisement:—

“WHEREAS Thomas Williams, of the society of real and well-meaning Chymists hath prepaired certain Medicynes for the cure and prevention of the Plague, at cheap rates, without Benefit to himself, and for the publick good, In pursuance of directions from authority, be it known that these said Medicynes are to be had at Mr Thomas Fidges, in Fountain Court, Shoe Lane, near Fleet Street, and are also left by him to be disposed of at the Green Ball, within Ludgate, the Ben Jonson’s Head, near Yorkhouse,” &c.[78]

There is still a Ben Jonson’s Head tavern with a painted portrait of the poet in Shoe Lane, Fleet Street; a Ben Jonson’s Inn at Pemberton, Wigan, Lancashire; and another at Weston-on-the Green, Bicester.

Shakespeare’s Head is to be seen in almost every town where there is a theatre. At a tavern with that sign in Great Russell Street, Covent Garden, the Beefsteak Society (different from the Beefsteak Club,) used to meet before it was removed to the Lyceum Theatre. George Lambert, scene-painter to Covent Garden Theatre, was its originator. This tavern was at one time famous for its beautifully painted sign. The well-known Lion’s Head, first set up by Addison at Button’s, was for a time placed at this house.[79] There was another Shakespeare Head in Wych Street, Drury Lane, a small public-house at the beginning of this century, the last haunt of the Club of Owls, so called on account of the late hours kept by its members. The house was then kept by a lady under the protection of Dutch Sam the pugilist. After this it was for one year in the hands of the well-known Mr Mark Lemon, present editor of Punch, then just newly married to Miss Romer, a singer of some renown, who assisted him in the management of this establishment. The house was chiefly visited by actors from Covent Garden, Drury Lane, and the Olympic, whilst a club of literati used to meet on the first floor.

Sir John Falstaff, who so dearly loved his sack, could not fail to become popular with the publicans, and may be seen on almost as many signboards as his parent Shakespeare.

Milton’s Head was, in 1759, the sign of George Hawkins, a bookseller at the corner of the Middle Temple gate, Fleet Street; at present there are two Milton’s Head public-houses in Nottingham. Dryden’s Head was to be seen in 1761, at the door of H. Payne and Crossley, booksellers in Paternoster Row. At Kate’s Cabin, on the Great Northern Road, between Chesterton and Alwalton, there is a sign of Dryden’s head, painted by Sir William Beechey, when engaged as a house-painter on the decoration of Alwalton Hall. Dryden was often in that neighbourhood when on a visit to his kinsman, John Dryden of Chesterton.

Pope’s Head was in favour with the booksellers of the last century; thus the Gentleman’s Magazine, Sept. 1770, mentions a head of Alexander Pope in Paternoster Row, painted by an eminent artist, but does not say who the painter was. Edmund Curll, the notorious bookseller in Rose Street, Covent Garden, had Pope’s head for his sign, not out of affection certainly, but out of hatred to the poet. After the quarrel which arose out of Curll’s piratical publication of Pope’s literary correspondence, Curll, in May 22, 1735, addressed a letter of thanks to the House of Lords, ending thus,—“I have engraved a new plate of Mr Pope’s head from Mr Jervas’s painting, and likewise intend to hang him up in effigy for a sign to all spectators of his falsehood and my own veracity, which I will always maintain under the Scotch motto, ‘Nemo me impune lacessit.’” R. Griffiths, a bookseller in St Paul’s Churchyard since 1750, had the Dunciad for his sign. He was agent for a very primitive social-evil movement; advertisements emanating from this “sett of gentlemen sympathising with the misfortunes of young girls” occur in the papers of June and July 1752. One of the regulations was, “☞ None need to apply but such as are Fifteen years of age, and not above Twenty-five: older are thought past being reclaim’d, unless good Recommendations are given. Drinkers of spirits and swearers have a bad chance.”

The Man of Ross is at the present day a signboard at Wye Terrace, Ross, Herefordshire; the house in which John Kyrle, the Man of Ross, dwelt, was, after his death, converted into an inn. Twenty or thirty years ago the following poetical effusion was to be read stuck up in that inn:—

“Here dwelt the Man of Ross, O traveller here,
Departed merit claims the rev’rent tear.
Friend to the friendless, to the sick man health,
With generous joy he view’d his modest wealth.
If ’neath this roof thy wine-cheer’d moments pass,
Fill to the good man’s name one grateful glass.
To higher zest shall memory wake thy soul,
And virtue mingle in th’ ennobled bowl,
Here cheat thy cares, in generous visions melt,
And dream of goodness thou hast never felt.”

The head of Rowe, the first emendator, corrector, and illustrator of Shakespeare, was in 1735 the sign of a bookseller in Essex Street, Strand. The Camden Head and Camden Arms occur in four instances as the sign of London publicans. Camden Town, however, may perhaps take the credit of this last sign. Addison’s Head was for above sixty years the sign of the then well-known firm of Corbett & Co.—first of C. Corbett, afterwards of his son Thomas, booksellers in Fleet Street from 1740 till the beginning of this century. Dr Johnson’s Head, exhibiting a portrait of the great lexicographer, is a modern sign in Bolton Court, Fleet Street, opposite to where the great man lived, and which was in his time occupied by an upholsterer. It is sometimes asserted to be the house in which the Doctor resided, but this statement is wrong, for the house in which he had apartments was burned down in 1819. Finally, a portrait of Sterne, under the name of the Yorick’s Head, was the sign of John Wallis, a bookseller in Ludgate Street in 1795.

Of modern poets Lord Byron is the only one who has been exalted to the signboard. In the neighbourhood of Nottingham his portrait occurs in several instances; his Mazeppa also is a great favourite, but it must be confessed its popularity has been greatly assisted by the circus, by sensational engravings, and, above all, by that love for horse flesh innate to the British character. Don Juan also occurs on a publican’s signboard at Cawood, Selby, West Riding; and Don John at Maltby, Rotheram, in the same county; but perhaps these are merely the names of race horses.

The latest of all literary celebrities who attained sufficient popularity to entitle him to a signboard was Sheridan Knowles, who was chosen as the sign of a tavern in Bridge Street, Covent Garden, facing the principal entrance to Drury Lane Theatre, (now a nameless eating-house.) There the Club of Owls used to meet. Sheridan Knowles was one of the patrons, and Augustine Wade, an author and composer of some fame, was chairman of the club in those days. Pierce Egan and Leman Rede were amongst its members; so that it may be conjectured that the nights were not passed in moping.[80]

Mythological divinities and heroes, also, have been very fairly represented on our signboards. At this head, of course, Bacchus (frequently with the epithet of Jolly) well deserves to be placed. In the time when the Bush was the usual alehouse sign, or rather when it had swollen to a crown of evergreens, a chubby little Bacchus astride on a tun was generally a pendant to the crown. In Holland and Germany we have seen a Beer king, (a modern invention, certainly,) named Cambrinus, taking the place of Bacchus at the beer-house door; but, according to the sixteenth century notions, Bacchus included beer in his dominions. Hence he is styled “Bacchus, the God of brew’d wine and sugar, grand patron of robpots, upsey freesy tipplers, and supernaculum takers, this Bacchus, who is head warden of Vintner’s Hall, ale connor, mayor of all victualling houses,” &c.—Massinger’s Virgin Martyr, a. ii. s. l. Next to Bacchus, Apollo is most frequent, but whether as god of the sun or leader of the Muses it is difficult to say. Sometimes he is called Glorious Apollo, which, in heraldic language, means that he has a halo round his head.[81] In the beginning of this century there was a notorious place of amusement in St George’s Fields, Westminster Road, called the Apollo Gardens—a Vauxhall or a Ranelagh of a very low description. It was tastefully fitted up, but being small and having few attractions beyond its really good orchestra, it became the resort of the vulgar and the depraved, and was finally closed and built over.

Minerva also is not uncommon—probably not so much because she was the goddess of wisdom, but as “ye patroness of scholars, shoemakers, diers,” &c.[82] Juno has a temple in Church Lane, Hull, and Neptune of course is of frequent occurrence in a country that holds the

“Imperium pelagi sævumque tridentem.”

The smith “being generally a thirsty soul, his patron Vulcan constitutes an appropriate alehouse sign, and in that capacity he frequently figures, particularly in the Black country. Amongst the quaint Dutch signboard inscriptions there is one which, in the seventeenth century, was written under a sign of Vulcan lighting his pipe:—

“In Vulcanus. Hy steekt zyn pyp op aan ’t vyer
Die goed tabak wil hebben die komt alhier.
Je krygt een gestopte pyp toe en op kermis een glas dik bier.”[83]

Vulcan, as the god of fire, without which there is no smoke, was a common tobacconist’s sign in Holland two hundred years ago. One of these dealers had the following rhymes affixed to his Vulcan sign:—

“Vulcan die lamme smid als hy was moei van smeden
Ging hy wat zitten neer en ruste zyne leden
De Goden zagen ’t aan, hy haalde uit zyn zak
Zyn pypye en zyn doos en rookte doen tabak.”[84]

Mercury, the god of commerce, was of frequent occurrence, as might be expected. Amongst the Banks collection of shop-bills there is one of a fanshop in Wardour Street with the sign of the Mercury and Fan. Both Cupid and Flora were signs at Norwich in 1750,[85] and Comus is frequently the tutelary god of our provincial public-houses. Castor and Pollux, represented in the dress of Roman soldiers of the empire standing near a cask of tallow, was the sign of T. & J. Bolt, tallow-chandlers, at the corner of Berner Street, Oxford Street, at the end of the last century, for the obvious reason that, like the Messrs Bolt, they were two brothers that spread light over the world. Our admiration for athletic strength and sports suggested the sign of Hercules, as well as his biblical parallel Samson.

As for the Hercules Pillars, this was the classic name for the Straits of Gibraltar, which by the ancients was considered the end of the world; in the same classic sense it was adopted on outskirts of towns, where it is more common now to see the World’s End. In 1667 it was the sign of Richard Penck in Pall Mall, and also of a public-house in Piccadilly, on the site of the present Hamilton Place, both which spots were at that period the end of the inhabited world of London. The sign generally represented the demi-god standing between the pillars, or pulling the pillars down—a strange cross between the biblical and the pagan Hercules.

The Pillars of Hercules in Piccadilly is mentioned by Wycherley in the “Plain Dealer,” 1676:—“I should soon be picking up all our own mortgaged apostle spoons, bowls, and beakers out of most of the alehouses betwixt the Hercules Pillars and the Boatswain in Wapping.” The Marquis of Granby often visited the former house, and here Fielding, in “Tom Jones,” makes Squire Western put up:—“The Squire sat down to regale himself over a bottle of wine with his parson and the landlord of the Hercules Pillars, who, as the Squire said, would make an excellent third man, and would inform them of the news of the town; for, to be sure, says he, he knows a great deal, since the horses of many of the quality stand at his house.”[86] In Pepys’ time there was a Hercules Pillars tavern in Fleet Street. Here the merry clerk of the Admiralty supped with his wife and some friends on Feb. 6, 1667-8; his return home gives a good idea of London after the fire:—

“Coming from the Duke of York’s playhouse I got a coach, and a humour took us and I carried them to the Hercules Pillars, and there did give them a kind of supper of about 7s. and very merry, and home round the town, not through the ruins. And it was pretty how the coachman by mistake drives us into the ruins from London Wall unto Coleman Street, and would persuade me that I lived there. And the truth is, I did think that he and the linkman had contrived some roguery, but it proved only a mistake of the coachman; but it was a cunning place to have done us a mischief in, as any I know, to drive us out of the road into the ruins, and there stop, while nobody could be called to help us. But we came home safe.”

Atlas carrying the World was the very appropriate sign of the map and chart makers. In 1674 there was one in Cornhill,[87] and under a print of Blanket fair (the fair held on the Thames when frozen over) occurs the following imprint:—“A map of the river Thames merrily called Blanket-fair, as it was frozen in the memorable year 1683-4, describing the Booths, Footpaths, Coaches, Sledges, Bull-baitings, and other remarks. Sold by Joseph Moxon on the West side of Fleet ditch, at the sign of the Atlas.” Equally appropriate was Orpheus as the sign of the music shop of L. Peppard, next door to Bickerstaffe’s coffee-house, Russell Street, Covent Garden, 1711. No fault either can be found with the Golden Fleece as the sign of a woollen draper—Jason’s golden fleece being an allegory of the wool trade, but at the door of an inn or public-house it looks very like a warning of the fate the traveller may expect within—in being fleeced. In the seventeenth century there was a Fleece Tavern in St James’s:—

“A RARE Consort of four Trumpets Marine, never heard of before in England.[88] If any person desire to come and hear it, they may repair to the Fleece Tavern near St James’s about 2 o’clock in the afternoon every day in the week except Sundays. Every consort shall continue one hour and so to begin again. The best places are 1 shilling, the others sixpence.”—London Gazette, Feb. 1-4, 1674.

This is amongst the earliest concerts on record in London. Another example of this sign worth mentioning was the Fleece Tavern, (in York Street,) Covent Garden, which, says Aubrey, “was very unfortunate for homicides; there have been several killed—three in my time. It is now (1692) a private house. Clifton, the master, hanged himself, having perjured himself.”[89] Pepys does not give this house a better character:—“Decemb. 1, 1660. Mr Flower did tell me how a Scotch knight was killed basely the other day at the Fleece in Covent Garden, where there had been a great many formerly killed.” On the Continent, also, this symbol was used; for instance, in 1687, by Jean Camusat, a printer in the Rue St Jacques, Paris; his colophon represented Jason taking the golden fleece off a tree, with the motto—“Tegit et quos tangit inaurat.”

Another sign, of which the application is not very obvious, is Pegasus or the Flying Horse, unless it refers to this rhyme:—

“If with water you fill up your glasses,
You’ll never write anything wise;
For wine is the horse of Parnassus,
Which hurries a bard to the skies.”

“John Gay, at the Flying Horse, between St Dunstan’s Church and Chancery Lane, 1680,” is an imprint under many ballads. John Gay undoubtedly had adopted this sign as a compliment to the Templars, in whose vicinity he lived, and whose arms are a Pegasus on a field arg. As for the poor balladmongers, whose works Gay printed, they certainly put Pegasus too much to the plough, to imagine that he alluded to theirs as a Flying Horse. Instead of the Flying Horse, a facetious innkeeper at Rogate Petersfield, has put up a parody in the shape of the Flying Bull.

The Hope and the Hope and Anchor are constant signs with shop and tavern keepers. Pepys spent his Sunday, the 23d September 1660, at the Hope Tavern, in a not very godly manner; and his account shews the curious business management of the taverns in the time:—

“To the Hope and sent for Mr Chaplin, who with Nicholas Osborne and one Daniel come to us, and we drank of two or three quarts of wine, which was very good; the drawing of our wine causing a great quarrel in the house between the two drawers which should draw us the best, which caused a great deal of noise and falling out, till the master parted them, and came up to us and did give us a long account of the liberty he gives his servants, all alike, to draw what wine they will to please his customers; and we eat above two hundred walnuts.”

In consequence of these excesses Master Pepys was very ill next day, but the particulars of the illness, though very graphically entered into the diary, are “unfit for publication.”

The Fortune was adopted from considerations somewhat similar to those that prompted the choice of the Hope. It occurs as the sign of a tavern in Wapping in 1667. The trades tokens of this house represent the goddess by a naked figure standing on a globe, and holding a veil distended by the wind,—a delicate hint to the customers, for it is a well-known fact that a man who has “a sheet in the wind” is as happy as a king. Doubtless the name of the Elysium, a public-house in Drury Lane about thirty years ago, had also been adopted as suggestive of the happiness in store for the customers who honoured the place by their company.

Ballads, novels, chapbooks, and songs, have also given their contingent. Thus, for instance, the Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green—still a public-house in the Whitechapel Road—has decorated the signpost for ages. The ballad was written in the reign of Queen Elizabeth; but the legend refers to Henry de Montfort, son of the Earl of Leicester, who was supposed to have fallen at the battle of Evesham in the reign of Henry III. Not only was the Beggar adopted as a sign by publicans, but he also figured on the staff of the parish beadle; and so convinced were the Bethnal Green folks of the truth of the story, that the house called Kirby Castle was generally pointed out as the Blind Beggar’s palace, and two turrets at the extremity of the court wall as the place where he deposited his gains.

Still more general all over England is Guy of Warwick, who occurs amongst the signs on trades tokens of the seventeenth century: that of Peel Beckford, in Field Lane, represents him as an armed man holding a boar’s head erect on a spear. The wondrous strange feats of this knight form the subject of many a ballad. In the Roxburgh Collection there is one headed, “The valiant deads of chivalry atchieved by that noble knight, Sir Guy of Warwick, who, for the love of fair Phillis, became a hermit, and dyed in a cave of a craggy rock a mile distant from Warwick. In Normandy stoutly won by fight the Emperor’s daughter of Almayne from many a valiant, worthy knight.”[90] His most popular feat is the slaying of the Dun Cow on Dunsmore Heath, which act of valour is commemorated on many signs.

“By gallant Guy of Warwick slain
Was Colbrand, that gigantick Dane.
Nor could this desp’rate champion daunt
A dun cow bigger than elephaunt.
But he, to prove his courage sterling,
His whinyard in her blood embrued;
He cut from her enormous side a sirloin,
And in his porridge-pot her brisket stew’d,
Then butcher’d a wild boar, and eat him barbicu’d.”

Huddersford Wiccamical Chaplet.

A public-house at Swainsthorpe, near Norwich, has the following inscription on his sign of the Dun Cow:—

“Walk in, gentlemen, I trust you’ll find
The Dun Cow’s milk is to your mind.”

Another on the road between Durham and York:—

“Oh, come you from the east,
Oh, come you from the west,
If ye will taste the Dun Cow’s milk,
Ye’ll say it is the best.”

The King and Miller is another ballad-sign seen in many places. It alludes to the adventure of Henry II. with the Miller of Mansfield.[91] Similar stories are told of many different kings: of King John and the Miller of Charlton, (from whom Cuckold’s Point got its name;) of King Edward and the tanner of Drayton Basset; of Henry VIII.; of James V. of Scotland, (the guidman of Ballageich;) of Henry IV. of France and the pig-merchant; of Charles V. of Spain and the cobbler of Brussels; of Joseph II.; of Frederick the Great; and even of Haroun-al-Raschid, who used to go about incognito under the name of Il Bondocani.

The most frequent of all ballad signs is unquestionably Robin Hood and Little John, his faithful accolyte. Robin Hood has for centuries enjoyed a popularity amongst the English people shared by no other hero. He was a crack shot, and of a manly, merry temper, qualities which made the mob overlook his confused notions about meum and tuum, and other peccadilloes. His sign is frequently accompanied by the following inscription:—

“You gentlemen, and yeomen good,
Come in and drink with Robin Hood.
If Robin Hood be not at home,
Come in and drink with Little John.”

Which last line a country publican, not very well versed in ballad lore, thus corrected:—

“Come in and drink with Jemmie Webster.”

At Bradford, in Yorkshire, the following variation occurs:—

“Call here, my boy, if you are dry,
The fault’s in you, and not in I.
If Robin Hood from home is gone,
Step in and drink with Little John.”

At Overseal, in Leicestershire:—

“Robin Hood is dead and gone,
Pray call and drink with Little John.”

Finally, at Turnham Green:—

“Try Charrington’s ale, you will find it good.
Step in and drink with Robin Hood.
If Robin Hood,” &c.

And to shew the perfect application of the rhyme, mine host informs the public that he is “Little John from the old Pack Horse,” (a public-house opposite.)

One of the ballads in Robin Hood’s Garland has given another signboard hero, namely, the Pindar of Wakefield,[92] George a Green.

“In Wakefielde there lives a jolly Pindar,
In Wakefielde all on the greene.
‘There is neither knight nor squire,’ said the Pindar,
‘Nor baron so bold, nor baron so bold,
Dares make a trespass to the town of Wakefielde,
But his pledge goes to the Pinfold.’”

Drunken Barnaby mentions the sign in Wakefield in 1634:—

“Straight at Wakefielde I was seen, a’,
Where I sought for George-a-Green, a’,
But could find not such a creature,
Yet on sign I saw his feature.
Whose strength of ale had so much stirr’d me,
That I grew stouter far than Jordie.”

There was formerly a public-house near St Chad’s Well, Clerkenwell, bearing this sign, which at one period, to judge from the following inscription, would seem to have been more famous than the celebrated Bagnigge Wells hard by. A stone in the garden-wall of Bagnigge House said:—

☩
S. T.
This is Bagnigge
House, neare
the Pindar A
Wakefeilde.
1680.

Among the more uncommon ballad signs, we find the Babes in the Wood at Hanging Heaton, Dewsbury, West Riding. Jane Shore was commemorated in Shoreditch in the seventeenth century, as we see from trades tokens. Valentine and Orson we find mentioned as early as 1711,[93] as the sign of a coffee-house in Long Lane, Bermondsey; and there they remain till the present day.

Other chapbook celebrities are Mother Shipton, Kentish Town, and Low Bridge, Knaresboro’; which latter village disputes with Shipton, near Londesborough, the honour of giving birth to this remarkable character in the month of July 1488. The fact is duly commemorated under her signboard in the former place:—

“Near to this petrifying wall[94]
I first drew breath, as records tell.”

Her life and prophecies have at all times been a favourite theme in popular literature. If we may believe her biographers, she predicted the fall of Cardinal Wolsey, the dissolution of the monasteries, the establishment of the Protestant religion under Edward VI., the cruelty of Queen Mary, the glorious reign of Queen Elizabeth, the defeat of the Armada, the Plague and Great Fire, and many things not yet come to pass. Like the Delphic oracles, her predictions were given in metre, and veiled in mystery. The plague and fire, for instance, are thus foretold:—

“Triumphant death rides London thro’,
And men on tops of houses go.”

She is represented as of a most unprepossessing appearance; although we certainly might have expected better from the daughter of a necromancer, or “the phantasm of Apollo, or some aerial dæmon who seduced her mother;”—“her body was long, and very big-boned; she had great goggling eyes, very sharp and fiery; a nose of unproportionable length, having in it many crooks and turnings, adorned with great pimples, and which, like vapours of brimstone, gave such a lustre in the night, that the nurse needed no other light to dress her by in her childhood.”[95]

Another necromancer, Merlin, shares renown with Mother Shipton, both in chapbooks and on signboards. Merlin’s Cave is the sign of a public-house in Great Audley Street, and in Upper Rosomon Street, Clerkenwell, in which places he doubtless still plays his old pranks, of changing men into beasts. Innumerable romances and histories of Merlin were printed in the middle ages. He appears in Geoffrey of Monmouth as early as the twelfth century, and Alain de l’Isle gave an ample explanation of his prophecies in seven books, printed in 1608. “This Merlin,” says M. de la Monnoye, “tout magicien et fils du diable que l’on l’a cru,” has by the good Carmelite, Baptiste Mantuanus, been metamorphosed into a saint. At the end of his “Tolentinum,” a poem in three books, in honour of St Nicholas, (anno 1509,) he thus speaks of Merlin:—

“Vitæ venerabilis olim
Vir fuit et vates, venturi præscius ævi,
Merlinus, laris infando de semine cretus.
Hic satus infami coitu pietate refulsit
Eximia superum factus post funera consors.”[96]

His prophecies were also translated into Italian, and printed at Venice in 1516. The annotators say it was reported that Merlin, by his enchantments, transported from Ireland those huge stones found in Salisbury plain. His cave was in Clerkenwell, on the site where the alehouse now stands, and was in the reign of James I., one of the London sights strangers went to see.[97]

We have a well-known chapbook hero in Jack of Newbury, who had already attained to the signboard honours in the seventeenth century, when we find him on the token of John Wheeler, in Soper Lane (now Queen Street, Cheapside,) whilst at present, he may be seen in a full-length portrait in Chiswell Street, Finsbury Square. This Jack of Newbury, alias Winchcombe, alias Smallwoode, “was the most considerable clothier England ever had. He kept an hundred looms in his house, each managed by a man and a boy. He feasted King Henry VIII. and his first Queen Catherine at his own house in Newbury, now divided into sixteen clothiers’ houses. He built the Church of Newbury, from the pulpit westward to the town.”[98] At the battle of Flodden in 1513, he joined the Earl of Surrey with a corps of one hundred men, well equipped at his sole expense, who distinguished themselves greatly in that fight. He is buried in Newbury, where his brass effigy is still to be seen, purporting that he died February 15, 1519. An inn bearing his sign in Newbury, is said to be built on the site of the house where he entertained King Harry. Thomas Deloney, the ballad-writer, wrote a tale about him, entitled, “The pleasant history of John Winchcomb, in his younger years called Jack of Newberry, the famous and worthy clothier of England, declaring his life and love, together with his charitable deeds and great hospitalitie. Entered in the Stationers’ Book, May 7, 1596.”

Whittington and his Cat is still very common, not only in London but in the country also. Sometimes the cat is represented without her master, as on the token of a shop in Longacre, 1657, and on the sign of —— Varney, a seal-engraver in New Court, Old Bailey, 1783, whose shopbill[99] represents a large cat carved in wood holding an eye-glass by a chain. The story of Whittington is still a favourite chapbook tale, and has its parallel in the fairy tales of various other countries. Straparola, in his “Piacevole Notte,” is, we believe, the first who mentions it. The earliest English narrative occurs in Johnson’s “Crown Garland of Golden Roses,” 1612, but there is an allusion to “Whittington and his Puss” in the play of “Eastward Hoe!” 1603. For more than a century it was one of the stock pieces of Punch and his dramatic troop. Sept. 21, 1688, Pepys went to see it: “To Southwark Fair, very dirty, and there saw the puppet-show of Whittington, which is pretty to see; and how that idle thing do work upon people that see it, and even myself too.” Foote, in his comedy of the “Nabob,” makes Sir Matthew Mite account for the legend by explaining the cat as the name of some quick-sailing vessels by which Whittington imported coals, which should have been the source of the Lord Mayor’s wealth. In the Highgate Road there is a skeleton of a cat in a public-house window, which by the people who visit there is firmly believed to be the earthly remains of Whittington’s identical cat. The house is not far distant from the spot where the future Lord Mayor of London stopped to listen to the city bells inviting him to return. It is now marked by a stone, with the event duly inscribed thereon.

King Arthur’s Round Table is to be seen on various public-houses. There is one in St Martin’s Court, Leicester Square, where the American champion, Heenan, put up when he came to contest the belt with the valiant Tom Sayers. The same sign is also often to be met with on the Continent. In the seventeenth century there was a famous tavern called la Table Roland in the Vallée de Misère at Paris. John-o’-Groat’s House is also used for a sign; there was one some years ago in Windmill Street, Haymarket; and at present there is a John-o’-Groat’s in Gray Street, Blackfriars Road. Both these and the Round Table contain, we conceive, some intimation of that even-handed justice observed at the houses, where all comers are treated alike, and one man is as good as another.

Darby and John, a corruption of Darby and Joan, and borrowed from an old nursery fable, is a sign at Crowle, in Lincolnshire; and Hob in the Well, with a similar origin, at Little Port Street, Lynn; whilst Sir John Barleycorn is the hero of a ballad allegorical of the art of brewing, &c.

A favourite ballad of our ancestors originated the sign of the London Apprentice, of which there are still numerous examples. How they were represented appears from the Spectator, No. 428, viz., “with a lion’s heart in each hand.” The ballad informs us that the apprentice came off with flying colours, after endless adventures, one of which was that like Richard Cœur-de-Lion—he “robbed the lion of his heart.” The ballad is entitled “The Honour of an Apprentice of London, wherein he declared his matchless manhood and brave adventures done by him in Turkey, and by what means he married the king’s daughter of that same country.”

The Essex Serpent is a sign in King Street, Covent Garden, and in Charles Street, Westminster, perhaps in allusion to a fabulous monster recorded in a catalogue of wonders and awful prognostications contained in a broadside of 1704,[100] from which we learn that, “Before Henry the Second died, a dragon of marvellous bigness was discovered at St Osyph, in Essex.” Had we any evidence that it is an old sign, we might almost be inclined to consider it as dating from the civil war, and hung up with reference to Essex, the Parliamentary general; for though we have searched the chroniclers fondest of relating wonders and monstrous apparitions, we have not succeeded in finding any authority for the St Osyph Dragon, other than the above-mentioned broadside.

Literature of a somewhat higher class than street ballads, has likewise contributed material to the signboards. One of the oldest instances is the Lucrece, the chaste felo-de-se of Roman history, who, in the sixteenth century, was much in fashion among the poets, and was even sung by Shakespeare. We find that “Thomas Berthelet, prynter unto the kynges mooste noble grace, dwellynge at the sygne of the Lucrece, in Fletestrete, in the year of our Lorde 1536.” In 1557, it was the sign of Leonard Axtell, in St Paul’s Churchyard; and in the reign of Charles I., of Thomas Purfoot, in New Rents, Newgate Market, both booksellers and printers. The Complete Angler was the usual sign of fish-tackle sellers in the last century, and the essays of the Spectator made the character of Sir Roger de Coverley very popular with tobacconists. Doctor Syntax hangs at the door of many public-houses, as at Preston, Oldham, Newcastle, Gateshead, &c.; the Lady of the Lake at Lowestoft; Dandie Dinmont at West Linton, Carlisle; Pickwick in Newcastle; the Red Rover, Barton Street, Gloucester;[101] Tam o’ Shanter, Laurence Street, York, and various other towns; Robin Adair, Benwell, Newcastle. Popular songs also belong to this class, as the Lass o’ Gowrie, Sunderland and Durham; Auld Lang Syne, Preston Street, Liverpool; Tulloch-Gorum and Loch-na-Gar, both in Manchester; Rob Roy, Titheburn Street, Liverpool; Flowers of the Forest, Blackfriars Road. On the whole, however, this class of names is much more prevalent in the northerly than in the southerly districts of England. In the south, if we except The Old English Gentleman, who occurs everywhere, the great Jim Crow is almost the only instance of the hero of a song promoted to the signboard. Robinson Crusoe is common to all the seaports of the kingdom, whilst Uncle Tom, or Uncle Tom’s Cabin, is to be found everywhere, not only in England, but also on the Continent. Any little underground place of refreshment or beer-house difficult of access, is considered as fittingly named by Mrs Beecher Stowe’s novel.

A very appropriate, and not uncommon public-house sign is the Toby Philpott. That he well deserves this honour, appears from the following obituary notice, (in the Gent. Mag., Dec. 1810:)—

“At the Ewes farm-house, Yorkshire, aged 76, Mr Paul Parnell, farmer, grazier, and maltster, who, during his lifetime, drank out of one silver pint cup upwards of £2000 sterling worth of Yorkshire Stingo, being remarkably attached to Stingo tipple of the home-brewed best quality. The calculation is taken at 2d. per cupful. He was the bon-vivant whom O’Keefe celebrated in more than one of his Bacchanalian songs under the appellation of Toby Philpott.”

Between St Albans and Harpenden, there was, some years ago, and perhaps there is still, a public-house called the Old Roson. This name also appears to be borrowed from the well-known song, “Old Rosin the Beau,” beginning thus:—

“I have travell’d this wide world over,
And now to another I’ll go,
[82] I know that good quarters are waiting
To welcome old Rosin the Beau (ter.)

When I am dead and laid out on the counter,
A voice you will hear from below,
Singing out brandy and water
To drink to old Rosin the Beau (ter.)

You must get some dozen good fellows,
And stand them all round in a row,
And drink out of half-gallon bottles,
To the name of old Rosin the Beau,” &c.

These stanzas, and one or two more to the same import, were quite sufficient to make the old Beau a fit subject for the signboard, irrespective of his other amiable qualities held forth in the song. The very common Old House at Home, too, is borrowed from a once-popular ballad, the verse of which is too well known to need quotation here.

The equally common Hearty Good Fellow is adopted from a Seven Dials ballad:—

“I am a hearty good fellow,
I live at my ease,
I work when I am willing,
I play when I please.
.... With my bottle and my glass,
Many hours I pass,
Sometimes with a friend,
And sometimes with a lass,” &c.

Of signboards portraying artists, but few instances occur; and when they do, they are almost exclusively the property of printsellers. We have only met with three: Rembrandt’s Head, the sign of J. Jackson, printseller, at the corner of Chancery Lane, Fleet Street, 1759; and of Nathaniel Smith, the father (?) of J. T. Smith, in Great May’s Buildings, St Martin’s Lane. Another member of that family, J. Smith, who kept a printshop in Cheapside, where several of Hogarth’s engravings were published, assumed the Hogarth’s Head for his sign. The third is the Van Dyke’s Head, the sign of C. Philips, engraver and print-publisher in Portugal Street, in 1761. Hogarth also had a head of Van Dyke as his trade symbol, made from small pieces of cork, but being gilt, he called it the Golden Head, (see under Miscellaneous Signs.)

In old times, more than at present, music was deemed a necessary adjunct to tavern hospitality and public-house entertainment. The fiddlers and ballad singers of the “tap” room, however, gave way to the newer brass band at the doors, and this, in its turn, is now gradually fading before the “music hall” and so-called “concert” arrangement. Singing, it may be remarked, is one of the first follies into which a man falls after a too free indulgence in the cup. It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that musical signboards should have swung from time to time over the alehouse door. Paganini, who contributed so much to the popularity of that well-known part of the “Carnival de Venise”—still the shibboleth of all fiddlers—is of very common occurrence.

The love for music is also eloquently expressed by the sign of the Fiddler’s Arms, Gornal Wood, Staffordshire. Jenny Lind seems to be the only musician of modern times who has found her way to the signboard. In the last century, Handel’s Head was common; but at the present moment, no instance of its use remains. The Maid and the Magpie, a very common tavern title, is believed to be the only sign borrowed from an opera. In Queen Anne’s time, there was a Purcell’s Head in Wych Street, Drury Lane, the sign of a music-house. It represented that musician in a brown, full-bottomed wig, and green nightgown, and was very well painted. Purcell, who died in 1682, greatly improved English melody; he composed sonatas, anthems, and the music to various plays. His “Te Deum” and “Jubilate” are still admired.

Actors, and favourite characters from plays, have frequently been adopted as signs. The oldest instance we find is Tarleton, or Dick Tarleton, who, in the sixteenth century, seems to have been common enough to make Bishop Hall allude to him in his “Satyres,” (b. vi., s. 1)—

“O honour far beyond a brazen shrine,
To sit with Tarlton on an ale-post’s sign.”

Tarleton is seen on the trades token of a house in Wheeler Street, Southwark; and it is only within a very few years that this sign has been consigned to oblivion. Richard, or “Dick” Tarleton was a celebrated low-comedy actor, born at Condover in Shropshire, and brought to town in the household of the Earl of Leicester. He first kept an ordinary in Paternoster Row, called the Castle, much frequented by the booksellers and printers of St Paul’s Churchyard. Afterwards, he kept the Tabor, in Gracechurch Street. He was one of Queen Elizabeth’s twelve players, in receipt of wages, and was at that time living as one of the grooms of the chamber at Barn Elms, but lost his situation by reason of some scurrilous reflections on Leicester and Raleigh. He probably also performed at the Curtain in Shoreditch, in which parish he was buried, September 3, 1588. “The great popularity which Tarlton possessed may be readily seen from the numerous allusions to him in almost all the writers of the time, and few actors have been honoured with so many practical tokens of esteem. His portrait graced the ale-house, game-cocks were named after him, and a century after his death, his effigy adorned the jakes.”[102] The portrait of this famous wit is prefixed to the edition of his jests, printed in 1611, where he is represented in the costume of a clown playing on the tabor and pipe. Another portrait of him occurs as an accompaniment to the letter T, in a collection of ornamental letters,[103] with the following rhymes:—

“This picture here set down within his letter T,
Aright doth shew the forme and shape of Tharleton unto thee.
When he in pleasaunt wise the counterfeit expreste,
Of clowne with cote of russet hew, and startups wth the reste;
Who merry many made when he appear’d in sight,
The grave, the wise, as well as rude, att him did take delight.
The partie now is gone, and closlie clad in claye;
Of all the jesters in the lande, he bare the praise awaie.
Now hath he plaied his parte, and sure he is of this,
If he in Christe did die to live with Him in lasting bliss.”

Spiller’s Head was the sign of an inn in Clare Market, where one of the most famous tavern clubs was held. This meeting of artists, wits, humorists, and actors originated with the performances at Lincoln’s Inn, about the year 1697. They counted many men of note amongst their members. Colley Cibber was one of the founders, and their best president, not even excepting Tom d’Urfey. James Spiller, it should be stated, was a celebrated actor circa 1700. His greatest character was “Mat o’ the Mint,” in the Beggar’s Opera. He was an immense favourite with the butchers of Clare Market, one of whom was so charmed with his performances, that he took down his sign of the Bull and Butcher, and put up Spiller’s Head. At Spiller’s death, (Feb. 7, 1729,) the following elegiac verse was made by one of the butchers in that locality:—

“Down with your marrow-bones and cleavers all,
And on your marrow-bones ye butchers fall!
For prayers from you who never pray’d before,
[85] Perhaps poor Jimmie may to life restore.
‘What have we done?’ the wretched bailiffs cry,
‘That th’ only man by whom we lived should die!’
Enraged they gnaw their wax and tear their writs,
While butchers’ wives fall in hysteric fits;
For, sure as they’re alive, poor Spiller’s dead.
But, thanks to Jack Legar! we’ve got his head.
He was an inoffensive, merry fellow,
When sober, hipp’d, blythe as a bird when mellow.”

A ticket for one of his benefit representations, engraved by Hogarth, is still a morceau recherché amongst print collectors, as much as £12 having been paid for one. “Spiller’s Life and Jests” is the title of a little book published at that time.

Garrick’s Head was set up as a sign in his lifetime, and in 1768 it hung at the door of W. Griffiths, a bookseller of Catherine Street, Strand. It is still common in the neighbourhood of theatres. There is one in Leman Street, Whitechapel, not far from the place of his first successes, where, in 1742, he played at the theatre in Goodman’s Fields, and “the town ran horn-mad after him,” so that there were “a dozen dukes of a night at Goodman’s Fields sometimes.”[104]

Roxellana was, in the seventeenth century, the sign of Thomas Lacy, of Cateaton Street, (now Gresham Street,) City. It was the name of the principal female character in “The Siege of Rhodes,” and was originally the favourite part of the handsome Elizabeth Davenport, whose sham marriage to the Earl of Oxford, (who deceived her by disguising a trumpeter of his troop as a priest,) is told in De Grammont’s Memoirs. After she had found out the Earl’s deception, she continued under his protection, and is occasionally mentioned, (always under the name of Roxellana,) with a few words of encomium on her good looks by that entertaining gossip, Pepys.

Formerly there was a sign of Joey Grimaldi at a public-house nearly opposite Sadler’s Wells Theatre; not only had it the name, but addidit vultum verbis, in the shape of a clown with a goose under his arm, and a string of sausages issuing from his pocket. Joey’s name being less familiar to the public of the present day, the house is now called the Clown. This, we think, is the last instance of an actor being elevated to signboard honours.

Abel Drugger is one of the dramatis personæ in Ben Jonson’s comedy of the Alchymist, and from the character given him by his friend Captain Face, we get some curious information concerning the mysteries of the tobacco trade of that day:—

“This is my friend Abel, an honest fellow,
He lets me have good tobacco, and he does not
Sophisticate it with sack lees or oil,
Nor washes it with muscadel and grains,
Nor buries it in gravel underground,
Wrapp’d up in greasy leather or p—— clouts,
But keeps it in fine lily pots, that open’d
Smell like conserve of roses, or French beans.
He has his maple block, his silver tongs,
Winchester pipes, and fire of juniper.
A neat, spruce, honest fellow, and no goldsmith.”

This worthy was, in the end of the last century, the sign of Peter Cockburn, a tobacconist in Fenchurch Street, formerly shopman at the Sir Roger de Coverley, as he informs the public on his tobacco paper.[105] According to the custom of the times, and one which has yet lingered in old-fashioned neighbourhoods, this wrapper is adorned with some curious rhymes:—

“At Drugger’s Head, without a puff,
You’ll ever find the best of snuff,
Believe me, I’m not joking;
Tobacco, too, of every kind,
The very best you’ll always find,
For chewing or for smoaking.
Tho’ Abel, when the Humour’s in,
At Drury Lane to make you grin,
May sometimes take his station;
At number Hundred-Forty-Six,
In Fenchurch Street he now does fix
His present Habitation.
His best respects he therefore sends,
And thus acquaints his generous Friends,
From Limehouse up to Holborn,
That his rare snuffs are sold by none,
Except in Fenchurch Street alone,
And there by Peter Cockburn.”

Falstaff, whom we have already mentioned when speaking of Shakespeare, and Paul Pry, are both very common. The last is even of more frequent occurrence than “honest Jack” himself.

Lower down in the scale of celebrities and public characters, we find the court-jester of Henry VIII., Old Will Somers, the sign of a public-house in Crispin Street, Spittalfields, at the present day. He also occurs on a token issued from Old Fish Street, in which he is represented very much the same as in his portrait by Holbein, viz., wearing a long gown, with hat on his head, and blowing a horn. Under an engraving of this picture are the following lines:—

“What though thou think’st me clad in strange attire,
Knowe I am suted to my own deseire;
And yet the characters described upon mee
May shew thee that a king bestowed them upon mee.
This horn I have betokens Sommers’ game,
Which sportive tyme will bid thee reade my name,
All with my nature well agreeing to
As both the name, and tyme, and habit doe.”

Formerly there used to be in the town a wooden figure of Will with rams’ horns and a pair of large spectacles; and the story was told that he never would believe that his wife had presented him with the “bull’s feather” until he had seen it through his spectacles.

Two portraits of Sommers are preserved at Hampton Court, one in a picture after Holbein, representing Henry VII. with his queen, Elizabeth, and Henry VIII. with his queen, Jane Seymour. Will is on one side, his wife on the other. The other portrait is by Holbein, three-quarter life size, where he is represented looking through a closed window.[106] He also figures in Henry VIII.’s illuminated Psalter,[107] in which King Henry’s features are given to David, and those of Will Sommers to the fool who accompanies him.

Sommers was born at Eston Neston, Northamptonshire, where his father was a shepherd. His popularity arose from his frankness, which is thus eulogised by Ascham in his “Toxophilus:”—“They be not much unlike in this to Wyll Sommers, the kingis foole, which smiteth him that standeth alwayes before his face, be he never so worshipful a man, and never greatlye lokes for him which lurkes behinde another man’s backe that hurte him indeede.”

We next come to Broughton, the champion pugilist of England in the reign of George II. He kept a public-house in the Haymarket, opposite the present theatre; his sign was a portrait of himself, without a wig, in the costume of a bruiser. Underneath was the following line, from Æneid, v. 484:—

“Hic victor cæstus, artemque repono.”

Numerous public-houses already retail their good things under the auspices of the great Tom Sayers. One in Pimlico, Brighton, deserves especial mention, as it is reported to be the identical house in which the mighty champion made his entry on the stage of this world, for the noble purpose of dealing and receiving the blows of fistic fortune. But, as in the case of Homer’s birthplace, the honour is contested; almost every house in Pimlico lays claim to his nativity, and unless the great man writes his life and settles this mooted point, it is likely to give serious trouble to future historiographers.

Another athlete, Topham, “the strong man,” had also his quantum of signboards. “The public interest which his extraordinary exhibitions of strength had always excited did not die with him. His feats were delineated on many signs which were remaining up to 1800. One in particular, over a public-house near the Maypole, in East Smithfield, represented his first great feat of pulling against two dray horses.”[108]

Thomas Topham was born in London in 1710. His strength almost makes the feats of Homer’s heroes credible, for, besides pulling against two dray horses, in which he would have been successful if he had been properly placed, he lifted three hogsheads of water, weighing 1836 lbs, broke a rope two inches in circumference, lifted a stone roller, weighing 800 lbs., by a chain with his hands only, lifted with his teeth a table six feet long, with half a hundredweight fastened to the end of it, and held it a considerable time in a horizontal position, struck an iron poker, a yard long and three inches thick, against his bare left arm until it was bent into a right angle, placed a poker of the same dimensions against the back of his neck, and bent it until the ends met, and performed innumerable other remarkable feats.

In Daniel Lambert, whose portly figure acts as sign to a coffee-house on Ludgate Hill, and to a public-house in the High Street, St Martins, Stamford, Lincolnshire, we behold another wonder of the age. This man weighed no less than 52 stone 11 lb. (14 lbs. to the stone.) He was in his 40th year when he died, and the circumstances of his burial give a good idea of his enormous proportions. His coffin, in which there was great difficulty of placing him, was 6 ft. 4 in. long, 4 ft. 4 in. wide, and 2 ft. 4 in. deep. The immense size of his legs made it almost a square case. It consisted of 112 superficial feet of elm, and was built upon two axletrees and four clogwheels, and upon them his remains were rolled into the grave, a regular descent having been made by cutting the earth away for some distance slopingly down to the bottom. The window and part of the wall had to be taken down to allow his exit from the house in which he died. His demise took place on June 21, 1809.

Over the entrance to Bullhead Court, Newgate Street, there is a stone bas-relief, according to Horace Walpole once the sign of a house called The King’s Porter and the Dwarf, with the date 1660. The two persons represented are William Evans and Jeffrey Hudson. Evans is mentioned by Fuller.[109] Jeffrey Hudson, the dwarf, had a very chequered life. He was born in 1609 at Okeham in Rutlandshire, from a stalwart father, keeper of baiting-bulls to the Duke of Buckingham. Having been introduced at court by the Duchess, he entered the Queen’s service. On one occasion, at an entertainment given by Charles I. to his queen, he was served up in a cold pie; at another time at a court ball, he was drawn out of the pocket of Will Evans, the huge door porter, or keeper, at the palace. In 1630 he was sent to France to bring over a midwife for the queen, but on his return was taken prisoner by Flemish pirates, who robbed him of £2500 worth of presents received in France. Sir John Davenant wrote a comic poem on this occasion entitled “Jeffereïdos.” During the civil wars Jeffrey was a captain of horse in the royal army; he followed the queen to France, and there had a duel with a Mr Crofts (brother of Lord Crofts) whom he shot, for which misdemeanour he was expelled the court. Taken prisoner by pirates a second time, he was sold as a slave in Barbary. When he obtained his liberty he returned to London, but got into prison for participation in the Titus Oates plot, and died shortly after his release in 1682. Walter Scott has introduced him in his “Peveril of the Peak.”

Jeffrey is not the only dwarf who has figured on a signboard, for in the last century there was a Dwarf Tavern in Chelsea Fields, kept by John Coan, a Norfolk dwarf. It seems to have been a place of some attraction, since it was honoured by the repeated visits of an Indian king. “On Friday last the Cherokee king and his two chiefs, were so greatly pleased with the curiosities of the Dwarf’s Tavern in Chelsea Fields, that they were there again on Sunday at seven in the evening to drink tea, and will be there again in a few days.”—Daily Advertiser, July 12, 1762. Two years after we find the following advertisement:—“Yesterday died at the Dwarf Tavern in Chelsea Fields, Mr John Coan, the unparalleled Norfolk Dwarf.”—Daily Advertiser, March 17, 1764.

The name of Dirty Dick, which graces a public-house in Bishopsgate Without, was transferred to those spirit stores from the once famous Dirty Warehouse formerly in Leadenhall Street, a hardware shop kept in the end of the last century by Richard Bentley, alias Dirty Dick, in which premises, until about fifteen or twenty years ago, the signboard of the original shop was still to be seen in the window. Bentley was an eccentric character, the son of an opulent merchant, who kept his carriage and lived in great style. In his early life he was one of the beaux in Paris, was presented at the court of Louis XVI., and enjoyed the reputation of being the handsomest and best dressed Englishman at that time in the capital of France. On his return to London he became a new, though not a better, man. Brooms, mops, and brushes were rigorously proscribed from his shop; all order was abolished, jewellery and hardware were carelessly thrown together, covered by the same shroud of undisturbed dust. So they remained for more than forty years, when he relinquished business in 1804. The outside of his house was as dirty as the inside, to the great annoyance of his neighbours, who repeatedly offered Bentley to have it cleaned, painted, and repaired at their expense; but he would not hear of this, for his dirt had given him celebrity, and his house was known in the Levant, and the East and West Indies, by no other denomination than the “Dirty Warehouse in Leadenhall Street.” The appearance of his premises is thus described by a contemporary:—

“Who but has seen, (if he can see at all,)
‘Twixt Aldgate’s well-known pump and Leadenhall,
A curious hardware shop, in generall full
Of wares from Birmingham and Pontipool!
Begrimed with dirt, behold its ample front,
With thirty years’ collected filth upon’t;
In festoon’d cobwebs pendant o’er the door,
While boxes, bales, and trunks are strew’d around the floor.
....... Behold how whistling winds and driving rain
Gain free admission at each broken pane,
Safe when the dingy tenant keeps them out,
With urn or tray, knife-case or dirty clout!
[91] Here snuffers, waiters, patent screws for corks,
There castors, cardracks, cheesetrays, knives and forks;
There empty cases piled in heaps on high,
There packthread, papers, rope, in wild disorder lie.”
&c.&c.&c.

The present Dirty Dick is a small public-house, or rather a tap of a wholesale wine and spirit business in Bishopsgate Street Without. It has all the appearance of one of those establishments that started up in the wake of the army at Varna and Balaclava, or at newly-discovered gold-diggings. A warehouse or barn without floorboards; a low ceiling, with cobweb festoons dangling from the black rafters; a pewter bar battered and dirty, floating with beer; numberless gas-pipes, tied anyhow along the struts and posts, to conduct the spirits from the barrels to the taps; sample phials and labelled bottles of wine and spirits on shelves,—everything covered with virgin dust and cobweb,—indeed, a place that would set the whole Dutch nation frantic.

Yet, though it has been observed that cleanliness of the body is conducive to cleanliness of the soul, and vice versa, the regulations of this dirty establishment, (hung up in a conspicuous place,) are more moral than those of the cleaner gin-palaces,—as, for instance:—“No man can be served twice.”[110] “No person to be served if in the least intoxicated.” “No improper language permitted.” “No smoking permitted;” whilst the last request, for fear of this charming place tempting customers to lounge about, says, “Our shop being small, difficulty occasionally arises in supplying the customers, who will greatly oblige by bearing in mind the good old maxim:—

‘When you are in a place of business,
Transact your business
And go about your business.’”

By a trades token we see that Old Parr’s Head was already in the seventeenth century the sign of a house in Chancery Lane. Circa 1825, a publican in Aldersgate put up the old patriarch, with the following medical advice:—

“Your head cool,
Your feet warm,
But a glass of good gin
Would do you no harm.”

Thomas Parr was born in 1483, and dying November 15, 1635, at the age of 152, had lived in the reigns of ten several princes,—viz., Edward IV., Edward V., Richard III., Henry VII., Henry VIII., Edward VI., Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth, James I., and Charles I. He was not the only one of the family who attained to a great age, for the London Evening Post, August 24, 1757, has the following note:—“Last week died at Kanne, in Shropshire, Robert Parr, aged 124. He was great-grandson of old Thomas Parr, who died in the reign of King Charles I., and lies buried in Westminster Abbey. What is very remarkable is, that the father of Robert was 109; the grandfather 113; and the great-grandfather, the said Thomas, is well known to have died at the age of 152.” Signs of old Parr are still remaining at Gravesend and at Rochester.

Thomas Hobson, (Hobson’s Choice,) the benevolent old carrier, is the sign of two public-houses in Cambridge,—the one called Old Hobson, the other Hobson’s House. His own inn in London was the Bull Inn in Bishopsgate Street, where he was represented in fresco, having a £100 bag under his arm, with the words, “The fruitful mother of an hundred more.” There is an engraving of him by John Payne, his contemporary, which also represents him holding a bag of money. Under it are these lines:—

“Laugh not to see so plaine a man in print;
The shadow’s homely, yet there’s something in’t.
Witness the Bagg he wears, (though seeming poore,)
The fertile Mother of a thousand more.
He was a thriving man, through lawful gain,
And wealthy grew by warrantable faime.
Men laugh at them that spend, not them that gather,
Like thriving sonnes of such a thrifty father.”

The print also informs us that he died at the age of eighty-six, in the year 1630. Milton, who wrote two epitaphs upon him, says, that “he sickened in the time of his vacancy, being forbid to go to London by reason of the plague.”

Among this class of minor celebrities we may also place those who put up their own head for signs. Taylor, the water poet, (see Mourning Crown, pp. 49,) was one of the first. Next to him followed Pasqua Rosee; according to his handbill, “the first who made and publicly sold coffee-drink in England.” His establishment was “in St Michael’s Alley, in Cornhill, at the sign of his own head.” This handbill largely enters into the virtues of the “coffee-drink,” gives the natural history of the plant, prescribes how to make the drink, and advises that “it is to be drunk, fasting an hour before, and not eating an hour after, and to be taken as hot as possibly can be endured; the which will never fetch the skin off the mouth, or raise any blisters by reason of that heat.” The next enters upon a glowing description of all the evils cured by that drink, as fumes, headaches, defluxions of rhumes, dropsy, gout, scurvy, king’s-evil, spleen, hypochondriac, winds, stone, &c. This coffee-house was opened in 1652.

Lebeck’s Head was another instance of the owner setting up his own head as a sign; and though his name has not filled the trumpet of fame, yet had he many times bravely stood the fire, and filled the mouths of his contemporaries, for he kept an ordinary (about 1690) at the north-west corner of Half-moon Passage, (since called Bradford Street.) The sign seems to have found imitators at the time, and is even yet kept up by tradition. There is Lebeck’s Head in Shadwell, High Street; a Lebeck’s Inn and Lebeck’s Tavern in Bristol; and a Lebeck and Chaff-cutter at a village in Gloucestershire.

A still more famous house was the Pontack’s Head, formerly called the White Bear, in Christ Church Passage, (leading from Newgate Street to Christ Church.) This tavern having been destroyed by fire, Pontack, the son of a president of the parliament of Bordeaux, opened a new establishment on its site, and assuming his father’s portrait as its sign, called it the Pontack’s Head. It was the first fashionable eating-house in London, was opened soon after the Restoration, and continued in favour until about the year 1780, when it was pulled down to make room for the building of the vestry hall of Christ Church. De Foe describes it as “a constant ordinary for all comers at very reasonable prices, where you may bespeak a dinner from four or five shillings a head to a guinea, or what sum you please.”[111] In the beginning of the eighteenth century the dinners had become proverbially extravagant:—

“Now at Pontack’s we’ll take a bit,
Shall quicken Nature’s appetite.
Here, shew a room! what have you got?
The waiter (cries) What have we not?
All that the season can afford,
Fresh, fat, and fine, upon my word
A Guinea ordinary, sir.”

This Guinea ordinary was:—

“—— every way compleat,
Adorn’d and beautifully dress’d.
But what it was could not be guess’d.”

The waiter, however, gives the menu, which contains—Bird’s nest soup from China; a ragout of fatted snails; bantam pig, but one day old, stuffed with hard row and ambergris; French peas stewed in gravy, with cheese and garlick; an incomparable tart of frogs and forced meat; cod, with shrimp sauce; chickens en surprise, (they had not been two hours from the shell,) and similar dainties.[112] Pontack contributed much towards bringing the French wines in fashion, being proprietor of some of the Bordeaux vineyards which bore his name.

About the same time another tavern flourished, with its master’s head for sign; this was Caveac’s,[113] celebrated for wine; of him Amhurst sang:—

“Now sumptuously at Caveac’s dine,
And drink the very best of wine.”

Though it cannot be said that Don Saltero put up his portrait for a sign, yet his coffee-house was named after him, and is still extant under the same denomination in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. This house was opened in 1695 by a certain Salter, who had been servant to Sir Hans Sloane, and had accompanied him on his travels. Chelsea at that time was a village, full of the suburban residences of the aristocracy, and the pleasant situation of Salter’s house soon made it the resort of merry companions, on their way to or from friends’ villas, or Vauxhall, Jenny Whin’s, and other places of public resort in the neighbourhood. Vice-Admiral Mundy, on his return from the coast of Spain, amused with the pedantic dignity of Salter, christened him Don Saltero, and under that name the house has continued till this day.

From his connexion with the great Sir Hans Sloane, and the tradition of a descent from the Tradescants, Salter was of course in duty bound to have a museum of curiosities, which, by gifts from Sir Hans and certain aristocratic customers in the army and navy, soon became sufficiently interesting to constitute one of the London sights. It existed more than a century, and was at last sold by auction in the summer of 1798. From his catalogue[114] (headed with the words, “O Rare!”) we gather that the curiosities fully deserved that name, for amongst them we find: “a piece of St Catherine’s skin;” “a painted ribbon from Jerusalem, with which our Saviour was tied to the pillar when scourged, with a motto;”[115] “a very curious young mermaid-fish;” “manna from Canaan, it drops from the clouds twice a year, in May and June, one day in each month;” “a piece of nun’s skin;” “a necklace made of Job’s tears;” “the skeleton (sic) of a man’s finger;” “petrified rain;” “a petrified lamb, or a stone of that animal;” “a starved cat in the act of catching two mice, found between the walls of Westminster Abbey when repairing;” “Queen Elizabeth’s chambermaid’s hat,” &c.[116]

A most amusing paper in the Tatler, No. 34, gives a full-length portrait of Salter, who appears to have been an “original.” Music was his besetting sin, and with very little excuse for it. In that paper the museum, too, is taken to task. Richard Cromwell used to be a visitor to this house, where Pennant’s father, when a child, saw him, “a very neat old man, with a placid countenance.” Franklin also, when a printer’s apprentice, “one day made a party to go by water to Chelsea in order to see the college, and Don Saltero’s curiosities.”

There is a rather amusing advertisement of the Don’s in the Weekly Journal for June 23, 1723:—

“Sir,—Fifty years since to Chelsea great,
From Rodnam on the Irish main,
I stroll’d with maggots in my pate,
Where much improved they still remain.
Through various employs I’ve past,
Toothdrawer, trimmer, and at last,
I’m now a gimcrack whim-collector.
Monsters of all sorts here are seen,
Strange things in nature as they grew so;
Some relicks of the Sheba queen,
And fragments of the famed Bob Cruso;
Knicknacks to dangle round the wall,
Some in glass cases, some on shelf;
But what’s the rarest sight of all,
Your humble servant shows himself.
On this my chiefest hope depends.
Now if you will the cause espouse,
[96] In journals pray direct your friends
To my Museum-Coffeehouse;
And in requital for the timely favour
I’ll gratis bleed, draw teeth, and be your shaver.
Nay, that your pate may with my noddle tally,
And you shine bright as I do—marry shall ye.
Freely consult my revelation Molly;
Nor shall one jealous thought create a huff,
For she has taught me manners long enough.

“Chelsea Knackatory.

Don Saltero.”

At the end of his catalogue a list of the donors is added, most of whom, doubtless, also frequented his house. Amongst them the following names appear:—the Duke of Buccleuch, the Earl of Sutherland, Sir John Balchen, Sir Rob. Cotton, Bart., Sir John Cope, Bart., Sir Thomas de Veil, Sir Francis Drake, Lady Humphrey, Sir Thomas Littleton, Sir John Molesworth, the Hon. Capt. William Montague, Sir Yelverton Peyton, George Selwyn, the Hon. Mr Verney, Sir Francis Windham, &c., besides numbers of naval and military officers.

The Mother Redcap is a sign that occurs in various places, as in Upper Holloway, in the High Street, Camden Town, in Blackburn, Lancashire, in Edmund’s Lowland, Lincolnshire, &c.: whilst there is a Father Redcap at Camberwell Green, but he is merely a creature of the publican’s fancy. From the way in which Brathwaite mentions this sign in his “Whimsies of a new Cast of Characters,” 1631, it would seem to have been not uncommon at that time. “He [the painter] bestows his pencile on an aged piece of decayed canvas, in a sooty alehouse where Mother Redcap must be set out in her colours.” Who the original Mother Redcap was, is believed to be unknown, but not unlikely it is an impersonification of Skelton’s famous “Ellinor Rumming,” the alewife.

The Mother Redcap at Holloway is named by Drunken Barnaby in his travels. Formerly the following verses accompanied this sign:—

“Old Mother Redcap, according to her tale,
Lived twenty and a hundred years by drinking this good ale;
It was her meat, it was her drink, and medicine besides,
And if she still had drank this ale, she never would have died.”

At one time the Mother Redcap, in Kentish Town, was kept by an old crone, from her amiable temper surnamed Mother Damnable.[117] This was probably the same person we find elsewhere alluded to under the name of Mother Huff, as in Baker’s “Comedy of Hampstead Heath,” 1706, a. ii. s. 1. “Arabella.—Well, this Hampstead’s a charming place, to dance all night at the Wells, and be treated at Mother Huff’s.”

PLATE VI.

THREE SQUIRRELS. (Fleet Street, circa 1668.) | HAND AND STAR. (1550.)

CHESHIRE CHEESE.
(Modern sign, Aldermanbury, City.)

KING’S PORTER AND DWARF. (Newgate Street, circa 1668.) | ROYAL OAK. (Roxburghe Ballads, 1660.)

Only a few more celebrities now remain to be disposed of; but they are of such a varied character, and so heterogeneous, that they can scarcely be ranged under any of the former divisions: thus we meet with the stern reformer, Melancthon’s Head, as the sign of an orthodox publican, in Park Street, Derby. Pretty Nell Gwynn occurs on several London public-houses: one in Chelsea, where she must have been well known, since her mother resided in that neighbourhood, and popular tradition allows Nell to have been one of the principal promoters of the erection of the famous hospital there. Another house, named after Charles II.’s favourite mistress, may be observed in Drury Lane, in which street she lived, and where Pepys, on May-day, 1667, saw her “standing at her lodgings door, in her smock sleeves and boddice,” and thought her “a mighty pretty creature.”

The Sir John Oldcastle was a tavern, in Coldbathfields, in the beginning of the last century; near this house, Bagford and a Mr Conyers, an antiquarian apothecary of Fleet Street, discovered the skeleton of an elephant in a gravel pit.[118] This house is also named in the following bill:—[119]

“All gentlemen, who are lovers of the ancient and noble exercise of archery, are hereby invited, by the stewards of the annual feast for the Clerkenwell Archers, to dine with them at Mrs Mary Barton’s, at the sign of Sir John Oldcastle, upon Friday, the 18th day of July 1707, at one of the clock, and to pay the bearer, Thomas Beaumont, Master of the Regiment of Archers, two shillings and sixpence, and to take a sealed ticket, that the certain number may be known, and provision made accordingly.

Nathaniel Axtell, Esq. Edward Bromwick, Gent. } Stewards.”

Opposite this house stood the Lord Cobham’s Head, as appears from the Daily Advertiser for August 9, 1742, which contains an advertisement puff of this place, praising its beer at 3d. a tankard, and mentioning the concert and illuminations. The correspondent concludes his letter by saying: “Note.—In seeing this great preparation, I thought it a duty incumbent upon me to inform my fellow-citizens and others, that they may distinguish this place from any pretended concerts, which are nothing but noise and nonsense, in particular, one that is rightly-styled the Hog-concert,” &c.

Both these houses were named after “the Good Lord Cobham,”—Sir John Oldcastle, who married the heiress of the Cobham family—the first author, as well as the first martyr of noble family in England. Being one of the Lollards, he was accused of rebellion, hanged in chains, and burned alive at St Giles in the Fields, in December 1417. Lord Cobham’s estates were close to the site of these two public-houses, which were supposed to comprise a part of the ancient mansion of that nobleman.

The Sir Paul Pindar public-house, in Bishopsgate Street Without, is all that remains of the splendid mansion of the rich merchant of that name, who had here a beautiful park, well stocked with game. The house continues almost in its original state, in the Cinque Cento style of ornament; the best part of it is the façade. In “Londiniana,” ii. p. 137, is an engraving of a lodge, standing in Half-Moon Alley, ornamented with figures, which tradition says was the keeper’s lodge of Sir Paul Pindar’s Park. Mulberry trees, and other park-like vestiges, were still within memory in 1829. In Pennant’s time it was already a public-house, having for a sign, “a head, called that of the original owner.” Sir Paul was a contemporary of Gresham, the founder of the Exchange. He travelled much, and by that means acquired many languages, which, at that time, was a sure way to advancement. James I. sent him as ambassador to the Sultan, from whom he obtained valuable concessions for the English trade throughout the Turkish dominions. After his return, he was appointed farmer of the customs, and frequently advanced money to King James, and afterwards to Charles I. In 1639 he was esteemed worth £236,000, exclusive of bad debts. He expended £19,000 in repairing St Paul’s Cathedral, and contributed large sums to various charities, yet, strange to say, died insolvent, Aug. 22, 1650, the year after his royal master had been beheaded. His executor, William Toomes, was so shocked at the hopeless state of Sir Paul’s affairs, that he committed suicide, and was buried with all the degrading ceremonies of a felo-de-se.

The Welch Head was the sign of a low public-house in Dyot Street, St Giles. In the last century there was a mendicants’ club held here, the origin of which dated as far back as 1660, at which time they used to hold their meetings at the Three Crowns in the Poultry. Saunders Welch was one of the justices of the peace for Westminster, and kept a regular office for the police of that district, in which he succeeded Fielding. He died Oct. 31, 1784, and lies buried in the church of St George’s, Bloomsbury. He was a very popular magistrate: a story is told that in 1766 he went unattended into Cranbourne Alley, to quell the riotous meetings of the journeymen shoemakers there, who had struck for an advance of wages. One of the crowd soon recognised him, when they at once mounted him on a beer barrel, and patiently listened to all that he had to say. He quieted the rioters, and prevailed upon the master shoemakers to grant an additional allowance to the workmen. This little incident, joined to his well-known benevolence, and skill in capturing malefactors, gave him that popularity which rewards by a signboard fame.

The Bedford Head, Covent Garden, represented the head of one of the Dukes of Bedford, ground landlords of that district. Pope twice alludes to this tavern, as a place where to obtain a delicate dinner. This house Mr Cunningham[120] suspects to have occupied the north-east corner of the Piazza, and there it appears in a view of old Covent Garden, about 1780, preserved in the “Crowle Pennant,” (vii. p. 25.) There was another Bedford Head in Southampton Street, which was kept by Wildman, the brother-in-law of Horne Tooke. A Liberal club used to meet at this house, of which Wilkes was a member, for several years. There is still a Bedford Head in Maiden Lane, hard by, at which the Reunion Literary Club is held.

Under the historical signs may be ranged a class of more modern signs, referring to local celebrities,—“mighty hunters before the Lord” probably—such as Captain Harmer, White Horse Plain, Yarmouth; Captain Ross on Clinker, at Natland, a village in Westmoreland; Captain Digby (the name of a vessel wrecked), at St Peter’s, Margate; Colonel Linskill, Charlotte Street, North Shields, &c.

The Don Cossack, so frequently seen, dates from the celebrity acquired by those troops in the extermination of the unfortunate half-starved and frozen soldiers, on their retreat from Moscow; though a more intimate acquaintance with the formidable Cossacks, during the Crimean campaign, considerably damaged their ancient reputation. The signs of the Druid, the Druid’s Head, the Druid and Oak, and the Royal Arch Druid, are more to be attributed to various kinds of masonic brotherhoods, than as a mark of respect paid to our aboriginal clergy. The Union originated with the union of Ireland with this kingdom; the Jubilee dates from the centenary of the revolution of 1688, held with considerable pomp and national rejoicing, in 1788. The Hero of Switzerland, Loughborough Road, Brixton, and in a few other places, refers to William Tell; and the Spanish Patriot, (Lambeth Lower Marsh and White Conduit Street,) dates from the excitement of our proposed intervention in the Spanish Succession question, in 1833. The Spanish Galleon, Church Street, Greenwich, simply owes its origin to the pictures of our naval victories in the Greenwich Hospital.

These, then, are some of the principal and most curious historic signs. From the perusal of this catalogue, we can draw one conclusion—namely, that only a few of what we have termed “historical signs,” outlive the century which gave them birth. If the term of their duration extends over this period, there is some chance that they will remain in popular favour for a long time. Thus, in the case of most heroes of the last century, few publicans certainly will know anything about the Marquis of Granby, Admiral Rodney, or the Duke of Cumberland, yet their names are almost as familiar as the Red Lion, or the Green Dragon, and have indeed become public-household words. Once that stage past, they have a last chance of continuing another century or two—namely, when those heroes are so completely forgotten, that the very mystery of their names becomes their recommendation; such as the Grave Morris, the Will Sommers, the Jack of Newbury, &c.

[54] Lloyd’s Evening Post, February 11-13, 1761.

[55] Horace Walpole’s Letters. Thirteenth Letter to Mr Conway, April 16, 1747.

[56] In the Print-room of the British Museum.

[57] Pennant’s History of London, vol. i. p. 99.

[58] “The Quack Vintners, 1710,” a tract written against Brooke and Hilliers, the famous wine-merchants of that time, frequently mentioned by the Spectator.

[59] Newcastle Journal, June 28, 1746.

[60] Nugæ Antiquæ, vol. i. p. 348.

[61] Barrow’s Life of Peter the Great.

[62] Gent. Mag., March 1842.

[63] Peacham’s Compleat Gentleman, p. 79.

[64] The taverns of the seventeenth century appear in many instances to have been upstairs, above shops. In 1679, there was a “Mr Crutch, goldsmith, near Temple Bar, at the Palsgrave Head.” In a similar way, a bookseller lived at the sign of the Rainbow, at the same time as one Farr, who opened this place as a coffee-house. Another bookseller, James Roberts, who printed most of the satires, epigrams, and other wasp-stings against Pope, lived at the Oxford Arms, a carriers’ inn in Warwick Lane. Finally, Isaac Walton sold his “Complete Angler” “at his shopp in Fleet Street, under the King’s Head Tavern.”

[65] Macaulay’s Biographical Essays, Frederick the Great.

[66] Goldsmith’s Essay on the Versatility of Popular Favour.

[67] For more particulars about Topham, see p. 88.

[68] Trades tokens in the Beaufoy Collection.

[69] For several centuries, Fleet Street was the head-quarters for shows and exhibitions out of fair-time. Ben Jonson speaks of “the City of Nineveh at Fleetbridge.” This was in the reign of James I. Mrs Salmon’s waxworks were among the last remaining sights in that locality.

[70] Richardsoniana, p. 140.

[71] Grosley, in his Tour to London, 1772, vol i. p. 150, mentions this society, which at that period was held at the Robin Hood, and says it was a semi-public club, into which all sorts of people were admitted, and all sorts of topics, religious as well as political, were discussed. He makes an odd mistake, however, when he says that the president was a baker by trade.

[72] This John Marshall afterwards, when he was appointed the king’s optician, changed his sign into the Archimedes and King’s Arms, under which we find him, in 1718, advertising his “chrystall dressing-glasses for ladies, which shew the face as nature hath made it, which other looking-glasses do not.”

[73] Banks’s Collection.

[74] Banks’s Collection.

[75] The Angler. Hawkins’s edition. 1784.

[76] Bagford Bills, Bib. Harl. 5964.

[77] “On the chair of Ben Johnson, now remaining at Robert Wilson’s, at the sign of the Johnson’s Head, in the Strand.”—Wit and Drollery, 1655, p. 79.

[78] The Newes, August 24, 1655. This may have been the above-mentioned tavern, as York House was situated in the Strand on the site of the present York Buildings.

[79] Addison’s Lion’s Head, the box for the deposition of the correspondence of the Guardian, was originally placed at Button’s, over against Tom’s in Great Russell Street. “After having become a receptacle of papers and a spy for the Guardian, it was moved to the Shakespeare’s Head Tavern, under the Piazza in Covent Garden, kept by a person named Tomkins, and in 1751 was for a short time placed in the Bedford Coffeehouse, immediately adjoining the Shakespeare Tavern, and there employed as a medium of literary communication by Dr John Hill, author of the ‘Inspector.’ In 1769, Tomkins was succeeded by his waiter, named Campbell, as proprietor of the tavern and Lion’s Head, and by him the latter was retained till 1804, when it was purchased by the late Charles Richardson, after whose death in 1827 it devolved to his son, and has since become the property of his Grace the Duke of Bedford.”—Till, in his Preface to Descriptive Catalogue of English Medals.

[80] Our slang friends the burlesque writers and parodists, would probably say something about mopping.—Ed.

[81] An “Apollo in his glory” is a charge in the apothecaries’ arms.

[82] Aubrey, Remains of Gentilisme and Judaism. Lansdowne MSS. 231, p. 106.

[83] At the Vulcan. He lights his pipe at the fire;—whosoever wants to buy good tobacco let him come here;—you will get a pipe filled into the bargain, and a glass of strong beer in fair time.

[84] Vulcan, that lame blacksmith, when he got tired over his work, sat down a while to rest his limbs. The gods saw it; he took his cutty pipe and his tobacco box out of his pocket and smoked a pipe of tobacco.

[85] Gent. Mag., March 1842.

[86] The History of Tom Jones, book xvi. ch. ii.

[87] Lond. Gaz., June 18-22, 1674.

[88] This was not true, for Pepys went (24th Oct. 1667) to hear the same instrument played by a Mr Prin, a Frenchman, “which he do beyond belief, and the truth is, it do so far outdo a trumpet as nothing more, and he do play anything very true. The instrument is open at the end I discovered, but he would not let me look into it.” Philips, in his “New World of Words,” 1696, describes it as “an instrument with a bellows, resembling a lute, having a long neck with a string, which being struck with a hairbow sounds like a trumpet.”

[89] Aubrey, Miscellanies upon various subjects.

[90] See in Bib. Top. Brit., vol. iv., a Critical Memoir on the Story of Guy of Warwick, by the Rev. Samuel Pegge, who supposes that Guy lived in Saxon times, and was the son of Simon, Baron of Wallingford. He married Felicia, (Phillis,) the daughter and heiress of Rohand, Earl of Warwick, who flourished in the reign of Edward the Elder, and so became Earl of Warwick.

[91] In Ritson’s Ancient Songs and Ballads.

[92] The “pindar” was the man who took care of stray cattle, which he kept in the pinfold, or pound, until it was claimed and the expenses paid.

[93] Daily Courant, Feb. 19, 1711.

[94] The “Dropping Well,” one of the most noted petrifying springs in England, and so named on account of its percolating through the rock that hangs over it.

[95] This information we gather from a chapbook entitled “The Strange and Wonderful History and Prophecies of Mother Shipton, by Ferraby, printer on the Market Place, Hull.” It is evidently a reprint of a chapbook of the time of Charles II., as appears from many allusions.

[96] Once there was a man who led a holy life, and was a prophet, who could see what would come to pass; his name was Merlin, and he was the offspring of an evil and fiendish spirit. But though born from such a father, he shone forth in virtue, and after his death, became a companion of the saints.

[97] Henry Peacham’s Compleat Gentleman.

[98] John Collet’s Historical Anecdotes, Add. MSS. 8890, p. 113.

[99] In the Banks Collection.

[100] This broadside is reprinted in Notes and Queries for January 15, 1859. Sussex had its snake as late as 1614. There is a pamphlet In the Harl. Collection, entitled, “True and Wonderful—a discourse relating a strange and monstrous serpent, (or dragon,) lately discovered, and yet living, to the great annoyance and divers slaughter both of men and cattell, by his strong and violent Poyson, in Sussex, two miles from Horsam, in a woode called St Leonard’s Forrest, and thirtie miles from London, this present month of August 1614.” That this Sussex snake caused a great sensation, appears from the fact that seventeen years after, it is alluded to in “Whimsies: or, A New Cast of Characters,” 1631: “Nor comes his [the ballad-monger’s] invention far short of his imagination. For want of truer relations for a neede, he can find you out a Sussex dragon, some sea or inland monster, drawn out by some Shoe Lane man, [i.e., a sign-painter; they all lived in Harp Alley, Shoe Lane,] in Gorgon-like features, to enforce more horror in the beholder.”

[101] The title of Cooper’s novel seems to have taken hold of the popular fancy to an astonishing degree: not only are there several public-houses who have adopted it as their sign, but also race-horses, ships, and locomotive engines have been named after it. There is even a baked potato-can in the streets of London, decorated with that name; it is built in the shape of a locomotive-engine, japanned red, and wheeled about the streets by an old woman. The name on a brass plate is screwed to the can, similar to the names of locomotive-engines.

[102] Introduction to Tarlton’s Jests, by J. O. Halliwell.

[103] Harl. MSS. 3885.

[104] Gray’s Letter to Chute. Mitford, ii. 138.

[105] Banks’s Collection.

[106] This is engraved in Caulfield’s Portraits of Remarkable and Eccentric Characters, as well as the wooden figure in the Tower.

[107] MSS. Reg., 2 A. xvi.

[108] Fairholt, Remarkable and Eccentric Characters, p. 56.

[109] Fuller’s Worthies, voce Monmouthshire.

[110] This is an old “dodge,” mentioned long ago by Decker in his “Seven Deadly Sins, seven times pressed to Death,” &c.:—“Then you have another brewing called Huff’s ale, at which, because no man must have but a pot at a sitting, and so be gone, the restraint makes them more eager to come in, so that by this policie one may huffe it four or five times a day.”

[111] Journey through England, vol. i. p. 175.

[112] Metamorphosis of the Town; or, a View of the Present Fashions. London: Printed for J. Wilford at the Three Flower de Luces, behind the Chapter House in St Paul’s Churchyard, 1730.

[113] Oddly enough, both Cave and Ponto are terms of some games at cards.

[114] There is a copy in the British Museum.

[115] This motto was: “Misura della Colonna di Christo nro,” i.e., Measure of the column of our Saviour.

[116] A brother Boniface, Adams, “at the Royal Swan in Kingsland Road, leading from Shoreditch Church,” (1756) had also a knackatory, which, from his catalogue, looks very like a parody on the Don’s. He exhibited, for instance, “Adam’s eldest daughter’s hat;” “the heart of famous Bess Adams, that was hanged with Lawyer Carr, January 18, 1736-37;” “the Vicar of Bray’s clogs;” “an engine to shell green peas with;” “teeth that grew in a fish’s belly;” “Black Jack’s ribs;” “the very comb that Adam combed his son Isaac’s and Jacob’s head with;” “rope that cured Captain Lowry of the headach, earach, toothach, and bellyach;” “Adam’s key to the fore and back door of the garden of Eden,” &c., &c., and 500 other curiosities.

[117] Her portrait, with a poem upon her, too long to quote, occurs in “Portraits and Lives of Remarkable and Eccentric Characters,” Westminster, 1819.

[118] Harl. MSS. 5900.

[119] Bagford Bills. Harl. MSS. 5962.

[120] London, Past and Present, p. 48.

CHAPTER III.
HERALDIC AND EMBLEMATIC SIGNS.

Royalty stands prominently at the head of the heraldic signs in its triple hieroglyphic of the Crown, (no coronets ever occur,) the King’s or Queen’s Arms, and the various royal badges.

The Crown seems to be one of the oldest of English signs. We read of it as early as 1467, when a certain Walter Walters, who kept the Crown in Cheapside, made an innocent Cockney pun, saying he would make his son heir to the Crown, which so displeased his gracious majesty, King Edward IV., that he ordered the man to be put to death for high treason.

The Crown Inn at Oxford was kept by Davenant, (Sir William Davenant’s father.) Shakespeare, on his frequent journeys between London and his native place, generally put up at this inn, and the malicious world said that young Davenant (the future Sir William) was somewhat nearer related to him than as a godson only. One day, when Shakespeare was just arrived, and the boy sent for from school to see him, a master of one of the colleges, pretty well acquainted with the affairs of the family, asked the boy why he was going home in so much haste, who answered, that he was going to see his godfather Shakespeare. “Fie, child,” said the old gentleman, “why are you so superfluous? Have you not learnt yet that you should not use the name of God in vain?”

On the site occupied by the present Bank of England there used to stand four taverns; one of them bore the sign of the Crown, and was certainly in a good line of business, for, according to Sir John Hawkins,[121] it was not unusual in those toping days to draw a butt (120 gallons) of mountain in half-pints in the course of a single morning.

About the same period there was another Crown Tavern in Duck Lane, W. Smithfield. One of the rooms in that house was decorated by Isaac Fuller (ob. 1672) with pictures of the Muses, Pallas, Mars, Ajax, Ulysses, &c. Ned Ward praises them highly in his “London Spy.” “The dead figures appeared with such lively majesty that they begot reverence in the spectators towards the awful shadows!” Such painted rooms in taverns were not uncommon at that period.

The origin of the sign of the Three Crowns is thus accounted for by Bagford:[122]—“The mercers trading with Collen (Cologne) set vp ther singes ouer ther dores of ther Houses the three kinges of Collen, with the Armes of that Citye, which was the Three Crouens of the former kinges, in memory of them, and by those singes the people knew in what wares they deld in.” Afterwards, like all other signs, it was used promiscuously, and thus it gave a name to a good old-fashioned inn in Lichfield, the property of Dr Johnson, and the very next house to that in which the doctor was born.

Frequently the Royal Crown is combined with other objects, to amplify the meaning, or to express some particular prerogative; such are the Crown and Cushion, being the Crown as it is carried before the king in coronation, and other ceremonies. We even meet with the Two Crowns and Cushions; that is, the Crown for the King and for the Queen, which was the sign of a Mr Arne, an upholsterer in Covent Garden, the hero of several Tatlers and Spectators, and father of the celebrated musician and composer, Dr Arne. This political upholsterer also figures in a farce by Murphy, entitled “The Upholsterer; or what news?” The four Indian princes referred to in Tatler, No. 155, who came to England in the reign of Queen Anne, to implore the help of the British Government against the encroachments of the French in Canada, seem to have lodged in this man’s house,—a circumstance frequently alluded to in the papers of the Tatler and other periodicals of the time.

The Crown and Glove refers to the well-known ceremony of the Royal Champion at the Coronation. It occurs as a sign at Stannington, Sheffield, Eastgate Row, South Chester, &c. The Royal Champion himself figures in George Street, Oxford. In the Gazetteer for August 20, 1784, we find an anecdote recorded concerning the Royal Champion, which is almost too good to be true:—“At the coronation of King William and Queen Mary, the Champion of England dressed in armour of complete and glittering steel; his horse richly caparisoned, and himself, and beaver finely capped with plumes of feathers, entered Westminster Hall while the King and Queen were at dinner. And, at giving the usual challenge to any one that disputed their majesties’ right to the crown of England, (when he has the honour to drink the Sovereign’s health out of a golden cup, always his fee,) after he had flung down his gauntlet on the pavement, an old woman, who entered the hall on crutches, (which she left behind her,) took it up, and made off with great celerity, leaving her own glove, with a challenge in it to meet her the next day at an appointed hour in Hyde Park. This occasioned some mirth at the lower end of the hall: and it was remarkable that every one was too well engaged to pursue her. A person in the same dress appeared the next day at the place appointed, though it was generally supposed to be a good swordsman in that disguise. However, the Champion of England politely declined any contest of that nature with the fair sex, and never made his appearance.”

The Crown and Sceptre, another of the royal insignia, is named by Misson[123] in the following incident:—“Butler, the keeper of the Crown and Sceptre tavern, in St Martin’s Lane, told me that there was a tun of red port drunk at his wife’s burial, besides mulled white wine. Note.—No men ever goe to women’s burials, nor the women to the men’s; so that there were none but women at the drinking of Butler’s wine. Such women in England will hold it out with the men, when they have a bottle before them, as well as upon th’ other occasion, and tattle infinitely better than they.”

The Crown and Mitre, indicative of royalty and the church, is the sign of a High Church publican at Taunton; and the Bible and Crown has for more than a century and a half been the sign of Rivingtons the publishers. (See under Religious Signs.) The King and Parliament are represented by the well-known Crown and Woolpack, which at Gedney Holbeach, in Lincolnshire, has been corrupted into the Crown and Woodpecker. The Crown and Tower, at Taunton, may refer to the regalia kept in the Tower, or to the king being “a tower of strength.” A similar symbol seems to be intended in the Crown and Column, Ker Street, Devonport, perhaps implying the strength of royalty when supported by a powerful and united nation.

The Crown and Anchor, the well-known badge of the Navy, is a great favourite. One of the most famous taverns with this sign was in the Strand, where Dr Johnson often used to “make a night of it.” “Soon afterwards,” says Boswell, “in 1768, he supped at the Crown and Anchor in the Strand, with a company whom I collected to meet him. There were Dr Percy, now bishop of Dromore; Dr Douglas, now bishop of Salisbury; Mr Langton; Dr Robertson, the historian; Dr Hugh Blair, and Mr Thomas Davis.” On this occasion the great doctor was unusually colloquial, and according to his amiable custom “tossed and gored several persons.”

The famous “Crown and Anchor Association” against so-called Republicans and Levellers—as the reformers were styled by the ministerial party in 1792—owed its name to this tavern. Its rise and progress is rather curious: it was undertaken at the instance of Pitt and Dundas, by John Reeves, a barrister. Reeves, at first, could get no one to join him, but, to meet the wishes of his employers, used to go to the Crown and Anchor, draw up some resolutions, pass them nem. con., and sign them John Reeves, chairman: thus being in his own person, meeting, chairman, and secretary. In this way they were inserted in all the papers of the three kingdoms, the expense being no object to the persons concerned. Meetings of the counties were advertised, but the first, second, and third consisted of Reeves alone, and it was not till the fourth meeting that he had any coadjutors. The political effervescence created by this society, its imitations and branches, form part of the history of the nation.

In the year 1800 the Farming Society proposed to have an experimental dinner in order to ascertain the relative qualities of the various breeds of cattle in the kingdom; the dinner was planned and patronised by Sir John Sinclair, and the execution intrusted to Mr Simpkins, landlord of the Crown and Anchor, who sent a tender of the most Brobdignagian dinner probably ever heard of. Twelve kinds of oxen and sheep of the most famous breed, eight kinds of pork, and various specimens of poultry, were to bleed as victims in this holocaust to the devil of gluttony; the fish was only to be from fresh waters, such as were “entitled to the attention of British farmers;” there were various kinds of vegetables, nine sorts of bread, besides veal, lamb, hams, poultry, tarts and puddings, all of which were to be washed down by a variety of strong and mild ales, stout, cider, Perry, and “British” spirits. Tickets one guinea each.[124]

The Anchor and Crown was also the sign of the great booth at Greenwich fair; it was 323 feet long, and 60 feet wide, was used for dancing, and could easily accommodate 2000 persons at a time. The other booths also had signs; amongst them were the Royal Standard, the Lads of the Village, the Black Boy and Cat, the Moonrakers, and others.

The Crown and Dove, Bridewell Street, Bristol, may refer to the order of the Holy Ghost, or may have been suggested by the Three Pigeons and Sceptre.

Objects of various trades, with a crown above them, were very common: the Crown and Fan was an ordinary fan-maker’s sign.[125] The Crown and Rasp, belonging to snuff-makers, occurs as the sign of Fribourg and Treyer, tobacconists, at the upper end of Pall Mall, near the Haymarket, in 1781: it is still to be seen on the façade of the house. The oldest form of taking snuff was to scrape it with a rasp from the dry root of the tobacco plant; the powder was then placed on the back of the hand and so snuffed up; hence the name of râpé (rasped) for a kind of snuff, and the common tobacconist’s sign of LA CAROTTE D’OR, (the golden root,) in France. The rasps for this purpose were carried in the waistcoat pocket, and soon became articles of luxury, being carved in ivory and variously enriched. Some of them, in ivory and inlaid wood, may be seen at the Hôtel Cluny in Paris, and an engraving of such an object occurs in “Archæologia,” vol. xiii. One of the first snuff-boxes was the so-called râpé, or grivoise box, at the back of which was a little space for a piece of the root, whilst a small iron rasp was contained in the middle. When a pinch was wanted, the root was drawn a few times over the iron rasp, and so the snuff was produced and could be offered to a friend with much more grace than under the above-mentioned process with the pocket grater.

The Crown and Last originated with shoemakers, but the gentle craft having the reputation of being thirsty souls, it was also adopted as an alehouse sign: we find it as such in 1718:—

“ON Easter Monday, at the Crown and Last at Primlico (sic) in Chelsea road, a silver watch, value 30 sh., is to be bowled for; three bowls for six pence, to begin at Eight of the clock in the morning and continues till Eight in the evening. N.B.—They that win the watch may have it or 30s.”[126]

The Crown and Halbert was, in 1790, the sign of a cutler in St Martin’s Churchyard;[127] the Crown and Can occurs in St John Street; and the Crown and Trumpet at Broadway, Worcester: this last may either allude to the trumpet of the royal herald, or simply signify a crowned trumpet.

Of the King’s Arms, and the Queen’s Arms, there are innumerable instances; they are to be found in almost every town or village. The story is told that a simple clodhopper once walked ever so many miles to see King George IV. on one of his journeys, and came home mightily disgusted, for the king had arms like any other man, while he had always understood that his majesty’s right arm was a lion and his left arm a unicorn.

Grinling Gibbons, the celebrated carver and sculptor, lived at the sign of the King’s Arms in Bow Street, from 1678 until 1721, when he died. This house is alluded to in the Postman, January 24, 1701-2:—

“On Thursday, the house of Mr Gibbons, the carver in Bow Street, fell down, but by special providence none of the family were killed; but, ’tis said, a young girl which was playing in the court being missed, is supposed to be buried in the rubbish.”

At the Haymarket, corner of Pall Mall, stood the Queen’s Arms tavern, in the reign of Queen Anne. At the accession of George I. it was called the King’s Arms, and there, in 1734, the Whig party used to meet to plan opposition to Sir Robert Walpole. This club went by the name of the Rump-steak Club.

Faulkner[128] says that at the King’s Arms, in the High Street, Fulham, the Great Fire of London was annually commemorated on the 1st of September, and had been continued without interruption until his time. It was said to have taken its rise from a number of Londoners who had been burnt out, and who, having no employment, strolled out to Fulham, on their way collecting a quantity of hazel nuts, from the hedges, with which they resorted to this house. A capital picture of the great conflagration used to be exhibited on that day.

In 1568 the prizes of the first lottery held in England were exhibited at the Queen’s Arms in Cheapside, the house of Mr Dericke, goldsmith to Queen Elizabeth. There were no blanks, and the prizes consisted of ready money, and “certain sorts of merchandises having been valued and prized.” It had 400,000 lots of 10s. each, and the profits were to go towards repairing the havens of the kingdom. The drawing was at first intended to have taken place at Dericke’s house, but finally was done at the west door of St Paul’s. The programme of this lottery, printed by Binneman, was exhibited to the Antiquarian Society by Dr Rawlinson in 1748. The next lottery was in 1612. It was drawn on the same plan, and granted by King James, as a special favour, for the establishment of English colonies in Virginia. Thomas Sharpley, a tailor, had the chief prize, which consisted of £4000 of “fair plate.”

“On Friday, April 6,” (1781) says Boswell,[129] “Dr Johnson carried me to dine at a club, which, at his desire, had been lately formed at the Queen’s Arms in St Paul’s Churchyard. He told Mr Hoole that he wished to have a City-club, and asked him to collect one; but, said he, don’t let them be patriots. The company were that day very sensible well-behaved men.” This same tavern was also patronised by Garrick. “Garrick kept up an interest in the city by appearing about twice in a winter at Tom’s coffeehouse in Cornhill, the usual rendezvous of young merchants at Changetimes; and frequented a club established for the sake of his company at the Queen’s Arms Tavern in St Paul’s Churchyard, where were used to assemble Mr Samuel Sharpe, the surgeon; Mr Paterson, the City solicitor; Mr Draper, the bookseller; Mr Clutterbuck, a mercer; and a few others: they were none of them drinkers, and in order to make a reckoning, called only for French wines. These were his standing counsel in theatrical affairs.”[130]

Sometimes we meet with the King’s or Queen’s Arms in very odd combinations; thus in the reign of Queen Anne there was a Queen’s Arms and Corncutter[131] in King Street, Westminster; the sign of Thomas Smith, who, according to his handbill, (in the Bagford collection,) had, “by experience and ingenuity learnt the art of taking out and curing all manner of corns without any pain;” he also sold “the famoustest ware in all England, which never fails curing the toothache in half an hour.” It was customary with those who were “sworn servants to his Majesty,”—i.e., who had the lord chamberlain’s diploma, to set up the royal arms beside their sign. The said Thomas, however, does not appear to have had this honour, for not a word about it is mentioned in his bill, so that he must have set up the Queen’s Arms merely to blind the public. The name of the person who filled the important office of corncutter to Queen Anne, I am afraid is lost to posterity, but, en revanche, we know who drew King Charles II.’s teeth, for the Rev. John Ward has recorded in his Diary.[132] “Upon a sign about Fleetbridge this is written,—‘Here lives Peter de la Roch and George Goslin, both which, and no others, are sworn operators to the king’s teeth.’”

Royal badges, and the supporters of the arms of various kings, were in former times largely used as signs. The following is a list of the supporters:—

Richard II., Two Angels, (blowing trumpets.)

Henry IV., Swan and Antelope.

Henry V., Lion and Antelope.

Henry VI., Two Antelopes.

Edward IV., Lion and Bull.

Edward V., Lion and Hind.

Richard III., Two Boars.

Henry VII., Dragon and Greyhound.

Henry VIII., Lion and Dragon.

Edward VI., Lion and Dragon.

Mary, Eagle and Lion.

Elizabeth, Lion and Dragon.

James I., Lion and Unicorn, which have continued ever since.

Of early royal badges an interesting list occurs in Harl. MS., 304, f. 12:—

“King Edward the first after the Conquest, sonne to Henry the third, gave a Rose gold, the stalke vert.

“King Edward the iij gave a lyon in his proper coulor, armed azure langued or. The oustrich fether gold, the pen gold, and a faucon in his proper coulor and the Sonne Rising.

“The prince of Wales the ostrich fether pen and all arg.

[109]

“Queen Philipe, wyff of Edward the iijd. gave the whyte hynd.

“Edmond, Duk of York, sonne of Edward the iij, gave the Faucon arg. and the Fetterlock or.

“Richard the second gave the White hart, armed, horned, crowned or, and the golden son.

“Henry, sonne to the Erl of Derby, first Duk of Lancaster, gave the red rose uncrowned, and his ancestors gave the Fox tayle in his prop. coulor and the ostrich fether ar. the pen ermyn.

“Henry the iiij gave the Swan ar. and the antelope.

“Henry the v gave the Antelope or, armed, crowned, spotted (?) and horned gold and the Red Rose oncrowned and the Swan silver, crown and collar gold, by the Erldom of Herford.

“Henry the vi gave the same that his father gave.

“Edward the iiij gave the Whyte Lyon and the Whyte Rose and the Blak Bull uncrowned.

“Richard the iij gave the Whyte Boar and the Whyte Rose, the clayes gold.

“Henry the seventh gave the hawthorn tree vert and the Porte Cullys and the Red Rose and the Whyte Crowned.

“The Ostrych fether silver, the pen gobone sylver and azur, is the Duk of Somerset’s bage.

“The Shypmast with the tope and sayle down is the bage of . . .

“The Cresset and burnyng fyer is the bage of the Admyraltye.

“The Egle Russet with a maydenshead, abowt her neke a Crowne gold, is the bage of the mannor of Conysborow.

“The Duk of York’s bage is the Faucon and the Fetterlock.

“The Whyte Rose by the Castell of Clyfford.

“The Black Dragon by the Erldom of Ulster.

“The Black Bull horned and clayed gold by the honor of Clare.

“The Whyte Hynd by the fayre mayden of Kent.

“The Whyte Lyon by the Erldom of Marche.

“The ostrych fether silver and pen gold ys the kinges.

“The ostrych fether pen and all sylver ys the Prynces.

“The ostrych fether sylver, pen ermyn is the Duke of Lancasters.

“The ostrych fether sylver and pen gobone is the Duke of Somersets.”

Many of these badges, as will be seen afterwards, have come down on signboards even to the present day. Equally common are the Stuart badges, which were:—

The red rose of Lancaster and the white rose of York frequently placed on sunbeams; sometimes the red rose charged with the white.

The rose dimidiated with the pomegranate, symbolical of the connexion between England and Spain by the marriage of Catherine of Arragon; for the same reason the castle of Castille, and the sheaf of arrows of Granada, occur amongst their badges.

The portcullis, borne by the descendants of John of Gaunt, who was born in Beaufort Castle, whence, pars pro toto, the gate was used to indicate the castle.

The falcon and fetterlock, badge of Henry VII., on account of his descent from Edmond of Langley, Duke of York.

The red dragon, the ensign of the famous Cadwaller, the last of the British kings, from whom the Tudors descended.

The hawthorn bush crowned, which Henry VII. adopted in allusion to the royal crown of Richard III. having been found hidden in a hawthorn bush after the battle of Bosworth.

The white falcon crowned and holding a sceptre was the badge of Queen Anna Boleyn, and of Queen Elizabeth her daughter.

The phœnix in flames was adopted by Edward VI. in allusion to his birth, having been the cause of his mother’s death; afterwards he also granted this badge to the Seymour family.

In pondering over this class of signs great difficulty often arises from the absence of all proof that the object under consideration was set up as a badge, and not as a representation of the actual animal. As no amount of investigation can decide this matter, we have been somewhat profuse in our list of badges, in order that the reader should be able to form his own opinion upon that subject. Thus, for instance, with the first sign that offers itself, the Angel and Trumpet, it is impossible to say whether the supporters of Richard II. gave rise to it, or whether it represents Fame. Various examples of it still occur, and a very good carved specimen may be seen above a draper’s shop in Oxford Street. It is also the name of alehouses in King Street, Holborn, and in Stepney, High Street, &c.

The Antelope is not very common now, although in 1664 there was a tavern with this sign in W. Smithfield, the trades token of this house bearing the following legend:—Bibis. Vinum. Saluta. Antelop. The Rev. John Ward tells a very feeble college joke concerning the Antelope Tavern in Oxford:—

“I have heard of a fellow at Oxford, one Ffrank Hil by name, who kept the Antelope; and if one yawned, hee could not chuse but yawne, that vppon a time some schollars hawing stoln his ducks, hee had them to the Vice chancelor, and one of the scholars got behind the Vice chancelor, and when the fellow beganne to speak hee would presently fall a yawning, insomuch that the Vice chancelor turned the fellow away in great indignation.”[133]

Macklin, the centenarian comedian, who died in 1797, used for thirty years and upwards to visit a public-house called the Antelope in White Hart yard, Covent Garden, where his usual beverage was a pint of stout made hot and sweetened almost to a syrup. This, he said, balmed his stomach, and kept him from having any inward pains.[134] He died at the age of upwards of 107, a proof that if, as the teetotallers inform us, fermented liquors be a poison, it is certainly a slow one.

The Dragon appears to have been one of the oldest heraldic charges of this kingdom. It was the standard of the West Saxons, and continued so until the arrival of William the Conqueror, for in the Bayeux tapestry a winged dragon on a pole is constantly represented near the person of King Harold. It was likewise the supporter of the royal arms of Henry VII. and all the Tudor sovereigns except Queen Mary. Before that time it had been borne by some of the early Princes of Wales, and also by several of the kings. Thus it is recorded, 28 Hen. III., the king ordered to be made—

“Unum draconem in modum unius vexilli de quodam rubro sanulo, qui ubique sit de auro extensillatus, cujus lingua sit facta tamquam ignis comburens et continue appareat moveatur, et ejus oculi fiant de sapphiris vel de aliis lapidibus eidem convenientibus.”[135]

At the battle of Lewes, 1264, the chronicler says that—

“The king schewed forth his schild his Dragon full austere.”[136]

In that time, however, it appears not to have been the royal standard, but it was borne along with it, for Matthew of Westminster says, “Regius locus erat inter Draconem et standardum.”[137] Edward III., at the battle of Crescy, also had a standard “with a dragon of red silk adorned and beaten with very broad and fair lilies of gold.” Then, again, it occurs on a coin struck in the reign of Henry VI., and was also one of the badges of Edward IV.

The Green Dragon was of very frequent occurrence on the signboard. When Taylor, the water poet, wrote his “Travels through London,” there were not less than seven Green Dragons amongst the metropolitan taverns of that day. One of these is still in existence, the well-known Green Dragon in Bishopsgate Street, for nearly two centuries one of the most famous coach and carriers’ inns. At present it is simply a public-house. The Red Dragon is much less common, whilst the White Dragon occurs on a trades token of Holborn, representing a dragon pierced with an arrow, evidently some family crest.

The White Hart was the favourite badge of Richard II. At a tournament held in Smithfield in 1390, in honour of the Count of St Pol, Count of Luxemburg, and the Count of Ostrevant, eldest son of Albert, Count of Holland and Zealand, who had been elected members of the garter, “all the kynges house were of one sute; theyr cotys, theyr armys, theyr sheldes, and theyr trappours, were browdrid all with whyte hertys, with crownes of gold about their neck, and cheynes of gold hanging thereon, whiche hertys was the kynges leverye that he gaf to lordes, ladyes, knyghtes, and squyers, to knowe his household people from others.”[138]

The origin of this White Hart, with a collar of gold round its neck, dates from the most remote antiquity. Aristotle[139] reports that Diomedes consecrated a white hart to Diana, which, a thousand years after, was killed by Agathocles, king of Sicily. Pliny[140] states that it was Alexander the Great, who caught a white stag and placed a collar of gold round its neck. This marvellous story highly pleased the fancy of the mediæval writers, always in quest of the wonderful. They substituted Julius Cæsar for Alexander the Great, and transplanted the fable to western regions, in consequence of which various countries now claim the honour of having produced the white hart, collared with gold. One was said to have been caught in Windsor Forest, another on Rothwell Haigh Common, in Yorkshire, a third at Senlis, in France, and a fourth at Magdeburg. This last was killed by Charlemagne. The same emperor is also reported to have caught a white stag in the woods of Holstein, and to have attached the usual golden collar round its neck. More than three centuries after, in 1172, this animal was killed by Henry the Lion, and the whole story is, to this day, recorded in a Latin inscription on the walls of Lubeck Cathedral.

Amongst the oldest inns which bore this sign, the White Hart, in the High Street, Borough, ranks foremost in historical interest. Here it was that Jack Cade established his headquarters, July 1, 1450. “And you, base peasants, do ye believe him? Will you needs be hanged with your pardons about your necks? Hath my sword therefore broken through London gates, that ye should leave me at the White Hart in Southwark.”—Henry VI., p. ii. a. 1. s. 8. In the yard of that inn he beheaded “one Hawaydyne of Sent Martyns.”[141] Many and wild must have been the scenes of riot and debauchery enacted in this place during the stay of the reckless rebel. The original inn that had sheltered Cade and his followers, remained standing till 1676, when it was burnt down in the great fire that laid part of Southwark in ashes. It was rebuilt, and the structure is still in existence; in Hatton’s time (1708) it could boast of the largest sign in London except one, which was at the Castle Tavern in Fleet Street. Charles Dickens has immortalised the White Hart Inn, by a most lifelike description in his “Pickwick Papers.”

The White Hart Tavern, in Bishopsgate, is also of very respectable antiquity. It has the date 1480 in the front. Standing on the boundary of the old hospital of Bethlehem, it is probable that this building formed part of that religious house. Doubtless it was the hostelry or inn for the entertainment of strangers, which was a usual outbuilding belonging to the great hospitals in those days.

In the reign of Queen Elizabeth there was a White Hart Inn in the Strand, mentioned in a copy of an indenture of lease, from the Earl of Bedford to Sir William Cecil (7th September 1570) of a portion of pasture in Covent Garden, “beinge thereby devyeded from certayne gardens belonginge to the Inne called the Whyte Heart, and other Tenements scituate in the high streate of Westm’ comunly called the Stronde.” It is not improbable that this inn gave its name to Hart Street and White Hart Yard, in that neighbourhood.

There was another inn of this name in Whitechapel, connected with the name of a rather curious character, Mrs Mapp, the female bone-setter. “On Friday, several persons who had the misfortune of lameness, crowded to the White Hart Inn in Whitechapel, on hearing Mrs Mapp, the famous bonesetter, was there. Some of them were admitted to her, and were relieved as they apprehended. But a gentleman who happened to come by declared Mrs Mapp was at Epsom, on which the woman thought proper to move off.”[142] The genuine Mrs Sarah Mapp was a female bone-setter, or “shape mistress,” the daughter of a bonesetter of Hindon, Wilts. Her maiden name was Wallis. It appears that she made some successful cures before Sir Hans Sloane, in the Grecian Coffee-house. For a time she was in affluent circumstances, kept a carriage and four, had a plate of ten guineas run for at the Epsom races, where she lived, frequented theatres, and was quite the lion of a season. Ballads were made upon her, songs were introduced on the stage, in which the “Doctress of Epsom” was exalted to the tune of Derry Down; in short, she was called the “Wonder of the Age.” But, alas! the year after all this éclat, we read in the same Grub Street Journal, that had recorded all her greatness—“December 22, 1737. Died last week at her lodgings, near the Seven Dialls, the much-talked of Mrs Mapp, the bonesetter, so miserably poor, that the parish was obliged to bury her.” Sic transit gloria mundi!

Lastly, we must mention the White Hart, at Scole, in Norfolk, as most of all bearing upon our subject, for that inn had certainly the most extensive and expensive sign ever produced. It is mentioned by Sir Thomas Brown, March 4, 166

3

4

—“About three miles further, I came to Scoale, where is a very handsome inne, and the noblest sighnepost in England, about and upon which are carved a great many stories as of Charon and Cerberus, Actæon and Diana, and many others; the signe itself is a White Hart, which hanges downe carved in a stately wreath.” A century later, it is again mentioned. Speaking of Osmundestone, or Scole, Blomefield says—“Here are two very good inns for the entertainment of travellers. The White Hart is much noted in these parts, being called by way of distinction Scole Inn; the house is a large brick building adorned with imagery and carved work in several places, as big as the life; it was built in 1655 by James Peck, Esq., whose arms impaling his wife’s are over the porch door. The sign is very large, beautified all over with a great number of images of large stature carved in wood, and was the work of Fairchild; the arms about it are those of the chief towns and gentlemen in the county.” “There was lately a very round large bed, big enough to hold 15 or 20 couples, in imitation (I suppose) of the remarkable great bed at Ware. The house was in all things accommodated at first for large business; but the road not supporting it, it is much in decay at present.” A correspondent in Notes and Queries says:—“I think the sign was not taken down till after 1795, as I have a recollection of having passed under it when a boy, in going from Norwich to Ipswich.” We obtain full details of this wonderful erection from an engraving made in 1740, entitled:—

“The North East side of ye sign of ye White Heart at Schoale Inn in Norfolk, built in the year 1655 by James Peck, a merchant of Norwich, which cost £1057. Humbly Dedicated to James Betts, Gent., by his most obt servt, Harwin Martin.”

The sign passed over the road, resting on one side on a pier of brickwork, and joined to the house on the other; its height was sufficient to allow carriages to pass beneath. Its ornamentation was divided into compartments, which contained the following subjects according to the numbers in the engraving:—1. Jonah coming out of the fish’s mouth. 2. A Lion supporting the arms of Great Yarmouth. 3. A Bacchus. 4. The arms of Lindley. 5. The arms of Hobart. 6. A Shepherd playing on his pipe. 7. An Angel supporting the arms of Mr Peck’s lady. 8. An Angel supporting the arms of Mr Peck. 9. A White Hart [the sign itself] with this motto,—“Implentur veteris Bacchi pinguisque ferinæ. Anno dom. 1655.” 10. The arms of the Earl of Yarmouth. 11. The arms of the Duke of Norfolk. 12. Neptune on a Dolphin. 13. A Lion supporting the arms of Norwich. 14. Charon carrying a reputed Witch to Hades. 15. Cerberus. 16. A Huntsman. 17. Actæon [addressing his dogs with the words “Actæon ego sum, dominum cognoscite vestrum.”] 18. A White Hart couchant [underneath, the name of the maker of the sign, Johannes Fairchild, struxit.] 19. Prudence. 20. Fortitude. 21. Temperance. 22. Justice. 23. Diana. 24. Time devouring an infant [underneath, “Tempus Edax rerum.”] 25. An Astronomer, who is seated on a “circumferenter, and by some chymical preparations is so affected that in fine weather he faces that quarter from which it is about to come.” There is a ballad on this sign in “Songs and other Poems,” by Alexander Brome, Gent. London, 1661, p. 123.

This herd of white harts has led us over a large tract of ground, but we will now return to other royal badges, and note the Hawk and Buckle, which occurs in Wrenbury, Nantwich, Cheshire; Etwall, Derby; and various other places. This is simply a popular rendering of the Falcon and the Fetterlock, one of the badges of the house of York. The Hawk and Buck, which appears to be only another version of the last corruption, occurs at Pearsly Sutton Street, St Helens, Lancashire; the Falcon and Horse-shoe, a sign in Poplar in the seventeenth century, (see Trades’ Tokens,) may have had the same origin, whilst the Bull and Stirrup, in Upper Northgate, Chester, probably comes from the Bull and Fetterlock, another combination of badges of the house of York.

From this family are also derived the Blue Boar and the White Boar. One of the badges of Richard, Duke of York, father of Edward IV., was “a blewe Bore with his tuskis and his cleis and his membres of gold.”[143] The heraldic origin of this sign, of which there are still innumerable instances all over England, is now so completely lost sight of, that in many places it passes under the ignoble appellation of the Blue Pig.

The White Boar was the popular sign in Richard the Third’s time, that king’s cognizance being a boar passant argent, whence the rhyme which cost William Collingborne his life:—

“The Cat, the Rat, and Lovell our Dogge,
Rulen all England vnder an Hogge.”[144]

The fondness of Richard for this badge appears from his wardrobe accounts for the year 1483, one of which contains a charge “for 8000 bores made and wrought upon fustian,” and 5000 more are mentioned shortly afterwards. He also established a herald of arms called Blanc Sanglier, and it was this trusty squire who carried his master’s mangled body from Bosworth battle-field to Leicester.

After Richard’s defeat and death the White Boars were changed into Blue Boars, this being the easiest and cheapest way of changing the sign; and so the Boar of Richard, now painted “true blue,” passed for the Boar of the Earl of Oxford, who had largely contributed to place Henry VII. on the throne. Even the White Boar Inn at Leicester, in which Richard passed the last night of his royalty and of his life, followed the general example, and became the Blue Boar Inn, under which sign it continued until taken down twenty-five or thirty years ago. The bed in which the king slept was preserved, and continued for many generations one of the curiosities shewn to strangers at Leicester. It was said that a large sum of money had been discovered in its double bottom, which the landlord himself quietly appropriated. The discovery, however, got wind, and his widow was killed and robbed by some of her guests, in connivance with a maid-servant. They carried away seven horse-loads of treasure. This murder was committed in 1605.[145]

The sign of the White Boar, however, did not become quite extinct with the overthrow of the York faction, for we find it still in 1542, as appears from the following title of a very scarce book:—

“David’s Harp full of most delectable harmony newly strung and set in Tune by Thos. Basille ye Lord Cobham. Imprinted at London in Buttolp lane at ye sign of ye White Boar by John Mayler for John Gough, 1542.”[146]

The Firebeacon, a sign at Fulston, Lincolnshire, was a badge of Edward IV., and also of the Admiralty.

The Hawthorn, or Hawthornbush, which we meet in so many places, may be Henry VII.’s badge, but various other causes may have contributed to the popularity of that sign, such as the custom of gathering bunches of hawthorn on the first of May. Magic powers, too, are attributed to this plant. “And now,” says Reginald Scott, “to be delivered from witches themselves they hange in their entrees an hearb called pentaphyllon, cinquefole, also an oliue branch, also franckincense, myrrh, valerian veruen, palme, anterihmon, &c.; also Haythorne, otherwise whitethorne, gathered on Maiedaie,” &c.[147]

The Gun, or Cannon, was the cognizance of King Edward VI., Queen Mary, and Queen Elizabeth. In the beginning of the eighteenth century it was of such frequent occurrence that the Craftsman, No. 638, observed—“Nothing is more common in England than the sign of a cannon.” Sarah Milwood, the “wanton” who led George Barnwell astray, lived, according to the ballad, in Shoreditch, “next door unto the Gun.” At the present day it is still a great favourite. In the neighbourhood of arsenals its adoption is easily explained.

About eighty years ago there was a famous Cannon Coffee-house at the corner of Trafalgar Square, at the end of Whitcombe Street or Hedgelane; its site is now occupied by the Union Club. From this coffeehouse Hackman saw Miss Ray drive past on her way to Covent Garden Theatre, when he followed and shot her as she was entering her coach after the performance. The Gun was also a sign with many booksellers, as in the case of Edward White at the Little North Door of St Paul’s Church, 1579; Thomas Ewster in Ivy Lane, 1649; Henry Brome, at the West End of St Paul’s Churchyard, 1678, and various others.

The Swan was a favourite badge of several of our kings, as Henry IV., Edward III. At a tournament in Smithfield the last king wore the following rather profane motto:—

“Hay, hay, the wyth Swan,
By God’s soule I am thy man.”

Thomas Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, used the same cognizance; whence Gower styles him “cignus de corde benignus;” whilst Cecily Nevil, Duchess of York, mother of Edward IV. and Richard III., likewise had a swan as supporter of her arms.

The sign of the Swan and Maidenhead, at Stratford-on-Avon, may have originated in one of the royal badges; for we find that in 1375 the Black Prince bequeathed to his son Richard his hangings for a hall, embroidered with mermen, and a border of red and black empaled, embroidered with swans having ladies’ heads.[148] The Swan and Falcon (two badges of Edward III.) was a sign in Hereford, in 1775, as appears from the following advertisement:—

“HEREFORD MACHINE.

“IN a Day and a Half twice a week, continues flying from the Swan and Falcon, in Hereford, Monday and Thursday mornings; and from the Bolt-in-Tun, in Fleet Street, London, Monday and Thursday evenings. Fare 19s.; outsides half.”—Hereford Journal, January 12, 1775.

The Swan and White Hart may have been originally the Swan and Antelope, supporters of the arms of Henry IV., but as it at present stands two distinct royal badges are represented. This sign occurs on a trades-token of St Giles in the Fields, in the second half of the seventeenth century.

The Rising Sun was a badge of Edward III., and forms part of the arms of Ireland; but the Sun Shining was a cognizance of several kings. Various other causes may have led to the adoption of that luminary as a sign. (See Miscellaneous Signs.)

Lions have been at all times, and still continue, greater signboard favourites than any other heraldic animals. The lion rampant most frequently occurs, although in late years naturalism has crept in, and the felis leo is often represented standing or crouching, quite regardless of his heraldic origin. The lion of the signboard being seldom seen passant, it is more than probable that it was not derived from the national coat of arms, but rather from some badge, either that of Edward III. or from the White Lion of Edward IV. Though silver in general was not used on English signboards yet, the White Lion was anything but uncommon. Several examples occur amongst early booksellers. Thus in 1604 the “Shepherd’s Calendar” was “printed at London by G. Elde, for Thomas Adams, dwelling in Paule’s Churchyarde, at the signe of the White Lion.” In 1652 we meet with another bookseller, John Fey, near the New Exchange; and about the same period John Andrews, a ballad printer, near Pye Corner, who both had the sign of the White Lion. For inns, also, it was not an uncommon decoration. Thus the White Lion in St John’s Street, Clerkenwell, was originally an inn frequented by cattle-drovers and other wayfarers connected with Smithfield market. Formerly it was a very extensive building, two of the adjoining houses and part of White Lion Street, all being built on its site. The house now occupied by an oilshop was in those days the gateway to the inn-yard, and over it was the sign, in stone relief, a lion rampant, painted white, inserted in the front wall. It still remains in its original position, with the date 1714, when it was probably renewed. Pepys’s cousin, Anthony Joyce, drowned himself in a pond behind this inn. He was a tavern-keeper himself, and kept the Three Stags at Holborn, (a house of which tokens are extant.) Heavy losses by the fire of 1666 preyed upon his mind. He imagined that he had not served God as he ought to have done, and in a moment of despair committed the rash act. We have another, and not uninteresting instance, of this sign. Sir Thomas Lawrence’s father kept the White Lion Hotel at Bristol. He afterwards removed to the Bear, at Devizes, where he failed in business. It seemed that it was this last speculation in hotel-keeping which ruined him, with reference to which local wits used to say, “It was not the Lion but the Bear that eat him up.”—Bristol Times, June 4, 1859.

Since pictorial or carved signs have fallen into disuse, and only names given, the Silver Lion is not uncommon, though in all probability simply adopted as a change from the very frequent Golden Lion. Thus there is one in the High Street, Poplar; in the London Road, and Midland Road, Derby; in the Lilly Road, Luton, Herts, &c. The Red Lion is by far the most common; doubtless it originated with the badge of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, married to Constance, daughter of Don Pedro the Cruel, king of Leon and Castille. The duke bore the lion rampant gules of Leon as his cognizance, to represent his claim to the throne of Castille, when that was occupied by Henry de Transtamare. In after years it may often have been used to represent the lion of Scotland.

The Red Lion Inn at Sittingbourne is a very ancient establishment. A new landlord, who entered circa 1820, issued the following advertisement:—

“WM. WHITAKER having taken the above house, most respectfully solicits the custom and support of the nobility and gentry, &c., &c.

“The antiquity of the inn, and the respectable character which it has in history are recorded as under:—

“Sittingbourne, in Kent, is a considerable thoroughfare on the Dover Road, where there are several good inns, particularly the Red Lion, which is remarkable for an entertainment, made by Mr John Norwood, for King Henry the Fifth, as he returned from the battle of Agincourt, in France, in the year 1415, the whole amounting to no more than Nine Shillings and Ninepence. Wine being at that time only a penny a pint, and all other things being proportionably cheap.

P.S.—The same character in a like proportionate degree Wm. Whitaker hopes to obtain by his moderate charges at the present time.”

Red Lion Square, Holborn, was called after an inn known as the Red Lion. “Andrew Marvell lies interred under ye pews in the south side of St Giles church in ye Fields, under the window wherein is painted on glasse, a red lyon, (it was given by the Inneholder of the Red lyon Inne, Holborn.)”[149]

Another celebrated tavern was the Old Red Lion, St John’s Road, Islington,—which has been honoured by the presence of several great literary characters. Thomson, of the “Seasons,” was a frequent visitor; Paine, the author of the “Rights of Man,” lived, here; and Dr Johnson, with his friends, are said often to have sat in the parlour. Hogarth introduced its gable end in his picture of Evening.

The Black Lion is somewhat uncommon; it may have been derived from the coat of arms of Queen Philippa of Hainault, wife of Edward III.[150] We find an example of it in the following advertisement:—[151]

“AT the Union Society at the Black Lion against Short’s Garden in Drury Lane, a Linen Draper’s, on Thursday the 21st past, was[121] opened three offices of Insurance on the birth of Children, by way of dividend. At the same place there is two offices for marriages,” &c.

In this advertisement we touch upon the joint-stock mania then raging. Newspapers of the time teemed with advertisements of insurance companies of all sorts: the above paper, with less than a dozen advertisements, offers four schemes, by which on payment of 10s. per week £1000 were eventually to be received!

Among the badges of the Tudors, Henry VII. and Henry VIII. left us the still common sign of the Portcullis.

“A portcullis, or porte-coulisse, is French for that wooden instrument or machine, plated over with iron, made in the form of a harrow or lozenge, hung up with pullies in the entries of gates or castles, to be let down upon any occasion.”—Anstis Garter.

It is the principal charge in the arms of the city of Westminster, and is to be seen everywhere within and without the beautiful chapel of Henry VII., whose favourite device it was as importing his descent from the house of Lancaster. It was also one of the badges of Henry VIII., with the motto, Securitas Altera, and occurs on some of his coins.

To this same family we also owe the Rose and Crown, which sign, at the present day, may be observed on not less than forty-eight public-houses in London alone, exclusive of beer-houses. One of the oldest is in the High Street, Knightsbridge, which has been licensed above three hundred years, though not under that name, for anciently it was called the Oliver Cromwell. The Protector’s bodyguard is said to have been quartered here, and an inscription to that effect was formerly painted in front of the house, accompanied by an emblazoned coat of arms of Cromwell, on an ornamental piece of plaster work, which last is all that now remains of it. It is the oldest house in Brompton, was formerly its largest inn, and not improbably the house at which Sir Thomas Wyatt put up, while his Kentish followers rested on the adjacent green. Corbould painted this inn under the title of “The Old Hostelrie at Knightsbridge,” exhibited in 1849, but he transferred its date to 1497, altering the house according to his own fancy.

During the persecutions, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, of booksellers suspected as publishers of the mysterious Martin Marprelate tracts, we find one Bogue, at the loyal sign of the Rose and Crown, in St Paul’s Churchyard, who fell into the category of the suspected, and who was so severely persecuted that he was almost ruined by it.

One more royal, or rather princely badge remains to be mentioned,—The Feathers, Prince of Wales’ Feathers, occasionally varied to the Prince of Wales’ Arms. Ostrich feathers were from a very early period among the devices of our kings and princes. King Stephen, for instance, according to Guillim, bore a plume of ostrich feathers with the motto:—VI NULLA INVERTITUR ORDO, No force alters their fashion, meaning that no wind can ruffle a feather into lasting disorder. Not only the Black Prince, but also Edward III., himself and his sons, bore ostrich feathers as their cognizances, each with some distinction in colour or metal. The badge originally took the form of a single feather. John Ardern, physician to the Black Prince, who is the first to mention the derivation of the feathers from the King of Bohemia, says:—

“Et nota quod talem pennam albam portabat Edwardus primogenitus filius Edwardi regis super crestam suam, et illam pennam conquisivit de rege Boemiæ, quem interfecit apud Cresse in Francia, et sic assumpsit sibi illam pennam quæ dicitur ostrich feather, quam prius dictus rex nobilissimus portabat super crestam.”[152]

The feather, also, is drawn in the margin of the MS. as single, and in that shape, too, it is represented on the Black Prince’s tomb. This feather, however, appears only to have been an ornament on the helmet of King John of Bohemia. A contemporary Flemish poem, quoted by Baron van Reiffenberg, thus describes his heraldic crest:—

“Twee ghiervogelen daer aen geleyt
Die al vol bespringelt zyn
Met Linden bladeren gult fyn,
Deze is, as ik merken kan
Van Bohemen Koninck Jan.”[153]

And in that shape it also occurs on the King’s seal. More difficulties are offered by the motto: Hou moet ich dien, for so it is in full,—the Black Prince himself wrote it after this fashion in a letter dated April 25, 1370. The last two words in German mean “I serve,” but no explanation is given of the remainder, “Hou moet.” Since no mottos in two languages occur, we must look for a language which can account for both parts of the motto; and thus in Flemish we find these words to mean, “Keep courage, I serve,” or, in less concise language, “Keep courage, I serve with you, I am your companion in arms;” and though no parentage has as yet been found for this motto, it may not improbably have been derived from the Black Prince’s maternal family, since his mother, Queen Philippa of Hainault, was a Flemish princess.

Amongst the many shops which took the feathers for their sign we find the following noted in an advertisement:—

“THE Late Countess of Kent’s powder has been lately experimented upon divers infected persons with admirable success. The virtues of it against the Plague and all malignant distempers are sufficiently known to all the Physicians of Christendom, and the Powder itself prepared by the only person living that has the true Receipt, is to be had at the third part of the ordinary price at Mr Calvert’s, at the Feathers in the old Pall Mall near St James’s,” &c.

This, and other advertisements announcing equally efficacious panacea, appeared daily in the London papers during the plague of 1665. De Foe, in his little chronicle of the plague, often speaks of these quack medicines.

Less dismal images are called up by “the Feathers at the side of Leicester Fields,” which sign was evidently complimentary to its neighbour Frederick, Prince of Wales, son of George II., who lived at Leicester House, “the pouting house of princes,” when on bad terms with his father, and died there in 1751. The back parlour of this tavern was for some years the meeting-place of a club of artists and well-known amateurs, amongst whom Stuart, the Athenian traveller; Scott, the marine painter; Luke Sullivan, the miniature artist, engraver of the March to Finchley; burly Captain Grose, author of the “Antiquities of England,” and the greatest wit of his day; Mr Hearne, the antiquary; Nathaniel Smith, the father of J. T. Smith; Mr John Ireland, then a watchmaker in Maidenlane, and afterwards editor of Boydell’s edition of Dr Trusler’s “Hogarth Moralised,” and several others. When this house was taken down to make way for Dibdin’s theatre, called the Sans-souci, the club adjourned to the Coach and Horses, in Castle Street, Leicester Fields. But, in consequence of the members not proving customers sufficiently expensive for that establishment, the landlord one evening venturing to let them out with a farthing candle, they betook themselves to Gerard Street and thence to the Blue Posts in Dean Street, where the club dwindled to two or three members and at last died out.

An amusing anecdote is told about the Feathers, Grosvenor Street West. A lodge of Oddfellows was held at this house, into the private chamber of which George, Prince of Wales, one night intruded very abruptly with a roystering friend. The society was, at the moment, celebrating some of its awful mysteries, which no uninitiated eye may behold, and these were witnessed by the profane intruders. The only way to repair the sacrilege was to make the Prince and his companion “Oddfellows,” a title they certainly deserved as richly as any members of the club. The initiatory rites were quickly gone through, and the Prince was chairman for the remainder of the evening. In 1851 the old public-house was pulled down and a new gin palace built on its site, in the parlour of which the chair used by the distinguished Oddfellow is still preserved, along with a portrait of his Royal Highness in the robes of the order.

Among the badges and arms of countries and towns, the national emblem the Rose is most frequent, and has been so for centuries. Bishop Earle observes, “If the vintner’s Rose be at the door it is sign sufficient, but the absence of this is supplied by the ivy-bush.” Hutton, in his “Battle of Bosworth,” says that “upon the death of Richard III., and the consequent overthrow of the York faction, all the signboards with white roses were pulled down, and that none are to be found at the present day.” This last part of the statement, we believe, is true, but that the White Roses were not all immediately done away with appears from the fact that, in 1503, a White Rose Tavern was demolished to make room for the building of Henry VII.’s chapel in Westminster; that tavern stood near the chapel of Our Lady, behind the high altar of the abbey church. At present, however, as the rose on the signboard represents in the eye of the public simply the Queen of Flowers,—its heraldic history having been forgotten long ago,—it is painted any colour according to taste, or occasionally gilt. Long after the famous battles between the White and Red Roses had ceased, the custom was continued of adding the colour to the name of the sign. Thus, in Stow, “Then have ye one other lane called Rother Lane, or Red Rose Lane, of such a sign,” &c. In Lancashire we meet, in one or two instances, with the old heraldic flower, as at Springwood, Chadderton, Manchester, where the Red Rose of Lancaster is still in full bloom on a publican’s signboard.

Skelton’s “Armony of Byrdes” was “imprynted at Londo’ by John Wyght dwelling in Poule’s Church yarde at the sygne of the Rose.” Machyn, in his Diary, mentions many instances:—“The vij day of Aprill (1563) at seint Katheryns beyond the Toure, the wyff of the syne of the Rose, a tavarne, was set on the pelere for ettyng of rowe flesse and rostyd boyth,” which in our modern English means that she was put in the pillory for breaking fast in Lent.

The Rose Tavern in Russell Street, Covent Garden, was a noted place for debauchery in the seventeenth century; constant allusions are made to it in the old plays. “In those days a man could not go from the Rose Tavern to the Piazzi once but he must venture his life twice.”—Shadwell, the Scowrers, 1691. “Oh no, never talk on’t. There will never be his fellow. Oh! had you seen him scower as I did; oh! so delicately, so like a gentleman! How he cleared the Rose Tavern!”—Ibid. In this house, November 14, 1712, the duel between the Duke of Hamilton and Lord Mohun was arranged, in which the latter was killed. In the reign of Queen Anne the place was still a great resort for loose women; hence in the “Rake Reformed,” 1718—

“Not far from thence appears a pendant sign,
Whose bush declares the product of the vine,
Where to the traveller’s sight the full-blown Rose
Its dazzling beauties doth in gold disclose,
And painted faces flock in tallied cloaths.”

Hogarth has represented one of the rooms of the house in his “Rake’s Progress.” In 1766 this tavern was swallowed up in the enlargements of Drury Lane by Garrick, but the sign was preserved and hung up against the front wall, between the first and second floor windows.[154]

Two other Roses, not without thorns, are mentioned by Tom Brown:—

“Between two Roses down I fell,
As ’twixt two stools a platter;
One held me up exceeding well,
Th’ other did no such matter.
The Rose by Temple Bar gave wine
Exchanged for chalk, and filled me,
But being for the ready coin,
The Rose in Wood Street killed me.”

The “Rose by Temple Bar” stood at the corner of Thanet Place. Strype says it was “a well customed house, with good conveniences of rooms and a good garden.” Walpole mentions a painted room in this tavern in his letters of January 26 and March 1, 1776. The Rose in Wood Street was a spunging-house: “I have been too lately under their [the Bayliffs’] clutches, to desire any more dealings with them, and I cannot come within a furlong of the Rose spunging-house without five or six yellow boys in my pocket to cast out those devils there, who would otherwise infallibly take possession of me.”—Tom Brown’s Works, iii. p. 24.

Innumerable other Rose inns and taverns might be mentioned, but we will conclude with noting the Rose Inn at Wokingham, once famous as the resort of Pope and Gay. There was a room here called “Pope’s room,” and a chair was shown in which the great little man had sat. It is also celebrated in the well-known song of Molly Mog, attributed to Gay, and printed in Swift’s “Miscellanies.” “This cruel fair, who was daughter of John Mog, the landlord of that inn, died a spinster at the age of 67. Mr Standen of Arborfield, who died in 1730, is said to have been the enamoured swain to whom the song alludes. The current tradition of the place is, that Gay and his poetic friends having met upon some occasion to dine at the Rose, and being detained within doors by the weather, it was proposed that they should write a song, and that each person present should contribute a verse: the subject proposed was the Fair Maid of the Inn. It is said that by mistake they wrote in praise of Molly, but that in fact it was intended to apply to her sister Sally, who was the greater beauty. A portrait of Gay still remains at the inn.”[155] The house at present is changed into a mercer’s shop.

Sometimes the Rose is combined with other objects, as the Rose and Ball, which originated in the Rose as the sign of a mercer, and the Ball as the emblem or device which silk dealers formerly hung at their doors like the Berlin wool shops of the present day. (See under Ball.) The Rose and Key was a sign in Cheapside in 1682.[156] This combination looks like a hieroglyphic rendering of the phrase, “under the rose,” but the key is of very common occurrence in other signs, as will be seen presently.

The Scotch Thistle and Crown is another not uncommon national badge, adopted mostly by publicans of North British origin. The Crown and Harp is less frequent; there is one at Bishop’s Cleeve, Cheltenham. Of the Crown and Leek we know only one example, viz., in Dean Street, Mile End; but since both the rose and thistle are crowned, why not the leek also? It is “a wholesome food,” according to Fluellen, and would no doubt look just as well under a crown as in a Welshman’s cap. The Shamrock also is of common occurrence, but we have never seen it combined with the Crown.

Among heraldic signs referring to towns are the Bible and Three Crowns, the coat of arms of Oxford, which was not uncommon with the booksellers in former times. To one of them, probably, belonged the carved stone specimen walled up in a house at the corner of Little Distaff Lane and St Paul’s Churchyard. Such a sign is also mentioned in a rather curious advertisement in the Postboy, September 27, 1711:—

“THIS IS to give notice That ten Shillings over and above the Market price will be given for the Ticket in the £1,500,000 Lottery, No. 132, by Nath. Cliff at the Bible and Three Crowns in Cheapside.”

The Spectator in his 191st number took occasion from this advertisement to write a very amusing paper on the various lottery superstitions with regard to numbers.

There is also an Oxford Arms Inn in Warwick Lane, Newgate Street; a fine, old, galleried inn, with exterior staircases leading to the bed-rooms. This was already a carriers’ inn before the fire, as appears from the following advertisement:—

“THESE ARE to give notice that Edward Barlet, Oxford Carrier, hath removed his Inn in London from the Swan at Holborn Bridge, to the Oxford Arms in Warwick Lane, where he did inne before the fire. His coaches and waggons going forth on their usual days, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. He hath also a hearse with all things convenient to carry a corps to any part of England.”[157]

The Buck in the Park, Curzon Street, Derby, is the vernacular rendering of the arms of that town, which are—a hart cumbant on a mount, in a park paled, all proper. The Three Legs was the sign of a bookseller named Thomas Cockerill, over against Grocer’s Hall, in the Poultry, about 1700. Sometimes his house is designated on his publications as the Three Legs and Bible. These three legs were the Manx arms. It is still a not uncommon alehouse sign. There is one, for instance, in Call Lane, Leeds, which is known to the lower classes under the jocular denomination of “the kettle with three spouts.”

County arms also are sometimes represented on the signboards; as the Fifteen Balls, (which refer to the Cornish arms, fifteen roundles arranged in triangular form) at Union Street, Bodmin, Cornwall; One and All, the motto of the county of Cornwall, occurs at Cheapside, St Heliers, Jersey; and in Market Jew Street, Penzance. This motto has, besides the advantage of being a hearty appeal to all the thirsty sons of Bacchus, and will call to the mind of a thoughtful toper, the relative position of one and many, or all, as explained by the al-fresco artists, who decorate the pavement in Piccadilly—“Many can help one, one cannot help many.” The Staffordshire Knot is common in the pottery districts; besides these almost every county is represented by its own arms, such as the Northumberland Arms, &c., but about these nothing need be said.

The Three Balls of the pawnbrokers are taken from the lower part of the coat of arms of the Dukes of Medici, from whose states, and from Lombardy, nearly all the early bankers came. These capitalists also advanced money on valuable goods, and hence gradually became pawnbrokers. The arms of the Medici family were five bezants azure, whence the balls formerly were blue, and only within the last half century have assumed a golden exterior, evidently to gild the pill for those who have dealings with “my uncle;” as for the position in which they are placed, the popular explanation is that there are two chances to one that whatever is brought there will not be redeemed.

The Lion and Castle, of which there are a few instances, (Cherry Garden Stairs, Rotherhithe, for example,) need not be derived from royal marriage alliances with Spain, as it may simply have been borrowed from the brand of the Spanish arms on the sherry casks, and have been put up by the landlord to indicate the sale of genuine Spanish wines, such as sack, canary, mountain.

The Flower de Luce was a frequent English sign in old times, either taken from the quartering of the French arms with the English, or set up as a compliment to private families who bear this charge in their arms or as crest. The preface of “Edyth, the lying widow,” ends with these words:—

“In the cyte of Exeter by West away
The time not passed hence many a day,
There dwelled a yoman discret and wise,
At the siggne of the Flower de lyse
Which had to name John Hawkyn.”

Tokens are extant of an inn at Dover, in the seventeenth century, with the sign of the French Arms, a tavern name sufficiently common also in London at that period to attract the travellers from across the Channel. Thus James Johnson was a goldsmith, “that kept running cash,”—i.e., a banker,—in Cheapside, in 1677, living at the sign of the Three Flower de Luces.[158] In the fifteenth century, Gascon merchants and other strangers in London were allowed to keep hostels for their countrymen, and, in order to get known, they most likely put up the arms of those countries as their signs. No doubt the Three Frogs, London Road, Wokingham, is a travesty of Johnny Crapaud’s Arms.

PLATE VII.

HEDGEHOG. (Bynneman’s sign, 1560.) | BLUE BOAR. (Banks’s Collection, 1765.)

THE VALIANT LONDON APPRENTICE.
(From an old chapbook, 17th cent.)

THE SUN. (Sign of Wynkyn de Worde, 1497.) | THREE PHEASANTS AND SCEPTRE. (Banks’s Bills, 1795.)

Boursault,[159] in his letter to Bizotin, has a burst of indignation at a “fournisseur” of something or other to the royal family, who had adopted as his sign the English Arms, with the arms of France in the first quarter, and endeavours to call down the ire of the Parisian police upon the head of the unfortunate shopkeeper who had committed this act of treason:—

“Laissons l’Angleterre se repaître de chimères,” saith he, “et s’imaginer que ses souverains sont Rois de France, mais que des Français soyent assez ignorants, ou assez mauvais sujets, pour mettre les armes de France écartelés dans celles d’Angleterre, c’est ce que des sujets aussi zélez que Monsieur d’Argenson et les autres officiers préposez pour la police ne doivent nullement souffrir.”[160]

He next, in a threatening manner, reminds the poor shopkeeper how, according to “Candem [sic] Historien Angloys,” Queen Mary Stuart was beheaded for having quartered the English arms with those of Scotland, though she was the heir-presumptive of the English throne; and if such was the fate of that queen, what then did the man deserve who quartered the arms of his sovereign with those of a foreign king? Indeed he deserved the same fate as the arms.

Another sign, apparently of French origin, is the Dolphin and Crown, the armorial bearing of the French Dauphin, and the sign of R. Willington, a bookseller in St Paul’s Churchyard circa 1700. Some years after, this house seems to have been occupied by James Young, a famous maker of violins and other musical instruments, who lived at the west corner of London House Yard, St Paul’s Churchyard. On this man the following catch appeared in the Pleasant Musicall Companion, 1726:—

“You scrapers that want a good fiddle well strung,
You must go to the man that is old while he’s Young;
But if this same fiddle you fain would play bold,
You must go to his son, who’s Young when he’s old.
There’s old Young and young Young, both men of renown:
Old sells and young plays the best fiddle in town.
Young and old live together, and may they live long—
Young to play an old fiddle, old to sell a new song.”

This Young family afterwards removed to the Queen’s Head Tavern in Paternoster Row, where in a few years they grew rich by giving concerts, when they removed to the Castle in the same street. The Castle concerts continued a long time to be celebrated.

Many signs are exceedingly puzzling under the name by which they pass with the public. Such was that of “Rowland Hall, dwelling in Guttur Lane, at the sygne of the Half Eagle and Key.” This quaint sign is no other than the arms of Geneva, described in the non-heraldic language of the mob. Rowland Hall, a bookseller and printer, lived as a refugee in Geneva during the reign of Queen Mary; hence on his return to London he set up the arms of that town for his sign, as a graceful compliment to the hospitality he had received, and as a tribute of admiration to stanch Protestantism. Hall, at other periods of his life, lived at the Cradle in Lombard Street, and at the Three Arrows in Golden Lane, Cripplegate. In 1769 there was again the Geneva Arms among the London signs, before the shop of Le Grand, a “pastery-cook and cook,” as he styled himself, in Church Street, Soho. Formerly most pastry-cooks and confectioners were Swiss, and many from that country still follow those professions in Italy, Spain, and recently in England. This last sign has found imitators in Soho; for at the present day it figures at a public-house in Hayes Court, where it is put up, no doubt, in honour of the spirit which many call Geneva, but which we may name Gin. The origin of this name, as applied by publicans, is not a little curious. In Holland the juniper-berry is used for flavouring the gin or hollands which they distil there, and this, with the vulgar in that country, has gradually become corrupted from Juniper to Jenever, the latter term being still further corrupted here to Geneva, and Gin.

The Cross Keys are the arms of the Papal See, the emblem of St Peter and his successors:—

“Two massy keys he bore, of metals twain;
The golden opes, the iron shuts amaine.”

Milton.

This sign was frequently adopted by innkeepers and other tenants of religious houses, even after the Reformation; for the Cross Keys figure in the arms of the Bishops of York, Cashel, Exeter, Gloster, and Peterborough. At the Cross Keys in Gracechurch Street, where Tarlton, the comic actor, went to see fashions, Banks used to perform with his wonderful bay horse before a crowded house. This was in the days of Queen Elizabeth, when the inn consisted of a large court with galleries all round, which, like many other old London inns, was often used as an extempore theatre by our ancestors. It is named in 1681[161] amongst the carriers’ inns, and is in existence at the present day. The Cross Keys was the sign of a tavern near Thavies Inn in 1712:—

“May the Cross Keys near Thavies Inn succeed,
And famous grow for choicest white and red;
That all may know, who view that costly sign,
Those golden keys command celestial wine.”

The Quack Vintners. A Satire. 1712.

Besides, it is famous as the sign of Bernard Lintot, 1736, the publisher of Gay’s works, and many other popular books of that day. His shop was situated between the Temple Gates, in Fleet Street. The Cross Keys and Bible was the sign of J. Bell, in Cornhill, 1711.

Most numerous among heraldic signs were the crests, arms, and badges[162] of private families. The causes which dictated the choice of such subjects were various. One of the earliest was this:—

“In towns the hospitality of the burghers was not always given gratis, for it was a common custom even amongst the richer merchants to make a profit by receiving guests. These letters of lodgings were distinguished from the innkeepers or hostelers by the name of herbergeors, or people who gave harbour to strangers, and in large towns they were submitted to municipal regulations. The great barons and knights were in the custom of taking up their lodgings with those herbergeors rather than going to the public hostel, and thus a sort of relationship was formed between particular nobles or kings and particular burghers, on the strength of which the latter adopted the arms of their habitual lodgers as their sign.”[164]

This, again, led to the custom of prefixing to inns the arms of men of note who had sojourned in the house, as may be seen in Machyn’s Diary:—“The xxv day of January [1560] toke ys gorney into Franse, inbassadur to the Frenche kyng, the yerle of Bedford and he had iij dozen of logyng skochyons,” (lodging escutcheons). Thus, on the road from London to Westchester the coats of arms of several of the lord-lieutenants of Ireland might formerly have been observed, either as signs to inns or else framed and hung in the best rooms. That this was a general custom with ambassadors appears from Sir Dudley Digge’s “Compleat Ambassador,” 1654; who, alluding in his preface to the reserve of English ambassadors, observes:—“We have hardly any notion of them but their arms, which are hung up in inns where they passed.” Montaigne also mentions this practice as usual in France:—“A Plombières il me commanda à la faveur de son hostesse, selon l’humeur de la nation, de laisser un escusson de ses armes en bois, qu’un peintre dudict lieu fist pour un escu; et le fist l’hostesse curieusement attacher à la muraille pas dehors.”[165]

But the feudal relations between the higher and lower classes contributed above all to the adoption of this description of signs. A vassal, for instance, would set up the arms or crest of his feudal lord; a retired soldier the arms of the knight under whose banneret he had gathered both glory and plunder; an old servant the badge he had worn when he stood at the trencher, or followed his master in the chase; and, doubtless, many publicans adopted for their sign the badge of the neighbouring wealthy noble, in order to court the custom of his household and servants.

Bagford, in his MS. notes about the art of printing,[166] has jotted down a list of signs originated from badges, which we will transcribe in all the unrestrained freedom of Bagford’s spelling, in which, as well as in bad writing, he surpassed all his contemporaries, (see note, p. 102:)—

“Then for ye original of signes used to be set over ye douers of tradesmen, as Inkepers, Taverns, etc., thay hauing been domestic saruants to some nobleman, thay leauing ther Masters saruis toke to themselves for ther signes ye crest, bag,[167] or ye arms of ther Ld., and thes was a destincsion or Mark of one Mannes house from anouther, and [not] only by printers but all outher trades: and these seruants of kinges, queenes, or noblemen, being ther domestick saruants, and wor ther Leuirs[168] and Bages, as may be sene these day ye maner of the Leuirs and Bagges by ye wattermen:—

The Antelop was ye bag of Kg. Henery ye 8, as wel as ye porculouses[169] and ye Rose and Crown.

Ancor, Gould, ye Ld. of Lincolne and ye Lord High Admirall.

Bull, Black, with gould hornes, ye House of Clarence.

Bull, Dun, ye Lord Nevill, Westmoreland, Burgayne, Latimer, and Southamton.

Bour: White, ye Lord Winsor; Blew with a Mullit, ye Earle of Oxford.

Bucket and Chane, ye Lord Wills.

Bare and Ragged Staffe, ye Earle of Lester.

Bare, Black, ye Earle of Warwicke.

Bare, White, ye Earle of Kent.

Bears Head Muscled, ye Lord Morley.

Roe Buck, ye Lord Montacute.

Bulls head erased: White, ye Ld. Wharton; Red, ye Lord Ogle.

Crescent or halfe Moune, ye Earle of Northumberland and ye Temporalati.

Condy, black, ye Ld. Bray.

Cat, ye Lord Euers; Cat of Mount and Leper,[170] Mar. of Worster and ye Ld. Buckhurst.

Crosses and Mitters, and Cross Keyes, Archbishop and Bishopes, Abbots.

Cardinales Capes or hat, you have not meney of them, the war set up by sume that had ben seruants to Tho. Wollsey.

Dragon: Black, Wilsher[171] and Clifford; Red, Cumberland; Greene, ye

[134]Earle of Pembrocke.

Eagle, ye Earle of Cambridge; Eagel and Childe, ye Earle of Derby; Black, ye Lord Norris.

Eagle, sprede, ye Emperour.

Elephant, Sr. Ffrances Knowles, (and Henery Wyke, a printer, liuing in Fletstrete, 1570, was saruant to Sr. Ffr. Knowles, gaue ye Elephant for his signe,) and likwise it was ye bag of ye Lord Beamont and ye Ld. Sandes.

Phenix, ye Lord Hertford, and ye sign that —— Mansell [set up,] Copper, etc.[172]

Ffox, Red, Gloster and ye Bishop of Winchester.

Ffalcolne, ye Marquess of Winchester; armed and collered, ye Ld. St. John and Ld. Zouch.

Gripes Ffoot, ye Ld. Stanley.

Gotte, ye Earle of Bedford.

Grayhond, ye Ld. Clenton, Druery, and ye Lord Rich.[173]

Griffen, ye Ld. Wintworth.

Harpe, for Irland.

Hedge-Hog, Sr. Henery Sidney; Will. Seeres was his printer.

Hind, Sr. Christopher Haton; Hen. Beneyman his printer.

Lock, ye House of Suffolcke. Such a sign without Temple Bar.

Lion, Bleu, Denmarke.

Lion, Red, Rampant, Scotland.

Lion, White, Pasant, ye Earl of March.

Lion, White, Rampant, Norfolk and all ye Hawardes.

Maiden Head, ye Duck of Buckingam.

Portcullis, ye Earle of Somerset, Wayles, and ye Lord of Worster.

The Pye, ye Ld. Reuiers.[174]

Pelican, ye Lord Cromwell.

Pecocke, ye Earle of Rutland.

Plum of Ffeathers, ye Earle of Lincolne; azure, ye Lord Sorope.

Rauen, White, ye Earle of Comberland.

Rauen, Blacke, ye King of Scots.

Swane, ye Ducke of Buckingham, Gloster, Hartford, Hunsdon, Stafford.

Sune, ye Spirituallaty, ye Lord Willoby and York.

Staffe: White Ragged, Warwick; Black, Kent.

Starre, ye Earle of Sussen and ye Lord Ffitzwalter.

Sarason Head, ye Ld. Audley and ye Ld. Cobham.

Talbot, ye Earl of Shrewsbury and ye Lord Mountagew.

Tiger’s Head, Sr. Ffrancis Walsingam.

Whete-sheafe, ye Earle of Exeter, ye Lord Burley, etc.

Ape, clogged, ye House of Suffolcke.

Butterflie, white, ye Lord Audle.

Camel, ye Earle of Worster.

Ye 3 fluer de luses, ye King of France.

Fooles Head, ye Earle of Bath.

[135]Grayhond, ye Ld. Clinton; white, ye fameley of ye Druries.

Grayhondes Head, ye Lord Rich.

Hart, White, Kg. Richard ye 2 and Sir Walter Rowley.[175]

Horse, White, ye Earle of Arondele.

Hornes, 2 of seluer,[176] ye Ld. Cheney.

Milsale or Windmil, ye Lord Willobe.

Rose in Ye Sunbeams, ye Ld. Wardon of ye 8 ports.

Spearhead, Pembroke.

Vnicorne, White, ye Ld. Windsor.”

The arms of the lord of the manor were often put up as a sign,—a custom that has continued to our day, particularly in villages, where the inn invariably displays the name or coat-armour of the ground-landlord, whose steward once or twice in the year meets at the house the tenantry with their rents and land dues. Should the estate pass into other hands, the inn will most probably change its sign for the arms of the new purchaser. The house, as it were, wears the livery of the master, although, so far as heralds’ visitations are concerned, this may be as unauthorised as many other advertisements of noble descent, or gentle extraction, in use amongst the wealthy and the proud.

In ancient times, as we have seen, the great landowners performed the duties of innkeepers, and their arms were hung or carved at the entrances to the castles, as indications to wayfarers who was the lord and master in those parts. The keep in those days was rarely without a stranger or two, either travelling mechanics or persons acquainted with mysteries,—as trades and professions were termed in those days,—or vagabond soldiers on the tramp for a new master to fight under. Greater people were admitted further in the castle, but the common sort fared with the servants. According to the good-nature of the all-powerful lord was the fare good or bad, plentiful or meagre. It was, however, generally the custom in those early times to be profuse in all matters of food-bounty. The house-steward made charges for any extras, and the comfort obtainable generally depended on the liberality or greediness of these personages. As population increased, travellers became too numerous for the accommodation provided. Stewards also became old, and detached premises were given or built for them to carry on the business away from the castle or great house. The arms of the landlord were of course put up outside the house, and on occasion of predatory excursions or family fights, when other nobles joined their troops with those of the landlord, the soldiers were usually quartered at the inn outside the castle. As in all cases of public resort, people soon began to have fancies, and this Red Lion and that Greyhound became famous through the country for the good entertainment to be had there. In this manner Red Lions and Greyhounds found their way on to the signboards of the inns within the walled cities. The men of the castle, too, used those houses bearing their master’s arms when they visited the town. It will be readily seen that the name of a favourite tavern would quickly suggest its adoption elsewhere, and in this way the heraldic emblem of a family might be carried where that family was neither known nor feared.

Latterly, however, as all traces of the origin and meaning of these “Arms” have died out, or become removed from the understanding of publicans and brewers, the uses to which the word has been applied are most absurd and ridiculous. Not only do we meet constantly with arms of families nobody ever heard of, nor cares to hear about, but all sorts of impossible “Arms” are invented, as Junction Arms, Griffin’s Arms, Chaffcutter’s Arms, Union Arms,[177] General’s Arms, Antigallican Arms, Farmers’ Arms, Drovers’ Arms, &c., (see Introduction.)

In tavern heraldry the Adam’s Arms ought certainly to have the precedence: the publicans generally represent these by a pewter pot and a couple of crossed tobacco pipes, differing in this from Sylvanus Morgan, a writer on heraldry, who says that Adam’s arms were “Paly Tranchy divided every way and tinctured of every colour,”[178] The shield was in the shape of a spade, which was used

“When Adam delved and Eve span,”

whilst from the spindle of our first mother the female lozenge-shaped shield is said to be derived.

One of the most popular heraldic signs is the Bear and Ragged Staff, the crest of the Warwick family:—

“War. Now, by my father’s badge, old Nevil’s crest,
The rampant bear chain’d to the ragged staff,
This day I’ll wear aloft my burgonet.”

Henry VI., Part II. a. v. s. 1.

Arthgal, the first Earl of Warwick, in the time of King Arthur, was called by the ancient British the Bear, for having strangled such an animal in his arms; and Morvidius, another ancestor of this house, slew a giant with a club made out of a young tree; hence the family bore the Bear and Ragged Staff.

“When Robert Dudley was governor in the Low Countries with the high title of his Excellencie, disusing his own coat of the Green Lion[179] with two tails, he signed all instruments with the crest of the Bear and Ragged Staff. He was then suspected by many of his jealous adversaries to hatch an ambitious design to make himself absolute commander (as the lion is king of beasts) over the Low Countries. Whereupon some—foes to his faction and friends to the Dutch freedom—wrote under his crest set up in public places:—

‘Ursa caret cauda, non queat esse leo.’
‘The Bear he never can prevail
To lion it for lack of tail.’

Which gave rise to a Warwickshire proverb, in use at this day,—The Bear wants a tail and cannot be a Lion.”[180]

The Bear and Ragged Staff is still the sign of an inn at Cumnor, to which an historic interest is attached owing to its connexion with the dark tragedy of poor Amy Robsart, who in this very house fell a victim to that stony-hearted adventurer, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. Sir Walter Scott has introduced the house in the first chapter of “Kenilworth.” The power the Warwick family once enjoyed gave this sign a popularity which has existed to the present day, though the race of old Nevil, and the kings he made and unmade, have each and all passed away. Its heraldic designation has been better preserved than is the case of some other signs; only in one instance, at Lower Bridge Street, Chester, it has been altered into the Bear and Billet. Sometimes the sign of the Bear and Ragged Staff, we may inform the reader, is jocularly spoken of as the Angel and Flute.

The Ragged Staff figures also in single blessedness. A carriers’ inn in West Smithfield possessed this sign in 1682.[181] In the wall of a house at the corner of Little St Andrew Street and West Street, St Giles, there is still a stone bas-relief sign of two ragged staves placed salterwise, with the initials S. F. G., and the date 1691. It was doubtless put there as a compliment to Robert Sydney, Earl of Leicester, who in the reign of Charles II. built Leicester House, which gave a name to Leicester Fields, now the site of Leicester Square. Stow mentions that the king-maker, Richard Warwick, came to town for the convention of 1458, accompanied by 600 men, all in red jackets, “embroidered with ragged staves before and behind.”

Equally well known with the last sign is that of the Eagle and Child, occasionally called the Bird and Bantling, to obtain the favourite alliteration. It represents the crest of the Stanley family, and the following legend is told to account for its origin:—In the reign of Edward III., Sir Thomas Latham, ancestor of the house of Stanley and Derby, had only one legitimate child, a daughter named Isabel, but at the same time he had an illegitimate son by a certain Mary Oscatell. This child he ordered to be laid at the foot of a tree on which an eagle had built its nest. Taking a walk with his lady over the estate, he contrived to bring her past this place, pretended to find the boy, took him home, and finally prevailed upon her to adopt him as their son. This boy was afterwards called Sir Oscatell Latham, and considered the heir to the estates. Compunction or other motive, however, made the old nobleman alter his mind and confess the fraud, and at his death the greater part of the fortune was left to his daughter, who afterwards married Sir John Stanley. At the adoption of the child, Sir Thomas had assumed for crest an eagle looking backwards; this, out of ill feeling towards Sir Oscatell, was afterwards altered into an eagle preying upon a child. How matters were afterwards arranged may be seen in “Memoirs containing a Genealogical and Historical Account of the House of Stanley,” p. 22. Manchester, 1767. Bishop Stanley made an historical poem upon the legend, which is not without parallel, and seems to be either a corruption of or suggested by the fable of Ganimede. Edward Stanley, in his “History of Birds,” (vol. i. p. 119,) cites several similar stories. But the Stanley family is not the only one that bears this crest. Randle Holme (b. iii. p. 403) gives the arms of the family of Culcheth of Culcheth as “an infant in swaddling-clothes proper, mantle gules, swaddle band or, with an eagle standing upon it, with its wings expanded sable in a field argent.” “The fause fable of the Lo. Latham” is also told at length, with slight variations from the usual story, in a MS. in the College of Arms;[182] in this version the foundling is made the son of an Irish king. The Eagle and Child occurs as the sign of a bookseller, Thomas Creede, in the old Exchange, as early as 1584. Taylor the water-poet also names some instances of the sign among inns and taverns, and particularly extols one at Manchester:—

“I lodged at the Eagle and the Child,
Whereas my hostesse (a good ancient woman)
Did entertain me with respect not common,
She caused my linnen, shirts, and bands be washt,
And on my way she caused me be refresht;
She gave me twelve silke points, she gave me baken,
Which by me much refused at last was taken.
In troath she proued a mother unto me,
For which I ever more will thankefull be.”[183]

Another crest of the Derby family also occurs as a sign—namely, the Eagle’s Foot, which was adopted in the sixteenth century by John Tysdall, a bookseller at the upper end of Lombard Street.

The frequency of eagles in heraldry made them very common on the signboard, although it is now impossible to say whose armorial bearings each particular eagle was intended to represent. The Spread Eagle occurs as the sign of one of the early printers and booksellers, Gualter Lynne, who, in the middle of the sixteenth century, had two shops with that sign,—one on Sommer’s Key, near Billingsgate, and another next St Paul’s Wharf. In 1659 there was a Black Spread Eagle at the west end of St Paul’s, which shop was also a bookseller’s, one Giles Calvert. As the signs in large towns and cities were generally not altered when the house changed hands, it is not improbable but that this may be the same Black Eagle mentioned by Stow in the following words:—

“During a great tempest at sea, in January 1506, Philip, King of Castille, and his queen, were weather-driven at Falmouth. The same tempest blew down the Eagle of brass off the spire of St Paul’s Church in London, and in the falling the same eagle broke and battered the Black Eagle that hung for a sign in St Paul’s Churchyard.”

Milton’s father, a scrivener by trade, lived in Bread Street, Cheapside, at the sign of the Spread Eagle, which was his own coat of arms, and in this house the great author of “Paradise Lost” was born, December 9, 1608. When the poet’s fame had gone forth, strangers used to come to see the house, until it was destroyed by the fire of 1666. Perhaps its memory is preserved in Black Spread Eagle Court, which is the name of a passage in that locality.

Another Spread Eagle was a noted “porter-house” in the Strand at the end of the last century:—

“And to some noted porter-house repair;
The several streets or one or more can claim,
Alike in goodness and alike in fame.
The Strand her Spreading Eagle justly boasts.
...... Facing that street where Venus holds her reign,
And Pleasure’s daughters drag a life of pain,[184]
There the Spread Eagle, with majestic grace,
Shows his broad wings and notifies the place.
...... There let me dine in plenty and in quiet.”[185]

The Grasshoppers on the London signboards were all descendants of Sir Thomas Gresham’s sign and crest, which is still commemorated by the weather-vane on the Royal Exchange, of which he was the first founder. The original sign appears to have been preserved up to a very recent date.

“The shop of the great Sir Thomas Gresham,” says Pennant, “stood in this [Lombard] street: it is now occupied by Messrs Martin, bankers, who are still in possession of the original sign of that illustrious person—the Grasshopper. Were it mine, that honourable memorial of so great a predecessor should certainly be placed in the most ostentatious situation I could find.”[186]

The ancients used the grasshopper as a fascinum, (fascination, enchantment;) for this purpose Pisistratus erected one as a καταχηνη before the Acropolis at Athens; hence grasshoppers, in all sorts of human occupations, were worn about the person to bring good luck. The grasshopper sign certainly seems to have been a lucky one. Charles Duncombe and Richard Kent, goldsmiths, lived at the Grasshopper in Lombard Street, (no doubt Gresham’s old house,) in 1677,[187] and throve so well under its fascinum that Duncombe gathered a fortune large enough to buy the Helmsley estate in Yorkshire from George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. The land is now occupied by the Earl of Feversham, (Duncombe’s descendant,) under the name of Duncombe Park.

It is impossible to determine whether the Maidenhead was set up as a compliment to the Duke of Buckingham, to Catherine Parr, or to the Mercers’ Company, for it is the crest of the three. But at all events the Mercers’ crest had the precedence as being the oldest. Amongst the badges of Henry VIII. it is sometimes seen issuing out of the Tudor Rose:—

“This combination,” Willement says, “does not appear to have been an entire new fancy, but to have been composed from the rose-badge of King Henry VIII., and from one previously used by this queen’s family. The house of Parr had before this time assumed as one of their devices a maiden’s head couped below the breast, vested in ermine and gold, the hair of the head and the temples encircled with a wreath of red and white roses; and this badge they had derived from the family of Ros of Kendal.”

It was a sign used by some of the early printers. On the last page of a little work entitled “Salus Corporis, Salus Animæ,” we find the following imprint:—

“Hos cme Richardus quos Fax impressit ad unguem calcographus
summa sedulitate libros.

Impressum est presens opusculum londiniis in divi pauli semiterio sub virginei capitis signo. Anno millesimo quin getesimo nono. Mensis vero Decembris die xii.”[188]

Thomas Petit, another early printer, also lived “at the sygne of the Maydenshead in Paulis Churchyard,” 1541. He was probably a successor of Richard Fax.

An amusing anecdote is told of old Hobson, the Londoner, with regard to this sign:—

“Maister Hobson having one of his Prentices new come out of his time, and being made a free man of London, desired to set up for himself; so, taking a house not far from St Laurence Lane, furnished it with store[142] of ware, and set up the signe of the Maydenhead; hard by was a very rich man of the same trade, had the same signe, and reported in every place where he came, that the young man had set up the same signe that he had onely to get away his customers, and daily vexed the young man therewithall, who, being grieved in his mind, made it known to Maister Hobson, his late Maister, who, comming to the rich man, said, ‘I marvell, sir,’ (quoth Maister Hobson,) ‘why you wrong my man so much as to say he seketh to get away your customers.’ ‘Marry, so he doth,’ (quoth the other,) ‘for he has set up a signe called the Maidenhead, and mine is.’ ‘That is not so,’ (replied Maister Hobson,) ‘for his is the widdoe’s head, and no maydenhead, therefore you do him great wrong.’ The rich man hereupon, seeing himself requited with mocks, rested satisfied, and never after that envied Maister Hobson’s man, but let him live quietly.”[189]

This sign occurs occasionally as the Maid’s Head, but since Queen Elizabeth’s reign it has doubtless frequently referred to the virgin queen.

The Cross Foxes—i.e., two foxes counter saliant—is a common sign in some parts of England. It is the sign of the principal inn at Oswestry in Shropshire, and of very many public-houses in North Wales, and has been adopted from the armorial bearings of Sir Watkin Williams Wynne, Bart., whose family hold extensive possessions in these parts. The late baronet, too, made himself very popular as a patron of agricultural improvements. Old Guillim, the heraldic writer’s remarks upon this coat of arms, which he says belongs to the Kadrod Hard family of Wales, are quaint:—

“These are somewhat unlike Samson’s foxes that were tied together by the tails, and yet these two agree in aliquo tertio: They came into the field like to enemies, but they meant nothing less than fight, and therefore they pass by each other, like two crafty lawyers, which come to the Bar as if they meant to fall out deadly about their clients’ cause; but when they have done, and their clients’ purses are well spunged, they are better friends than ever they were, and laugh at those geese that will not believe them to be foxes, till they (too late) find themselves foxbitten.”[190]

The Tiger’s Head was the sign of the house of Christopher and Robert Barker, Queen Elizabeth’s booksellers and printers, in Paternoster Row: it was borrowed from their crest; their shop exhibited the sign of the Grasshopper, in St Paul’s Churchyard. They came of an ancient family, being descended from Sir Christopher Barker, knight, king-at-arms, in the reign of Henry VIII. Barker is said to have printed the first series of English news-sheets, or, as we now call them, newspapers. The earliest of those which remain (copies are preserved among Dr Birch’s Historical Collections in the British Museum, No. 4106) relate to the descent of the Spanish Armada upon the English coasts; but as they are numbered 50, 51, and 54 in the corner of their upper margins, it has been not improbably concluded that a similar mode of publishing news had been resorted to considerably earlier than the date of that event, though, as far as we know, none of the papers have been preserved. The title is:—

“THE ENGLISH MERCURIE, published by authoritie, for the prevention of false reports;”

and the last number contains an account of the queen’s thanksgiving at St Paul’s for the victory she had gained over the enemies of England. It is probable that when the great alarm of the Armada had subsided, no more numbers were published. The colophon runs:—

“Imprinted by Christopher Barker, her highnesse’s printer, July 23, 1588.”

It must not however be concealed that doubt is entertained of the genuineness of these papers. Two of them are not of the time, but printed in modern type; and no originals are known: the third is in manuscript of the eighteenth century, altered and interpolated with changes in old language, such only as an author would make.

The punning device, or printer’s emblem, of Barker was a man barking a tree, representations of which may be seen on the titles and last leaves of many of the old folio and quarto Bibles and New Testaments issued from his press. His descendants continued booksellers to the royal family until January 12, 1645, when Robert Barker, the last of the family, died a prisoner for debt in the King’s Bench. His misfortunes were probably occasioned by the embarrassments of his royal master, who for three years had been at war with the Parliament and a majority of his subjects.

Various other booksellers sold their books under the sign of the Tiger’s Head in St Paul’s Churchyard: apparently they succeeded each other in the same house. Thus we find Toby Cook, 1579-1590; Felix Kingston, 1599; and Henry Seile, 1634.

At Nortwich and Altringham, Chester, there is a sign called the Bleeding Wolf, which has not been found anywhere else. Its origin is difficult to explain, and the only explanation that can be immediately offered for it is the crest of Hugh Lupus and Richard, first and second Earls of Chester, which was a wolf’s head erased; the neck of the animal being erased may, by primitive sign-painters, have been represented less conventionally than is done now, and probably exhibited some of the torn parts, whence the name of the Bleeding Wolf. As for the use of the term “wolf,” instead of “wolf’s head,” we have a parallel instance in one of the gates of Chester, which, from this crest, was called Wolfsgate instead of Wolfshead Gate. There is another equally puzzling sign, peculiar to this county and to Lancashire—namely, the Bear’s Paw. Of this sign, it must be confessed that no explanation can be offered; it certainly looks heraldic, and lions jambs erased are the crest of many families.

Easy enough to explain is the sign of Parta Tueri, (Cellarhead, Staffordshire,) which is the motto of the Lilford family: this is the only instance as yet met with of a family motto standing for a sign; though in Essex a public-house sign, representing a sort of Bacchic coat of arms, with the motto, In Vino Veritas, may be seen. The Oakley Arms, at Maidenhead, near Bray, deserves passing mention, on account of some amusing verses connected with the place. As it is frequently the custom with publicans to choose for their sign the name or picture of some real or imaginary hero connected with the locality in which their house stands, the following verses were written on the Oakley Arms, near Bray:—

“Friend Isaac, ’tis strange you that live so near Bray
Should not set up the sign of the Vicar.[191]
Though it may be an odd one, you cannot but say
It must needs be a sign of good liquor.”
Answer:
“Indeed, master Poet, your reason’s but poor,
For the Vicar would think it a sin
To stay, like a booby, and lounge at the door,—
’Twere a sign ’twas bad liquor within.”

The Wentworth Arms, Kirby Mallory, Leicestershire, may also be mentioned on account of its peculiar inscription, which has a strange moral air about it, as if a pious Boniface drew beer and uncorked wine, and wished to compromise matters on high moral grounds, and limit with puritanical rigidity the government regulation above his door, “to be Drunk on the Premises”:—

“May he who has little to spend, spend nothing in drink;
May he who has more than enough, keep it for better uses.
[145] May he who goes in to rest never remain to riot,
And he who fears God elsewhere never forget him here.”

Other heraldic animals, different from those just mentioned, belong to so many various families, that it is utterly impossible to say in honour of whom they were first set up: such, for instance, is the Griffin, the armorial bearing of the Spencers, and innumerable other houses. Besides being an heraldic emblem, the griffin was an animal in whose existence the early naturalists firmly believed. Its supposed eggs and claws were carefully preserved, and are frequently mentioned in ancient inventories and lists of curiosities. “They shewed me,” [in a church at Ratisbonne,] says Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, in one of her letters, “a prodigious claw, set in gold, which they called the claw of a griffin; and I could not forbear asking the reverend priest that shewed it, whether the griffin was a saint? The question almost put him beside his gravity, but he answered, ‘They only kept it as a curiosity.’” The supposed eggs (no doubt ostrich eggs) were frequently made into drinking cups. The Tradescants had one in their collection, kept in countenance by an egg of a dragon, two feathers of the tail of a phœnix, and the claw of a ruck, “a bird able to trusse an elephant.” Sir John Mandeville gives the natural history of the griffin, in his “Right Merveylous Travels,” chap. xxvi. From him we learn that the body of this dreadful beast was larger and stronger than “8 lions or 100 eagles,” so that he could with ease fly off to his nest with a great horse, or a couple of oxen yoked together, “for,” says he, “he has his talouns so large and so longe, and so gret upon his feet as thowghe thei weren hornes of grete oxen, or of bugles or of kijgn.”

In the original edition of the Spectator, No. xxxiii.,[192] the griffin is mentioned as the sign of a house in Sheer Lane, Temple Bar. The advertisement begins oddly enough:—“Lost, yesterday, by a Lady in a velvet furbelow scarf, a watch,” &c. The Golden Griffin was a famous tavern in Holborn, of which there are trades tokens extant of the seventeenth century. Tom Brown talks of a “fat squab porter at the Griffin Tavern, in Fulwood’s rents,” which is the same house, as appears from Strype:—“At the upper end of this court is a passage into the Castle Tavern, a house of considerable trade, as is the Golden Griffin Tavern, on the west side, which has a passage into Fulwood’s rents,” (Book iii., p. 253.)

The variously-coloured lions come under the same category of heraldic animals. Amongst them the Golden Lion stands foremost. A public-house with that sign in Fulham ought not to be passed unnoticed; it is one of the most ancient houses in the village, having been built in the reign of Henry VII. The interior is not much altered; the chimney-pieces are in their original state, and in good preservation. Formerly there were two staircases in the thick walls, but they are now blocked up. Tradition says that the house once belonged to Bishop Bonner, and that it has subterraneous passages communicating with the episcopal palace. When the old hostelry was pulled down in 1836, a tobacco-pipe of ancient and foreign fashion was found behind the wainscot. The stem was a crooked bamboo, and a brass ornament of an Elizabethan pattern formed the bowl of the pipe. This pipe Mr Crofton Croker[193] tries to identify as the property of Bishop Bonner, who, on the 15th June 1596, died suddenly at Fulham, “while sitting in his chair and smoking tobacco.” If Mr Croker be right, this inn should also have been honoured by the presence of Shakespeare, Fletcher, Henry Condell, (Shakespeare’s fellow actor,) John Norden, (author of A Description of Middlesex and Hertfordshire,) Florio, the translator of Montaigne, and divers other notabilities.

The Blue Lion is far from uncommon, and may possibly have been first put up at the marriage of James I. with Anne of Denmark. The Purple Lion occurs but once—namely, on a trades token of Southampton Buildings.

Signs borrowed from Corporation arms form the last subdivision of this chapter. Such, for instance, is the Three Compasses, a change in the arms of both the carpenters and masons. This sign is a particular favourite in London, where not less than twenty-one public-houses make a living under its shadow. Perhaps this is partly owing to the compasses being a masonic emblem, and a great many publicans “worthy brethren.” Frequently the sign of the compasses contains between the legs the following good advice:—

“Keep within compass,
And then you’ll be sure,
[147] To avoid many troubles
That others endure.”

Three Compasses were a frequent sign with the French, German, and Dutch printers of the sixteenth century. The Three Compasses, Grosvenor Row, Pimlico, a well-known starting point for the Pimlico omnibuses, was formerly called the Goat and Compasses, for which Mr P. Cunningham suggests the following origin:—

“At Cologne, in the church of S. Maria di Capitolio, is a flat stone on the floor, professing to be the ‘Grabstein der Bruder und Schwester eines Ehrbahren Wein und Fass Ampts, Anno 1693.’ That is, as I suppose, a vault belonging to the Wine Cooper’s Company. The arms exhibit a shield with a pair of compasses, an axe, and a dray or truck, with goats for supporters. In a country like England, dealing so much at one time in Rhenish wine, a more likely origin for such a sign could hardly be imagined.”

Others have considered the sign a corruption of a puritanical phrase, “God encompasseth us.” But why may not the Goat have been the original sign, to which mine host added his masonic emblem of the compasses, a practice yet of frequent occurrence.

The Globe and Compasses seems to have originated in the Joiners’ arms, which are a chevron between two pairs of compasses and a globe. It occurs, amongst other instances, as the sign of a bookseller, in the following quaint title:—

“Sin discovered to be worse than a Toad; sold by Robert Walton, at the Globe and Compasses, at the West end of Saint Paul’s Church.”

The Three Goatsheads, a public-house on the Wandsworth Road, Lambeth, was originally the Cordwainers’ (shoemakers) arms, which are azure, a chevron or, between three goats’ heads, erased argent. Gradually the heraldic attributes have fallen away, and the goats’ heads now alone remain. As there were rarely names under the London signs, the public unacquainted with heraldry gave a vernacular to the objects represented. Thus the Three Leopards’ Heads is given on a token as the name of a house in Bishopsgate; yet the token represents a chevron between three leopards’ heads, the arms of the Weavers’ Company. The sign of the Leopard’s Head was anciently called the Lubber’s Head. Thus in the second part of Henry IV., ii. 1, the hostess says that Falstaff “is indited to dinner at the Lubbar’s Head in Lumbert Street, to Master Smooth’s the silkman.” “Libbard,” vulgo “lubbar,” was good old English for “leopard.”

The Green Man and Still is a common sign. There is one in White Cross Street, representing a forester drinking what is there called “drops of life” out of a glass barrel. This is a liberty taken with the Distillers’ arms, which are a fess wavy in chief, the sun in splendour, in base a still; supporters two Indians, with bows and arrows. These Indians were transformed by the painters into wild men or green men, and the green men into foresters; and then it was said that the sign originated from the partiality of foresters for the produce of the still The “drops of life,” of course, are a translation of aqua vitæ.

The Three Tuns were derived from the Vintners, or the Brewers’ arms. On the 9th of May 1667, the Three Tuns in Seething Lane was the scene of a frightful tragedy:—

“In our street,” says Pepys, “at the Three Tuns Tavern, I find a great hubbub; and what was it but two brothers had fallen out, and one killed the other. And who should they be but the two Fieldings. One whereof, Bazill, was page to my Lady Sandwich, and he hath killed the other, himself being very drunk, and so is sent to Newgate.”[194]

There seems to have been a kind of fatality attached to this sign, for the London Gazette for September 15-18, 1679, relates a murder committed at the Three Tuns, in Chandos Street, and in this same house, Sally Pridden, alias Sally Salisbury, in a fit of jealousy stabbed the Honourable John Finch in 1723. Sally was one of the handsomest “social evils” of that day, and had been nicknamed Salisbury, on account of her likeness to the countess of that name. For her attempt on the life of Finch she was committed to Newgate, where she died the year after, “leaving behind her the character of the most notorious woman that ever infested the hundreds of old Drury.”[195] Her portrait has been painted by Sir Godfrey Kneller.

Sometimes the sign of the One Tun may also be seen. It occurs in the following newspaper item:—

“Last Thursday four highwaymen drinking at the One Tun Tavern near Hungerford Market in the Strand, and falling out about dividing their booty, the Drawer overheard them, sent for a constable, and secured them, and next day they were committed to Newgate.”—Weekly Journal, December 6, 1718.

That these fellows meant mischief is evident from a subsequent article. They had a complete arsenal about them, viz., two blunderbusses, one loaded with fifteen balls, the other with seven, and five pistols loaded with powder and shot.

The Golden Cup, from the form in which it was generally represented, seems to have been derived from the Goldsmiths’ arms, which are quarterly azure, two leopards’ heads or, (whence the mint mark,) and two golden cups covered between two buckles or. It was a sign much fancied by booksellers, as: Abel Jeff’s in the Old Bailey, 1564; Edward Allde, Without Cripplegate, from 1587 until 1600; and John Bartlet the Elder, in St Paul’s Churchyard; whilst the Three Cups was a famous carriers’ inn in Aldersgate in the seventeenth century.

The Ram and Teazel, Queenshead Street, Islington, is a part of the Clothworkers’ arms, which are sable, a chevron ermine between two habicks in chief arg., and a teasel in base or. The crest is a ram statant or on a mount vert.

The Hammer and Crown appears from a trades token to have been the sign of a shop in Gutter Lane, in the seventeenth century. It was a charge from the Blacksmiths’ arms: sable, a chevron between three hammers crowned or. The Lion in the Wood was a tavern of some note a hundred years ago in Salisbury Court, Fleet Street. It seems originally to have been the Woodmongers’ arms, whose crest is a lion issuing from a wood. At the present day it is the sign of a public-house in the same locality, namely, in Wilderness Lane, Dorset Street, Fleet Street.

To these Corporation arms we may add two belonging to companies. During the South Sea mania the South Sea Arms was a favourite sign; in 1718, the very year that Queen Anne had established the company and granted them arms, they appeared as the sign of a tavern near Austin Friars: they are a curious heraldic compound. “Azure, a globe representing the Straights of Magellan and Cape Horn, all proper. On a canton the arms of the United Kingdoms of Great Britain, and in sinister chief two herrings salterwise arg., crowned or.”

The Sol’s Arms, Sol’s Row, Hampstead Road, immortalised by Dickens in “Bleak House,” derives its name from the Sol’s Society, who were a kind of freemasons. They used to hold their meetings at the Queen of Bohemia’s Head, Drury Lane, but on the pulling down of that house the society was dissolved.

[121] History of Musick.

[122] Harl. MSS. 5910, vol. i. fol. 193. The reader will be amused with the spelling of this extract from the original manuscript, written when Addison was penning “Spectators,” and many classic English compositions were issuing from the press. Old Mr Bagford was a genuine antiquary, and despised new hats, new coats, and anything approaching the new style of spelling, with other changes then being introduced.

[123] Misson’s Memoirs and Observations in his Travels over England. London, 1719.

[124] England is the country, par excellence, for gigantic dinners, amongst which agricultural repasts stand foremost; even that nuptial dinner of Camacho, at which honest Sancho Panza did such execution, would scarcely rank as a lunch beside the Homeric dinners of our farmers. In our times we have seen Soyer roast a whole ox for the Agricultural Society at Exeter; the details of this culinary feat are somewhat interesting: it was called a “baron with saddle back of beef à la magna charta, weighing 535 lbs., the joints being the whole length of the ox, rumps, rounds, loins, ribs, and shoulders to the neck. It was roasted in the open air within a temporary enclosure of brick work, the monster joint steaming and frizzling away over 216 jets of gas from pipes of an inch diameter, the whole being covered in with sheet iron; when in 5 hours the beef was dressed for 5 shillings.”—Hints for the Table.

[125] Various examples of it occur in the Banks Bills.

[126] Original Weekly Journal, March 29 to April 3, 1718.

[127] Banks Bills.

[128] Historical and Topographical Account of the Parish of Fulham, 1813, p. 271.

[129] Boswell’s Johnson, vol. iv. p. 60.

[130] Hawkins’s Life of Dr Johnson, p. 433.

[131] This corncutter was probably the antique statue of the boy picking a thorn out of his foot, and was usual with pedicures. See under the sign “Old pick my toe.”

[132] Diary of the Rev. John Ward, M.A., 1648-1679. London, 1839.

[133] Diary of Rev. John Ward, M.A., 1648-1679, p. 122.

[134] Memoirs of Charles Macklin, Esq. By J. F. Kirkman. Vol. ii. p. 419.

[135] “A dragon in the manner of a banner, of a certain red silk embroidered with gold; its tongue like a flaming fire must always seem to be moving; its eyes must be made of sapphire, or of some other stone suitable for that purpose.”

[136] Peter Langtoffe’s Chronicle of Robert of Brunne, p. 217.

[137] “The king’s place was between the Dragon and the standard.”

[138] Caxton’s Chronicle at the end of Polychronicon, lib. ult. chap. vi.

[139] Hist., lib. ix. cap. vi.

[140] Nat. Hist., lib. viii. cap. ii.

[141] Chronicle of the Grey Fryars, Camden Society, p. 19.

[142] Grub Street Journal, Sept. 2, 1736.

[143] Badges of Cognizance of Richard, Duke of York, written on a blank leaf at the beginning of Digby MS. 82. Bodleian Library, Oxford. Archæologia xvii. 1814.

[144] The Cat, William Catesby; the Rat, Sir Richard Ratcliffe; Lovell our dog, Lord Lovel.

[145] Sir Roger Twisden’s Commonplace Books, 1653, as quoted in extenso in Notes and Queries, Aug. 8, 1857. Mr James Thompson, in his “History of Leicester,” informs us that one man was hanged and a woman burned for this crime, and not seven persons capitally executed, according to the popular tradition.

[146] Harl. MS. 5910; of this printer Bagford says: “I do not find he prented many books, or at lest few of them have come to my hand.”

[147] Reginald Scot, The Discovery of Witchcraft, b. xii. ch. xviii. p. 268, 1584.

[148] Archæologia. vol. xxix. 1840.

[149] Aubrey, iii. 438.

[150] Owen Glendower also bore a lion rampant sable, “the black lion of Powyss;” his arms were Paly of eight, arg. and gules, over all a lion sable. The black lion was the royal ensign of his father Madoc ap Meredith, last sovereign prince of Powyss; he died at Winchester in 1160. The black lion consequently might sometimes be set up by Welshmen.

[151] Daily Courant, January 1, 1711.

[152] “And observe that such a white feather was borne on his crest by Edward the eldest son of K. Edward; and this feather he conquered from the King of Bohemia whom he killed at Cressy in France, and so he assumed the feather, called the ostrich feather, which that most noble king had formerly worn on his crest.”—Sloane MSS. No. 56.

[153] Added to this were two vultures, sprinkled all over with finely-gilt linden leaves. Therefore I know this is King John of Bohemia.

[154] See the engraving in Pennant’s History of London, vol. i. p. 100.

[155] Lyson’s Berkshire, vol. i. p. 442.

[156] London Gazette, Sept. 18-21, 1682.

[157] London Gazette, March 12, 1672-3.

[158] Little London Directory for 1677, the oldest printed lists of bankers and merchants in London, reprinted, with historical introduction by John Camden Hotten, 1863.

[159] A very amusing French author of the time of Louis XIV., celebrated for his witty letters.

[160] “Let England amuse herself with idle fancies, and imagine that her kings are kings of France; but that there be Frenchmen who are ignorant enough, or bad subjects enough, to quarter the arms of France with those of England, that is a thing which such zealous subjects as M. d’Argenson, and the other police magistrates, ought by no means to permit.”

[161] Thos. Delaune’s Present State of London, 1681.

[162] These badges consisted of the master’s arms, crest, or device, either on a small silver shield or embroidered on a piece of cloth, and fastened on the left arm of servants. A ballad in the Roxburgh collection thus alludes to this custom:[163]—

“The nobles of our Land
were much delighted then,
To have at their command
a Crue of lustie Men,
Which by their Coats were knowne,
of Tawnie, Red, or Blue;
With crests on their sleeves showne
when this old cap was new.”

[163]

“Time’s alteration;
or,
The old man’s rehearsall what brave days he knew
A great while agone, when his old cap was new.”

Rox. Ball., i. fol. 407.

Stow gives us a good picture of a great nobleman’s retinue in the good old time, before the nobility took to hotel-keeping:—“The late Earl of Oxford, father to him that now liveth, has been noted within these forty years, to have ridden into this city and so to his house by London Stone, with eighty gentlemen, in a livery of Reading tawny, and chains of gold about their necks, before him, and one hundred tall yeomen in the like livery to follow him, without chains, but all having his cognisance of the blue boar embroidered on their left shoulder.” These badges fell into disuse in the reign of James I.

[164] Wright’s Domestic Manners and Sentiments in England during the Middle Ages, p. 333.

[165] “At Plombières he ordered me to leave with his hostess, according to the fashion of the country, an escutcheon of his arms in wood, which a painter of that town made for a crown and the hostess had it carefully hung upon the wall outside the house.”

[166] Harl. MSS., 5910, vol. ii. p. 167.

[167] Badge.

[168] Liveries.

[169] Portcullises.

[170] Leopard.

[171] Wiltshire.

[172] A transcript adds to these the names of Archbishop Parker and Jugge.

[173] This statement is modified lower down.

[174] Rivers.

[175] Raleigh.

[176] Silver.

[177] The Union Arms in Panton Street, Haymarket, was the public-house of Cribb, the pugilist champion, a fact commemorated by a poet of the prize ring, in all probability a better “fist” at smashing than at “wooing the Muses:”—

“The champion I see is again on the list,
His standard—the Union Arms.
His customers still he will serve with his fist,
But without creating alarms.
Instead of a floorer, he tips them a glass,
Divested of joking or fib;
Then, ‘lads of the fancy,’ don’t Tom’s house pass,
But take a hand at the game of Cribb.”

[178] Sylvanus Morgan’s Sphere of Gentry. London, 1661.

[179] There is a sign of the Green Lion in Short Street, Cambridge, the only one I have ever seen.

[180] Fuller, in voce Warwickshire.

[181] Delaune’s Present State of London, 1682.

[182] Printed in the Journal of Brit. Archæolog. Assoc., vol. vii. p. 71.

[183] Taylor’s Pennylesse Pilgrimage, 1630.

[184] Catherine Street, in the Strand, was a disreputable thoroughfare in the last century. Gay alludes to it in his “Trivia:”—

“Oh, may thy virtue guard thee through the roads
Of Drury’s mazy courts and dark abodes!
The harlots’ guileful path, who nightly stand
Where Catherine Street descends into the Strand.
With empty bandbox she delights to range,
And feigns a distant errand from the ‘Change.
Nay, she will oft the Quaker’s hood profane,
And trudge demure the rounds of Drury Lane.”

Tom Brown describes, con amore, the wickedness of that part of the town. Catherine Street at present is not quite so bad as formerly, but the hundred of Drury Lane cannot by any means be called the most virtuous part of London.

[185] Art of Living in London. Printed for William Griffin, at the Garrickshead, in Catherine Street, in the Strand, 1768.

[186] Pennant’s Account of London, 1813, p. 618.

[187] Little London Directory for 1677, the oldest list of London merchants.

[188] “Buy these books, which Richard Fax the printer has printed with the wedge, with the greatest care. This little book was printed at London, in St Paul’s Churchyard, at the Maidenhead, in the year 1509, on the 12th of December.” The printing with the wedge was the first attempt of the art, whence the books produced in this manner are sometimes called incunables.

[189] Pleasant Conceits of old Hobson the Londoner, 1607. Hobson’s answer proves the truth of Misson’s remark, that there were no inscriptions on the London signs to tell what they represented, otherwise the maid could not have been passed off as a widow.

[190] Guillim’s Display of Heraldry, folio, p. 197.

[191] The Vicar of Bray, the hero of Butler’s comic poem, appears to have been a certain Simon Aleyn, ob. 1583; he was by turns, and as the times suited, Roman Catholic and Protestant, in the times of Henry VIII., Edward VI., Queen Mary, and Queen Elizabeth.

[192] The original edition of the Spectator contained bona fide advertisements like any other newspaper.

[193] In 1847, Mr Crofton Croker read a paper at a meeting of the Brit. Arch. Assoc. at Warwick, “On the probability of the Golden Lion Inn at Fulham having been frequented by Shakespeare about the year 1595 and 1596,” in which the possible genealogy of this pipe is given.

[194] Pepys here makes a mistake, for he tells as afterwards, July 4, when he went to the Session House to hear the trial, that Basil was the murdered man.

[195] Caulfield’s Memoirs of Remarkable Persons. A curious epitaph upon her occurs in the Weekly Oracle, February 1, 1735; unfortunately it is too highly spiced to be introduced here.

CHAPTER IV.
SIGNS OF ANIMALS AND MONSTERS.

It is in many cases impossible to draw a line of demarcation between signs borrowed from the animal kingdom and those taken from heraldry: we cannot now determine, for instance, whether by the White Horse is meant simply an equus caballus, or the White Horse of the Saxons, and that of the House of Hanover; nor, whether the White Greyhound represented originally the supporter of the arms of Henry VII., or simply the greyhound that courses “poor puss” on our meadows in the hunting-season. For this reason this chapter has been placed as a sequel to the heraldic signs.

As a rule, fantastically coloured animals are unquestionably of heraldic origin: their number is limited to the Lion, the Boar, the Hart, the Dog, the Cat, the Bear, and in a few instances the Bull; all other animals were generally represented in what was meant for their natural colours. The heraldic lions have already been treated of in the last chapter; but sometimes we meet with the lion as a fera naturæ, recognisable by such names as the Brown Lion, the Yellow Lion, or simply the Lion. There is a public-house in Philadelphia with the sign of the Lion, having underneath the following lines:

“The lion roars, but do not fear,
Cakes and beer sold here.”

Which inscription is certainly as unnecessary as that over the nonformidable-looking lions under the celebrated fountain in the Spanish Alhambra, “O thou who beholdest these lions crouching, fear not, life is wanting to enable them to exhibit their fury.”

Lions occur in numerous combinations with other animals and objects, which in many cases seem simply the union of two signs, as the Lion and Dolphin, Market Place, Leicester; the Lion and Tun, at Congleton: the Lion and Swan in the same locality may owe its joint title to the name of the street in which the public-house is situated, viz., Swanbank. The combination of the Lion and Pheasant, Wylecop, Shrewsbury, seems rather mysterious, unless the Pheasant has been substituted for the Cock, just as in the Three Pheasants and Sceptre, they were substituted for the Three Pigeons and Sceptre. As for the Cock and Lion, a very common sign, their meeting, if we may believe ancient naturalists, is anything but agreeable to the lion.

“The lyon dreadeth the white cocke, because he breedeth a precious stone called allectricium, like to the stone that hight Calcedonius. And for that the Cocke beareth such a stone, the Lyon specially abhorreth him.”[196]

Some more information about this stone may be gathered from a mediæval treatise on natural history:

“Allectorius est lapis obscuro cristallo sĩlis e vẽtriculo galli castrati trahitur post quartũ añũ. Ultima eius quãtitas ẽ ad magnitudinẽ fabe—quẽ gladiator. hñs in ore penanct̃. ĩvictus ac sine siti.”[197]

The Lion and Ball owes its origin to another mediæval notion:

“Some report that those who rob the tiger of her young use a policy to detaine their damme from following them, by casting sundry looking-glasses in the way, whereat she useth to long to gaze, whether it be to beholde her owne beauty or because when she seeth her shape in the glasse she thinketh she seeth one of her young ones, and so they escape the swiftness of her pursuit.”[198]

The looking-glass thrown to the tiger was spherical, so that she could see her own image reduced as it rolled under her paw, and would therefore be more likely to mistake it for her cub. Lions and tigers being almost synonymous in mediæval zoology, the spherical glass was generally represented with both. In sculpture it could only be represented by a ball, which afterwards became a terrestrial globe, and the lion resting his paw upon it, passed into an emblem of royalty.

In the last century an innkeeper at Goodwood put up as his sign the Centurion’s Lion, the figure-head of the frigate Centurion, in which Admiral Anson made a voyage round the world. Under it was the following inscription:—

“Stay, Traveller, a while and view
One that has travelled more than you,
Quite round the Globe in each Degree,
Anson and I have plow’d the Sea;
Torrid and Frigid Zones have pass’d,
And safe ashore arriv’d at last.
In Ease and Dignity appear
He—in the House of Lords, I—here.”

When Anson was in general disfavour about the Minorca affair, the following biting reply to this inscription went the round of the newspapers:—

“The Traveller’s reply to the Centurion’s Lion.
“O King of Beasts, what pity ’twas to sever
A pair whose Union had been just for ever!
So diff’rently advanced! ’twas surely wrong,
When you’d been fellow-travellers so long.
Had you continued with him, had he born
To see the English Lion dragg’d and torn?
Brittannia made at every vein to bleed,
A ravenous Crew of worthless Men to feed?
No; Anson once had sought the Land’s Relief;
Now—Ease and Dignity have banish’d Grief.
Go, rouse him then, to save a sinking nation,
Or call him up, the partner of your station.
We often see two Monsters for a sign,
Inviting to good Brandy, Ale, or Wine.”

The Tiger is of rare occurrence on signboards; there is a Golden Tiger in Pilgrim Street, Newcastle, and a bird-fancier on Tower Dock, not far from the then famous menagerie which attracted crowds to the Tower, chose the Leopard and Tiger for his sign. In 1665 there was a Leopard Tavern in Chancery Lane; the same animal is still occasionally seen on public-house signs. Generally speaking, the carnivorous animals are not great favourites, and those named above are almost the only examples that occur. As for the popularity of the Bear, it is entirely to be attributed to the old vulgar pleasure of seeing him ill-treated, a relic of the once common amusements of bear-baiting and whipping. The colours in which he is represented are the Black Bear, the Brown Bear, the White Bear, and in a very few instances (as at Leeds) the Red Bear.

Besides bear-whipping and bear-baiting, another barbarous fancy led sometimes to the choice of this animal for a sign,—viz., the lamentable pun which the publican made upon the article he sold, and the name of the animal. Will. Rose of Coleraine, in Ireland, for instance, issued trades tokens with a bear passant, on the reverse Exchange.for.a.can (i.e., of Bear!), and as if the pun was not ridiculous enough, there was a rose as a rebus for his name. Thomas Dawson of Leeds perpetrated a similar pun on his token, dated 1670; it says,—Beware.of.ye.Beare, evidently alluding to the strength of his beer.[199]

Bears used often to be represented with chains round their neck, (as on the stone sign in Addle Street, with the date 1610.) This led to the following amusing rejoinder:—It happened that a pedestrian artist had run up a bill at a road-side inn which he was unable to pay, whereupon the landlord, in order to settle the account, commissioned him to paint a bear for his sign. The painter, wanting to make a little besides, suggested that, if the bear was painted with a chain round his neck, which he strongly advised him to have, it would cost him half-a-guinea more, on account of the gold, &c. But the host was not agreeable to this extra expense; accordingly, the sign was painted, (but in distemper,) and the painter went his way. Not many days after it began to rain, and the bear was completely washed from the board. The first time the landlord met the painter, he accused him in great dudgeon of having imposed upon him, for that, in less than a month, the bear had gone from his signboard. “Now, look here,” replied the painter; “did not I advise you to have a chain put about the bear’s neck? but you would not hear of it; had that been done he could not have run away, and would still be at your door.”

Among the most famous Bear inns and taverns were,—the Bear “at Bridgefoot,” i.e., at the foot of London Bridge, on the Southwark side, for many centuries one of the most popular London taverns; as early as the reign of Richard III. we find it the resort of the aristocratic pleasure-seeker. Thus, in March 146

3

4

, it was repeatedly visited by Jocky of Norfolk, the then Sir John Howard, who went there to drink wine and shoot at the target, at which he lost 20 pence.[200] It is also frequently named by the writers of the seventeenth century.[201] Pepys mentions it April 3, 1667. “I hear how the king is not so well pleased of this marriage between the Duke of Richmond and Mrs Stuart, as is talked; and that he by a wile did fetch her to the Bear at the Bridgefoot, where a coach was ready, and they are stole away into Kent without the king’s leave.” The wine of this establishment did not meet with the approbation of the fastidious searchers after claret in 1691.

“Through stinks of all sorts, both the simple and compound,
Which through narrow alleys, our senses do confound,
We came to the Bear, which we now understood
Was the first house in Southwark built after the flood;
[154] And has such a succession of vintners known,
Not more names were e’er in Welsh pedigrees shown;
But claret with them was so much out of fashion,
That it has not been known there a whole generation.”

Last Search after Claret in Southwark, 1691.

This old tavern was pulled down in 1761, at the removal of the houses from London Bridge. “Thursday last the workmen employed in pulling down the Bear Tavern, at the foot of London Bridge, found several pieces of gold and silver coin of Queen Elizabeth, and other money, to a considerable value.”—Public Advertiser, Dec. 26, 1761. Coins, no doubt, dropped between the boards by the revellers of bygone generations.

There was another famous Bear Tavern at the foot of Strandbridge; the vicinity of the “Bear” and “Paris Gardens” had evidently suggested the choice of those signs. At the Bear Tavern in the Strand, the earliest meetings of the Society of Antiquaries took place, when there were as yet only three members, Mr Talman, Mr Bagford, and Mr Wanley. Their first meeting was on Friday, Nov. 5, 1707; subsequently they met at the Young Devil Tavern in Fleet Street, and then at the Fountain, opposite Chancery Lane. Mr Talman was the first president; Mr Wanley was a savant of considerable acquirements. It was he who purchased Bagford’s MS. collection for the Harleian Library.

The White Bear at Soper’s Lane End, (now Queen Street,) Cheapside, was the shop in which Baptist Hicks, as a silk mercer, by selling silks, velvets, lace, and plumes to the courtiers of James I., amassed that fortune which led to the Peerage, and the title of Viscount Campden. There was another White Bear Tavern in Thames Street, of which the sign is still extant, a stone bas-relief with the date 1670, and the initials M. E. In 1252, Henry III. received a white bear as a present from the king of Norway; and in King Edward VI.’s time, May 29, 1549, the French ambassadors, after they had supped with the Duke of Somerset, went to the Thames and saw the bear hunted in the river.[202] Such an occurrence might easily lead to the adoption of this animal as a sign in that locality. The following little fact connected with another White Bear Inn forcibly calls up the dark ages before gas was invented. In 1656, John Wardall gave by will to the Grocers’ Company a tenement called “The White Bear in Walbrook,” upon condition that they should yearly pay to the church-wardens of St Botolph’s, Billingsgate, £4 to provide a lanthorn with a candle, so that passengers might go with more security to and from the waterside during the night. This lamp was to be fixed at the north-east corner of the parish church of St Botolph, from St Bartholomew’s-day to Lady-day; out of this sum £1 was to be paid to the sexton for taking care of the lanthorn. The annuity is now applied to a lamp lighted with gas in the place prescribed by the will.[203]

The White Bear Inn, at the east end of Piccadilly, was for more than a century one of the busiest coaching houses. In this house died Luke Sullivan, engraver of some of Hogarth’s works; also Chatelain, another engraver, the last in such penurious circumstances, that he was buried at the expense of some friends in the poor ground of St James’s workhouse. It was in this inn that West passed the first night in London on his arrival from America. The sign of the White Bear is still common; at Springbank, Hull, there is one called, with zoological precision, the Polar Bear. This may, however, refer to the constellation.

The Bear’s Head occurs in Congleton, Cheshire; probably it is a family crest, the same as the Bear’s Paw,—both of which, it is believed, occur only in that county and in Lancashire. The Bear is also met in frequent combinations; one of the most common is the Bear and Bacchus, which looks like a hieroglyphic rendering of the words Beer and Wine, having the additional attraction of alliteration. Since mythology does not mention a Beer-God, the animal was probably chosen as a rebus for the drink. In the Bear and Rummer, Mortimer Street, the rummer implies the sale of liquors, in the same manner as the Punchbowl is often used. The Bear and Harrow seems to be a union of two signs. In the seventeenth century it formed the house-decoration of an ordinary at the entrance of Butcher Row, (now Picket Street, Strand.) One night in 1692, Nat Lee, the mad poet, in going home drunk from this house, fell down in the snow and was stifled.

The Elephant, in the middle ages, was nearly always represented with the castle on his back. For instance, in the Latin MS., Bestiarium Harl., 4751, a tower is strapped to him, in which are seen five knights in chain-armour, with swords, battle-axes, and cross-bows, their emblazoned shields hanging round the battlements; and, in the description of the animal, it is said, “In eorum dorsis, P[er] si et Indi ligneis turribus collocati tamquam de muro jaculis dimicant.” The rook, in Chinese chess-boards, still represents an elephant thus armed.

Cutlers in the last century frequently used the Elephant and Castle as their sign, on account of it being the crest of the Cutlers’ Company, who had adopted it in reference to the ivory used in the trade. Hence the stone bas-relief in Belle Sauvage Yard, which was the sign of some now forgotten shopkeeper, who had chosen it out of regard to his landlords. The houses in the yard are the property of the Cutlers’ Company. The Elephant and Castle public-house, Newington Butts, was formerly a famous coaching inn, but, by the introduction of railways, it has dwindled down to a starting-point for omnibuses. The occasion of this sign being put up was the following:—Some time about 1714, a Mr Conyers, an apothecary in Fleet Street, and a great collector of antiquities, was digging in a gravel-pit in a field near the Fleet, not far from Battle Bridge, when he discovered the skeleton of an elephant. A spear with a flint head, fixed to a shaft of goodly length, was found near it, whence it was conjectured to have been killed by the British in a fight with the Romans,[204] though now, since the late discoveries concerning the flint implements, very different conclusions would be drawn from this fact. But be this as it may, that elephant, whether post-tertiary or Roman, gave its name to the public-house soon after erected in that locality; and, regardless of the venerable antiquity of this origin, it is often now-a-days jocularly degraded into the Pig and Tinder-box.

What is meant by the whimsical combination of the Elephant and Fish, at Sandhill, Newcastle, is hard to say, unless we assume the fish originally to have been a dragon. Between elephants and dragons there was supposed to be a deadly strife, and their battles are recorded by Strabo, Pliny, Ælianus, and their mediæval followers. The fight always ended in the death of both, the dragon strangling the elephant in the windings of his tail, when the elephant, falling down dead, crushed the dragon by his weight.

The Elephant and Friar, in Bristol, may possibly have originated from the representation of an elephant accompanied by a man in Eastern costume, whose flowing garment might be mistaken for the gown of a friar. That sign would have admirably suited the fancy of the landlord of the Elephant and Castle, formerly in Leeds; his name happening to be Priest, he had the following inscription above his door:

“He is a priest who lives within,
Gives advice gratis, and administers gin.”

In the seventeenth century, the Reindeer began to make its appearance on the signboard, where it has kept its place to the present day. At first it was called Rained Deer, as we see from the newspapers of that period:—“Mr John Chapman, York carrier in Hull, at the sign of the Rained Deer.” This led to the answer of a sailor who had made a voyage to Lapland, and on his return, being asked if he had seen any rained deer? “No,” answered Jack, “I have seen it rain cats, dogs, and pitchforks, but I never saw it rain deer.” The first instance we find of this animal on the signboards of London, is in 1682, when there was

“Right Irish Usquebaugh to be sold at the Reindeer in Tuttle Street, Westminster, in greater or smaller quantities, by one from Ireland.”—London Gazette, Nov. 23-27, 1682.

Pepys mentions it as early as October 7, 1667, at Bishop Stortford, as the sign of a tavern kept by a Mrs Elizabeth Aynsworth. Of this woman a good story is told:—Mrs A. had been a noted procuress at Cambridge, for which reason she was expelled the town by the University authorities. Subsequently keeping the Reindeer at Bishop Stortford, the Vice-chancellor and some of the heads of colleges, on their way to London, had occasion to sleep at her house, little thinking under whose roof they were. She received them nobly, served the supper up in plate, and brought forth the best wine; but, when the hour of reckoning came, would receive no money, “for,” said she, “I am too much indebted to the Vice-chancellor for expelling me from Cambridge, which has been the means of making my fortune.” For all this, however, she does not seem to have mended her evil courses, for, shortly after, she was implicated in the murder of a Captain Wood in Essex, for which one man was executed, whilst Mrs Aynsworth was only acquitted by some flaw in the evidence.

Dragons, when apothecaries’ signs, were not derived from heraldry, but were used to typify certain chemical actions. In an old German work on Alchemy,[205] one of the plates represents a dragon eating his own tail; underneath are the words,—

“Das ist gros Wunder und seltsam List,
Die höchst Artzney im Drachen ist.”[206]

In mediæval alchemy, the dragon seems to have been the emblem of Mercury, which appears from these words on the same print: “Mercurius recte et chymice præcipitatus vel sublimatus in sua propria aqua resolutus et rursum coagulatus.”[207] To which are added the following rhymes:—

“Ein Drach im Walde wohnend ist,
An Gifft demselben nichts gebrisst;
Wenn er die Sonne sieht und das Fewr
So speusst er Gifft fleugt ungehewr,
Kein Lebend Thier für ihm mag gnesn
Der Basilisc mag ihm nit gleich wesn.
Wer diesen Wurmb wol weiss zu tödtn
Der kömpt auss allen seinen Nöthen.
Sein Farber in seinem Todt sich vermehrn;
Auss seiner Gifft Artzney thut werden.
Sein Gifft verzehrt er gar und gans
Und frisst sein eign vergiften Schwantz.
Da mus er in sich selbst volbringen
Der edelst Balsam auss ihm thut tringen,
Solch grosse Tugend wird man schawen
Welches alle Weysn sich hoch erfrawen.”[208]

Hence the dragon became one of the “properties” of the chemist and apothecary, was painted on his drug-pots, hung up as his sign, and some dusty, stuffed crocodile hanging from the ceiling in the laboratory had to do service for the monster, and inspire the vulgar with a profound awe for the mighty man who had conquered the vicious reptile.

The Salamander was another animal of the same class, and also represented certain chemical actions, owing to its fabled powers of resisting the fire. The notions of early naturalists concerning this creature were very extraordinary. A Bestiarium in the Royal Library of Brussels, No. 10074, says that it lives on pure fire, and produces a substance which is neither silk nor linen, nor yet wool, of which garments are made that can only be cleaned by fire; and that if the animal itself falls into a burning fire, it would at once extinguish the flames. Bossewell, besides incombustibility, attributes to the salamander some other qualities fully as extravagant.

“Among all venomenous beastes he is the mightiest of poyson and venyme. For if he creepe upon a tree, he infecteth all the apples or other fruit that groweth thereon with his poyson, and killeth them which eate thereof. Which apples, also, if they happen to falle into any pitte of water, the strength of the poyson killeth them that drinke thereof.”[209]

This incombustibility made it a very proper sign for alchemists and apothecaries, and with the last it still continues as such, at least on the Continent. Why the early Venetian printers adopted it as a sign is less evident. In France it was certainly a favourite sign with this class of workmen; but this was from the fact of its having been the badge of Francis I., a liberal patron of the arts and sciences.

The qualities attributed to the Unicorn caused this animal to be used as a sign both by chemists and goldsmiths. It was believed that the only way to capture it was to leave a handsome young virgin in one of the places where it resorted. As soon as the animal had perceived her, he would come and lie quietly down beside her, resting his head in her lap, and fall asleep, in which state he might be surprised by the hunters who watched for him. This laying his head in the lap of a virgin made the first Christians choose the unicorn as the type of Christ born from the Virgin Mary.[210] The horn, as an antidote to all poison, was also believed to be emblematic of the conquering or destruction of sin by the Messiah. Religious emblems being in great favour with the early printers, some of them for this reason adopted the unicorn as their sign; thus John Harrison lived at the Unicorn and Bible in Paternoster Row 1603. Again, the reputed power of the horn caused the animal to be taken as a supporter for the apothecaries’ arms, and as a constant signboard by chemists. Albertus Magnus says:—“Cornu cerastis sunt qui dicunt præsenti veneno sudare et ideo ferri ad mensas nobilium, et fieri inde manubria cultellorum quæ infixa mensis prodant presens venenum. Sed hoc non satis probatum est.”[211] Whatever it was that passed for unicorn’s horn, (probably the horn of the narwal,) it was sold at an immense price. “The unicorn whose horn is worth a city,” says Decker in his Gull’s Hornbook; and Andrea Racci, a Florentine physician, relates that it had been sold by the apothecaries at £24 per ounce, when the current value of the same quantity of gold was only £2, 3s. 6d. In a MS. table of customs entitled, “The Book of Rates in ye first yeare of Queen Mary 1531,”[212] we find the duty paid upon “cornu unicorn ye ounce 20s.” An Italian author who visited England in the reign of Henry VII.,[213] speaking of the immense wealth of the religious houses in this country says:—“And I have been informed that, amongst other things, many of these monasteries possess unicorns’ horns of an extraordinary size.” Hence such a horn was fit to be placed among the royal jewels, and there it appears at the head of an inventory taken in the first year of Queen Elizabeth, and preserved in Pepys’s library.[214] “Imprimis, a piece of unicorn’s horn,” which, as the most valuable object, is named first.

This was no doubt the piece seen by the German traveller Hentzner, at Windsor: “We were shown here, among other things, the horn of a unicorn of above eight spans and a half in length, valued at above £10,000.”[215] Peacham places “that horne of Windsor (of an unicorne very likely)”[216] amongst the sights worth seeing. Fuller also speaks of a unicorn’s horn—“in my memory shewn to people in the Tower”[217]—and enters on a long dissertation about its virtues; but it seems to have been lost, or at least, no longer exhibited in his time.

The belief in the efficacy and value of this horn continued to the close of the seventeenth century; for the Rev. John Ward in his diary, p. 172, says:—

“Mr Hartman had a piece of unicorn’s horn, which one Mr Godeski gave him; hee had itt att some foraine prince’s court. I had the piece in my hand. Hee desired Dr Willis to make use of itt in curing his ague; but the Dr refusd because hee had never seen itt used. Mr Hartman told me the forementioned gentleman has as much of itt as would make a cup, and he intended to make one of itt. It approved ittself as a true one, as he said by this: if one drew a circle with itt about a spider, she would not move out off itt.”[218]

PLATE VIII.

TWO SPIES. (Banks’s Collection, 1730.) | THREE NEATS’ TONGUES. (Harleian Collection, 1708.)

MAN IN THE MOON.
(Banks’s Collection, 1760.)

BULL AND MOUTH. (St Martin’s-le-Grand, 1835.) | BULL AND MOUTH. (Angel St., St Martin’s-le-Grand, circa 1800.)

The great value set upon unicorns’ horn caused the goldsmiths to adopt this animal as their sign. There is one recorded in Machyn’s Diary: the first of May 1561, “at afternone dyd Mastyr Godderyke’s sune the goldsmyth go hup into hys father’s gyldyng house, toke a bowe-strynge, and hanged ymseylff at the syne of the Unycorne in Chepesyd.” In 1711 the Unicorn and Dial was the sign of a watchmaker near the Strand Bridge.[219]

Another fabulous animal that formerly (though rarely) occurred on signboards was the Cockatrice, which was the sign of a place of amusement in Highbury circa 1611. The “Bestiaria,” or ancient natural histories, give most extraordinary particulars about the birth of this creature:—

“When the cock is past seven years old an egg grows in his belly, and when he feels this egg, he wonders very much, and sustains the greatest anxiety any animal can suffer. He seeks, privately, a warm place on a dunghill or in a stable, and scratches with his feet, until he has formed a hole to lay his egg in. And when the cock has dug his hole he goes ten times a day to it, for all day he thinks that he is going to be delivered. And the nature of the toad is such that it smells the venom which the cock carries in his belly, consequently it watches him, so that the cock cannot go to the hole without being seen by it. And as soon as the cock leaves the place where he has to lay his egg, the toad is immediately there to see if the egg has been laid; for his nature is such, that he hatches the egg if he can obtain it. And when he has hatched it, until it is time to open, it produces an animal that has the head, and neck, and breast of a cock, and from thence downwards, the body of a serpent.”—Translation from the MS. Bestiarium, Bib. Roy. Brussels, No. 10074.

That cocks, sometimes in the middle ages, forgot themselves so far as to lay eggs, appears from a lawsuit which poor chanticleer had at Basle in 1474, when he was convicted, condemned, and, with his egg, burned at the stake for a sorcerer, with as much pomp and ceremony as if he had been a Protestant or other heretic.

The Ape was, in bygone times, the sign of an inn in Philip Lane, near London wall; all that now remains of this ancient hostelry is a stone carving of a monkey squatted on its haunches, and eating an apple; under it the date 1670, and the initial B. The courtyard, where the lumbering coaches used to arrive and depart, is now an open space, round which houses are built. The Racoon is a painted sign at Dalston, but a hyæna seems to have sat for the portrait; the Hippopotamus occurs in New-England Street, Brighton; the Ibex at Chadelworth, Wantage; the Crocodile in Higham Street, Norwich; the Camel may be met with in a few instances, and at Weston Peverell, Plymouth, there is the sign of the Camel’s Head. Finally, there is the Kangaroo, of which, occasionally, an example may be seen, set up probably by some landlord who had tried his luck in Australia. The Civet is common all over Europe as a perfumer’s sign, as it was said to produce musk. A Dutch perfumer in the seventeenth century wrote under his sign:—

“Dit ’s in de Civet kat, gelyk gy kunt aanschouwen,
Maar komt hier binnen, hier zyn parfuimen voor mannen en vrouwen.”[220]

The Hedgehog was never very common. In the reign of Queen Elizabeth it was the sign of William Seeres, bookseller, in St Paul’s Churchyard, who put it up, according to Bagford, on account of its being the badge of his former master Sir Henry Sydney.[221] Apparently this same house was concerned in the following strange affair:—

“By a lettere dated London, 11 May 1555, it appears that in Powles Churchyearde at the sign of the Hedgehog, the goodwife of the house was brought to bed of a manchild, being of the age of 6 dayes and dienge the 7th daye followinge; and half an hour before it departed spake these words followinge: (rise and pray) and so continued half an houre in thes words and then cryinge departed the worlde. Hereupon the Bishope of London examined the goodman of the house and other credible persones who affirmed it to be true and will dye uppon the same.”[222]

The Hedgehog is now very scarce on signboards; at Dadlington, near Market Bosworth, there is a Dog and Hedgehog, doubtless borrowed from the well-known engraving of “A Rough Customer.”

Signs relating to sport or the chase are comparatively common; thus we have the Rat and Ferret at Wilson, near Ashby de la Zouch; the Three Conies, or rabbits, figure on an old trades token of Blackman Street; the Hare, on the token of John Perris in the Strand, 1666; and Nicholas Warren, in Aldersgate.[223] Warren evidently made a cockney mistake, thinking that hares, instead of rabbits, lived in warrens. Another Hare was the sign of Philip Hause in Walbrook in 1682.[224] The Hare and Squirrel occur together on a sign at Nuneaton; what the combination means it is difficult to surmise.

“Cages with climbing Squirrels and bells to them were formerly the indispensable appendages of the outside of a Tinman’s shop, and were, in fact, the only live sign. One, we believe, still (1826) hangs out on Holborn; but they are fast vanishing with the good old modes of our ancestors.”[225]

The Three Squirrels was the sign of an inn at Lambeth, mentioned by Taylor the Water poet in 1636; and from a trades token it appears that in the seventeenth century there was a similar sign in Fleet Street. Probably it was the same house which, in 167

3

4

, was occupied by Gosling the banker, “over against St Dunstan’s Church,” where the triad of squirrels may still be seen in the iron-work of the windows. Gosling’s was one of the leading banking establishments in the reign of Charles II. Among the curiosities of this old firm is a bill for £640, 8s., paid out of the secret service money for gold lace and silver lace, bought by the Duchess of Cleveland for the wedding clothes of the Lady Sussex and Litchfield.

The Hare and Hounds are very common; some fifty years ago it was the sign of a notorious establishment in St Giles’s, one of those places associated with “the good old customs of our ancestors.” As the few houses of this character that remain are difficult of access, a description of this place may not be uninteresting.

“The Hare and Hounds was to be reached by those going from the west end towards the city, by going up a turning on the left hand, nearly opposite St Giles’s churchyard. The entrance to this turning or lane was obstructed or defended by posts with cross bars, which being passed, the lane itself was entered. It extended some twenty or thirty yards towards the north, through two rows of the most filthy, dilapidated, and execrable buildings that could be imagined; and at the top or end of it stood the citadel, of which ’Stunning Joe’ was the corpulent castellan;—I need not say that it required some determination and some address to gain this strange place of rendezvous. Those who had the honour of an introduction to the great man were considered safe, wherever his authority extended, and in[164] this locality it was certainly very extensive. He occasionally condescended to act as a pilot through the navigation of the alley to persons of aristocratic or wealthy pretensions, whom curiosity, or some other motive best known to themselves, led to his abode. Those who were not under his safe conduct frequently found it very unsafe to wander in the intricacies of this region. In the salon of this temple of low debauchery were assembled groups of all ‘unutterable things,’ all that class distinguished in those days, and, I believe, in these, by the generic term ‘cadgers.’

Hail cadgers, who in rags array’d,
Disport and play fantastic pranks;
Each Wednesday night in full parade,
Within the domicile of Bank’s.

A ‘lady’ presided over the revels, collected largess in a platter, and, at intervals, amused the company with specimens of her vocal talent. Dancing was ‘kept up till a late hour,’ with more vigour than elegance, and many terpsichorean passages, which partook rather of the animation of the ‘Nautch’ than the dignity of the minuet, increased the interest of the performance. It may be supposed that those who assembled were not the sort of people who would have patronised Father Matthew had he visited St Giles’s in those times. There was indeed an almost incessant complaint of drought, which seemed to be increased by the very remedies applied for its cure; and had it not been for the despotic authority with which the dispenser of the good things of the establishment exercised his rule, his liberality in the dispensation would certainly have led to very vigorous developments of the reprobation of man and of woman also. In the lower tier, or cellars, or crypt of the edifice, beds or berths were provided for the company, who, packed in bins after the ‘fitful fever’ of the evening, slept well.”[226]

In 1750 there was a sign of the Hare and Cats at Norwich,[227] which was clearly a travesty of the Hare and Hounds.

The Stag may in early times have been put up as a religious type. As such it is of constant occurrence in the catacombs and in early Christian sculptures, in allusion to Psalm xlii., “Like as the hart desireth the water brook, so longeth my soul after thee, O God!”[228] The Stag is still a very common sign. A publican on the Fulham Road has put up the sign of the Stag, and added to this on the tympanum: “Rex in regno suo non habet parem,” the application of which is best known to mine host himself.

The Baldfaced Stag is seen in many places: baldfaced is a term applied to horses who have a white strip down the forehead to the nose. At Chigwell in Essex there is a Bald Hind, and in the High Street, Reading, a Bald Face, both evidently derived from the last-named stag.

Various combinations also occur, as the Stag and Castle, at Thornton, near Hinckly; the Stag and Pheasant, rather common; both these, doubtless, allude to the game seen in parks, or in the neighbourhood of noblemen’s seats; the Stag and Oak, the Cape, Warwickshire, points towards a similar origin, but the Stag and Thorn at Traffick Street, Derby, seems to be a union of two signs, for the Thorn appears in the same street on another public-house. There is, however, a sort of tree called the Buck-Thorn, which possibly may have been corrupted into the Buck and Thorn, and hence the Stag and Thorn. The Rising Deer (Brampton-en-le-Morthen, Yorkshire) and the Rising Buck (Sheinton, Shropshire) have a decided deer-stalking smack about them, affording us a glimpse of the cautious stag rising from the heather, pricking his ears and sniffing the wind.

The Ranged Deer was the sign of the King’s gunsmith in the Minories, 1673.[229] At that period this street was full of smiths:

“The Mulcibers who in the Minories sweat
And massive bars on stubborn anvils beat,
Deform’d themselves, yet forge those stays of steel
Which arm Aurelia with a shape to kill.”—Congreve.

This ranged deer was simply intended for the Reindeer, which animal had then just newly come under the notice of the public; their knowledge of it was still confused, and its name was spelled in various ways, such as: rain-deer, rained-deer, range-deer, and ranged-deer.

The Roebuck is equally common with the Stag; the Golden Buck, near St Dunstan, was the shop of P. Overton, publisher of “The Cries of the City of London, consisting of 74 copper-prints, each figure drawn after the life, by the famous Mr Laron.” The Buck and Bell is a sign at Long Itchington: the bell was frequently added to the signs of public-houses in honour of the bell-ringers, who were in the habit of refreshing themselves there. Hence we have the Bull and Bell, Briggate, Leeds; the Raven and Bell, at Shrewsbury, Wolverhampton, and Newport; the Bell and Talbot, at Bridgenorth; the Dolphin and Bell on the token of John Warner, Aldersgate, 1668; the Fish and Bell, (evidently the same sign,) Charles Street, Soho; the Three Swans and Peal at Walsall; the Nelson and Peal, and many others.

Among the taverns with the sign of the Roebuck that have become famous, the house in Cheapside may be mentioned as a notorious place during the Whig riots in 1715.

Not only the Deer tribe themselves, but their Horns also make a considerable figure on the signboard. It is probably to the sign of the Horns that allusion is made in the roll of the Pardoner, “Cocke Lorells Bote:”—

“Here is Maryone Marchauntes at Allgate
Her Husbõde dwells at ye siggne of ye Cokeldes Pate.”

The Horns was a tavern of note in Fleet Street in the reign of Queen Elizabeth:

“The xvj day of September (1557), cam owt of Spayn to the Quens Cowrt in post Monser Regamus, gorgysly apparelled, with divers Spaneardes, and with grett cheynes, and their hats sett with stones and perlles, and sopyd [supped], and by vij of the cloke were again on horsẽbake, and so thrugh Flet Strett, and at the Hornes they dronke, and at the Grayhonde, and so thrugh Chepesyde, and so over the bryge, and so rod all nyght toward Dover.”—Machyn’s Diary.

Sometimes the Horns are specified as the Hart’s Horns Inn, Smithfield, near Pie Corner, one of the houses in the yard of which Joe Miller used to play during Bartholomew Fair time, when he was associated with Pinkethman at the head of a troop of actors. The London Daily Post for August 24, &c., 1721, contains several advertisements of his troop, and the parts played by himself.

What most contributed to the popularity of this sign in the environs of London was the custom alluded to by Byron:

“And many to the steep of Highgate hie,
Ask ye, Bœotian shades! the reason why,
’Tis to the worship of the solemn horn,
Grasp’d in the holy hand of mystery,
In whose dread name both men and maids are sworn,
And consecrate the oath with draught and dance till morn.”[230]

Highgate was the headquarters for this swearing on the horn. Hone gives the oath in the following form:—

“An old and respectable inhabitant of the village says, that 60 years ago, upwards of 80 stages stopped every day at the Red Lion, and that out of every 5 passengers 3 were sworn. The oath was delivered standing, and ran thus: ‘Take notice what I now say unto you, for that is the first word of your oath—mind that! You must acknowledge me to be your adopted father, I must acknowledge you to be my adopted son (or daughter). If you do not call me father, you forfeit a bottle of wine. If I do not call you son, I forfeit the same. And now, my good son, if you are travelling through this village of Highgate, and you have no money in your pocket, go call for a bottle of wine at any house you think proper to go into, and book it to your father’s score. If you have any friends with you you may treat them as well, but if you have money of your own you must pay for it yourself. For you must not say you have no money when you have, neither must you convey the money out of your own pockets into your friends’ pockets, for I shall search you as well as them; and if it is found that you or they have money, you forfeit a bottle of wine for trying to cozen and cheat your poor old ancient father. You must not eat brown bread while you can get white, except you like the brown the best; you must not drink small beer while you can get strong, except you like the small the best. You must not kiss the maid while you can kiss the mistress, except you like the maid the best, but sooner than lose a good chance you may kiss them both. And now, my good son, for a word or two of advice: keep from all houses of ill repute, and every place of public resort for bad company. Beware of false friends, for they will turn to be your foes, and inveigle you into houses where you may lose your money and get no redress. Keep from thieves of every denomination. And now, my good son, I wish you a safe journey through Highgate and this life. I charge you, my good son, that if you know any in this company who have not taken the oath you must cause them to take it, or make each of them forfeit a bottle of wine, for if you fail to do so you will forfeit a bottle of wine yourself. So now my good son, God bless you. Kiss the horns or a pretty girl, if you see one here which you like best, and so be free of Highgate.’”

After that, the new-made member became fully acquainted with the privileges of a freeman, which consisted in:

“If at any time you are going through Highgate, and want to rest yourself, and you see a pig lying in the ditch, you have liberty to kick her out and take her place; but if you see three lying together, you must only kick out the middle one and lie between the other two.”

These last liberties, however, are a later addition to the oath introduced by a blacksmith, who kept the Coach and Horses. Nearly every inn in Highgate used to keep a pair of horns for this custom. In Hone’s time the principal inn, the Gatehouse, had stag-horns:—

The Mitre, stags’-horns.

The Green Dragon, do.

The Red Lion and Sun, bullocks’-horns.

The Bell, stags’-horns.

The Coach and Horses, rams’-horns.

The Castle, do.

The Red-Lion, rams’-horns.

The Coopers’ Arms, do.

The Fox and Hounds, rams’-horns.

The Flask, do.

The Rose and Crown, stags’-horns.

The Angel, rams’-horns.

The Bull, stags’-horns.

The Wrestlers, do.

The Lord Nelson, do.

The Duke of Wellington, stags’-horns.

The Crowne, do.

The Duke’s Head, do.

Hone supposes the custom to have originated in a sort of graziers’ club.[231] Highgate being the place nearest London where cattle rested on their way from the north, certain graziers were accustomed to put up at the Gatehouse for the night. But as they could not wholly exclude strangers who, like themselves, were travelling on business, they brought an ox to the door, and those who did not choose to kiss its horns, after going through the ceremony described, were not deemed fit members of their society. Similar customs prevailed in other places, as at Ware, at the Griffin in Hoddesdon, &c.

On the Continent the sign of the Horns was formerly equally common, often accompanied with some sly allusion to what Othello calls “the forked plague.” Thus in the Rue Bourg Chavin, in Lyons, there is now a pair of horns with the inscription “Sunt similia tuis;” and a Dutch shopkeeper of the seventeenth century wrote under his sign of the Horns—

“Ik draag Hoornen dat ider ziet,
Maar menig draagt Hoornen en weet het niet.”[232]

The Fox, as might be expected, is to be seen in a great many places; there is one at Frandley, Cheshire, with the following rhymes:—

“Behold the Fox, near Frandley stocks,
Pray catch him when you can,
For they sell here, good ale and beer,
To any honest man.”

A still more absurd inscription accompanies the sign of the Fox at Folkesworth, near Stilton, Hunts:—

“I . ham . a . cunen . fox
You . see . ther . his .
No . harm . atched .
To . Me . it . is . my . Mrs
Wish . to . place . me
Here . to . let . you . no .
He . sells . good . beere .”

Formerly there used to be a sign of the Three Foxes in Clement’s Lane, Lombard Street, carved in stone, representing three foxes sitting in a row. But a few years ago the house came into the possession of a legal firm, who, no doubt afraid of the jokes to which the sign might lead, thought it advisable to do away with the carving by covering it over with plaster.

One of the most favourite combinations is the Fox and Goose, represented by a fox currant, with the neck of the goose in his mouth and the body cast over his back. It seems suggested by an incident in the old tale of “Reynard the Fox,” and was a subject which mediæval artists were never tired of representing; it occurs in stall carvings, as in Gloucester Cathedral; in the border of the Bayeux tapestry, and in endless MS. illuminations. It is, or was, a coat of arms borne by the families of Foxwist and Foxfeld. Derived from this sign are the Fox and Duck, (two in Sheffield,) and the Fox and Hen, of which there is an example at Long Itchington. Reynard’s predatory habits are further illustrated by the Fox and Lamb, in Pilgrim Street, Newcastle, in Allendale, &c., and the Fox and Grapes, borrowed from the fable. From the same well-known source also arose the sign of the Fox and Crane. But we see the punishment of all Reynard’s misdemeanours in the Fox and Hounds, a sign of old standing, as there is one in Putney on a house which professes to have been “established above three hundred years.” The Fox and Owl at Nottingham, seems to owe its origin to a curious qui pro quo in language. A bunch of ivy, or ivy tod, was generally considered the favourite haunt of an owl; but a tod also signifies a fox; and so the owl’s nest, owls-tod, may have led to the owl and tod, the fox and owl. The Owl’s Nest is still a sign at St Helen’s, Lancashire. See under Bird Signs.

In the sign of the Fox and Bull, at Knightsbridge, the bull has been added of late years. About fifty years ago a magistrate used to sit once a week at this public-house to settle the small disputes of the neighbouring inhabitants. At that period Knightsbridge was still in such a benighted condition that neither a butcher’s nor draper’s shop was to be found between Hyde Park Corner and Sloane Street; and the whole locality could only boast of one stationer where note-paper and newspapers could be obtained. The voyage to London in those days was performed in a sort of lumbering stagecoach, over an ill-paved and dimly-lighted road. To this Fox Inn, by a very old wooden gate at the back, the bodies of the drowned in the Serpentine used to be conveyed, to the care of the Royal Humane Society, who had a receiving-house here. Among the many unhappy young and fair ones who were carried through that “Lasciate-ogni-speranza” gate, was Harriet Westbrook, the first wife of Shelley the poet, who had drowned herself in the Serpentine upon hearing that her husband had run off to Italy with Mary, the daughter of William Godwin, bookseller and philosopher of Snow Hill. The ancient inn remained much in its Elizabethan condition till the year 1799, when certain alterations cleared away the old-fashioned fire-places, chimney-pieces, and dog-irons, by which had sat the weather-beaten soldiers of Cromwell, the highwaymen lying in ambush for the mail coaches, and the fair London ladies out on a sly trip.

Some other combinations are not so easily explained, such as the Fox and Cap, Long Lane, Smithfield: but when we see the bill of this shop[233] the mystery is explained; it was the sign of Tho. Tronsdale, a capmaker, and represented a fox running, with a cap painted above him, to intimate the man’s business. The Fox and Crown, Nottingham and Newark, is evidently a combination of two signs. The Fox and Knot, Snow Hill, seems to be of old standing, as it has given its name to a court close by. Its origin, doubtless, is exactly similar to that of the Fox and Cap; the knot or top-knot being a head-dress worn by ladies in the last century. The Flying Fox at Colchester, may either allude to some kind of bat or flying squirrel (?) thus denominated, or is a landlord’s caprice.

It is certainly somewhat strange that in this sporting country the sign of the Brush or the Fox’s Tail should be so rare; in fact, no instance of its use is now to be found, although, beside the interest attached to it in the hunting field, it had the honour of being one of the badges of the Lancaster family. What is still more surprising is, that the Fox’s Tail should have been the sign of a Parisian bookseller, Jean Ruelle, in 1540; but what prompted him to choose this sign is now rather difficult to guess.

DOMESTIC ANIMALS.

Notwithstanding the ballad of the “Vicar and Moses,” which says,

“At the sign of the Horse old Spintext of course
Each night took his pipe and his pot,”

the horse rarely or never occurs without a distinctive adjective to determine its colour, action, or other attribute. All natural colours of the horse, and some others, are found on the signboard—black, white, bay, sorrel, (rare,) pied, spotted, red, sometimes golden, and in one instance, at Grantham, a Blue Horse is met with. Frequently the sign of the Horse is accompanied by the following hippophile advice:—

“Up hill hurry me not;
Down hill trot me not;
On level ground spare me not;
And in the stable I’m not forgot.”

Many years ago, at Greenwich, there was a public-house with the sign of a Horse. Behind the house was a large grass field, to which referred the following notice, painted under the sign:—“Good Grass for Horses. Long Tails three shillings and sixpence per week.” An inquisitive person passing that way, and not understanding the meaning of the notice, went in and questioned the landlord, who informed him that a difference was made for the bob-tailed horses; “for,” said he, “long-tailed horses can whisk off the flies, and eat at their leisure; but bob-tails have to shake their heads and run about from morning till night, and so do eat much less.”

The Red Horse is now almost extinct; it occurs as the sign of a house in Bond Street, in an advertisement about a spaniel lost by the Duke of Grafton.[234] By the term red was not meant vermilion; at that time it was the accepted word for what we now call roan. The Bay Horse is a great favourite in Yorkshire; in 1861 there were, in the West Riding alone, not less than seventy-seven inns, taverns, and public-houses, with such a sign, besides innumerable ale-houses. One would expect the Yorkshire Grey more indigenous to that county. The Dapple Grey is apparently a tribute of gratitude of the publicans to the “Dapple Grey” of the nursery rhyme—

“I had a little bonny nag,
His name was Dapple Grey,
And he would bring me to an ale-house
A mile out of the way.”

Dappled grey, too, was the fashionable colour of horses in the last century; thus Pope’s mercenary Duchess—

“The gods, to curse Pamela with her prayers,
Gave her gilt coach and dappled Flanders mares.”

Of the White Horse innumerable instances occur, and many are connected with names known in history. At the White Horse, near Burleigh-on-the-Hill, the noted Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, spent the last years of his life, and died.

“The Duke of Queensbury being present at his death, knowing the Duke to be a dissenter, and thinking he must be a Catholic, offered to send for a Catholic priest, to which the Duke answered, ‘No,’ said he, ‘those rascals eat God; but if you know of any set of fellows that eat the devil, I should be obliged to you if you would send for one of them!’”

All of a piece! So ended

“That life of pleasure, and that soul of whim.”[235]

At the White Horse in Kensington, Addison wrote several of his Spectators. His favourite dinner, when he stayed at this house, was fillet of veal and a bottle of claret. The old inn remained in its original state till about forty years ago, when it was pulled down, and the name changed to the Holland Arms; but the sign is still preserved in the parlour of the new establishment.

Edinburgh also has its famous White Horse; in a close in the Canongate, an inn dating from the time of Queen Mary Stuart, and which Scott has introduced in one of his novels, may still be seen. It was well-known to runaway couples, and hundreds have been made happy or unhappy for life “at a moment’s notice,” in its large room, in which, as well as in the White Hart in the Grassmarket, these impromptu marriages were as regularly performed as at Gretna Green. The White Horse Cellar, Piccadilly, now a tame omnibus office, was for more than a century one of the bustling coaching inns for the West. “Some persons think the sublimest object in nature is a ship launched on the bosom of the ocean; but give me, for my private satisfaction, the mail coaches that pour down Piccadilly of an evening, tear up the pavement, and devour the way before them to the Land’s-End.”—Hazlitt. This place calls up pleasant fancies of travelling by the mail, through merry roads, with blooming hawthorn and chestnut trees, larks singing aloft, the village bells, and the blacksmith’s hammer tinkling in the distance; but another White Horse Inn shows the dark side of the picture—the unsafety of the roads, for the White Horse, corner of Welbeck Street, Cavendish Square, was long a detached public-house, where travellers customarily stopped for refreshment, and to examine their firearms before crossing the fields to Lisson Green.[236] The last White Horse we shall mention was in Pope’s Head Alley, the sign of John Sudbury and George Humble, the first men that opened a printshop in London, in the beginning of the seventeenth century. Peacham, in his “Compleat Gentleman,” says that Goltzius’ engravings were commonly to be had in Pope’s Head Alley. There also, in 1611, the first edition of Speed’s “Great Britain” was published.

At a certain place in Warwickshire a fellow started a public-house near four others, with signs respectively of the Bear, the Angel, the Ship, and the Three Cups. Yet quite undaunted at his neighbours, he put up the White Horse as his sign, and under it wrote the following spirited and prophetic rhymes:—

“My White Horse shall bite the Bear,
And make the Angel fly;
Shall turn the Ship her bottom up,
And drink the Three Cups dry.”

And so it did; the lines pleased the people, the other houses soon lost their custom, and tradition says that the fellow made a considerable fortune.

The Running Horse or the Galloping Horse—perhaps originally the horse of Hanover—is also very common. In the London Gazette, Feb. 12-15, 1699, a horse race is advertised at Lilly Hoo, in Hertford; the advertisement concludes: “and on the same day a smock worth £3 will be run for, besides other encouragements for those that come in 2d. or 3d. Any woman may run gratis, that enters her name at the Running Horse, where articles may be seen,” &c. Races by women were not uncommon in those days, and instances may yet occasionally be heard of, particularly in the east end of London, where every great match generally concludes with a race among the free and easy ladies of the neighbourhood.

The combinations in which we meet with the Horse are all very plain, and require no explanation. The Horse and Groom, and the Horse and Jockey, are the most prevalent. Racing, from time immemorial, has been a favourite English sport. Fitzstephen mentions the races in the days of Henry II., and in the ballad of Syr Bevys of Hampton,[237] full details are given.

“In somer at Whitsontide,
Whan knighten most on horseback ride,
A course let they make or a daye
Steedes and Palfraye for to assaye;
Which horse that best may ren,
Three miles the cours was then,
Who that might ride them shoulde
Have forty pounds of redy golde.”

In the reign of Queen Elizabeth races were much in vogue, and betting carried to great excess. The famous George Earl of Cumberland is recorded to have wasted more money than any of his ancestors, chiefly by racing and tilting. In 1599, private matches by gentlemen who rode their own horses were of frequent occurrence. In the reign of James I. public races were celebrated at various places, under much the same regulations as now. The most celebrated were called Bellcourses. In the latter part of the reign of Charles I. there were races in Hyde Park as well as at Newmarket. Charles II. was very fond of this diversion, and appointed meetings at Datchet Mead when he resided at Windsor. Gradually, however, Newmarket became the principal place. The king, a constant attendant, established a house for his own accommodation, and entered horses in his royal name. Instead of bells, he gave a silver bowl or a cup, value 100 guineas, on which the exploit and pedigree of the winning horse were generally engraved. William III. and Queen Anne both added to the plate. George I., towards the end of his reign, discontinued the plate and gave 100 guineas instead; George II. made several racing regulations, about the age of horses, the weight of jockeys, &c. Already, in 1768, the horses had obtained great swiftness; for Misson, in his “Travels,” mentions one that ran 20 miles in 55 minutes upon uneven ground, which for those times was certainly a remarkable feat.

The Bell and Horse is an old and still frequent sign; it occurs on trades tokens; as John Harcourt at the Bell and Black Horse in Finsbury, 1668, and on various others; whilst at the present day it may be seen at many a roadside alehouse. Bells were a favourite addition to the trappings of horses in the middle ages. Chaucer’s abbot is described:—

“When he rode men his bridle hear,
Gingling in a whistling wind as clere,
And eke as loud as doth a chapel bell.”

In a MS. in the Cottonian Library[238] relating the journey of Margaret of England to Scotland, there to be married to King James, we find constant mention of these bells. The horse of Sir William Ikarguil, companion of Sir William Conyars, sheriff of Yorkshire, is described as “his Hors Harnays full of campanes [bells] of silver and gylt.” Whilst the master of the horse of the Duke of Northumberland was “monted apon a gentyll horse, and campanes of silver and gylt.” And a company of knights is introduced, “some of their hors harnes was full of campanes, sum of gold and sylver, and others of gold.” This led to the custom of giving a golden bell as the reward of a race. In Chester, such a bell was run for yearly on St George’s day; it was “dedicated to the kinge, being double gilt with the Kynges Armes upon it,” and was carried in the procession by a man on horseback “upon a septer in pompe, and before him a noise of trumpets in pompe.”[239] This custom of racing for a bell led to the adoption of the still common phrase, bearing off the BELL.

Names of celebrated race horses are found on signboards as well as human celebrities. Such are Bay Childers at Dronfield, Derby; Flying Childers at Melton Mowbray; Wild Dayrell, Oldham; Filho da Puta, Nottingham; and Filho tavern, Manchester. Blink Bonny is common in Northumberland; Flying Dutchman occurs in various places; and the Arabian Horse at Aberford, in Yorkshire, may perhaps represent the great Arabian Godolphin, the sire of all our famous racers.

The Horse and Tiger, at Rotherham, is said to refer to the accident in a travelling menagerie which took place many years ago, when the tiger broke loose and sprang upon the leaders of a passing mail coach, although visitors from London generally suppose the “tiger” to mean the spruce groom, or horse attendant, coming from the country to London in such numbers. Even that poor hack, the Manage Horse, is not forgotten, as he may be seen going through his paces before a public-house in Cottles Lane, Bath. In one of the turnings in Cannon Street, City, there is an old sign of the Horse and Dorsiter, which is simply an old rendering of the more common Pack Horse, formerly the usual sign of a posting inn. No doubt the Frighted Horse, which occurs in many places, belongs to this class of horses,—the expression “fright” being a corruption of freight. Some publicans who, with their trade combine the calling of farrier, set up the sign of the Horse and Farrier,—in Ireland rendered as the Bleeding Horse. A Dutch farrier in the village of Schagen, in the seventeenth century, put up the sign of the White Horse, and wrote under it the following very philosophical verse:—

“In ’t witte Paard worden de paarden haar voeten met yzer beslagen
[176] Dat men de menschen dat mee kon doen zy hoefden dan geen schoenen te dragen.”[240]

The Horse and Stag, (Finningley, Nottinghamshire,) and the Horse and Gate, are both hunting signs; yet the last may have been suggested by the Bull and Gate. The Horse and Trumpet is a very common sign, illustrating the war horse; the Horse and Chaise (or shaze, as it is spelled) in the Broad Centry, (sanctuary,) Westminster, is named in an advertisement in the Postboy, Jan. 23-25, 1711; whilst the Chaise and Pair is still to be seen at Northill, Colchester.

The Nag’s Head—which only in one instance is varied by the Horse’s Head, namely, at Brampton in Cumberland—is a sign that has become famous in history; it is represented on the print of the entry of Queen Marie de’ Medici on her visit to her daughter Henriette Marie, Queen of Charles I., being the sign of a notorious tavern opposite the Cheapside Cross. It is suspended from a long square beam, at the end of which a large crown of evergreens is seen. As none of the other houses are decked with greens, this apparently represents the Bush.[241] This tavern was the fictitious scene of the consecration of the Protestant bishops at the accession of Queen Elizabeth in 1559. It was pretended by the adversaries of the Protestant faith, that a certain number of ecclesiastics, in a hurry to take possession of the vacant sees, assembled here; where they were to undergo the ceremony from Antony Kitchen, alias Dunstane, Bishop of Llandaff, a sort of occasional Nonconformist, who had taken the oath of supremacy to Elizabeth; Bonner, Bishop of London, (then confined in the Tower,) hearing of it, sent his chaplain to Kitchen, threatening him with excommunication in case he proceeded. On this the prelate refused to perform the ceremony; whereupon, according to Catholics, Parker and the other candidates, rather than defer possession of their dioceses, determined to consecrate one another, which they did, without any sort of scruple. Scorey began with Parker, who instantly rose Archbishop of Canterbury. The refutation of this tale may be read in Strype’s life of Archbishop Parker.[242]

A curious anecdote is told concerning the sign of a Gelding. Golden Square, it appears, was originally called Gelding Square, from the sign of a neighbouring inn; but the inhabitants, indignant at the vulgarity of the name, changed it to its present title.

Some publicans appear to be of opinion that the Grey Mare is the best horse for their signboards; in Lancashire, especially, this sign abounds. Others put up the Mare and Foal; but they are evidently not very well acquainted with the old ballad of the “Mare and Foal that went to church,” for there the Mare says:—

“Oh! to pray for those publicans I am very loath,
They fill their pots full of nothing but froth,
Some fill them half full, and others the whole;
May the devil go with them!—Amen, says the foal.
Derry down,” &c.

Besides the Mare and Foal, there is the Cow and Calf, which is very common. A still more happy mother, the Cow and Two Calves, was, in 1762, a sign near Chelsea Pond; whilst a touching picture of paternal bliss might have been seen on a sign in Islington in the last century, viz., the Bull and Three Calves; that animal, doubtless, was placed there in the company of his offspring, to illustrate the homely old proverb, “He that bulls the cow must keep the calf.” The Goat and Kid was a sign at Norwich in 1711;[243] the Sow and Pigs is common; and the Ewe and Lamb occurs on a trades token of Hatton Garden in 1668, and may still be seen in many places. A practical traveller in the coaching days, staying at the Ewe and Lamb in Worcester, wrote on a pane of glass in that inn the following very true remark:—

“If the people suck your ale no more
Than the poor Lamb, th’ Ewe at the door,
You in some other place may dwell,
Or hang yourself for all you’ll sell.”

The Cat and Kittens was, about 1823, a sign near Eastcheap; it may have come from the publican’s slang expression, cat and kittens, as applied to the large and small pewter pots. In the police courts it is not uncommon to hear that such and such low persons have been “had up” for “cat and kitten sneaking,” i.e., stealing quart and pint pots.

So much for quadrupeds. Happy families of birds are equally abundant; there was the Sparrow’s Nest in Drury Lane, of which trades tokens are extant; the Throstle Nest, (a not inappropriate name for a free-and-easy singing club!) is the sign of a public-house at Buglawton, near Congleton; the Martin’s Nest, at Thornhill Bridge, Normanton; the Kite’s Nest, (an unpromising name for an inn, if there be anything in a name,) at Stretton, in Herefordshire; and finally, the Brood Hen, or Hen and Chickens, which latter is more common than any of the former. Not improbably it originated with the sign of the Pelican’s Nest, to which several of the above-named nests may be referred. Under the name of the “Brood Hen,” it occurs on a trades token of Battle Bridge, Southwark; as the “Hen and Chickens,” it was also known in the seventeenth century, for there are tokens of John Sell “at ye Hen and Chickens on Hammond’s Key;” it is likewise mentioned in the following daily occurrence of the good old times:—

“Wednesday night last, Captain Lambert was stopt by three footpads near the Hen and Chickens, between Peckham and Camberwell, and robbed of a sum of money and his gold watch.”[244]

The prevalence of this sign may be accounted for by the kindred love for the barleycorn in the human and gallinaceous tribes. It was also used as a sign by Paulus Sessius, a bookseller of Prague, in 1606, who printed some of Kepler’s astronomical works; above his colophon, representing the hen and her offspring, is the motto: “GRANA DAT A FIMO SCRUTANS,” the application of which is not very obvious.

Speaking of birds’ nests figuring as signs, we may mention that, at the beginning of the present century, the small shops under the tree at the corner of Milk Street, City, used to describe themselves as “under the Crow’s Nest, Cheapside.” An old-fashioned snuff shop, still in existence, issued its tobacco papers in this way, and the small bookshop there at present advertises itself as “under the tree,” although it was only very recently that the crow ceased to visit and repair his nest here.

The Three Colts, in Bride Lane, 1652, is represented on a trades token by three colts running; such a sign gave its name to a street in Limehouse. The Horseshoe is a favourite in combination with other subjects. Aubrey, in his “Miscellanies,” p. 148, says:—

“It is a very common thing to nail horseshoes on the thresholds of doors, which is to hinder the power of witches that enter into the house. Most houses of the West End of London have the horseshoe on the threshold; it should be a horseshoe that one finds.”

Elsewhere he says:—

“Under the Porch of Staninfield Church in Suffolk, I saw a tile with a horseshoe upon it placed there for this purpose, though one would imagine that the holy water would have been sufficient.”

Concerning the same superstition Brand observes:—

“I am told there are many other similar instances. In Monmouth Street (probably the part alluded to by Aubrey) many horseshoes nailed to the threshold are still to be seen. In 1813 not less than 17 remained, nailed against the steps of doors. The bawds of Amsterdam believed in 1687, that a horseshoe which had either been found or stolen placed on the hearth would bring good luck to their houses.”[245]

The charm of the horseshoe lies in its being forked and presenting two points; thus Herrick says:—

“Hang up hooks and sheers, to scare
Hence the hag that rides the mare;
Till they be all over wet
With the mire and the sweat,
This observ’d the manes shall be
Of your horses all knot-free.”[246]

Any forked object, therefore, has the power to drive witches away. Hence the children in Italy and Spain are generally seen with a piece of forked coral (coral is particularly efficacious) hung round their necks, whilst even the mules and other cattle are armed with a small crescent formed by two boars’ tusks, or else a forked piece of wood, to avert the spells of what Macbeth calls “the juggling fiends.” Even the two forefingers held out apart are thought sufficient to avert the evil eye, or prevent the machinations of the lord and master of the nether world. Great power also lies in the pentagram and Solomon’s seal, which, being composed of two triangles, present not less than six forked ends. Both these figures are much used by the Moors, with the same object in view as the horseshoe by western nations. In this country, at the present day, scarcely a stable can be seen where there is not a horseshoe nailed on the door or lintel; there is one very conspicuous at the gate of Meux’s brewery at the corner of Tottenham Court Road, and conspicuous on the horse trappings of this establishment the shoe in polished brass may be seen; in fact, it has become the trade-mark of the firm, the same as the red triangle which distinguishes the pale ale of the Burton brewers. The iron heels of workmen’s boots are also frequently seen fixed against the doorpost, or behind the door, of houses of the lower classes.

The Horseshoe, by itself, is comparatively a rare sign. There is a Horseshoe Tavern, mentioned by Aubrey in connexion with one of those reckless deeds of bloodshed so common in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries:—

“Captain Carlo Fantom, a Croatian, spake 13 languages, was a captain under the Erle of Essex. He had a world of cuts about his body with swords and was very quarrelsome and a great ravisher. He met coming late at night out of the Horseshoe Tavern in Drury Lane with a lieutenant of Colonel Rossiter, who had great jingling spurs on. Said he, the noise of your spurrs doe offend me, you must come over the kennel and give me satisfaction. They drew and passed at each other, and the lieutenant was runne through and died in an hour or two, and it was not known who killed him.”[247]

This tavern was still in existence in 1692, as appears from the deposition of one of the witnesses in the murder of Mountfort the actor by Captain Hill, who, with his accomplice, Lord Mohun, whilst they were laying in wait for Mrs Bracegirdle, drank a bottle of canary which had been bought at the Horseshoe Tavern.

The Three Horseshoes are not uncommon; and the single shoe may be met with in many combinations, arising from the old belief in its lucky influences: thus the Horse and Horseshoe was the sign of William Warden, at Dover, in the seventeenth century, as appears from his token. The Sun and Horseshoe is still a public-house sign in Great Tichfield Street, and the Magpie and Horseshoe may be seen carved in wood in Fetterlane; the magpie is perched within the horseshoe, a bunch of grapes being suspended from it. The Horns and Horseshoe is represented on the token of William Grainge in Gutterlane, 1666,—a horseshoe within a pair of antlers. The Lion and Horseshoe appears in the following advertisement of a shooting match:—

“ON Friday the 16th of this instant, at two in the afternoon, will be a plate to be (sic) shot for, at twenty-five guineas value, in the Artillerie Ground near Moorfields. No gun to exceed four feet and a half in the barrel, the distance to be 200 yards, and but one shot a piece, the nearest the centre to win. No person that shoots to be less than one guinea, but as many more as he pleases to compleat the sum. The money to be put in the hands of Mr Jones, at the Lion and Horseshoe Tavern, or Mr Turog, gunsmith in the Minories. Note, that if any gentleman has a mind to shoot for the whole, there is a person will shoot with him for it, being left out by mistake in our last.”[248]

The Hoop and Horseshoe on Towerhill, was formerly called the Horseshoe. This, like every old tavern, has its murder to record:—

“The last week one Colonel John Scott took an occasion to kill one John Buttler, a hackney coachman, at the Horse Shoe Tavern on Tower Hill, without any other provocation ’tis said, but refusing to carry him and another gentleman pertaining to the law, from thence to Temple Bar for 1s. 6d. Amongst the many pranks that he hath played in other countries ’tis believed this is one of the very worst. He is a very great vindicator of the Salamanca Doctor. He is a lusty, tall man, squint eyed, thin faced, wears a peruke sometimes and has a very h—— look. All good people would do well if they can to apprehend him that he may be brought to justice.”[249]

The Horseshoe and Crown is named in the following handbill, which is too characteristic to curtail:—

“Daughter of a Seventh daughter.
Removed to the sign of the Horseshoe and Crown in Castle Street, near the 7 Dials in St Giles.

Liveth a Gentlewoman, the Daughter of a Seventh Daughter, who far exceeds all her sex, her business being very great amongst the quality, has now thought fit to make herself known to the benefit of the Publick.

She resolves these questions following:—As to Life whether happy or unhappy? the best time of it past or to come? Servants or lodgers if honest or not? To marry the person desir’d or who they shall marry and when? A Friend if real or not? a Woman with child or not, or ever likely to have any! A friend absent dead or alive, if alive when return? Journey by Land or voyages by Sea, the Success thereof. Lawsuits, which shall gain the better? She also Interprets Dreams. These and all other lawful questions which for brevity sake are omitted, she fully resolves.

Her hours are from 7 in the Morning till 12, and from 1 till 8 at Night.”[250]

These quack “gentlewomen” were as much the order of that day as the broken-down clergymen who advertise medicines for nervous and rheumatic complaints are in our own time. Heywood, in his play of “the Wise Woman of Hogsden,” enumerates the following occupations as their perquisites:—

“Let me see how many trades have I to live by: First, I am a wise woman and a fortuneteller, and under that I deale in physick and fore-speaking, in palmestry and things lost. Next I undertake to cure madd folks; Then I keepe gentlewomen lodgers, to furnish such chambers as I let out by the night; Then I am provided for bringing young wenches to bed; and for a need you see I can play the matchmaker.”

Generally they proclaimed themselves the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, a relationship that is still thought to be accompanied by powers not vouchsafed to ordinary mortals. This belief in the virtue of the number 7 doubtless originated from the Old Testament, where that number seems in greater favour than all others. The books of Moses are full of references to it; the creation of the world in 7 days, sevenfold vengeance on whosoever slayeth Cain; Noah had to take 7 males and females of every clean beast, 7 males and females of every fowl of the air, for in 7 days it would begin to rain; the ark rested in the 7th month, &c., &c. From this the middle ages borrowed their predilection for this number, and its cabalistic power.[251]

Horned cattle are just as common as horses on the signboards; the Bull, in particular, is a favourite with the nation, whether as a namesake—so much so, indeed, as to have given it a popular name abroad—or as the source of the favourite roast-beef, or from the ancient sport of bull-baiting, it is difficult to say. From Ben Jonson we gather that there was another reason which sometimes dictated the choice of this animal on the signboard. In the “Alchymist” he introduces a shopkeeper, who wishes the learned Doctor to provide him with a sign.

“Face. What say you to his Constellation, Doctor, the Balance?
Sub. No, that is stale and common:
A Townsman born in Taurus gives the Bull
Or the Bull’s head: in Aries, the Ram,
A poor device.”—Alchymist, a. ii. s. i.

Newton dates a letter from “the Bull,” at Shoreditch, September 1693; it is addressed to Locke, and a curious letter it is, containing an apology for having wished Locke dead.

The Bull is generally represented in his natural colour, black, white, grey, pied, “spangled” (in Yorkshire,) and only rarely red and blue; yet these two last colours may simply imply the natural red, brown, and other common hues, for newspapers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries often contain advertisements about blue dogs; and whatever shade that was intended for, it may certainly with as much justice be applied to a bull as to a dog. The Chained Bull at North Allerton, Leeds, and the Bull and Chain, Langworthgate, Lincoln, doubtless refer to the old cruel pastime of bull-baitings. Occasionally we meet also with a Wild Bull, as at Gisburn, near Skipton.

Leigh Hunt observes:—“London has a modern look to the inhabitants; but persons who come from the country find as odd and remote-looking things in it as the Londoners do in York and Chester; and among these are a variety of old inns with corridors running round the yard. They are well worth a glance from anybody who has a respect for old times.” Such a one is the Bull’s Inn in Bishopsgate Street, where formerly plays were acted by Burbadge, Shakespeare’s fellow-comedian, and Tarlton in good Queen Bess’s time amused our forefathers on summers’ afternoons with his quaint jokes and comic parts.[252] This inn is also celebrated as the London house of the famous Hobson, (Hobson’s choice,) the rich Cambridge carrier. Here a painted figure of him was to be seen in the eighteenth century, with a hundred pound bag under his arm, on which was the following inscription:—“The fruitful Mother of a Hundred More.”[253] At the Bull public-house on Towerhill, Thomas Otway, the play writer, died of want at the age of 33, on the 14th of April 1685, having retired to this house to escape his creditors.[254]

The Bull, at Ware, obtained a celebrity by its enormous bed. Taylor, the Water poet, in 1636 remarked, “Ware is a great thorowfare, and hath many fair innes, with very large bedding, and one high and mighty Bed called the Great Bed of Ware: a man may seeke all England over and not find a married couple that can fill it.” Nares, in his “Glossary,” quotes Chauncey’s, Hertfordshire; for a story of twelve married couple who, laid together in the bed, each pair being so placed at the top and bottom of the bed, that the head of one pair was at the feet of another. Shakespeare alludes to it in “Twelfth Night,” where Sir Toby Belch in his drunken humour advises Aguecheek to write: “as many lies as will lie in this sheet of paper, though the sheet were big enough for the Bed of Ware in England,” (a. iii. s. 2.) Where the “high and mighty Bed” was located, seems a mooted point; some say at the Bull, others at the Crown, and Clutterbuck places it at the Saracen’s Head, where there is or was a bed of some twelve feet square, in an Elizabethan style of carved oak, but with the date 1463 painted on the back. Tradition says that it was the bed of Warwick the king-maker, and was bought at a sale of furniture at Ware Park. Recently it has been sold, and Charles Dickens is now said to be its possessor.

The Bull Inn at Buckland, near Dover, deserves to be mentioned for its comical caution to the customers:

“The Bull is tame so fear him not,
All the while you pay your shot.
[184] When money’s gone, and credit’s bad,
It’s that which makes the Bull run mad.”

The famous Old Pied Bull Inn, Islington, was pulled down circa 1827, the house having existed from the time of Queen Elizabeth. The parlour retained its original character to the last. There was a chimney-piece containing Hope, Faith, and Charity, with a border of cherubims, fruit and foliage, whilst the ceiling in stucco represented the five senses. Sir Walter Raleigh is said to have been an inhabitant of this house.

“This conjecture is somewhat strengthened by the nature of the border [in a stained glass window,] which was composed of seahorses, mermaids, parrots, &c., forming a most appropriate allusion to the character of Raleigh, as a great navigator, and discoverer of unknown countries; and the bunch of green leaves [two seahorses supporting a bunch of green leaves,] has been generally asserted to represent the tobacco plant, of which he is said to have been the first importer into this country.”[255]

At what time the house was converted into an inn does not appear. The sign of the Pied Bull in stone relief, on the front towards the south, bore the date 1730, which was probably the year this addition was made to the building. That it was an inn in 1665, appears from the following episode of the Plague-time:

“I remember one citizen, who, having thus broken out of his house in Aldersgate Street, or there about, went along the road to Islington. He attempted to have gone in at the Angel Inn, and after that at the White Horse, two inns known still by the same signs, but was refused; after which he came to the Pied Bull, an inn also still continuing the same sign. He asked them for lodging for one night only, pretending to be going into Lincolnshire, and assuring them of his being very sound, and free from the infection, which also at that time had not reached much that way. They told him they had no lodging, that they could spare but one bed up in the garret, and that they could spare that bed but for one night, some drovers being expected the next day with cattle; so if he would accept of that lodging, he might have it, which he did; so a servant was sent up with a candle with him, to show him the room. He was very well dressed, and looked like a person not used to lie in a garret; and when he came to the room he fetched a deep sigh, and said to the servant, ‘I have seldom lain in such a lodging as this;’ however, the servant assured him again that they had no better. ‘Well,’ says he, ‘I must make shift; this is a dreadful time, but it is but for one night.’ So he sat down upon the bed-side, and bade the maid, I think it was, fetch him up a pint of warm ale. Accordingly the servant went for the ale; but some hurry in the house, which perhaps employed her otherwise, put it out of her head, and she went up no more to him. The next morning, seeing no appearance of the gentleman, somebody in the house asked the servant that had showed him up stairs, what was become of him. She started; ‘alas,’ said she, ‘I never thought more of him; he bade me carry him some warm ale, but I[185] forgot.’ Upon which, not the maid, but some other person was sent up to see after him, who coming into the room found him stark dead, and almost cold, stretched out across the bed. His clothes were pulled off, his jaw fallen, his eyes open in a most frightful posture, the rug of the bed being grasped hard in one of his hands; so that it was plain he died soon after the maid left him; and that it is probable, had she gone up with the ale, she had found him dead in a few minutes after he sat down upon the bed. The alarm was great in the house, as any one may suppose, they having been free from the distemper till that disaster; which bringing the infection to the house, spread it immediately to other houses round about it. I do not remember how many died in the house itself, but I think the maid-servant who went up first with him, fell presently ill by the fright, and several others; for whereas there died but two in Islington of the plague the week before, there died seventeen the week after, whereof fourteen were of the plague. This was in the week from the 11th of July to the 18th.”[256]

The Red Bull was the sign of another of the inn-playhouses in Shakespeare’s time; but, like the Fortune, mostly frequented by the meaner sorts of people. It was situated in Woodbridge Street,[257] Clerkenwell, (its site is still called Red Bull Yard,) and is supposed to have been erected in the early part of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. At all events, it was one of the seventeen playhouses that arose in London between that period and the reign of Charles I. Edward Alleyn the actor, founder of Dulwich College, says in a memorandum, Oct. 3, 1617, “went to the Red Bull and received for the ‘Younger Brother’ [a play], but £3-6-4.” Killigrew’s troop of the king’s players performed in it until the theatre in Lincoln’s-Inn-fields opened. The place was then abandoned to exhibitions of gladiators and feats of strength. The names of the principal theatres at the time of the Commonwealth occur in the following puritanical curse:—

“—— That the Globe
Wherein (quoth he) reigns a whole world of vice,
Had been consumed, the Phenix burnt to ashes,
The Fortune whipp’d for a blind—Blackfriars,
He wonders how it ’scaped demolishing
I’ the time of Reformation; lastly he wished
The Bull might cross the Thames to the Bear-gardens,
And there be soundly baited.”[258]

The Bull’s Head is often seen instead of the Bull; its origin may be from the butchers’ arms, which are azure two axes salterwise, arg. between two roses arg. as many bulls’ heads couped of the second attired or, &c.; in Holland a carved bull’s head is always a leather-seller’s sign. At the Bull’s Head, in Claremarket, the artists’ club used to meet, of which Hogarth was a member, and Dr Ratcliffe a constant visitor. The Bull’s Head was already used in signs three hundred years ago, as we may see from an entry in Machyn’s Diary, which does not say much for the morality of the period:—

“The xij day of June (1560) dyd ryd in a care[259] abowt London ij men and iij women; one man, for he was the bowd and to brynge women unto strangers; and on women was the wyff of the Bell in Gracyous Strett; and a-nodur the wyff of the Bull-hed besyd London Stone, and boyth were bawdes and hores and the thodur man and the woman were brodur and syster and wher taken nakyd together.”

As a variation, on the Bull’s Head there is the Cow’s Face:—

“GEORGE TURNIDGE, aged about 16, a short thickset Lad with a little dark brown Hair, a scar in his left cheek under his eye, wears a canvass jacket lined with red and canvass Breeches, with a red cap, run away from his Master the 7th instant. Whoever secures him and gives Notice to Mr Henry Davis, Waxchandler at the Cow’s Face in Miles Lane in Canon Street, shall have a Guinea Reward, and reasonable charges.”—London Gazette, Jan. 13-17, 1697.

The Bull’s Neck is a sign at Penny Hill, Holbeach, and the Buffalo Head is common in many places. The latter was the sign of one of the coffee-houses near the Exchange, during the South Sea bubble, and was hung up over the head quarters of a company for a grand dispensary, capital £3,000,000. The rage for joint-stock companies had come to such a pitch at that period, that an advertisement appeared stating:—

“THIS day the 8th instant at Sam’s Coffeehouse behind the Royal Exchange, at three in the afternoon, a book will be opened, for entering into a joint copartnership for carrying on a thing that will turn to the advantage of those concerned.”

Not less than £28,000,000 were asked for at that period to enter upon various speculations. At the Buffalo Head Tavern, Charing Cross, Duncan Campbell, the deaf and dumb fortune-teller, used at one time to deliver his oracles. He is immortalised in the Spectator, No. 474, where, in answer to the letter of a lady inquiring about Duncan’s address, a note is entered, “That the Inspector I employ about Wonders, inquire at the Golden Lyon, opposite the Halfmoon Tavern, Drury Lane, into the merit of this silent sage.”[260]

Among the combinations in which the Bull is met with on signboards, the Bull and Dog is one of the most common, derived, like the Bull and Chain, from the favourite sport of bull-baiting, which amusement is described at full length and in brilliant colours by Misson, in his “Travels.” A comical variation of this is the Bull and Bitch at Husborn Crawley, Woburn. In the sign of the Bull and Butcher,[261] the bull is placed in still worse company; this was very forcibly expressed on the sign of a butcher in Amsterdam, who was represented with a glass of wine in his hand, standing between two calves, and pledging them with the cruel words,—

“Zyt verblyt
Soo lang gy er zyt.”[262]

The Bull and Magpie, which occurs at Boston, has been explained as meaning the Pie, πιναξ, and the Bull of the Romish Church; but this looks very like a cock-and-bull story. As “some help to thicken other proofs that also demonstrate thinly,” as Iago has it, it may be asked whether this might not have arisen out of the sign of the “Pied Bull,” thus leading to the “Pie and Bull,” or the “Bull and Magpie;” the transition seems simple and easy enough; but should this not be considered satisfactory, since we have the “Cock and Bull,” and the “Cock and Pie,” we may by a sort of rule of three manœuvre obtain the Bull and Pie or Magpie. See under Bird Signs.

The Black Bull and Looking-Glass is named in an advertisement in the original edition of the Spectator, No. lxviii., as a house in Cornhill. It was evidently a combination of two signs.

Still more puzzling is the Bull and Bedpost; but as the actual use of this sign as a house decoration remains to be corroborated, we may dismiss it with the remark, that the Bedpost, in all probability, was a jocular name for the stake to which the bull was tied when being baited, in allusion to the stout stick formerly used in bed-making to smooth the clothes in their place. The Bull and Swan, High Street, Stamford, may be heraldic, both these animals being badges of the York family; but the Swan in all probability was the first sign, the Bull being added on account of the singular custom of Bull Running, which yearly took place, both at Tamworth and Stamford, on St John’s eve. The Bull in the Pound, is the Bull punished for trespass, and put in the pound or pinfold; whilst the Bull and Oak at Wicker, Sheffield, (at Market Bosworth there is a house with the sign of the Bull in the Oak,) may have originated from the sign of “the Bull” being suspended from an oak tree, or referring to an oak tree standing near the house. Bulls are often tied to trees or posts in pastures, and this also may have given rise to the sign.

Visitors to the Isle of Wight will have noticed the word Bugle frequently inscribed under the picture of a Bull on the inn signboards there. Bugle is a provincial name in those parts for a wild bull. It is an old English word, and is used by Sir John Mandeville; “homes of grete oxen, or of bugles, or of kygn.” It was still current in the seventeenth century, for Randle Holme, 1688, classes the “Bugle, or Bubalus,” amongst “the savage beasts of the greater sort.” The horns of this animal, used as a musical instrument, gave a name to the Buglehorn. It may be remarked that the term bugle doubtless came, in old times, with other Gallicisms common to Sussex and Hampshire, from across the Channel, where the word bugle is still preserved in the verb beugler, the common French word for the lowing of cattle.

The Ox is rather uncommon; the Durham Ox and the Craven Ox, two famous breeds, are sometimes met with; then there is a Craven Ox Head, in George Street, York, and a Grey Ox at Brighouse, in the West Riding. The Ox and Compasses at Poulton Swindon, in Cumberland, is evidently a jocular imitation of the London sign of the Goat and Compasses.

The Cow is more common; its favourite colours being Red, Brown, White, Spotted, Spangled, &c. The Red Cow occurs as a sign near Holborn Conduit, on the seventeenth century trades tokens. It also gave a name to the alehouse in Anchor and Hope Lane, Wapping, in which Lord Chancellor Jeffries was taken prisoner, disguised as a sailor, and trying to escape to the Continent after the abdication of James II. Thinking himself safe in this neighbourhood, he was looking out of the window to while the time away, when he was recognised by a clerk who bore him a grudge, and at once betrayed him. An heraldic origin is not necessary for this colour of the cow.

“Cows (I mean that whole species of horned beasts) are more commonly black than Red in England. ’Tis for this reason that they have a greater value for Red Cow’s Milk than for Black Cow’s Milk. Whereas in France we esteem the Black Cow’s Milk, because Red Cows are more common with us.”[263]

Speaking of the Green Walk, St James’s Park, Tom Brown says: “There were a cluster of senators talking of state affairs, and the price of corn and cattle, and were disturbed with the noisy Milk folk crying: A can of Milk, Ladies; a can of Red Cow’s Milk, sirs?”[264] The preference for the Red Cow’s milk may, however, have a more remote origin, namely, from the ordinance of the law contained in Numbers xix. 2, where a red heifer is enjoined to be sacrificed as a purification for sin. Hence, Red Cow’s milk is particularly recommended in old prescriptions and panacea, as, for instance, in the following receipt of “a Cock water for a Consumption and Cough of the Lunges:”—

“Take a running cock and pull him alive, then kill him and cutt him in pieces and take out his intrailes and wipe him cleane, breake the bones, then put him into an ordinary still with a pottle of sack and a pottle of Red Cow’s Milk,” &c., &c.[265]

The Red Cow, in Bow Street, was the sign of a noted tavern, (afterwards called the Red Rose,) which stood at the corner of Rose Alley. It was when going home from this tavern that Dryden was cudgelled by bravoes, hired by Lord Rochester, for some remarks in Lord Mulgrave’s Essay on Satire, in the composition of which Dryden had assisted his lordship. The king offered £50, and a free pardon, but “Black Will with a cudgel,” to whom Lord Rochester had intrusted the task of thrashing the laureate, showed that there was such a thing as honour amongst rogues, and did not betray him for the king’s £50. In all probability, however, he received a larger sum from his lordship. In Dryden’s old age, Pope, then a boy, came here to look at the great man whose fame in after years he was to equal if not to eclipse. This tavern was the famous mart for libels and lampoons; one Julyan, a drunken dissipated “secretary to the Muses,” as he calls himself, was the chief manufacturer.

Near Marlborough, Wilts, there is an alehouse having the sign of the Red Cow, with the following rhyme:—

“The Red Cow
Gives good Milk now.”

That under a Brown Cow at Oldham is still more sublime:—

“This Cow gives such Liquor,
’Twould puzzle a Viccar (sic.)”

The Heifer is to be met with sometimes in Yorkshire, but always with some local adjective, as the Craven Heifer; the Airesdale Heifer, the Durham Heifer, &c. The Pied Calf at Spalding seems to present a solitary instance of a calf on the signboard. Neither are sheep very common; the Ram was a noted carrier’s inn in the seventeenth century, in West Smithfield, and, indeed, continued as such until the recent destruction of this old cattle market. The crest of the cloth-workers was a mount vert, thereon a ram statant; so that this sign in that locality was very well chosen, being in honour of the cattle-dealers on ordinary occasions, and serving for the cloth-workers in the time of Bartholomew fair, for whose benefit the fair was founded. In 1668 there were two Ram’s Head inns in Fenchurch Street; one of them was a carriers’ inn for the Essex people. The Ram’s Skin, which occurs at Spalding in Lincolnshire, is another name for the Fleece. The Black Tup figures on a sign near Rochdale, perhaps in allusion to the black ram frail matrons used to bestride in the old custom of Free Bench, thus related in Jacob’s “Law Dictionary:”—

“In the manors of East and West-Enbourne in the Co. of Berks, and the manor of Torre in Devonshire, and other parts of the West of England, there is a custom, that when a Copyhold Tenant dies his widow shall have ‘Free Bench’ in all his customary lands ‘dum sola et casta fuerit,’ but if she commits incontinency she forfeits her estate. Yet nevertheless on her coming into the court of the manor, riding backwards on a black ram with his tail in her hand and saying the words following, the steward is bound by the custom to readmit her to her free bench; The words are these:—

Here I am
Riding upon a Black Ram
Like a w——e as I am;
And for my crincum crancum
I have lost my bincum bancum;
And for my T——’s game
Have done this worldly shame.
Therefore pray, Mr Steward, let me have my land again.

This is a kind of penance among jocular tenures to purge the offence.”

Though the ram is rarely, and the sheep never seen on the signboard, the Lamb is not uncommon. In 1586, it was the sign of Abraham Veale, (agreeably to the punning practices of the time, one would have expected the Calf from him,) a bookseller in St Paul’s Churchyard, and in 1728 of Thomas Cox, also a bookseller, under the Royal Exchange in Cornhill. Doubtless, these signs had originally represented the Lamb with the flag of the Apocalypse. The sign was used by other trades: in 1673, it was the distinctive ornament of a confectioner at the lower end of Gracechurch Street;[266] and an instance of an alehouse is found in the following advertisement, which at the same time affords us a peep at the homely proceedings of the Admiralty in those days:—

“THIS is to give notice to the Officers and Company of His Majesty’s Frigate Boreas, who were on Board her at the taking the Ship Vrow Jacoba and Briggantyne Leon, that they will be paid their respective Shares of said Prizes, on Wednesday the Eight of April next, at the sign of the Lamb, in Abchurch Lane. Paying will begin at Eight o’clock of the forenoon of the said Day.”[267]

Think of that, ye clerks in Her Majesty’s offices, eight o’clock in the forenoon!

A few combinations also occur, as the Lamb and Breeches, the sign of Churches & Christie, leather-sellers and breeches-makers, on London Bridge, in the last century; this was a sign like that of the Hat and Beaver, in which the living animal, and the article manufactured from its skin, were juxtaposed. The Lamb and Crown was a sort of colonial or emigration office in Threadneedle Street, near the Southsea House in 1759.[268] At the present day there is a Lamb and Lark at Keynsham, Bath, and in Printing House Lane, Blackfriars. It is a typical representation of the proverb, “Go to bed with the Lamb and rise with the Lark.”

The Lamb and Hare figure together in Portsmouth Place, Lower Kennington Lane. The Lamb and Still is a combination intimating the sale of distilled waters. It was the sign of a house in Compton Street, in 1711, which had the honour to lodge Mr Fert, a dancing-master, and author of a work called “A Discourse or Explanation of the ground of Dancing.”[269]

If we except the heraldic Blue Boar, and the Sow and Pigs, we shall find no other pigs on the signboard but the Pig and Whistle,[270] the Little Pig at Amblecote, Stourbridge, and the Hog in the Pound in Oxford Street, jocularly called the gentleman in trouble. This latter was formerly a starting-point for coaches, and became notorious through the crime committed by its landlady, Catherine Hayes. Having formed an illicit connexion, she was induced by her paramour to murder her husband, after which she cut off his head, put it in a bag, and threw it in the Thames. It floated ashore, and was put on a pole in St Margaret’s Churchyard, Westminster, in order that it might be recognised; and by this primitive means the murderess was detected. The man was hanged, and Catherine burnt alive at Tyburn in 1726.

The Goat is not very common; there was a Goat Inn at Hammersmith, taken down in 1826, and rebuilt under the name of Suspension Bridge Inn; up to that time, the sign, and the woodwork from which it was suspended, used to extend across the street. The Goat in Boots, on the Fulham Road,[271] was in old times called simply “the Goat.” Besides these, there is a Black Goat in Lincoln, and a Grey Goat in Penrith and Carlisle, and a few others without addition of colour.

A walk through town on a fine Sunday morning will at once convince anybody of the good understanding that exists between the Englishmen and the canine species, “l’ami de l’homme” as Buffon calls the dog. From every lane and alley in the lower parts of the town sally forth men and youths in clean moleskins and corduroys, each invariably accompanied by some yelping cur, the least of whose faults is to be ugly. It is no wonder, then, that the Dog should be of frequent occurrence on the signboard. Pepys mentions a tavern of that name in Westminster, where, about the time of the Restoration, he used occasionally to show his merry face. In 1768, the author of the “Art of Living in London,” recommended the Dog in Holywell Street for a quiet good dinner:—

“Where disencumbered of all form or show,
We to a moment might or sit or go;
Eat what the palate recommends us hot,
Yet not considered as a useless guest.”

PLATE IX.

GOOSE AND GRIDIRON. (St Paul’s Churchyard, circa 1800.) | ANGEL AND GLOVE. (Harleian Collection, 1710.)

THREE KINGS.
(Banks’s Collection, 1720.)

MARYGOLD. (Child’s Bank, Fleet Street, circa 1670.) | GUY OF WARWICK. (Roxburghe Ballads, circa 1650.)

For some unknown reason, the Black Dog seems the greatest favourite; perhaps the English terrier is meant by it, a dog who “once had its day,” as the Scotch terrier appears to have it now. In the seventeenth century, there was a Black Dog Tavern near Newgate; a house of old standing, of which trades tokens are yet extant.

Mr Akerman, in his work on “Trades Tokens issued between 1648-1672,” makes a mistake in surmising that Luke Hutton’s “Black Dog of Newgate” had anything to do with this tavern. That poem is simply against “coney-catchers,” i.e., roguish detectives or informers of the Jonathan Wild stamp, and even worse. Such a one is impersonificated under the name of the Black Dog of Newgate, because the coney-catchers used to hunt people down threatening them with Newgate. This Black Dog may have derived its name from the canine spectre that still frightens the ignorant and fearful in our rural districts, just as the terrible Dun Cow, and the Lambton Worm were the terror of the people in old times. Near Lyme Regis, Dorset, there is an alehouse which has this black fiend in all his ancient ugliness painted over the door. Its adoption there arose from a legend that the spectral black dog used to haunt at nights the kitchen fire of a neighbouring farm-house, formerly a Royalist mansion, destroyed by Cromwell’s troops. The dog would sit opposite the farmer; but one night, a little extra liquor gave the man additional courage, and he struck at the dog, intending to rid himself of the horrid thing. Away, however, flew the dog and the farmer after him, from one room to another, until it sprang through the roof, and was seen no more that night. In mending the hole, a lot of money fell down, which, of course, was connected in some way or other with the dog’s strange visit. Near the house is a lane still called Dog Lane, which is now the favourite walk of the black dog, and to this genius loci the sign is dedicated.

There was another notorious Black Dog next door to the Devil Tavern, the shop of Abel Roper, who printed and distributed the majority of the pamphlets and ballads that paved the way for the Revolution of 1688. He was the original printer of the famous ballad of “Lillibulero.” Whatever pleased the public, whether good or bad, he was always ready to provide and send into the world; he was also the editor of the newspaper called the Postman. In the beginning of the reign of Charles II. he lived “at the Sun, over against St Dunstan’s Church, in Fleet Street.”[272]

Tokens are extant of the Pied Dog in Seething Lane, 1667, a sign still frequently to be seen at the present day.

We very rarely meet with the Blue Dog; but there is an example in Grantham, and the sign occurs in a few other places.

Sometimes a peculiar breed is chosen, as the Setter Dog at Redford, Notts; the Pointer at Peckfield, Milford Junction; the Beagle at Shute, Axminster, and the Merry Harriers, common in hunting counties. Equally common is the Greyhound, particularly in the North country, where coursing has long been a favourite sport. In the seventeenth century, it was the sign of a fashionable tavern in London, for in a sprightly ballad in the Roxburgh collection,[273] a young gallant is introduced who is going to forsake his evil courses and turn over a new leaf. He gives a last farewell to all his doxies:

“Farewell unto black patches,
And farewell powder’d locks;”

and remembers all those delightfully wicked places he used to haunt formerly, and amongst them:

“Farewell unto the Greyhound,
And farewell to the Bell,
And farewell to my landlady,
Whom I do love so well.”

This was probably the same Greyhound mentioned by Machyn, which seems to have been situated in Fleet Street, where the gaudily dressed Spanish ambassador took his stirrup-cup before leaving London. The same author mentions the sign elsewhere, apparently in Westminster; and the little picture of manners which accompanies it is rather curious:—

“The viij day of January (1557) dyd ryd in a care in Westmynster the wyff of the Grayhound, and the Abbot’s servand was wypyd [whipped] becawse that he toke her owt of the car, at the care h—e, [the back of the cart.]”

—another example that the course of true love never does run smooth, even though it runs upon wheels.

The White Greyhound was the sign of John Harrison, in St Paul’s Churchyard, a bookseller who published some of Shakespeare’s early works, as “The Rape of Lucrece,” “Venus and Adonis,” &c. White greyhounds, or rather silver greyhounds, were, until eighty years ago, the badges worn on the arm by king’s messengers.

The sign of the Black Greyhound is also of frequent occurrence, and at Grantham there is a Blue Greyhound. Indeed, although Lincoln was formerly famous for green, it seems also to have taken a great fancy to blue, for there we find the Blue Bull and the Blue Cow, the Blue Dog, the Blue Fox, (all in Colsterworth,) besides the Blue Pig, the Blue Ram, in Grantham, which town can also boast of the unique sign of the Blue Man.

The Talbot—old and now almost obsolete term for a large kind of hunting dog—has acquired a literary celebrity from having been substituted for the old sign of the Tabard Inn in Southwark, whence the pilgrims started on their merry journey to Canterbury. In 1606, we find the Talbot the sign of Thomas Man, bookseller in Paternoster Row, which, however, at that time, was not such a book market as now, being occupied by “eminent mercers, silkmen, and lacemen; and their shops were so resorted unto by the nobility and gentry in their coaches, that ofttimes the street was so stopped up, that there was no passage for foot passengers.”[274] So it continued until the fire; and it was only in the middle of the last century that the booksellers began to make their appearance in it.

A Talbot Inn in the Strand is mentioned in the following very quaint advertisement:—

“TO BE SOLD, a fine Grey Mare, full fifteen hands high, gone after the hounds many times, rising six years and no more; moves as well as most creatures upon earth, as good a road mare as any in 10 counties and 10 to that; trots at a confounded pace; is from the country, and her owner will sell her for nine guineas; if some folks had her she would fetch near three times the money. I have no acquaintance, and money I want, and a service in a shop to carry parcels or to be in a gentleman’s service. My father gave me the mare to get rid of me, and to try my fortune in London, and I am just come from Shropshire, and I can be recommended, as I suppose nobody takes servants without, and have a voucher for my mare. Enquire for me at the Talbot Inn near the New Church at the Strand.

“A. R.”[275]

At the foot of Burdley’s Hill, Gloucester, there is a Talbot Inn, which has a sign painted with two inscriptions; at the side where the road is level, it says:—

“Before you do this hill go up,
Stop and drink a cheerful cup.”

On the side of the hill it says:

“You’re down the hill, all danger’s past,
Stop and drink a cheerful glass.”

A publican at Odell has chosen the Mad Dog for a sign, evidently his beau ideal of a “jolly fellow,” one having a great horror for water; another at Pidley, Hunts, not to be behindhand with the Mad Dog, has put up the Mad Cat. We have as odd and apparently as unmeaning a sign in Tabernacle Walk, namely, the Barking Dogs.

All the combinations of the sign of the Dog point towards sports, as the Dog and Bear, which was very common in the seventeenth century, when bear-baiting was in fashion, and kings and queens countenanced it by their presence. The Dog and Duck refers to another barbarous pastime, when ducks were hunted in a pond by spaniels. The pleasure consisted in seeing the duck make her escape from the dog’s mouth by diving. It was much practised in the neighbourhood of London till the beginning of this century, when it went out of fashion, as most of the ponds were gradually built over. One of the most notorious Dog and Duck Taverns stood in St George’s Fields, where Bethlem Hospital now stands; it had a long room with tables and benches, and an organ[276] at the upper end. In its last days it was frequented only by thieves, prostitutes, and other low characters. After a long and wicked existence it was at length put down by the magistrates. In the seventeenth century it was famous for springs, but already in Garrick’s time its reputation was very equivocal:

“St George’s Fields, with taste and fashion struck,
Display Arcadia at the Dog and Duck,
And Drury Misses, here in tawdry pride,
Are there “Pastoras” by the fountain side;
To frowsy bowers they reel through midnight damps,
With Fauns half drunk and Dryads breaking lamps.”[277]

In an unpublished paper from the MS. collection of William Hone, we have a mention of it:—

“It was a very small public-house till Hedger’s mother took it, who had been a barmaid to a tavern-keeper in London, who left this house to her at his death. Her son Hedger then was a postboy to a yard I believe at Epsom, and came to be master there. After making a good deal of money he left the house to his nephew, one Miles, (though it still went in Hedger’s name,) who was to allow him £1000 per annum out of the profits, and it was he that allowed the house to acquire so bad a character that the licence was taken away. I have this from one William Nelson who was servant to old Mrs Hedger, and remembers the house before he had it. He is now [1826] in the employ of the Lamb Street Water Works Company, and has been for thirty years. In particular, there never was any duck hunting since he knew the Gardens. Therefore, if ever, it must have been in a very early time indeed. Hedger, I am told, was the first person who sold the mineral water, (whence the St George’s Spa.) In 1787, when Hedger applied for a renewal of his licence, the magistrates of Surrey refused, and the Lord Mayor came into Southwark and held a court and granted the licence, in despite of the magistrates, which occasioned a great disturbance and litigation in the law courts.”

The old stone sign is still preserved, embedded in the brick wall of the garden of Bethlehem Hospital, visible from the road, and representing a dog squatted on his haunches, with a duck in his mouth, and the date 1617.

Another famous Dog and Duck inn formerly stood on the site of Hertford Street, in the now aristocratic precincts of May Fair. It was an old-fashioned wooden public-house, extensively patronised by the butchers and other rough characters during May Fair time. The pond in which the cruel sport took place was situated behind the house, and for the benefit of the spectators was boarded round to the height of the knee, to preserve the over-excited spectators from involuntary immersions. The pond was surrounded by a gravel walk shaded with willow trees.

The Dog and Badger, Kingswood, Gloucester, refers to the now obsolete sport of badger-baiting. More genial sports, however, are called to mind by the Dog and Gun, Dog and Partridge, Dog and Pheasant, all of which are very common.

“As I was going through a street of London, where I never had been till then, I felt a general clamp and faintness all over me, which I could not tell how to account for, till I chanced to cast my eyes upwards and found that I was passing under a signpost on which the picture of a cat was hung.” This little incident of the cat-hater, told in No. 538 of the Spectator, is a proof of the presence of cats on the signboard, where, indeed, they are still to be met with, but very rarely. There is a sign of the Cat at Egremont, in Cumberland, a Black Cat at St Leonard’s Gate, Lancaster, and a Red Cat at Birkenhead. There is also a sign of the Red Cat in the Hague, Holland, and “thereby hangs a tale.” It was put up by a certain Bertrand, a Frenchman, who had left his native country, having been mixed up in some conspiracy against Mazarin. Arrived at the Hague, he opened a cutler’s shop, and put up a double sign, representing on the one side a red cat, on the other a portrait of his Eminence Cardinal Mazarin in his red gown, and with his bristling moustache; underneath he wrote “aux deux méchantes bêtes” (the two obnoxious animals.) Holland, however, was at peace with France at that time, and so the Burgomaster, afraid of offending the French ambassador, requested Bertrand to alter his sign. Mazarin’s face was then painted out and another red cat put in its place. Gradually as the first sign was forgotten, the name became unmeaning, and was finally altered into the Red Cat, and in this shape it has come down to the present day, still the sign of a cutler, and a descendant of Bertrand.[278]

The Cat and Lion, which we meet with sometimes, as at Stockport, was probably at one time the Tiger and Lion. It is occasionally accompanied by the following elegant distich:—

“The lion is strong, the cat is vicious,
My ale is strong, and so is my liquors.”

The Cat and Parrot was, in 1612, the sign of Thomas Pauer, a bookseller, dwelling near the Royal Exchange. At Santry, near Dublin, and in some other places, we meet with the Cat and Cage, which is represented by a cat trying to pull a bird out of a cage; but its origin may be found in the Cat in the Basket, a favourite sign of the booths on the Thames when that river was frozen over in 17

39

40

. The sign was a living one, a basket hanging outside the booth, with a cat in it. It was revived when the river was again frozen in 1789, and seems to have had many imitators, for on a print[279] representing a view of the river at Rotherithe during the frost, there is a booth with a merry company within, whose sign, inscribed the Original Cat in the Cage, represents poor Tabby in a basket. This sign of the Cat in the Basket, or in the Cage, doubtless originated from the cruel game, once practised by our ancestors, of shooting at a cat in a basket. Brand, in his “Popular Superstitions,” gives a quotation, from which it appears that a similar cruel sport was still practised at Kelso in 1789; but instead of shooting at the cat, it was placed in a barrel, the bottom of which had to be beaten out. The same game is still practised in Holland, and generally, if not always, on the ice.

[196] J. Bossewell, Workes of Armourie, London, 1597, p. 97.

[197] “Allectorius is a stone similar to a dark crystal, which is taken from the stomach of a capon when it is four years old. Its utmost size is that of a bean. Gladiators take it in their mouths in order to be invincible, and not to suffer from thirst.”—Tractatus de Animalibus et Lapidibus, 4to, circa 1465-75.

[198] Guillim’s Display of Heraldry. The same is also related in the Latin Bestiarium. Harl. MSS. 4751; and by Albertus Magnus, Camerarius, &c.

[199] “Boyne’s and Akerman’s Trades Tokens of the 17th Century,” in England, Ireland, and Wales.

[200] Steward’s Accounts of Sir John Howard.

[201] See Cunningham’s London Past and Present, p. 41.

[202] Burnet’s History of the Reformation, Lib. ii., vol. ii., p. 14. It is possible also that the White Bear was set up in compliment to Anne, daughter of the Earl of Warwick, queen to Richard III., who, as a difference from her father’s bear and ragged staff, had adopted the White Bear as a badge.

[203] Timbs’s Flyleaves.

[204] Bagford, who was present at the excavations, relates this story in a letter prefixed to Leland’s Collectanea, p. lxiii., 1770. See also Sir John Oldcastle.

[205] “Lambspring, das ist ein herzlichen Teutscher Tractat von Philosophischen Steine, welchen für Jahren ein adelicher Teutscher Philosophus, Lampert Spring geheissen mit schöne Figuren beschrieben hat. Frankfort am Main, 1625.”

[206] “This is a great wonder, and very strange: the dragon contains the greatest medicament.”

[207] “Mercury rightly precipitated or sublimated in its own water dissolved and again coagulated.”

[208] “There is a dragon lives in the forest who has no want of poison: when he sees the sun or fire he spits venom, which flies about fearfully. No living animal can be cured of it; even the basilisk does not equal him. He who can properly kill this serpent has overcome all his danger. His colours increase in death; physic is produced from his poison, which he entirely consumes, and eats his own venomous tail. This must be accomplished by him in order to produce the noblest balm. Such great virtue as will point out herein that all the learned shall rejoice.”

[209] Bossewell, Workes of Armourie, p. 61.

[210] Allusions to the unicorn occur frequently in the Old Testament, and commentators inform us that these references were typical of the coming Saviour.

[211] “It is reported that the unicorn’s horn sweats when it comes in the presence of poison, and that for this reason it is laid on the tables of the great, and made into knife-handles, which, when placed on the tables, show the presence of poison. But this is not sufficiently proved.”—Albertus Magnus, De Animalibus, lib. xxv.

[212] Bib. Harl. 5953, vol. i., p. 403.

[213] Relation of the Island of England, published by the Camden Society.

[214] See Bib. Harl. 5953, vol. i., p. 407.

[215] Hentzner’s Travels, p. 54.

[216] Henry Peacham’s Compleat Gentleman.

[217] Fuller’s Worthies, voce Middlesex.

[218] “It is rather peculiar that the same superstitious notions should be found in India in connexion with the horn of the rhinoceros, whom some consider as the fabled unicorn divested of his romantic garb. His horn, too, was thought useful in diseases, and for the purpose of discovering poisons.”—Calmet’s Dictionary of the Bible. “The fine shavings were supposed to cure convulsions and spasms in children. Goblets made of these would discover a poisonous draught that was poured into them, by making the liquor ferment till it ran quite out of the goblet.”—Thunberg’s Journey to Caffraria.

[219] Daily Courant, February 2, 1711.

[220] “This is the Civet, as you may see; but enter. Perfumes sold here for men and women.”

[221] The reason why the hedgehog was generally represented with apples stuck on his quills, appears from the following words in Bossewell, (p. 61,)—“He clymeth upon a vine or an apple-tree and biteth off their braunches and twigges, and when they [the apples] be fallen downe, he waloweth on them, and so they sticke on his prickes, and he beareth them unto a hollow tree or some other hole.” The early naturalists also said that if, when he was so loaded, one of the apples happened to drop off, he would throw all the others down in anger and return to the tree for a new load.

[222] Harl. MSS. 353, fol. 145.

[223] London Gazette, No. 368.

[224] London Gazette, Sept. 18-21, 1682. I am confident the newspapers made a misprint, and that the man’s name was Haase, Dutch or German, for the Hare he represented on his sign.

[225] Hone’s Every-Day Book, Oct. 17, fol. 1.

[226] Rev. J. Richardson, LL.B., Recollections of the Last Half Century. See also under Stunning Joe Banks in the Slang Dictionary, recently issued by the publisher of this work.

[227] Gentleman’s Magazine, March 1842.

[228] See under Religious Signs.

[229] London Gazette, Oct. 2-6, 1673.

[230] Childe Harold, canto I. lxx.

[231] Hone’s Every Day Book, Jan. 17, vol. ii.

[232]

“I wear horns, which everybody sees,
But many a one wears horns and does not know it.”

[233] Bagford Bills. Bib. Harl. 5962.

[234] Postman, February 1-3, 1711.

[235] Richardsoniana, p. 168.

[236] Timbs, Curiosities of London, p. 402.

[237] As quoted by Strutt in “Gliggam,” &c.

[238] Printed in Leland’s Collectanea, pp. 270, 272.

[239] A MS. of the sixteenth century, Bib. Harl. 2150, fol. 356, gives full particulars of this fête and procession.

[240]

“At the White Horse, horses are shod with iron,
Pity the same cannot be done to men, for then they would need no shoes.”

[241] Crowns exactly similar to this, made of box, tinsel, and coloured paper, are yearly hung out by the fishmongers in Holland on the first arrival of the salt herring after the summer fishery.

[242] Pennant’s Account of London, p. 423.

[243] Gentleman’s Magazine, March 1842; and London Gazette, Dec. 30, 1718.

[244] Lloyd’s Evening Post, Jan. 16-19, 1761.

[245] Brand’s Popular Superstitions.

[246] Robert Herrick, Hesperides, p. 234.

[247] Aubrey, Anecdotes and Traditions, p. 3.

[248] Postman, June 1703.

[249] Intelligencer, May 30, 1681.

[250] Bagford Bills. Bib. Harl. 5964.

[251] Hence we have 7 ages, 7 churches, 7 champions, 7 penitential psalms, 7 sleepers of Ephesus, 7 years’ apprenticeship, 7 cardinal virtues and deadly sins, 7 make a gallows-ful, boots of 7 leagues, 7 liberal arts, and innumerable other instances.

[252] Collier’s Annals, vol. iii. p. 271, and Halliwell’s Introduction to Tarlton’s Jests, p. 16.

[253] Spectator, No. 509.

[254] “He went about almost naked in the rage of hunger,” says Dr Johnson, “and finding a gentleman in a neighbouring coffeehouse asked him for a shilling; and Otway going away bought a roll and was choked with the first mouthful.”

[255] Lewis’s Islington, p. 160.

[256] The History of the Plague, by Defoe.

[257] There is still a Bull’s Head public-house in this street, built on the site of the house of Thomas Britton, the Musical Small-Coal Man, where he gave his celebrated concerts for a period of 36 years, powdered duchesses and fastidious ladies of the Court tripping through his coal repository, and climbing up a ladder to assist at these famous meetings.

[258] Randolph’s Muses’ Looking-Glass.

[259] This riding in a cart was a very ancient punishment, probably introduced by the Normans; in the romance of Lancelot du Lac the cart is mentioned with the following remarks:—“At that time a cart was considered so vile that nobody ever went into it, but those who had lost all honour and good name; and when a person was to be degraded, he was made to ride in a cart, for a cart served at that time for the same purpose as the pillory now-a-days, and each town had only one of them.” In the old English laws it was called the Tumbrill; thus Edward I. in 1240 enacted a law by which millers stealing corn were to be chastised by the Tumbrill.—See Fabian’s Chronicles, 2 Edw. I.

[260] For the chequered life of this strange individual, see Caulfield’s Memoirs of Remarkable Persons, vol. ii. From the Original Weekly Journal, Sept. 13, 1718, we gather the information that, “Last week Dr Campbell, the famous dumb fortune-teller, was married to a gentlewoman of considerable fortune in Shadwell.”

[261] A curious story of Bulleyn Butchered, the sign said to have been put up in commemoration of Henry VIII.’s unfortunate queen, and its corrupted form of Bull and Butcher will be found in the first division of this work. Vide Historical Signs.

[262] “Be happy while you live.”

[263] M. Misson’s Memoirs and Observations on his Travels in England, 1719.

[264] Tom Brown’s Amusements for the Meridian of London, 1700.

[265] From a MS., entitled “Medycine Boke” of one Samson Jones, doctor of Bettws, Monmouthshire, 1650-90; a note on the flyleaf says, “I had this book from Mr Owen of Bettws, Monmouth. He assured me he knew for a fact it was the receipt booke of Samson Jones, a good doctor of that parish, a hundred and fifty years agone.” It contains some extraordinary prescriptions. Surely if Master Samson Jones made use of them, the earth must very quickly have hidden his blunders.

[266] London Gazette, Nov. 10-13, 1673.

[267] Idem, March 24-28, 1761.

[268] Public Advertiser, March 4, 1759.

[269] Postman, Feb. 13, 1711.

[270] See under Humorous Signs, further on.

[271] See under Humorous Signs, further on.

[272] Kingdom’s Intelligencer, March 30 to April 6, 1683.

[273] The Merry Man’s Resolution, or his last farewell to his former acquaintance. Rox Ball. iii. f. 242.

[274] Strype, B. iii. p. 195.

[275] Public Advertiser, March 1759.

[276] Organs were first introduced in taverns during the Commonwealth. When the liturgy and the use of organs in Divine service were abolished, these instruments being removed from churches, were set up in inns and taverns. Hence a pamphlet of 1659 has these words:—“They have translated the organs out of their churches and set them up in taverns, chaunting their dithyrambics and bestial Bacchanalias to the tune of those instruments which were wonted to assist them in the celebration of God’s praises.”

[277] Garrick’s Prologue to the Maid of the Oaks, 1774.

[278] La Haye, par de Fonseca. 1853.

[279] Crowle Pennant, vol. viii.

CHAPTER V.
BIRDS AND FOWLS

Thomas Coryatt, a gentleman from Somerset, who travelled over a great part of Europe in the reign of King James I., and wrote an amusing account of his travels, gives a curious instance of the prevalence of signs in Paris representing birds. Speaking of the bridges over the Seine, he says one of them is “the Bridge of Birdes, formerly called the Millar’s Bridge. The reason why it is called the Bridge of Birdes is because all the signes belonging unto shops on each side of the streete are signes of birdes.”[280] They never were so general in England, though certainly the Cock and the Swan appear to have found more votaries than any other signboard animals. The Eagle is not nearly so common; some we have mentioned in a former part as undoubtedly of heraldic origin. From this source the Golden Eagle may be derived; it was the emblem of the Eastern Empire, and occurs in various family arms; but it is also a fera naturæ. It was, in 1711, the sign of James Levi, a bookseller in the Strand, near the Fountain Tavern. The Eagle and Ball, of which there are two in Birmingham, was suggested by the imperial eagle standing on the globe, or the spread eagle with the globe in his talon. The Eagle and Serpent, or the Eagle and Snake, is a mediæval emblem of courage united to prudence.

Mythical birds also have been in great favour. The burning and reviving of the Phœnix, for instance, like the salamander and the dragon, typified certain transformations obtained by chemistry, whence he was a very general sign with chemists, and may still be seen on their drug-pots and transparent lamps. The firm of Godfrey and Cooke, for instance, have adhered to it ever since the opening of their establishment, A.D. 1680. Persons of a highly imaginative turn will probably shudder to think of the awful quantities of physic prepared by this house in those 184 years. The pills, if piled up like cannon-balls, would make pyramids higher than those of Gizeh; the draughts would be sufficient to cover the earth with a nauseous deluge; and the powders, if blown about by an evil wind, levelling valleys and mountains, would change the whole of Europe into a medicated desert. The original shop referred to by the date 1680 stood in Southampton Street, and there phosphorus was first manufactured by the predecessor of this firm, Hanckwitz, a Pole or Russian by birth, who advertised it wholesale at 50s., and retail at £3 the ounce. Ambrose Godfrey was his successor.

Not only apothecaries used this emblem, but all kinds of shops adopted it. In the time of James I. it was the sign of one of the places where plays were acted in Drury Lane,—sometimes also called the Cockpit Theatre. This was destroyed by the unruly apprentices during one of their saturnalia. Being rebuilt, it was sacked a second time by the Parliamentary soldiers. In Charles II.’s piping times of peace Killigrew’s troop of “the king’s servants” played in it, until they removed to the theatre in Lincoln’s Inn.

The character ascribed to the Pelican was fully as fabulous as that of the Phœnix. From a clumsy, gluttonous, piscivorous water-bird, it was transformed into a mystic emblem of Christ, whom Dante calls “nostro Pellicano.” St Hieronymus gives the story of the pelican restoring its young ones destroyed by serpents, as an illustration of the destruction of man by the old serpent, and his salvation by the blood of Christ. The “Bestiarium,” in the Royal Library at Brussels, says:—

“Phisiologus dist del Pellican qu’il aime moult ses oiseles et quant ils sont nés et creu ils s’esbanoient en lor ni contre lor pere et le fierent de lors eles en ventilant ensi come il li vont entor et tant le fierent qu’ils le blechent es ex. Et lors les refiert li peres et les occit. Et la mere est de tel nature que ele vient al ni al tierc jor et s’accoste sor ses oiselès mors et ell oevre son costé de son bec et en espant son sanc sor ses oiseles et ensi les resucite de mort; car li oiseles par nature rechoivent le sang si toit come il saut de la mere et le boivent.”[281]

In the Armory of Birds by Skelton, a similar notion is expressed:

“Than sayd the Pellycane,
When my Byrdts be slayne,
With my Bloude I them reuyue,
Scrypture doth record
The same dyd our Lord,
And rose from deth to lyue.”

There is still an old stone carving of the Pelican walled in the front of a house in Aldermanbury, and as a sign the bird appears to be a great favourite at the present day. An anecdote is told of Jekyl’s dissatisfaction at the prices at the Pelican Inn, Speenham Land, and of his writing the following epigram upon the same:—

“The Pelican at Speenhamland,
That stands below the hill,
May well be called the Pelican,
From his enormous bill.”

Longfellow made a similar epigram on the Raven Inn at Zurich:—

“Beware of the raven of Zurich,
’Tis a bird of omen ill,
With a noisy and unclean breast,
And a very, very long bill.”

It is amusing to see how wit runs in the same channel. In “Scrapeana, a Collection of Anecdotes, 1792,” a similar anecdote is fathered upon Foote. “Pray what is your name?” said Foote to the Master of the Castle Inn at Salthill. “Partridge, sir!”—“Partridge! it should be Woodcock by the length of your bill!”

But the coincidence is most amusing in the case of Longfellow. It is observed by a contributor to Notes and Queries,[282] that the verses may be a plagiarism; at any rate they have a strange family resemblance to the following, said to have been written by a commercial traveller on an inside window shutter of the Golden Lion, Brecon, kept by a Mr Longfellow, alias Tom Longfellow:—

“Tom Longfellow’s name is most justly his due,
Long his neck, long his bill, which is very long too;
Long the time ere your horse to the stable is led,
Long before he’s rubbed down, and much longer till fed.
Long indeed may you sit in a comfortless room,
Till from kitchen, long dirty, your dinners shall come.
Long the often-told tale that your host will relate,
Long his face while complaining how long people eat,
Long may Longfellow long ere he see me again,
Long ’twill be ere I long for Tom Longfellow’s inn.”

And long, doubtless, was his face when he read the above.

The Raven, or the Black Raven, is still a common inn sign. There is one in Bishopsgate yet in existence, of which trades tokens of the seventeenth century are extant; and on the Great Western Road between Murrell Green and Basingstoke, the Raven Inn is still, or was not many years ago, to be seen, in which Jack the painter, alias James Aitken, the man who set fire to Portsmouth Dockyard, Dec. 7, 1776, was taken prisoner. This house was built in 1653, and has preserved much of its original appearance. In 1711 the Raven or the Black Raven was the sign of S. Popping, bookseller in Paternoster Row; and about the same time John Dunton published at the Black Raven, in the Poultry, the earliest printed review of literary works, under the name of “Literature from the North, and News from all Nations.” What the work was worth we may judge from D’Israeli’s description of the man: “a crack-brained, scribbling bookseller, who boasted he had a thousand projects, fancied he had methodised six hundred, and was ruined by the fifty he executed.” Notwithstanding this, his autobiography, under the name of the “Life and Errors of John Dunton,” is one of the most curious works in existence. In Molesworth Street, Dublin, there is a sign of the Three Ravens, which may be called a living sign, for there are always some ravens kept on the premises. The Raven was the badge of the old Scotch kings, and thus may have been adopted as a kind of Jacobite symbol. To this may be attributed its frequency on the signboard as well as some other sable birds. The common occurrence of the Blackbird and the Cock and Blackbird as signs had long puzzled us, till one day turning over some old Scotch ballads we came upon one, which Allan Ramsay gives as a favourite old Scotch song. We shall merely quote the first two stanzas, (there are six in all,)—quite sufficient, as far as the poetry is concerned:—

“Upon a fair morning for soft recreation,
I heard a fair lady was making her moan,
With sighing and sobbing, and sad lamentation,
Saying, my blackbird most royal is flown.”
My thoughts they deceive me,
Reflections do grieve me,
And am o’erburthen’d with sad misery.
Yet if death should blind me,
As true love inclines me,
My blackbird I’ll seek out wherever he be.

“Once in fair England my blackbird did flourish,
He was the chief blackbird that in it did spring,
Prime ladies of honour his person did nourish,
Because he was the true son of a king.
But since that false fortune,
Which still is uncertain,
Has caused this parting between him and me,
His name I’ll advance,
In Spain and in France,
And I’ll seek out my blackbird wherever he be.”

To which dark-haired prince of the Stuart family the song alludes is not known; but there is a passage in a letter of Sir John Hinton, physician to Charles II., which seems to imply that the black boy was a nickname for Charles II.

“The day before General Monk went into Scotland he dined with me; and after dinner he called me into the next room, and after some discourse, taking a lusty glass of wine, he drank a health to his bonny black boy, (as he called Your Majesty,) and whispered to me, that if ever he had power, he would serve Your Majesty to the utmost of his life.”[283]

What lends strength to the supposition is the occurrence of such a sign as the Crow in the Oak, at Foleshill, Coventry, which seems to have been a covert way of representing the royal oak during the times of the Commonwealth, the disguise continuing after there was no more need of it, similar to the “Cat and Wheel,” and other signs dating from the same period, for no other reason than because the house had become known by them. In the same manner the Oak and Black Dog, (at Stretton on Dunsmoor,) if not a combination of two signs, may have been put up in derision of the Prince in the Royal Oak. The Crow or the Black Crow, is also a common sign; so are the Three Blackbirds;[284] then there is the Chough, at Chard in Sommerset, the Three Choughs at Yeovil; the Three Crows,—all of which belong to the same family, and seem to have the same origin.

On Friday, August 27, 1770, at the Three Crows in Brook Street, Holborn, the coroner sat on the body of Thomas Chatterton, and the ten jurymen returned a verdict of felo de se. One cannot think of this sign and the crowner (as the vulgar still term this officer) sitting on the body of poor Chatterton without calling to mind the ballad of the three corbies; but the poor suicide had no “fallow doe” that

“buried him before the prime,
And was dead herself ere even-song time.”

He was interred in the burying ground of Shoelane workhouse; at the present day Farringdon market-place occupies the spot.

The Stork now is of frequent occurrence, although it does not occur among the older English signs. Coryatt thus speaks of these birds:—

“There, [at Fontainebleau] I saw two or three birds that I never saw before; yet I have much read of admirable things of them, in Aelianus the Polyhistor, and other historians, even Storckes, which do much haunt many cities and towns of the Netherlands, especially in the sommer. For in Flushing, a towne of Zeland, I saw some of them, those men esteeming themselves happy in [on] whose houses they harbour, and those most unhappy whom they forsake. It is written of them that when the old one is become so old that it is not able to helpe itselfe, the young one purveyeth foode for it, and sometime carryeth it about on his backe, and if it seeth it so destitute of meate, that it knoweth not where to get any sustenance, it casteth out that which it hath eaten the day before, to the end to feede his damme. This bird is called in Greeke πελαργος where hence cometh the Greeke word αντιπελαργειν which signifieth to imitate the stork in cherishing our parents.”[285]

This fabled virtue of the stork suggested the sign to many Continental booksellers and printers. The Two Storks was the sign of Martin Nutius of Antwerp, 1550, and his son, Philip Nutius. Their colophons, which were varied continually, all represent a young stork feeding an old one, sometimes carrying him on his back, with the motto: “pietas homini . tutissima . virtus.” A similar sign was used, circa 1682, by Franciscus Canisius; and, in 1651, by Joan. Bapt. Verdussen, both of Antwerp. The Parisian booksellers adopted it as well, for we find it on the titlepages of Sebastien Nivelle, and of Sebastien Cramoisy, the king’s printer, of the Rue St Jacques, 1636. He used a Scripture motto with it: “honora patrem tuum et matrem tuam ut sis longaevus super terram, Ecc. XX.” In the Banks’ Collection of Bills there is one of the Stork Hotel at Basle, of the end of the last century. It gives the address in four languages. The English stands thus:—Christophe Imhoff, “a the Seigne off the Storgk at Basel.”

The Three Cranes was formerly a favourite London sign. With the usual jocularity of our forefathers, an opportunity for punning could not be passed, so instead of the three cranes, which in the vintry used to lift the barrels of wine, three birds were represented. The Three Cranes in Thames Street, or in the vicinity, was a famous tavern as early as the reign of James I. It was one of the taverns frequented by the wits in Ben Jonson’s time. In one of his plays he says:—

“A pox o’ these pretenders to wit, your Three Cranes, Mitre and Mermaid men! not a corn of true salt, not a grain of right mustard among them all!”—Bartholomew Fair, a. i. s. 1.

On the 23d of January 166

1

2

, Pepys suffered a strong mortification of the flesh in having to dine at this tavern with some poor relations. The sufferings of the snobbish secretary must have been intense:—

“By invitation to my uncle Fenner’s and where I found his new wife, a pitiful, old, ugly, ill-bred woman in a hatt, a midwife. Here were many of his and as many of her relations, sorry mean people; and after choosing our gloves we all went over to the Three Cranes Taverne, and though the best room of the house in such a narrow dogghole we were crammed, and I believe we were near 40, that it made me loath my company and victuals and a very poor dinner it was too.”

Opposite this tavern people generally left their boats to shoot the bridge, walking round to Billingsgate, where they would re-enter them.

The Cock occurs almost as frequently on the signboard as alive at the head of his family in the farm yard. It is one of the oldest signs, already in use at the time of the Romans, who record that one Eros, a freeman of Licius, Africanus Cerealis, kept an inn at Narbonne at the sign of the Cock—“a gallo gallinaceo.” In Christian times the sign acquired a new prestige. The cock is thus mentioned in “The Armory of Byrdes:”—[286]

“The Cocke dyd say
I use alway
To crow both first and last.
Lyke a Postle I am,
For I preche to Man,
And tell hym the nyght is past.

“I bring new tydynges
That the Kyng of all Kynges,
In tactu profudit chorus:
Then sang he mellodious
Te Gloriosus
Apostolorum chorus.”

This bird, in the legends of the middle ages, was surrounded with a mystical, religious halo:—

“It was about the time of cock-crowing when our Saviour was born,—the circumstance of the time of cock-crowing being so natural a figure and representation of the Morning of the Resurrection; the Night as shadowing out the night of the Grave; the third Watch being as some suppose the time our Saviour will come to judgment at; the noise of the cock awakening sleepy man and telling him as it were the night is far spent, and the day is at hand, representing so naturally the voice of the Archangel awakening the dead and calling up the righteous to everlasting day; so naturally does the time of cock-crowing shadow out these things, that probably, some good, well meaning men might have been brought to believe that the very devils themselves when the cock crew and reminded them of them did fear and tremble and shun the light.”[287]

Ideas such as these continued a long time in the popular mind, for Aubrey tells us that in his younger days people “had some pious ejaculation too when the cock did crow, which put them in mind of ye Trumpet at ye Resurrection.”[288]

One of the oldest Cock taverns in London is the Cock in Tothill Street, Westminster, lately re-christened as the Cock and Tabard. An ancient coat of arms, carved in stone, England quartered with France, discovered in this house, is now walled up in the front of the building. In the back parlour is a jolly, bluff-looking man in a red coat, said to represent the driver of the first mail to Oxford, which started from this tavern. Tradition says that the workmen employed at the building of Westminster Abbey, in the reign of Henry VII., used to receive their wages at this house. It was formerly entered by steps; the building now exhibiting traces of great antiquity, and appears at one time to have been a house of considerable pretensions. The rafters and timber are principally of cedar wood. There is a curious hiding-place on the staircase, and a massive carving of Abraham about to offer his son Isaac; and another, in wood, representing the Adoration of the Magi, said to have been left in pledge, at some remote period, for an unpaid score. The cock may have been adopted as a sign here on account of the vicinity of the Abbey, of which St Peter was the patron, for in the middle ages a cock crowing on the top of a pillar was often one of the accessories in a picture of the apostle. This certainly was a very unkind allusion for the poor saint, particularly when accompanied with such a sneering rhyme as that under the sign of the Red Cock in Amsterdam in 1682. On the one side was written:—

“Doe de Haan begost te kraayen
Toen begost Petrus te schraayen.”

On the reverse:—

“De haan die kraait niet by ongeval
Vraagt Petrus die ’t U zeggen zal.”[289]

The Cock in Bow Street witnessed a disgraceful scene in the reign of Charles II.:—

“Sackville, who was then Lord Buckhurst, with Sir Charles Sedley and Sir Thomas Ogle, got drunk at the Cock, in Bow Street, by Covent Garden, and going into the balcony, exposed themselves to the public, in very indecent postures. At last, as they grew warmer, Sedley stood forth naked, and harangued the populace in such profane language, that the public indignation was awakened. The crowd attempted to force the door, and being repulsed, drove in the performers with stones, and broke the windows of the house. For this demeanour they were indicted, and Sedley was fined £500. What was the sentence of the others is not known. Sedley employed Killigrew and another to procure a remission of the king, but (mark the friendship of the dissolute!) they begged the fine for themselves and exacted it to the last groat.”[290]

It was on his way home from supper at this house, December 21, 1670, that Sir John Coventry was attacked by several men, and had his nose cut to the bone. Sir John had remonstrated in the House of Commons against the improper distribution of public money, and proposed to lay a tax on the theatres; this was opposed by the Court, the players being “the king’s servants and a part of his pleasure;” upon which Sir John asked “whether the king’s pleasure lay among the men or among the women that acted?” The assault was committed by Simon Parry, Miles Reeves, O’Brian, and Sir Thomas Sandys, instigated by the Duke of Monmouth.

Pepys much praises the Cock in Suffolk Street:—

“15th March 1669.—Mr Hewes and I did walke to the Cocke, at the end of Suffolke Street, where I never was, a great ordinary mightily cried up, and there bespoke a pullet, which, while dressing, he and I walked into St James’s Park, and thence back and dined very handsome with a good soup and a pullet for 4s. 6d. the whole.”

This first visit evidently had given great satisfaction, for, three weeks after, he took Mrs P. and some friends there, and was, as usual, “mighty merry, this house being famous for good meat, and particularly pease porridge.”

At the same period there was another celebrated Cock Tavern in Fleet Street, near Temple Bar, properly called the Cock and Bottle, a sign still of daily occurrence, which seems to be a figurative rendering of liquor on draught and in bottle, cock being an old English, and still provincial word for the spigot or tap in a barrel.[291] The sign is, however, generally represented by a cock standing on a bottle. The present sign of the house, still conspicuous in gilt over the door, is said to have been carved by no less a hand than Grinling Gibbons. During the plague time of 1665, the following advertisement appeared in the Intelligencer:—

“THIS is to certify that the Master of the Cock and Bottle, commonly called the Cock alehouse, at Temple Bar, hath dismissed his servants and shut up his house for this long vacation, intending (God willing) to return at Michaelmass next so that all persons who have any accounts or farthings belonging to the said house are desired to repair thither before the 8th of this instant July and they shall receive satisfaction.”

Certainly those were dull times, and well might that fashionable establishment close for the “long vacation,” for the plague was then coming to its highest pitch; all the gallant customers had fled town, and according to Defoe’s computation, “not less than 10,000 houses were forsaken of the inhabitants in the city and suburbs:”—

“There was not so much velvet stirring as would have bene a cover to a little booke in octavo, or seamde a Lieftenant’s Buff-doublet; a French hood would have been more wondered at in London, than the Polonyans with their long-tayld Gaberdynes; and, which was most lamentable, there was never a Gilt spur to be seene all the Strand over, never a feather wagging in all Fleet Streete, vnlesse some country Fore-horse came by, by meere chaunce with a Raine-beaten Feather in his costrill; the streete looking for all the world like a Sunday morning at six o’Clocke, three hours before service, and the Bells ringing all about London, as if the Coronation day had beene a half a yeare long.”[292]

But there was a good time coming after the plague and fire, when troops of gay courtiers might quaff their wine and sparkling ale, as happy as the “merry monarch” himself. Amongst them, our friend Pepys, who informs us, that on the 23d of April 1668, he went “by water to the Temple, and then to the Cock alehouse, and drank and eat a lobster, and sang, and mighty merry. So almost night, I carried Mrs Pierce home, and then Knipp and I to the Temple again and took boat, it being darkish, and to Foxhall, it being now night, and a bonfire burning at Lambeth for the king’s coronation day.”

Exactly one hundred years later, the Cock is named with encomiums on its porter, in the “Art of Living in London;” but it is to be hoped the porter was better than the poetry:—

“Nor think the Cock with these not on a par,
The celebrated Cock of Temple Bar,
Whose Porter best of all bespeaks its praise,
Porter that’s worthy of the Poet’s lays.”[293]

In William Waterproof’s Monologue, the fame of a waiter of this tavern is handed down to posterity in the harmonious verses of the Poet Laureate.

Jackson the pugilist, who has a pompous epitaph on his grave in the Brompton burial-ground, kept for some time the Cock alehouse, Sutton, on the Epsom Road; but being patronised by the Prince of Wales and a great many of the leading members of the “nobility and gentry,” he was in a very short time enabled to retire with a £10,000 fortune. Finally, some twenty years ago, there was a Cock and Bottle public-house in Bristol kept by a man named John England, who added to his sign the well known words:—

“England expects every man to do his duty.”

The sign of the Three Cocks occurs in the following advertisement:—

“ALL persons that have any Household Goods, Plate, Rings, Watches, Jewels, Wearing Apparel, etc., in the hands of Thomas Bastin, at the Three Cocks in St John’s Lane, Pawnbroker, which were pledged to him before the 25th of December 1709, are desired to fetch them away by the 25th of March next, or they will be disposed off.”—London Gazette, Jan. 18-21, 1711.

From this and innumerable other similar advertisements, it appears that pawnbrokers in those days did not always rigorously adhere to the Three Balls; that is to say, they were occasionally goldsmiths, and in that capacity used any sign.

It is rarely that the sign of the Cock designates any particular colour. There is a Black Cock in Owen Street, Tipton; a cock of this colour was always considered something more than an ordinary bird; with the Greeks it was a grateful sacrifice to Esculapius and Pluto, and in the middle ages it played a prominent part in matters of witchcraft. The Blue Cock is a sign at Leicester; but neither colour is common. At Hargrave, near Bury St Edmunds, there is a Cock’s Head, put up either in imitation of a nag’s,—bull’s,—bear’s,—or boar’s head, or as the crest of a fool’s cap, which, in old times, usually terminated with a cock’s head.

Though some sort of religious prestige may at first have prompted the choice of the cock, more profane ideas latterly contributed to make it popular, such as the pastimes of cock-throwing, or “shying,” and cock-fighting. To this first practice alludes the sign of William Brandon, on Dowgate Hill, which was called, Have at it; his token representing a man about to throw a stick at a cock. This cruel game was very common in alehouses in former times; the whole sport consisting in throwing a stick at an unfortunate cock tied to a stake; if the animal was killed it was the thrower’s property; if not, he forfeited the small sum paid for each “shy.” What a slaughter of cocks was carried on in this way may be judged from the following:—

“Last Tuesday a Brewer’s servant in Southwark took his walk round Towerhill, Moorfield, and Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and knocked down so many cocks that by selling them again, he returned home twenty shillings odd pence richer man than he came out.”[294]

Medals are extant of the reign of William III., on which John Bull is represented throwing sticks at the French cock: not a very lofty allegory, it must be confessed; but in those days the public taste was not very refined; thus, after the victory of Blenheim, the simile was in equal bad taste, the same idea being expressed by a huge lion tearing an unfortunate cock in pieces.

Cock-fighting was a favourite diversion with the Romans, and we find continual traces of it during their occupation here. Fitz-Stephen says, it was the sport of schoolboys in his time; but as they grew up it seems the taste adhered to them. That sturdy bluebeard-king, Henry VIII., though always ready to chop off the heads of his subjects, felt his heart melt at the miseries of the cocks, and made edicts against cock-fights, yet with the inconsistency that marked his other tastes built a cock-pit unto himself at Whitehall. James I., also, was a great amateur. Though habitually suppressed by various sovereigns, the evil would always break out again, till it was finally abolished by an Act of Parliament in the 12 & 13 Queen Victoria. In Staffordshire, and other counties where this sport is still practised “on the sly,” the Fighting Cocks is a favourite sign.

The cock occurs in innumerable combinations with all kinds of heterogeneous objects, many of which seem merely selected for their oddity: among the most explicable is the Cock and Bottle, of which we have offered a solution, (p. 207) and which again occurs in the following title:—

“Just Published,

“A full account of the Life and Visions of Nicholas Hart who has every year in his Life past, on the 5th of August, fall’n into a Deep Sleep and cannot be awaked till 5 Days and Nights are expired, and then gives a surprising Relation of what he hath seen in the other World. Taken from[211] his own mouth in September last; after he had slept 5 days in St Bartholomew’s Hospital, the August before. By William Hill, of Lincoln’s Inn. The Truth of all which the said Nicholas Hart hath attested under his Hand, the 3d Day of August 1711, before several credible Witnesses, and declared his Readiness to take oath of the same. He began to sleepe as usual the 5th Day of this instant August 1711 at Mr Dixies at the Cock and Bottle in Little Britain. Entered according to Law. Printed for J. Baker, at the Black Boy, in Paternoster Row, price 2d.”[295]

This same book, under the title of “Life and Visions of William Hart, in which are particularly described the state of the Blessed Spirits in the Heavenly Canaan, and also a Description of the Condition of the Damned in a State of Punishment, etc., by Will. Hill, senior of Lincoln’s Inn, London,” is still sold as a chapbook by the “running stationers.” The Spectator did not believe in Nicholas Hart, and introduced the subject to the public with his usual humour in No. 191. Hart seems to have tested the truth of the proverb which says, that fortune comes whilst we are sleeping, for he certainly made more by sleeping than many others by waking. Stow tells a similar story of one William Foxley, potmaker to the mint, who slept full fourteen days and fifteen nights, and when he woke up “was in all points found as if he had slept but one night.”

The Cock and Trumpet is a common sign, typifying those ideas about the cock expressed on p. 205. This simile is constantly used by the poets; and most beautifully enlarged upon by Shakespeare:—

“The Cock that is the Trumpet of the morn,” &c.—Hamlet, a. i. sc. 1.

“And now the Cock, the morning’s trumpeter,
Play’d hunt’s up to the day-star to appear.”—Drayton.

“All the night shrill chaunticler,
Day’s Proclaiming Trumpeter,
Claps his wings and loudly cries,
Mortals, mortals, wake, arise.”—Nativity Hymn.[296]

The Cock and Bell, if not a simple combination of two signs, may be derived from a custom formerly practised in some parts of England, for boys to have cock-fights on Shrove Tuesday; the party whose cock won the most battles, was held victorious in the cock-pit, and gained the prize—a small silver bell suspended to the button of the victor’s hat, and worn for three successive Sundays. It is an old sign, and occurs on a Birchin Lane trades token between 1648 and 1672.

The Cock and Breeches originated in a favourite form of gilt gingerbread at Bartholomew Fair, although the very objectionable anecdote of Joe Miller concerning such a sign is generally believed to have had something to do with its origin.

The Cock and Bull is still frequently seen, but though the meaning of the phrase is well understood, neither its origin, nor the meaning of the two animals on the signboard, have as yet been properly explained. As we have no sound theory to offer, we shall abstain from entering on the subject, for fear of giving an illustration of what a cock-and-bull story is, rather than clearing up the mystery of the signboard. It occurs amongst the seventeenth century trades tokens.

The Cock and Dolphin was the sign of one of the London carriers’ inns:—

“James Nevil’s Coach to Hampstead comes to the Cock and Dolphin in Gray’s Inn Lane, in and out every day.”—De Laune’s Present State of London, 1681.

Hatton, in 1708, placed this inn “on the east side of Gray’s Inn Lane, near the middle.” At the present day it is a public-house sign in Kendal, Westmoreland. It is more likely to be a combination of two signs, than to refer to the French Cock and the Dolphin in the arms of the Dauphin. The same applies to the Cock and Anchor in Gateshead and Dublin; the Cock and Swan, and the Cock and Crown, both in Wakefield; and the Cock and Bear at Nuneaton; whilst the Cock and House in Norwich may originally have been the cocking-house of the district,—that is, the house where cock-fights were held.

Fully as general as the sign of the Cock is that of the Swan; the reason why, is perhaps truly, though coarsely, expressed under an old Dutch signboard:—

“De Swaan voert ieder kroeg, zoowel in dorp als stad,
Om dat hy altyd graag is met de bek in ’t nat.”[297]

Not only is there a conformity of æsthetic symbolism in various parts of Europe, observable in the constant recurrence of the same objects on signboards, but even the same jokes are found. Thus the Swan at Bandon, near Cork, has the following rhymes, nearly akin to the Dutch epigram above, but strongly flavoured with Hibernian wit:—

“This is the Swan
That left her pond,
[213] To Dip her Bill in porter,
Why not we,
As well as she
Become regular Topers.”

Another Milesian at Mallow, also near Cork, has it thus modified:—

“This is the Swan that dips her neck in Water,
Why not we as well as she, drink plenty of Beamish and Crawford’s Porter.”

In London it was always a favourite sign by the river side:—

“‘I find the Swan to be your usual sign by the River,’ said I. ‘Why, yes,’ replied George. ‘I don’t know what a Coach or a Waggon and Horses or the High-mettled Racer have to do with our River.’ ‘Pray, now,’ said I to my oracle, ‘do enumerate the signs of the Swan remaining [this was in 1829] on the Banks of the River, between London and Battersea Bridges.’ ‘Why, let me see, Master, there’s the Old Swan at London Bridge, that’s one—there’s the Swan in Arundel Street, two,—then ours here, (Hungerford Stairs,) three,—the Swan at Lambeth; that’s down though. Well, then the Old Swan at Chelsea, but that has long been turned into a Brewhouse, though that was where our people [the Watermen] rowed to formerly, as mentioned in Doggett’s will; now they row to the sign of the New Swan, beyond the Physick Garden; we’ll say that’s four, then there’s the two Swan signs at Battersea, six.’”[298]

The Swan, by London Bridge, was a very ancient house, and gave a name to the Swan stairs. Trades tokens of this house are extant, representing a Swan walking on Old London Bridge, with the date 1657. This feat was performed by the Swan on the token, to intimate that it was the Swan above the Bridge in contradistinction to another tavern known as the Swan below the Bridge. Pepys once dined at this house; and though always very ready to be pleased, he has not much good to say about it. “27 June, 1660. Dined with my Lord and all the officers of his regiment, who invited my Lord and his friends, as many as he would bring to dinner, at the Swan at Dowgate, a poor house and ill dressed, but very good fish and plenty.” The landlady of this tavern is mentioned in a curious manner in a tract printed in 1712, entitled “The Quack Vintners:”—

“May the chaste widow prosper at the Swan
Near London Bridge, where richest wines are drawn,
And win by her good humour and her trade,
Some jolly son of Bacchus to her bed.”

Previous to 1598 there was a Swan Theatre on the Bankside, near the Globe; so named from “a house and tenement called the Swan,” mentioned in a charter of Edward VI., granting the manor of Southwark to the City of London. It fell into decay in the reign of James I., was closed in 1613, and subsequently only used for gladiatorial exhibitions. Yet, in its time, it had been well frequented, for a cotemporary author says—“it was the Continent of the world, because half the year a world of beauties and brave spirits resorted to it.” One of the oldest Swan signs on record is that of the old printer, Wynkyn de Worde, assistant, and finally successor to Caxton, who, in the beginning of the sixteenth century, issued some works “emprynted at the signe of the Swane in Fletestrete.”

From an anecdote preserved by Aubrey, iii. 415, it appears that Ben Jonson did not always “go to the Devil,” but was also in the habit of having his cup of sack at a Swan tavern near Charing Cross:—

“A Grace by Ben Jonson extempore, before King James.

“Our king and queen, the Lord God blesse,
The Palsgrave and the Lady Besse,
And God blesse every living thing
That lives and breathes and loves the King.
God blesse the Councill of Estate,
And Buckingham the fortunate.
God blesse them all and keep them safe,
And God blesse me, and God bless Ralph.

“The king was mighty inquisitive to know who this Ralph was. Ben told him ’twas the drawer at the Swanne Taverne by Charing-crosse, who drew him good canarie. For this drollerie, his Matie gave him an hundred poundes.”

Tokens of this house of the plague year are extant, representing a Swan with a sprig in its mouth, and the inscription, “Marke Rider at the Swan against the Mewes,[299] 1665. His Halfe Penny.”

The Swan at Knightsbridge had a reputation which we should call “fast.” It was well known to young gallants, and was the terror of all such jealous husbands and fathers as the Sir David Dunce who figures in Otway’s “Soldier of Fortune,” 1681:—

“I have surely lost and never shall find her more. She promised me strictly to stay at home till I came back again; for ought I know, she may be up three pairs of stairs in the Temple now, or it may be taking the air as far as Knightsbridge with some smoothfaced rogue or another; ’tis a damned house that Swan; that Swan at Knightsbridge is a confounded house!”

Tom Brown also alludes to it; Peter Pindar (Dr Woolcot) commemorates a vestry dinner there:—

“At Knightsbridge at a Tavern called the Swan,
Churchwardens, Overseers, a jolly clan,
Order’d a dinner for themselves,
A very handsome dinner,” &c.

The old house was pulled down in 1788, and its name transferred to a public-house in Sloane Street, which, with three other houses, occupies the site of the old Swan.

The Swan tavern in Exchange Alley, Cornhill, was well known among the musical world in the last century. In this house, some celebrated concerts were given, at a time when there were no proper concert-rooms; they commenced in 1728, under the management of one Barton, formerly a dancing-master, and continued for twelve years, when the place was burnt down; at the rebuilding, it was christened the King’s Head.

In 1825, the landlord of the Swan tavern at Stratford, near London, recommended the charms of his place in the following poetical strain:—

“At the Swan Tavern kept by Lound
The best accommodation’s found,—
Wine, Spirits, Porter, Bottled Beer,
You’ll find in high perfection here.
If in the Garden with your lass
You feel inclin’d to take a glass,
There Tea and Coffee of the best,
Provided is for every guest.
And females not to drive from hence,
The charge is only fifteen pence.
Or if disposed a Pipe to smoke,
To sing a song or crack a joke,
You may repair across the Green,
Where nought is heard, though much is seen.
There laugh, and drink, and smoke away,
And but a mod’rate reckoning pay.
Which is a most important object
To every loyal British subject.
In short,
The best accommodation’s found
By those who deign to visit Lound.”

The Black Swan, though formerly considered a rara avis in terris, may now be seen in every town and village, swinging at the door of mine host, the picture painted just as fancy may have suggested, long before the actual bird was brought over from Australia. At the Black Swan tavern in Tower Street, the Earl Rochester, when banished from the Court, took lodgings under the name of Alexander Bendo, his profession that of an Italian quack, and there he had those comical adventures with the waiting-maids of the Court. Hamilton says in his “Memoires de Grammont,” that the adventures Rochester had in this disguise are by far the most amusing given in his works. Another Black Swan alehouse is named in a broadside of 1704:—

“A most strange but true account of a very large sea monster that was found last Saturday in a common-shore in New Fleet Street in Spittlefields, where at the Black Swan alehouse thousands of people resort to see it,” &c.

This dreadful monster was simply “a dead Porpoise of a very large size, it being above Four Foot in length, and Three Foot about,” and the fact of it “leaving the deep to rove up into Fresh Water Rivers, and more especially to crawl up so far a common-shore,” prognosticated, it was thought, some dire calamities, which are told in not very parliamentary language.

The Swan with Two Necks is another lusus naturæ observable on the signboard, said to owe its origin to the corruption of the word nick into neck.[300] This explanation, however ingenious, is somewhat “sujet à caution,” for this reason: it is a well-known and established fact that the London signs of old had no inscriptions under them. Now, considering the small size of the nicks in question, they would scarcely have been perceptible at the height on which the sign was generally suspended, and even if visible, would never have been sufficiently noticed or understood to give a name to the sign. We shall not venture to propose another solution, as nothing of a sufficiently distinct character occurs to us: but it is just possible that a sign of two swans represented swimming side by side may have given rise to the “Swan with two necks,” or that the symbol of two birds’ necks encircled by a coronet which was used by a foreign publisher—taken, it has been conjectured, by him from the arms of some trade company—may have been the origin.

Machyn, in his “Diary,” mentions the sign of “the Swane with the ij nekes at Mylke Street end,” in 1556, when on the 5th of August, a woman living next door to that sign drowned herself in Moorfields.

In 1636, the Two Necked Swan was already to be seen in Berkshire, at the town of Lamburne, where Taylor the water poet names it as the sign of a tavern. In later years it was a famous carriers’ inn in Lad Lane, Cheapside, whence, for more than a century and a half, passengers and goods were despatched to the North. To this inn the following couplet alludes:—

“True sportsmen know nor dread nor fear,
Each rides, when once the saddle in,
As if he had a neck to spare,
Just like the Swan in Ladlane.”

Huddersford Cape Hunt.

Notwithstanding the “double bill” suggested by the two heads, it still continues a favourite inn sign. Four is rather an unusual number on the signboard, but we have this quadruple alliance in one solitary instance, the Four Swans, Bishopsgate, which is internally one of the best remaining examples of those famous galleried inns of old London.

The Swan and Bottle, Uxbridge, is a variation of the Cock and Bottle; the Swan and Rummer was a coffee-house near the Exchange, during the South Sea bubble—the Rummer, a common addition, being simply joined to the Swan, to intimate that wine was sold; the Swan and Salmon are combined on many signs, doubtless in honour of the two ornaments of our English rivers. The very name is sufficient to call up a pleasant picture.

The Swan and Hoop, Moorfields, was the birthplace of Keats the poet. The Swan on the Hoop, “on the way called old Fysshe Strete,” is mentioned as early as 1413.[301] The same combination may still be seen on London signboards.

With regard to the Swan and Sugarloaf, which occurs amongst the trades tokens, and is still seen, (as in Fetter Lane, for instance,) the sugarloaf was at first added by a grocer, whose sign having gained popularity as a noted landmark, or from other causes, was imitated by rivals or juniors, particularly on account of its presenting the favourite alliteration. Combinations with the sugarloaf are very common, all arising from its being the grocer’s sign: thus the Three Crowns and Sugarloaf, Kidderminster; Wheatsheaf and Sugarloaf, Ratcliff Highway, seventeenth century, (trades token;) Tobacco Roll and Sugarloaf, Gray’s Inn Gate, Holborn;[302] the Three Coffins and Sugarloaf, Fleet Street, 1720.

In the sign of the Swan and Rushes, at Leicester, the rushes were merely a pictorial accessory, placed in the background to bring out the white plumage of the Swan, whilst the Swan and Helmet, at Northampton, no doubt originated from a helmet with a Swan for crest.

In one instance, a Drake occurs as a sign, namely, on the token of Will. Johnson, at “ye Drake in Bell Yard,” near Temple Bar, 1667. The Duck is only to be seen in company with the Dog; in one instance it accompanies a Mallard. This last animal was otherwise well known to the Londoners, since in 1520, amongst “the articles of good gouernãce of the cite of London,” it was recommended to magistrates—“also ye shall enquyre, yf ony person kepe or norrysh hoggis, oxen, kyen, or mallardis within the ward in noying of ther neyhbours.”[303] The Duck and Mallard was the sign of a lock (and probably gun-) smith in East Smithfield in 1673.[304]

The Pigeon was a tavern at Charing Cross in 1675.[305] The Three Pigeons were very common; there still exists an inn of this name at Brentford:—

“It is a house of interest as being in all likelihood one of the few haunts of Shakespeare now remaining; as being indeed the sole Elizabethan tavern existing in England, which in the absence of direct evidence, may fairly be presumed to have been occasionally visited by him.”[306]

It was kept at one time by Lowin, one of the original actors in Shakespeare’s plays, and is often named by the old dramatists:

“Thou art admirably suited for the Three Pigeons at Brentford. I swear I know thee not.”—The Roaring Girl.

“We will turn our courage to Braynford, westward,
My Bird of the Night—to the Pigeons.”

Ben Jonson’s Alchymist.

There, also, George Peel played some of his merry pranks. In the parlour is an old painting dated 1704, representing a landlord attending to some customers seated at a table in the open air, with these lines:—

“Wee are new beginners
And thrive wee would fain,
I am honest Ralph of Reading,
My wife Susana to name.”

Bat Pidgeon, the famous hairdresser, immortalised by the Spectator, lived at the sign of the Three Pigeons, “in the corner house of St Clement’s Churchyard, next to the Strand.” There he remained as late as 1740, when he cut the “boyish locks” of Pennant.

In 1663 it was the sign of a bookseller in St Paul’s Churchyard,[307] and in 1698 of John Newton, also a bookseller over against Inner Temple Gate, Fleet Street.

The Dove was the sign of a coffeehouse on the riverside, between the two malls at Fulham. “In a room in this house, Thomson wrote part of his ‘Winter.’ He was in the habit of frequenting the house during the winter season, when the Thames was frozen and the surrounding country covered with snow. This fact is well authenticated, and many persons visit the house to the present day.”[308] The Stockdove is a sign at Romiley, Stockport; the Dovecote is a public-house at Laxton, Carlton-on-Trent, probably on account of the pigeons constantly flying out and in; and there is a Pigeon Box at Prior’s Lee, near Shiffnall. The pigeon-shooting matches may have something to do with the selection of this sign.

The Falcon was another of the devices used by Wynkyn de Worde over his shop in Fleet Street. Falcon Court, in that locality, perhaps derives its name from this house. Subsequently, Gordobuc, the earliest English tragedy, was “imprynted at London, in Flete Strete, at the sign of the Faucon,” no doubt Wynkyn’s house, by William Griffiths in 1565; and in 1612, Peacham’s “Garden of Heroical Devises” was published by Wa. Dight at the sign of the Falcon in Shoe Lane. These booksellers, perhaps, borrowed their device from the stationers’ arms, which are, argent on a chevron between three bibles, or, a falcon volant between two roses, the Holy Ghost in chief; it was also a badge of some of the kings. At the Falcon inn, Stratford-on-Avon, there is still a shovelboard on which William Shakespeare is said often to have played. Another Falcon Tavern connected with Shakespeare’s name used to stand on the Bankside, where he and his companions occasionally refreshed themselves after the fatigues of the performances at the Globe. It long continued celebrated as a coaching inn for all parts of Kent, Surrey, and Sussex, till it was taken down in 1808. The name is still preserved in the Falcon Glass-house, which stands opposite its site, and in the Falcon Stairs. There was another Falcon Inn in Fleet Street, bequeathed to the company of cordwainers, by a gentleman named Fisher, under the obligation that they were yearly to have a sermon preached in the Church of St Dunstan, in the West, on the 10th of July. Formerly, on that day, sack and posset used to be drunk by those concerned, in the vestry of the church, if not to the health, at least to the “pious memory” of this Fisher; but that good custom has long since been abandoned.

The Falcon on the Hoop is named in 1443. “In the xxj yer of Kyng Harry the vjte,” the brotherhood of the Holy Trinity received “for the rent of ij yere of Wyllym Wylkyns for the Sarrecyn Head v li. vj s. viij d., paynge by the yer liij s. iiij d. and of the Faucon on the Hope, for the same ij yer vi li., that is to say paynge by the yer iij li.” Rent, it must be confessed, seems small, and landlords exceedingly accommodating in those days. Six days before that period, there is an entry in the church-wardens’ accounts for “kervyng and peinting of the seigne of the Faucon vj sh.”[309] This mention of the sign clearly shows that it was not a picture, but a carved and coloured falcon, suspended in a hoop, whence the name of the sign.

The Magpie being a bird of good omen, was, on that account, very often chosen; with this another reason concurred, namely, the sign of the eatable pie falling into disuse, it was transformed into the Magpie, (see Cock and Pie;) and this transition was so much the easier as the original name of the magpie was pie, (Latin pica, French pie,) and only subsequently for its knowing antics, did it receive the nickname of maggoty[310] pie, which gradually was abbreviated into Magpie. The full form of the epithet is preserved in the nursery rhyme:—

“Round about, round about,
Maggoty Pie,
My father loves good ale
And so do I.”

The Maggoty Pie was an inn in the Strand during the reign of James I.: it is alluded to in Shirley’s Comedy of “The Ball,” a. i. sc. 1, where Freshwater, the Italianised Englishman, says:—

“I do ly at the signe of Dona Margaretta de Pia in the Strand.”

which his man Gudgin explains to mean, “the Maggety Pie in the Strand, sir.”

As late as 1654, we find the name “maggoty pie” used in “Mercurius Fumigosus, or the Smoking Nocturnal,” July 26 to August 3, where the Welshman’s arms are described as a fly, a maggoty pie, &c.[311] The Magpie and Stump represents the magpie sitting on the stump of a tree; it was the sign of one of the Whig pothouses in the Old Bailey during the riots of 1715. There is still an old house with such a sign in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. The Magpie and Pewter Platter, in Wood Street, originated from a magpie standing by a dish and picking out of it. The Magpie and Crown, says the author of “Tavern Anecdotes,” (1825,) is a ridiculous association; but when once joined is not to be separated without injury to the concern, as it happened in the case of a Mr Renton, who was originally waiter at a house of this name in Aldgate, famous for its ale, which was sent out in great quantities. The landlord becoming rich, pride followed, and he thought of giving wing to the Magpie, retaining only the royal attribute of the crown. The ale went out for a short time, as usual, but it was not from the Magpie and Crown, and the customers fancied it was not so good as usual; consequently the business fell off. The landlord died, and Renton purchased the concern, caught the Magpie, and restored it to its ancient situation; the ale improved in the opinion of the public, and its consumption increased so much, that Renton, at his death, left behind him property amounting to £600,000, chiefly the profits of the Magpie and Crown ale. This danger of altering a sign is also illustrated by another example. When Joseph II., emperor of Germany, was at Maestricht, in the Netherlands, he stayed at the Gray Ass Inn, (L’Ane Gris,) in honour of which imperial visit the landlord discarded his humble quadruped sign, and put up the Emperor’s Head. The customers seeing the Old Gray Ass gone, thought the business had fallen into other hands, and so went to various inns in the neighbourhood, and particularly to a New Gray Ass, which had just then opened in the same street. The landlord seeing his business falling off, through the change of his sign, yet unwilling to part with his Emperor’s head, after long thinking and pondering, at last hit upon a clever compromise: he kept up the portrait of the Emperor, but wrote under it, “At the Original Gray Ass, (au veritable Ane Gris.)”

The Parrot, or Popinjay, is an old sign now almost out of fashion, the Green Parrot, Swinegate, Leeds, being one of the few remaining. Andrew Maunsell, a bookseller and printer, resided at the Parrot in St Paul’s Churchyard in 1570, and continued to trade under this sign till 1600. Taylor, the water poet, mentions the Popinjay at Ewell, in 1636. It was a very appropriate sign for quacks, and one of these, at all events, had candour enough to adopt it. His handbill begins in a grandiloquent style:—

“Noble or Ignoble, you may be foretold anything that may happen to your Elementary Life: as at what time you may expect prosperity; or if in Adversity the End thereof, or when you may be so happy as to enjoy the Thing desired. Also young Men may foresee their Fortunes as in a Glass, and pretty Maids their Husbands in this Noble, yea, Heavenlie art of Astrologie. At the sign of the Parrot opposite to Ludgate Church within Blackfriars’ Gateway.”[312]

The Parrot and Cage, in St Martin’s Lane, Strand, advertised in 1711 as a “just and substantial office of insurance” on marriages, births, &c. This office, apparently, had chambers in some bird-fancier’s house, at all events to that class of the community the sign belonged more exclusively. In 1787, there was one near the monument, the sign of a cagemaker who sold “likewise parrots and other forring birds.”

The Peacock, in ancient times, was possessed of a mystic character. The fabled incorruptibility of its flesh led to its typifying the Resurrection; and from this incorruptibility, doubtless, originated the first idea of swearing “by the Peacock,” an oath that was to be inviolably kept. Its first introduction on the signboard is lost in the unrecorded wastes of time; but the oath was a common one in early times, especially on occasions of military adventures. Near the Angel in Clerkenwell, there is the Peacock public-house, which bears the date 1564. This was formerly a great house of call for the mail and other coaches travelling on the Great North Road, much the same as the Elephant and Castle was for the southern counties. The Peacock and Feathers was a sign in Cornhill in 1711.

The Ostrich seems more common at present than in ancient times. There is one on a stone-carved sign in Bread Street, probably the sign of a feather shop. Generally, the ostrich is represented with a horseshoe in his mouth, in allusion to its digestive powers; for this reason Cade says to Iden:—

“I’ll make thee eat iron like an ostrich, and swallow my sword like a great pin.”—Henry VI., 2d Part, a. iv. sc. 10.

The landlord of an alehouse at Calverley, near Leeds, has put his premises under the protection of Minerva’s bird, the Owl. At St Helens, Lancashire, there is a still more curious sign, viz., the Owl’s Nest, or the Owl in the Ivy Bush. A bush or tod of ivy was formerly supposed to be a favourite place for the owl to make its nest in. The old dramatists abound in allusions to this:

“And, like an owle, by night to go abroad,
Roosted all day within an ivy-tod.”[313]—Drayton.

“Michael von Owle, how dost thou?
In what dark barn or tod of aged ivy
Hast thou been hid?”—Beaumont and Fletcher, a. iv. sc. 3.

In a masque of Shirley’s, entitled “The Triumph of Peace,” 1633, one of the scenes represented a wild, woody landscape, “a place fit for purse-taking,” where, “in the furthest part was seene an ivy-bush, out of which came an owle.” Opinion, one of the dramatis personæ, informed the public, that this scene was intended for “a wood, a broad-faced owl, an ivy-bush, and other birds beside her.”[314]

In districts where Grouse and Moorcock are found, these birds frequently court the patronage of the thirsty sportsman at the village alehouse door. One publican, at Upper Haslam, Sheffield, invites at once the follower of Nimrod and of Walton: his sign is the Grouse and Trout.

The last bird-sign which remains to be noticed, is unquestionably the most puzzling of all. It occurs on an old trades token of Cornhill, and is there called “The Live Vulture.” That the man should have kept a live vulture at his door seems very improbable. The only explanation which occurs to us, is the possibility that, at some period or other, a live vulture had been exhibited at this house, and that from this event its name was derived.[315]

A curious instance of a tradesman exhibiting a living bird as an attraction to his house, is supplied us in a recent letter of a Paris correspondent, which gives at the same time an amusing anecdote of the well-known Alexandre Dumas. The writer, speaking of a magnificent new café which had recently been completed, says:—

“Writing of this newly started restaurant naturally recals the fact of the disappearance of the historic pavilion of Henry IV. at St Germain-en-Laye, kept for many years by the Duchess of Berry’s maître d’hôtel, Collinet. He was the pupil of Carême, and learnt to make sauces from Richout, saucemaker to the last of the Condés, and pastry from Heliot, “Ecuyer ordinaire de la bouche de Madame la Dauphine,” a title I have vainly searched for in the list of the queen’s household. The result of this combination of culinary instructions was that his “Bifsteaks à la Bearnaise,” and his woodcock pies, attracted not only all the fashionable world, but a brilliant galaxy of literary celebrities to the “Pavilion Henry IV.” Alexandre Dumas’s château of Monte Christo was close to St Germain. He sent daily for his cutlets to Collinet, who let his bill run on till it amounted to 25,000f. (£1000), in payment of which the distinguished chef received an autograph letter from the great novelist, accompanied by a live eagle. Alexandre Dumas expressed his regret at not being able to pay the bill, but suggested his exhibiting the eagle and the letter, which exhibition would inevitably attract crowds to his hotel, and there I myself have seen the eagle and read the letter.”

PLATE X.

GREEN MAN. (Roxburghe Ballads, circa 1650.) | ADAM AND EVE. (Newgate Street, 1669.)

TOBACCONIST SIGN.
(Banks’s Collection, 1750.)

DOG’S HEAD IN POT. (Roxburghe Ballads, 1665.) | WHISTLING OYSTER. (Drury Lane, 1825.)

[280] Coryatt’s Crudities, vol. i. p. 29.

[281] “Phisiologus tells us that the Pelican is very fond of his young ones, and when they are born and begin to grow, they rebel in their nest against their parent and strike him with their wings, flying about him and beat him so much till they wound him in his eyes. Then the father strikes again and kills them. And the mother is of such a nature that she comes back to the nest on the third day and sits down upon her dead young ones, and opens her side with her bill and pours her blood over them, and so resuscitates them from death, for the young ones by their instinct receive the blood as soon as it comes out of the mother, and drink it.”—Bibl. Nat. Belg. No. 10074.

[282] Notes and Queries, No. 236, May 6, 1854.

[283] Letter of Memorial to King Charles II. from Sir John Hinton, physician in ordinary to His Majesty, 1679. Ellis, Orig. Letters, 3d series, vol. iii. p. 307.

[284] The Three Blackbirds, Choughs, Crows, Ravens, &c., may allude to Charles, James, and Rupert.

[285] Coryatt’s Crudities, vol. i. p. 39. In the East the same fable is current as to the paternal affection of young storks; their name in Hebrew is chesadao, which implies mercy or pity.

[286] “Armory of Byrdes, Imprynted at Londõ by John Wyght dwellĩg Poules Church yarde at the sygne of the Rose.” A poem of the time of Henry VIII., attributed to Skelton, the poet laureate.

[287] Bourne’s Observations on Popular Antiquities, 1725, p. 65.

[288] Aubrey’s Remains of Gentilisme and Judaism.—Lansdown MSS.

[289] On the obverse:—

“When the cock began to crow
St Peter began to cry.”

Reverse:—

“The cock does not crow for nothing;
Ask St Peter, he can tell you.”

[290] Johnson’s Life of Lord Dorset.

[291] There was formerly a kind of ale called Cock ale, but what it was is not exactly known.

[292] Meeting of Gallants at an Ordinarie. London, 1604. Percy Society, 1841. Though this is a description of the state of London in 1603, it perfectly applies to the plague of 1665.

[293] The Art of Living in London. Poem in 2 cantos, 1768.

[294] Protestant Mercury, Feb. 14, 1700.

[295] Daily Courant, Aug. 9, 1711.

[296] Bisson’s Janus, or Small Tokens for the Old Year, and Little Gifts for the New Year. 1674. Luttrell Ballads, vol. ii. p. 20.

[297] “The reason why so many alehouses in town and country have the sign of the swan, is because that bird is so fond of liquid.”

[No English translation can convey the peculiar significance of the original. The above gives only the bare sense.]

[298] J. T. Smith, Book for a Rainy Day, p. 280.

[299] The king’s stables (which stood on the site now occupied by Trafalgar Square) called the “mews,” because formerly his majesty’s falcons were kept there, mue being a French word for a certain kind of bird-cage or coop: whence the words “mewed up.”

[300] These nicks were little horizontal, vertical, and diagonal notches cut in the swan’s bill, in order that each owner might know his own swans. In the Archæologia for 1812, a roll of 219 swan marks is given, together with the ordinances respecting swans on the river Witham, in Lincoln, belonging to various gentlemen; this paper bears the date of June 1570. The nicking was done by swanherds, appointed by the king’s licence, who kept a register of all the various marks. None but freeholders were to have marks, and these were to be perfectly distinct from those used by other gentlemen. The Corporation of London had the right of keeping swans on the Thames for fourteen leagues above and below bridge, and their flocks seem to have been very numerous, for Paulus Jovius describing the approach to London in 1552, says, “This river abounds in swans swimming in flocks, the sight of which, and their noise, are very agreeable to the fleets that meet them in their course.” Those of the company of the vintners had two nicks or marks on their bill, it is said, and hence the popular explanation of the sign. This nicking of swans on the river was formerly a matter of great state. The members of the Corporation of London used annually to go up the Thames in the month of August, in gaily decorated barges, and after the swans were nicked and counted, to land off Barn Elms, and there partake of a collation in the open air, ending which, history informs us, they used to dance, but it would require very reliable authority to convince us that an alderman could find enjoyment on the “light fantastic toe,” particularly after a hearty collation.

[301] For the origin of the sign, see under Hoop.

[302] Mercurius Publicus, Aug. 30-Sept. 16, 1660.

[303] Arnold’s Customs of London.

[304] London Gazette, October 2-6, 1673.

[305] City Mercury, or Advertisements concerning Trade, Nov. 4, 1675.

[306] Halliwell’s Local Illustrations to the “Merry Wives of Windsor.” Folio Shakespeare.

[307] Kingdom’s Intelligencer, March 30 to April 6, 1663.

[308] Faulkner’s Account of Fulham, 1813, p. 359.

[309] Hone’s Ancient Mysteries Described, p. 81.

[310] Magot is in French a quaint, little figure.

[311] For the benefit of those curious in Cambrian heraldry we will give these arms in a note:—“A fly, a maggoty pie, a gammon of bacon and a ——: the fly drinks before his master; a magpie doth prate and chatter, a gammon of bacon is never good till it be hanged, and a —— when it is out never returns to its country, no more will a Welshman; otherwise, his arms are two trees verdant, a beam tressant, a ladder rampant, and Taffe pendant.”

[312] Bagford Bills Harl. MSS., 5931.

[313] A tod is an old word for any entangled mass, but generally applied to flax and ivy.

[314] This comment of “Opinion” might lead to the conclusion that either there was no painted scene at all, or at least that it was badly executed; yet such can scarcely have been the case, for a notice occurs at the end of the masque, purporting that “the scene and ornament was the act of Inigo Jones, Esq., surveyor of His Majesty’s Works.” This play was acted by the gentlemen of the Inns-of-Court, in the presence of the king and queen, at Whitehall, Feb. 3, 1633.

[315] That vultures were exhibited as great curiosities, will be seen from our notice of the George and Vulture. See under Religious Signs.

CHAPTER VI.
FISHES AND INSECTS.

The Mermaid, as a sign, must have had great attractions for our forefathers. Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and other dramatists, notice this taste for strange fishes. The ancient chronicles teem with captures of mermen, mermaids, and similar creatures. Old Hollinshed gives a detailed account of a merman caught at Orford, in Suffolk, in the reign of King John. He was kept alive on raw meal and fish for six months, but at last “fledde secretelye to the sea, and was neuer after seene nor heard off.” Another chronicler says, “About this time [1202] fishes of strange shapes were taken, armed with helmets and shields like armed men, only they were much bigger.” And Gervase of Tilbury roundly asserts that mermen and mermaids live in the British Ocean. Even in more modern times, every now and then a mermaid (the mermen seem to have been more scarce) made her appearance. In an advertisement at the beginning of the seventeenth century, we find:—

“IN Bell Yard, on Ludgate Hill, is to be seen, at any hour of the day, a living Mermaid, from the waist upwards of a party colour, from thence downwards is very strange and wonderful.

Mulier formosa superne
Desinit in piscem.”

After which follows a most promising and tempting little bit of information in French:—“Son corps est de divers couleurs avec beaucoup d’autres curiosités qu’on ne peut exprimer.” Again, in 1747:—

“We hear from the north of Scotland, that some time this month a sea creature, known by the name of Mermaid, which has the shape of a human body from the trunk upwards, but below is wholly fish, was carried some miles up the water of Devron.”[316]

In 1824, a mermaid or merman (for the sex was discreetly left in dubio) made its appearance before “an enlightened public,” when, as the papers inform us, “upwards of 150 distinguished fashionables” went to see it. At Bartholomew Fair, in 1830, a stuffed mermaid was exhibited; but if once she had been such a “mulier formosa” as captivated the ancient mariners, she was certainly much altered.[317] A very different specimen had been exhibited in Fleet Street in 1822; but she disappeared all at once most mysteriously, not, however, without a rumour of her being under the protection of the Lord Chancellor, which, as she was a comely maiden with flaxen hair, “mulier superne et inferne,” lies within the range of possibilities. The sea-serpent has now almost done away with the mermaid; yet, as late as 1857, there appeared an article in the Shipping Gazette, under the intelligence of 4th June, signed by some Scotch sailors, and describing an object seen off the North British coast, “in the shape of a woman, with full breast, dark complexion, comely face,” and the rest.

At one time it appears to have been a very common sign, if we may judge from the way in which it is mentioned by Brathwait in his New Cast of Characters, (1631):—

“If she [the hostess] aspire to the conceit of a sine and device, her birch pole pull’d downe, he will supply her with one, which he performes so poorely as none that sees it, but would take it for a sign he was drunk when he made it. A long consultation is had before they can agree what sign must be reared. ‘A meere-mayde’ says she, ‘for she will sing catches to the youths of the parish.’ ‘A lyon,’ says he, for that is the onely sign he can make; and this he formes so artlessly, as it requires his expression, this is a lyon. Which old Ellenor Rumming, his tapdame, denies, saying it should have been a meere-mayde.”

Among the most celebrated of the Mermaid taverns in London, that in Bread Street stands foremost. As early as the fifteenth century, it was one of the haunts of the pleasure-seeking Sir John Howard, whose trusty steward records, anno 1464:—“Paid for wyn at the Mermayd in Bred Stret, for my mastyr and Syr Nicholas Latimer, x d. ob.” In 1603, Sir Walter Raleigh established a literary club in this house, doubtless the first in England. Amongst its members were Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Selden, Carew, Martin, Donne, Cotton, &c. It is frequently alluded to by Beaumont and Fletcher in their comedies, but best known is that quotation from a letter of Beaumont to Ben Jonson:—

“What things have we seen
Done at the Mermaid! heard words that have been
So nimble and so full of subtle flame,
As if that any one from whence they came
Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest,
And had resolved to live a fool the rest
Of his dull life; then when there hath been thrown
Wit able enough to justify the town
For three days past; wit that might warrant be
For the whole city to talk foolishly,
Till that were cancell’d; and when that was gone,
We left an air behind us, which alone
[227] Was able to make the two next companies
(Right witty, though but downright fools) more wise.”

There was another Mermaid in Cheapside, frequented by Jasper Mayne, and in the next reign by the poet laureate, John Dryden. Mayne mentions it in “The City Match,” (1638:)—

“I had made an ordinary,
Perchance at the Mermaid.”

At one time the landlord’s name was Dun, which is told us in a somewhat amusing anecdote:—“When Dun, that kept the Meremaid Tavern in Cornhill, being himself in a room with some witty gallants, one of them (which, it seems, knew his wife) too boldly cryd out in a fantastick humour, ‘I’ll lay five pound there’s a cuckhold in this company.’ ‘’Tis Dun,’ says another.”[318] In 1681, there was a Mermaid in Carter Lane, which had a great deal of traffic as a carriers’ inn.[319]

The sign was also used by printers. John Rastall, for instance, brother-in-law of Sir Thomas More, “emprynted in the Cheapesyde at the sygne of the Meremayde; next to Poulysgate in 1527;” and in 1576 a translation of the History of Lazarillo de Tormes, dedicated to Sir Thomas Gresham, was printed by Henry Binnemann, the queen’s printer, in Knight-rider Street, at the sign of the Mermaid. A representation of this fabulous creature was generally prefixed to his books.

The Seahorse may be seen in Birmingham, York, and various other places. Bossewell, in his peculiar mixture of English and Latin, gives a quaint description of this animal:—

“This waterhorse of the sea is called an hyppotame, for that he is like an horse in back, mayne, and neying: rostro resupinato a primis dentibus: cauda tortuosa, ungulis binis. He abideth in the waters on the day, and eateth corn by night et hunc Nilus gignit.”[320]

The Dolphin is another sign of very old standing. One of the first instances of its use was probably the following inn:—

“The other side of this High Street, from Bishopsgate and Houndsditch, the first building is a large inn for the receipt of travellers, and is called the Dolphin, of such a sign. In the year 1513, Margaret Ricroft, widow, gave this house, with the gardens and appurtenances, unto William Gam, R. Clye, their wives, her daughters, and to their heirs, with condition they yearly do give to the warders or govornors of the Greyfriars’ Church, within Newgate, 40 shillings, to find a student of divinity in the university for ever.”[321]

Moser, in his “Vestiges Revived,” mentions this same inn as the Dolphin, or rather, Dauphin Inn; and says that it was adorned with fleur-de-lys, cognisances, and dolphins; and was reported to have been the residence of one of the dauphins of France, probably Louis, the son of Philip August, who, in 1216, came to England to contest the sceptre with King John.[322] The house was still in existence at the end of the seventeenth century, when it was a famous coaching inn. Perhaps it was to this tavern that Pepys and his company adjourned on 27th March 1661:—

“To the Dolphin to a dinner of Mr Harris’s, where Sir William and my Lady Batten and her two daughters, and other company, when a great deal of mirth, and there staid till 11 o’clock at night, and in our mirth I sang and sometimes fiddled, (there being a noise of fiddlers there,) and at last we fell to dancing, the first time that ever I did in my life, which I did wonder to see myself to do. At last we made Mingo, Sir W. Batten’s black, and Jack, Sir W. Penn’s, dance, and it was strange how the first did dance with a great deal of skill.”

Pepys might well wonder what a man may come to, he who had been born when “lascivious dancing” was considered a heinous crime. Another Dolphin, well worthy of remembrance, was the sign of Sam. Buckley, a bookseller in Little Brittain, at whose house Steele and Addison’s Spectator was published.

Ancient naturalists made a wonderful animal of the dolphin. Bossewell, for instance, from whom we have just quoted, tells most extraordinary stories about him; but they are unfortunately too long to quote. Londoners formerly might have seen the living fish from the river banks, for old chroniclers every now and then have entries to the effect that dolphins paid London a visit. Thus: “3 Henry V. Seven dolphins came up the river Thames, whereof 4 were taken.” “14 Rich. II. On Christmas day a dolphin was taken at London Bridge, being 10 ft. long, and a monstrous grown fish.”[323] The Dolphin and Anchor is still a common sign; and the Fish and Anchor, at North Littleton, Warwickshire, evidently implies the same emblem. Aldus Manutius, the celebrated Venetian printer, was the first to use the sign, adopting it from a silver medal of the Emperor Titus, presented to him by Cardinal Bembo, with the motto, σπευδε βραδεως. Camerarius thus (in our translation) mentions this sign in his book on Symbols:—

“That the dolphin wound round the anchor was an emblem of the Emperors August and Titus, to represent that maturity in business which is the medium between too great haste and slowness; and that it was also used in the last century by Aldus Manutius, that most famous printer, is known to everybody. Erasmus clearly and abundantly explains the import of that golden precept.

“Our emblem is taken from Alciatus, and has a different meaning. He reports, namely, that ‘when violent winds disturb the sea, as Lucretius says, and the anchor is cast by seamen, the dolphin winds herself round it, out of a particular love for mankind, and directs it, as with a human intellect, so that it may more safely take hold of the ground; for dolphins have this peculiar property, that they can, as it were, foretell storms. The anchor, then, signifies a stay and security, whilst the dolphin is a hieroglyphic for philanthropy and safety.’”—Joach. Camerarius, “Symbolorum et Emblematum Centuriæ Quatuor.” Centuria iv. p. 19; Moguntia, 1697.

This sign was afterwards adopted by William Pickering, a worthy “Discipulus Aldi,” as he styled himself; Sir Egerton Bridges made some verses upon it, amongst which occur the following:—

“Would you still be safely landed,
On the Aldine Anchor ride;
Never yet was vessel stranded,
With the Dolphin by its side.
....... “Nor time, nor envy ever shall canker
The sign that is my lasting pride;
Joy then to the Aldus Anchor,
And the Dolphin at its side.

“To the Dolphin as we ’re drinking,
Life and health and joy we send;
A poet once he saved from sinking,
And still he lives—the poet’s friend.”

The Dolphin and Comb was the sign of E. Herne, a milliner on London Bridge in 1722. This is an instance of one of the articles sold within being added to the original sign of the house. Milliners in those days used to have a much more extensive variety of objects for sale than they have now, comprehending almost every article required for female apparel,—and including knives, scissors, combs, pattens, patches, poking sticks, fans, bodkins, &c. Such additions to signs were of frequent occurrence, thus the Fox and Topknot, the Lamb and Breeches, the Fox and Cap, and the Lamb and Inkbottle, which last figures on the imprint of Thomas Roch, Newgate Street, a bookseller who made “the best ink for deeds and records,” 1677. Frequently the sign of the Fish is seen without any further specification; in this case it is probably meant for the Dolphin, which is the signboard-fish par excellence. The Fish sign is a very common public house decoration at the present day, probably for the same reason as the Swan, because he is fond of liquor,—nay, to such an extent goes his reputation for intemperance, that to “drink like a fish” is a quality of no small excellence with publicans. In Carlisle, however, there are two signs of the Fish and Dolphin, a rather puzzling combination,—unless it has reference to the dolphin’s chase after the shoals of small fishes. The Fish and Bell, Soho, may either allude to a well-known anecdote of a certain numskull, who, when he caught a fish, which he desired to keep for dinner on some future grand occasion, put it back into the river, with a bell round its neck, so that he should be able to know its whereabouts the moment he wanted it; or it may be the usual Bell added in honour of the bell-ringers. A quaint variety of this sign is the Bell and Mackerel, in the Mile-End Road. The Three Fishes was a favourite device in the Middle Ages, crossing or interpenetrating each other in such a manner, that the head of one fish was at the tail of another. We cannot prove that it had any emblematic meaning, but it may possibly represent the Trinity, the fish being a common symbol for Christ, derived from the Greek monogram or abbreviation, ΙΧΘΥΣ. It occurs as a sign in the following advertisement, which minutely describes the livery of a page in the year of the Restoration:—

“On Saturday night last run away from the Lord Rich, Christophilus Cornaro, a Turk christened; a French youth of 17 or 18 years of age, with flaxen hair, little blew eyes, a mark upon his lip, and another under his right eye; of a fair complexion, one of his ears pierced, having a pearl-coloured suit, trimmed with scarlet and blue ribbons, a coat of the same colour with silver buttons; his name Jacob David. Give notice to the Lord, lodging at the Three Fishes in New Street, in Covent Garden, a cook-shop, and good satisfaction shall be given.”[324]

The Three Herrings, the sign of James Moxton, a bookseller in the Strand, near Yorkhouse, in 1675, is evidently but another name for the Three Fishes; at the present day it is the sign of an ale-house in Bell Yard, Temple Bar. Several taverns with this sign are mentioned in the French tales and plays of the 17th century; two of them seem to have been very celebrated, one in the Faubourg St Marceau, the other near the Palais de Justice; this last one seems to have been particularly famous, for it is named as a rival to the celebrated Pomme de Pin. “Si je vay au Palais, tous ces clercs sont alentour de moy; l’un me mène aux Trois Poissons, l’autre à la Pomme de Pin.”—Comédie de la Vefve, ac. iii. s. 3.[325] The Fish and Quart at Leicester must be passed by in silence, as the combination cannot immediately be accounted for. Were it in France a solution would be easier, for in French slang a “poisson,” or fish, means a small measure of wine. The Fish and Eels at Roydon, in Essex; the Fish and Kettle, Southampton; and the White Bait, Bristol, all tell their own tale, and need no comment. The Salmon is seen occasionally near places where it is caught. The Salmon and Ball is the well-known Ball of the silkmercers in former times, added to the sign of the Salmon; whilst the Salmon and Compasses is the masonic emblem that is added to the sign. Both these occur in more than one instance in London. The Fishbone is rarely met with as a public-house sign, though there is an example of it at Netherton in Cheshire, and also amongst the seventeenth century tokens of New Cheapside, Moorfields. But generally it is the sign of a rag and bone shop, or, in the euphonious language of the day, a “miscellaneous repository,” or “bank of commerce.” These shops, as their title of “marine stores” implies, used to buy all the odds and ends of rope, sails, seamen’s old clothes, in short all the rubbish of which a ship is cleared after its return from a long voyage. Bones of large fish would be often amongst the curiosities brought home by the sailors, these also they bought and hung them up outside their doors, and in the end these bones became their distinctive sign. The Sun and Whalebone at Latton, in Essex, may have originated from a whalebone hanging outside the house, or that the landlord had laid the foundation of his fortune as a rag merchant.

Insects are of very rare occurrence. The industrious habits of the bees, however, made their habitation a favourite object to imply a similar industry in the shopkeepers. Many years ago there used to be at Grantham in Lincolnshire, a signpost on which was placed a Beehive in full swarm, with the following lines under it:—

“Two wonders, Grantham, now are thine,
The highest spire and a living sign.”

Though the living bees were gone the following season, yet the sign and inscription remained until very recently. The following is a common inscription under the sign of the Beehive:—

“Within this hive we’re all alive,
Good liquor makes us funny;
If you are dry, step in and try
The flavour of our honey.”

A tea-dealer at the corner of Oxford Street, Tottenham Court Road, in the end of the last century, had for his sign the Walking Leaf, (the Phyllium siccifolium of the naturalists,) an East Indian insect, of an anything but agreeable association, when we consider the remarkable vegetable appearance of this insect, and the possibility that it might be dried among the tea-leaves.

Although the frog cannot be considered either an insect or a fish, yet we may include it in this chapter. Of frogs there are some instances on the signboard; the Three Frogs, (see under Heraldic Signs,) and Froghall, formerly a public-house at the south end of Frog Lane, Islington. On the front of this house there was exhibited the ludicrous sign of a plough drawn by frogs. There is at the present day a Froghall Inn at Wolston, near Coventry; and a public-house of that name at Layerthorpe in the West Riding, but the picture of the sign was doubtless unique. The principal inn on the island of Texel is called the Golden Frog, (de Goude kikker.) We may wonder that there are not more examples of this sign in Holland, for there are, without doubt, as many frogs in that country as there are Dutchmen; and even unto this day it is a mooted point, which of the two nations has more right to the possession of the country; both, however, are of a pacific disposition, so that they live on in a perfect entente cordiale.

[316] General Magazine, Jan. 1747.

[317] It was sketched by George Cruikshank; and a wood-cut of it may be seen in Morley’s “Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair,” p. 488.

[318] “Coffeehouse Jests,” 1688, p. 128.

[319] Delaune’s “Present State of London,” 1681.

[320] Bossewell’s “Works of Armourie,” 1589, p. 65.

[321] Stow, p. 62. A striking instance of the depreciation of money within the last three centuries. At the present day, 40s. would scarcely keep an Oxford or Cambridge student in cigar-lights.

[322] Moser makes a slight error. The heir-apparent to the throne of France did not assume the title of Dauphin till 1349, when Humbert II., Dauphin of Vienne, having no posterity, retired to a monastery, and sold his estates to Philip VI., King of France, on behalf of his grandson, afterwards Charles V.

[323] Delaune’s “Present State of London.”

[324] “Mercurius Publicus,” Aug. 30; Sep. 6, 1660.

[325] “If I go to the Palace of Justice, all those clerks are constantly after me; one takes me to the Three Fishes, the other to the Pine Cone.”—Comedy of the Widow, a. iii. s. 3.

CHAPTER VII.
FLOWERS, TREES, HERBS, ETC.

In old times, when signboards flourished, there would have been many reasons for choosing these house-decorations. 1. Their symbolic meaning, as the olive-tree, the fig-tree, the palm-tree. 2. To intimate what was sold within, as the vine, the coffee-plant, &c. 3. The use of some plants as badges. 4. The vicinity of some well-known tree or road-mark, near the place where the sign was displayed. 5. The desire of a landlord to have an unusual sign.

The oldest sign borrowed from the vegetable kingdom is the Bush; it was a bush or bunch of ivy, box or evergreen, tied to the end of a pole, such as is represented in many of the suttler’s tents in the pictures of Wouverman. The custom came evidently from the Romans, and with it the oft-repeated proverb, “Good wine needs no Bush.” (Vinum vendibile hedera non est opus; in Italian, Al buon vino non bisogna frasca; in French, à bon vin point d’enseigne.) Ivy was the plant commonly used: “The Tavern Ivy clings about my money and kills it,” says the sottish slave in Massinger’s “Virgin Martyr,” (a. iii. s. 3.) It may have been adopted as the plant sacred to Bacchus and the Bacchantes, or perhaps simply because it is a hardy plant, and long continues green. As late as the reign of King James I. many inns used it as their only sign. Taylor, the water poet, in his perambulation of ten shires around London, notes various places where there is “a taverne with a bush only;” in other parts he mentions “the signe of the Bush.” Even at the present day “the Bush” is a very general sign for inn and public-house, whilst sometimes it assumes the name of the Ivy Bush, or the Ivy Green, (two in Birmingham.) In Gloucester, Warwick, and other counties, where at certain fairs the ordinary booth people and tradesmen enjoy the privilege of selling liquors without a licence, they hang out bunches of ivy, flowers, or boughs of trees, to indicate this sale. As far away as the western States of North America, at the building of a new village, or station, it is no uncommon thing to see a bunch of hay, or a green bough, hung from above the “grocery,” or bar-room door, until such time as a superior decoration can be provided. The bunch being fixed to a long staff was also called the Alepole; thus among the processions of odd characters that came to purchase ale at the Tunnyng of Elinour Rummyng:—

“Another brought her bedes
Of jet or of coale,
To offer to the Alepole.”

How these Alepoles, from the very earliest times, continued to enlarge and encroach upon the public way, has been shown in our Introduction, pp. 16, 17. The Bunch gradually became a garland of flowers of considerable proportions, whence Chaucer, describing the Sompnour, says:—

“A garlond hadde he sette upon his hede
As gret as it were for an alestake.”

Afterwards it became a still more elegant object, as exemplified by the Nagshead in Cheapside, in the print of the entry of Marie de Medici; finally it appeared as a crown of green leaves, with a little Bacchus, bestriding a tun dangling from it. Thus the sign was used simultaneously with the bush.

“If these houses [ale-houses] have a boxe-bush, or an old post, it is enough to show their profession. But if they be graced with a signe compleat, it’s a signe of a good custome.”[326]

In a mask of 1633, the constituents of a tavern are thus described:—“A flaminge red lattice, seueral drinking roomes, and a backe doore, but especially a conceited signe and an eminent bush.” “Tavernes are quickly set up, it is but hanging out a bush at a nobleman’s or an alderman’s gate, and ’tis made instantly.”—Shirley’s Masque of the Triumph of Peace. In a woodcut from the “Cent Nouvelle Nouvelles,” introduced in Wright’s “Domestic Manners,” the Bush is suspended from a square board, on which the sign was painted; for in France as well as in England, signboard and bush went together:—

“La taverne levée
L’enseigne et le bouchon,
La dame bien peignée
Les cheveux en bouchon.”[327]

—Chanson nouvelle des Tavernes et Tavernières, Fleur des Chansons Nouvelles, Lyon, 1586.

Whilst an English host in “Good News and Bad News,” says:—“I rather will take down my bush and sign than live by means of riotous expense.” Gradually, as signs became more costly, the bunch was entirely neglected and the sign alone remained.

The Hand and Flower is a sign very frequently adopted by alehouses in the vicinity of nursery grounds:—thus, there is one in the High Street, Kensington, and one in the King’s Road, a little past Cremorne, though there the nursery ground has very recently been built over.

The Rose, besides being the queen of flowers, and the national emblem, had yet another prestige which alone would have been sufficient to make it a favourite sign in the middle ages; this was its religious import. On the monumental brass of Abbot Kirton, formerly in Westminster Abbey, there was a crowned rose with I.H.C. in its heart, and round it the words

SIS, ROSA, FLOS FLORUM, MORBIS MEDECINA MEORUM.[328]

And in Caxton’s Psalter, above a woodcut representing an angel holding a shield with a rose on it, occur the words:—

“Per te rosa toluntur vitia,
Per te datur mestis leticia.”[329]

It was evidently an emblem of the Virgin, and may contain some allusion to the Rose of Jericho, or to the Christmas rose.

Three centuries ago roses were still very scarce, as we learn from an original MS. of the time of Henry VIII., and signed by him, preserved at the Remembrance Office, in which it says that a red rose cost two shillings; hence, roses were often amongst the terms of a tenure. Sir Christopher Hatton, the handsome Lord Chancellor, with the “bushy beard and shoe strings green,” who danced himself into Queen Elizabeth’s favour, paid the Bishop of Ely for the rent of Ely House for a term of twenty-one years in 1576, a red rose, ten loads of hay, and £10 a-year; but that roses then were plentiful, in that garden at all events, is also evident, for the Bishop and his successors had a right to gather yearly twenty bushels of roses out of it. Sir John Poulteney, 21 Edward III., gave and confirmed by charter to Humphrey de Bohun, Earl of Hereford and Essex, his tenement of Cold Harborough, and appurtenances, for one rose at Midsummer; a still more whimsical tenure was that of a farm at Brookhouse, Penistone, York, for which yearly a payment was to be made of a red rose at Christmas, and a snow ball at Midsummer.[330] Unless the flower of the Viburnum or Gueldres Rose, sometimes called a Snowball, was meant, the payment will have been almost impossible in those days when ice-cellars were unknown.

At the present day some publicans take liberties with the old sign of the Rose; in Macclesfield, and at Preston, for instance, there is the Moss Rose; on Silkstone Common, in Yorkshire, the Bunch of Roses; on the London Road, Preston, the Rosebud, &c. The Three Roses was formerly a common sign; from the way they are represented, they appear to have been heraldic roses, (see our illustration of the ancient Lattice.) It was the sign of Jonathan Edwin, bookseller in Ludgate Street in 1673. At the Rose Garland, Robert Coplande, the bookseller and printer, published in 1534 Dame Juliana Berner’s “Boke of Hawkyng, Huntyng, and Fyshyng.” This shop was in “the Flete Strete.” Rose garlands or chaplets were not only worn in the middle ages as head-dresses, but also awarded as archery prizes.

“On euery syde a Rose garlonde
They shott under the lyne,
Whoso faileth of the Rose garlonde, sayth Robyn,
His tackyll he shall tyne.”

Merry Gestes of Robin Hoode.

Copland’s Rose garland, doubtless, suggested the sign of another bookseller, John Wayland, who also lived in Fleet Street about the year 1540; his sign was the Blue Garland.

The colloquial phrase, Under the Rose, is sometimes used as a sign, or written under the pictorial representation of the rose; it occurs on a trade’s token of Cambridge,[331] and may be seen on various public-houses of the present day. Numerous suppositions have been made concerning its origin, some holding that it arose from this flower being the emblem of Harpocrates; others from a rose painted on the ceiling, any conversations held under which were not to be divulged; whilst Gregory Nazianzen seems to imply that the rose, from its close bud, had been made the emblem of silence.

“Utque latet rosa verna suo putamine clausa,
Sic os vincla ferat, validis arcietur habenis,
Indicatque suis prolixa silentia labris.”[332]

At Lullingstone Castle, in Kent, the residence of Sir Percival Dyke, Bart., there is, says a correspondent of Notes and Queries, a representation of a rose nearly two feet in diameter, surrounded with the following inscription:—

“Kentish true blue
Take this as a token,
That what is said here
Under the Rose is spoken.”

The Dutch have a similar phrase. In an old Book of Inscriptions of the seventeenth century is a device written round a rose painted on the ceiling:—

“Al wat hier onder de Roos geschied,
Laat dat aldaar en meld het niet.”[333]

There is one sign of the Rose, the origin of which it is difficult to ascertain, this is the Rose of Normandy, a public-house in the High Street, Marylebone. It was built in the seventeenth century, and is the oldest house in that parish. In 1659 it is described as having

“Outside a square brick wall set with fruit trees, gravel walks 204 paces long, 7 broad; the circular wall 485 paces long, 6 broad; the centre square, a bowling-green, 112 paces one way, 88 another—all, except the first, double set with quickset hedges, full grown, and kept in excellent order, and indented like town walls.”[334]

The street having been raised, the entrance to the house is at present some steps beneath the roadway. The original form of the exterior has been preserved, and the staircases and balusters are coeval with the building; but the garden and large bowling-green have dwindled into a miserable skittle-ground.

As a sign the Marygold, it is said, arose from a popular reading of the sign of the Sun; a very natural and plausible origin. At the same time, it is just worth mentioning, that this flower (originally called the Gold) seems to have been considered as an emblem of Queen Mary; so, at least, it would appear from a lengthy ballad of “the Marygolde,” composed by her chaplain, William Forrest, in which, amongst many other similar allusions, the following words are found:—

“She [the Queen] may be called Marygolde well,
Of Marie (chiefe) Christes mother deere,
That as in heaven she doth excell,
And golde on earth to have no peere,
So certainly she shineth cleere,
In grace and honour double fold,
[238] The like was never erst seen heere,
Such as this flower the Marygolde.”

The flower was a favourite one in the middle ages, deriving the first part of its name from the Virgin Mary. No mention of the actual use of the sign, however, has been met with previous to 1638, when it appears on the title-pages of Francis Eglisfield, a bookseller in St Paul’s Churchyard. His name still occurs at the same house in 1673,[335] when it was also the sign of “Mr Cox, milliner, over against St Clement’s Church in the Strand.”[336] This must have been the same house in which Richard Blanchard and Francis Child, the goldsmiths, kept their “running cashes.”[337] It is the oldest banking firm in London. Francis Child, the founder, was, in the reign of Charles I., apprenticed to a goldsmith, William Wheeler, whose shop stood on the same spot now occupied by the bank. He married his master’s daughter, and thus laid the foundation of his immense fortune. Many bills and other papers relating to Nell Gwynn are still preserved by this firm, as well as various documents concerning the sale of Dunkerque. Alderman Blackwell, who was ruined by the shutting up of the Exchequer in the reign of Charles II., was at one time a partner in this house. It was here that Dryden deposited the £50 offered for the discovery of the bullies of the “Rose-alley cudgel ambuscade.”[338] The old sign of the house is still preserved by their successors, together with various relics of the Devil Tavern, on the site of which it was built.

Only a few other flowers occur, mostly modern introductions. The Daisey, Bramley, Leeds; the Tulip, Springfield, Chelmsford; the Lilies of the Valley, Ible, near Wirksworth; the Snowdrop, near Lewes; Woodbine Tavern, South Shields; and the Forest Blue Bell, Mansfield. The Blue Bell is very common, but, inter doctores lis est, whether it signifies the little blue flower, or a bell painted blue.

As a sequel to the flowers, we may name the Myrtle tree, of which there are two in Bristol, and the Rosemary Branch, in Camberwell, and in many other places. Rosemary was formerly an emblem of Remembrance, in the same way as the Forget-me-not is now; “There’s Rosemary, that’s for remembrance,” says Ophelia, (Hamlet, ac. iv., s. 5,) and in Winter’s Tale, Perdita says:—

“For you, there’s Rosemary and Rue, these keep
Seeming and savour all the winter long,
Grace and remembrance be to you both.”

Winter’s Tale, ac. iv., s. 4.

Hence Rosemary and gloves were of old presented to those who followed the funeral of a friend.

Fruit trees are much more common, particularly the Apple-tree and the Pear-tree, which (owing to the favourite drinks of cider and perry) are next to the Rose; and the Oak, the most frequent among vegetable signs. The Apple-tree, near Coldbath Fields prison, was one of the numerous public-houses which Topham the strong man kept in 1745. At the Apple-tree Tavern, in Charles Street, Covent Garden, four of the leading London Free Masons’ lodges, considering themselves neglected by Sir Christopher Wren in 1716, met and chose a grandmaster, pro tem., until they should be able to place a noble brother at the head, which they did the year following, electing the Duke of Montague. Sir Christopher had been chosen in 1698. The three lodges that joined with the Apple-tree Lodge used to meet respectively at the Goose and Gridiron, St Paul’s Churchyard; the Crown, Parker’s Lane; and at the Rummer and Grapes Tavern, Westminster. The Hand and Apple was the sign, in 1782, of a shop in Thames Street, where “syder, Barcelona, cherry brandy, tobacco,” &c., were sold. It represented a hand holding an apple, and was chosen on account of the cider.[339] To this beverage other signs owe their origin: for instance, the Red-streak Tree, from the apple of which the best cider is made. Tickets used formerly to be in the windows of houses where cider was sold, with the words, “Bright Red-streak Cyder sold here,” illustrated with three merry companions in cocked hats, sitting under an apple-tree drinking cider, on the other side a pile of barrels, from which the landlord is drawing the liquor. In Maylordsham, Hereford, this sign is rendered as the “Red-streaked Tree;” there was a Red-streaked Tree Inn in that same town in 1775.[340] The Apple-tree and Mitre is an old painted sign, a great deal the worse for London smoke, in Cursitor Street. It represents an apple-tree abundantly loaded with fruit, standing in a landscape, with some figures; above it a gilt mitre. It is evidently a combination of two signs.

The Pear-tree is as common as the Apple-tree. The Iron Pear-tree at Appleshaw, Andover, Hants, and at Redenham in the same county, may have been derived from some noted pear-tree in that neighbourhood, whose hollow and broken stem was secured with plates or bands of iron. Very general, also, is the Cherry-tree. It was the sign of a once famous resort in Bowling-green Lane, Clerkenwell, and was adopted on account of the quantities of cherry-trees which grew upon its grounds, even as late as thirty or forty years ago. In our younger days, this house was the resort of the fast men of Clerkenwell; its bowling-green gave the name to the alley in which the house stood. Down the river, at Rotherhithe, was the Cherry-garden, a famous place of entertainment in the reign of the Merry Monarch. Pepys went to it on June 15, 1664, and, with his usual pleasant flow of animal spirits, “came home by water, singing merrily.”

“Over against the parish church, [St Olave’s, Southwark,] on the south side of the street, was some time one great house, builded of stone, with arched gates, which pertained to the Prior of Lewis, in Sussex, and was his lodging when he came to London; it is now a common hostelry for travellers, and hath to sign the Walnut-tree.”[341]

The Walnut-tree was also the sign of a tavern at the south side of St Paul’s Churchyard, over against the New Vault, in which place a concert is advertised in July 1718, which, from the high price of the admission tickets—5s. each—must have been something out of the common.[342] The Walnut-tree was frequently adopted by cabinetmakers, and is at the present day a not uncommon alehouse sign.

The Mulberry-tree was introduced at an early period, but does not seem to have been used as a sign until modern times. James I., in 1609, caused several shiploads of mulberry trees to be imported from abroad to encourage the home manufacture of silk: these were planted in a part of St James’s Park; but the climate being too cold for the silk worms, it was changed into a pleasure garden, where even the serious Evelyn would occasionally relax. 10th May 1654:—

“My Lady Gerard treated us at the Mulberry Gardens, now ye only place of refreshment about ye towne for persons of ye best quality to be exceedingly cheated at; Cromwell and his partizans having shut up and seized on Spring Gardens, which till now had been ye usual rendezvous for ye ladys and gallants at this season.”

Here Dryden went to eat mulberry tarts, and here Pepys occasionally dined, as 5th April 1669, when he indulged in what he calls an “olio,” evidently an olla podrida, since it was prepared by a Spanish cook; and the dish was so “noble,” and such a success, that he and his friends left the rest of their dinners untouched; and after a ride in a coach and a walk for digestion, they took supper “upon what was left at noon, and very good.”

Orange trees were one of the ornaments of St James’ Park in the reign of Charles II.; and at that period and long after, were mostly used as signboards of the seed-shops, and by Italian merchants. The Orange-tree and Two Jars was the sign of a shop of the latter description in the Haymarket in 1753.[343] No doubt, the orange tree must have obtained some popularity in the reign of William III., as it is the emblem of the Orange family. The orange tree is said to be originally a Chinese plant, (whence they were formerly called China oranges.) They were unknown to the ancients, and introduced by the Moors into Sicily in the twelfth century. France possessed them in the fourteenth century; and probably much about the same period they were brought to England, for we find “pome d’orring” mentioned as one of the items at the coronation dinner of Henry IV. in 1399, where they occur in the third course, along with quincys en comfyte doucettys, and other items of a modern dessert.[344] But a still earlier instance is mentioned in the “Book of Days,” (vol. ii. p. 694,) viz., in 1290, when a large ship from Spain arrived at Portsmouth laden with spices. On this occasion, Queen Eleanor of Castile, anxious to taste again the luscious fruit that reminded her of her home in sunny Spain and the days of her girlhood, bought out of the cargo “a frail of figs, of raisins, and of grapes, a bale of dates, 230 pomegranates, 15 citrons, and 7 oranges.” This probably is the oldest mention of the orange being brought to England. The tree is said to have been introduced into this country by a member of the Carew family. Oranges are named amongst the articles of diet consumed by the Lords of the Star Chamber in 1509, when their price is quoted one day at iijd., and another at ijd., whilst the charge for strawberries was vijd., and on another day iiijd.[345] Perhaps, however, they were only used as hors d’œuvres, for Randle Holme, in his instructions how to arrange a dinner, (in that omnium gatherum, “Academy of Armory,”) mentions oranges and lemons as the first item of the second course. At all events, they were abundant enough in 1559, for on May day of that year the revellers “at the queen’s plasse at Westmynster shott and threw eges and orengs on a-gaynst a-nodur.”[346] In an “Account of several Gardens near London,” in 1691,[347] Beddington Gardens are mentioned—then in the hands of the Duke of Norfolk, but belonging to the Carew family—as having in it the best oranges in England. The orange and lemon trees grew in the ground, “and had done so near one hundred years, the house in which they were being above 200 feet long. Each of the trees was about 13 feet high, and generally full of fruit, producing above 10,000 oranges a year.” Sir William Temple’s oranges at Sheen are also praised. It is, indeed, a pity that this plant has so much gone out of fashion; for, besides being always green, it bears fruit and flowers all the year round, both appearing at the same time. The flowers have a delicious smell; the candied petals impart a very fine flavour to tea, if a few of them are infused with it; whilst the fruit may be preserved in exactly the same manner as other fruit. The sign of the orange-tree still occurs at Highgate, Birmingham; the Lemon Tree at Beacon Street, Lichfield.

The Olive Tree was a common Italian warehouse sign, but was occasionally used by other shops. Amongst the tokens in the Beaufoy Collection, there is the “Olfa Tree, Singon Strete,” an example of the liberties taken with our language on the old tokens, as this stands for the Olive Tree in St John’s Street. The usefulness of the olive tree made it in very early times a symbol of peace. In 1503 it was the sign of Henry Estienne, a bookseller and printer at the end of the Rue de St Jean Beauvais, otherwise Clos Bruneau, in Paris. This firm, for several generations, continued the leading publishers and printers in Paris. Sauval, who wrote in 1650, says that in his time the olive tree, carved in stone, was still to be seen in the front of the house. Here Francis I., in 1539, visited Robert Estienne, grandson of the founder of the firm, in his workshops; and to give him a proof of his favour, conferred upon him the title of Printer to the King for Latin and Hebrew; and presented him with those beautiful letters which Estienne proudly mentions on his title-pages: “Ex officina Roberti Stephani, typographi regii, typis regiis.”

The Vine, or the Bunch of Grapes, is a very natural sign at a place where wine is sold. The last particularly was almost inseparable from every tavern, and was often combined with other objects—

“Without there hangs a noble sign,
Where golden grapes in image shine;
To crown the bush, a little Punch-
Gut Bacchus dangling of a bunch,
Sits loftily enthron’d upon
What’s called (in miniature) a Tun.”

Compleat Vintner: London, 1720, p. 86.

The Bunch of Carrots, at Hampton Bishop, Hereford, is probably meant as a joke upon the Bunch of Grapes. Bagford, in a letter to his brother antiquary, Leland,[348] says:—

“I have often thought, and am now fully perswaded, that the planting of vines in the adjacent parts about this city, was first of all begun by the Romans, an industrious people, and famous for their skill in agriculture and gardening, as may appear from their rei agrariæ scriptores, as well as from Pliny and other authors. We had a vineyard in East Smithfield, another in Hatton Garden, (which at this time is called Vine Street,) and a third in St Giles-in-the-Fields.[349] Many places in the country bear the name of the Vineyard to this day, especially in the ancient monasteries, as Canterbury, Ely, Abingdon, &c., which were left as such by the Romans.”

In Bede’s time vineyards were abundant; and still later, tithes on wine were common in Gloucester, Kent, Surrey, and the adjacent counties. Winchester was famous for its vineyards in olden times, for Robert of Gloucester, in summing up the various commodities of the English counties, says:—

“And London ships most, and wine at Winchester.”

The Isle of Ely was called Isle des Vignes, and the tithe on the vines yielded as much as three or four tuns of wine to the bishop. Even in Richard II.’s time, the Little Park at Windsor was used as a vineyard for the home consumption; and the vale of Gloucester, according to William of Malmesbury, produced, in the twelfth century, as good a wine as many of the provinces of France; this county, in fact, produced the best wine:—

“There is no province in England hath so many or such good vineyards as this county, [Gloucester,] either for fertility or sweetness of the grape; the wine whereof carrieth no unpleasant tartness, being not much inferior to French in sweetness.”[350]

From the household expenses of Richard de Swinfield, Bishop of Hereford, (1289-1290,) it appears that the white wine was at that period chiefly home-grown, whilst the greater proportion of red wine was imported from abroad. Even as late as the last century wine was made in England: Faulkner[351] quotes the following memorandum from the MS. notes of Peter Collinson:—

“October 18, 1765.—I went to see Mr Roger’s vineyards at Parson’s Green [at Fulham] all of Burgundy grapes, and seemingly all perfectly ripe; I did not see a green, half-ripe grape in all this quantity. He does not expect to make less than fourteen hogsheads of wine. The branches and fruit are remarkably large, and the wine very strong.”

Grosley[352] mentions a vineyard at Cobham, belonging to a Mr Hamilton, of about half an acre, planted with Burgundian vines; but the wine it produced will cause nobody to regret that the culture has been abandoned, for “it was a liquor of a darkish gray color; to the palate it was like verjuice and vinegar blended together by a bad taste of the soil.” This description, enough to set the teeth on edge, is most likely true, and gives us the reason why English wine came to be abandoned.

As the vine was set up as a sign in honour of wine, so the Hop-pole, or the Hop and Barleycorn, the Barley Mow, the Barley Stack, the Malt and Hops, and the Hopbine, are very general tributes of honour rendered to beer. In many ale-houses a bunch of hops may be seen suspended in some conspicuous place.

The Pine-apple, in the end of the last and the beginning of this century, was generally the emblem adopted by confectioners, though not exclusively, for it was the sign of an eating-house in New Street, Strand, at which Dr Johnson, on his first coming to town, used to dine.

“I dined very well for eightpence, with very good company, at the Pine-apple in New Street, just by.[353] Several of them had travelled; they expected to meet every day, but did not know one another’s names. It used to cost the rest a shilling, for they drank wine; but I had a cut of meat for sixpence, and bread for a penny, and gave the waiter a penny; so that I was quite well served, nay, better than the rest, for they gave the waiter nothing.”

The pine-apple was first known at the discovery of America, and was preserved in sugar as early as 1556. The first pine-apple was brought from Santa Cruz to the West Indies, thence to the East Indies and China. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, writing in October 1716, informs her sister that she had been at a supper of the King of Hanover, “where there were,” says she, “what I thought worth all the rest, two ripe ananas, which, to my taste, are a fruit perfectly delicious. You know they are naturally the growth of Brazil, and I could not imagine how they came there, but by enchantment.” Upon inquiry she learned that they had been forced in stoves or hot-houses, and is “surprised we do not practise in England so useful an invention.” It was not till the end of the last century that they were introduced into English gardens, having been brought over from hot-houses in Holland; and from that time seems to date their introduction on the signboard. It is still in general use with public-houses.

Of the Fig Tree there are several examples among the London trades tokens, some of them, no doubt, grocers’ signs, but other trades may have adopted it, either in allusion to the text of every man “sitting under his own fig-tree,” or because the fig-tree was a symbol of quiet unassuming industry; as such, at least, Camerarius represents it:—

“Verno tempore ficus arbor speciosis floribus aut fructuum præcocium abundantia minime sese ostentat, nullamque inanem hominibus de se spem injicit: in autumno autem fructus suaviss. ac quidem in illis reconditos quasi flores quosdam proferre solet.”[354]

The Almond Tree was the sign of John Webster in St Paul’s Churchyard, in 1663; and the Peach Tree occurs sometimes as an ale-house sign, as, for instance, in Nottingham. Neither of these signs, however, are of frequent occurrence.

Not only fruit-trees but various forest-trees are constantly met with on the signboard: thus the Green Tree, which is very common, originally had allusion to the foresters of the “merry greenwood,” or was suggested by some large evergreen, or tree sheltering, or standing near the inn; of this green tree the Green Seedling in Chester is evidently a sprout. Again, in Sheffield there are two signs of the Burnt Tree, which name possibly originated from some tree having been damaged in a fire, and becoming a well-known landmark. The Oak, the vigorous emblem of our mighty state, is deservedly much used for a sign; sometimes it is called the British Oak. At Kilpeck, in Herefordshire, the following rhyme accompanies it:—

“I am an oak and not a yew,
So drink a cup with good John Pugh.”

Druidical recollections are called up by the Oak and Ivy, at Bilston, Stafford; Hearts of Oak is the material out of which, according to the song, our ships and seamen are constructed, and therefore well deserves the favourite place it occupies amongst the signboards of the present day; whilst the Acorn, the fruit of the British oak, is nearly as common as the other oak signs.

Next to the oak the Elm seems to have had most followers. From the trades tokens it appears that the Three Elms was the sign of Edward Boswell in Chandos Street, in 1667; and also of Isaac Elliotson, St John Street, Clerkenwell. Besides these there was, about the same date, the One Elm, and the Elm. At present we have the Nine Elms, and the Queen’s Elm, Brompton, which is mentioned under the name of the Queen’s Tree, in the parish books of 1586. This tree is said to derive its name from the fact of Queen Elizabeth, when on a visit to Lord Burleigh, being caught in a shower of rain, and taking shelter under the branches of an elm-tree, then growing on this spot. The Seven Sisters, the sign of two public-houses in Tottenham, were seven elm-trees, planted in a circular form, with a walnut tree in the middle; they were upwards of 500 years old, and the local tradition said that a martyr had been burnt on that spot. They stood formerly at the entrance from the high road at Page Green, Tottenham. Within the last twenty years they have been removed. The Chestnut, the Sycamore, the Beech Tree, the Fir Tree, the Birch Tree, and the Ash Tree, all occur in various places where ale-houses are built in the shadow of such trees. The Thorn Tree is peculiar to Derbyshire. The Buckthorn Tree was, in 1775, the sign of “William Blackwell in Covent Garden, or at his garden in South Lambeth.” He had chosen this sign because he sold, amongst other herbs, “buckthorn and elder-berries, besides leeches and vipers.” What the use of the first was is well known; as for the vipers, they were eaten in broth and soups, before Madame Rachel’s enamels were employed, by ladies who wished to continue “young and beautiful for ever.” The Crab Tree, our indigenous apple-tree, is also seen in a great many places. A house in Fulham, with that name, is well known to the oarsmen on the Thames. It derives its denomination from a large crab-tree growing near the public-house, which gave its name to the whole village. The Willow Tree is very rare; in the seventeenth century it was the sign of a shop in the Old Exchange, as appears from a trades token, but what business was carried on under this gloomy sign does not appear. Fuller, in his Worthies, (voce Cambridgeshire,) says of willows:—

“A sad tree whereof such who have lost their love make them mourning garlands; and we know that exiles hung their harps upon such doleful supporters; the twiggs hereoff are physick to drive out the folly of children. Let me add that if green ash may burn before a queen, withered willows may be allowed to burn before a lady.”

As an attribute of forsaken love it is of constant occurrence in old plays:—

“Sylli. If you forsake me,
Send me word, that I may provide a willow garland
To wear when I drown myself.”

Massinger’s Maid of Honour, a. iv. s. 5, 1631.

And in the same play Sylli, who thinks himself the preferred lover, says to his rival:—

“You may cry willow, willow!”—Ibid., a. v. s. 1.

Shakespeare uses the same emblem frequently, particularly in Desdemona’s famous willow song. There is a quaint ballad which an old Northumberland woman used to sing, but which we have never seen in print: it begins as follows:—

“Young men are false, and they are so deceitful:
Young men are false, and they seldom will prove true;
For wi’ wrangling and jangling, their minds are always changing,
They’re always seeking for some pretty girl that’s new.

It’s all round my hat, I will wear a green willow,
It’s all round my hat for a twelvemonth and a day;
If any one should ask you the reason why I wear it,
Oh! tell them I have been slighted by my own true love.”

Douce, in his “Illustrations to Shakespeare,” says:—This tree might have been chosen as the symbol of sadness from the verse in Psalm cxxxvii.: “We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof;” or else from a coincidence between the weeping willow and falling tears. Another reason has been assigned: the Agnus castus or vitex was supposed by the ancients to promote chastity, “and the willow being of a much like nature,” says an old writer, “it is yet a custom that he which is deprived of his love must wear a willow garland.”—Swan’s Speculum Mundi, ch. vi. sec. 4. 1635.

The frequency of the sign of the Yew Tree is not to be attributed to its association with the churchyard, but to its being the wood from which those famous bows were made that did such execution at Agincourt and Poictiers, and wherever the English armies trod the field before the invention of gunpowder. So great was the patronage our early kings granted to the practice of the bow, that the patten-makers, by an Act of Parliament of 4 Henry V., were forbidden, under a penalty of £5, to use in their craft any kind of wood fit to make arrows of.

The Cotton Tree is a sign generally put up in the neighbourhood of cotton factories, as at Manchester. The Palm Tree is one of the oldest symbols known: it was used as such by the Assyrians, the Greeks, the Romans, and by them transmitted to the early Christians. St Ambrosius, in a very forcible image, compares the life of an early and faithful Christian to the palm tree, rough and rugged below, like its stem, but increasing in beauty upwards, where it bears heavenly fruit. It might also illustrate a more homely truth, namely, that business cannot flourish without patronage and custom; thus, Camerarius says:—

“Inter alias multas singulares proprietates quas scriptores rerum naturalium Palmæ attribuunt, ista non postrema est, quod hæc arbor non facile crescat, nisi radiis solaribus opt. foveatur nec non humore aliquo conveniente irrigetur.”[355]

The Cocoa Tree was frequently the sign of chocolate-houses when that beverage was newly imported and very fashionable. One of the most famous was in St James’ Street; it was, in the reign of Queen Anne, strictly a Tory house:—“A Whig will no more go to the Cocoa Tree, or Ozinda’s, [another chocolate-house in the same neighbourhood,] than a Tory will be seen at the coffee-house of St James’.”[356] Deep play was the order of the day in that as in all other fashionable resorts at the end of the last century. Walpole, in 1780, wrote to one of his friends:—

“Within this week there has been a cast at hazard at the Cocoa Tree, the difference of which amounted to an hundred and four score thousand pounds. Mr O’Birne, an Irish gamester, had won £100,000 off a young Mr Harvey, of Chigwell, just started from a midshipman into an estate by his elder brother’s death. O’Birne said, ‘You can never pay me?’ ‘I can,’ said the youth, ‘my estate will sell for the debt.’ ‘No,’ said O., ‘I will win ten thousand, you shall throw for the odd ninety.’ They did, and Harvey won.”[357]

It afterwards became a club, of which Byron was a member. This gambling seems to have been inseparable from the chocolate-houses. Roger North, attorney-general to James II., says,—

“The use of coffee-houses seems newly improved by a new invention called Chocolate-houses, for the benefit of rooks and cullies of all the quality, where gaming is added to all the rest, and the summons of wh—— seldom fails: as if the devil had erected a new university, and those were the colleges of its professors, as well as his school of discipline.”[358]

Chocolate was known in Germany as early as 1624, when Joan Franz. Rauch wrote a treatise against that beverage and the monks. In England, however, it seems to have been introduced much later, for in 1657 it was advertised as a new drink:—

“IN BISHOPSGATE STREET, in Queen’s Head Alley, at a Frenchman’s house, is an excellent West India drink called Chocolate to be sold, where you may have it ready at any time, and also unmade, at reasonable rates.”[359]

It is amusing to observe the fluctuating reputation of chocolate on its first introduction. Mme. de Sévigné, in her letters, gives many proofs of it; at one time she fervently recommends it to her daughter as a perfect panacea, at other times she is as violently against it, and puts it down as the root of all evil.

The Coffee House is the now inappropriate sign of a gin-palace in Chalton Street, Somers Town. Early in the last century this neighbourhood was a delightful rural suburb, with fields and flower gardens. A short distance down the hill was the then famous Bagnigge Wells, and close by were the remains of Totten-Hall, with the Adam and Eve tea-gardens, and the so-called King John’s Palace. Many foreign Protestant refugees had taken up their residence in this suburb, on account of the retirement it afforded, and the low rates asked for the small houses. “The Coffee House” was then the popular tea and coffee-gardens of the district, and was visited by the foreigners of the neighbourhood, as well as the pleasure-seeking Cockney from the distant city. There were other public-houses and places of entertainment near at hand, but the specialty of this establishment was its coffee. As the traffic increased, it became a posting-house, uniting the business of an inn to the profits of a pleasure garden. Gradually the demand for coffee fell off, and that for malt and spirituous liquors increased. At present the gardens are all built over, and the old gateway forms part of the modern bar; but there are aged persons in the neighbourhood who remember Sunday-school excursions to the place, and pic-nic parties from the crowded city, making merry here in the grounds.

The Holly Bush is a common public-house sign at the present day. Among the London trades tokens there is one of the Hand and Holly Bush at Templebar, evidently the same inn mentioned in 1708 by Hatton, “on the north side, and about the middle of the backside of St Clements, near the church.”[360] This combination with the hand does not seem to have any very distinct meaning, and apparently arose simply from the manner of representing objects in those days, as being held by a hand issuing from a cloud. Adorning houses and churches at Christmas with evergreens and holly is a very ancient custom, supposed, like some others of our old customs, to be derived from the Druids. Formerly the streets also appear to have been decked out, for Stow tells us that

“Against the feast of Christmas every man’s house, as also the parish churches, were decked with holme, ivy, and bayes, and whatsoever the season of the year afforded to be given. The conduits and standards in the streets were likewise garnished.”

Thus flowers, fruit trees, and forest trees were represented on the signboard, and with them even the homely but useful tenants of the kitchen garden found a place. The Artichoke, above all, used to be a great favourite, and still gives a name to some public-houses. As a seedsman’s sign it was common and rational; not so for a milliner, yet both among the Bagford and Banks’s shopbills there are several instances of its being the sign of that business; thus:—

“Susannah Fordham, att the Hartichoake, in ye Royal Exchange,” in the reign of Queen Anne, sold “all sorts of fine poynts, laces, and linnens, and all sorts of gloves and ribons, and all other sorts of millenary wares.”[361]

Probably the novelty of the plant had more than anything else to do with this selection; for though it was introduced in this country in the reign of King Henry VIII., yet Evelyn observes:—

“’Tis not very long since this noble thistle came first into Italy, improved to this magnitude by culture, and so rare in England that they were commonly sold for a crowne a piece.”[362]

The Cabbage is an ale-house sign at Hunslet, Leeds, and at Liverpool, and Cabbage Hall, opposite Chaney Lane, on the road to the Lunatic Asylum, Oxford, was formerly the name of a public-house kept by a tailor; but whether he himself had christened it thus, or his customers had a sly suspicion that it owed its origin to cabbaging, history has omitted to record. Another public-house, higher up the hill, was known by the name of Caterpillar Hall, a name clearly selected in compliment to Cabbage Hall, intimating that it meant to draw away the customers from Cabbage Hall, in other words, that the caterpillar would eat the cabbage. The Oxnoble, a kind of potato, is the name of a public-house in Manchester, and the homely mess of Pease and Beans was a sign in Norwich in 1750.[363] The Three Radishes was, in the seventeenth century, a common nursery and market gardener’s sign in Holland. There was one near Haarlem, to which was added a representation of Christ appearing to Mary Magdalene in the garden, with this rhyme—

“Christus vertoont men hier
Na zyn dood in verryzen,
Als een groot hovenier
Die ieder een moet pryzen.
Dit ’s in de drie Radyzen.”[364]

Another, near Gouda, had a still more absurd inscription:—

“Adam en Eva leefden in den Paradyze
Zelden aten zy stokvisch maar veel warmoes, kropsla en radyzen.
Hier vindt gy allerley aardgewas om menschen mêe te spyzen.”[365]

The Wheatsheaf is an extremely common inn, public-house, and baker’s sign; it is a charge in the arms of these three corporations, besides that of the brewers. In the middle of Farringdon Street, opposite the vegetable market, is Wheatsheaf Yard, once a famous waggon inn, which also did a roaring trade in wine, spirits, and Fleet Street marriages. Indeed, most of the large inns within the liberties of the Fleet served as “marriage shops” between 1734 and 1749; amongst the most famous were the Bull and Garter, the Hoop and Bunch of Grapes, the Bishop Blaize and Two Sawyers, the Fighting Cocks, and numerous others. The gateway entrance to the old coach-yard is adorned with very fine carvings of wheat ears and lions’ heads intermixed, finished in a manner not unworthy of Grinling Gibbons himself.

The Oatsheaf is very rare; it was the sign of a shop in Cree Church Lane, Leadenhall Street, in the seventeenth century, as appears from a trades token; but this seems the only instance of the sign.

With these plants we may also class Tobacco, that best abused of all weeds. Sometimes we see a pictorial representation of the Tobacco plant, but most usually it occurs in the form of Tobacco rolls, representing coils of the so-called spun or twist tobacco, otherwise pigtail, for the sake of ornament, painted brown and gold alternately. Decker, in his “Gull’s Hornbook,” mentions Roll Trinidado, leaf, and pudding tobacco, which probably were the three sorts smokers at that day preferred. That it was used mixed may be conjectured from the introduction to “Cinthia’s Revels,” a play by Ben Jonson; one of the interlocutors says,—“I have my three sorts of tobacco in my pocket.”

[326] “The Country Carbonadoed,” by D. Lupton, 1632. Voce “Alehouse.”

[327]

“The tavern opened
With signboard and bush;
The landlady’s hair neatly dressed.
Tied up in a knot.”

[328] Be thou, rose, queen of flowers, the cure of my diseases.

[329]

Through thee, rose, sins are taken away,
Through thee, gladness is given to the sorrowing.

[330] Blount’s “Fragmenta Antiquitatis, or Ancient Tenures,” p. 248.

[331] See Boynes’ Tokens issued in the seventeenth century in England, Wales, and Ireland.

[332] Like the rose in spring, hidden in its bud, so must the mouth be closed and restrained with strong reins, enforcing silence to the loquacious lips.

[333]

All that is done here, under the Rose,
Leave it here and do not divulge it.

[334] Memoirs by Samuel Sainthill, 1659, Gent. Mag., lxxxiii. p. 520.

[335] London Gazette, Nov. 6, 1673.

[336] Ibid., Oct. 20, 1673.

[337] See the “Little London Directory, 1677,” recently reprinted.

[338] Domestic Intelligencer, Sept. 9, 1679.

[339] Banks’s Bills in the British Museum.

[340] Hereford Journal, January 7, 1775.

[341] Stow’s Survey, p. 340.

[342] Daily Courant, July 1, 1718.

[343] Banks’s Bills.

[344] Harl. MSS., 279, p. 47, a cookery book of that period.

[345]

Lansdowne MS., No. 1, fol. 49. Three weeks’ diet of the Lords of the Star Chamber. These lords appear to have lived very well, as we may learn from some of the items of one day’s dinner:—
ffirst for bread, xijd.; ale, iijs. iiijd.; and wine, xvjd. Item to
viijd.vjd. vd. ijd. xiiijd. xd.
loyne of moton; maribones and beef; powdered beef; ij capons; ij geese; v conyes;
iiijd. xviijd. vd. xijd. vjd. xd.
j leg moton; vj places; vj pegions; ij doz. larkes; salt and sause; butter and eggs,
&c., &c., &c.

[346] Machyn’s Diary.

[347] Archæologia, vol. xii.

[348] Prefixed to Collectanea, 1770, p. lxxv.; there is also a paper on Vines in England in Archæologia, i. p. 321; and Roach Smith’s Collectanea Antiqua, vol. vi., p. 78, et seq. may be consulted with advantage upon this subject.

[349] Curiously enough, until about 1820, a public-house, the sign of the Vine, in Dobie Street, St Giles, occupied the very site assigned to this vineyard in Domesday Book, A.D. 1070.

[350] Hollinshed’s Description of Britain, p. 3.

[351] Faulkner, Antiquities of Kensington.

[352] Grosley, vol. i., p. 83.

[353] He lived then in Exeter Street, at a stay-maker’s. Boswell’s Johnson: London, 1819, p. 67.

[354] “In spring-time the fig-tree does not make any show of beautiful flowers or precocious fruit to deceive mankind with idle hope; but in autumn it generally produces exceedingly sweet fruit, with flowers as it were contained within them.”—Joachimus Camerarius, “Symbolorum Centuriæ Quatuor,” 1697, Centur. i., p. 18.

[355] “Among the many curious properties which the writers on natural history attribute to the palm tree, it is not one of the least singular that this tree cannot well thrive unless it be properly basked by the beams of the sun, and watered by some neighbouring stream.”—J. Camerarius, “Centuria,” i., 1697.

[356] Defoe’s Journey through England, p. 168.

[357] Horace Walpole’s Letters to Mr Mann, February 6, 1780.

[358] As quoted in Disraeli’s Curiosities of Literature, ii. p. 326.

[359] Publick Advertiser, Tuesday, June 16-22, 1657.

[360] Hatton’s New View of London, 1708, p. 36.

[361] Bagford Bills.

[362] Evelyn’s Miscellaneous Writings, p. 735.

[363] Gent. Mag., March 1842.

[364]

“Christ is represented here
After his death and resurrection,
As a great gardener
Whom every body must praise.
This is at the Three Radishes.”

[365]

“Adam and Eve lived in Paradise,
They rarely ate stock fish, but a great deal of hotchpotch, lettuce, and radishes.
All sorts of vegetables sold here for human food.”

A similarly dull joke occurs in an old English comedy, “Law Tricks,” by John Day, 1608. “I have heard old Adam was an honest man and a good gardener, loved lettuce well, salads and cabbage reasonably well, yet no tobacco.”

CHAPTER VIII.
BIBLICAL AND RELIGIOUS SIGNS.

The earlier signs were frequently representations of the most important article sold in the shops before which they hung. The stocking denoted the hosier, the gridiron the ironmonger, and so on. The early booksellers, whose trade lay chiefly in religious books, delighted in signs of saints, but at the Reformation the Bible amongst those classes, to whom till then it had been a sealed book, became in great request, and was sold in large numbers. Then the booksellers set it up for their sign; it became the popular symbol of the trade, and at the present moment instances of its use still linger with us. There was one day in the year, St Bartholomew’s, the 24th of August, when their shops displayed nothing but Bibles and Prayer-books. It is not impossible that this may have been originally intended for a manifestation against Popery, since it was the anniversary of the dreadful Protestant massacre in Paris in 1572. The following, however, is the only allusion we have met with relating to this custom:—“Like a bookseller’s shop on Bartholomew day at London, the stalls of which are so adorned with Bibles and Prayer-books, that almost nothing is left within but heathen knowledge.”[366]

One of the last Bible signs was about twenty years ago, at a public-house in Shire Lane, Temple Bar. It was an old established house of call for printers.

The Bible being such a common sign, booksellers had to “wear their rue with a difference,” as Ophelia says, and adopt different colours, amongst which the Blue Bible was one of the most common. “Prynne’s Histrio-Mastrix” was “printed for Michael Sparke, and sold at the Blue Bible, in Green Arbour Court, Little Old Bailey, 1632.” This blue colour, so common on the signboard, was not chosen without meaning, but on account of its symbolic virtue. Blue, from its permanency, being an emblem of truth, hence Lydgate, speaking of Delilah, Samson’s mistress, in his translation from Boccacio, (MS. Harl. 2251,) says—

“Insteade of blew, which steadfaste is and clene,
She weraed colours of many a diverse grene.”

It also signified piety and sincerity. Randle Holme[367] says—

“This colour, blew, doth represent the sky on a clear, sun-shining day, when all clouds are exiled. Job, speaking to the busy searchers of God’s mysteries, saith (Job xi. 17,) ‘That then shall the residue of their lives be as clear as the noonday.’ Which to the judgment of men (through the pureness of the air) is of azure colour or light blew, and signifieth piety and sincerity.”

Other booksellers chose the Three Bibles, which was a very common sign of the trade on London Bridge in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: of one of them, Charles Tyne, trades tokens are extant,—great curiosities to the numismatist, as booksellers were not in the habit of issuing them. The sign of the Three Bibles seems to have originated from the stationers’ arms, which are arg. on a chevron between three bibles, or a falcon volant between two roses, the Holy Ghost in chief. One bookseller, on account of his selling stationery, also added three inkbottles to the favourite three Bibles, as we see from an advertisement, giving the price of playing cards in 1711:—

“SOLD by Henry Parson, Stationer at the Three Bibles and Three Inkbottles, near St Magnus’ Church, on London Bridge, the best principal superfine Picket Cards, at 2s. 6d. a dozen; the best principal Ombro Cards, at 2s. 9d. a dozen; the best principal superfine Basset Cards, at 3s. 6d. a dozen; with all other Cards and Stationery Wares at Reasonable Rates.”[368]

Combinations of the Bible with other objects were very common, some of them symbolic, as the Bible and Crown, which sign originated during the political troubles in the reign of Charles I. It was at this time when the clergy and the court party constantly tried to convince the people of the divine prerogative of the Crown, that the “Bible and Crown” became the standing toast of the Cavaliers and those opposed to the Parliament leaders. As a sign it has been used for a century and a half by the firm of Rivington the publishers. The old wood carving, painted and gilt in the style of the early signs, was taken down from over the shop in Paternoster Row in 1853, when this firm removed westward. It is still in their possession. Cobbett, the political agitator and publisher, in the beginning of this century chose the sign of the Bible, Crown, and Constitution; but the general tenor of his life was such, that his enemies said he put them up merely that he might afterwards be able to say he had pulled them down. A Bible, Sceptre, and Crown, carved in wood, may still be seen on the top of an ale-house of that name in High Holborn. The crown and sceptre in this case are placed on two closed Bibles.

The Bible and Lamb, i.e., the Holy Lamb, we find mentioned in an advertisement in the Publick Advertiser, March 1, 1759—

“TO BE HAD at the Bible and Lamb, near Temple Bar, on the Strand Side, the Skin for Pains in the Limbs, Price 2s.”

Books also were sold here, for in those days booksellers and toyshops were the usual repositories for quack medicines.

The Bible and Dove, i.e., the Holy Ghost, was the sign of John Penn, bookseller, over against St Bride’s Church, Fleet Street, 1718; and the Bible and Peacock, the sign of Benjamin Crayle, bookseller, at the west end of St Paul’s, in 1688. If not a combination of two signs, the bird may have been added on account of its being the type of the Resurrection, in which quality it is found represented in the Catacombs, a symbolism arising from the supposed incorruptibility of its flesh.[369] Various other combinations occur, as the Bible and Key. Rowland Hall, a printer of the sixteenth century, had for his sign the Half Eagle and Key, (see Heraldic Signs,) of which the Bible and Key may be a free imitation. It was the sign of B. Dod, bookseller, in Ave Maria Lane, 1761; whilst the Golden Key and Bible was that of L. Stoke, a bookseller at Charing Cross, 1711. The “Bible and Key” is also the name of a certain Coscinomanteia, somewhat similar to the Sortes Virgilianæ. This method of divination was performed in two ways, in the first, (stated by Matthew of Paris to have been frequently practised at the election of bishops,) the Bible was opened on the altar, and the prediction taken from the chapter which first caught the eye on opening the book; the other was by placing two written papers, one negative, the other affirmative, of the matter in question, under the pall of the altar, which, after solemn prayers, was believed would be decided by divine judgment. Gregory of Tours mentions another method by the Psalms.[370]

At the present day “Bible and Key” divinations are often attempted by those who believe in fortune-telling and vaticinations. The method adopted is as follows:—A key is placed, with the bow or handle sticking out, between the leaves of a Bible, on Ruth i. 16:

“AND RUTH said, Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.”

The Bible is then firmly tied up, most effectually with a garter, and balanced by the bow of the key on the fore-fingers of the right hands of two persons, the one who wishes to consult the oracle, the other any person standing near. The book is then addressed with these words—“Pray, Mr Bible, be good enough to tell me if —— or not?” If the question be answered in the affirmative the key will swing round, turn off the finger, and the Bible fall down; if in the negative, it will remain steady in its position. Not only upon matrimonial, but upon all sorts of questions, this oracle may be consulted.

Further combinations are the Bible and Sun. The Sun was the sign of Wynkyn de Worde, and the printers that succeeded him in his house. It may, however, in this combination have been an emblem of the Sun of Truth, or the Light of the World. It was the sign of J. Newberry, in St Paul’s Churchyard, the publisher of Goldsmith’s “Vicar of Wakefield;” also of C. Bates, near Pie Corner; and of Richard Reynolds, in the Poultry, both ballad printers in the times of Charles II. and William III. Then there is the Bible and Ball, a sign of a bookseller in Ave Maria Lane in 1761, who probably hung up a Globe to indicate the sale of globes and maps; and the Bible and Dial, over against St Dunstan’s Church, Fleet Street, in 1720, was the sign of the notorious Edmund Curll, who was pilloried at Charing Cross, and pilloried in Pope’s verses. The Dial was, in all likelihood, a sun-dial on the front wall of his house.

Of the Apocryphal Books there is only one example among the signboards, viz., Bel and the Dragon, which was at one time not uncommon, more particularly with apothecaries. It was represented by a Bell and a Dragon, as appears from the Spectator, No. 28. “One Apocryphical Heathen God is also represented by this figure [of a Bell], which, in conjunction with the Dragon, makes a very handsome picture in several of our streets.” Although at the first glance this sign seems taken from the doubtful books of the Old Testament, still there is nothing in the Apocryphal book which could in any way prompt the choice of it for a signboard. After all, it may possibly be only a combination, or corruption, of two other signs. There still remain a few public-houses which employ it,—as in Worship Street; at Cookham, Maidenhead; at Norton in the Moors, &c., whilst in Boss Street, Horsely Down, there is a variation in the form of the Bell and Griffin. From a handbill of Topham, the Strong Man,[371] we see that it was vulgarly called the King Astyages Arms, for no better reason than because King Astyages is the first name in the story: the incident related in the Book of Bel and the Dragon having taken place after his death.

PLATE XI.

HOLE IN THE WALL.
(“Guide for Malt-Worms.” Circa 1720.)

STAR, OR BUSH. (MS., circa 1425.) | BARLEY MOW. (Hogarth’s print of Beer St.) | DOG AND DUCK. (In the brick wall of Bethlehem Hospital.)

FLYING HORSE.
(“Guide for Malt-Worms.” Circa 1720.)

A very common sign of old, as well as at present, is the Adam and Eve. Our first parents were constant dramatis personæ in the mediæval mysteries and pageants, on which occasions, with the naïveté of those times, Eve used to come on the stage exactly in the same costume as she appeared to Adam before the Fall.[372] The sign was adopted by various trades, including the publishers of books, as we may see from the following quaint title:—

“A PROTESTANT Picture of Jesus Christ, drawn in Scripture colours, both for light to sinners and delight to saints. By Tho. Sympson, M.A., Preacher of the Word at London. Sold by Edw. Thomas at the Adam and Eve, in Little Britain. 1662.”

In Newgate Street there yet remains an old stone sign of the Adam and Eve, with the date 1669. Eve is represented handing the apple to Adam, the fatal tree is in the centre, round its stem the serpent winding. It was the arms of the fruiterers’ company.

There is still an Adam and Eve public-house in the High Street, Kensington, where Sheridan, on his way to and from Holland House, used to refresh himself, and in this way managed to run up rather a long bill, which Lord Holland had to pay for him. A still older place of public entertainment was the Adam and Eve Tea-gardens, in Tottenham Court Road, part of which was the last remaining vestige “of the once respectable, if not magnificent, manor-house appertaining to the Lords of Tottenhall.” Richardson, in 1819, said that the place had long been celebrated as a tea-garden; there was an organ in the long room, and the company was generally respectable, till the end of last century, when highwaymen, footpads, pickpockets, and low women, beginning to take a fancy to it, the magistrates interfered. The organ was banished, and the gardens were dug up for the foundation of Eden Street. In these gardens Lunardi came down after his unsuccessful balloon ascent from the Artillery ground, May 16, 1783. Hogarth has represented the Adam and Eve in the March of the Guards to Finchley. Upon the signboard of the house is inscribed, “Tottenham Court Nursery,” in allusion to Broughton’s Amphitheatre for Boxing, erected in this place. How amusing is this advertisement of the great Professor’s “Nursery:”—

“From the Gymnasium at Tottenham Court
on Thursday next at Twelve o’clock will begin:

A lecture on Manhood or Gymnastic Physiology, wherein the whole Theory and Practice of the Art of Boxing will be fully explained by various Operators on the animal Œconomy and the Principles of Championism, illustrated by proper Experiments on the Solids and Fluids of the Body; together with the True Method of investigating the Nature of all Blows, Stops, Cross Buttocks, etc., incident to Combatants. The whole leading to the most successful Method of beating a Man deaf, dumb, lame, and blind.

by Thomas Smallwood, A.M.,
Gymnasiast of St. Giles,
and
Thomas Dimmock, A.M.,
Athleta of Southwark,
(Both fellows of the Athletic Society.)

*** The Syllabus or Compendium for the use of students in Athleticks, referring to Matters explained in this Lecture, may be had of Mr Professor Broughton at the Crown in Market Lane, where proper instructions in the Art and Practice of Boxing are delivered without Loss of Eye or Limb to the student.”

The tree with the forbidden fruit, always represented in the sign of Adam and Eve, leads directly to the Flaming Sword, “which turned every way to keep the way of the tree of life.” Being the first sword on record, it was not inappropriately a cutler’s sign, and as such we find it in the Banks Collection, on the shop-bill of a sword cutler in Sweeting’s Alley, Royal Exchange, 1780. It is less appropriate at the door of a public-house in Nottingham, for the landlord evidently cannot desire to keep anybody out, whether saint or sinner. The vessel by which the life of the first planter of the vine was preserved, certainly well deserves to decorate the tavern: hence Noah’s Ark is not an uncommon public-house sign, though it looks very like a sarcastic reflection on the mixed crowd that resort to the house,—not to escape the “heavy wet,” as the animals at the Deluge, but in order to obtain some of it. Toy-shops also constantly use it, since Noah’s Ark is generally the favourite toy of children. Evelyn, in 1644, mentions a shop near the Palais de Justice in Paris:

“Here is a shop called Noah’s Ark, where are sold all curiosities, natural or artificial, Indian or European, for luxury or use, as cabinets, shells, ivory, porcelain, dried fishes, insects, birds, pictures, and a thousand exotic extravagances.”[373]

The Deluge was one of the standard subjects of mediæval dramatic plays. In the third part of the Chester Whitsun plays, for instance, Noah and the Flood make a considerable item; and at a much later period the same subject was exhibited at Bartholomew Fair. A bill of the time of Queen Anne[374] informs us that—

“AT Crawley’s Booth, over against the Crown Tavern in Smithfield, during the time of Bartholomew Fair, will be presented a little Opera, called the Old Creation of the World, yet newly revived, with the addition of Noah’s Flood; also several fountains playing water during the time of the play. The last scene presents Noah and his family coming out of the Ark, with all the beasts, two by two, and all the fowls of the air, seen in a prospect, sitting upon trees. Likewise over the Ark is seen the sun rising in a most glorious manner: moreover, a multitude of angels will be seen, in a double rank, which presents a double prospect—one for the sun, the other for a palace, where will be seen 6 angels ringing of bells, etc.”

The Deluge was the mystery performed at Whitsuntide by the company of dyers in London, and from this their sign of the Dove and Rainbow might have originated, unless it were adopted by them on account of the various colours of the rainbow. On the bill of John Edwards, a silk-dyer in Aldersgate Street, the Dove, with an olive branch in her mouth, is represented flying underneath the Rainbow, over a landscape, with villages, fenced fields, and a gentleman in the costume of the reign of Charles II. Besides this there are various other dyers’ bills with the sign of the Dove and Rainbow, both among the Bagford and Banks Collections. A few public-houses at the present day still keep up the memory of the sign; there is one at Nottingham, and another in Leicester.

“Abraham Offering his Son” was the sign of a shop in Norwich in 1750. A stone bas-relief of the same subject (Le Sacrifice d’Abraham) is still remaining in the front of a house in the Rue des Prêtres, Lille, France. A Dutch wood-merchant, in the seventeenth century, also put up this sign, and illustrated its application by the following rhyme:—

“’T Hout is gehakt, opdat men ’t zou branden,
Daarom is dit in Abram’s Offerhande.”[375]

Thus, though the wood of the sacrifice played a very insignificant part in the story, yet the simple mention of it was enough to make it a fit subject for a Dutchman’s signboard. We have a similar instance in Jacob’s Well, which is common in London, as well as in the country. The allusion here is to the well at which Christ met the woman of Samaria, who said to him:

“ART thou greater than our father Jacob, which gave us the well, and drank thereof himself, and his children, and his cattle? Jesus answered and said unto her, Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again.” (S. John iv. 12.)

How cruelly these words apply to the gin-tap, at which generation after generation drink, and after which they always thirst again. Not unlikely the English use of this sign dates from the Puritan period.[376] Not always, however, had the sign any direct relation to the trade of the inmate of the house which it adorned; as, for example, Moses and Aaron, which occurs on a trades token of Whitechapel. In allusion to this, or a similar sign, Tom Brown says, “Other amusements presented themselves as thick as hops, as Moses pictured with horns, to keep Cheapside in countenance.”[377] Even the Dutch shopkeeper, whose imagination was generally so fertile in finding a religious subject appropriate as his trade sign, was at a loss what to do with Moses; for a baker in Amsterdam, in the seventeenth century, put up the sign of Moses, with this inscription:

“Moses wierd gevist in het water,
Die hier waar haalt krygt vry gist, een Paaschbrood,
En op Korstyd een Deuvekater.”[378]

In London, however, the use of this sign may at first have been suggested by the statues of Moses and Aaron that used to stand above the balcony of the Old Guildhall. Connected with the history of Moses, we find several other signs, one in particular, mentioned by Ned Ward as the Old Pharaoh in the town of Barley, in Cambridgeshire. It was so named, says he, “from a stout, elevating malt liquor of the same name, for which this house had been long famous.”[379] Why this beer was called Pharaoh, Ned Ward does not seem to have known; but a story in the county is current that it was so named because the beer, like the Egyptian king of old, “would not let the people go!” It is now no longer drunk in England, but a certain strong beer of the same name is still a favourite beverage in Belgium. Next, in chronological order, connected with the history of Moses, follows the Brazen Serpent, the sign of Reynold Wolfe, a bookseller and printer in St Paul’s Churchyard, 1544, and also of both his apprentices, Henry Binneman and John Shepperde. It had probably been imported by the foreign printers, for it was a favourite amongst the early French and German booksellers. At the present day it is a public-house sign in Richardson Street, Bermondsey. What led to the adoption of this emblem was not the historical association, but the mystical meaning which it had in the middle ages:—

“A serpent torqued with a long cross; others blazon Christ, supporting the brazen serpent, because it was an anti-type of the passion and death of our Saviour; for as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, (Num. xxi. 8, 9; John iii. 14,) that all that behold him, by a lively faith, may not perish, but have everlasting life. This is the cognizance or crest of every true believer.”[380]

The idea was no doubt borrowed from the Biblia Pauperum. The Balaam’s Ass, again, was one of the dramatis personæ in the Whitsuntide mystery of the company of cappers, (cap-makers,) and this is the only reason we can imagine for his having found his way to the signboard. It occurs in 1722 in a newspaper paragraph, concerning a child born without a stomach, the details of which are too nauseous to be introduced here.[381]

The Two Spies is the last sign belonging to the history of Moses; it represents two of the spies that went into Canaan, “and cut down from thence a branch with one cluster of grapes, and they bare it between two upon a staff,” (Num. xiii. 23.) This bunch of grapes made it a favourite with publicans; at many places it may still be seen, as in Catherine Street, Strand, (a house of old standing;) in Long Acre, &c. In Great Windmill Street, Leicester Square, it has been corrupted into the Three Spies.

After Moses there is a blank until we come to Samson, to whom our national admiration for athletic sports and muscular strength has given a prominent place on the signboard. Samson and the Lion occurs on the sign of various houses in London in the seventeenth century, as appears from the trades tokens. It is still of frequent occurrence in country towns, as at Dudley, Coventry, &c. It was also used on the Continent. In Paris there is, or was, not many years ago, a della Robbia ware medallion sign in the Rue des Dragons, with the legend “le Fort Samson,” representing the strong man tearing open the lion. To a sign of Samson at Dordrecht, in the seventeenth century, the following satirical inscription had been added:—

“Toen Samson door zyn kracht de leeuw belemmen kon,
De Philistynen sloeg, de vossen overwon.
Wiert hy nog door een Vrouw van zyn gezigt beroofd,
Gelooft geen vrouw dan of zy moet zyn zonder hoofd.”[382]

This admiration of strong men, which procured the signboard honours to Samson, also made Goliah, or Golias, a great favourite. In the Horse Market, Castle Barnard, he is actually treated just like a duke, admiral, or any other public-house hero, for there the sign is entitled the Goliah Head. Some doubts, however, may be entertained whether by Golias or Goliah, (for the name is spelt both ways,) the Philistine giant and champion was always intended. Towards the end of the twelfth century there lived a man of wit, with the real or assumed name of Golias, who wrote the “Apocalypsis Goliæ,” and other burlesque verses. He was the leader of a jovial sect called Goliardois, of which Chaucer’s Miller was one. “He was a jangler and a goliardeis.” Such a person might, therefore, have been a very appropriate tutelary deity for an alehouse.[383]

Goliah’s conqueror, King David, liberally shared the honours with his victim, and he still figures on various signboards. There is a King David’s inn in Bristol, and a David and Harp in Limehouse; whilst in Paris, the Rue de la Harpe is said to owe its name to a sign of King David playing on the harp. David’s unfortunate son, Absalom, was a peruke-maker’s very expressive emblem, both in France and in England, to show the utility of wigs. Thus a barber at a town in Northamptonshire used this inscription:

“Absalom, hadst thou worn a perriwig, thou hadst not been hanged.”

Which a brother peruke-maker versified, under a sign representing the death of Absalom, with David weeping. He wrote up thus:

“Oh Absalom! oh Absalom!
Oh Absalom! my son,
If thou hadst worn a perriwig,
Thou hadst not been undone.”

Psalm xlii. seems to be very profanely hinted at in the sign of the White Hart and Fountain, Royal Mint Street, which, if not a combination of two well-known signs, apparently alludes to the words, “As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God.” The Panting Hart (het dorstige Hert, or het Heigent Hert,) was formerly a very common beer-house sign in Holland. In the seventeenth century there was one with the following inscription at Amsterdam:—

“Gelyk het hert by frisch water sig komt te verblyden,
Komt also in myn huys om u van dorst te bevryden.”[384]

Another one at Leyden had the following rhyme:—

“Gelyk een hart van jagen moe lust te drinken water rein,
Also verkoopt men hier tot versterking van de maag, toebak, bier en Brandewyn.”[385]

The wise king Solomon does not appear to have ever been honoured with a signboard portrait, but his enthusiastic admirer, the Queen of Saba, figured before the tavern kept by Dick Tarlton the jester, in Gracechurch Street. This Queen of Saba, or Sheba, was a usual figure in pageants. There is a letter of Secretary Barlow, in “Nugæ Antiquæ,” telling how the Queen of Sheba fell down and upset her casket in the lap of the King of Denmark—when on his drunken visit to James I.—who “got not a little defiled with the presents of the queen; such as wine, cream, jelly, beverages, cakes, spices, and other good matters.”

Douce, in his “Illustrations to Shakespeare,” has a very ingenious explanation for the sign of the Bell Savage, as derived from the Queen of Saba, which though non è vero, ma ben trovato. He bases his argument on a poem of the fourteenth century, the “Romaunce of Kyng Alisaundre,” wherein the Queen of Saba is thus mentioned:—

“In heore lond is a cité,
On of the noblest in Christianté,
Hit hotith Sabba in langage,
Thence cam Sibely Savage.
Of all the world the fairest queene,
To Jerusalem Salomon to seone.
For hire fair head and for hire love,
Salomon forsok his God above.”[386]

Elisha’s Raven, represented with a chop in his mouth, is the sign of a butcher in the Borough,—a curious conceit, and certainly his own invention; at least we do not remember any other instance of the sign. This tribute is certainly very disinterested in the butcher, for if there were any such ravens now, it is probable that they would sadly interfere with the trade.

Few signs have undergone so many changes as the well-known Salutation. Originally it represented the angel saluting the Virgin Mary, in which shape it was still occasionally seen in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as appears from the tavern token of Daniel Grey of Holborn. In the times of the Commonwealth, however, “sacrarum ut humanarum rerum, heu! vicissitudo est,” the Puritans changed it into the Soldier and Citizen, and in such a garb it continued long after, with this modification, that it was represented by two citizens politely bowing to each other. The Salutation Tavern in Billingsgate shows it thus on its trades token, and so it was represented by the Salutation Tavern in Newgate Street, (an engraving of which sign may still be seen in the parlour of that old established house.) At present it is mostly rendered by two hands conjoined, as at the Salutation Hotel, Perth, where a label is added with the words, “You’re welcome to the city.” That Salutation Tavern in Billingsgate was a famous place in Ben Jonson’s time; it is named in “Bartholomew Fayre” as one of the houses where there had been

“Great sale and utterance of wine,
Besides beere and ale, and ipocras fine.”

During the civil war there was a Salutation Tavern in Holborn, in which the following ludicrous incident happened,—if we may believe the Royalist papers:—

“A hotte combat lately happened at the Salutation Taverne in Holburne, where some of the Commonwealth vermin, called soldiers, had seized on an Amazonian Virago, named Mrs Strosse, upon suspicion of being a loyalist, and selling the Man in the Moon; but shee, by applying beaten pepper to their eyes, disarmed them, and with their own swordes forced them to aske her forgiveness; and down on their mary bones, and pledge a health to the king, and confusion to their masters, and so honourablie dismissed them. Oh! for twenty thousand such gallant spirits; when you see that one woman can beat two or three.”[387]

At the end of the last century there was a Salutation Tavern in Tavistock Row, called also “Mr Bunch’s,” which was one of the elegant haunts, patronised by “the first gentleman of Europe,” otherwise the Prince Regent. Lord Surrey and Sheridan were generally his associates in these escapades. The trio went under the pseudonyms of Blackstock, Greystock, and Thinstock, and disguised in bob wigs and smockfrocks. The night’s entertainment generally concluded with thrashing the “Charlies,” wrenching off knockers, breaking down signboards, and not unfrequently with being taken to the roundhouse.

The Salutation in Newgate Street, some time called the Salutation and Cat, (a combination of two signs,) was haunted by many of the great authors of the last century. There is a poetical invitation extant to a social feast held at this tavern, January 19, 173

5

6

, issued by the two stewards, Edward Cave (of the Gentleman’s Magazine,) and William Bowyer, the antiquary and printer:—

“Saturday, January 17, 173

5

6

.

“Sir,

You’re desired on Monday next to meet,
At Salutation Tavern, Newgate Street,
Supper will be on table just at eight.
(Stewards) one of St John, [Bowyer,] t’other of St John’s Gate, [Cave.]”

Richardson the novelist was one of the invités. He returned a poetical answer, too long to quote at length: the following is part of it:—

“For me, I’m much concern’d I cannot meet
At Salutation Tavern, Newgate Street.
Your notice, like your verse, (so sweet and short!)
[266] If longer I’d sincerely thank’d you for it.
Howev’r, receive my wishes, sons of verse!
May every man who meets your praise rehearse!
May mirth as plenty crown your cheerful board!
And every one part happy, —— as a lord!
That when at home by such sweet verses fir’d,
Your families may think you all inspir’d.
So wishes he, who, pre-engag’d can’t know
The pleasures that would from your meeting flow.”

In this tavern Coleridge the poet, in one of his melancholy moods, lived for some time in seclusion, until found out by Southey, and persuaded by him to return to his usual mode of life. Sir T. N. Talfourd, in his Life of Charles Lamb, informs us that here Coleridge was in the habit of meeting Lamb when in town on a visit from the University. Christ’s Hospital, their old school, was within a few paces of the place:—

“When Coleridge quitted the University and came to town, full of mantling hopes and glorious schemes, Lamb became his admiring disciple. The scene of these happy meetings was a little public-house called the Salutation and Cat, in the neighbourhood of Smithfield, where they used to sup, and remain long after they had ‘heard the chimes of midnight.’ There they discoursed of Bowles, who was the god of Coleridge’s poetical idolatry, and of Burns and Cowper, who of recent poets—in that season of comparative barrenness—had made the deepest impression on Lamb; there Coleridge talked of ‘fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute,’ to one who desired ‘to find no end’ of the golden maze; and there he recited his early poems with that deep sweetness of intonation which sunk into the heart of his hearers. To these meetings Lamb was accustomed, at all periods of his life, to revert, as the season when his finer intellects were quickened into action. Shortly after they had terminated, with Coleridge’s departure from London, he thus recalled them in a letter:—‘When I read in your little volume your nineteenth effusion, or what you call “The Sigh,” I think I hear you again. I imagine to myself the little smoky room at the Salutation and Cat, where we have sat together through the winter nights, beguiling the cares of life with poesy.’ This was early in 1769, and in 1818, when dedicating his works—then first collected—to his earliest friend, he thus spoke of the same meetings:—‘Some of the sonnets, which shall be carelessly turned over by the general reader, may happily awaken in you remembrances which I should be sorry should be ever totally extinct—the memory “of summer days and of delightful years,” even so far back as those old suppers at our old inn—when life was fresh and topics exhaustless—and you first kindled in me, if not the power, yet the love of poetry, and beauty, and kindliness.’”

The Angel was derived from the Salutation, for that it originally represented the angel appearing to the Holy Virgin at the Salutation or Annunciation, is evident from the fact that, even as late as the seventeenth century on nearly all the trades tokens of houses with this sign, the Angel is represented with a scroll in his hands; and this scroll we know, from the evidence of paintings and prints, to contain the words addressed by the angel to the Holy Virgin: “Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum.” Probably at the Reformation it was considered too Catholic a sign, and so the Holy Virgin was left out, and the angel only retained. Among the famous houses with this sign, the well-known starting-place of the Islington omnibuses stands foremost. It is said to have been an established inn upwards of two hundred years. The old house was pulled down in 1819; till that time it had preserved all the features of a large country inn, a long front, overhanging tiled roof, with a square inn-yard having double galleries supported by columns and carved pilasters, with caryatides and other ornaments. It is more than probable that it had often been used as a place for dramatic entertainments at the period when inn-yards were customarily employed for such purposes. “Even so late as fifty years since it was customary for travellers approaching London, to remain all night at the Angel Inn, Islington, rather than venture after dark to prosecute their journey along ways which were almost equally dangerous from their bad state, and their being so greatly infested with thieves.”[388] On the other hand, persons walking from the city to Islington in the evening, waited near the end of John Street, in what is now termed Northampton Street, (but was then a rural avenue planted with trees,) until a sufficient party had collected, who were then escorted by an armed patrol appointed for that purpose. Another old tavern with this sign is extant in London, behind St Clement’s Church in the Strand. To this house Bishop Hooper was taken by the Guards, on his way to Gloucester, where he went to be burnt, in January 1555. The house, until lately, preserved much of its ancient aspect: it had a pointed gable, galleries, and a lattice in the passage. This inn is named in the following curious advertisement:—

“TO BE SOLD, a Black Girl, the property of J. B——, eleven years of age, who is extremely handy, works at her needle tolerably, and speaks French perfectly well; is of excellent temper and willing disposition. Inquire of W. Owen, at the Angel Inn, behind St Clement’s Church, in the Strand.”—Publick Advertiser, March 28, 1769.

Older than either of these is the Angel Inn, at Grantham. This building was formerly in the possession of the Knights Templars, and still retains many remains of its former beauty, particularly the gateway, with the heads of Edward III. and his queen Philippa of Hainault on either side of the arch; the soffits of the windows are elegantly groined, and the parapet of the front is very beautiful. Kings have been entertained in this house; but it seemed to bring ill luck to them, for the reigns of those that are recorded as having been guests in it, stand forth in history as disturbed by violent storms—King John held his court in it on February 23, 1213; King Richard III. on October 19, 1483; and King Charles I. visited it May 17, 1633.

Ben Jonson, it is said, used to visit a tavern with the sign of the Angel, at Basingstoke, kept by a Mrs Hope, whose daughter’s name was Prudence. On one of his journeys, finding that the house had changed both sign and mistresses, Ben wrote the following smart but not very elegant epigram:—

“When Hope and Prudence kept this house, the Angel kept the door,
Now Hope is dead, the Angel fled, and Prudence turned a w——.”

The Angel was the sign of one of the first coffee-houses in England, for Anthony Wood tells us that, “in 1650 Jacob, a Jew, opened a coffee-house at the Angel, in the parish of St Peter, Oxon; and there it [coffee] was by some, who delight in noveltie, drank.” Finally, there was an Angel Tavern in Smithfield, where the famous Joe Miller, of joking fame—a comic actor by profession—used to play during Bartholomew Fair time. A playbill of 1722 informs the public in large letters that—

“Miller is not with Pinkethman, but by himself, at the Angel Tavern, next door to the King’s Bench, who acts a new Droll, called the Faithful Couple or the Royal Shepherdess, with a very pleasant entertainment between Old Hob and his Wife, and the comical humours of Mopsy and Collin, with a variety of singing and dancing.

“The only Comedian now that dare,
Vie with the world and challenge the Fair.”

In France, also, the sign of the Angel is and was at all times, very common. The Hotel de l’Ange, Rue de la Huchette, appears to have been the best hotel in Paris in the sixteenth century. It was frequently visited by foreign ambassadors: those sent by Emperor Maximilian to Louis XII. took up their abode here; so did the ambassadors from Angus, King of Achaia, who, in 1552, came to see France, much in the same way as various ambassadors from all sorts of high and low latitudes occasionally honour our Court with a visit. Chapelle, a French poet of the seventeenth century, thus celebrates a tavern with this sign in Paris, frequented by the wits of the period:—

“Je n’ay pas vu vostre theâtre
Qu’aussitot je ressors de là,
Pour un Ange que j’idolâtre,
A cause du bon vin qu’il a.”[389]

There being, then, such a profusion of Angels everywhere, it became necessary to make some distinctions, and the usual means were adopted; the Angel was gilded, and called the Golden Angel; this, for instance, was the sign of Ellis Gamble, a goldsmith in Cranbourn Alley, Hogarth’s master in the art of engraving on silver; shop-bills engraved for this house by Hogarth are still in existence. Another variety was the Guardian Angel, which is still the sign of an ale-house at Yarmouth. This, too, was used in France, as we find l’Ange Gardien, the sign of Pierre Witte, a bookseller in the Rue St Jacques, Paris, in the seventeenth century.

Very common, also, were the Three Angels, which may have been intended for the three angels that appeared to Abraham, or simply the favourite combination of three,[390] so frequent on the signboard and in heraldry. That three angels were thought to possess mysterious power, is evident from the following Devonshire charm for a burn:—

“Three Angels came from the north, east, and west,
One brought fire, another ice,
And the third brought the Holy Ghost,
So out fire—and in frost—
In the name of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.”

The Three Angels was a very general linen-draper’s sign, for which there seems no reason other than that the long flowing garments in which they are generally represented, suggest their having been good customers to the drapery business.

Angels appear in combination with various heterogenous objects, in many of which, however, the so-called Angel is simply a Cupid. The Angel and Bible was a sign in the Poultry in 1680.[391] The Angel and Crown was a not uncommon tavern decoration. The following stanza from a pamphlet, entitled, “The Quack Vintners,” London, 1712, p. 18, shows the way in which this sign was represented:—

“May Harry’s Angel be a sign he draws
Angelick nectar, that deserves applause,
Such that may make the city love the Throne,
And, like his Angel, still support the Crown.”

From this we learn it was a Cupid or Amorino supporting a crown; the sign of the house had doubtless originally been the Crown, and the Cupid, so common in the Renaissance style, had been added by way of ornament, but was mistaken by the public as a constituent of the sign. The verses probably applied to the Angel and Crown, a famous tavern in Broad Street, behind the Royal Exchange. There was another Angel and Crown in Islington, where convivial dinners were held in the olden time. It was a common practice in the last and preceding centuries for the natives of a county or parish to meet once a year and dine together. The ceremony often commenced by a sermon, preached by a native, after which the day was spent in pleasant conviviality, after-dinner speeches, and mutual congratulations. The custom now has almost died out; but this is one of the invitation tickets:

St Mary, Islington.

Sir,

You are desidered to meet many other Natives of this place on Tuesday [271]ye 11th day of April 1738 at Mrs Eliz. Grimstead’s ye Angel and Crown, in ye Upper Street, about ye hour of One; Then and there wth Full Dishes, Good Wine and Good Humour to improve and make lasting that Harmony and Friendship which have so long reigned among us.

Walter Sebbon.
John Booth.
Bourchier Durrell.
James Sebbon.
Stewards.

N.B. The Dinner will be on the table peremptorily at Two.
Pray pay the Bearer Five Shillings.

That same year, another Angel and Crown Tavern in Shire Lane obtained an unenviable notoriety, for it was there that a Mr Quarrington was murdered and robbed by Thomas Carr, an attorney from the Temple, and Elisabeth Adams. They were hanged at Tyburn, January 18, 1738.

The Angel and Gloves at first sight seems a whimsical combination, but is easily explained when we advert to the woodcut above the shop-bill of Isaac Dalvy, in Little Newport Street, Soho, who, in the reign of Queen Anne, sold gloves, &c., under this sign, which simply represented two Cupids, each carrying a glove,—in fact, exactly the same conceit as that of the Herculanese shoemaker, noticed in a former chapter. It is more difficult to find a rational explanation for the Angel and Stilliards. The Steelyard, or Stilliard, in Upper Thames Street, was the place where the Hanse merchants exposed their goods for sale, and was so called from the king’s steelyard, or beam, there erected for weighing the tonnage of goods imported into London.[392] Whether this sign represented a Cupid with such a weighing machine, or a view of the hall of the Hanse merchants, with a Fame flying over it, is now impossible to decide. It may be suggested that a variation of the well-known figure of Justice, with steelyards in place of the usual scales, was the origin. Be this as it may, the only mention we have found of the sign is in the following advertisement:—

“WILLIAM DEVAL, at the Angel & Stilliards, in St Ann’s Lane, near Aldersgate, London, maketh Castle (Castille), Marble, and white Sope as good as any Marseilles Sope; Tryed and Proved and sold at very Reasonable Rates.”[393]—Domestic Intelligencer, January 2d, 1679.

A few years later we find the Angel and Still noticed, as in the following advertisement:—

“A WELL-SET Negro, commonly called Sugar, aged about twenty years, teeth broke before, and several scars in both his cheeks and forehead, having absented from his Master, whosoever secures him and gives notice to Benjamin Maynard, at the Angel and Still, at Deptford, shall have a Guinea Reward and reasonable charges.”—Weekly Journal, October 18, 1718.

In this case the still was simply added to intimate the sale of spirituous liquors.

The Angel and Sun, apparently a combination of two signs, is named as a shop or tavern near Strandbridge, in 1663,[394] and is still the name of a public-house in the Strand. The Angel and Woolpack, at Bolton, is the same sign which, near London Bridge, is called the Naked Boy and Woolpack. A woolpack, with a negro seated on it, was at one time very common; for a change or distinction, this negro underwent the reputed impossible process of being washed white, and thus became a naked boy, which, in signboard phraseology, is equivalent to an angel.

The Virgin was unquestionably a very common sign before the Reformation, and it may be met with even at the present day, as, for instance, at Ebury Hill, Worcester, and in various other places. In France it was, and is still, much more common than in England, as might be expected. Tallemant des Réaux tells of a miraculous tavern sign of Notre Dame, on the bridge of that name, in Paris, which was observed by the faithful to cry and shed tears, probably on account of the bad company she had to harbour. It was taken down by order of the archbishop. At the end of the seventeenth century there was, in the Rue de la Seine, Paris, a quack doctor, who pretended to cure a great variety of complaints. He put up a holy Virgin for his sign, with the words, “Refugium Peccatorum,” which is one of the usual epithets of the holy Virgin in the Roman Catholic Church service, very wittily, although profanely, applied in this instance. The sign of the Virgin was also called Our Lady, as: “Newe Inne was a guest Inne, the sign whereof was the picture of our Lady, and thereupon it was also called Our Lady’s Inne.”[395] Our Lady of Pity was the sign of Johan Redman, a bookseller in Paternoster Row, in 1542. Johan Byddell, also a bookseller, had introduced this sign in the beginning of that century. This Byddell, or Bedel, (who lived in Fleet Street, next to Fleet Bridge,) had evidently borrowed it from a nearly similar figure in Corio’s History of Milan, 1505. He afterwards lived at the Sun, in Fleet Street, the house formerly occupied by Wynkyn de Worde.

The prevalence of the Baptist’s Head probably dated from the time when pilgrimages across the sea were considered good works, and the head of St John the Baptist at Amiens Cathedral came in for a large share of visits from English worshippers. The old monkish writers say that in 448 after Christ, the head was found in Jerusalem; in 1206 it was transferred to Amiens, where it was kept in a salver of gold, surrounded with a rim of pearls and precious stones.[396] Various other reasons may be adduced for the prevalence of this sign, as the conspicuous place occupied by St John in the Roman Catholic hagiology, and hence in mediæval plays and mysteries; the festivities of Midsummer, (a day of great moment in London for setting the watch;) and, finally, his being the patron saint of the Knights of Jerusalem. It was doubtless in compliment to those knights that the Baptist’s Head in St John’s Lane, Clerkenwell, was named. This house seems to be the remainder of some noble mansion of Queen Elizabeth’s time; it contains many Elizabethan ornaments, particularly a chimney-piece, with the coats of arms of the Radcliff and Forster families. When the house was adapted to its present purpose, it was distinguished by the head of St John the Baptist in a charger, now gone. Doctor Johnson is said to have been an occasional visitor here, when returning from Edward Cave’s, the editor of the Gentleman’s Magazine, whose office was close by at St John’s Gate. Goldsmith is also reported to have made frequent calls here, when business of a similar nature led him to the same spot. In later years it became the house of call of the prisoners on their way to the new prison in the parish—a circumstance commemorated by Dodd in the “Old Bailey Registers.” Another St John’s Head is mentioned by Stow in the following accident:—

“The 11th of July (1553) Gilbert Pot, drawer to Ninion Saunders, vintner, dwelling at St John’s Head within Ludgate, who was accused by the said Saunders, his maister, was set on the pillory in Cheape, with both his ears nailed and cleane cut off, for wordes speaking at the time of the proclamation of Lady Jane; at which execution was a trumpet bloune and a herault in his coat of armes redd his offence, in presence of William Garrard, one of the Sheriffes of London. About 5 of the clocke the same day, in the afternoone, Ninion Saunders, master to the said Gilbert Pot, and John Owen, a gunmaker, both gunners of the Tower, comming from the Tower of London by water in a whirrie and shooting London Bridge, towards the Black Fryers, were drowned at S. Mary Loch[397] and the whirry-man saved by their oars.”

To this same saint also refers the John of Jerusalem, a sign at the present day in Rosoman Street, Clerkenwell, put up, like the Baptist Head, in remembrance of the Knights of St John of Jerusalem, who formerly had their priory in this locality.

In France this sign was equally common. Jean Carcain, one of the early Parisian publishers and printers, (1487,) adopted it for his shop. One of his books has the following quaint impress:—

“Parisii Sancti Pons est Michaelis in Urbe;
Multae illic aedes; notior una tamen;
Hanc cano, quae Sacri Baptistae fronte notata est
Hic respondebit Bibliopola tibi;
Vis impressoris nomen quoque nosse? Joannis
Carcain nomen ei est. Ne pete plura, Vale.”[398]

It was an old signboard jocularity in France to represent St John the Baptist by a monkey with cambric (batiste) ruffles and wristbands, (singe en batiste.) From the parables the sign of the Good Samaritan was borrowed, which, even at the present day, may be seen in Turner Street, Whitechapel; Grimshaw Park, Blackburn, &c. When barbers combined with their trade the practice of letting blood—otherwise than by “easy shaving,”—of drawing teeth, and setting bones, they frequently adopted this sign. In the seventeenth century, a barber-surgeon at Leeuwarden, in Holland, wrote under his device of the Good Samaritan the following poetical effusion:—

“Gelyk den Wyn, fyn,
Dryft zorgen uit der herten
Zoo geneest Medicyn, pyn,
En ontlast van Smarten.”[399]

The Samaritan Woman (la Samaritaine) is the French version of our Jacob’s Well, and was a common sign in Paris; everybody knows the Bains de la Samaritaine, in which the luxurious Parisian indulges in a fresh water bath in his Seine, which at that place is about as clear as the Thames at Blackwall. In the Rue Caquerel at Rouen there is a stone bas-relief of the Samaritan woman at the well, with the date 1580. Jacques Dupuy, a bookseller in the Rue St Jacques, also used the Samaritan woman as his sign, evidently because it was a subject in which he could introduce a well, and so have the satisfaction of punning on his name. This kind of pun was none the less relished for being far-fetched; thus there is a stone bas-relief in the Rue Froid, at Caen, of the Miraculous Draught of Fishes, (la Pêche Miraculeuse,) which, in the early part of the seventeenth century, was placed there by a bookseller of the name of Poisson, (Fish,) who, being an “odd fish,” adopted this sign as a pun on his own name. At the present day, the house is still inhabited by a bookseller of the same name and family.

Christ’s Passion does not seem to have suggested any signs in England, although the great symbol of His death, the Cross, was comparatively common. In Paris there was, in 1640, a bookseller, George Josse, in the Rue St Jacques, who had the Crown of Thorns (la Couronne d’Epine) for his sign, probably on account of the original Crown of Thorns being one of the relics kept at Paris. Coryatt’s remarks on this relic are rather amusing:—

“They report in Paris that the Thorny Crown, wherewith Christ was crowned on the Crosse, is kept in the Palace, which vpon Corpus Christi Day, in the afternoone, was publickly shewed, as some told me; but it was not my chance to see it. Truely, I wonder to see the contrarieties amongst the Papists, and most ridiculous varieties concerning their reliques, but especially about this of Christ’s Thorny Crowne. For whereas I was after that at the Citie of Vicenza in Italy, it was told me that in the monastery of the Dominican Fryers of that Citie, this Crowne was kept, which Saint Lewes, King of France, bestowed upon his brother Bartholomew, Bishop of Vicenza, and before one of the Dominican family. Wherefore I went to the Dominican Monastery and made suit to see it, but I had the repulse; for they told me that it was kept vnder three or four lockes, and neuer shewed to any by any favour whatsoeuer, but only upon Corpus Christi Day. If this Crowne of Paris, whereof they so much bragge, be true, that of Vicenza is false. Ho! the truth and certainty of Papistical reliques.”[400]

Crosses of various colours were probably amongst the first signs put up by the newly-converted Christians, (as soon as they could effect this with impunity,) on account of the recommendation of the early fathers, and for their beneficial influence. Father Lactantius, who lived in the fourth century, writes—“As Christ, whilst He lived amongst men, put the devils to flight by His words, and restored those to their senses whom these evil spirits had possessed; so now His followers in the name of their Master, and by the sign of His passion, even exercise the same dominion over them.” St Ephrem says—“Let us paint and imprint on our doors the life-giving cross; thus defended no evil will hurt you.” St Chrysostom says the same—“Wherefore let us with earnestness impress this cross on our houses, and on our walls, and our windows.” St Cyril of Alexandria introduces the Emperor Julian the apostate saying, “You Christians adore the wood of the cross, you engrave it on the porches of your houses,” &c. Hence the still prevalent custom in Roman Catholic places of painting crosses on the walls of houses, to drive away witches, as it is said; and these crosses being painted in different colours, might easily serve as a sign by which to designate the house. At the Crusades the popularity of this emblem increased: a red cross was the badge of the Crusader, and would be put up as a sign by men who had been to the Holy Land, or wished to court the patronage of those on their way thither. Finally, the different orders of knighthood settled each upon a particular colour as their distinctive mark. Thus the knights of St John wore white crosses, the Templars red crosses, the knights of St Lazarus green crosses, the Teutonic knights black crosses, embroidered with gold, &c. But the most common in England was the red cross, which was the cross of St George, and also of the red cross knights, who acted as a sort of police on the roads between Europe and the Holy Land to protect pilgrims. This badge, therefore, could not fail to be very popular.

In France it used to be, and in all probability is still, a common rebus to see le signe de la croix represented by a swan with a cross on his back, (cygne de la croix.)

Only very few signs of the cross are now remaining. The Golden Cross in the Strand is one of these, and has been in that locality for centuries. It was one of the first upon which the Puritans brooked their ill-humour and hatred of popery; for in 1643 it was taken down by order of a committee from the House of Commons, as “superstitious and idolatrous.” This was the precursor of the fall of old Charing Cross itself. The sign, however, was put up again at the Restoration, and figures prominently in Canaletti’s well-known view of Charing Cross, in the Northumberland Collection. The tavern was probably pulled down at the formation of Trafalgar Square.

At a point on the road between Dunchurch and Daventry, where three roads meet, there was formerly an inn with the sign of the Three Crosses, in allusion to the three roads. Swift, in one of his pedestrian excursions, happened to stop at that inn. Not being very elegantly dressed, and rather importunate to be served, the landlady told him that she could not leave her customers for “such as he,” upon which the Dean, who was not the most modest, nor the most patient of men, wrote the following epigram on one of the windows:—

“TO THE LANDLORD.
There hang three crosses at thy door,
Hang up thy wife and she’ll make four.”

The Resurrection was the sign of John Day, a bookseller, who, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, dwelt in St Sepulchre’s parish, a little above Holbourne Conduit. It was a sort of conundrum or charade on his name, which was carried out by his colophon, representing a man asleep, who is wakened by another with the words, “Arise, for it is day.” This, although somewhat profane, according to our present notions of such things, was nothing strange in a time when the people, though Protestants by name, were still strongly imbued with Roman Catholic ideas. John Cawoode, also a printer and publisher of St Paul’s Churchyard in 1558, had a still more profane sign—viz., the Holy Ghost. And this even continued till the beginning of the seventeenth century, for in 1602 we find this identical sign used by another printer, William Leake, who was probably his successor, and published in that year Shakespeare’s “Venus and Adonis.” Worse still was the sign of another bookseller in St Paul’s Churchyard in 1520, which was the Trinity.[401] We must bear in mind, however, that in Roman Catholic countries conversation upon matters of religion is not nearly so strict and guarded as amongst believers in Protestant nations. An amusing instance of this once occurred to the writer in Jerusalem, the great head-quarters of Christianity. Usually the pilgrims or travellers staying at the Latin convent there, which serves as an hotel, dine all together in a kind of table-d’hôte fashion; but for some reason it so fell out that our party one day dined in private. The holy brother who attended us happened to be a Spaniard, and as we had visited that country, and were tolerably acquainted with Valladolid, his native town, worldly recollections began to overcome the sanctity of the good monk, and he became inexhaustible in reminiscences of his younger days. Whilst talking with him, and refreshing ourselves with a meal of salad, grown in the garden of Gethsemane, we had indulged in two tumblers of a pithy white wine, quite strong enough to justify our resisting the pressing invitations of the reverend butler to take a third glass; but the jovial monk was not to be beaten, and finally convinced us with the following argument: “Oh come, brother, you must take another glass, remember you are in Jerusalem, and so take one for the Father, one for the Son, and one for the Holy Ghost!”

Although the English ale and refreshment houses continue to select fresh signs from the notabilities of the hour, the Palmerston’s Head and the Gladstone Arms for instance, they rarely choose anything of a religious or devotional cast. One instance, however, occurs to us, and that in the neighbourhood of London, which deserves mention. In Kentish Town, under the Hampstead hills, the noisiest and most objectionable public-house in the district bears the significant sign of the Gospel Oak. It is the favourite resort of navvies and quarrelsome shoemakers, and took its name, not from any inclination to piety on the part of the landlord, but from an old oak tree in the neighbourhood, near the boundary line of Hampstead and St Pancras parishes, a relic of the once general custom of reading a portion of the gospel under certain trees in the parish perambulations, equivalent to “beating the bounds.” “The boundaries and township of the parish of Wolverhampton are,” says Shaw, in his “History of Staffordshire,” (vol. ii., p. 165,) “in many points marked out by what are called Gospel Trees;” and Herrick, in his “Hesperides,” (Ed. 1859, p. 26,) says:—

“Dearest, bury me
Under that holy oak, or gospel tree;
Where, though thou see’st not, thou may’st think upon
Me, when thou yeerly go’st procession.”

The old Kentish Town Gospel Oak was removed a short time since, but not until it had given a name to the surrounding fields, to a village, (Oak village,) and to a chapel, as well as to the public-house alluded to.

[366] New Essays and Characters, by John Stephens the younger, of Lincoln’s Inn, Gent. London, 1631, p. 221.

[367] Randle Holme, “Academy of Armour and Blazon,” p. 52.

[368] Postman, Feb. 1-3, 1711.

[369] “Notandum quoq. eius (pavonis) carnem quod D. Augustinus quoq., lib. xxi. de civitate Dei, cap. iii., et Isidorus, lib. xii., affirmant non putrescere.”—Camerarius, Centur., iii. 20, 1697. How to make this agree with Skelton’s idea it is not very easy to explain—

“Then sayd the Pecocke,
All ye well wot,
I sing not musycal,
For my breast is decay’d.”—Skelton’s Armory of Birds.

[370] See Fosbrooke’s Encyclopædia of Antiquities, vol. ii., p. 673.

[371] For particulars of Topham, the Strong Man, see under Historical Signs.

[372] This statement is made on the authority of Hone, in his “Ancient Mysteries.” Doubts, however, have been expressed as to the accuracy of his data upon this particular subject.

[373] Diary of John Evelyn, Feb. 3, 1684.

[374] Bagford Collection, Bib. Harl., 5931.

[375]

“The wood is cut in order to be burned,
Therefore is this Abraham’s sacrifice.”

[376] Jacob’s Inn is mentioned by Hatton, 1708, “on the east side of Red Cross Street near the middle.”

[377] “Amusements for the Meridian of London,” 1706.

[378]

“Moses was found in the water.
Whosoever purchases his bread here shall have yeast for nought,
Besides a currant-loaf at Easter, and a spice-cake at Christmas time.”

[379] “A Step to Stirbitch Fair,” 1708.

[380] Randle Holme, B. ii., ch. xviii.

[381] Weekly Journal, August 4, 1722.

[382]

“Though Samson by his strength could overcome the lion,
Defeat the Philistines and master the foxes,
Yet a woman deprived him of his sight;
Never, therefore, believe a woman unless she has no head.”

This alludes to the Good Woman, described elsewhere in this work.

Samson’s history was not only painted on the signboard, but also sung in ballads, “to the tune of the Spanish Pavin.” Amongst the Roxburgh ballads (vol. i. fol. 366) there is one entitled “A most excellent and famous ditty of Sampson, judge of Israel, how hee wedded a Philistyne’s daughter, who at length forsooke him; also how hee slew a lyon and propounded a riddle, and after how hee was falsely betrayed by Dalila, and of his death.”

[383] See Bibliographia Britannica, voce Golias, and Wright’s History of Caricature.

[384]

“Like to the hart which comes to the water brook to refresh himself,
So you enter my house to quench your thirst.”

[385] The first six words are literally the beginning of the psalm in the Dutch version,—

“Like a hart the hunt escaped, wishes for the limpid water brooks,
So there is here tobacco, beer, and brandy for sale to strengthen the stomach.”

[386] For the true origin of this sign, see under Miscellaneous Signs.

[387] A Royalist paper, entitled, “The Man in the Moon discovering a world of wickedness under the Sun,” July 4, 1649.

[388] Cromwell’s History of Clerkenwell, p. 32.

[389] “As soon as I had seen your theatre I left it, to go to an Angel whom I adore on account of his good wine.”

[390] Even in the most remote periods of history three was considered a mystic number, and regarded with reverence. The Assyrians had their triads. In Ancient Egypt every town or district had its own triad, which it worshipped, and which was a union of certain attributes, the third member proceeding from the other two. Sir Gardiner Wilkinson, in his “Ancient Egyptians,” vol. iv., ch. xii., p. 230, mentions a stone with the words “one Bail, one Athor, one Akori, hail father of the world, hail triformous God.” Thoms, in his “Dissertation on Ancient Chinese Vases,” says:—“The Chinese have a remarkable preference for the number three; they say one produced two, two produced three, and three produced all things. There is something remarkable in this last phrase; perhaps it conveys an indistinct idea of the Trinity. The Buddhists, who are of modern date in China, use the term ‘the three precious ones’—‘the Deity that has ruled, the ruling Deity, and the Deity that shall rule.’ The Taore sect have also their ‘three pure ones.’ The number three has many associations, as the three bonds—a prince and minister, father and son, husband and wife; the three superintendents—the treasurer, judge, and collector of customs; the three powers—heaven, earth, and man,” &c. In the Hindoo religion combinations of three are equally frequent: they have several trimustis or trinities; three principal deities, Brahma, Vishnu, and Mahadeva; another triad is Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva, or matter, spirit, and destruction; there are three plaited locks on the head of Radha, representing a mystical union of three principal rivers, Ganges, Yamuna, and Sarawati. Siva has three eyes; the sun is called three-bodied; the triangle with the Hindoos is a favourite type for the triune co-equality, hence the pentagram (a figure composed of two equilateral triangles, placed with the apex of the one towards the base of the other, and so forming six triangles by the intersections of their sides) is in great favour with them; further, they use three mystic letters to denote their deity; have 3 × 7 hells, (seven is also a mystic number with them and other ancient races,) and many other combinations of three. The same preference for this number is observable in the Greek and Roman mythology, which mentions three theocraties, three graces, three fates, three harpies, three syrens, three heads of Cerberus, three eggs of Leda, &c. And, taking 3 as a unit, 3 × 3 muses, 3 × 4 principal gods, (Dii Majores,) 3 × 4 labours of Hercules, &c.

[391] London Gazette, Nov 8 to 11, 1680.

[392] Cunningham’s Handbook to London, p. 470.

[393] Soap, wax, tallow, and similar articles were part of the merchandise in which the Hanse merchants dealt.

[394] Kingdom’s Intelligencer, April 6-13, 1663.

[395] Stow’s Survey of London.

[396] See a woodcut of an Amiens pilgrim’s token in the Journal of Brit. Arch. Assoc., vol. i., Oct. 1848; also a detailed account of this venerable relic in Coryatt’s Crudities vol. i, p. 17.

[397] Name of one of the arches of old London Bridge.

[398]

“In the town of Paris there is a bridge named St Michael,
On which there are many houses; but one of them is more known than the others.
That is the house I mean, which is known by the sign of the Baptist Head.
There the bookseller will answer you.
Would you also like to know the name of the printer? John
Carcain is his name. Now, do not ask any more. Farewell.”

[399]

“Like wine, fine,
Driveth away care;
So medicine cureth pain,
And delivers us from suffering.”

[400] Coryatt’s Crudities, vol i., p. 41.

[401] From his colophon we see that the Trinity on his sign was represented by a triangle with a circle at each angle, respectively containing the words PATER, FILIUS, SPIRITUS, and, between the circles, on each of the sides of the triangle, the words NON EST, a mystical way of representing the Trinity, very common in the middle ages.

CHAPTER IX.
SAINTS, MARTYRS, ETC.

At the end of the last chapter we spoke of the profane application of some of the most sacred things to signboard purposes. In France this was still worse than in England. That amusing gossip, Tallemant des Réaux, in his “Contes et Historiettes,” tells us how an innkeeper of the Rue Montmartre, in Paris, put up for his sign the God’s head, (la Tête Dieu,) and notwithstanding all the efforts of the curé of St Eustache to make him take it down he would not comply until compelled by the magistrates. Though two centuries have elapsed, the French of the present day are not much better; for in Paris, in the Rue Mondétour, there is actually a café known as the Nom de Jesus.

Boursault, a clever writer of the time of Louis XIV., whose indignant letter about the Royal Arms we have noticed in a former chapter, addressed a letter to Bizoton, one of the police magistrates, in which he vents his anger at some of the religious signs, and complains of the profanity of a lodging-house with the sign of the Annunciation in the Rue de la Huchette, in which there were as many rogues and reprobates as there were honest lodgers. Amongst the signs that shocked him most he names le Saint Esprit, (the Holy Ghost,) la Trinité, (the Trinity,) l’Image Notre Dame, &c.; but particularly one, representing Christ taken prisoner, with the profane motto, “Au juste prix.” This contains a blasphemous pun,—juste prix at once signifying a fixed price, and “just caught.” The sign was set up at a little ordinary in a lane between the Rue St Honoré and the Rue Richelieu. And, though Boursault says in his letter that he had so fumed and thundered against the landlord that he had taken it down, yet it made its appearance again afterwards, and was handed down to our time, since not many years ago it might have been observed in the Cour du Dragon, above the shop of an ironmonger.

Saints are still in full feather on the signboards in Roman Catholic countries. Amongst hundreds of others the following may be seen in Paris on cafés and hotels in the present day:—St Barbe, St Christophe, St Eustache, St Joseph, St Laurent, St Marie, St Louis, St Merri, St Michel, St Paul, St Phar, St Pierre, St Quentin, St Roc, St Thomas d’Aquin, St Vincent de Paul, &c., &c.

A curious French sign is mentioned by Coryatt, which he saw at Amiens. “I lay at the signe of the Ave Maria, where I read these two verses, written in golden letters upon the linterne of the doore, at the entry into the Inne. This in Greeke, Της φιλοξενιας μη ἐπιλανϐανεσθε, that is, Forget not your good entertainment; and this in Latine, Hospitibus hic tuta fides.”[402]

Saints were formerly very common on signboards, and this abuse also was wittily ridiculed by the pungent satire of Artus Desiré, a French poet of the fifteenth century:—

“En leur logis plein de vers et de teignes,
Où est logé le grand diable d’enfer,
Mettent de Dieu et de saints les enseignes,
Leurs ditz logis où n’y a que desroys.
Pendre font tous sur le pavé du roy
De grands tableaux et enseignes dorées,
Pour des montres qu’ils ont fort bien de quoy,
Et qu’il y a de tres grasses porées.
L’un pour enseigne aura la Trinité,
L’autre Saint Jehan, et l’autre Saint Savin,
L’autre Saint Maure, l’autre l’Humanité
De Jesus Christ notre Sauveur divin,
De Dieu, des saintz, sont leurs crieurs de vin,[403]
Tant aux citez que villes et villages,
Des susditz sainctz les devotes images,
En prophanant leur préciosité.”[404]

Many of these saints were patrons of particular trades, and were constantly adopted as the signs of those that followed them. Thus St Crispin was generally a shoemaker’s sign. At the present day, the gentle craft represented by this saint live up to the proverb, and keep to the “last;” but many publicans still have the sign of Crispin, Saint Crispin, Jolly Crispin, or Crispin and Crispian, and occasionally King Crispin, (as at Morpeth.) And well may they put their houses under the protection of this saint, since the proverb says, “Cobblers and tinkers are the best ale drinkers.” Crispin and Crispian were two Roman brothers, sons of a king; they travelled to France to preach Christianity, and worked at the trade of shoemakers, making sandals for the poor, which they gave away, the angels supplying them with leather. Hence they are considered the patrons of shoemakers. They were beheaded at Soissons in 308. What may have contributed to their popularity in this country is the fact of the battle of Agincourt having been fought on their day, October 25, 1415:—

“And Crispin Crispian shall never go by
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember’d,
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers,
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition,
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap, while any speaks
That fought with us upon St Crispin’s day.”

Henry the Fifth, iv. 3.

From Shakespeare we turn to the homely rhymes of a Dutch shoemaker at the Hague, who, in the seventeenth century, had this couplet over his door:—

“Dit is Sint Crispyn, maar ik hiet Stoffel,
Ik maak een laars, schoen en pantoffel.”[405]

A more spirited one about the same time was in Bergen op Zoom, which is not bad satire for a Dutchman:—

“Hier in Krispyn kan men de mensch uit beestevellen
Elk schoenen na zyn voet voor gelt terstond bestellen,
Doch menig beest alheir steekt in een menschevel,
Draagt zelf zyn broeder’s huid en ’t staat dat beest nog wel.”[406]

The St Hugh’s Bones was another sign of the gentle craft; it seems to be extinct now, but a trades token shows that, in 1657, it was the sign of a house in Stanhope Street, Claremarket. From a little chapbook, entitled,—

“The Delightful, Princely, and Entertaining History of the Gentle Craft, &c. London printed for J. Rhodes, at the corner of Bride Lane, in Fleet Street, 1725,”

we gather that Saint Hugh was a prince’s son,[407] deeply in love with a saintly coquette called Winifred. Having been jilted by this lady in a very pious manner, he went travelling, resisted the temptations of Venice,[408] like another St Anthony, passed through numberless adventures, compared to which those of Baron Munchausen sink into insignificance, and was finally, by a jumble of most amusing anachronism, martyred in the reign of Diocletian, by being made to drink a cup of the blood of his lady-love, mixed with “cold poison,” after which, his body was hung on the gallows. But among other misfortunes in his travels, he had been shipwrecked and lost all his wealth, so that he had to choose a profession, which was that of shoemaker, and so well he liked his fellow-workmen that, having nothing else to give, he bequeathed his bones to them. After they had been “well picked by the birds,” some shoemakers took them from the gallows, and made them into tools, and hence their tools were named St Hugh’s Bones. They are specified in the following rhyme, which appears to have been the shoemakers’ shibboleth:—

“My friends, I pray, you listen to me,
And mark what Saint Hugh’s Bones shall be:
First a Drawer and a Dresser,
Two Wedges, a more and a lesser.
A pretty Block, Three Inches high,
In fashion squared like a die;
Which shall be called by proper name
A Heelblock, ah! the very same;
A Handleather and a Thumbleather likewise,
To put on Shooe-thread we must devise;
[283] The Needle and the Thimble shall not be left alone,
The Pinchers, the Pricking Awl, and Rubbing Stone;
The Awl, Steel and Jacks, the Sowing Hairs beside,
The Stirrop holding fast, while we sow the Cow hide;
The Whetstone, the Stopping Stick, and the Paring Knife,
All this does belong to a Journeyman’s Life:
Our Apron is the shrine to wrap these Bones in,
Thus shroud we S. Hugh’s Bones in a gentle lamb’s skin.

“Now you good Yeomen of the Gentle Craft,” the story goes on, “tell me (quoth he) how like you this? As well (replied they) as Saint George does of his horse: for as long as we can see him fight the Dragon, we will never part with this poesie. And it shall be concluded, That what journeyman soever he be hereafter that cannot handle his Sword and Buckler, his long Sword and Quarterstaff, sound the Trumpet, or play upon the Flute, or bear his part in a Three Man’s song, and readily reckon up his Tools in Rhime, (except he have borne colours in the Field, being a Lieutenant, a Sergeant or Corporal,) shall forfeit and pay a Bottle of Wine, or be counted a Colt; to which they answered all viva voce, Content, Content. And then, after many merry songs, they departed. And never after did they travel without these tools on their backs, which ever since have been called Saint Hugh’s Bones.”

Bishop Blaze, or Blaize, otherwise St Blasius, is another patron of a trade to be met with on the signboard. This worthy, Bishop of Sebaste, in Cappadocia, is considered the patron of woolcombers, whence the sign is very common in the clothing districts. He is represented with the instrument of his martyrdom in his hands, an iron comb, with which the flesh was torn from his body in 289; from this implement has been attributed to him the invention of woolcombing. His holiday is celebrated every seventh year by a procession and feast of the masters and workmen of the woollen manufactories in Yorkshire and Bedfordshire; in sheep-shearing festivals, also, a representation of him used to be introduced; a stripling in habiliments of wool was seated on a milk-white steed, with a lamb in his lap, the horse, the youthful bishop, and the lamb all covered with a profusion of ribbons and flowers.

St Julian, the patron of travellers, wandering minstrels, boatmen, &c., was a very common inn sign, because he was supposed to provide good lodgings for such persons. Hence two Saint Julian’s crosses, in saltier, are in chief of the innholders’ arms, and the old motto was:—“When I was harbourless ye lodged me.” This benevolent attention to travellers procured him the epithet of “the good herbergeor,” and in France “bon herbet.” His legend in a MS., Bodleian, 1596, fol. 4, alludes to this:—

“Therfore yet to this day, thei that over lond wende,
They biddeth Seint Julian, anon, that gode herborw he hem sende,
And Seint Julianes Pater Noster ofte seggeth also
For his faders soule and his moderes that he hem bring therto.”

And in “Le dit des Heureux,” an old French fabliau:—

“Tu as dit la patenotre
Saint Julian à cest matin,
Soit en Roumans, soit en Latin,
Or tu seras bien ostilé.”[409]

In mediæval French, L’hotel Saint Julien was synonymous with good cheer.

“Sommes tuit vostre.
Par Saint Pierre le bon Apostre,
L’ostel aurez Saint Julien,”[410]

says Mabile to her feigned uncle, in the fabliau of “Boivin de Provins;” and a similar idea appears in “Cocke Lorell’s bote,” where the crew, after the entertainment with the “relygyous women” from the Stews’ Bank, at Colman’s Hatch,

“Blessyd theyr shyppe when they had done
And dranke about a Saint Julyan’s torne.”

St Martin’s character as a saint was not unlike St Julian’s; hence we find him frequently on the signboard. The most favourite representation being the saint on horseback cutting off with his sword a piece of his cloak, in order to clothe a naked beggar. Not only inns, but booksellers also used his sign, as for instance Dionis Rose, (1514,) printer in the Rue St Jacques, Paris; and Bernard Aubrey, another printer in the same street.

“Avoir l’hotel St Martin,” in old French, meant exactly the same as “avoir l’hotel St Julian:” thus, in the romance of Florus and Blanche:—

“Flor. Sovent dient par le bon vin
“Flor.Qu’ils ont l’ostel Saint Martin.”[411]

And in the story of “L’Anneau,” by Jean de Boves, (which is the same as Chaucer’s “Miller’s Tale,”) it is said of the two students at the end:—“C’est ainsi qu’ils eûrent à ses depens l’ostel Saint Martin.”[412] These two saints, it is believed, are no longer to be found on the signboard, but another powerful patron of travellers, St Christopher, may still occasionally be met with, as for instance in Bath, where in the seventeenth century it was still very common. Taylor the Water poet mentions it as the sign of an inn at Eton, and it occurs on various trades tokens of London shops, inns, and taverns. This saint’s intercession was thought efficacious against all danger from fire, flood, and earthquake, whence it became a custom to paint his image of a colossal size on walls of churches and houses, sometimes occupying the whole height of the building, so that it might be seen from a great distance. Generally he was represented wading through a river, with the infant Christ on his shoulders, and leaning on a flowering rod. Such representations are met with in every part of Western Europe; they still remain in many places in England, as at St James’ Church, South Elmham, Suffolk; Bibury Church, Gloucestershire; Beddington, Surrey; Croydon; Hengrave; West Wickham, &c., &c., &c. They were also very numerous on the Continent; in the porch of St Mark’s, Venice, there is a mosaic bust of him, with these words:—

“Christophori Sancti speciem quicumque tuetur
Illo namque die nullo languore tenetur.”[413]

A somewhat similar inscription occurs under one of the very earliest block prints, (now in the possession of Earl Spencer,) evidently made for pasting against the walls in inns, and other places frequented by travellers and pilgrims. Under it are the following words:—

“Cristofori faciem die quacumque tueris
Illo nempe die morte malâ non morieris.

millesimo ccccxx. tercio.”[414]

Travellers even carried his figure about with them, either on their hat or on their breast, as we gather from Chaucer’s “Yeoman”—

“A Cristofre on his brest of silver shene.”

In the “Pleasant Conceits of Old Hobson the Londoner,” 1607, a jest is related, made by that dry old joker at the expense of Saint Christopher, which again illustrates the levity with which religious matters were treated in those days:—

“Maister Hobson and another of his neighboris on a time walking to Southwarke faire, by chance dranke in a house, which had the signe of Sa. Christopher, of the which signe the goodman of the house gave this commendation, Saint Christopher (quoth he) when hee lived upon the earth bore the greatest burden that ever was, which was this, he bore Christ over a river; nay, there was one (quoth Maister Hobson) that bore a greater burden. Who was that? (quoth the innkeeper) Marry, (quoth Maister Hobson) the asse that bore him and his mother. So was the innekeeper called asse by craft.”

The house in which this joke was perpetrated is enumerated by Stowe amongst the principal inns of Southwark.

St Luke still figures as the sign of two or three public-houses in London. Being the patron of painters, it certainly was the least the sign-painters could do to honour his portrait with an occasional appearance on the signboard. Yet it must be confessed St Luke was but a sorry hand at painting. There is a portrait of the Holy Virgin painted by him preserved in the Church of Silivria, on the shores of the Sea of Marmora; but such a daub! the most modest village sign-painter would be ashamed of the production. Yet, for all that, the thing works miracles, and the only wonder is that its first effort in this line was not to change itself into a good picture. We wonder at the Virgin, too, and expected better from her taste; for in Valencia Cathedral there is another portrait of her painted by Alonzo Cano, which is one of the most lovely female heads we ever had the happiness to gaze upon. And so well pleased was the Holy Virgin with this likeness, that she deigned to descend from heaven to compliment the blessed artist upon his work. So says the legend, and so the old beadle tells the travellers. But Luke possessed other attributes. Aubrey tells us: “At Stoke Verdon, in the Parish of Broad Chalke, was a chapell (in the chapell close by the farm-house) dedicated to Saint Luke, who is the Patron or Tutelar Saint of the Horne Beasts, and those that have to do with them,” &c.[415] This arose evidently from the Ox being his emblem, as the Lion was of St Mark, the Eagle of St John, and the Angel of St Matthew. For this reason St Luke was doubtless often chosen as the sign of inns frequented by farmers and graziers.

Simon the Tanner of Joppa is an old-established house in Long-lane, Bermondsey, and, as a sign, is supposed to be unique. It seems to have been adopted with reference to the tanners, who frequented the house, or it may have been the former occupation of the landlord, who gave the sign to his house. Simon is named in Acts x. 32, “Send therefore to Joppa, and call hither Simon, whose surname is Peter; he is lodged in the house of one Simon a tanner, by the sea-side.”

But of all the signs coming under this class, Saint George and the Dragon is undoubtedly the greatest favourite in England, and it is equally well represented in other countries; for of this saint may be said what Velleius Paterculus said about Pompey: “Quot partes terrarum sunt, tot fecit monumenta victoriæ suæ.” In London alone there are at present not less than sixty-six public-houses and taverns with this name, not counting the beer-houses, coffee-houses, &c. Yet, after all, it is very doubtful if St George ever existed, and he may be only a popular corruption of St Michael conquering Satan, or Perseus’ romantic delivery of Andromeda. Hence the little rhyme recorded by Aubrey, and various other seventeenth century collectors of ana:

“To save a mayd St George the Dragon slew—
A pretty tale, if all is told be true.
Most say there are no dragons, and ’tis sayd
There was no George; pray God there was a mayd.”

St George is mentioned by Bede, who calls the 23d of April “Natale S. Georgii Martyris.” He was, however, at that time a very recent importation, for Adamnanus (690), who lived just before Bede, says, speaking of Arnulphus after his return from the East: “Etiam nobis de quodam martyre Georgio nomine narrationem contulit.” In the reign of Canute, there was already a house of regular canons sacred to St George at Thetford, in Norfolk. The church of St George, Southwark, is also thought to have existed before the Conqueror. But after the Conquest, chapels were frequently erected to him, and on the seals of this period he is often represented without the Dragon. Edward III. had a particular veneration for him. Many of his statutes begin: “Ad honorem omnipotentis Dei, Sanctæ Mariæ Virginis gloriosæ, et Sancti Georgii Martyris.” It was after the foundation of the Order of the Garter that it became such a favourite sign. The fact that he was the patron of soldiers also assisted his popularity on the signboard.

There still exists an old and much dilapidated stone sign of St George and the Dragon in the front of a house on Snowhill. Frequently this sign is abbreviated to the George. There was an inn of this name, mentioned in 1554 as being situate on the north side of the Tabard. This inn was very much damaged by the great fire of Southwark in 1670, and completely burned down in 1676. But it was rebuilt, and has come down to our time.

Machyn, in his Diary, mentions several Georges; one of them in connexion with an occurrence which gives a good view of these lawless times:—

“The viij day of December 1559 was the day of the Conception of owre Lade was a grett fyre in the Gorge in Bred stret; itt begane at vj of the cloke at nyght and dyd gret harm to dyvers houses. The 9th of December cam serten fellows unto the Gorge in Bred stret where the fyre was and gutt into the howse and brake up a chest of a clothear and toke owt xl. lb. and after cryd fyre, fyre, so that ther cam ijc pepull, and so they took one.”

The George in Lombard Street was a very old house, once the town mansion of the Earl Ferrers, in which one of that family was murdered as early as 1175, (see Stow.) At this house died, in 1524, Richard Earl of Kent, who had wasted his property in gaming and extravagance; it was then an inn, where the nobility used to put up at. George Dowdall, Archbishop of Armagh, (1558,) was buried from this house. Finally, we may mention a George Inn at Derby, in connexion with the following advertisement from the Daily Advertiser, Oct. 1758:—

“A YOUNG LADY STRAYED.—A young Lady, just come out of Derbyshire, strayed from her Guardian. She is remarkably genteel and handsome. She has been brought up by a farmer near Derby, and knows no other but that they are her parents; but it is not so, for she is a lady by birth, though of but little learning. She has no cloathes with her, but a riding habit she used to go to market in. She will have a fine estate, as she is an heiress, but knows not her birth, as her parents died when she was a child, and I had the care of her, so she knows not but that I am her mother. She has a brown silk gown that she borrowed of her maid—that is, dy’d silk, and her riding dress a light drab, lin’d with blue Tammy, and it has blue loops at the button-holes; she has outgrown it; and I am sure that she is in great distress both for money and cloaths; but whoever has relieved her I will be answerable if they will give me a letter, where she may be found; she knows not her own sirname. I understand she has been in Northampton for some time; she has a cut in her forehead. Whosoever will give an account where she is to be found shall receive twenty guineas reward. Direct for M. W. at the George Inn, Derby.”

Besides the Dragon, St George is found in various other combinations, as the George and Blue Boar, High Holborn, an old inn lately come to its end. In the seventeenth century this house was called the Blue Boar, and is said to have been the house in which Cromwell and Ireton, disguised as common troopers, intercepted a letter of King Charles to his queen. Cromwell, the story goes on to say, finding by this letter that his party were not likely to obtain good terms from the king, “from that day forward resolved his ruin.”[416] Unfortunately for lovers of the romantic, there is no foundation for this dramatic incident.

PLATE XII.

GRINDING OLD INTO YOUNG.
(From an old woodcut, circa 1720.)

FIVE ALLS.

(From an old print by Kay. The figures represent Dr Hunter, a famous Scotch clergyman; Erskine the lawyer; a farmer; His Sacred Majesty George III.; and the gentleman whose name should never be mentioned to ears polite.)

The George and Thirteen Cantons, kept by the great Bob Travers, is another odd combination, occurring in Church Street, Soho; it is, however, easily explained when we learn that there is another public-house called the Thirteen Cantons, in King Street, also in Soho. This sign was put up in reference to the thirteen Protestant cantons of Switzerland—a compliment to the numerous Swiss who inhabit the neighbourhood.

But the strangest combination of all is that of the George and Vulture. At present there are three public-houses in London with this sign: one in St George-in-the-East, one in Wapping, and one in Haberdasher Street, Hoxton. As in the “Live Vulture,” (see p. 224,) the only obvious explanation for this strange combination seems to be the possibility of a vulture having been exhibited at this house. Vultures were still considered great curiosities as late as the eighteenth century. In 1726, one of the attractions at Peckham Fair was a menagerie, and amongst the animals exhibited the vulture was described in the following terms:—

“The noble Vulture Cock, brought from Archangall, having the finest talons of any bird that seeks her prey; the forepart of his head is covered with hair; the second part resembles the wool of a black; below that is a white ring, having a ruff that he cloaks his head with at night.”

It is a name of some standing. “Near Ball Alley was the George Inn, since the Fire, rebuilt with very good houses, well Inhabited, and warehouses, being a large open yard, and called George Yard, at the farther end of which is the George and Vulture Tavern, which is a large house and of a great trade, having a passage into St Michael’s Alley,” [Cornhill].[417] There was another tavern of this name on the east side of the high road, nearly opposite Bruce Green, Tottenham, in early times much frequented by the citizens of London taking their recreations. It is mentioned in the “Search after Claret” as early as 1691. Several coins of the reign of Queen Elizabeth and Charles I. were discovered on pulling down the old house. A coat of arms of Queen Elizabeth was fixed over the front door, but at the demolition of the building it was put up at the back of a house in Hale Lane. After the fashion of the time, the house was duly puffed up in newspaper poems. The following is copied from a newspaper-cutting circa 1761-62, and as it enumerates the attractions of a suburban tea-garden of the period, may be quoted here at full length:—

“If lur’d to roam in Summer Hours,
Your Thoughts incline tow’rd Tott’nham Bow’rs.[418]
Here end your airing Tour and rest
Where Cole invites each friendly Guest:
Intent on signs, the prying Eye,
The George and Vulture will descry;
Here the kind Landlord glad attends
To wellcome all his chearfull Friends
Who, leaving City smoke, delight
To range where various scenes invite.
The spacious garden, verdant Field,
Pleasures beyond Expression yield,
The Angler here to sport inclined
In his Canal may Pastime find.
Neat racy Wine and Home-brew’d Ale
The nicest Palates may regale,
Nectarious Punch—and (cleanly grac’d)
A Larder stor’d for ev’ry Taste.
The cautious Fair may sip with Glee
The fresh’st Coffee, finest Tea.
Let none the outward Vulture fear,
No Vulture host inhabits here,
If too well us’d you deem ye—then
Take your Revenge and come again.”

St Paul, the patron saint of London, was formerly a common sign in the metropolis. One of the trades tokens of a house or tavern in Petty France, Westminster, represents the saint before his conversion, lying on the ground, with his horse standing by him; this house was called “the Saul.” Perhaps this was a monkish pleasantry of the period, (as Westminster was under the patronage of St Peter,) representing an unpleasant event in the history of the great patron, and showing, by simple analogy, the vast superiority of the converted St Peter. The usual way, however, of commemorating the saint on the signboard was the St Paul’s Head. This was the sign of a very old inn in Great Carter Lane, (Doctors’ Commons,) opposite which Bagford lived in 1712. As an inn, it is mentioned by Machyn, in his Diary, in 1562. “The 25 may was a yonge man did hang ymseylff at the Polles Head, the inn in Carterlane.” Trades tokens of this house are extant in the Beaufoy Collection. In the eighteenth century, most of the celebrated libraries were sold at this inn:[419] amongst others that of the bibliomaniac, Tom Rawlinson—the Tom Folio of the Tatler, whose books were brought to the hammer between 1721-33—the sale extending to seventeen or eighteen separate auctions. The disposal of his MSS. alone occupied sixteen days. To this tavern formerly the new sheriffs, after having been sworn in, used to resort to receive the keys of the different jails; that ceremony terminated, they were regaled with sack and walnuts by the keeper of Newgate. The St Paul’s Coffee-house is built on the site of this old inn. About 1820 there was another Paul’s Head in Cateaton Street, where a literary club used to be held “for the cultivation of forensic eloquence.” It was under the patronage of several distinguished characters, and had for a motto the modest words, “Sic itur ad astra.” The vicinity of the cathedral evidently had suggested both these signs, as well as that exhibited by Philip Waterhouse, a bookseller “at the St Paul’s Head in Canning Street near Londonstone” in 1630. On another sign, in the same locality, the two saints were united, viz., the Saint Peter and Saint Paul, St Paul’s Churchyard. Of this house, also, trades tokens are extant.

Although St Peter was, doubtless, as common on the signboard before the Reformation as the other great saints of religious history, yet no instances of this have come down to us. His keys, however—the famous Cross Keys—are very common. At Dawdley, and on the road between Warminster and Salisbury, there is a very curious sign called Peter’s Finger, which is believed to occur nowhere else. In all probability this refers to the benediction of the Pope, the finger of his Holiness being raised whilst bestowing a blessing. St Peter being the first of the Papal line, was doubtless often represented with his finger raised in old pictures and carvings. The following passage from Bishop Hall’s “Satires” alludes to the finger:—

“But walk on cheerly ’till thou have espied
St Peter’s finger, at the churchyard side.”—Book v., sat. 2.

St Dunstan, the patron saint of the parish of that name in London, was godfather to the Devil,—that is to say, to the sign of the famous tavern of the Devil and St Dunstan, within Temple Bar. The legend runs, that one day, when working at his trade of a goldsmith, he was sorely tempted by the devil, and at length got so exasperated that he took the red hot tongs out of the fire and caught his infernal majesty by the nose. The identical pinchers with which this feat was performed are still preserved at Mayfield Palace, in Sussex. They are of a very respectable size, and formidable enough to frighten the arch one himself. This episode in the saint’s life was represented on the signboard of that glorious old tavern. By way of abbreviation, this house was called The Devil, though the landlord seems to have preferred the other saint’s name; for on his token we read: “The D—— (sic) and Dunstan,” probably fearing, with a classic dread, the ill omen of that awful name.

Allusions to this tavern are innumerable in the dramatists; one of the earliest is in 1563, in the play of “Jack Jugeler.” William Rowley thus mentions it in his comedy of a “Match by Midnight,” 1633:—

“Bloodhound. As you come by Temple Bar make a step to the Devil.

Tim. To the Devil, father?

Sim. My master means the sign of the Devil, and he cannot hurt you, fool; there’s a saint holds him by the nose.

Tim. Sniggers, what does the devil and a saint both on a sign?

Sim. What a question is that? What does my master and his prayer-book o’ Sundays both in a pew?”

So fond was Ben Jonson of this tavern, that he lived “without Temple Bar, at a combmaker’s shop,” according to Aubrey, in order to be near his favourite haunt. It must have been, therefore, in a moment of ill-humour, when he found fault with the wine, and made the statement that his play of the “Devil is an Ass,” (which is certainly not amongst his best,) was written “when I and my boys drank bad wine at the Devil.” But surely he would not have established his favourite Apollo Club at a place where they sold bad wine. He himself composed the famous “Leges Conviviales” for this club, which are still preserved, with the respect due to so sacred a relic, in the banking house of Messrs Child & Co., erected in 1788 on the place where the tavern formerly stood. They are twenty-four in number, some of them rather characteristic:—

“4. And the more to exact our delight whilst we stay,
“4. Let none be debarr’d from his choice female mate.

“5. Let no scent offensive the chamber infest.

10. Let our wines without mixture or scum be all fine,
10. Or call up the master and break his dull noddle.

[293]

16. With mirth, wit, and dancing, and singing conclude,
16. To regale every sense with delight in excess.

21. For generous lovers let a corner be found,
21. Where they in soft sighs may their passions relieve.”

The last clause was, “Focus perennis esto,” which proves that rare old Ben understood comfort. Latin inscriptions were also in other parts of the house. Over the clock in the kitchen might have been seen, as late as 1731, “Si nocturna tibi noceat potatio vini, hoc in mane bibis iterum, et erit medicina.”[420] An elegant rendering of the well-known phrase, “A hair of the dog that bit you.” Not only Ben Jonson, but almost all the great poets of two centuries, honoured this house with their presence. “I dined to-day,” says Swift, in one of his letters to Stella, “with Dr Garth and Mr Addison, at the Devil Tavern, near Temple Bar, and Garth treated.” Numerous similar quotations might be found, showing the visits to this place of nearly all the great literary stars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Simon Wadloe was one of the most famous landlords of this tavern. Pepys, April 22, 1661,—“Wadlow, the Vintner at the Devil, in Fleet Street, did lead a fine company of soldiers, all young comely men, in white Doublets” (this was on Charles II. going from the Tower to Whitehall.) Ben Jonson called him the king of skinkers.[421] Among the verses on the door of the Apollo room occurred the lines—

“Hang up all the poor hop drinkers,
Cries old Sim, the king of skinkers.”

Camden, in his “Remains,” records the following epitaph on this worthy:—

“Apollo et cohors Musarum,
Bacchus vini et uvarum,
Ceres pro pane et cervisia,
Adeste omnes cum tristitia.
Diique, Deæque, lamentate cuncti,
Simonis Vadloe funera defuncti,
Sub signo malo bene vixit, mirabile!
Si ad cœlum recessit gratias Diaboli.”[422]

In opposition to this Old Devil a Young Devil Tavern was opened, also in Fleet Street, in 1707, and here the first meetings of the Society of Antiquaries were held, but the “Young Devil” was not a success, and the house was soon closed.

Though the Devil is not a promising name for a public-house, owing to his near connexion with evil spirits, yet there was a third tavern named after—if not devoted to him—the Little Devil, Goodman’s Fields, Whitechapel. Ned Ward, in 1703, highly commends the punch of this house, which he partook of in “a room neat enough to entertain Venus and the graces.” It was a house entirely after jolly Ned’s fancy. “My landlord was good company, my landlady good humoured, her daughter charmingly pretty, and her maid tolerably handsome, who can laugh, cry, say her prayers, sing a song, all in a breath, and can turn in a minute to all sublunary points of a female compass.”[423]

The Devil (le Diable) was also a celebrated tavern in Paris, near the Palais de Justice. It is thus named in the “Ode à tous les Cabarets:”—

“Lieux sacrés où l’on est soumis
Aux saints oracles de Themis,
Encor que vous ayez la gloire,
De voir tout le monde à genoux,
Sans le Diable et la Tête-Noire;[424]
Je n’approcherais pas de vous.”[425]

In the seventeenth century Paris also had its Petit Diable, (Little Devil,) a tavern of some renown.

The Devil’s House was the name of a favourite Sunday resort in the last century, in the Hornsey Road, Islington. It is said to have been the retreat of Claude Duval (unde Duval’s house, Devil’s house,) the elegant highwayman in the reign of Charles II., who infested the lanes about Islington; but from a survey taken in 1611, it appears that the house bore already at that time the name of “Devil’s House.” From its general appearance it seemed to date from Queen Elizabeth’s reign. It was surrounded by a moat filled with water, and passed by a wooden bridge. Its attractions are held forth in the following laudatory epistle, an example of the florid and poetical advertising in vogue when Richardson wrote novels of six volumes all in letters—compositions too painfully pathetic for our matter-of-fact age:—

“To the Printer of the Publick Advertiser.

“Sir,—Returning yesterday from a rural excursion to Hornsey, I casually stopped for a little refreshment at an house, commonly known by the name of Devil’s House, situated within two fields of Holloway-Turnpike. I own that I was vastly surprised at so charming and delightful a place, so near town, and at the great improvements lately made there. The garden is well laid out, encompassed with a beautiful moat, and a good canal in the orchard. On inquiry, I found the landlord (remarkable for his civil and obliging behaviour) had stocked the same with plenty of tench, carp, and other fish, with free liberty for his customers to angle therein. Tea and hot loaves are ready at a moment’s notice, and new milk from the cows grazing in the pleasant meadows adjoining, with a good larder, and the best wines, &c. In short, I know not a more agreeable place, where persons of both sexes of genteel taste may enjoy a more innocent and delightful amusement. But what surprised me most, was that the landlord, by a peculiar turn of invention, had changed the Devil’s House to the Summer House,—a name I find it is for the future to be distinguished by. I wish, Mr Printer, your readers as much pleasure as myself, and am, sir, your constant reader,

“H. G.

“May 25, 1767.”

At Royston, Herts, there is a public-house known as the Devil’s Head. There is no signboard, but a carved representation of his satanic majesty’s head projects from the building, the name being underneath.

St Patrick is exclusively an Irish sign. He is generally represented in the costume of a bishop, driving a flock of snakes, toads, and other vermin before him, which he is said to have banished from Ireland. His life is more replete with miracles than any of the other saints.

“St Patrick was a gentleman,
And came of dacent people,”

for his father was a noble Roman, who lived at Kirkpatrick, in Scotland. The saint’s life was very active; he founded 365 churches, ordained 365 bishops, and 3000 priests, converted 12,000 persons in one district, baptized seven kings at once, established a purgatory, and with his staff expelled every reptile that stung or croaked. This last feat, however, has been performed by a great many saints in different parts of the world. Not so the feat he performed at his death, when, having been beheaded, he coolly took his head under his arm, (or, according to the best authorities, in his mouth,) and swam over the Shannon. In such cases as the Bishop of Narbonne said about St Denis, (who walked from Montmartre to St Denis with his head under his arm,) “il n’y a que le premier pas qui coute.”[426]

In many instances, no doubt, before the Reformation, the shopkeeper would choose his patron saint for his sign, to act as a sort of lares and penates to his house. An example of this occurs on the following imprint:—“Manual of Prayers, 1539. Imprynted in Bottol [St Botolph’s] Lane, at the sygne of the Whyt Beare, by me, Jhon Mayler, for John Waylande, and be to sell in Powles Churchyarde, by Andrew Hester, at the Whyt Horse, and also by Mychel Lobley, at the sygne of the Saint Mychel;” this last bookseller, therefore, had chosen his own patron saint for his sign. For the same reason another bookseller adopted, in the early part of the sixteenth century, Saint John the Evangelist—“The Doctrynall of Good Servauntes. Imprynted at London, in Flete Strete, at the sygne of Saynt Johan Evangelyste, by me, Johan Butler.” This Butler was a judge of the Common Pleas, as well as a bookseller. About the same period the Evangelist was also the sign of another man of the same profession—“Robert Wyce, dwellinge at the sygne of Seynt Johan Euāgelyst, in Seynt Martyns parysshe, in the filde besyde Charynge Crosse, in the bysshop of Norwytche rentys.” He was the printer of the well-known “Pronostycacion for ever of Erra Pater; a Jewe borne in Jewry, a doctor in Astronomye and Physicke,” which was continued for ages after him. Robert Wyce must have been about the first bookseller and printer in this neighbourhood, as in Queen Elizabeth’s reign the parish contained less than one hundred people liable to be rated.[427] We find the same as one of the oldest printer’s signs in France, on an edition of Merlin’s Prophecies, printed at Paris in 1438, by Abraham Verard, dwelling near the church of Notre Dame, at the sign of St John the Evangelist.

Other saints, again, have a local reputation, and are perpetuated on the signboards in certain localities only, as for instance St Thomas of Canterbury; St Edmund’s Head, at Bury St Edmunds; and St Cuthbert, at Monk’s house, near Sunderland. This saint was the first bishop of Northumberland.

“But fain St Hilda’s nuns would learn,
If on a rock by Lindisfarne,
[297] St Cuthbert sits and toils to frame
The seaborn weeds which bear his name,”

says Sir Walter Scott, alluding to the stalks of the Encrinites, which are called St Cuthbert’s Beads, the saint, as the story goes, amusing himself by stringing them together.

Hugh Singleton, a bookseller in the sixteenth century, lived at the sign of the St Augustine; probably he had chosen this saint from the fact of his being a distinguished writer as well as saint. George Carter, a shopkeeper in the seventeenth century, adopted St Alban, the protomartyr, as his sign, evidently for no other reason but because he lived in “St Alban’s Street, near St James’s Market;” and another, William Ellis of Tooley Street, had the sign of St Clement, perhaps on account of his being a native of the parish of St Clement’s. Trades tokens of both these houses are to be seen in the Beaufoy Collection.

St Laurent was the sign of an inn in Lawrence Lane, Cheapside, but from a border of blossoms or flowers round it, it was commonly called Blossoms, or by corruption, Bosom’s Inn—such at least is the explanation of Stow:—

“Antiquities in this lane—[St Laurence Lane, Cheapside]—I find none other than that, among many fair houses, there is one large inn for the receipt of travellers called Blossom’s Inn, but corruptly Bosom’s Inn, and hath to sign St Laurence the deacon in a border of blossoms or flowers.”

Flowers are said to have sprung up at the martyrdom of this saint, who was roasted alive on a gridiron. But in the “History of Thomas of Reading,” ch. ii., another version is given, which seems, however, little else than a joke:—

“Our jolly clothiers kept up their courage and went to Bosom’s Inn, so called from a greasy old fellow who built it, who always went nudging with his head in his bosom winter and summer, so that they called him the picture of old Winter.”

In 1522 the Emperor Charles V. honoured Henry VIII. with a visit; at first his intention was to come with a retinue of 2044 persons and 1127 horses, but subsequently he reduced them to 2000 persons and 1000 horses. To lodge these visitors, various “inns for horses” were “seen and viewed,” amongst which “St Laurance, otherwise called Bosoms Yn,” is noted down to have “xx beddes and a stable for lx horses.”[428] It is curious, in this list of inns, to observe the proportion of beds as compared with stabling room, showing how most of the followers of a nobleman on a journey had to shift for themselves and sleep in the straw or elsewhere. On the occasion of this imperial visit, the city authorities were evidently afraid of being drunk dry by the many Flemings in the train of the Emperor. To avoid this calamity, a return was made of all the wine to be found at the eleven wine merchants, and the twenty-eight principal taverns then in London, the sum total of which was 809 pipes.[429]

In the sixteenth century the house seems already to have been famous as a carrier’s inn, (which it continued for three centuries,) as appears from the following allusion:—“Yet have I naturally cherisht and hugt it in my bosome, even as a carrier at Bosome’s Inne doth a cheese under his arms.”[430] A satirical tract about Banks and his horse “Marocius Extaticus,” (reprinted by the Percy Society,) gives the names of its authors as “John Dando the wiredrawer of Hadley, and Harrie Hunt, head ostler of Besomes Inne.” Another domestic of this establishment is handed down to posterity in Ben Jonson’s “Masque of Christmass,” presented at Court in 1616, where the following lines occur:—

“But now comes Tom of Bosom’s Inn,
And he presenteth Misrule.”[431]

The Catherine Wheel was formerly a very common sign, most likely adopted from its being the badge of the order of the knights of Saint Catherine of Mount Sinai, created anno 1063, for the protection of pilgrims on their way to and from the Holy Sepulchre. Hence it was a suggestive, if not eloquent sign for an inn, as it intimated that the host was of the brotherhood, although in a humble way, and would protect the travellers from robbery in his inn,—in the shape of high charges and exactions,—just as the knights of St Catherine protected them on the high road from robbery by brigands. These knights wore a white habit embroidered with a Catherine wheel, (i.e. a wheel armed with spikes,) and traversed with a sword stained with blood.[432] There were also mysteries in which St Catherine played a favourite part, one of which was acted by young ladies on the entry of Queen Catherine of Arragon (queen to our Henry VIII.) in London in 1501; in honour of this queen the sign may occasionally have been put up. The Catherine wheel was also a charge in the Turners’ arms. Flecknoe tells us, in his “Enigmatical Characters,” (1658,) that the Puritans changed it into the Cat and Wheel, under which name it is still to be seen on a public-house at Castle Green, Bristol. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Catherine Wheel was a famous carrier’s inn in Southwark; and at the present day there is still an old public-house in Bishopsgate Street Without, inscribed, “Ye old Catherine Wheel, 1594.”[433]

Besides these, there were other signs expressing a religious idea, such as the Heart in Bible, which occurs under one of the Luttrell Ballads:—“The Citizens’ joys for the Rebuilding of London, printed by P. Lillicross, for Richard Head, at the Heart in Bible, in Little Britain, where you may have Mr Matthews, his approved and universal pills for all diseases, 1667.” Another bookseller on London Bridge, Eliz. Smith, 1691, had the Hand and Bible. Biblical phrases also were employed, as for instance, the Lion and Lamb, which occurs on several seventeenth century trades tokens of Snowhill, Southwark, &c., and is still much in vogue. It is an emblematical representation of the Millennium, when “the lion shall lie down by the kid.” In the last century there was a Lion and Lamb on a signboard at Sheffield, with the following poetical effusion:—

“If the Lyon show’d kill the Lamb,
We’ll kill the Lyon—if we can;
But if the Lamb show’d kill the Lyon,
We’ll kill the Lamb to make a Pye on.”

The antithesis to this sign, namely, the Wolf and Lamb, occurs occasionally, as in Charles Street, Leicester, and in a few other places. In Grosvenor Street it was probably once represented by a lion and a kid, but the public, not minding the text, called the sign the Lion and Goat, and that name it still bears. The Lion and Adder, Nottingham, Newark, and various other places, or the Lion and Snake, as at Bailgate, Lincoln, come from Psalm xci. 13, where the godly are reminded:—“Thou shalt tread upon the Lion and Adder, the young lion and the dragon shalt thou trample under feet.” These two signs apparently came in use during the Commonwealth. They have a decided flavour of the time when Scripture language formed the common speech of every day life.

The Lamb and Flag is another sign common all over England, representing originally the holy lamb with the nimbus and banner, but now so little understood by the publicans, that on an alehouse at Swindon, it is pictured with a spear, to which a red-white-and-blue streamer is appended. It may also be of heraldic origin, for it was the coat of arms of the Templars, and the crest of the merchant tailors. The Lamb and Anchor, Milk Street, Bristol, seems to be a mystical representation of hope in Christ; both these last signs date from before the Reformation. From that period also dates the sign of the Bleeding Heart, the emblematical representation of the five sorrowful mysteries of the Rosary, viz., the heart of the Holy Virgin pierced with five swords. There is still an ale-house of this name in Charles Street, Hatton Garden, and Bleeding Heart Yard, adjoining the public-house, is immortalised in “Little Dorrit.” The Wounded Heart, one of the signs in Norwich in 1750,[434] had the same meaning. The Heart was a constant emblem of the Holy Virgin in the middle ages; thus, on the clog almanacs, all the feasts of St Mary were indicated by a heart. It was not an uncommon sign in former times. The Heart and Ball appears on a trades token as the sign of a house in Little Britain, the Ball being simply some silk mercer’s addition; and the Golden Heart[435] was a sign in Greenwich in 1737, next door to which Dr Johnson used to live when he was newly come to town, and wrote the Parliamentary articles for the Gentleman’s Magazine. At present there are three public-houses with this sign in Bristol, and in other places it may be met with.

Heaven was a house of entertainment near Westminster Hall; the present committee rooms of the House of Commons are erected on its site. Butler alludes to this house in “Hudibras,” p. 3:—

“False Heaven at the end of the Hall.”

Pepys records his dining at this house in the winter of 1660, and with due respect for the place, he put on his best fur cap for the occasion. “I sent a porter to bring my best fur cap, and so I returned and went to Heaven; where Luellin and I dined.”

Paradise was a messuage in the same neighbourhood, and Hell and Purgatory subterranean passages; but in the reign of James I. Hell was the sign of a low public-house frequented by lawyers’ clerks. Heaven and Hell are mentioned, together with a third house called Purgatory, in an old grant dated the first year of Henry VII.[436] The Three Kings is a sign representing the three Eastern magi or kings, who came to do homage to our Saviour. We find it used as early as the sixteenth century by Julyan Notary, in St Paul’s Churchyard, one of the earliest London printers. The Three Kings was formerly a constant mercer’s sign. Bagford gives the following reason for this:—

“Mersers in thouse dayes war Genirall Marchantes and traded in all sortes of Rich Goodes, besides those of scelckes (silks) as they do nou at this day: but they brought into England fine Leninn thered (linen thread) gurdeles (girdles) finenly worked from Collin[437] (Cologne.) Collin, the city which then at that time of day florished much and afforded rayre commodetes, and these merchāts that vsually traded to that citye, set vp ther singes ouer ther dores of ther Houses the three kinges of Collin, with the Armes of that Citye, which was the Three Crouens of the former kings in memorye of them, and by those singes the people knew in what wares they deld in.”[438]

There is and was until lately such a sign carved in stone in front of a house in Bucklersbury, which street was once the head quarters of the mercers and perfumers. The three kings stood in a row, all in the same garb and position, with their sceptres shouldered. The history of the Three Kings was a favourite story in the middle ages. Wynkyn de Worde printed, anno 1516, “The Lives of the Three Kinges of Collen.” The same subject had been printed in Paris in 1498 by Tresyrel: “La Vie des Troys Roys, Balchazar, Melchior, et Gaspard.” They also appeared in many of the ancient plays and mysteries. In one of the Chester pageants, acted by the shearmen and tailors, they are called Sir Jasper of Tars; Sir Melchior, king of Araby; Sir Balthazer, king of Saba; they enjoy the same names and kingdoms in the “Comédie de l’Adoration des Trois Roys,” by Marguerite de Valois. Their offerings are recorded in the following charm against falling sickness:—

“Jaspar fert myrrham, thus Melchior, Balthazar aurum,
Hæc tria qui secum portabit nomina regum
Solvitur a morbo, Christi pietate, caduco.”[439]

Another Latin distich has—

“Tres Reges Regi Regum tria dona firebant
Myrrham Homini, uncto aurum, thura dedere Deo.”[440]

Melchior was usually represented as a bearded old man, Jasper as a beardless youth, and Balchazar as a Moor with a large beard.

This sign was as common on the Continent as in England, and at the present day it may often be met with. Eustache Deschamps, in the sixteenth century, thus celebrated the good cheer of one of the taverns in Paris:—

“Prince, par la Vierge Marie,
On est à la Cossonerie,
Aux Caunettes ou aux Trois Rois.”

L’Adoration des Trois Rois was, in 1674, the sign of François Muguet, one of the Parisian booksellers.

Not unlikely the sign of the Kings and Keys, a tavern in Fleet Street, is an abbreviation of the Three Kings and Cross Keys. At Weston-super-Mare, and at Chelmsforth, there is another sign which owes its origin to the Three Kings, namely, the Three Queens. When, in 1764, the Paving Act for St James’ was put into execution, the sign of the Three Queens, in Clerkenwell Green, was removed at a cost of upwards of £200; it extended not less than seven feet from the front of the house. Lloyd’s Evening Post, January 12-14, 1761, tells how two sharpers came to this ale-house and stole the silver tankard in which their drink was served them. Each tavern in those days possessed a number of silver tankards, in which the well-dressed customers were served with sack and canary. It may be imagined that the thieves were quietly on the look-out for such a prize. The same paper gives an advertisement about two silver pints stolen from the Jolly Butchers at Bath; in fact, similar advertisements were of almost daily occurrence. “The Praise of Yorkshire Ale,” 1685, also mentions—

“Selling of Ale, in Muggs,
Silver Tankards, Black Pots, and Little Juggs.”

One other semi-religious legend has provided a subject for many a signboard, namely, the Man in the Moon. Though this cannot strictly be styled a religious legend, yet it may be included in this class, as the idea is said to have originated from the incident given in Numbers xv. 32, et seq., “And while the children of Israel were in the wilderness, they found a man that gathered sticks upon the Sabbath-day,” &c. Not content with having him stoned for this desecration of the day, the legend transferred him to the moon. It is, however, a Christian legend, for the Jews had some Talmudical story about Jacob being in the moon; in fact, almost every nation, whether ancient or modern, sees somebody in it. The Man in the Moon occurs on a seventeenth century token of a tavern in Cheapside, represented by a half-naked man within a crescent, holding on by the horns. There is still a sign of this description in Little Vine Street, Regent Street, and in various other places. Generally he is represented with a bundle of sticks, a lanthorn (which, one would think, he did not want in the moon,) and frequently a dog. Thus Chaucer depicts him in “Cresseide,” v. 260:—

“Her gite was gray and full of spottes blacke,
And on her breast a chorl painted full even,
Bearing a bush of thorns on his backe,
Which for his theft might clime no ner ye heven.”

Shakespeare also alludes to him:—

“Steph. I was the Man in the Moon when time was.

“Caliban. I have seen thee in her, and I do adore thee; my mistress showed me thee, thy dog and bush.”—Tempest, ii., sc. 2.

Also—

“Quince. One must come in with a bush of thorns and a lanthorn, and say he comes to disfigure or to present the person of moonshine.”—Midsummer Night’s Dream, iii., sc. 1.

This bunch of thorns is alluded to by Dante, “Inferno,” canto xx. 124, where the Man in the Moon is spoken of as Cain—

“Ma viene omai: che gia tiene il confine
D’amendue gli emisperi e tocca l’onda
Sotto Sibilia Caino è le spine.”[441]

And again in “Paradiso,” canto ii. 49, speaking of the moon, he asks—

“Ma detemi, che sono i segni bui
Di questi corpo, che laggiuso in terra
Fan di Cain favoleggiare altrui?”[442]

And the annotators of Dante say that Cain was placed in the moon with a bundle of thorns on his back, similar to those he had placed on the altar when he offered to the Lord his unwelcome sacrifice. This Man in the Moon, whether Cain, Jacob, or the Sabbath-breaker, has been celebrated by innumerable songs. Alex. Neckham (recently edited by Mr T. Wright) refers to him from a very ancient ballad, and one of the oldest songs is in the Harl. MSS., 2253, beginning:—

“Mon in the mone stond and streit,
On is bot-forke is burthen he bereth,
Hit is muche wonder that he na doun slyt
For doute lest he valle he shoddreth and skereth.
When the forst freseth muche chele he byd
The thornes beth kene is hattren to-tereth
N’is no wytht in the world that wot when he syt
Ne, bote hit bee the hegge, whot wedes he wereth.”

For all this, his life seems to be very merry, for one of the Roxburghe Ballads (i. f., 298) informs us that—

“Our Man in the Moon drinks Clarret,
With powderbeef, turnep and carret;
If he doth so, why should not you
Drink until the sky looks blue.”

From whence they obtained the information it is difficult to say, but it was a well-established fact with the old tobacconists that he could enjoy his pipe. Thus he is represented on some of the tobacconists’ papers in the Banks Collection puffing like a steam-engine, and underneath the words, “Who’ll smoake with ye Man in ye Moon?” If these frequent allusions in songs and plays were not enough to remind the Londoners that there was such a being, they could see him daily amongst the figures of old St Paul’s—

“The Great Dial is your last monument; where bestow some half of the three score minutes to observe the sauciness of the Jacks[443] that are above the Man in the Moon there; the strangeness of their motion will quit your labour.”—Decker’s Gull’s Hornbook.

[402] Coryatt’s Crudities, London, 1776, p. 15, reprinted from the edition of 1611.

[403] In those early days the sign alone of a house was not thought to give sufficient publicity. Touters (crieurs) were therefore sent about town (a custom dating from the Romans.) Thus in the “Crieries de Paris,” (Barbazan, Fabliaux et Contes, vol. ii., p. 277,)—

“D’autres cris on fait plusieurs,
Qui long seraient à reciter.
L’on crie vin nouveau et vieux,
Duquel l’on donne à tater.”

These touters had their statutes and privileges granted to them by Philip Auguste in 1258, some of which are very curious.

[404] Not only had the innkeepers saints on their signboards, but the different reception-rooms in their houses were also sanctified with some holy name. Artus Desiré quaintly inveighs against this practice in his “Loyaulté Consciencieuse des Tavernières:”—

“Semblablement toutes leurs chambres painctes,
Où il n’y a qu’ordure et ivrognise,
Portent les noms de benoistz sainctz et sainctes
Contre l’honneur de Dieu et son Eglise.
L’une s’apelle, à leur mode et devize,
Le Paradis et l’autre Sainct Clement.
Et quant quelqu’un rabaste fermement,
L’hostesse crie André, Guillot, Mornable,
Laisse-moy tout, et va legerement
En Paradis, compter de par le Diable.
S’on si veut chauffer,
Portent le faggot
Robin avec Margot,
De par Lucifer.”

(“In the same manner all their painted rooms, in which there is nothing but filth and drunkenness, are named after some blessed saint, contrary to the respect due to the Lord and His Church. According to this custom one is called the Paradise, and another St Clement. And if anybody higgles about his bill the hostess calls out, Andrew, Will, Mornable, leave everything, and run quickly up to the Paradise to make out the bill, in the Devil’s name. And if anybody wants a fire, Bob or Maggy has to carry up a faggot in the name of Lucifer.”)

[405]

“This is Saint Crispin, but my name is Kit,
I make boots, shoes, and slippers.”

[406]

“Here at the Crispin any man may for his money
Immediately obtain shoes made out of animals’ skins;
But many a brute in this town wears a human skin,
Nay, wears his own brother’s skin, and the brute looks even well in it”

[407] So were Crispin and Crispian, and hence the trade is called the “Gentle Craft.”

[408] The gayest city in Europe three centuries ago.

[409]

“You have said
St Julian’s prayer this morning,
Either in French or in Latin,
Now you are sure to be well lodged.”

[410]

“We are entirely at your service.
By S. Peter the good apostle
You shall have St Julian inn (or welcome.)”

[411]

“Often good wine makes them say,
That they have the inn of St Martin.”

[412]

“Thus they had at his expense the inn of St Martin.”

[413]

“Whosoever sees the image of St Christopher,
Shall that day not feel any sickness.”

[414]

“The day that you see St Christopher’s face,
That day shall you not die an evil death. 1423.”

[415] Aubrey, Remains of Judaism and Gentilism. Lansdowne MSS., No. 231.

[416] Memoirs of Roger Earl of Orrery, by Rev. Mr Th. Morris, (Earl of Orrery’s State Letters,) 1742, fol. 15.

[417] Strype, B. ii., p. 162.

[418] Tottenham High Cross.

[419] The first library sold by auction in this country was that of Dr Seaman, of Warwick Court, Warwick Lane, in 1676.

[420] “If your potations overnight do not agree with you, take another glass of wine in the morning, and it will cure you.”

[421] Skinker, an old English word, synonymous to tapster, drawer.

“Bacchus the win him skinketh all about.”—Chaucer, Marchant’s Tale, 9696

[422]

“Apollo and you, band of Muses,
Bacchus, god of wine and grapes,
Ceres, goddess of bread and beer,
You all must share our sorrow.
Weep all ye gods and goddesses,
Over the bier of the defunct Simon Wadloe,
He lived well under an evil sign,
If he goes to heaven, O miracle! thanks to the Devil.”

[423] Ned Ward’s “London Spy,” 1703.

[424] La Tête Noire, (the Moor’s head,) another famous tavern in that locality.

[425]

“Sacred precincts, where are delivered
The holy oracles of Themis,
Though you may boast
To see everybody kneel to you,
Were it not for the Devil and the Moor’s head
I would never come near you.”

[426] St Justin, another martyr, after his head was struck off, picked it up, and, holding in his hand, conversed with the bystanders.

[427] Cunningham’s London.

[428] Our Harry VIII. was fully as extravagant in his retinue. When he went over to meet Francis I. at the Camp du Drap d’or, he required 2400 beds, and stabling for 2000 horses.

[429] “Rutland Papers,” reprinted for Camden Society.

[430] Epistle Dedicatory to “Have at you to Saffron Walden,” 1596.

[431] “Misrule in a velvet cap, a sprig, a short cloak, a great yellow ruff, like a reveller, his torch bearer bearing a rope, a cheese, and a basket.” The names given were the real designations of the performers in private life. Kit, the cobbler of Philpot Lane; Cis, a cook’s wife from Scalding Alley; Nell, a milliner from Threadneedle Street; and Tom, our drawer from Blossom’s Inn.

“And he presenteth Misrule,
Which you may know by the very show,
Albeit you never ask it;
For there you may see, what his ensignes bee,
The rope, the cheese, and the basket.”

[432] St Catherine was beheaded after having been placed between wheels with spikes, from which she was saved by an angel descended from heaven.

[433] Several of the old carriers and coaching inns still remain in Bishopsgate Street, under their old names, as the Black Bull, the Green Dragon, the Four Swans, and (until a few months ago) the Flowerpot, &c.

[434] Gentleman’s Magazine, March 1842.

[435] It is said that this sign, put up in French somewhere as the cœur doré, was Englished into the “queer door.”

[436] Note in Gifford’s Ben Jonson, vol iv., p. 174.

[437] They were called the three kings of Cologne because they were buried in that city. The Empress Helena brought their bones to Constantinople, from whence they were removed to Milan, and thence in 1164 to Cologne, where they are still kept as sacred and miracle-working relics.

[438] Harl. MSS. 5910, vol. i., fol. 193.

[439]

“Jasper brings myrrh, Melchior frankincense, Balthazar gold.
He who carries these three names of the kings about with him
Will, through Christ’s favour, be delivered of the falling sickness.”

In the trial of the smugglers for the murder of Chater and Galley, excisemen of Chichester, in the last century, one of the prisoners was found with this charm in his pocket. With this scrap of paper in his possession, he had considered himself quite safe from detection.

[440]

“Three kings brought three gifts to the King of Kings.
They gave myrrh to him as man, gold as king, and frankincense as God.”

[441]

“But come now, for already hovers Cain with his bundle of thorns
On the confines of the two hemispheres, and touches the
Waves beneath Seville.”

[442]

“But tell me, what are the dark spots
On that body, which makes them down there on earth
Talk of Cain and the bundle of thorns!”

[443] Paul’s Jacks were the little automaton figures that struck the hours in old St Paul’s. Similar puppets, or figures, were also on other London churches.

CHAPTER X.
DIGNITIES, TRADES, AND PROFESSIONS.

Tools and utensils, as emblems of trade, were certainly placed outside houses at an early period, to inform the illiterate public of the particular trade or occupation carried on within. Centuries ago the practice, as a general rule, fell into disuse, although a few trades still adhere to it with laudable perseverance: thus a broom informs us where to find a sweep; a gilt arm wielding a hammer tells us where the gold-beater lives; and a last or gilt shoe where to order a pair of boots. Those houses of refreshment and general resort, which sought the custom of particular trades and professions, also very frequently adopted the tools and emblems of those trades as their distinguishing signs. At other houses, again, signs were set up as tributes of respect to certain dignities and functions. Amongst the latter, the King’s Head and Queen’s Head stand foremost, and none were more prominent types than Henry VIII. and Queen Elizabeth, even for more than two centuries after their decease. Only fifty or sixty years ago, there still remained a well-painted, half-length portrait of bluff Harry, as a sign of the King’s Head, before a public-house in Southwark. His personal appearance, doubtless, more than his character as a king, were at the bottom of this popular favour. He looked the personification of jollity and good cheer, and when the evil passions, expressed by his face, were lost under the clumsy brush of the sign-painter, there remained nothing but a merry, “beery-looking” Bacchus, eminently adapted for a public-house sign.

A very respectable folio might be filled with anecdotes connected with the various King’s Head inns and taverns up and down the country and in London—some connected with royalty, others with remarkable persons. Thus, for instance, when the Princess (afterwards Queen) Elizabeth came forth from her confinement in the Tower, November 17, 1558, she went into the church of All Hallows, Staining, the first church she found open, to return thanks for her deliverance from prison. As soon as this pious duty was performed, the princess and her attendants went to the King’s Head in Fenchurch Street to take some refreshment, and there her Royal Highness dined on pork and peas. A monument of this visit is still preserved at the above house in an engraving of the princess, from a picture by Hans Holbein, hung up in the coffee-room; and the dish from which she ate her dinner still remains, it is said, affixed to the kitchen dresser there. There is a tradition that the bells of All Hallows were rung on this occasion with such energy, that the queen presented the ringers with silken ropes.

A more painful association is connected with another King’s Head:—

“In a secluded part of the Oxfordshire hills, at a place called Collins End, situated between Hardwicke House and Goring Heath, is a neat little rustic inn, having for its sign a well-executed portrait of Charles I. There is a tradition that this unfortunate monarch, while residing as a prisoner at Caversham, rode one day, attended by an escort, into this part of the country, and hearing that there was a bowling-green at this inn, frequented by the neighbouring gentry, struck down to the house, and endeavoured to forget his sorrows for a while in a game at bowls. This circumstance is alluded to in the following lines, written beneath the signboard:—

“Stop, traveller, stop, in yonder peaceful glade,
His favourite game the royal martyr play’d.
Here, stripp’d of honours, children, freedom, rank,
Drank from the bowl, and bowl’d for what he drank;
Sought in a cheerful glass his cares to drown,
And changed his guinea ere he lost his crown.”[444]

The sign, which seems to be a copy from Vandyke, though much faded from exposure to the weather, evidently displayed an amount of artistic skill not usually met with on the signboard; but the only information the people of the house could give was, that they believed it to have been painted in London. His son, Charles II., is also connected in an anecdote with a King’s Head Tavern, in the Poultry, for it is reported that he stopped at this inn on the day of his entry at the Restoration, at the request of the landlady, who happened just then to be in labour, and wished to salute his majesty. Mrs King, the lady so honoured, was aunt to William Bowyer, “the learned printer of the eighteenth century.” In Ben Jonson’s time there was a famous King’s Head Tavern in New Fish Street, “where roysters did range.” It is this tavern, probably, that is alluded to in the ballad of “The Ranting Wh——’s Resolution:”—

“I love a young Heir
Whose fortune is fair,
And frollick in Fish Street dinners,
[307] Who boldly does call,
And in private paies all,
These boyes are the noble beginners.”[445]

At the King’s Head, the corner of Chancery Lane, Cowley the poet was born in 1618; it was then a grocer’s shop kept by his father. Subsequently it became a famous tavern, of which tokens are extant. It was at this house that Titus Oates’s party met, and trumped up their infamous story against the Roman Catholics, trying to implicate the Duke of York in the murder of Sir Edmundbury Godfrey. In the reign of William III., it was a violent Whig club. The distinction adopted by the members was a green ribbon worn in the hat. When these ribbons were shown, it was a sign that mischief was on foot, and that there were secret meetings to be held. North gives an amusing and lively description of this club:—

“The house was double balconied in front, as may be yet seen, for the clubsters to issue forth, in fresco, with hats and no perruques, pipes in their mouths, merry faces and diluted throat for vocal encouragement of the canaglia below, at bonfires, on unusual and usual occasions.”

Here the Pope-burning manifestations were got up, the Earl of Shaftesbury being president. In opposition to this Green Ribbon Club, the Tories wore in their hat a scarlet ribbon, with the words, Rex et Haeredes. Ned Ward, with his usual humour, describes a breakfast given in 1706 by the master of this house to his customers, consisting of an ox of 415 lb., roasted whole, and at the same time embraces the opportunity of praising the landlord as “the honestest vintner in London, at whose house the best wine in England is to be drunk.” This was probably Ned’s way of settling an old score.

Another King’s Head is mentioned by Pepys, 26th March 166

3

4

:—

“Thence walked through the ducking-pond fields, but they are so altered since my father used to carry us to Islington, to the old man’s at the Kings-head, to eat cakes and ale (his name was Pitts,) that I did not know which was the ducking-pond, nor where I was.”

It was a very different “ducking” in which the landlady of the Queen’s Head ale-house was concerned, as shown by the following newspaper paragraph:—

“Last week, a woman that keeps the Queen’s Head ale-house at Kingston, in Surrey, was ordered by the Court to be ducked for scolding, and was[308] accordingly placed in the chair and ducked in the river Thames, under Kingston Bridge, in the presence of 2000 or 3000 people.”—London Evening Post, Ap. 27, 1745.

Full particulars of such an operation are given by Misson:—

“They fasten an arm-chair to the end of two strong beams, twelve or fifteen feet long, and parallel to each other. The chair hangs upon a sort of axle, on which it plays freely, so as to remain in the horizontal position. The scold being well fastened in her chair, the two beams are then placed as near to the centre as possible, across a post on the water side, and being lifted up behind, the chair of course drops into the cold element. The ducking is repeated according to the degree of shrewdness possessed by the patient, and generally has the effect of cooling her immoderate heat, at least for a time.”

At the King’s Head, Strutton, near Ipswich, about ten years ago, there was the following inscription:—

“Good people, stop, and pray walk in,
Here’s foreign brandy, rum, and gin,
And, what is more, good purl and ale,
Are both sold here by old Nat Dale.”

Old Nat had lived for a period of eighty years under the shadow of the King’s Head.

Combinations with the King’s Head are not very frequent. The King’s Head and Lamb, an ale-house in Upper Thames Street, is evidently a quartering of two signs. The Two Kings and Still, sign of Henry Francis in Newmarket, 1667,[446] representing a still between two kings crowned, holding their sceptres, may have originated from the distillers’ arms, the two wild men, serving as supporters, being refined into two kings, the garlands on their heads into crowns, and their clubs into sceptres.

That Queen Elizabeth was for more than two centuries the almost unvarying type of the Queen’s Head need not be wondered at when we consider her well-deserved popularity. A striking instance of the veneration and esteem in which she was held, even through all the tribulations and changes of the Commonwealth, is exhibited in the fact of the bells ringing on her birthday, as late as the reign of Charles II.:—

“The Earl of Dorset coming to court, one Queen Elisabeth’s birthday, the king [Charles II.] asked him what the bells rung for? which having answered, the king farther asked him, ‘how it came to pass that her holiday was still kept, whilst those of his father and grandfather were no more thought of than William the Conqueror’s?’ ‘Because,’ said the frank peer[309] to the frank king, ‘she being a woman, chose men for her counsellors; and men, when they reign, usually chuse women.’”[447]

During the queen’s lifetime, however, the sign-painters had to mind how they represented “Queen Bess,” for Sir Walter Raleigh says that portraits of the queen “made by unskilful and common painters” were, by her own order, “knocked in pieces, and cast into the fire.”[448] A proclamation had been issued to that effect, in the year 1563, saying that:—

“Forasmuch as thrugh the natural desire that all sorts of subjects and people, both noble and mean, have to procure the portrait and picture of the Queen’s Majestie, great nomber of Paynters, and some Printers and Gravers have allredy, and doe daily, attempt to make in divers manners portraictures of hir Majestie, in paynting, graving, and pryntyng, wherein is evidently shewn, that hytherto none hath sufficiently expressed the naturall representation of hir Majesties person, favor, or grace, but for the most part have also erred therein, as thereof daily complaints are made amongst hir Majesties loving subjects, in so much, that for redress hereof hir Majestie hath lately bene so instantly and so importunately sued by the Lords of hir Consell, and others of hir nobility, in respect of the great disorder herein used, not only to be content that some special coning payntor might be permitted by access to hir Majestie to take the naturall representation of hir Majestie, whereof she hath been allwise of hir own right disposition very unwillyng, but also to prohibit all manner of other persons to draw, paynt, grave, or pourtrayit hir Majesties personage or visage for a time, until by some perfect patron and example the same may be by others followed.

“Therfor hir Majestie, being herein as it were overcome with the contynuall requests of so many of hir Nobility and Lords, whom she can not well deny, is pleased that for thir contentations, some coning persons, mete therefore, shall shortly make a pourtraict of hir person or visage, to be participated to others, for satisfaction of hir loving subjects; and furdermore commandeth all manner of persons in the mean tyme to forbear from payntyng, graving, printing, or making of any pourtraict of hir Majestie, untill some speciall person that shall be by hir allowed, shall have first fynished a pourtraicture thereof, after which finished, hir Majestie will be content that all other painters, printers, or gravers that shall be known men of understanding, and so thereto licensed by the hed officers of the plaices where they shall dwell, (as reason it is that every person should not without consideration attempt the same,) shall and maye at their pleasures follow the sayd patron or first portraicture. And for that hir Majestie perceiveth that a grete nomber of hir loving subjects are much greved and take grete offence with the errors and deformities allredy committed by sondry persons in this behalf, she straightly chargeth all her officers and ministers to see to the observation hereof, and, as soon as may be, to reform the errors allredy committed, and in the mean tyme to forbydd and[310] prohibit the shewing and publication of such as are apparently deformed, until they may be reformed which are reformable.”[449]

That there were signboards, however, representing her Majesty’s “person, favour, and grace,” during her lifetime, is evident from the fact that an ancestor of Pennant, the London topographer, made his fortune as a goldsmith at the sign of the Queen’s Head, in Smithfield, during the reign of good Queen Bess.

The irascible Mr Boursault, whose bile was so often deranged by signboard irregularities, took also sycophantic exception at royal heads being represented in that way:

“Je souffre impatiemment que le portrait du Roy, celuy de la Reine, de Monseigneur et des autres Princes et Princesses, servent d’enseignes de boutiques; eux qui ne devroient faire l’ornement que des plus célèbres galeries et des plus illustres cabinets. Monsieur d’Argenson et Vous même, Monsieur le Commissaire, n’auriez-vous pas juste raison de vous facher de voir vôtre portrait servir d’enseigne à, la Maison d’un cabaretier, ou à la boutique d’un Fripier; et pourquoi donc ne vous fachez-vous pas de ce que celui du Roy y est?”[450]

Of celebrated Queen’s Heads we must begin with the highly respectable inn of that name, in which, before the reign of Queen Elizabeth, lived the canonists and professors of spiritual and ecclesiastical law. It was situated in Paternoster Row, where its name is still preserved in Queen’s Head Alley. From this place the lawyers removed to Doctors’ Commons.

Nearly as ancient a building was the old Queen’s Head, Lower Street, Islington, at the corner of Queen’s Head Lane, one of the most perfect specimens of ancient domestic architecture in the vicinity of London. It is said that it was built by Sir Walter Raleigh, after he had obtained “lycense for keeping of taverns and retayling of wynes throughout Englande,” and that it was called by him the Queen’s Head in compliment to his royal mistress. Essex is also said to have resided there, and to have been visited by the queen. The same tradition is current about the Lord Treasurer Burleigh. In the reign of George II. it was used as a playhouse, and bills are still extant of plays acted there at that period.

It was a strong wood and plaster building, three lofty stories high, projecting over each other, and forming bay windows supported by brackets and caryatides. Inside it was panelled with wainscot, and had stuccoed ceilings, adorned with dolphins, cherubims, and acorns, bordered by a wreath of flowers. The porch was supported by caryatides of oak, crowned with scroll-capitals.[451] This time-honoured structure was pulled down in October 1829, and nothing of it remains in the new building erected on its site but the name, the carved oak panels of the parlour, and a bust of Queen Elizabeth at the top front. A carved mantelpiece, (formerly in the parlour of the old house,) with the history of Dian and Actæon on it, (a favourite subject with the virgin queen,) was sold for more than £60 at the sale of the building materials, most of which were bought by antiquaries.

There used to be a large pewter tankard in this house, with an inscription engraved on it, which is much too highly spiced to be given here. It was signed John Cranch, and bore date 1796.

At the Queen’s Head, Duke Court, Bow Street, the English language was enriched with two new terms, though one of them seems to have been still-born. This tavern was once kept by a facetious individual of the name of Jupp. Two celebrated characters, Annesley Shay and Bob Todrington—the latter a sporting man—meeting late in the day at the above place, went to the bar and asked for half a quartern each, with a little cold water. In the course of the evening they drank twenty-four, when Shay said to the other, “Now we’ll go.” “Oh no,” replied his companion, “we’ll have another, and then go.” This did not satisfy the Hibernian, and they continued drinking on till three in the morning, when they both agreed to go; so that under the idea of going they made a long stay, and this was the origin of drinking goes; but another preferring to eke out the measure his own way, used to call for a quartern at a time, and these in the exercise of his humour he called stays.[452]

In the beginning of this century, when Marylebone consisted of “green fields, babbling brooks,” and pleasant suburban retreats, there was a small but picturesque house of public entertainment, yclept the Queen’s Head and Artichoke, situated “in a lane nearly opposite Portland Road, and about 500 yards from the road that leads from Paddington to Finsbury”—now Albany Street. Its attractions chiefly consisted in a long skittle and “bumble puppy” ground, shadowy bowers, and abundance of cream, tea, cakes, and other creature comforts. The only memorial now remaining of the original house is an engraving in the Gentleman’s Magazine, November 1819. The queen was Queen Elizabeth, and the house was reported to have been built by one of her gardeners, whence the strange combination on the sign.

Besides Crowns (see p. 101) other royal paraphernalia are occasionally used as signboard decorations. The Sceptre is not uncommon; the Sceptre and Heart was the sign of Samuel Grover, chirurgical instrument maker, on London Bridge, in the latter end of the seventeenth century. It is engraved on his shop-bill, and represents a circle surrounded by fruit and foliage, having two Cupids standing at the upper corner, and containing in the centre two palm branches enclosing a sceptre surmounted by a heart. Round the whole are suspended lancets, trepans, saws, &c. In all probability it is simply a quartering of two signs.

The Royal Hand and Globe was the loyal sign of a stationer at the corner of St Martin’s Lane, in 1682.[453] It doubtless refers to the royal hand holding the golden orb, surmounted by a cross. It is still the sign of an ale-house near the Soho Theatre. The same orb or globe seems to be alluded to in the sign of the Sword and Ball, on Holborn Bridge, in the seventeenth century. What stands in the way of this explanation, however, is that on the token of this house the sword is represented piercing the ball; but this may merely have been a fancy of the sign-painter, who did not understand its meaning. As for the Sword and Mace, the meaning is perfectly clear; it is the sign of a public-house in Coventry.

The Church is almost as abundantly represented as royalty. Even long after the Reformation the Pope’s Head was still very common. Nash’s “Anatomie of Absurdities” was printed by T. Charlwood for Thomas Hacket, and was “to be sold at his shop in Lumbard Street, vnder the signe of the Popes Heade, 1590.” Taylor, the Water poet, in his “Travels through London,” 1636, mentions four Pope’s Head taverns; but the most famous of all was the Pope’s Head tavern in Cornhill.

“I have read[454] of a countryman that, having lost his hood in Westminster Hall, found the same in Cornhill hanged out to be sold, which he challenged, but was forced to buy, or go without it, for their stall they said was their market. At that time also the wine drawers at the Pope’s Head tavern (standing without the door in the High Street,)[455] took the same man by the sleeve, and said, ’Sir, will you drink a pint of wine?’ Whereunto he answered, ‘A penny spend I may,’ and so drank his pint, for bread nothing did he pay, for that was allowed free.[456] This Pope’s Head tavern, with other houses adjoining, strongly built of stone, hath of old time been all in one, pertaining to some great estate, or rather to the king, as may be supposed both by the largeness thereof, and by the arms, to wit, three leopards passant gardant, which were the whole arms of England before the reign of Edward III., that quartered them with the arms of France three flower de lys. Some say this was King John’s house, which might be, for I find in a written copy of ‘Matthew Paris’s History’ that in the year 1232, Henry III. sent Hubert de Burgh, earl of Kent, to Cornehill in[314] London, there to answer all matters objected against him: when he wisely acquitted himself. The Pope’s Head tavern hath a footway through from Cornhill into Lumbard Street.”—Stow’s Survey, p. 75.

In this tavern, in the fourth of Edward IV. (1464,) a trial of skill was held between Oliver Davy, goldsmith of London, and White Johnson, “Alicante Strangeour,” also of London,—the London goldsmiths being divided into native and “foren” workmen. These last, though they might be Englishmen, were so named merely as a distinction with respect to the work they produced, which consisted frequently in counterfeit articles and bad gold. The trial consisted in making, in four pieces of steel the size of a penny, a cat’s face in relief, and another cat’s face engraved, a naked man in relief, and another engraved, which work was to be performed in five weeks. Oliver Davy, the native goldsmith, won the wager, as White Johnson, the foreign workman, after six weeks could only produce the two “inward engraved” objects. The forfeit was a crown, and a dinner to the wardens, the umpires, and all those concerned in the wager. The works were kept in Goldsmith’s Hall, “to yat intent that they be redy iff any suche controursy herafter falls, to be shewede that suche traverse hathe be determyn’d aforetymes.”[457] In Pepys’s time this tavern, like many others of that period and later, had a painted room. “18 January 1668.—To the Pope’s Head, there to see the fine-painted room which Rogerson told me of, of his doing, but I do not like it at all, though it be good for such a publick room.” Here in 1718 Quin killed his brother actor Bowen. “On Thursday s’ennight at night, Mr Bowen and Mr Quin, two comedians, drinking at the Pope’s Head tavern in Cornhill, quarrelled, drew their swords, and fought, and the former was run into the guts; he languished till Sunday last, and then died. Bowen, before he expired, desired that Mr Quin might not be prosecuted, because what had happened to him was his own seeking.”[458] The jury brought in a verdict of manslaughter, and Quin for the offence was burned in the hand.[459] The quarrel was rather a foolish one, arising out of a wager which of the two was the honester man, which had been decided in favour of Quin; inde iræ. This tavern seems to have continued in existence till the latter part of the last century.

The emblem of another class of high dignitaries of the Roman Catholic Church, the Cardinal’s Hat or Cap, was at one time common in England. Bagford says: “You have not meney of them, they war set up by sume that had ben saruants to Tho. Wolsey.”[460] But we find the sign long before Wolsey’s time, for in 1459, Simon Eyre

“Gave the Tavern called the Cardinal’s Hat in Lumbard Street, with a tenement annexed on the East part of the tavern, and a mansion behind the East tenement, together with an alley from Lumbard Street to Cornhill, with the appurtenances, all which were by him new built, towards a brotherhood of our Lady in St Mary Woolnots.”—Stow, p. 77.

This tavern and another of the same name, also in Lombard Street, were still extant in the seventeenth century. It was also the sign of one of the Stairs on the Bankside, the name of which is still preserved to that locality in Cardinal Cap’s Alley.

“But at the naked stewes
I understands howe that
The sygne of the Cardinall’s hat
That inne is now shit up.”

Skelton’s Whye come ye not to Courte.

These houses, by proclamation of 37, Henry VIII., were “whited and painted with signes on the front for a token of the said houses;” they were under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Winchester, whence Pennant makes some sly remarks upon the sign of the Cardinal’s Cap:—

“I will not give into scandal so far as to suppose that this house was peculiarly protected by any coeval member of the sacred college. Neither would I by any means insinuate that the Bishops of Winchester and Rochester, or the abbots of Waverley, or of St Augustine in Canterbury, or of Battel, or of Hyde, or the Prior of Lewis, had there their temporary residences for them or their trains, for the sake of these conveniences, in that period of cruel and unnatural restriction,” &c.[461]

The Bishop’s Head was, in 1663, the sign of J. Thompson, a bookseller and publisher in St Paul’s Churchyard. At this house, in 1708, was published Hatton’s “New View of London;” it was then in the occupation of Robert Knaplock.

More general, however, was the Mitre, which was the sign of several famous taverns in London in the seventeenth century. There was one in Great Wood Street, Cheapside, (called on the trades token of the house the Mitre and Rose,) mentioned by Pepys as “a house of the greatest note in London.”[462] The landlord of this house, named Proctor, died at Islington of the plague in 1665, in an insolvent state, though he had been “the greatest vintner for some time in London for great entertainments.” There was another Mitre near the west end of St Paul’s, the first music-house in London. The name of the master was Robert Herbert alias Forges. Like many brother-publicans, he was, besides being a lover of music, also a collector of natural curiosities, as appears by his

“Catalogue of many natural rarities, with great industrie, cost, and thirty years’ travel into foreign countries, collected by Robert Herbert, alias Forges, Gent., and sworn servant to his Majesty; to be seen at the place called the Musick house at the Mitre, near the West End of S. Paul’s Church, 1664.”

This collection, or at least a great part of it, was bought by Sir Hans Sloane. It is conjectured that the Mitre was situated in London House Yard, at the north-west end of St Paul’s, on the spot where, afterwards, stood the house known by the sign of the Goose and Gridiron. Ned Ward[463] describes the appearance of another music-house of the same name in Wapping, which he calls “the Paradise of Wapping,” though more probably it was in Shadwell, where there is still a Music House Court, which seems to point to some such origin. His description of this prototype of the Oxford and Alhambra music-halls is not a little amusing. The music, consisting of fiddles, hautboys, and a humdrum organ, he compares to the grunting of a hog added as a base to a concert of caterwauling cats in the height of their ecstacy. The music-room was richly decorated with paintings, (Hornfair was one of the pictures,) carvings, and gilding; the seats were like pews in a church, and the orchestra railed in like a chancel. The musicians occasionally went round to collect contributions, as they still do in the Cafés Chantants of the Champs Elysées, Paris. The other rooms in the house were “furnished for the entertainment of the best of companies,” all painted with humorous subjects. The kitchen, used at that period in many taverns as a sitting room by the customers, was railed in and ornamented in the same gaudy style as the rest of the houses; a quantity of canary birds were suspended on the walls. Underground was a tippling sanctuary painted with drunken women tormenting the devil, and other somewhat quaint subjects. The wine of the establishment was good. Here, then, we may imagine our great-great-grandfathers listening to the woeful fiddles scraping “Sillenger’s Round,” “John, come kiss me,” “Old Simon the King,” or other old tunes, until flesh and blood could stand it no longer, and a dance would be indulged in to the music of “Green Sleeves,” “Yellow Stockings,” or some other equally comic dance and tune; after which everybody went home, through the dirty dark streets, doubtless “highly pleased with the entertainment.”

Older than either of these was the Mitre in Cheap, which is mentioned in the vestry books of St Michael’s, Cheapside, before the year 1475.[464] In “Your Five Gallants,” a comedy by Middleton, about 1608, Goldstone prefers it to the Mermaid:—“The Mitre in my mind for neat attendance, diligent boys and—push, excels it [the Mermaid] far.” But the most famous of the inns with this name, was the Mitre in Mitre Court, Fleet Street, one of Doctor Johnson’s favourite haunts, “where he loved to sit up late,”[465] and where Goldsmith, and the other celebrities, and minor stars that moved about the great doctor, used to meet him. This house is named in the play of “Ram Alley, or Merry Tricks,” in 1611. It was one of those houses which, for more than two centuries, was the constant resort of all the wits about town; even the name of Shakespeare throws its halo around this place:—

“Mr Thorpe, the enterprising bookseller of Bedford Street,” says Mr J. P. Collier, “is in possession of a MS. full of songs and poems in the handwriting of a person of the name of Richard Jackson; all prior to the year 1631, and including many unpublished poems by a variety of celebrated poets. One of the most curious is a song of five-seven-lines stanzas thus headed: ’Shakespeare’s Rime which he made at the Mytre in Fleete Street.’ It begins—‘From the rich Lavinian shore,’ and some few of the lines were published by Playford, and set as a catch. Another shorter piece is called in the margin: ’Shakespeare’s Rime:’—

‘Give me a Cup of rich Canary Wine,
Which was the Mitre’s (drink) and now is mine;
Of which had Horace and Anacreon tasted
Their lives as well as lines till now had lasted.’

I have little doubt that the lines are genuine, as well as many other songs.”

In this same tavern Boswell supped, for the first time, with his idol, and the description of the biographer’s delight on that grand occasion has a festive air about it that cannot fail to make a lively impression on his readers:—

“He agreed to meet me in the evening at the Mitre. I called on him, and we went thither at nine. We had a good supper, and port wine, of which he then sometimes drank a bottle. The orthodox high church sound of the Mitre,—the figure and manner of the celebrated Samuel Johnson—the extraordinary power and precision of his conversation and the pride from finding myself admitted as his companion, produced a variety of sensations and a pleasing elevation of mind beyond what I had ever experienced.”

There, also, that amusing scene with the young ladies from Staffordshire took place, which would make an excellent companion picture to Leslie’s “Uncle Toby and the Widow Wadman.”

“Two young women from Staffordshire visited him when I was present to consult him on the subject of Methodism, to which they were inclined. Come (said he) you pretty fools, dine with Maxwell and me at the Mitre, and we will talk over that subject, which they did; and after dinner, he took one of them on his knees and fondled them for half an hour together.”

Hogarth, too, was an occasional visitor at this tavern. A card is still extant, wherein he requested the company of Dr Arnold King to dine with him at the Mitre. The written part is contained within a circle, (representing a plate) to which a knife and fork are the supporters. In the centre is drawn a pie with a Mitre on the top of it, and the invitation—

Mr Hogarth’s compliments to Mr King, and desires the honour of his company to dinner, on Thursday next, to η. β. π. [Eta beta py.][466]

In this tavern the Society of Antiquaries used to meet, before apartments were obtained in Somerset House.

“The Society hitherto having no house of their own, meet every Thursday evening, about seven o’clock, at the Mitre Tavern in Fleet Street, where antiquities are produced and considered, draughts and impressions thereof taken, dissertations read, and minutes of the several transactions entered, and the whole economy under such admirable regulations, that probably in a short time they may apply for a royal power of incorporation.”[467]

In the bar of the Mitre Tavern in St James’ Market, which was kept by her aunt, (Mrs Voss, formerly the mistress of Sir Godfrey Kneller,) Captain Farquhar overheard Miss Nancy Oldfield read the play of “The Scornful Lady,” and was so struck with the proper emphasis and agreeable turn she gave to each character, that he swore the girl was cut out for the stage. Captain (afterwards Sir John) Vanbrugh, a friend of the family, recommended her to Rich, and shortly after she made her debut at Covent Garden, with an allowance of fifteen shillings a week.

Though a dozen other famous Mitre Taverns might be mentioned, these are sufficient to show how general a sign it was; the partiality of tavern-keepers for it is somewhat accounted for in the following stanza of the “Quack Vintners,” 1712:—

“May Smith, whose prosperous mitre is his sign,
To shew the church no enemy to wine;
Still draw such Christian liquor none may think,
Tho’ e’er so pious, ’tis a sin to drink.”[468]

The Mitre also is found in a few combinations, as the Mitre and Dove, i.e., the Holy Ghost, in King Street, Westminster; the Mitre and Keys, in Leicester—evidently the Cross Keys, which are a charge in the arms of several bishoprics; and the Mitre and Rose, which, from trades tokens, appears to have been the sign of a tavern in the Strand, as well as in Wood Street, Cheapside.

That the friars were also honoured on the signboard appears from “Fryar Lane, on the south side of Thames Street, near Dowgate. It was formerly called Greenwich Lane, but of later years Fryar’s Lane, from the sign of a Fryar sometime there.”[469] Probably it was a Black Friar, or Dominican Monk, for that order, above all others, had the reputation of being great topers, and therefore were not out of place on a signboard. There is a prayer extant of the holy fathers, addressed to St Dominic:—

“Sanctus Dominicus sit nobis semper amicus
Qui canimus nostro jugiter præconia rostro,
De cordis venis, siccatis ante lagenis;
Ergo tuas laudes si tu nos pangere gaudes,
Tempore paschali, fac ne potu puteali
Conveniat uti; quod si fit, undique muti
Semper erunt patres qui, non curant nisi fratres.”[470]

And an old French couplet gives the following gradations of the potatory capacities of the different orders, in which the Franciscans only are said to beat the Dominicans:—

“Boire à la Capucine,
C’est boire pauvrement;
Boire à la Célestine,
C’est boire largement;
Boire à la Jacobine,
C’est chopine à chopine;
Mais boire en Cordelier,
C’est vider le cellier.”[471]

Tokens are extant of a music-house, with the sign of the Black-friar, dated 1671. In Paris also, the Bacchic propensities of the Black-friars made a tavern-keeper of the seventeenth century choose St Dominic as the patron saint of his tavern. His principal customers, who formed a sort of club, were called Dominicans; a contemporary song thus gives the rule of this order:—

“Nous sommes dix, tous grands buveurs;
Bons ivrognes et grands fumeurs,
Qui ne cessant jamais de boire,
Et de remuer la machoire,
Méprisons d’amour les faveurs.”[472]

Nuns also figured on the signboard as the Three Nuns, which was constantly used by drapers; not exactly, as Tom Brown says, “very dismally painted to keep up young women’s antipathy to popery and” single blessedness, but because the holy sisterhoods were generally very expert in making lace embroidery, and other fancy work—as the handkerchiefs made by the nuns of Pau, and sold by our drapers, fully prove even at the present day. In the seventeenth century, the Three Nuns was the sign of a well-known coaching and carriers’ inn in Aldgate, which gave its name to Three Nuns’ Court close at hand; near this inn was the “dreadful gulf, for such it was rather than a pit,” in which, during the Plague of 1665, not less than 1114 bodies were buried in a fortnight, from the 6th to the 20th of September.[473] Not improbably this sign, after the Reformation, was occasionally metamorphosed into the Three Widows: Peter Treveris, a foreigner, erected a press and continued printing until 1552 at the Three Widows in Southwark; he printed several books for William Rastell, John Reynor, R. Copeland, and others in the city of London. It is still the sign of a cap and bonnet shop in Dublin. The Matrons, also, may have originally represented Nuns; this last hung, in the seventeenth century, at the door of John Bannister, crutch and bandage maker, near the hospital, (Christ’s Hospital School,) Newgate Street.[474]

PLATE XIII.
MERCURY AND FAN. (Banks’s Collection, 1810.) | NOBODY. (From an old print, circa 1600.)
RUNNING FOOTMAN. (Charles Street, Berkeley Square, circa 1790.) | QUEEN ELIZABETH. (Banks’s Collection.)

At the present day the Church is a very common ale-house sign, either on account of the esteem in which good living has been held by churchmen in all ages, “superbis pontificum potiore cœnis,” or, from the proximity of a church to the ale-house in question; thus, one inn in the town would be known as the “Market House,” whilst another might be known as the “Church Inn.” It has been said the name was given that topers might equivocate and say that they “frequently go to church.” Be this as it may, there is generally an ale-house close to every church, (in Knightsbridge the chapel of the Holy Trinity is jammed in between two public-houses,) whereby a good opportunity is offered to wash a dry sermon down. In Bristol, at the beginning of the present century, it was still worse—a Methodist meeting-room was immediately over a public-house, which gave rise to the following epigram:—

“There’s a spirit above and a spirit below,
A spirit of joy and a spirit of woe—
The spirit above is the spirit divine;
But the spirit below is the spirit of wine.”

Other signs connected with the church are the Chapel Bell, at Suton, in Norfolk, and the Church Stile or Church Gates, which is very common. The origin of this last comes from an old custom of drinking ale on the parish account, on certain occasions, at the church stile. Pepys mentions this when he was at Walthamstow, April 14, 1661:—“After dinner we all went to the church stile, and there eat and drank.” To this a correspondent in the Gent. Mag. (Nov. 1852, p. 442) makes the following note:—“In an old book of accounts belonging to Warrington parish, the following minute occurs:—“Nov. 5, 1688. Paid for drink at the church steele, 13s.;” and in 1732, “It is ordered that hereafter no money be spent on ye 5th of November or any other State day on the parish account, either at the church stile or any other place.” Though certainly the parish now does not pay for any ale drunk at the church stile, the sign is evidently set up in remembrance of the good old time when such things were.

Belonging to the church was also the sign of the Three Brushes, or Holy Water Sprinklers, which was that of an old house near the White Lion prison, Southwark, in which there was a room with panelled wainscoting and ceiling ornamented with the royal arms of Queen Elizabeth. Probably it had been the court-room at the time the White Lion Inn was a prison. Amongst the Beaufoy trades tokens there is one of “Rob. Thornton, haberdasher, next the Three Brushes in Southwark, 1667.”

Innumerable signs were borrowed from the army and navy; thus, at the present day, every uniform in the service is represented near barracks or in other haunts of soldiers. The Recruiting Sergeant is generally the sign of the public-house, where that worthy spreads his nets. Cross Guns, Cross Lances, Cross Swords, and Cross Pistols, respectively, are meant to allure artillerymen, lancers, and various cavalry men. But above all the Standard, the Banner, or the Waving Flag—“the glorious rag that for a thousand years has stood the battle and the breeze,” is of common occurrence, not only in the neighbourhood of military quarters, but everywhere in towns and villages. At the Standard Tavern in the Strand, Edmund Curll the bookseller used to meet the mysterious Rev. Mr Smith, who sold him Pope’s correspondence.

“I am just going to the Lords to finish Pope,” writes Curll to this person. “I desire you to send me the sheets to perfect the first fifty books, and likewise the remaining three hundred books, and pray be at the Standard Tavern this evening and I will pay you £20 more.”

The Kettledrum is a sign at St George-in-the-East; the Drum and the Trumpet are both of frequent occurrence, and the last is of old standing. One of the characters in “The Ball,” a play by Shirley, 1633, thus commends the beer of the Trumpet:—

“Their strong beere is better than any I
Ever drunke at the Trumpet.”—The Ball, Act v.

Possibly this was the Trumpet in Shire Lane, immortalised in the Tatler, and one of the favourite haunts of merry good-natured Dick Steele. Bishop Hoadley was once present at one of the meetings in this tavern, when Steele rather exposed himself in his efforts to please, a double duty devolving upon him, as well to celebrate the “glorious memory” of King William III., it being the 4th of November—as to drink up to conversation pitch his friend Addison, the phlegmatic constitution of whom was hardly warmed for society by the time Steele was no longer fit for it. One of the company, a red hot Whig, knelt down to drink the health with all honours. This rather disconcerted the bishop, which, Steele seeing, whispered to him—“Do laugh, my lord, pray laugh; it is humanity to laugh.” Shortly after Steele was put into a chair and sent home. Next morning he was much ashamed, and sent the Bishop this distich:—

“Virtue with so much ease on Bangor sits,
All faults he pardons though he none commits.”

Some trades tokens are extant of houses with the sign of the Trumpet in King Street, Wapping, and in the Minories. At the same period there was a sign of the Trumpeter in Trump Alley, probably suggested by the name of the thoroughfare.

The Buckler is a very old sign, and occurs in “Cocke Lorell’s Bote:”—

“Here is Saunder Sadeler of Froge Street Corner, With Jelyan Joly at signe of the Bokeler.”

More general was the sign of the Sword and Buckler, which was frequently set up by haberdashers for the following reason:—

“And whereas, until about the twelve or thirteenth yeere of Queene Elisabeth, the auncient English fight of sword and buckler was only had in use, the bucklers then being only a foot broad, with a pike of four or five inches long; then they beganne to make them full half ell broad, with sharpe pikes 10 or 12 inches long, wherewith they meant either to breake the swordes of their enemies, if it hitte uppon the pike, or else sodainely to runne within them and stabbe, and thrust their buckler with the pike into the face, arme, and body of their adversary, but this continued not long;[475] every haberdasher then sold bucklers”.—Stow’s Chronicle.

The great prevalence of this sign originated in the so-called sword and buckler play, once so common in England. Misson, who visited this country in the beginning of the eighteenth century, says:—

“Within these few years you should often see a sort of gladiators marching through the streets, in their shirts to the waste, their sleeves tucked up, sword in hand, and preceeded by a drum to gather spectators. They give so much a head to see the fight, which was with cutting swords and a kind of buckler for defence. The edge of the sword was a little blunted, and the care of the prize fighters was not so much to avoid wounding one another, as to avoid doing it dangerously; nevertheless as they were obliged to fight till some blood was shed, without which nobody would give a farthing for the show, they were sometimes forced to play a little roughly. The fights are become very rare within these eight or ten years.”[476]

In the seventeenth century it was not a little rough play, which is evident from those matches at which Pepys was present, and which he describes at large. Jouvin, another Frenchman who visited England in 1672, gives a detailed account of these divertisements, which, at that period, at all events, were anything but play; and Maitland was right when he designated them as “a barbarous performance, by those whom necessity (occasioned by a scandalous laziness and indolence) induces to expose themselves to be horribly mangled for a little money, while the bloodily-minded spectators satiate themselves with human gore to the great reproach of religion.”

In the Spectator, No. 436, there is an amusing essay on those “Hockley-in-the-Hole Gladiators,” and in No. 449 a letter appears, in which the deceits of the champions are shown:—

“I overheard two masters of the science agreeing to quarrel on the next opportunity. This was to happen in the company of a set of the fraternity of the basket hilts who were to meet that evening. When this was settled, one asked the other: ‘Will you give cuts or receive?’ The other answered, ‘Receive.’ It was replied, ‘Are you a passionate man?’ ‘No, provided you cut no more, nor no deeper than we agree.’”

A few other instances of the Sword occur on signs, as the Sword and Cross, a sort of emblem of the Church militant, or perhaps an inversion of the Cross Swords: this was a sign “next door to the Savoy Gate in 1711.” The Swordblade, a coffee-house in Birchen Lane in 1718, and the Sword and Dagger, a combination of arms that evokes the phantom of many a desperate duel amongst the ruffling gallants of the reign of James I. This sign of ill omen was, in the seventeenth century, in St Catherine Lane, Tower, as appears from the traded tokens issued there.

The Dagger was once common in London—

“My lawyer’s clerk I lighted on last night
In Holborn at the Dagger,”

says Captain Face, in Ben Jonson’s “Alchymist,” and various trades tokens testify the prevalence of the sign. Probably this arose from its being a charge in the city arms, which was supposed to represent the dagger Sir William Walworth used in slaying Wat Tyler. This at least was asserted in the inscription below the niche in which Sir William’s statue was erected in Fishmonger’s Hall:—

“Brave Walworth knyght Lord Mayor yt slew
Rebellious Tyler in his alarmes—
The king therefore did give in lieu
The Dagger to the Cytyes armes.”

Stow says that this is erroneous, as, when in the 4 Richard II. a new seal was made for the city, “the armes of this city were not altered, but remayne as afore; to witte, argent, a playne cross gules a sword of Saint Paul in the first quarter and no dagger of William Walworth as is fabuled.”[477] The Dagger and Pie was in the seventeenth century the sign of a celebrated pie-shop in Cheapside, the Pie being added to the original sign; but from the trades tokens of this house we see that this was represented by a rebus of a dagger with a magpie on the point. Dagger-pies are frequently mentioned in the plays of that period; for instance, in Decker’s “Satyro-Mastrix:”—“I’ll not take thy word for a dagger-pie;” and in Prynne’s “Histrio-Mastrix,” “and please you, let them be dagger-pies.” The London apprentices appear to have been good customers to this house. Whenever, for example, old Hobson, the merry haberdasher, went abroad, “his prentices wold ether bee at the Taverne filling their heds with wine or at the Dagger in Cheapside cramming their bellies with minced pyes.”[478] And in Heywood’s comedy of “If you Know not me you Know Nobody,” the worthy citizen bitterly inveighs against the temptations held out to apprentices by the dainties of this house:—

“Ten pounds a morning! Here is the fruit
Of Dagger-pies and Ale-house guzzling.”—Act i. sc. i., 1606.

A rather curious sign was that of the Red M and Dagger. The letter M was the initial of Mrs Milner’s name, who, at this sign in Pope’s Head Alley, “over against the Royal Exchange in Cornhill,” sold the “Grand Restorative,” which cured consumption, stone, dropsy, and all evils flesh is heir to. The sign occurs among the Bagford bills; there is a similar one amongst the Banks bills, the Pistol and C, the sign of John Crook, a razor-maker at the Great Turnstile, Holborn, circa 1787: the bill represents a renaissance scutcheon with a pistol, above it a C, and surgical instruments disseminated on the field.

Though we have the authority of Cicero that cedant arma togæ, yet booksellers, who flourish by the arts of peace, choose the Helmet for their sign. Humphrey Joy, a bookseller and printer in St Paul’s Churchyard in 1550, and another, celebrated in the reigns of Henry VIII., Edward VI., and Queen Mary, Rowland Hall by name, had both a Helmet for their sign. This Hall changed his sign more frequently than is generally the custom; thus, besides the Helmet, he is known to have traded at the signs of the Cradle, in Lombard Street; the Half Eagle and Key, in Gutter Lane; and the Three Arrows, in Golden Lane, near Cripplegate. There is still a stone carving of the helmet fixed in the front of a house in London Wall, with the date 1668 and the initials H. M. Ned Ward mentions the Helmet in Bishopsgate; he says at the battles without bloodshed of the Trainbands in Moorfields, the gallant warriors wish

“For beer from the Helmet in Bishopsgate.
And why from the Helmet? Because that sign
Makes the liquor as welcome t’ a soldier as wine.”

Trades tokens are extant of the Blue Helmet in Tower Street. From the same source we learn that there was, in the seventeenth century, a sign of the Plate, i.e., the Breastplate, in Upper Shadwell; and a Handgun in Shadwell. This weapon was a sort of musket of early times, fired in the hand without a rest; “gunners with handguns or half-hakes” are named by Stow in his enumeration of the troops marching in the city watch on St John’s night.

A few other old weapons remain to be mentioned, as the Arrow, once a great favourite when this weapon made the English name terrible whenever our troops took the field. In the last century there was a beer-house at Knockholt, in Kent, the sign an Arrow, with the following poetical effusion beneath:—

“Charles Collins liveth here,
Sells rum, brandy, gin, and beer;
I make this board a little wider,
To let you know I sell good cyder.”

The Cross-bullets, a name puzzling at first sight, was a sign in Thames Street in the seventeenth century, representing two bar-shot crossed, which the trades token elucidates by the equally puzzling legend, “at the Crose bvlets;” this was an instrument of destruction formerly used in naval engagements, and for that reason set up in the neighbourhood of the shipping.

If we may believe a jocular article on a quack handbill in the Spectator, No. 444, there was a Cannon-ball in Drury Lane; for he mentions that—

“In Russell Court, over against the Canonball, at the Surgeons’ Arms, in Drury Lane, is lately come from his travels a surgeon who has practised surgery and physic both by sea and land these twenty-four years. He (by the blessing) cures the Yellow Jaundice, Green sickness, Scurvey, Dropsy, Surfeits, Long sea voyages, Campaigns, and women’s miscarriages, lyings in, etc., as some people that has been lamed these thirty years can testify; in short he cureth all diseases incident on man, women, or children.”

Undoubtedly this bill had been slightly touched up in passing through the hands of the Spectator, who, like the mythological king, “quodcunque tetigit inaurat,” for it is rather “too good to be true.”

The Halbert and Crown was, in 1791, the sign of Paul Savigne, a cutler in St Martin’s Churchyard; whilst the Spear in Hand is at the present day the sign of a public-house at Norwich, being undoubtedly a popular version of some family crest.

In Jews’ Row, or Royal Hospital Row, Chelsea, there is a sign which greatly mystifies the maimed old heroes of the Peninsula and Waterloo, and many others besides; this is the Snow-shoes. It is the sign of a house of old standing, and was set up during the excitement of the American war of independence, when snow-shoes formed part of the equipment of the troops sent out to fight the battles of King George against “Mr Washington and his rebels.”

One of the low public-houses that stood on the outskirts of London, towards Hyde Park Corner, at the end of the last century, was called the Triumphal Car. There were a great many other houses of the same description in that neighbourhood, viz., the Hercules Pillars, the Red Lion, the Swan, the Golden Lion, the Horse-shoe, the Running Horse, the Barleymow, the White Horse, and the Half-moon, which two last have given names to two streets in Piccadilly. The sign of the Triumphal Car was in all probability bestowed upon the house in honour of the soldiers who used to visit it.

“These public-houses, about the middle of last century, were much visited on Sundays, but those contiguous to Hyde Park were chiefly resorted to by soldiers, particularly on review days, when there were long wooden seats fixed in the street before the houses for the accommodation of six or seven barbers, who were employed on field days in powdering those youths who were not adroit enough to dress each other’s hair. Yet it was not unusual for twenty or thirty of the older soldiers to bestride a form in the open air, where each combed, soaped, powdered, and tied the hair of his comrade, and afterwards underwent the same operation himself.”[479]

The grenadiers of Frederick the Great managed those things still better, for twenty or thirty of them used to sit in a circle, each dressing, plaiting, and powdering the pigtail of the man before him, so that all hands were employed at the same time, and none was lost in waiting. There is still a Triumphant Chariot public-house in Pembroke Mews, Chelsea, a house of more than fifty years’ standing.

The Bombay Grab in High Street, Bow, belongs to military signs, as “Grab,” or “Crab,” is a slang expression for a foot soldier; perhaps the landlord at one time may have been in the Bombay army.

Objects relating to the navy, or rather to shipping, are still more common in this seafaring nation of ours than the attributes or emblems of any other trade or profession. Ned Ward describes Deptford in 1703 as every house being distinguished by either the sign of the Ship, the Anchor, the Three Mariners, Boatswain and Call, or something relating to the sea.

“For as I suppose [says he] if they should hang up any other, the salt-water novices would be as much puzzled to know what the figure represented as the Irishman was, when he called the Globe the Golden Cabbage, and the Unicorn the White Horse with a barber’s pole in his forehead.”[480]

There is scarcely a town in the kingdom that has not a Ship inn, tavern, or public-house. Tokens exist of “the Ship without Templebar, 1649,” probably the inn granted in 1571 to Sir Christopher Hatton, along with some lands in Yorkshire and Dorsetshire, and the wardship of a minor.[481] William Faithorne the engraver (ob. 1691) seems to have occupied the same house afterwards, for Walpole informs us that—

“Faithorne now set up in a new shop at the sign of the Ship, next to the Drake, opposite to the Palsgrave Head, without Temple Bar, where he not only followed his art, but sold Italian, Dutch, and English prints, and worked for booksellers.”[482]

This sign of the Ship, next to the Drake, seems to have constituted a sort of a pun or a rebus on Admiral Drake, as observed by Mr Akerman. Among the trades tokens there was “Will Jonson at ye Drake, Bell Yard, Temple Bar, 1667.” The Drake stood next to the Ship. It was doubtless a rebus, and alluded to the Admiral, who was very popular in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, the mint-mark of the martlet on her coins being termed by the vulgar a Drake. The situation of this sign near the Ship was appropriate enough. In the seventeenth century there was a sign of the Ship at Leeuwarden, in Friesland, (Netherlands,) with the following inscription:—

“Die in de ly, my vaart voorby
Zal hebben een Ryxdaalder en ’t gelach vry.”[483]

At the Ship tavern in the Old Bailey, kept by Mr Thomas Amps, on Tuesday the 14th of February 1654, a plot against Cromwell was discovered. Carlyle[484] forcibly pictures the conspirators as eleven truculent, rather threadbare persons, sitting over small drink there on that Tuesday night, considering how the Protector might be assassinated. Poor broken Royalist men, payless old captains, and such like, with their steeple hats worn very brown, and jackboots slit, projecting there what they could not execute. The poor knaves were found guilty, but not worth hanging, and got off with being sent to the Tower for a while to ponder over their wickedness.

Names of famous men-of-war are often found on the signboard, in seaports; either in honour of some brilliant feat performed by them, or simply in compliment to the crew, in the hopes of obtaining their liberal patronage. Thus the Albion, the Saucy Ajax, the Circe, and Arethusa, with innumerable others, may be met with in the vicinity of Plymouth, Portsmouth, and other seaports. The naming of signboards in this way was an old custom; as two examples among the London trades tokens very sufficiently prove. Thus, for instance, The Speaker’s Frigate, the sign of a shop in Shadwell in the seventeenth century. The frigate had been named after Sir Richard Stainer, speaker in the House of Commons in the time of the Commonwealth, who had done good service under command of Admiral Blake, in some of the naval engagements with the Spaniards. In 1652, this ship was sent to “Argier in Turkey,” (Algiers,) under command of Captain Thorowgood, with the sum of £30,000 to redeem English captives from slavery. Upon this occasion the Puritan newspapers made the following punning prayer:—

“A prosperous gale attend his motion; and a Christian vote and blessing be present, in all their debates and consultations, for doubtless, ’tis a sacrifice pleasing both to God and man, and plainly denotes unto the people of England, that our magistrates had rather bring home exiles, than make more.”[485]

After the Restoration the name of this ship was changed into the Royal Charles, (which also occurs as a sign,) that ill-fated ship taken by the Dutch in 1667, when, under Admiral de Ruyter, they made their descent on Chatham and Sheerness, and burnt a part of our fleet. The Royal Charles was one of the ships they took away. Its stern is still kept as a trophy in Rotterdam.

Ships occur in various conditions, as the Full Ship, Hull; Ship in Dock, Dartmouth; and the Ship on Launch, in every ship-building locality. The Ship in Full Sail was the sign of the first shop of Murray the publisher, in Fleet Street—probably in opposition to Longman, who had the Ship at Anchor. The Ship in Distress is a touching appeal to the good-natured wayfarer to assist in keeping the pump going. At Brighton, there was such a sign in the last century, on which the poet had assisted the painter to invoke the sympathy of the thirsty public:—

“With sorrows I am compass’d round,
Pray lend a hand, my ship’s aground.”

The Ship is to be met with in innumerable combinations: the Ship and Pilot Boat, Narrow Quay, Bristol; the Ship And Anchor is not uncommon, and in one place, at Chipping Norton, it is quaintly corrupted into the Sheep and Anchor;[486] the Ship and Whale, in compliment to the Greenland Fishery, occurs at South Shields, and the Ship and Notchblock is a sailor’s coffee-house in the Ratcliff Highway. All these explain themselves; most of the other combinations seem to result from the quartering of two signs, as the Ship and Bell, Horn Dean, Hants; the Ship and Fox, “next door but one to the Five Bells tavern, near the Maypole in the Strand,” in 1711; the Ship and Star on a trades token of Cornhill, may be the north star by which ancient mariners used to navigate; the Ship and Rainbow is common to many places; the Ship and Shovel, Tooley Street; said to be a deterioration of the Sir Cloudesley Shovel, but more likely alluding to the shovels used in taking out ballast, coal, corn, (when in bulk) and various other cargoes; the Ship and Plough, Hull; the Ship and Blue Coat Boy, Walworth Road, although susceptible of explanations, are doubtless only but quarterings. The Ship and Castle, though of common occurrence, seemed to puzzle the public already in the seventeenth century:—

“What resemblance the Ship and the Castle may bear
To ships floating on clouds, or to castles in air,
We know not; but this we are sure of, ’tis plain
Their clarets are perfectly Leger-de-Main.”

Search after Claret, 1691, canto I.

If not a combination of two signs, it may have some reference to our national defences. It was a sign in Cornhill as early as 1716, when, on November 9, the newspapers conveyed the following information to the metropolis:—

“We are informed that this day a fowl was roasted in a wonderful sun-kitchen on the top of the Ship and Castle tavern, Cornhill, in view of many gentlemen. The artist performer, who is a gentleman newly come from France, proposes to roast and boil meat, bake bread, prepare tea and coffee, and all kitchenwork done without common fire; some particular thing to be seen every day that the sun shines out brightly. ’Twas observable that when the fowl was dressed, it had the same taste and smell as if done by a common fire. The machine is composed of about a hundred small looking or convex-glasses.”

The scheme, seemingly, did not succeed in dethroning “old king coal,” for if we had to depend on the sun for our cookery, it is to be feared we would often have cold cheer.

Amongst all these ships, of course, Jack tar could not be forgot. The Ship Friends occur in Sunderland; the Three Mariners is an old sign, of which there are examples among the trades tokens, and which is still to be seen on two or three public-houses in London. There was formerly a tavern known by this sign in Vauxhall.

“On repairing it in 1752, in it was found a remarkably high-elbowed chair covered with purple cloth, and ornamented with gilt nails. An old fisherman told Mr Buckmaster that he had heard his grandfather say, that King Charles II. disguised, used on his water tours with his ladies to frequent the above tavern to play at chess, &c., and that the chair found, was the same as the king sat in. The chair was repaired and kept as a curiosity by the late John Dawson, Esq., but by neglect was, at the pulling down of his old dwelling at Vauxhall in 1777, destroyed. Mr Buckmaster sat in the chair many times, but his feet would not touch the ground. King Charles was very tall. No tavern of this name is known to exist now in Lambeth, but there is one of the sign of the Three Merry Boys,[487] probably a corruption of the above name.”[488]

In other places we meet with the Three Jolly Sailors; at Castleford there used to be one representing the jolly sailors “with a sheet in the wind,” and under it the following professional invitation:—

“Coil up your ropes and anchor here,
Till better weather does appear.”

In North Street, Hull, there is a sign of Jack on a Cruise, not on board H.M. ship, but “out on” what the lands folk call “a spree;” the cruises, however, are generally confined to rather low latitudes. The Boatswain appears to have been a public-house in Wapping in the reign of Charles II., for Wycherly in the “Plain Dealer,” 1676, makes Jerry Blackaire say:—“I should soon be picking up all our own mortgaged apostle spoons, bowls, and beakers, out of most of the ale-houses betwixt Hercules Pillars and the Boatswain in Wapping.” The Boatswain’s Call is a public-house sign in Frederick Street, Portsea, whose invitation the sailors, no doubt, accept with much more pleasure than the boatswain’s call of “all hands on deck” on a frosty winter morning. It was the name of a patriotic sea song during one of the wars with France. Red, White, and Blue, and its synonyme, the Three Admirals, both occur in more than one instance in Liverpool.

The Anchor was, perhaps, set up rather as an emblem than as referring to its use in shipping. It is frequently represented in the catacombs, typifying the words of St Paul, who calls hope “the anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast.” St Ambrose says, “it is this which keeps the Christian from being carried away by the storm of life.” Other early writers use it as a symbol of true faith, and one of them has this beautiful idea:—

“As an anchor cast into the sand will keep the ship in safety, even so hope, ever amidst poverty and tribulation, remains firm, and is sufficient to sustain the soul; though, in the eyes of the world, it may seem but a weak and frail support.”[489]

It was a favourite sign with the early printers, probably in imitation of Aldus.[490] Thus Thomas Vautrollier, a scholar and printer from Paris and Rouen, who came to England about the beginning of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, and established his printing-office in Blackfriars, had an anchor for his sign, with the motto, “Anchora Spei.” At West Bromwich there is an ale-house having the sign of the Anchor with the following inscription:—

“O sweet ale, how sweet art thou,
Thy chearing streams new life impart,
Esteemed by all extremely good,
To quench our thirst and do us good.”

Sometimes a female figure in flowing garments is represented holding the anchor, in which case it is called the Hope and Anchor. The Blue Anchor was painted of that colour as a “difference” from other anchors; it is a common sign; it was the trade emblem of Henry Herringman, of the “New Exchange,” the principal London bookseller and publisher in the reign of King Charles II., the friend of Davenant, Dryden, and Cowley. The Blue Anchor and Ball was the sign of a mercer’s shop near the Conduit in Cheapside in 1707, the ball being the usual addition to intimate the sale of silks. Other distinctions are the Sheet Anchor, at Whitmore, in Staffordshire; the Foul Anchor, a sign of two public-houses at Wisbeach, implying, no doubt, that the lotus-eaters, who anchor in that harbour, get so entangled in the luxurious weeds of pleasure, that it becomes impossible for them to leave; the Raffled Anchor, Swan’s Quay, North Shields; and the Rope and Anchor, which is very common, the anchor being generally represented with a piece of cable twined round the stem.

A few combinations also occur: the Anchor and Can, at Ross, and at Putson, Hereford, which seems to allude to the Anchor as a measure; the Anchor and Shuttle, Luttendenfoot, Warley, Manchester, the shuttle being added in compliment to the weavers; the Anchor and Castle, a quartering of two signs in Tooley Street, &c.

Sometimes instead of the ship, some peculiar vessel is chosen, as, for instance, the Sloop, or the Leigh Hoy, a sort of smack, which occurs amongst the trades tokens as a sign near St Catherine’s Docks, and is still to be seen in Church Street, Mile End; the Coble, a sort of fishing-boat, common in Northumberland; the Tiltboat, Sommers Quay, Thames Street, in the XVIIth. century, and still at Billingsgate. This last was an open passenger boat for Greenwich, Woolwich, Gravesend, and other places down the river. It took twelve hours to perform the voyage to Gravesend, and much more if the wind was contrary, and the boat had not arrived before the tide turned. The tiltboats were superseded by steamers in 1815. The Dark House, Billingsgate, was their starting-place, and passengers would probably patronise the tavern with this name in the immediate neighbourhood, as they go now for a glass of ale and a sandwich to the Railway, or Steamboat Inn, during the quarter of an hour preceding departure.

The Fishing Smack was a public-house formerly standing near St Nicholas Church, Liverpool. The sign represented a man standing in a cart loaded with fish, and holding in his right hand what the artist intended to represent as a salmon. Underneath were the following lines:—

“This salmon has got a tail,
It’s very like a whale;
It’s a fish that’s very merry;
They say it’s catch’d at Derry;
It’s a fish that’s got a heart,
It’s catch’d and put in Dugdale’s cart.”

This truly classic production of the Muse of the Mersey continued for several years to adorn the host’s door, until a change in the occupant of the house induced a corresponding change of the sign, and the following lines took the place of the preceding:—

“The cart and salmon has stray’d away,
And left the fishing-boat to stay,
When boisterous winds do drive you back,
Come in and drink at the Fishing-Smack.”[491]

The Old Barge was a sign in Bucklersbury: “When Walbrooke did lye open, barges were rowed out of the Thames, or towed up so farre; and therefore the place has ever since been called the Old Barge, of such a sign hanging out over the gate thereof.”[492] The Old Barge, or the Old Boat, is still frequently seen as a sign on the banks of some of the canals through which boats and barges are towed.

The Boat, an isolated tavern in the open fields, at the back of the Foundling Hospital, was the head-quarters of the rioters and incendiaries, who, excited by the injudicious zeal of Lord George Gordon, set London in a blaze during the “No Popery” riots in 1780.

Next Boat by Paul’s, in Upper Thames Street, may be seen on the trades token of an ale-house, evidently kept by a waterman, who used to ply with his boat near St Paul’s. The token of this house represents a boat containing three men, over it the legend, “Next Boat.” “Next Oars” was the cry of the watermen waiting for a fare. Tom Brown in his walk round London, says, “I steered him down Blackfryars towards the Thames side till coming near the stairs, up started such a noisy multitude of grizly old Tritons, hollowing and hooting out Next Oars and scullers, &c. And with that I bawled out as loud as a speaking trumpet, ‘Next Oars,’ and away ran Captain Caron, and hollowed to his man Ben to bring the boat near.” “Next Boat,” was also the sign of a public-house of note adjoining Holland’s Leaguer in Blackfriars, where Holland Street is now.

The Law is very badly represented—the Judge’s Head seems to be the only sign in honour of this branch of the Commonwealth. It was the sign of Charles King, a bookseller in Westminster Hall in 1718,[493] and may be readily accounted for in that locality. It was also the first sign of Jacob Tonson, the well-known bookseller and secretary of the Kit-Kat Club, when he lived near Inner Temple gate, Fleet Street. In 1697 when he removed to Gray’s Inn gate, he adopted the Shakespeare’s Head, under which he became famous. After 1712, he took a shop in the Strand, opposite Catherine Street, but without altering his sign, and there he died in March 1736 possessed of a splendid fortune. This was that famous Tonson who published the works of the most celebrated authors and poets of the day. Dryden was one of them. Liberality in those days was a word not to be found in the dictionary of a publisher, as Dryden often experienced; in one of his ill tempers, when Tonson had been putting on the screw rather too much, the incensed poet began a satire upon him:—

“With leering look, bullfac’d, and freckled fair,
With two left legs, with Judas-colour’d hair,
And frowsy pores that taint the ambient air.”

These three lines he sent as a sample of his savoir faire to the publisher, with the gentle addition: “Tell the dog that he who wrote this can write more.” Tonson did not wish to see more, however, and Dryden obtained what he desired. About the year 1720, Jacob Tonson left the business to his nephew, Jacob Tonson, jun., son of his brother Richard, who, through the patronage of the Duke of Newcastle, became stationer, bookbinder, and printer to the Public Board, and this lucrative appointment was enjoyed by the Tonson family, or their assignees, till the month of January 1800.

Lot Goodal, Beadle of St Martin-in-the-Fields, in 1680, had, like other celebrities, taken his own goodly person for the sign of his house in Rupert Street, as appears from his advertisement, in which, like a true Dogberry, the public are informed that he had taken a silver watch with a studded case “in custody.” The Brown Bill was another constable’s sign:—

“Which is the constable’s house
At the sign of the Brown Bill?”

Blurt, Master Constable or the Spaniard’s Nightwalk. Tho. Middleton. 1602.

This brown bill was a kind of battle-axe, or hatchet affixed to a long staff, used by constables. The name was transferred from the weapon to the men who carried it:—

“Const. Come, my brown bills, we’ll roar,
“Const. Bounce loud at the tavern door.”—Ibid.

They were also called Billmen:—

“To us billmen relate,
Why you stagger so late,
And how you came drunk so soon.”

John Lilly’s Endymion. 1591.

Lawyers are only commemorated in the complimentary sign of the Good Lawyer,[494] and in the Rolls, a tavern kept by Ralph Massie, in Chancery Lane, in the reign of Charles II. In various parts of the house, and particularly in the great room up stairs, the coats of arms of the Carew family spoke of its former possessors. Further back still, we have it as a timber tenement belonging to the knights of St John of Jerusalem, by whom it was sold to Cardinal Wolsey, who for a time inhabited it, before he had reached the summit of his pride and fame. Behind this building was the house and garden of Sir Walter Raleigh. But all these remnants of bygone glory were swept away in 1760, when the house was rebuilt, and the name changed into the Crown and Rolls. The name of Rolls, it is needless to observe, was adopted from the neighbouring Rolls House, where the rolls and records of Chancery have been kept since the reign of Richard III.

The liberal arts are as badly represented on the signboard as the Bar. The Poet’s Head was a sign in St James’s Street in the seventeenth century; who the poet was it is impossible to say now; perhaps it was Dryden, since the trades tokens represent a head crowned with bays. The same sign had been used during the Commonwealth by Taylor the Water poet, but in his case the poet was Taylor himself, (see p. 48.) The Five Inkhorns, we gather from the trades tokens, was the sign of Walter Haddon, in Grub Street, a very appropriate trade emblem in that scribbling locality. There was also a house with this sign in Petticoat Lane, opposite which Strype’s mother lived; letters of his are extant addressed:—

These for his honoured Mother,
Mrs Hester Stryp, widow
dwelling in Petticoat Lane over
against the five Inkhorns, without
Bishopsgate
in London.

Petticoat Lane in that time was the great manufacturing place for inkhorns. The Hand and Pen was a scrivener’s sign, which was adopted by Peter Bales, Queen Elizabeth’s celebrated penman. Hollinshed says[495] that

“He writ within the Compasse of a Penie in Latine, the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed, the Ten Commandements, a praise to God, a Prayer for the Queéne, his posie, his name, the daie of the month the yeare of our Lord, and the reigne of the Queéne. And on the seuenteenth of August next following, at Hampton Court, he presented the same to the Queenes maiestie in the head of a ring of gold, couered with a christall, and presented therewith an excellent spectacle, by him devised, for the easier reading thereof; wherewith her maiestie read all that was written therein with great admiration, and commended the same to the Lords of the Councill and the ambassadors, and did weare the same manie times vpon her finger.”

Bale was employed by Sir Francis Walsingham, and afterwards kept a writing school at the upper end of the Old Bailey. In 1595, when nearly fifty years old, he had a trial of skill with one Daniel Johnson, by which he was the winner of a golden pen, of a value of £20, which, in the pride of his victory, he set up as his sign. Upon this occasion, John Davis made the following epigram in his “Scourge of Folly:”—

“The Hand and Golden Pen, Clophonion
Sets on his sign, to shew, O proud, poor soul,
Both where he wonnes, and how the same he won,
From writers fair, though he writ ever foul;
But by that Hand, that Pen so borne has been,
From Place to Place, that for the last half Yeare,
It scarce a sen’night at a place is seen.
That Hand so plies the Pen, though ne’er the neare,
For when Men seek it, elsewhere it is sent,
Or there shut up, as for the Plague or Rent,
Without which stay, it never still could stand,
Because the Pen is for a Running Hand.”[496]

The sign of the Hand and Pen was also used by the Fleet Street marriage-mongers, to denote “marriages performed without imposition.”

Music-shops always adhered to the primitive custom of using the instruments they sold as their signs; for instance, the Harp and Hautboy, the sign of John Walsh, “servant to his Majesty,” in Catherine Street in the Strand, in 1700.[497] Other music-shops had the French Horn and Violin; the Violin, Hautboy, and German Flute; the Hautboy and Two Flutes; all these instruments in the woodcut above the shopbill, which was a copy of the sign, are placed perpendicularly beside each other, without any attempt at grouping. The Hautboy was one of the most constant music-shop signs; it was formerly a favourite street instrument, and might be heard at the Christmas “waits,” and on occasions of popular rejoicing. Waits even are said to have derived their name from it, that, according to one authority, being the old English name of the hautboy.[498] This, however, we believe to be a mistake. The Waits were “watches”—guêts, who went round at certain hours of the night with music, to let it be known they were on the look-out, and make people feel secure.

Novello, the well-known music publisher, still adheres to the old tradition, and carries on business in the Poultry under the sign of the Golden Crotchet. Somewhat similar was the Sol La, or the Merry Song (le chant Gaillard) of Guyot or Guy Marchant, a bookseller and printer in Paris circa 1490. His colophon here represents the two notes sol la, surmounting two conjoined hands, in evident allusion to the words of the Pange Lingua “Sola Fides.” At the side are represented two merry cobblers, a class of mechanics, who, from time immemorial, have been noted above all others for merriment, and a habit of singing whilst at their work. It is a curious fact, that on the title-page of one of the books printed by Marchant, the “Epistola de Insulis de novo repertis,” his chant Gaillard is translated into “Campo Gaillardo,” which seems to lead to the inference that this work had been printed by some one who had heard of Marchant’s sign, but had never seen it, and merely adopted his name as being well known in the literary world,—a fraud frequently complained of by the old printers.

The French Horn was once a very common sign, and is still of frequent occurrence; thus, there is a French Horn and Rose in Wood Street, Cheapside; a French Horn and Half-moon at Wandsworth; and a French Horn and Queen’s Head in Smithfield. This last house was, for many years, kept by Peter Crawley, a noted member of the P. R., and there John Leech the artist, and a friend, used to study low life and boxiana under the tutelage of Black Sam. Finally, in the seventeenth century, there was a Horn and Three Tuns in Leadenhall Street. The trades tokens represent it as a French horn; but a drinking horn would certainly have been a more useful instrument in the company of three tuns. It was evidently a corruption of the Bottle-makers’ arms, which were argent on a chevron sable, three bugle-horns of the first between three leather-bottles of the second. These leather-bottles might easily be mistaken for tuns, and the bugle-horn be modernised into a musical instrument.

This frequency of the Horn rather jars with the unpleasant signification that instrument had in seventeenth century slang. Among the Roxburghe Ballads (ii. 138) there is one entitled “The Extravagant Youth, or an Emblem of Prodigality,” with a woodcut representing a youth jumping into the mouth of a large horn. On one side stands the father, seemingly in distress; on the other is a mad-house, with the sign of The Fool, two of the inmates looking out from behind the bars. The extravagant youth, after expatiating on his mad career, says:—

“But now all my glory is clearly decay’d,
And into the horn myself have betray’d.
......
All comforts now from us are flown,
My father in Bedlam makes his moan,
And I in the counter a prisoner thrown,
This Horn is a figure by which it is known.”

The Bugle Horn is fully as common; it occurs on a trades token of 1667 as the sign of a house in Aldersgate Street, and is still to be seen on many inns by the roadside, where the mail coach, in the good old coaching time, used to announce its arrival by a cheerful tune from the guard’s horn. Sometimes the Horn was used in a different sense. It was the sign and badge of the cattle doctor and village gelder, and came to be exhibited as such either from its use in drenching animals, or from the fact of such an instrument being blown by the doctor, to give notice to the villagers of his approach. At Messingham, Lincoln, the Horn Inn, a century ago, was kept by such a personage. Further on, at p. 369, this professional is mentioned in connexion with Tom of Bedlam.

The Harp, in the beginning of the eighteenth century, was the sign of a bird-fancier, “over against Somerset House in the Strand;”[499] and is still used as the sign of many public-houses, generally denoting an Irish origin. The Jew’s Harp (an instrument formerly called jeu trompe, Jew’s trump, i.e., toy trumpet) was in former times the sign of a house with bowery tea-gardens and thickly-foliated “snuggeries,” in what was once Marylebone Park, near the top of Portland Place, but removed on the laying out of Regent’s Park. Mr Onslow the Speaker used to go there in plain attire, and sitting in the chimney-corner, join in the humours of the customers, until, being recognised by the landlord one day, as he was riding in his golden coach to the House in state, he found, on going in the evening for his quiet pipe and glass, that his incognito was betrayed. This broke the charm, and like the fairies in the legend, he never more returned after that day. At the end of the last century there was another Jew’s Harp Tavern [and Tea-gardens] in Islington. It consisted of a large upper room, ascended by a staircase on the outside for the accommodation of the company on ball nights, and in this room large parties dined. Facing the south front of the premises was a large semicircular enclosure, with boxes for tea and ale drinkers, guarded by deal-board soldiers, between every box, painted in proper colours. In the centre of this opening were tables and seats placed for the smokers; a trap-ball ground was on the eastern side of the house, whilst the western side served for a tennis court; there were also public and private skittle-grounds. We find a clue to this rather odd sign in Ben Jonson’s play of the “Devil is an Ass,” Act i., scene 1, from which it appears that it was formerly a custom to keep a fool in a tavern, who, for the edification of the customers, used to play on a Jew’s harp, sitting on a joint-stool.

One of the signs originally used exclusively by apothecaries was the Mortar and Pestle, their well-known implements for pounding drugs. Among the celebrities who sold medicines under this emblem was the noted John Moore, “author of the celebrated Worm Powder,” to whom Pope addressed some stanzas beginning:—

“How much, egregious Moore, are we
Deceived by shows and forms;
Whate’er we think, whate’er we see,
All human kind are worms.”

His shop was in St Lawrence Poultney Lane. Every week the newspapers contained advertisements proving, by the most wonderful cures, the efficacy of his powders.

In the sixteenth century a publican in Paris adopted the sign of the Pestle, on account of his living in the Rue de la Mortellerie, (Mortar Street.) His house was in high repute amongst the gallants of the period, which procured him a visit from Master Villon, who thus describes it:—

“S’en vint en une hotellerie,
Rue de la Mortellerie.
Ou pend l’enseigne du Pestel,
A bon logis et bon hostel.”[500]

Villon, Franches Repues.

The Apothecary leads us to the Barber, or rather Barber-Surgeon, and the Barber’s Pole, which dates from the time when barbers practised phlebotomy: the patient undergoing this operation had to grasp the pole in order to make the blood flow more freely. This use of the pole is illustrated in more than one illuminated MS. As the pole was of course liable to be stained with blood, it was painted red; when not in use, barbers were in the habit of suspending it outside the door with the white linen swathing-bands twisted round it; this, in latter times, gave rise to the pole being painted red and white, or black and white, or even with red, white, and blue lines winding round it. It was stated by Lord Thurlow in the House of Peers, July 17, 1797, when he opposed the Surgeon’s Incorporation Bill, that, “by a statute still in force, the barbers and surgeons were each to use a pole. The barbers were to have theirs blue and white striped, with no other appendage, but the surgeons [which were the same in other respects] were to have a gallipot and a red flag in addition, to denote the particular nature of their vocation.”

Besides the well-known brass soap-basins appended to the pole, the barbers in former times used to have other and more repulsive signs of their profession:—

“His pole with pewter[501] basons hung,
Black, rotten teeth in order strung,
Rang’d cups that in the window stood,
Lined with red rags to look like blood,
Did well his threefold trade explain,
Who shaved, drew teeth, and breathed a vein.”

In Constantinople, where the barber still acts as surgeon and dentist, the teeth drawn by him are worked in ornamental patterns intermixed with blue beads, and hung as trophies in the window. Some of our London dentists even yet follow this disgusting custom, for in no less a thoroughfare than Sloane Street there is a certain chemist-dentist who exhibits in his window a whole bottleful of decayed teeth. Instead of cups “lined with red rags to look like blood,” the genuine article was formerly exhibited in the windows; but this was already prohibited at an early period, since the “Liber Albus” enjoins “that no barber be so bold or so daring as to put blood in their windows openly or in view of folks; but let them have it carried privily unto the Thames, under pain of paying two shillings unto the use of the Sheriffs.”

As “a little learning is dangerous,” the barber of the olden times generally contrived to make himself more or less ridiculous. Steele says:—“The particularity of this man [Don Saltero, see p. 95] put me into a deep thought whence it should proceed that of all the lower orders barbers should go further in hitting the ridiculous than any other set of men. Watermen brawl, cobblers sing: but why must a barber be for ever a politician, a musician, an anatomist, a poet, and a physician?” This love of music was at all times an idiosyncrasy of the knights of the brass basin. Morley, in his “Plain and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke,” says:—“It should seem you came lately from a barber’s shop, where you heard Gregory Walker or a Corranta plaide in the new proportions.” Henry Bold, in the beginning of the seventeenth century, speaks of ancient tunes “still sung to Barbers’ citterns”, viz., the “Lady’s Fall;” “John come kiss me now;” “Green Sleeves and Pudding Pies;” “The Punk’s Delight,” &c. And Tom Brown, in his “Amusements for the Meridian of London,” remarks:—

“In a Barber’s shop I saw a Beau so overladen with wig that there was no difference between his head and the wooden one that stood in the window. The fop it seems was newly come to his Estate, though not to the years of Discretion, and was singing the Song: ‘Happy the child whose father is gone to the Devil;’ and the Barber was all the while keeping time on his Cittern, for, you know, a Cittern and a Barber is as natural as milk to a calf, or the bears to be attended by a Bagpiper.”

The cittern is also mentioned by Ned Ward:—“I would sooner hear an old barber sing ‘Whittington’s Bells’ upon a cittern.”

But enough of their musical parts; as for their learning no examples are wanting: Partridge, the classical scholar, in Fielding’s “Tom Jones;” Vossius’ barber, who used to comb his hair in iambics;[502] and Smollett’s Hugh Strap, are excellent specimens. This last one was sketched from life; his real name was Hugh Hughson; he died in the parish of St Martin’s-in-the-Field, at the advanced age of eighty-five, having kept a barber-shop in that locality upwards of forty years. His shop was hung round with Latin quotations, and he would frequently point out to his customers the several scenes in “Roderick Random” pertaining to himself, which had their foundation, not in the Doctor’s inventive fancy, but in truth and reality. The meeting at the barber-shop in Newcastle, the subsequent mistake at the inn, their arrival together in London, and the assistance they experienced from Strap’s friends, were all facts. He is said to have left behind him an interleaved copy of “Roderick Random,” showing how far we are indebted to the creative fancy of Doctor Smollett, and to what extent the incidents recorded were founded upon fact.

Not many years ago there was a hairdresser in the Rue Racine, who, probably on account of his proximity to the universities of the Collège de France and the Sorbonne, had this inscription on his window: “κειρω τακιστα και σιναω,” “I shear quickly and am silent.” This classical hairdresser was evidently acquainted with the answers given by Anaxagoras to a barber who asked him, “How do you wish to have your beard shaved?” and who received the laconic answer, “without talking.” The shutters and windows of our Parisian worthy were covered with inscriptions in foreign languages, the number of which was only surpassed by the Bible shop in Brompton, during the time of the International Exhibition in 1862.

An eccentric barber opened a shop under the walls of the King’s Bench Prison; the windows being broken when he entered the house, he mended them with paper, on which appeared, “Shave for a penny,” with the usual invitation to customers; whilst on his door was scrawled the following rhymes:—

“Here lives Jemmie Wright,
Shaves almost as well as any man in England,
Almost—not quite.”

Foote, who delighted in anything eccentric, saw this inscription, and hoping to extract some wit from the author, whom he justly concluded to be an odd character, he pulled off his hat, and thrusting his head through a paper pane into the shop, called out, “Is Jimmy Wright at home?” The barber immediately forced his own head through another pane into the street, and replied: “No, sir, he has just popt out.”

Numerous more or less witty barbers’ inscriptions are recorded; one of the best is that attributed to Dean Swift, penned by him for a barber, who at the same time kept a public-house:—

“Rove not from pole to pole, but step in here,
Where nought excels the shaving but the beer.”

A variation often met is:—

“Rove not from pole to pole, but here turn in,
Where nought excels the shaving but the gin.”

Sir Walter Scott in his “Fortunes of Nigel,” vol ii., as a motto to chap. iv., gives the following version:—

“Rove not from pole to pole—the man lives here,
Whose razor’s only equall’d by his beer;
And where, in either sense, the Cockney-put,
May, if he pleases, get confounded cut.”

The amalgamation of the two trades has led to some other rhymes and jokes. A barber-publican in Dudley has the following barbarous joke:—

“What do you think
I’ll shave you for nothing and give you some drink?”

The point of this joke lies in the punctuation, which the illiterate shavers coming to the shop are sure to treat with supreme contempt; but a barber in Ratcliffe Highway, circa 1825, had the following bona fide invitation:—

“Hair cut with despatch,
Shave well in a minute,
And a glass in the bar—gain
With a thimbleful in it.”*

Note—Of gin and bitters, all for a penny

1

2

d.
* Note—Come in, Jolly Tars, and be scraped across the line.”

Another common inscription is the following:—“I tell U there is no shaving to X L——’s” (name of the barber.) The Parisian barbers are much on a par with their English colleagues in brilliancy of wit and inventive power: “Ici on rajeunit,”[504] used to be a frequent inscription with them; others have:—

“La nature donne barbe et cheveux,
Et moi je les coupe tous les deux.”

or—

“A toutes les figures dédiant mes rasoirs,
Je nargue la critique des fidèles mirroirs.”[505]

Tools belonging to various handicrafts are common public-house signs at the present day. The Axe is a very old sign; it was a well-known carriers’ inn in Aldermanbury in the seventeenth century, and was one of the places visited in 1634 by that thirsty tourist, Drunken Barnaby. From this inn, the first regular line of stage waggons from London to Liverpool was established towards the middle of the seventeenth century. There were constantly some of them on the road, for they left every Monday and Thursday, and it took them ten days in summer, and as many as twelve in winter to perform the journey.

In 1642 there appeared “A Petition from the Towne and County of Leicester unto the King’s most excellent Majestie,” which was “printed for William Gay, and to be sold at his shop in Hosier Lane, at the signe of the Axe, July 29, 1642.” When we consider that “the King’s most excellent Majestie,” was Charles I., we may come to the conclusion that there is something in a sign, as well as in a name; it was certainly an ominous and bad sign for the king. The Cross Axes is a sign at Preston, Bolton, &c. The axe is also found combined with various other carpenter’s tools, as the Axe and Saw, Carlton, Newmarket; Axe and Compasses in many places; Axe and Cleaver, in Boston, Yorkshire. Another sign, complimentary to the same class of workmen, was the Two Sawyers, which, at the end of the last century, was to be seen near the garden wall of the archiepiscopal palace at Lambeth; not unlikely, this was the same house, of which trades tokens are extant from the time of Charles II., when it was kept by John Raines, and its locality is described as the “New Plantation, Narrow Wall, Lambeth.”

Signs referring to iron in its various states are very common on public-houses, as the smith is generally a good customer to them. Iron seems to have a dyspeptic effect even in the bowels of the earth, if we may judge from the quantity of Miners’ Arms in Staffordshire, Warwickshire, and the black country, in which latitudes teetotalism evidently has made but little progress; the Davy Lamp is another sign intended to court the custom of miners, but being almost exclusively for workmen in coal pits, it only occurs in Northumberland. The Forge, or the Three Forges, is common in the Midland iron districts. The Cinder-oven occurs in Norwich. The Anvil, the Anvil and Blacksmith, the Anvil and Hammer, the Smith and Smithy, &c., are all common about Sheffield. So are Hammers, combined with various instruments, as Pincers, Vice, Stithy, &c. The Two Smiths was a sign in the Minories in 1655; the trades tokens of the house represent two men working at the anvil. Hobnails is a sign in Dudley, that town having been famous for the manufacture of nails of every description, even as early as the time of Henry VIII., for the nails used in building the hall at Hampton Court came from there, and the original accounts preserved in the Public Record Office state that there was “Payde to Raynalde Warde, of Dudley, for 7350 of dubbyll tenpenny nayles inglys at 11s. the 1000.”

The Bag of Nails was once a very common sign; there is one still remaining in Arabella Row, Pimlico. “About fifty years ago, the original sign might have been seen at the front of the house, which was a satyr of the woods, and a group of jolly dogs, ycleped Bacchanals. But the satyr having been painted with cloven feet, and painted black, it was by the common people called the Devil, while the Bacchanalians were transmuted by a comical process into a Bag of Nails.”[506] This was, however, only an old slang name for the house, for, in the trial of Catlin, Patterson, and others, for conspiracy, one of the witnesses describing the place where the conspirators used to meet, says: “He went into a public-house, the sign of the Devil and Bag of Nails, for so that gentry called it amongst themselves, (though it was the Blackmoor’s Head and Woolpack,) by Buckingham Gate.”[507]

A bona fide representation of a bag of nails was also used as a sign, as may be seen on the trades token of Henry Hurdam in Tuttle (Tothill) Street, Westminster, 1663, where the bag of nails is combined with a hammer crowned. And as it would be difficult to guess what the bag contained, and nobody cares to buy “a pig in a poke,” the nails were sometimes represented protruding through it, as on the token of Samuel Hincks of Whitechapel, 1669. A somewhat similar sign is expressed in Rouen, Rue des Bons Enfans; it is carved in stone, and represents a bag, with smith’s tools protruding out of it.

Bakers and millers also are represented by a variety of signs. Beginning at the Bushel, a sign on the Bankside in the seventeenth century, and the Shovel and Sieve, the sign of a brush and turnery warehouse among the Bagford Bills, we next accompany the corn to the mill, where we meet the Dusty Miller, a favourite sign in some parts of Yorkshire and Lancashire. A reminiscence of childhood may have suggested the epithet in this sign, for there is the well known nursery rhyme,

“Millery, Millery, Dusty poll,
How many sacks have you stole?”

The Millstone may be seen at Stockport and Macclesfield.

The Windmill itself is a very old sign. It was a tavern in Lothbury, Old Jewry, frequented by fast men in the reigns of Elizabeth, James, and Charles I. Wellbred, in “Every Man in his Humour,” (a play by Ben Jonson,) dates his letter to Edward Knowell from this house:—

“Why, Ned, I beseech thee, hast thou forsworn all thy friends in the Old Jewry, or doest thou think us all Jews that inhabit there,” &c.

It is named amongst the list of inns “viewed” previous to the visit of Charles V. in 1522.

“Hugh Clapton, Mercer, mayor, in 1492, dwelt in this house and kept his Mayoralty there; it is now a tavern, and has to sign a Windmill. And thus much for this house, sometime a Jew’s synagogue [in 1262,] since a house of friars, [fratres de penitentia Jesu or de Sacca, 1275,] then a nobleman’s house, [Robert Fitz Walter, 1305,] after that a merchant’s house, wherein Mayoralties have been kept, and now a wine taverne.”—Stow.

The Peel, i.e., the wooden shovel with a long handle used by bakers to place bread in the oven, was the sign of John Alder, in Leadenhall Street, 1668. Next comes the basket or Panyer, to bring bread round, which gave its name to “a passage out of Paternoster Row—called of such a sign Panyer Alley.”[508] This is the highest spot in the City of London, as we are informed from an inscription under a stone figure of a boy sitting on a pannier, eating a very questionable bunch of grapes:

“When you have sought the City round,
Yet still this is the highest ground.

Aug. 26, 1688.”

The Pannier was not an uncommon trade emblem. The Baker and Basket is the sign of a public-house in Leman Street, and another in Worship Street. The claims to superior usefulness of the Baker and Brewer are held forth triumphantly to the advantage of the latter in some signs of this name. One, in Wash Lane, Birmingham, gives a pictorial representation of it; the baker’s hand is resting on what is usually called the “Staff of Life,”—namely, a loaf of very respectable dimensions; the brewer exhibits “with artful pride,” a foaming tankard, when the following dialogue ensues:—

“The Baker says, I’ve the Staff of Life,
And you’re a silly elf;
The Brewer replied, with artful pride,
Why, this is life itself.”

The Two Brewers, or the Two Jolly Brewers, used to be very common, but is now gradually becoming obsolete. It represented two brewers’ men carrying a barrel of beer slung between them on a pole; it was also frequently called the Two Draymen. In the bar of the Queen’s Head Tavern, Great Queen Street, is preserved a carved wooden sign, which formerly hung before this house, representing two men standing near a large tun. The Dray and Horses, meaning of course the brewer’s dray, has now in some instances superseded the Two Jolly Brewers. The Still, the chief implement in the manufacture of spirits, is very appropriate before the houses where the produce of the still is sold: frequently it is combined with other objects.

The Boy and Barrel, to be seen in Dagger Lane, London, and in many country places, is all that remains of the little Bacchus on a tun, formerly in almost every ale-house:—

“A little Punch-
Gut Bacchus dangling of a bunch,
Sits loftily enthron’d upon
What’s called (in Miniature) a Tun.”

Compleat Vintner. London, 1720, p. 86.

The Boy and Cup at Norwich, in 1750, was a variation of this sign. Other brewers and distillers’ measures also are exhibited, as the Barrel; the Porter Butt, (three in Bath;) the Brandy Casks, (three in Bristol;) the Rum Puncheon, at Boston, Lincoln, and such like. Promises of fair dealing are held out in the sign of the Full Measure, (four in Hull;) the Golden Measure, Lowgate, Hull; and the Foaming Tankard; or, an appeal is made to public joviality by such a sign as the Parting Pot, at Stamford, Lincoln.

Shoemakers generally follow the advice of the proverb, ne sutor ultra crepidam, and confine themselves to the sign of the Last, which, for variety’s sake, they paint red, blue, gold, &c. But since “cobblers and tinkers are the best ale drinkers,” many alehouses have adopted this sign also. A Crispin who keeps an ale-house near Liscard, Chester, has shown himself “true to the last,” by putting under his sign of a Wooden Shoe or Last:—

“All day long I have sought good beer,
And, at the last, I have found it here.”

The Shears was originally a tailor’s sign, though like most other trade emblems it had become common in the seventeenth century.

“Snip, snap, quoth the tailor’s shears;
Alas, poor Louse, beware thy ears.”

This elegant little verse is quoted by Randle Holme, and seems to have been thought such a good joke, that a canny Scotchman, buried in Paisley Abbey, had a pictorial representation of it on his headstone. Charles Mackie, who wrote the history of that Abbey, says it is an obliterated cross; more probably, however, it is a fleur de luce: this would also agree with the Scottish pronunciation of the name of the insect, which is exactly the same as the last part of that heraldic charge.

The Hand and Shears, in Cloth Fair, Smithfield, played an important part at the opening of Bartholomew Fair. It was customary to make the proclamation for opening the fair late in the afternoon of August 23d, but the showmen and traders opened their booths early in the morning:—

“Lawful objections being made to this, a riotous assembly met the night before the day of the Mayor’s Proclamation at the public-house within Cloth Fair, in which the Court of Piepoudre was held,[509] the Hand and Shears—now transformed into a tall brick gin-palace—and at midnight sallied forth, bearing along, in later years, the effigy of a woman to represent Lady Holland, (who must have been instigator, and it would seem, first leader of the mob,) and the mob—knocking at doors, ringing bells, clamouring and rioting, some five thousand strong, during three hours of the middle of the night—proclaimed for itself, in its own way, that Bartholomew Fair was open. The first irregular proclamation was for many years made by a company of tailors, who met the night before the legal proclamation at the Hand and Shears, elected a chairman, and as the clock struck twelve went out into Cloth Fair, each with a pair of shears in his hand. The chairman then proclaimed the Fair to the expectant mob, who all sped on their errand of riot, to arouse with the news of it the sleepers in the neighbourhood of Smithfield.”[510]

The Three Crowned Needles looks also like a tailor’s sign, and from the evidence of a trades token of 1669 we know that it was the sign of a shop in Aldersgate. Hatton thinks that a similar sign may have given its name to Threadneedle Street, (Three Needle Street.) Three Crowned Needles was a charge in the needle-makers’ company’s arms. It is a curious fact that all the needles used in England up to the time of Queen Elizabeth were of foreign make; those sold in Cheapside in the reign of Queen Mary were made by a Spanish negro, who carried the secret of their manufacture with him to the grave. In 1566 they were manufactured under the direction of a German, Elias Grause, and after that time only it seems that we had learned how to make them.

Among agricultural signs, the Plough leads the van, sometimes accompanied by the legend “Speed the Plough.” Of two inscriptions on the sign of the Plough that have come under our observation, both contain sound advice. That of the Plough at Filey might well be remembered by “afternoon” farmers: it says:—

“He who by the Plough would thrive,
Himself must either hold or drive;”

whilst on the Plough Inn, Alnwick, the following is cut in stone:—

“That which your father old
Hath purchased and left you to possess,
Do you dearly hold
To shew your worthiness. 1717.”

In the inventory of church goods made at Holbeach, in Lincoln, at the time of the Reformation:—

Wm. Davy bought the sygne whereon the plowghe did stond for xvjd.

This probably refers to the signs or badges exhibited by the religious guilds in the middle ages over the altars and as decorations in their churches, which were in some measure of the nature of other signs, in pointing out certain fraternities or trades, besides possessing a secondary and religious meaning.

The Plough and Horses is a sign at Branston, Lincoln. The Plough and Harrow is very common. Two doors west from the Harrow Inn lived Isaac Walton, about 1624, carrying on the business of “milliner and sempster,” or what we should now call a linen-draper. He afterwards resided at a house in Chancery Lane, until he left London, for fear of having his morals corrupted—as he himself asserted. Goldsmith’s tailor, who lived at the sign of the Harrow, has gained immortality by the bad taste of poor Goldy. On one occasion—

“Goldsmith strutted about, bragging of his dress, and, I believe, was seriously vain of it, for his mind was wonderfully prone to such impressions. ‘Come, come,’ said Garrick, ‘talk no more of that, you are perhaps the worst—eh, eh.’ Goldsmith was eagerly attempting to interrupt him, when Garrick went on, laughing ironically, ‘Nay, you will always look like a gentleman, but I am talking of being well or ill drest.’ ‘Well, let me tell you,’ said Goldsmith, ‘when my tailor brought home my bloom-coloured coat, he said, “Sir, I have a favour to beg of you. When anybody asks you who made your clothes, be pleased to mention, John Filby, at the Harrow in Water Lane.”’ Johnson. ‘Why, sir, that was because he knew the strange colour would attract crowds to gaze at it, and then they might hear of him, and see how well he could make a coat even of so absurd a colour.’”[511]

Near Bagshot there is a public-house called the Jolly Farmer, a corruption of the Golden Farmer, a nickname obtained by one of the former possessors on account of his wealth, and his custom of paying his rent always in guineas, which—so says the legend—he obtained as a footpad on Bagshot Heath. That some such thing happened is evident from the Weekly Journal, March 29, 1718, where allusion is made to “Bagshot Heath, near the Gibbet where the Golden Farmer hanged in chains.” The use of this word Jolly, on the signboard, formerly so common in our “Merry England,” is now gradually dying away. Whatever be the opinion of our workmen upon the subject of national good humour, they no longer desire to be advertised as Jolly; it is vulgar, and they prefer Arms like their betters—hence those heraldic anomalies of the Graziers’ Arms, the Farmers’ Arms, the Chaff-Cutters’ Arms, the Puddlers’ Arms, the Paviors’ Arms, and so forth.

The Shepherd and Shepherdess is one of those signs reminding us of—

“The tea-cup days of hoop and hood
And when the patch was worn.”

calling up pictures of rouged shepherdesses with jaunty straw hats on the top of powdered hair a foot high, short quilted petticoats and high-heeled boots, courted in madrigals by shepherds dressed in the height of the elegance of the New Exchange gallants, with ribboned crooks and flowered-satin waistcoats. It was the sign of a pleasure resort in the City Road, Islington, much frequented in the eighteenth century for amusement, and by invalids for the pure, healthy, country air of Islington, which was then a charming village, more rural in the midst of its meadows and rivulets than Richmond is now. Cakes, cream, and furmity were its great attractions:—

“To the Shepherd and Shepherdess then they go
To tea with their wives for a constant rule,
And next cross the road to the Fountain also,
And there they sit so pleasant and cool,
And see in and out
The folks walk about,
And gentlemen angling in Peerless Pool.”[512]

PLATE XIV.
BRAZEN SERPENT. (Reynold Wolfe, circa 1550.) | GREEN MAN. (Banks’s Collection, 1760.)
SIR ROGER DE COVERLEY. (Banks’s Collection, 1780.) | ASS PLAYING ON THE HARP. (Chartres Cathedral, circa 1420.)

More business-like is the sign of the Shepherd and Dog; he, too, wears patches, but not on his face; so with the Shepherd and Crook, and the Crook and Shears. All these may be found in most villages, and refer to the inferior farm-labourer, to whom the care of the flock is intrusted, and not the elegant Corydon or Alexis.

The merry, thirsty time of haymaking is commemorated in the usual signs of a Load of Hay and the Cross Scythes. There is a Load of Hay tavern on Haverstock Hill, a favourite place for Sunday afternoon excursionists in the summer time. Many years ago the eccentricity of Davies the landlord was one of the attractions of the place. Lately the house has been re-built, and it is now only a suburban gin-palace. The Mattock and Spade, and the Spade and Becket, refer to field labour; the first is very general, the second less so; but an example occurs at Chatteris, Cambridgeshire. The Peat Spade, Longstock, Hants, tells its own tale. The Dairy Maid was in great favour with the London cheesemongers of the seventeenth century. Akerman gives a trades token of such a sign in Catherine Street, in 1653, which is an amusing specimen of the liberties the token engravers took with the king’s English, the country Phillis being transformed into a “Deary Made.” The Dutch in the seventeenth century used the sign for a rather heterogenous trade: it seems that the process of sucking or inhaling the tobacco smoke carried back their ideas to tender years of innocence and milk diet, and so the Dairy Maid became the sign, par excellence, of tobacco shops. Even at the present day that idea is not quite forgotten; tobacco boxes or other smoking implements are sometimes seen amongst that nation, with the words, “Troost voor Zuigelingen,” “consolation for sucklings.” The inscriptions under these signs were occasionally very curious:—

“Toebak dat edel kruyt soveel daarvan getuygen
Al die lang zyn gespeent beginnen weer te zuygen.”[513]

On the Goudsche Melkmeid in Amsterdam:—

“Goede Waar en goed bescheid
Krygt gy hier in de Goudsche Melkmeid
Puyk van Verinas en Virginia Tabac
Kunt gy hier rooken op uw gemak.”[514]

Another had:—

“Leckere Neusen, eele baasen,
Die by ’t klinken van de glaasen
Tot het smooken zyt bereyt;
Zoek je ’t beste van den acker
Puyk verynis? komt dan wacker
By de walsse mellik-meid.”[515]

Harvest-home, the pleasant time of congratulation and feasting, must be an alluring sign for the villagers, calling up recollections of all the festivities yearly celebrated on that grand occasion, when—

“the harvest treasures all
Are gather’d in beyond the rage of storms,
Sure to the swain.”—Thomson.

One of the misfortunes of the “nimium fortunati sua si bona norint” is pictured in the Cart Overthrown, which is a public-house sign at Lower Edmonton; though how it came to be such is difficult to guess. On Highgate Hill there is an old roadside inn, the Fox and Crown, which displays on its front a fine gilt coat of arms with the following inscription underneath:—

6th July 1837.

This Coat of Arms is a Grant
from Queen Victoria, for Ser-
vices rendered to Her Majesty
when in Danger Travelling
down this Hill.

The carriage conveying Her Majesty was proceeding down the hill without a skid on the wheel, when something started the horses, and the occurrence above narrated took place. The late landlord died in distressed circumstances, and he stoutly asserted to the last, that although he made repeated applications to the Government for recompense, he having imperilled his own life to save that of Her Majesty, all he ever received for his pains was permission to display the royal arms on his house front.

The Woodman is another very common sign, invariably representing the same woodman copied from Barker’s picture, and evidently suggested by Cowper’s charming description of a winter’s morning in the “Task.” The Drover’s Call is still seen on many roadsides, though the profession that gave rise to it is well-nigh extinct; the herds of steaming, fierce-looking oxen, formerly driven from all parts of the kingdom, along the main roads leading to London, there to be devoured, being now nearly all sent here by rail. A yet older practice produced the sign of the String of Horses, which may still be seen on many a highroad in the North, and dates from times before mail coaches and stage waggons existed, when all the goods-traffic inland had to be performed by strings of packhorses, who carried large baskets, hampers, and bales slung across their backs, and slowly, though far from surely, wound their way over miles and miles of uninhabited tracts, moors, and fens, which lay between the small towns and straggling villages.

Many signs still recall those bygone days: the Old Coach and Six may yet be seen in some places. There is one, for instance, in Westminster, but it is no longer a “sign of the times,” for alas!—

“No more the coaches shall I see
Come trundling from the yard,
Nor hear the horn blown cheerily
By brandy-bibbing guard.”

The names of the coaches were often adopted by inns on the road; for instance, the Mail, the Telegraph, the Defiance, the Balloon, the Tally-Ho, the Bang-up, the Express, &c., &c.; but alas! the modern railroad has swept away the signs as well as the coaches.

In London, there are not less than fifty-two public-houses known as the Coach and Horses, exclusive of beer-houses, coffee-houses, and similar establishments. Stow says, in his “Summary of English Chronicles,” that in 1555, Walter Ripon made a coach for the Earl of Rutland, “which was the first that was ever used in England.” But in his larger Chronicle he says:—

“In the year 1564 Guilliam Boonen, a Dutchman, became the queen’s coachman, and was the first that brought the use of coaches into England. After a while divers great ladies, with as great jalousy of the queen’s displeasure, made them coaches, and rid up and down the country in them, to the great admiration of all the beholders, but then by little they grew usual among the nobility and others of sort, and within twenty years became a great trade of coachmaking.”

Taylor the Water poet, who, as a waterman of course, bore a grudge to coaches, said, “It is a doubtful question whether the devil brought tobacco into England in a coach, for both appeared at the same time.” How common they became in a short time appears from all the satirists of that period; not only the nobility, but even the citizens could no longer do without them, after they were once introduced. Not forty years after their first appearance Pierce Pennyless, speaking of merchants’ wives, says: “She will not go unto the field to coure on the green grasse, but she must have a coach for her convoy.”[516] No wonder, then, that, according to the “Coach and Sedan,” a pamphlet of 1636, there were then in London, the suburbs, and four miles’ compass without, coaches to the number of 6000 and odd. These were nearly all private carriages, for the hackney coaches were only established in 1625 by one Captain Bailey. Their first stand was at the Maypole in the Strand. They numbered about twenty, and were attached to the principal inns. In 1636, the number of hackney coaches was confined to 50; in 1652, to 200; in 1654, to 300; in 1662, to 400; in 1694, to 700; in 1710, to 800; in 1771, to 1000; in 1802, to 1100; but in 1833 all limitation of number ceased. Besides cabs of various kinds, there are now above a thousand omnibusses regularly employed in the Metropolis, and the commissioners of stamps are authorised to license all such carriages without limitation as to number; the proprietor paying the duty of £5 for the licence, and 10s. per week during its continuance. What a difference just two centuries ago, when by proclamation of the “Merry Monarch:”—

“The excessive number of hackney coaches [about 400] and coach horses in London, are found to be a common nuisance to the public damage of our people, by reason of their rude and disorderly standing, and passing to and fro, in and about our cities and suburbs; the streets and highways being thereof pestered and much impassable, the pavement broken up, and the common passages obstructed and made dangerous.” Hence orders are[357] given, that “henceforth none shall stand in the street, but only within their coach-houses, stables, and yards.”

At the Coach and Horses, Bartholomew Close, some vestiges of the ancient buildings of St Bartholomew’s Hospital and Convent still remain—viz., a clustered column in the beer cellar, walls of immense thickness, and an early English window in the taproom, &c. This building occupies the site of the north cloister.[517] Another Coach and Horses, in Ray Street, Clerkenwell, is also built on classic ground, for it occupies the site of the once famous Hockley-in-the-Hole of bear-baiting memory. A comical alehouse keeper in Oswestry has travestied the sign of the Coach and Horses into the Coach and Dogs.

The Wheel, an object sometimes seen on signboards, may have been derived from the Catherine Wheel, (the name of a favourite old coaching inn in Bishopsgate Street,) or from the wheel of fortune; the Saddle and the Spur are both very general on roadside inns, owing to the ancient mode of travelling on horseback; the Whip occurs in Briggate, Leeds.

In Norwich there was (and we believe is still) a curious combination, the Whip and Egg, which existed in that locality as early as the year 1750,[518] and which is enumerated in London, under the name of the Whip and Eggshell, amongst the taverns in the black letter ballad of “London’s Ordinarie, or Everie Man in his Humour,” whilst a still earlier mention occurs in Mother Bunch’s Merriment, (1604,) when the transformation of pigs into fowls, whereby one of the gulls was so “sweetly deceyved,” is laid at the Whip and Eggshell. It has been explained as a corruption of the Whip and Nag, but the combination of these two would be so obvious that a corruption would scarcely be possible. In “Great Britain’s Wonder, or London’s Admiration,” a ballad on the frost of 1685, when the Thames was frozen over, and a fair held upon it, the following lines occur:—

“In this same street, before the Temple made,[519]
There seems to be a brisk and lively trade,
When ev’ry booth hath such a cunning sign
As seldom hath been seen in former time;
The Flying P—— pot is one of the same,
The Whip and Eggshell, and the Broom by name.”

The Whip and Egg, therefore, figured on the ice, and may have been brought together from the whipping of eggs, in making egg-punch, egg-flip, and similar beverages, much drunk on the ice in Holland; and as there were always crowds of Dutchmen on the ice, whenever the river was frozen over, they may have introduced their favourite drink as well as their Dutch whirlings, whimsies, and flying boats, and the sign have been invented in order to indicate the sale of those liquors.

The Three Jolly Butchers used to be seen in the neighbourhood of markets and shambles, either in allusion to the three merry north-country butchers, who killed nine highwaymen, according to the ballad, or simply that favourite combination of three which is of such frequent recurrence. The Cleaver seems also to be in compliment to this profession, as well as the Marrowbones and Cleaver. This last is a sign in Fetter Lane, originating from a custom, now rapidly dying away, of the butcher boys serenading newly married couples with these professional instruments. Formerly, the band would consist of four cleavers, each of a different tone, or, if complete, of eight, and by beating their marrowbones skilfully against these, they obtained a sort of music somewhat after the fashion of indifferent bell-ringing. When well performed, however, and heard from a proper distance, it was not altogether unpleasant. A largesse of half-a-crown or a crown was generally expected for this delicate attention. The butchers of Clare market had the reputation of being the best performers. The last public appearance of this popular music was at the marriage of the Prince of Wales, when small bands of them perambulated the town, playing “God Save the Queen.” This music was once so common that Tom Killigrew called it the national instrument of England. In 1759 a burlesque Ode on St Cecilia’s day, written by Bonnell Thornton, was performed at Ranelagh. Amongst the instruments employed in this there was a band of marrowbones and cleavers, whose endeavours were admitted by the cognoscenti to have been “a complete success.”

As the use of coaches gave rise to the sign of the Coach and Horses, so the Sedan produced some signs, as the Sedan Chair, Broad Quay, Bristol; North Searle, Newark; the Two Chairmen, &c., Warwick Street, Cockspur Street, and other parts of London; and the Three Chairs in the seventeenth century, a famous tavern in the Little Piazza, Covent Garden. The Sedan, says Randle Holme, “is a thing in which sick and crazy persons are carried abroad, which is borne up by the staves by two lusty men.”[520] The first sedan chair used in England was one that the Duke of Buckingham had received as a gift from Charles I., when Prince of Wales, on his return from that romantic “Jean-de-Paris” expedition to Spain.[521] The use of it got the Duke into trouble, and he was accused of “degrading Englishmen into slaves and beasts of burden.” Lysons, in his “Magna Britannia,” gives another origin for them; speaking of Duncombe at Battlesden, in Bedfordshire, he says:—

“It was to one of this family, Sir Saunders Duncombe, a gentleman pensioner to King James and Charles I., that we are indebted for the accommodation of the sedans or close chairs, the use of which was first introduced by him in this country in the year 1634, when he procured a patent which vested in him and his heirs the sole right of carrying persons up and down in them for a certain time.”

Sir Saunders hereupon got forty or fifty sedans made, and sent them about town, but differences soon arose between the chairmen and the coachmen. Pamphlets were written,[522] ballads were sung on the occasion, and the public sided with one or the other, according to individual taste. A ballad in favour of the sedan said:—

“I love sedans, cause they do plod
And amble everywhere,
Which prancers are with leather shod,
And neere disturb the care.
Heigh downe, dery, dery, downe,
With the hackney coaches downe,
Their jumpings make
The pavement shake,
Their noyse doth mad the towne.”[523]

De Foe, in 1702, says, “We are carried to these places [coffee-houses] in chairs, which are here very cheap—a guinea a week, or a shilling per hour—and your chairmen serve you for porters to run on errands, as your gondoliers do at Venice.” The chairmen of the aristocracy wore gaudy liveries and plumed hats, and their chairs were richly gilt and painted, and provided with velvet cushions. They used to be kept in the halls of their large mansions. As for the chairmen, we may infer from Gay’s “Trivia” that they were an insolent set of fellows:—

“Let not the chairman with assuming stride
Press near the wall and rudely thrust thy side,
The laws have set him bounds; his servile feet
Should ne’er encroach where posts defend the street.
Yet, who the footman’s arrogance can quell,
Whose flambeau gilds the sashes of Pall Mall,
When in long rank a train of torches flame,
To light the midnight visits of the dame.”

The trumpet-like instruments in which these torches were extinguished, when arrived at their place of destination, are still seen attached to the area railings of most of the houses in Grosvenor and St James’ Squares, and various other parts of the town fashionably inhabited at that period.

Another creature of this class, now as completely extinct as the Plesiosaurus and the Megatherion, or any other monster of the pre-Adamite world, was the Running Footman. We cannot say that there is not a “sign” of him left, for there is one in Charles Street, Berkeley Square, representing a man in gaudy attire, running, with a long cane in his hand—under it, “I am the only Running Footman.” This was a class of servants used by rich families in former days to run before the carriage, to clear the way, bear torches at night, pay turnpikes, and serving also in a great measure for pomp. Generally their livery was very rich, being somewhat of the Jockey dress, with a silk sash round the waist; sometimes, instead of breeches, they wore a sort of silk petticoat with a deep gold fringe. They carried long sticks with silver heads, which have now descended to their successors the footmen. The Duke of Queensberry was one of the last noblemen who kept running footmen. A good story is told of him in connexion with one of these servants. Whenever his grace wanted to engage one it was his custom to make him put on his livery and run up and down Piccadilly, whilst he, from his balcony, watched their paces; and so it happened on a time, that after one of those fellows had gone through all his evolutions and presented himself under the balcony, the Duke said: “That will do; you will suit me very well.” “And so your livery does me,” was the answer, and off the fellow went running like a deer and was never heard of afterwards. Another feat on record, somewhat more to the credit of the fraternity, was that one of them ran for a wager to Windsor against the Duke of Marlborough in a phaeton with four horses, and lost only by a short distance; but it cost the poor fellow his life, for he died very soon after. Most of these running footmen were Irish, hence Decker[524] says—“The Devil’s footeman was very nimble of his heeles, for no wild Irishman could outrunne him,” and Brathwaite remarks:—

“For see those thin-breech’d Irish lackies run.”[525]

St Patrick’s day was generally given to them as a holiday, which they invariably celebrated by purging themselves. In various country places the sign of the Running Footman has been corrupted into the Running Man.

Another “domestic” sign is the Trusty Servant at Minstead, Hants:—

“A trusty servant’s portrait would you see,
This emblematic figure well survey;
The porker’s snout not nice in diet shows,
The padlock shut, no secret he’ll disclose.
Patient the ass his master’s rage will bear,
Swiftness in errand the stag’s feet declare.
Loaden his left hand apt to labour saith,
The vest his neatness: open hand his faith.
Girt with his sword, his shield upon his arm,
Himself and master he’ll protect from harm.”

The origin of this sign is a picture on the wall of one of the rooms, near the kitchen of Winchester College, where it is accompanied by the above verses in English and Latin.

Further, there is the Stave-Porter, Dockhead, London; the Ticket-Porter, near London Bridge; the Porter’s Lodge, Leicester; and the Porter and Gentleman in three different places in London.

The Huntsman is common in the hunting districts. To the hunt, also, we must refer such signs as—Hark to Bounty, Staidburn, Clitheroe; Hark up to Nudger, Dobcross, Manchester; Hark the Lasher, near Castleton, Derby; Hark up to Glory, Rochdale, and the Chase Inn in Leamington. In Cambridge there are two signs of the Birdbolt, an implement formerly used to shoot birds; consequently it must be a sign of some antiquity. In Nightingale Lane, East Smithfield, there is an Experienced Fowler, who, no doubt, well knows the value of “a bird in the hand,” and at Oldham and Rochdale there is an equally satirical sign, that of the Trap. The Angler is common enough in the neighbourhood of trout streams and other fishing resorts frequented by the disciples of Isaak Walton.

Many professions are only represented by one or two objects relating to them. The Tallow Chandler, very common among the trades tokens, was always represented by a man dipping candles. To that trade also seems to belong the Bowls and Candle Poles, which occurs in the following rambling advertisement:—

“Stolen,
Lost, or Mislaid,

A Promissory Note for one hundred and twenty Pounds, signed by John Smallwood and indorsed by John Addams. Whoever will bring the same note to the House known by the Bowls and Candlepoles in Duke Street, in the Park, Southwark, shall receive five Guineas Reward; and if offered to be paid away or any Writ to be taken out for payment of the said Note, pray stop it and the party, and you shall have the same Reward.

*** The House is in Tenements, and some part thereof being a Pawnbroker’s, was broke open and several things of value missing. Note, This mischief arrises from a country Butcher, who did strike and kick an old Gentleman at London Bridge, about three quarters of a year ago. And all persons who did see the said Assault and will speak the truth, (for Christ’s sake,) are desired to send their Names and Place of Abode to the Bowls and Candlepoles and the favour shall be thankfully acknowledged.”[526]

The Scales is a common sign referring to various trades: one of the engraved bill-heads in the Bagford Collection gives the Hand and Scales—viz., a hand holding a pair of scales; this antiquated mode of representing a hand issuing from the clouds to perform some action, has given name to a great many signs—all combinations of the hand with some other object. The Spinning Wheel was formerly much more common than now; there is still a public-house with this sign at Hamsterley near Darlington. The Woolsack was originally a wool-merchant’s sign; it is often accompanied by the Black Boy. Machyn mentions this sign in 1555: “The xx day of July was cared to the Toure in the morning erlee iiij men; on was the goodman of the Volsake with-owt Algatt.” It seems to have been one of the leading taverns in Ben Jonson’s time, who often alludes to it in his plays; like the Dagger, it was famous for its pies.

“And see how the factors and prentices play there
False with their masters, and geld many a full pack,
To spend it in pies at the Dagger and the Woolpack.”

The Devil is an Ass, act i., sc. 1.

“Her Grace would have you eat no more Woolsack pies nor Dagger furmety.”—Alchymist, act v., sc. 2.

In the year 1682, the Woolsack Tavern in Newgate Market attracted great attention, owing to a wonderful phenomenon there exhibited, and set forth in the following handbill from the Sloane Collection, No. 958:—

“At the sign of the Woolpack in Newgate Street, is to be seen a strange and wonderful thing, which is, an elm-board, being touch’d with a hot iron, doth express itself, as if it was a man dying, with grones and trembling, to the great admiration of all the hearers. It has been presented before the King and his nobles, and hath given them great satisfaction. Vivat Rex.”

Such a curiosity could not fail to prove an object of immense attraction with our wonder-loving ancestors, particularly after the house had been visited by his Majesty, and thus acquired additional respectability. Very soon, however, numerous London taverns claimed public attention for similar wonders. It was as if the wood used in their construction had been cut from the myrtle-tree which conversed with Æneas near the river Hebrus, (“Æneid,” lib. iii. 19,) or from the “fiera selvaggia” Dante saw in the second circle of Hades, where he

“sentia da ogni parte tragger guai
E non vedea persona che’l facesse.”[527]

Inferno, canto xiii.

The mantel-piece at the Bowman Tavern, Drury Lane, expressed its aversion of a red hot poker as unequivocally as the elm-board at the Woolsack, and the dresser at the Queen’s Arms in St Martin’s Lane was evidently a “chip of the same block.” Indeed, boards were cauterised and groaned all over London.

The Block was a hatter’s sign, or as that trade was sometimes called, Bever-cutter, the block being the mould on which the hat is formed. Beatrix, in “Much Ado about Nothing,” says: “He wears his faith, but as the fashion of his hat it ever changes with the next block.” And Decker, in the “Gull’s Hornbook:” “John, in Paul’s Churchyard, shall fit his head for an excellent block.” The word was also often used as a synonym for “hat.”

The Postboy was the sign of a fishmonger’s shop in Sherborne Lane, where in 1759 Green-native Colchester oysters were sold at 3s. 3d. a barrel, and exceeding fine “Pyfleet oysters” at 4s. 3d. a barrel. The Up and Down Post used to be, in the good old coaching times, a thriving inn on the now deserted highway between Birmingham and Coventry. The picture represented an erect and a prostrate pillar, which after all was only a rebus or a misunderstanding. In former times, before the mail-coaches were instituted, the equestrian letter-carriers of the up and down mail used to meet at this house, exchange their bags and each return whence they came, thus effecting a considerable saving of time and trouble. Even washerwomen have been exalted to the signboard, for in Norwich there was the sign of the Three Washerwomen in 1750. And one of the implements of their trade, the Golden Maid, (better known as “the Dolly,”) may still be seen at a turner’s shop in Dudley.

A few others remain, which cannot, strictly speaking, be called professions, yet are they—or at least they were—means of making a living, as the Three Morris-dancers, once a very common sign, but now, like the custom that gave rise to it, almost extinct. There is one still left, however, at Scarisbrook, Lancashire, and in a few villages a remnant of the dance is also kept up on certain occasions. They were called Morris, or Moors, from the Spanish Morisco. Black faces were required for the dance:—

“Nam faciem plerumque inficiunt fuligine et peregrinum vestium cultum assumunt, qui ludicris talibus indulgent ut Mauriesse videantur, aut e longius remota patria credantur advolasse atque insolens recreationis genus advenisse.”[528]

There is a painted glass window at Betley, in Staffordshire, on which the characters performing the dance in the early part of the sixteenth century are represented; to these afterwards others were added. The earliest performers appear to have been called Robin Hood and Little John, Maid Marian, Friar Tuck, the May queen, the fool, the piper, and the plain rank and file of dancers variously dressed. To these afterwards were added a dragon, a hobby-horse, and other quaint types. Among the characters represented on the painted window are also a franklein, a churl, or peasant, and a nobleman. The hobby-horseman occupies the middle of the window, and is said to represent a Moorish king: he has two swords thrust into his cheeks, which seem to represent a feat of dexterity performed by Indian and Egyptian jugglers of throwing a somersault with two swords balanced on each side of the cheek. The horse (merely a frame covered with long trappings, and only showing the neck and limbs of a horse, in which the man capered about) held a ladle in his mouth for collecting money.

The fool was one of the features of the pageant, and on him rested a great deal of the duties to amuse the public, particularly when the hobby-horse was not present; hence Ben Jonson:—

“But see the Hobby-Horse is forgot,
Fool, it must be your lot
To supply your wont with faces
And some other buffoon graces.
You know how.”

On May-day, which in those merry days was the merriest of all the year, they came out in full force, and, along with the milkmaids dancing with piles of plate on their heads, contributed not a little to give the streets and thoroughfares a merry aspect. The May-dance of the sweeps is perhaps the “last stage of decomposition” of this amusement of our forefathers; their sooty complexions, their clowns, their Lord and Lady and Jack in the Green, may be all that remain of the morris-dance, the fool, the Lord and Lady, the hobby-horse, and the rest.

In treating of games, we may advert to a rendering of the Flying Horse, overlooked on a former occasion. Besides its mythological and heraldic origin, there was another reason which sometimes prompted the choice of this sign. It was the name of a popular amusement, which consisted in a swing, the seat of which formed a wooden horse. This the flying equestrian mounted, and as he was swinging to and fro he had to take with a sword the ring off a quintain. If he succeeded, his adroitness was no doubt rewarded either with a number of swings gratis, or a quotum of beer. Such a Flying Horse served for a sign to an ale-house of that denomination in Moorfields, in the time of Queen Anne. Swings, round-abouts, and such-like amusements, were in those days the usual appendages of suburban ale-houses, and to a certain extent have even come down to our time.

Oil and colour-shops generally, and some public-houses—mostly near theatres—adopt the sign of the Harlequin. One of the most noted amongst the latter was kept in the beginning of this century in Drury Lane, by the eccentric Richardson, the showman, or, rather, the “Prince of Showmen,” as he called himself. In this tavern he saved some money, which enabled him to fit up a travelling theatre, by which he realised so much, that when he died in 1836, he left £20,000. It used to be one of his boasts that he had brought out Edmund Kean, and several other eminent actors. He desired in his will to be buried at Marlow, in Bucks, (where he was born in the workhouse,) in the same grave with the “Spotted Boy,” a natural phenomenon which had been one of his luckiest hits, and brought him a considerable amount of money.

It is curious to observe how the same simple thing has made mankind laugh for nearly thirty centuries, and that is a black face. In our age a large proportion of the public seem to find inexhaustible pleasure in pseudo-negroes, their songs and antics. The Greeks on their stage had a young satyr, dressed in goat or tiger-skin, with a short stick in his hand, a white hat on his head, his hair cut short, and a brown mask. This satyr performed some antics, and was the prototype of the harlequin. The Romans adopted a somewhat similar character under the name of planipes, because he did not wear the tragic cothurna; he also wore a variegated dress, for Apuleius, in his “Apology,” speaks of the “mimus centunculus.” From the Romans it descended to the Italians, and as early as the sixteenth century we find the whole troop complete, playing in Spain, namely, Harlequin, Pantaloon, Pagliacico, the Doctor, &c. At a masked ball at the court of Charles IX., in 1572, the king represented Brighella; the Cardinal of Lorraine, Pantaloon; Catherine de Medici, Columbine; and the Duke of Anjou, (afterwards Henry III.,) Harlequin. At that time, or shortly after, the troop of the Gelosi played the Italian pieces in Paris, in which these characters were introduced.

For the sign of the Green Man there is a twofold explanation. 1o. That it represents the green, wild, or wood men of the shows and pageants, such as described by Machyn in his Diary on Lord Mayor’s Day, October 29, 1553:—“Then cam ij grett wodyn with ij grett clubes all in grene and with skwybes [squibs] bornyng . . . . with gret berds and ryd here and ij targets a-pon their bake.” This green in which they were dressed consisted of green leaves. When Queen Elizabeth was at Kenilworth Castle, in 1575, “on the x of Julee met her in the Forest as she came from hunting one clad like a savage man all in ivie,”[529] who made a very neat speech to the queen, in which he was kindly assisted by the echo. Besides wielding sticks with crackers in pageants, these green men sometimes fought with each other, attacked castles and dragons, and were altogether a very favourite popular character with the public. One of their duties seems to have been to clear the way for processions. In one of the Harleian MSS., entitled “The maner of the showe, that is, if God spare life and health, shall be seen by all the behoulders upon St Georges Day next, being the 23 of Aprill, 1610,” we see amongst the requirements:—

“It. ij men in greene leaves set with work upon their other habet with black heare & black beards very owgly to behould, and garlands upon their heads with great clubs in their hands with fireworks to scatter abroad to maintaine way for the rest of the show.”[530]

This interpretation is also given as the origin of the Green Man by Bagford:—

“They are called woudmen, or wildmen, thou’ at thes day we in ye signe call them Green Men, couered with grene bones: and are used for singes by stillers of strong watters and if I mistake not are ye sopourters of ye king of Deanmarks armes at thes day; and I am abpt to beleve that ye Daynes learned us hear in England the use of those tosticatein lickers [intoxicating] as well as ye breweing of Aele and a fit emblem for those that use that intosticating licker which berefts them of their sennes.”[531]

The Wild Man, therefore, on a sign at Quarry Hill, Ladybridge, Leeds, is the same as the Green Man.

2o. The second version of this sign is, that it is intended for a forester, and in that garb the Green Man is now invariably represented; even as far back as the seventeenth century, it is evident from the trades tokens that the Green Man was generally a forester, and, in many cases, Robin Hood himself, which may be inferred from the small figure frequently introduced beside him, and meant for Little John. The ballads always described Robin and his merry men as dressed in green, “Lincoln green.” When Robin meets the page who brings him presents from Queen Katherine:—

“Robin took his mantle from his backe,
It was of the Lincoln greene
And sent that by this lovely page
For a present unto the queene.”[532]

And in the same ballad, when he is going to court, “he clothed his men in Lincolne greene,” &c. Drayton, in his “Polyolbion,” says:—

“An hundred valiant men had this brave Robin Hood
Still ready at his call, that bowmen were right good,
All clad in Lincoln green which caps of red and blue.”

Sometimes it is called Kendal green:—

“All the woods
Are full of outlaws, that in Kendal green
[368] Follow the outlawed Earl of Huntingdon.”

Richard, Earl of Huntingdon, 1601, (i.e., Robin Hood)

It was, in fact, the ordinary dress of foresters and woodmen, and is so still in Germany.

“All in a woodman’s jacket he was clad,
Of Lincoln Green, belayed with silver lace.”

Spenser’s Faery Queene.

One of the most noted Green Man taverns was that on Stroud Green, Islington, formerly the residence of Sir Th. Stapleton, of Gray’s Court, Bart., whose initials, with those of his wife, and the date 1609, were to be seen on the façade. It was one of the suburban retreats frequented by the fashion in the days of Charles I., when it had been converted into a tavern. A century ago the sign bore the following inscription:—

“Ye are wellcome all
To Stapleton Hall.”

A club used to meet annually at this place, styling themselves the Lord Mayor, Aldermen, and Corporation of Stroud Green.[533] At Dulwich, in the reign of George II., there was another Green Man, a place of amusement for the Londoners during the summer season; it is enumerated, with other similar resorts, in the following stanza:—

“That Vauxhall and Ruckholt and Ranelagh too,
And Hoxton and Sadlers both Old and New,
My Lord Cobham’s Head and the Dulwich Green Man
May make as much pastime as ever they can.[534]
Derry Down,” &c.

Musick in Good Time, a new Ballad, 1745.

The Merry Andrew was a card-maker’s sign; in the Banks Collection there is a shopbill of the time of Queen Anne, of Edward Hall, card-maker to her Majesty at the Merry Andrew, in Piccadilly. The playing-cards at that time used to have certain heads on the wrapper, according to which they were denominated. Merry Andrew was one of them. Other sorts had the Great Mogul, Henry VII., Henry VIII., and the Duke of Savoy, (Prince Eugene;) second-class cards had the Queen of Hungary, the Spaniard, the beau, and the Merry Andrew. The original Merry Andrew is said to have been a certain Doctor Andrew Borde, born at Pevensey in the fifteenth century, and educated at Winchester and New College, Oxford, but who obtained his doctor’s degree at Montpellier. His writings abound with witticisms, which are reported also to have pervaded his speech. He is said to have frequented fairs, markets, and other “busy haunts of men,” haranguing the people in order to increase his practice in physic. He had many followers and imitators, whence it came that those who affected the same language and gestures were called Merry Andrews. Notwithstanding all this mirth and animal spirits, he professed himself a Carthusian, lived in celibacy, drank water three days in the week, wore a hair shirt, and nightly hung his shroud at the foot of his bed. He is said to have been physician to King Henry VIII., and member of the College of Physicians in London. He died a prisoner in the Fleet in 1549. More celebrated than his works on physic are his “Merry Tales of the Wise Men of Gotham,” and the “Merry History of the Miller of Abingdon.”

Lower down still in the sphere of callings and professions the signs will take us. At Oswald Wistle, Accrington, we meet with the Tinker’s Budget. The budget is the tinker’s bag of instruments; we see the word thus used in Randle Holme:[535]—“A Tinker with his budget on his back, having always in his mouth this merry cry:—‘Have you any work for a Tinker?’” And Shakespeare, in the “Winter’s Tale:”

“If tinkers may have leave to live
And bear the sowskin budget.”

This inn, then, is certainly very modest in its pretensions; but we shall descend lower still. Even “poor Tom’s flock of wild geese,” otherwise Tom of Bedlam, we have now to introduce. We find him at Balsall, Warwick, and no doubt it was formerly not an uncommon sign, since he was such a favourite in ballads; the Merry Tom, at Kirkcumbeck, Cumberland, evidently refers to the same individual. Notwithstanding all the fantastic ballads that went under Tom’s name, he was but a sorry rogue. Randle Holme[536] says:—

“The Sow gelder and Tom of Bedlam are both wandering knaves alike, and such as are seldom or never out of their way, having their home in any place. The first is described as carrying a long staff, with a head like[370] a spear or a half pike, and a horn hung by his side from a broad leather belt or girdle cross his shoulders. Tom of Bedlam is in the same garb, with a long staff, and a Cow or Ox Horn by his side, but his cloathing is more fantastic or ridiculous, for being a mad man he is madly decked and dressed all over with Rubins, Feathers, cuttings of cloth and what not; to make him seem a madman or one distracted, when he is no other but a dissembling knave.”

“The Canting Academy,” 1674, gives them a similar attire and character:—

“Abram-men, otherwise called Tom of Bedlams; they are very strangely and antickly garbed, with several coloured ribands or tape in their hats, it may be instead of a feather, a fox tail hanging down a long stick, with ribands streaming and the like; yet for all their seeming madness they have wit enough to steal as they go.”[537]

Aubrey says:—

“Before the Civil Warre, I remember Tom o’ Bedlams went about a begging. They had been such as had been in Bedlam and there recovered and come to some degree of soberness, and when they were licensed to goe out they had on their left arme an armilla of tinne (printed) about three inches breadth, which was sodered on.”[538]

This permission, if ever it was granted, was retracted after the Restoration, for in the year 1675 the London Gazette contained in several numbers the following advertisement:—

“Whereas several Vagrant Persons do wander about the city of London and countries, pretending themselves to be Lunaticks under cure in the Hospitall of Bethlem, commonly called Bedlam, with brass plates upon their arms and inscriptions thereon, These are to give notice that there is no such liberty given to any Patients kept in the Hospital for their cure, neither is any such plate as a distinction or mark put upon any Lunatick during their being there or when discharged thence. And that the same is a false pretence to colour their wandering and begging and deceive the people to the dishonour of the Government of that Hospital.”

Not only men but also women of a roving disposition, adopted poor Tom’s horn, and went wandering, begging, and pilfering under the name of Bess of Bedlam, which is still seen as a sign in Oak Street, Norwich. Bess was an old companion of poor Tom, for in the play of King Lear, Tom sings a snatch of a song with the words, “Come over the bourn, Bessy, to me,” and in the jollities of Plough Monday the fool and Bessy are two of the principal personages.[539]

A third class of beggars called Mumpers, is also found on the signboard under the name of the Three Mumpers.

Thus, after having gone through all ranks of society, from the palace to the cottage, and from the sceptre to Tom’s staff with a fox-tail, we now come to the great leveller Death, who also was represented on the signboard. There were the Three Death’s-heads in Wapping, of which house trades tokens are extant; probably it was an apothecary’s, though it was a ghastly sign for his customers. Undertakers were also strictly professional in their choice. In the eighteenth century there were the Four Coffins over against Somerset House,[540] and another in Fleet Street, the sign of Stephen Roome,[541] whose son was the unfortunate author whom Pope has “gibbeted” in the Dunciad, as afflicted with a “funereal frown.” Savage, one of Pope’s literary sicarii, calls Roome “a perfect town-author,”[542] and has drawn his portrait in “An Author to be let, by Iscariot Hackney:”—

“Had it not been more laudable for Mr Roome, the son of an undertaker, to have borne a link and a mourning staff, in the long procession of a funeral—or even been more decent in him to have sung psalms according to education, in an Anabaptist meeting, than to have been altering the Jovial Crew or Merry Beggars into a wicked imitation of the Beggars’ Opera?”

Another undertaker, James Maddox, clerk and coffin-maker of St Olave’s, had for a sign the Sugar-loaf and three Coffins. The addition of the sugar-loaf has, of course, nothing to do with his profession, for when death calls, the sweets of life are past. It was simply the sign of a former tenant, suspended in front or fixed in the wall of the house. Although the undertakers of the present day do not display signs as of old, they advertise their calling quite as effectually. The men who in their handbills solicit us to try their “economic funerals,” or to test one of their “three guinea respectable interments,—one trial only asked,” are commercial with the rest of the age, although we might wish that they would force themselves a little less upon our attention. One undertaker recently hit upon what he deemed a brilliant method of advertising his cheap funerals. He selected some good names from the “Court Guide,” and sent out hundreds of telegrams announcing the low prices at which a “body” could be interred. Some reached their destination just as the lady or gentleman “body” was sitting down to dinner, others as the “parties” were dressing, or in the act of leaving home; but although the scheme failed, the name of the undertaker and his prices were firmly fixed in people’s memories, and he received, instead of orders, numerous cautions not to telegraph in that way again.

An undertaker in Islington, some years ago, exhibited in his window some pleasing artistic efforts of his children, which must have greatly comforted the father. “Master A., aged 12 years,” had produced a grinning skeleton, garnished with worms and cross-bones; and “Miss B., aged 10,” had painted in colours a section of a vault, with coffin heads, skulls, and sexton’s tools, neatly arranged right and left. The drawings were framed and glazed, and parental pride had placed them in the best spot in the windows.

[444] Notes and Queries.

[445] Roxburghe Ballads, iii., fol. 253.

[446] Akerman’s Trades Tokens.

[447] “Richardsoniana,” London, 1776, p. 159.

[448] Preface to his “History of the World.”

[449] Archæologia, ii., p. 169. In an article in “Notes and Queries,” No. 150, a document is quoted by which George Gower was appointed “the Queen’s Sargeant Paynter,” and Nicolas Hilliard her miniature portrait painter. No portraits of the queen painted by Gower appear, however, to be known.

[450] Lettre à M. Bizotin. “I cannot bear to see the portraits of the king, of the queen, of the dauphin, and of the other princes and princesses used as signs for shops; they whose portraits ought to be reserved for the most celebrated galleries and the most famous collections only. Would not M. d’Argenson, and you as well, M. le Commissaire, have very serious reason to be annoyed if you were to see your portrait as a sign to a public-house or to a rag-shop? Why, then, are you not annoyed in seeing the king’s portrait in such places?” Mr Boursault’s flattery is much more evident than his logic.

[451] There is a print of it in Gentleman’s Magazine, June 1794.

[452] “Memoirs of J. Decastro, comedian,” London, 1824. See under “Go,” (as “a go of gin,” “a go of rum,”) in the “Slang Dictionary,” 3d edition: John Camden Hotten, Piccadilly, London.

[453] London Gazette, Nov. 30 to Dec. 4, 1682.

[454] In Lydgate’s ballad of “London Lyckpenny,” temp. Henry VI.

[455] This touting, or standing at the door inviting the passers by to enter, was at one time a universal practice with all kind of shops, both at home and abroad. The regular phrase used to be “What do ye lack? What do ye lack?” The French dits and fabliaux teem with allusions to this custom. In the story of “Courtois d’Arras,”—a travesty of the prodigal son, in a thirteenth century garb—Courtois finds the host standing at his door shouting, “Bon vin de Soissons à 6 deniers le lot.” And in a mediæval mystery, entitled “Li jus de S. Nicholas,” the innkeeper roars out, “Céans il fait bon diner, céans il y a pain chaud et harengs chauds et vin d’Auxerre à plein tonneau.” In “Les trois Aveugles de Compiegne,” mine host thus addresses the thirsty wanderers:—

“Ci a bon vin fres et nouvel,
Ça d’Ancoire, ça de Soissons
Pain et char et vin et poissons,
Céens fet bon despendre argent,
Ostel i a à toute gent,
Céens fet moult bon heberger.”

And in the “Debats et facétieuses rencontres de Gringalet et de Guillot Gorgen son maistre,” the servant who had taken advantage of the host’s invitation, excuses himself, saying, “Le tavernier a plus de tort que moy, car passant devant sa porte, et luy étant assiz, (ainsi qu’ils sont ordinairement), il me cria me disant: Vous plaist-il de dejeuner céans? Il y a de bon pain, de bon vin et de bonne viande.” This touting at tavern doors was still practised in the last century, as appears from the following passage in Tom Brown:—“We were jogging forward into the city, when our Indian cast his eyes upon one of his own complexion, at a certain coffee-house which has the Sun staring its sign in the face, even at midnight, when the moon is queen regent of the planets, and, being willing to be acquainted with his countryman, gravely inquired what province or kingdom of India he belonged to; but the sooty dog could do nothing but grin, and show his teeth, and cry, Coffee, sir, tea, will you please to walk in, sir; a fresh pot, upon my word.”—Tom Brown, vol iii., p. 17. Not only taverns but all sorts of shops kept these barking advertisements at the door. The ballad of “London Lyckpenny” enumerates a quantity of them. “What do you lack?” was the stereotype phrase. The “Buy, buy, what’ll you buy?” of the butchers, is one of the last remains in London of this custom. At Greenwich, the practice of touting at the doors of the small coffee-houses is still kept up; and throughout the United States and Canada the custom of waiting at steamboat wharves and railway termini, to catch passengers, and worry them with recommendations to this or that hotel, is unpleasantly prevalent. The touters there are known as hotel runners.

[456] “Wine one pint for a pennie, and bread to drink it was given free in every tavern.”—Note by Stow. The imperfect tense shows that this excellent custom had already fallen into disuse in Stow’s time.

[457] Will Herbert, “History of the Twelve Great Living Companies,” vol. ii. p. 197.

[458] Weekly Journal, April 26, 1718.

[459] Ibid., July 12, 1718.

[460] Harl. MSS. 5910, part II.

[461] “Account of London,” p. 60, 1813.

[462] Pepys’s Memoirs, Sept 18, 1660.

[463] “London Spy,” 1706.

[464] Wilkinson’s “Londina Illustrata.”

[465] Boswell’s Life of Johnson, vol. i., p. 272.

[466] Erskine used to send somewhat similar cards of invitation when on the Bench, by drawing a turtle on a card, and sending it to a friend, with the day and hour.

[467] Maitland’s History of London, 1739, p. 647.

[468] “The Quack Vintners, or a Satyr against Bad Wine,” 1713; probably a pamphlet got up by the London vintners against Brook and Hilliers, the famous wine merchants recommended by the Spectator.

[469] Hatton’s New View of London, 1708, p. 32.

[470]

“Saint Dominic be always our friend,
Who sing thy praises daily in our pulpit,
From the veins of our hearts, after we have emptied our flagons;
Therefore if thou rejoicest to hear us set forth thy praise,
Make that in Easter time we of spring water
Need not drink, for if that were to happen, everywhere
They will be mute monks, who do not run about unless they be friars.”

[471]

“To drink like a Capuchin,
Is to drink poorly;
To drink like a Benedictine,
Is to drink deeply;
To drink like a Dominican,
Is pot after pot;
But to drink like a Franciscan,
Is to drink the cellar dry.”

[472]

“We are ten, all deep drinkers,
Jolly topers, and good smokers,
Who, never giving over drinking
And eating,
Scorn the favours of love.”

[473] The Plague, by De Foe.

[474] Beaufoy Trades Tokens.

[475] A proclamation of Queen Elizabeth restricted the length of the sword, rapier, and such like weapons to “one yard and half a quarter of the blade at the uttermost,” and the point of the buckler not above two inches in length, under the penalty of a “fine at the Queen’s pleasure, and the weapon to be forfayted, and if any such persons shall offend a second time, then the same to be banished from the place and towne of his dwelling.”

[476] Misson’s Travels, p. 307.

[477] Stow’s Chronicle, Thom’s edition, p. 83.

[478] Merry Jests of old Hobson the Londoner, 1611

[479] J. T. Smith’s Antiquarian Ramble in the Streets of London, edited by Charles Mackay, 1846.

[480] Nicolas’s Life and Times of Sir Christopher Hatton, p. 7.

[481] Ned Ward’s Frolic to Horn Fair, 1703.

[482] Walpole’s Anecdotes of Painting, p. 132.

[483]

“Whoever outsails me under the lee,
shall have a dollar and drink scot-free.”

[484] Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches.

[485] Intelligencer, Jan. 27—Feb. 4, 1652.

[486] Unless it be another version of the Lamb and Anchor, see p. 300. Ship and Sheep, however, were formerly used promiscuously. Thus there is a token of William Eye “at the Sheep,” in Rye, 1652, representing a ship, whilst Decker, in Histrio-mastrix, 1602 says, “and this shipskin cap shall be put off.”

[487] Still in existence in Upper Fore Street, Lambeth.

[488] Thomas Allen’s History of Lambeth, 1827, p. 367.

[489] See Louisa Twining’s Symbols of Christian Art.

[490] See p. 228.

[491] Hone’s Every Day Book, vol. ii.

[492] Stowe’s Survey of London.

[493] Daily Courant, Dec. 17, 1718.

[494] See under Humorous Signs.

[495] Hollinshed’s Chronicles, iv., p. 330.

[496] The whole history of this calligraphic contest, written by Bale himself, is preserved amongst the Harl. MSS., No. 675.

[497] “Twelve Sonatas in two parts; the first part solos for a violin, a bass violin, viol and harpsichord; the second Preludes, Almands, Corants, Sarabands and Jigs, with the Spanish Folly. Dedicated to the Electress of Brandenburgh by Archangelo Corelli; being his fifth and last opera, etc. Price 8 shillings, or each part single 5 shillings.”—London Gazette, August 26-29, 1700. The use of the word opera here is somewhat peculiar.

[498] Hawkins’s History of Music, vol. ii., p. 107.

[499] London Gazette, December 30 to January 2, 1700.

[500]

“He came to an inn,
In the Rue de la Mortellerie,
Where the sign of the Pestle hangs out,
At which place there is good entertainment to be had.”

This poet-swindler, Villon, used to go about with a few friends, who robbed and cheated landlords, and obtained good dinners without paying for them, whence he called them “Repues Franches.” Too frequently he got off safe, but occasionally he would get a caning in the bargain to assist his digestion. These predatory dinners he has related in an épopée which has come down to us.

[501] It is to be observed that these soap-basins are now always of brass, and also that on the continent their place is taken by a shallow brass basin to contain hot water—Don Quixote’s helmet of Mambrino, held under the chin of the person to be shaved, with a hollow space in the rim to fit the neck, and a cavity into which the soap is deposited during the operation.

[502] Vossius, “De Poematum Cantu et viribus Rythmi,” Oxford, 1673, p. 62. Isaac Vossius was an eccentric Dutchman, who died a canon of Windsor in 1689. In the above treatise on rhythm he says:—“I remember that more than once I have fallen into the hands of men of this sort who could imitate any measure of song in combing the hair, so as sometimes to express very intelligibly iambics, trochees, dactyls, &c., from whence there arose to me no small delight.”

[504] “People made younger here,” alluding to the youthful appearance of a man without a beard.

[505]

“Nature gives beard and hair,
And I cut them both.”

or—

“I devote my razors to all faces,
And can stand the test of the truest looking-glasses.”

[506] Tavern Anecdotes, 1825.

[507] Remarkable Trials, vol. ii., p. 14. 1765.

[508] Stow. p. 128.

[509] The court before which persons aggrieved in the Fair might have a “speedy relief.”

[510] H. Morley, Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair, p. 237. See also Hone’s Every-day Book, Sept. 5, vol. i.

[511] Boswell’s Life of Johnson, vol. ii., p. 63.

[512] Formerly a dangerous pond in Old Street Road, in which a number of people were drowned, whence it obtained its name of perilous Pond. In 1713 it was walled in by one Kemp, who on that occasion altered its name into Peerless Pool, by a similar process as the Pontus αξενος, inhospitable, was called ευξεινος, hospitable, by the Greeks.

[513]

“Tobacco is a noble weed, as many can testify.
Numbers of people who were long since weaned begin to suck again.”

[514]

“Here at the Milkmaid of Gouda
You will receive good articles and civil treatment,
Here you may smoke at your ease
Tip-top Varinas and Virginia tobacco.”

[515]

“Dainty noses, noble masters,
Who, by the jingling of the glasses,
Are prepared for a ’smoke;’
If you look for the finest growth,
The best Varinas? Come then at once
To the Walloon Milkmaid,” &c.

[516] Pierce Pennyless, Supplication to the Devil, 1593.

[517] These remains are engraved in Archer’s Vestiges of Old London.

[518] Gentleman’s Magazine, March 1842.

[519] A row of booths on the ice opposite the Temple.

[520] Randle Holme, book iii, ch. viii., p. 345.

[521] Dr Johnson’s explanation that they received their name from the town of Sedan, whence they were introduced into England, is evidently a mistake—for the French copied them from us. See Tallemant des Réaux, “Contes et Historiettes,” vol. vii., p. 102.

[522] Coach and Sedan pleasantly disputing for Place and Precedence. 4to, 1636.

[523] Roxburghe Ballads, vol. i., fol. 546, entitled “The Coaches Overthrow, or a joviall Exaltation of divers tradesmen and others for the suppression of troublesome Hackney Coaches.”

[524] Decker’s English Villanies, 1632.

[525] Brathwaite’s Strapado for the Diuell, 1615. Notes in Percy Society edition.

[526] Newspaper cutting of the year 1762, probably from the London Register.

[527] “—heard groans from every side, but saw nobody who uttered them.”

[528] Junius’ Etymologia: “For those that take part in these games, besmear their faces with soot and adopt outlandish garments, so that they may look like Moors, or as if they had come from distant countries, and thence had introduced this quaint amusement.”

[529] Nicholl’s Progresses of Queen Elizabeth, vol. i., p. 494.

[530] Harl. MSS., No. 2150, fol. 356.

[531] Harl. MSS., No. 5900.

[532] Roxburghe Ballads, vol. i., f. 375.

[533] Lewis’s History of Islington, p. 281.

[534] Ruckholt was a reputed mansion of Queen Elizabeth, at Leyton, in Essex. Being opened to the public in 1742, it became a fashionable summer drive during a couple of seasons; public breakfasts, weekly concerts, and occasional oratorios were numbered amongst its attractions. The house was pulled down in 1745. Old and New Sadler’s Wells relates to the well-known place in Islington, at that period a music house. Lord Cobham’s Head has been noticed on p. 97.

[535] Book iii., ch. iii., p. 181

[536] Book iii., ch. iii., p. 181.

[537] Canting Academy, second edition, 1674, as quoted in Malcolm’s “Manners and Customs,” vol. i., p. 322.

[538] Lansdowne MS., No. 231 “Remains of Judaisme and Gentilisme.”

[539] There is a very unfavourable parallel between the Ladies and Besses of Bedlam in the Muse’s Recreation, 1656, entitled:—“Upon the naked Bedlams and spotted Beasts we see in Covent Garden,” beginning:—

“When Besse! she ne’re was half so vainly clad,
Besse ne’re was half so naked, half so mad;
Again, this raves with lust, for love Besse ranted,
Then Besse’s skin is tanned—this is painted.”

[540] Advertisement in the original edition of the Spectator, No. clxxxvi.

[541] City Mercury, or Advertisements concerning Trade. November 4, 1675.

[542] London Gazette, May 30-June 3, 1681, where he gives a most dismal catalogue of what he could do.

CHAPTER XI.
THE HOUSE AND THE TABLE.

Instead of carved or painted signs hung above the doors, many shop and tavern keepers preferred to designate their houses after some external feature, such as the colour of the building—thus we find the Red house, the White house, the Blue house, the Dark house, &c. Others painted their door-posts a particular colour, whence the origin of the well-known Blue Posts. In still older times painted posts or poles in front of the houses seem occasionally to have served as signs; to some such distinction, at least Caxton’s Red Poles, as mentioned in one of his advertisements, seems to refer:—

“If it please ony man spirituel or temporel to bye our pyes of two or thre comemoracio’s of salisburi use, emprynted after the form of this prese’t letre whiche ben wel and truly correct, late hym come Westmonester into the almonestrye at the Reed Pale, and he shal have them good and chepe:

Supplico stet cedula.”

Even in the seventeenth century such a distinction was still occasionally used, as the Green Pales in Peter Street, Westminster;[543]—and Stukeley[544] speaks of Mr Brown’s garden at the Green Poles, where an urn was dug up lined with lead and filled with earth and bones. In Etheredge’s play “She Would if she Could,” the Black Posts in James Street are named, (Act i., sc. 1, 1703;) whilst the newspapers in the beginning of the eighteenth century contain advertisements stating that the mineral water from Hampstead Wells might be obtained, at the rate of 3d. a flask, from the lessee of the wells, who lived at the Black Posts in King Street, near Guildhall.

Garden-houses, or Summer-houses, attached to a building, were also used to designate shops and residences, as appears from a trades token “at the garden-house in Blackfriars,” and also from a newspaper advertisement of 1679, where the garden-house in King Street, St Giles, is mentioned. Frequent allusions to these garden-houses are found in the old plays; they appear to have been similar in all intents and purposes to the petites maisons of the profligate French nobility in the times of the Régence. Stubbe, in his “Anatomy of Abuses,” severely attacks them:—

“In the suburbes of the citie they have gardens either paled or walled round about very high, with their harbers and bowers fit for the purpose; and lest they might be espied in those open places, they have their banqueting houses, with galleries, turrets, and what not, therein sumptuously erected, wherein they may, and doubtless do, many of them, play the filthy persons.”

The young Rake in Shakespeare’s spurious play of the “London Prodigal,” (1604,) says to the lady:—

“Now, God thank you, sweet lady, if you have any friend, or a garden-house where you may employ a poor gentleman as your friend, I am yours to command in all sweet service.”

And Corisca in Massinger’s “Bondsman,” (Act i., sc. 3):—

“And if need be I have a couch and banqueting-house in my orchard, where many a man of honour has not scorned to spend an afternoon.”

He also alludes to it in the “City Madam.” A remnant of this custom is still to be traced in a few country towns, (Sunderland for instance,) where the middle classes have little gardens, in the outskirts of the town, with bowers and wooden summer-houses for tea-drinkings. In Holland they still flourish; the family usually take tea in them, whilst paterfamilias placidly smokes his pipe and listens to the croaking of the frogs and the lowing of the cows in the flat meadows beyond.

The Well and Bucket is a sign in Shoreditch, not badly chosen, as it intimates an inexhaustible supply; it is of very old standing in London, for it is mentioned in the “Paston Letters” in the year 1472.[545]

“I pray God send you all your desires and me my mewed goss-hawk in haste, or, rather than fail, a scar-hawk; there is a grocer dwelling right over against the Well with Two Buckets, a little from St Helen’s Church, hath ever hawks to sell.”

The anxiety about the bird, expressed in this letter, is most amusing:—“I ask no more good of you for all the services that I shall do you, while the world standeth, but a goss-hawk,” is the commencement of the letter, which concludes:—

“Now, think on me, good lord, for if I have not an hawk I shall wax fat for default of labour, and dead for default of company by my troth.”

In old times the ale-house windows were generally open, so that the company within might enjoy the fresh air, and see all that was going on in the street; but, as the scenes within were not always fit to be seen by the “profanum vulgus” that passed by, a trellis was put up in the open window. This trellis, or lattice, was generally painted red, to the intent, it has been jocularly suggested, that it might harmonise with the rich hue of the customers’ noses; which effect, at all events, was obtained by the choice of this colour. Thus Pistol says:—

“He called me even now by word through a red lattice, and I could see no part of his face from the window.”

The same idea is expressed in the “Last Will and Testament of Lawrence Lucifer,” 1604:—

“Watched sometimes ten hours together in an ale-house, ever and anon peeping forth and sampling thy nose with the red lattice.”

So common was this fixture, that no ale-house was without it:—

“A whole street is in some places but a continuous ale-house, not a shop to be seen between red lattice and red lattice.”—Decker’s English Villanies Seven Times Pressed to Death.

At last it became synonymous with ale-house:—

“As well known by my wit as an ale-house by a red lattice.”[546]

“Trusty Rachel was drinking burnt brandy with a couple of tinder-box cryers at the next red lattice.”[547]

The lattices continued in use until the beginning of the eighteenth century, and after they disappeared from the windows were adopted as signs, and as such they continue to the present day. The Green Lattice occurs on a trades token of Cock Lane, and still figures at the door of an ale-house in Billingsgate, whilst not many years ago there was one, in Brownlow Street, Holborn, which had been corrupted into the Green Lettuce.

When balconies were newly introduced, they were also used in the place of signs. Lord Arundel was the inventor of them, and Covent Garden the first place where they became general. “Every house here has one of ’em,” says Richard Broome, in 1659. Trades tokens “of the Bellconey,” in Bedford Street, are still extant, and also tokens of “John Williams, the king’s chairman, at ye lower end of St Martin’s Lane, at ye Balconey. 1667.” The first house that adopted a balcony was situated at the corner of Chandos Street, “which country people were wont much to gaze on;” soon, however, they became so common that further distinctions had to be added, as the Iron Balcony, (St James’ Street, 1699,) the Blue and Gilt Balcony, (Hatton Street, 1673.) Lamps have also, for two or three centuries, frequently done duty as signs, and continue still to act as beacons to those who want the assistance of the doctor, the chemist, or the sweep. Ale and coffee-houses, too, are frequently decorated with gorgeous lamps: this was already the custom in Tom Brown’s time:—

“Every coffee-house is illuminated both without and within doors; without by a fine Glass Lanthorn, and within by a woman so light and splendid you may see through her without the help of a Perspective.”[548]

The Moorfield quacks had always lamps at their doors at night, with round glasses, having the same colours as the balls in their signs, and this custom has been handed down to our day by the chemists, who still have circular, red, green, and yellow bull’s-eye glasses in their lamps.

In Paris, in the sixteenth century, the pastry-cooks used at nights to place a kind of lamp in their windows, which acted as magic lanterns. They were made of transparent paper, covered with rudely-painted figures of men and animals. Regnier mentions them in his eleventh satire:—

“Ressemblait transparent une lanterne vive,
Dont quelques patissiers amusent les enfants,
Où des oysons bridez, guenuches, elefans,
Chiens, chats, lièvres, renards, et mainte estrange beste
Courent l’une après l’autre.”[549]

A Dutch grocer, in the seventeenth century, put up the sign of the Burning Lamp, and wrote under it the following distich:—

“Myn lampje brant uyt den Orienten,
Ik verkoop oly, vygen en krenten.”[550]

The Brass Knocker in the Great Gardens, Bristol, is another sign taken from the exterior of the house; also the Flower-pot, which was very common in old London: one of the last remaining stood at the corner of Bishopsgate and Leadenhall Streets. It dated from an early period, and was, in the heyday of its fame, a celebrated coaching inn. The introduction of railroads, however, gave it a death-blow; for some time it continued to languish as a starting-point for omnibuses, and was finally demolished to make room for merchants’ offices in 1863. Trades tokens of this inn are extant in the Beaufoy collection. Mr Burn, the compiler of the catalogue of this collection, suggests that the Flower-pot was originally the vase of lilies, always represented in the old pictures of the Salutation or Annunciation; according to his theory the Angel and the Virgin were omitted at the Reformation, and nothing but the vase left. This, however, seems somewhat improbable. There is no apparent reason why it should not have been a real flower-pot, or rather vase, which our ancestors frequently had on the top of the pent-houses above their shops. In order to distinguish them from ordinary flower-pots, some painted theirs blue, thus the sign of the Blue Flower-pot, as appears from the advertisement of Cornelius a Tilborgh, who styles himself “sworn chirurgeon in ordinary to King Charles II., to our late sovereign King William, as also to her present majesty Queen Anne.” This worthy lived in Great Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Holborn Row, and besides the Blue Flower-pot at his front door, his customers might recognise the house, by “a light at night over the door,” and a Blue Ball at the back-door. The Two Blue Flower-pots used to be a sign in Dean Street, Soho; and the Two Flower-pots and Sun Dial in Parker’s Lane, near Drury Lane, (London Gazette, Sept. 16-19, 1700.)

Innumerable objects from the interior of the house were likewise adopted as signs, such as furniture of all kinds, and domestic utensils. The upholsterers, for instance, generally selected pieces of furniture. At the end of the last century The Royal Bed was a great favourite, as may be seen from engravings on several of the shop bills in the Banks collection; the bed in olden times was a very important article in a household, and was always particularly named in the will. Upholsterers in those days were also frequently called bed-joiners. Next we have the Board or Table, still a great favourite in the north—in Durham alone at least sixty public-houses with that sign could be named.

The mention of the Table affords an opportunity for particularising those good things which usually grace the festive board. First of all there is the Salt Horn, (at Bradford and Leeds,) which formerly at dinner marked the line of demarcation; for whether a guest was to be placed above or below the salt was a matter of etiquette strictly to be attended to. In Dudley we find a very substantial and tempting Round of Beef, with the following rhymes:—

“If you are hungry or a-dry,
Or your stomach out of order,
There’s sure relief at the Round of Beef,
For both these two disorders.”

The roast beef of old England is further represented by The Ribs of Beef, in Wensum Street, Norwich. The Flank Of Beef at Spalding, the much less tempting Cow Roast at Hampstead, besides a couple of unpretending Beef-steaks in Bath. Our bill of fare also contains plenty of mutton, sometimes rehaussé with a poetic sauce, as one that was at Hackney in the last century, The Shoulder of Mutton and Cat, having the following rhymes:—

“Pray Puss, don’t tear,
For the Mutton is so dear;
Pray Puss, don’t claw,
For the Mutton yet is raw.”

The sign is still there, but the verses are gone. This suggested to another innkeeper on the common at Horsham, the sign of the Dog and Bacon. An epicurean publican at Yapton, Arundel, has a more gastronomic combination, viz.:—the Shoulder Of Mutton and Cucumbers. It was at the Shoulder of Mutton in Brecknock that Mrs Siddons, England’s greatest tragic actress, was born, July 14, 1755. “Fancy,” writes an enthusiastic biographer, “the English Melpomene behind the bar of such a place!” Legs of Mutton on the signboard do not appear to be so common as Shoulders. But by far the finest of all the dishes represented on the signboard was the Boar’s Head, in Eastcheap, for the character of the famous inn patronised by Jack Falstaff makes the association of an excellent dish much more natural than any heraldic origin. The first mention of this inn occurs in the testament of William Warden, in the reign of Richard II., who gave “all that tenement called the Boar’s Head in Eastcheap,” to a college of priests, or chaplains, founded by Sir W. Walworth, the Lord Mayor, in the adjoining church of St Michael, Crooked Lane. The presence of “Prince Hal” in this house was no invention of Shakespeare; history records his pranks, how one night, with his two brothers, John and Thomas, he made such a riot that they had to be taken before the magistrate. No wonder, then, at the proud inscription on the sign, which still existed in Maitland’s time:—“This is the chief tavern in London.” At one time the portal was decorated with carved oak figures of Falstaff and Prince Henry; and in 1834 the former was in the possession of a brazier of Eastcheap, whose ancestors had lived in the shop he then occupied since the great fire. The last great Shakespearian dinner-party at the Boar’s Head took place about 1784, on which occasion Wilberforce and Pitt were present, and though there were many professed wits, Pitt was the most amusing of the company.

On the removal of a mound of rubbish at Whitechapel, brought there after the great fire, a carved boxwood bas-relief boar’s head was found, set in a circular frame formed by two boars’ tusks, mounted and united with silver. An inscription to the following effect was pricked in the back:—“Wm. Brooke, Landlord of the Bore’s Hedde, Estchepe, 1566.” This object, formerly in the possession of Mr Stamford, the celebrated publisher, was sold at Christie and Manson’s, on January 27, 1855, and was bought by Mr Halliwell.[551]

The original inn having been destroyed by the fire, was rebuilt and continued in existence until 1831, when it was finally demolished to make way for the streets leading to new London Bridge. Its site was between Small Alley and St Michael’s Lane. The ancient sign, carved in stone, with the initials I. T. and the date 1668, is now preserved in the City of London Library, Guildhall.

In the month of May 1718, one James Austin, “inventor of the Persian ink powder,” desiring to give his customers a substantial proof of his gratitude, invited them to the Boar’s Head to partake of an immense plum-pudding. This pudding weighed 1000 lbs.; a baked pudding of 1 foot square, and the best piece of an ox roasted: the principal dish was put in the copper on Monday, May 12, at the Red Lion Inn, by the Mint in Southwark, and had to boil fourteen days. From there it was to be brought to the Swan Tavern, in Fish Street Hill, accompanied by a band of music playing—“What lumps of pudding my mother gave me;” one of the instruments was a drum in proportion to the pudding, being 18 feet 2 inches in length, and 4 feet diameter, which was drawn by “a device fixt on six asses.” Finally the monstrous pudding was to be divided in St George’s Fields, but apparently its smell was too much for the gluttony of the Londoners; the escort was routed, the pudding taken and devoured, and the whole ceremony brought to an end, before Mr Austin had a chance to regale his customers.

Puddings seem to have been the forte of this Austin. Twelve or thirteen years before this last pudding, he had baked one for a wager, ten feet deep in the Thames, near Rotherhithe, by enclosing it in a great tin pan, and that in a sack of lime: it was taken up after about two hours and a half, and eaten with great relish, its only fault being that it was somewhat overdone. The bet was for more than £100. Austin was also noted for his fireworks.

The back windows of the Boar’s Head looked out upon the burial-ground of St Michael’s Church,[552] and there rested all that was mortal of one of the waiters of this tavern. His tomb, in Purbeck stone, had the following epitaph:—

“Here lieth the bodye of Robert Preston, late Drawer at the Boar’s Head Tavern, Great Eastcheap, who departed this Life, March 16, Anno Domini, 1730, aged 27 years.”

“Bacchus, to give the topeing world surprize,
Produc’d one sober son, and here he lies.
Tho’ nurs’d among full Hogsheads, he defy’d
The charm of wine and ev’ry vice beside.
O Reader, if to Justice thou ’rt inclin’d,
Keep Honest Preston daily in thy Mind.
He drew good wine, took care to fill his pots,
Had sundry virtues that outweighed his fauts (sic)
You that on Bacchus have the like dependance,
Pray, copy Bob, in measure and attendance.”[553]

Amongst other Boar’s Head Inns, we may notice one in Southwark, the property of Sir John Falstolf of Caistor Castle, Norfolk, who died in 1460, and whose name Shakespeare adopted in the play. Then there was another one without Aldgate, as appears from the following curious document:—

“At St James’s the v daye of September, an. 1557.

“A letter to the Lord Mayor of London, to give order forthwith that some of his officers do forthwith repaire to the Boreshed whout Aldgate, where the Lordes are enformed a lewde Playe, called ‘A Sacke full of Newse,’ shall be plaied this daye, the Playeres whereof he is willed to apprehende and to comitt to safe warde, untill he shall heare further from hence, and to take their Playsbook from them, and to send the same hither.

“At Westr the vj daye of Sep. 1557.”[554]

At the beginning of this century there was a noted tavern in Bond Street, called THE Brawn’s Head, and the general opinion was, that at one time it had a brawn or boar’s head for its sign; this, however, was a mistake; the house was named after the head of a noted cook whose name was Theophilus Brawn, formerly landlord of Rummer Tavern in Great Queen Street, and the article (as the letters THE were usually supposed to be) was simply an abbreviation of the man’s magnificent Christian name.

All these gastronomic signs, doubtless, originated in the old custom of landlords selling eatables:—

“You brave-minded and most joviall Sardanapalitans,” saith Taylor the Water poet, addressing the country tavern-keepers, “have power and prerogative (cum privilegio) to receive, lodge, feast, and feed, both man and beast. You have the happinesse to Boyle, Roast, Broyle, and Bake, Fish, Flesh, and Foule, whilst we in London have scarce the command of a Gull, a widgeon, or a woodcock.”

In a little volume of 1685, entitled “The Praise of Yorkshire ale,” we are told that Bacchus held a parliament in the Sun, behind the Exchange in York, to consider the adulteration of wine, the various drinking vessels, and other matters sold in alehouses, as:—

“Papers of sugar, with such like knacks,
Biskets, Luke olives, Anchoves, Caveare,
Neats’ tongues, Westphalia Hambs, and
Such like cheat, Crabs, Lobsters, Collar Beef,
Cold puddings, oysters, and such like stuff.”

Hence, then, the once common sign of the Three Neats’ Tongues, one of which still exists in Spitalfields; another one in the eighteenth century was very appropriately situated in Bull and Mouth Street.[555] The Ham is the usual porkman’s sign, though at Walmyth, in Yorkshire, there is a public-house sign of the Ham and Firkin. The Crab and Lobster Inn occurs at Ventnor; the Lobster is a sign on trades tokens of a shop in Bearbinder (now St Swithin’s) Lane, and also near the Maypole in the Strand; the Crawfish at Thursford Guist, in Norfolk, and the Butt and Oyster at Chelmondiston, Ipswich. Those eatables, all more or less salt, were sold as incitements to drink, and went by the cant term of shoeing horns, gloves, or pullers-on. They are often alluded to by ancient authors:—

“Then, sir, comes me up a service of shoeing-horns of all sorts, salt cakes, red herrings, anchoves, and gammon of bacon, and abundance of such pullers-on.”—Bishop Hall’s Mundus alter et idem.

The Pie was a sign in very early times, and gave its name to Pie Corner, “a place so called from such a sign, sometimes a fair inn for receipt of travellers.”—Stow, p. 139. One of the most famous inns with that sign was the Pie in Aldgate.

“One ask’d a friend where Captain Shark did lye,
Why, sir, quoth he, at Aldgate at the Pye.
Away, quoth th’ other, he lies not there, I know’t.
No, sayes the other, then he lies in ’s throat.”

Wits’ Recreation, p. 185, vol. ii.

De Foe, in his “History of the Plague,” tells of “a dreadful set of fellows” who used to revel and roar nightly in that inn during the time the plague was at its height, but within a fortnight all of them were buried. The Cock and Pie was once common. At an inn in Ipswich there used to be a rude representation of a cock perched on a pie, which was discovered whilst the house was undergoing some repairs. It was also, about the middle of last century, the sign of a house famed for conviviality, which stood on the site of the present Rathbone Place, Oxford Street, and was the resort of the “fancy” of those days. A row of fine elms connected this house with another, noted for the manufacture of Bath buns and Tunbridge water-cakes, the latter a dainty now almost obsolete, but which then was so famous, that it was one of the London cries, being sold by a man on horseback. With regard to the origin of the sign Cock and Pie, both the ancient Catholic oath, to swear by Cock and Pie, (by God and the Pie, or Roman Catholic service book,) and the fable of the magpie (Old English pie, or pye) and the peacocks, have each been duly considered by us; but the sign is probably only an abbreviation of the Peacock and Pie. In ancient times the peacock was a favourite dish, and was introduced on the table in a pie; the head, with gilt beak, being elevated above the crust, and the beautiful feathers of the tail expanded. As a dainty dish, then, it may have been put up, like the other good things of this world, just mentioned, as a trap to hungry or epicurean passers-by; at last the dish went out of fashion, the name even became a mystery, and was rendered by the sign-painters, according to their own understanding, by a Cock and Magpie, which is still very common. There is a public-house with such a sign in Drury Lane, which was already in existence more than two centuries ago, when the rest of Drury Lane was still occupied by farms and gardens, and the mansions of the Drury family. Hither the youths and maidens of the metropolis, who, on May-day, danced round the Maypole in the Strand, were accustomed to resort for cakes and ale, and other refreshments. This ale-house gave its name to the Cock and Pye Fields, between Drury Lane and St Giles’ Hospital. At Chatsworth, the original name was mutilated by a provincialism into the Cock and Pynot, (Derbyshire, for Magpie.) In this ale-house, still existing, the Revolution of 1688 was plotted, between Thomas Osborne Earl of Danby, William Cavendish Earl of Devonshire, and Mr John d’Arcy. They met by appointment on a heath adjoining the house, but a shower of rain coming on, they adjourned to the inn. The room is still shown in which the conspirators met. In Hone’s “Table Book” there is a woodcut of the inn, showing the wooden construction across the road, by which the signs in villages were generally suspended.

Lastly, we may mention the Pickled Egg, in Clerkenwell. As the origin of this sign, it is said that Charles II. here once partook of the dish, which so flattered the landlord, that he adopted it as his sign, and so it has remained till this day. It has given its name to a lane called Pickled Egg Walk, in which there was a notorious cocking-house, frequently mentioned in advertisements circa 1775.

We may very appropriately terminate the gastronomic signs with the Cheshire Cheese, which is still very common; there is a famous tavern of this name in Wine Office Court, Fleet Street, and numerous public-houses in the country have adopted it as their signs. And as we began with the Salt Horn we will end with the Mustard-pot, which was the sign of a mustard shop in Holland, in the seventeenth century, with these rhymes:—

“Ik lever uyt
Een zeldzaam kruyt
Daar zyn der weinig in de stad
Of ik heb ze by de neus gehad.”[556]

This reminds us of a rather indelicate sign of a mustard shop, formerly in the Rue du Chatel, at Beauvais, but now in the Musée d’Antiquités of that town, representing a fool stirring mustard in a barrel with a large stick, whilst a tall grinning monkey stands just opposite, assisting him in a way we need not describe.

Drinkables are not frequent as signs, if we except such as the Rhenish Wine House, and the Canary House; two taverns of Old London, named after the wines they sold. Barley Broth, Bee’s-wing, and Yorkshire Stingo, are at present all three common: the first applies either to whisky or beer; the second is the delicate crimson film left in bottles by old port wine, and Yorkshire stingo is the well-known name of a kind of ale. From a house with this name in the New Road, the first pair of London omnibuses were started, July 4, 1829, running to the Bank and back: they were constructed to carry twenty-two passengers, all inside; the fare was one shilling, or sixpence for half the distance, together with the luxury of a newspaper. A Mr J. Shillibeer was the owner of these carriages, and the first conductors were the two sons of a British naval officer.

Drinking vessels are very appropriate ale-house signs. Amongst the oldest certainly ranks the Black Jack, common even in the present day, although the vessel that it represented is long since fallen into disuse: it was a leather bottle, sometimes lined with silver or other metal, and perhaps took its name from a part of the soldiers’ armour. Sometimes it was ornamented with little silver bells “to ring peales of drunkeness,” in which case it was called a “gyngle boy.”[557] This primitive bottle has been celebrated in one of the Roxburghe Ballads, (vol. iii., fol. 433:)—

“God above that made all things,
The heaven, and earth, and all therein,
The ships that on the sea do swim
For to keepe the enemies out that none come in,
And let them all do what they can,
It is for the use and pains of man;
And I wish in heaven his soul may dwell,
Who first devized the leather bottle.”

Its various good qualities are next explained, and finally:—

“Then when this bottle doth grow old,
And will no longer good liquor hold,
Out of its side you may take a clout,
Will mend your shoes when they are worn out,
Else take it and hang it upon a pin,
It will serve to put odd trifles in,
As hinges, awls, and candle ends,
For young beginners must have such things.”

PLATE XV.

BELL AND HORNS. (Formerly in Brompton Road, circa 1830.) | RASP AND CROWN. (1780.) | HAND AND GLOVE. (Harleian Collection, 1708.)

GREEN MAN AND STILL.
(Harleian Collection, 1630.)

THE PUMP. (Harleian Collection, 1710.) | CROWN AND PATTEN. (Banks’s Collection, 1790.)

There is another ballad in the same collection, (vol i., fol. 107,) entitled “Time’s Alteration, or the Old Man’s Rehearsal,” which speaks of the black jack in the following terms:—

“Black jacks to euery man
Were filled with wine and Beere,
No pewter Pot nor Canne
In those days did appeare:
...... We took not such delight
In cups of silver fine;
No pewter Pot nor Canne
In those days did appeare:
...... None under the degree of a knight
In Plate drunk Beere or Wine.”

But we may glean more full and complete particulars from Heywood’s “Philocothonista or Drunkard Opened, Dissected and Anatomized,” 1635, where we get a detailed inventory of all the various drinking vessels of the day:—

“Of drinking Cups divers and sundry sorts we have; some of elme, some of box, some of maple, some of holly, etc. Mazers, broad mouthed dishes, naggins, whiskins, piggins, creuzes, alebowles, wassel bowles, court dishes, tankards, kannes, from a pottle to a pint, from a pint to a gill. Other bottles we have of leather, but they are most used amongst the shepheards and harvest people of the countrey: small jacks wee have in many alehouses of the citie and suburbs lipt with silver: blackjacks and bombards at the Court; which when the Frenchmen first saw, they reported at their return into their countrey that the Englishmen used to drinke out of their bootes. We have besides cups made of hornes of beastes, of cockernuts,[558] of goords, of eggs of estriches; others made of the shells of divers fishes brought from the Indies and other places, and shining like mother of pearle. Come to plate, every taverne can afford you flat bowles, french bowles, prounet cups, beare bowles, beakers; and private householders in the citie, when they make a feaste to entertain their friends, can furnish their cupboards with flaggons, tankards, beere cups, wine bowles, some white, some percell guilt, some guilt all over, some with covers, others without, of sundry shapes and qualities.”

That they were of ancient use and high in price appears from an entry in the expenses of John, King of France, when prisoner in England after the battle of Poictiers, 1359-60:—

“Pour deux bouteilles de cuir achetées a Londres pour Monseigneur Philippe9s. 8d.”

Though these vessels are now completely superseded by pewter and glass, yet their memory still lives on the signboard, and the Leather Bottle is anything but an uncommon ale-house emblem at the present day. There is one still to be seen, carved in wood, suspended in front of an old ale-house at the corner of Charles Street, Hatton Garden. In Germany, also, the leather bottle was once in use; drinking vessels of various materials, in the shape of a boot, are common in that country, usually with this inscription:—

“Wer sein Stiefel nit drinken kan,
Der ist führwahr kein Teutscher Man.”

The Black-jack Tavern, in Clare Market, still in existence, acquired some celebrity from being the favourite haunt of Joe Miller, the reputed author of the famous Jest Book. The house was also for a long time known by the cant name of the Jump, which it had received from the fact of Jack Sheppard one day escaping the clutches of Jonathan Wild’s emissaries by jumping from a window into the street, and so making his escape. From the Leather Bottle to the Golden Bottle is not so great a step as would appear at first sight, the golden bottle being simply the leather bottle gilt, as may be seen above the door of Messrs Hoare the bankers, in Fleet Street, a firm established for centuries under the same sign, although not always occupying the same premises. In the “Little London Directory for 1677” we find:—“James Hore at the Golden Bottle in Cheapside,” one of the goldsmiths that kept “running cashes.” In 1693 we find Mr Richard Hoare, a goldsmith, “at the Golden Bottle” in Cheapside, but in 1718 the house in Cheapside seems to have had a second occupant:—

“DROPT or taken from a Ladies’ side on Tuesday, the 25th of March, coming from the Spanish ambassadour’s at St James’ Square, a gold watch and chain, with a seal to it, a pendulum[559] on the outside; Windmill the maker. Whoever brings it to Mr Madding, Goldsmith at the Golden Bottle, the upper end of Cheapside, or to Jonathan Wilde, over against the Duke of Grafton’s Head in the Old Bailey, shall have 8 Guineas and no questions asked.”—Daily Courant, April 5, 1718.

That the Golden Can was also an old sign may be concluded from a mention in the nursery rhyme:—

“Little Brown Betty lived at the Golden Can,
Where she brewed good ale for gentlemen.
And gentlemen came every day,
Till little brown Betty she hopt away.”

Where the fact of little brown Betty brewing good ale points to a very old custom, when ale-wives flourished, and Eleanor Rumying and her gossips brewed their own ale. The Golden Can is still to be seen on two public-houses in Norwich. The Guilded Cup in Houndsditch is mentioned in a quaint little pamphlet on the virtues of “Warme Beere,” 1641.

The Flask was the sign of an old-established tavern in Ebury Square, Pimlico. In the last century there were two famous Flask taverns in Hampstead; the one called the Lower Flask was an inn at the foot of the hill, and is mentioned in the following advertisement, printed on the cover of the original edition of the Spectator, No. 428:—

“THIS IS TO GIVE NOTICE that Hampstead Fair is to be kept upon the Lower Flask Tavern Walk, on Friday, the first of August, and holds for four days.”

The Upper Flask was a place of public entertainment near the summit of Hampstead Hill, and is now a private residence. Here Richardson sends his Clarissa:—“The Hampstead coach, when the dear fugitive came to it, had but two passengers in it, but she made the fellow go off directly, paying for the vacant places. The two passengers directing the coachman to set them down at the Upper Flask, she bid them set her down there also.” The well-known Kit-Kat Club used to meet at this tavern in the summer months; and here, after it became a private abode, George Steevens, the celebrated critic and antiquary, lived and died.

Besides these, more homely vessels occur as publicans’ signs at the present day, which it requires no stretch of imagination to understand the meaning of, as the Pitcher and Glass, the Brown Jug, the Jug and Glass, the Bottle and Glass, the Foaming Quart, &c. At Newark the Bottle is accompanied by the following inscription:—

“From this Bottle I am sure
You’ll get a glass both good and pure,
In opposition to a many,
I’m striving hard to get a penny.”

The Pewter Pot, an old sign, is thus alluded to by Randle Holme.[560]

“This should be looked upon by all good artists to be the most ignoble and dishonourable bearing; but as the custom takes away the sense of dislike, so the frequent use takes away the dishonour, which is seen by those[388] multitudes that have it for their cognizance, in so much that it is painted over their doors by the wayside.”[561]

The Pewter Pot, in Leadenhall Street, was a famous carriers’ and coaching inn in 1681. There are also the Six Cans, in High Holborn, (a sign evidently suggested by the Three Tuns;) and, in the same locality, the Six Cans and Punchbowl. This last object, the Punchbowl, was introduced on the signboard at the end of the seventeenth century, when punch became the fashionable drink; in one instance, at Penalney Kea, near Truro, we have the Punchbowl and Ladle, but most generally it is found in combination with other very heterogeneous objects. The reason of this is that punch, like music, had a sort of political prestige, and was the Whig drink, whilst the Tories adhered to sack, claret, and canary, connected in their memory with bygone things and times. Hence it followed that the punchbowl was added as a kind of party-badge to many of the Whig tavern signs, and hence such combinations as the following, all of which still survive at the present day:—

The Crown and Punchbowl, Somersham, St Ives.

The Magpie and Punchbowl, Bishopsgate Within.

The Rose and Punchbowl, Redman’s Row, Stepney, and elsewhere.

The Ship and Punchbowl, Wapping.

The Red Lion and Punchbowl, St John’s Street, Clerkenwell.

The Union Flag and Punchbowl, High Street, Wapping.

The Dog and Punchbowl, Lymm, Warrington, Cheshire.

The Halfmoon and Punchbowl, Buckle Street, Whitechapel.

The Parrot and Punchbowl, Aldringham, Suffolk.

The Fox and Punchbowl, Old Windsor, (perhaps meant for the great statesman, who was not disinclined to the beverage.)

The Two Pots is the sign of a public-house at Boxworth, St Ives, accompanied by the following verses, which are enough to set the teeth of a Bœotian on edge: how then must they shock the refined ears of the Cambridge dons?—

“Rest, traveller, rest; lo, Cooper’s hand
Obedient brings two pots at thy command;
Rest, traveller, rest; and banish thoughts of care,
Drink to thy friends and recommend them here.”

Another Two Pots, at Leatherhead, can boast a most venerable antiquity, for it is believed to be the very ale-house where the notorious Eleanor Rumying tunned her “noppy ale,” and made

“thereof fast sale
To travellers, to tinkers,
To sweaters, to swinkers,
And all good ale-drinkers.”

There was, at the end of the last century, a painted sign still remaining, which, under a coating of summer’s dust and winter’s sludge, faintly showed two pots of beer placed in the same position as they are on the title-page of the original edition of Skelton’s poem.

The sign of the Two Pots again gave rise to that of the Three Pots, at Horseway Bridge, Chatteris, in the same county, and at Burbage, near Hinckley.

The Rummer, another drinking vessel, is also common: there is one in Old Fish Street, and there are three Rummer public-houses in Bristol alone. A tavern of that name was kept by Samuel Prior, uncle of Matthew Prior the poet. Uncle Sam took his nephew as an apprentice to learn the business, and be his successor. Prior alludes to this uncle and his little professional tricks in the following lines:—

“My uncle, rest his soul, when living,
Might have contrived me ways of thriving;
Taught me with cider to replenish
My vats or ebbing tide of Rhenish;
So, when for Hock I drew pricked white Wine,
Swear ’t had the flavour and was right wine.”

To his stay in this tavern also alludes the bitter Whig satire in “State Poems,” (ii., p. 355,) beginning—

“A vintner’s boy the wretch was first preferr’d
To wait at vice’s gates and pimp for bread;
To hold the candle, and sometimes the door,
Let in the drunkard, and let out the w——.”

In 1709 there was another Rummer tavern “over against Bow Lane, in Cheapside,” where “the surprizing Mr Higgins, the posture master, that lately performed at the Queen’s Theatre Royal in the Haymarket,” was to be seen every evening at six; admission 18d. and 1s.

This sign was also common in Holland two centuries ago; at that time there was one in Amsterdam with this inscription:—

“Als gy dees Roemer ziet, gy kunt ze pryzen of laken,
Maar komt in, proeft zyn nat, dat zal u beeter smaaken.”[562]

And another one at the Hague had this same idea, but added a caution to it on a double-sided signboard:—

“Dees Roemer die gy ziet en kan u niet vermaken,
Komt in en proeft het nat het zal u beter smaken
Maar siet eens wat hier achter staat.”

On the other side:—

“Betaal eerst, eer je henen gaat
Of anders hoed of mantel laat.”[563]

A near relative of the Rummer was the Bumper, a tavern in St James’ Street, Covent Garden, kept by Estcourt the actor. His drawer was “his old servant Trusty Anthony, who has so often adorned both the theatres in England and Ireland; and as he is a person altogether unknown in the Wine Trade, it cannot be doubted but that he will deliver the wine in the same natural purity as he receives it from the said merchants,” (Brooke & Hillier.)—Estcourt’s advertisements on the last page of the original Edition of the Spectator, cclx., 1711. To this occupation of Estcourt, Parnell alludes in the beginning of his poems:—

“Gay Bacchus liking Estcourt’s wine,
A noble meal bespoke us;
And for the guests that were to dine
Brought Comus, Love, and Jocus.”

This same Estcourt was sometime provedore of the Beefsteak Club.

Finally, we may conclude this notice of drinking vessels on the signboard with the Tankard, which is still of frequent occurrence. There is a public-house at Ipswich with this sign, which was formerly part of the house of Sir Anthony Wingfield, one of the legal executors of Henry VIII.

The hanap or tankard was generally of silver, and was formerly one of the most valuable properties of an ale-house, for in the Act 13 Edw. I., it says that “if a tavern-keeper keep his house open after curfew he shall be put on his surety the first time by the hanap of the tavern, or by some other good pledge therein found.”[564] Silver tankards were more or less common in all the London taverns. In some houses they were reserved for the more distinguished visitors; in others, as at the Bull’s Head in Leadenhall Street, “every poor mechanic drank in plate.” They were of different sizes, and experienced topers well knew for which name to call when ordering a tankard proportionate to their thirst. From a curious old tippler’s handbook, published in the reign of Queen Anne or George the First, entitled, “A Vade Mecum for Maltworms,” we gather that the names of the tankards at the Sweet Apple, in Sweet Apple Yard, were “the Lamb,” “the Lion,” “the Peacock,” (in honour of the brewer,) “Sacheverell,” (in memory of the notorious divine of St Andrew’s, Holborn,) and “Nan Elton.” The same work also relates a curious instance of enthusiasm in a publican. His house, the Raven, in Fetter Lane, was famous for

“Massy tankards form’d of silver plate,
That walk throughout his noted house in state;
Ever since Eaglesfield in Anna’s reign,
To compliment each fortunate campaign,
Made one be hammer’d out for every town was ta’en.”

We may suppose each tankard named after a victory—the greater the victory, the greater the tankard; and can imagine the gratifying display of loyalty in emptying those tankards to the perdition of “Popery and wooden shoes.”

Besides the tankard for drinking beer or wine, there was also the Water Tankard. In Ben Jonson’s comedy of “Every Man in his Humour,” 1598, Cob, the water-carrier of the Old Jewry, says:—“I dwell, sir, at the sign of the Water Tankard, hard by the Green Lattice. I have paid scot and lot there many time this eighteen years.” These water-tankards were used for carrying water from the conduits to the houses, and were therefore a professional sign of the water-carriers. The measures held about three gallons, and were shaped like a truncated cone, with an iron handle and hoops like a pail, and were closed with a cork, bung, or stopple. In Wilkinson’s “Londina Illustrata,” there is an engraving of Westcheap as it appeared in the year 1585, copied from a drawing of the period, in which the Little Conduit is seen with a quantity of water-tankards ranged round it.

Amongst the other articles of furniture which are represented on the signboard we must first of all notice that useful article the Looking Glass, which was the favourite sign of the booksellers on London Bridge. Thus, one of John Bunyan’s works, “The Saints’ Triumph, or the Glory of Saints with Jesus Christ discovered in a Divine Ejaculation by J. B.,” was printed by J. Millet for J. Blare, at the Looking Glass on London Bridge, in 1688. The French booksellers also used it: for instance, Nicholas Despréaux, or Dupré, a bookseller of the seventeenth century, who lived near the church of St Etienne du Mont, at Paris. Its origin was this:—Speculum, a looking-glass, was in the middle ages a common name for a certain class of books. We find, as early as 1332, a work entitled “Speculum Historiale in consuetudine Parisiensi;” then there is the “Grand Speculum Historiale,” the great historical work of Vincent of Beauvais, one of the most celebrated books of the Middle Ages; “Speculum Humanæ Salvationis;” “Speculum Humanæ Vitæ;” “Speculum Vitæ Christæ,” “a boke that is clepid the Myrrour of the blessed lyffe of our Lorde J’hu cryste;” the “Mirrour of Magistrates;” “Le miroir de l’ame pécheresse,” and innumerable other Speculums. These Speculums were amongst the first books that were printed; many of the early booksellers adopted the Bible as their sign, whilst others chose the Speculum, which they translated and made more fit for the signboard under the name of the Looking Glass.

A curious fact is connected with this so common title of the Speculum for early religious books. When the first pioneers in the art of printing were pondering over their new invention, during the transition period from block-printing to printing with detached letters, Guttenberg, in 1436, entered into an agreement with John Riffe, Anthony Heilman, and Andrew Dreizehn, in which speculation the three associates were to furnish the necessary funds, whilst Guttenberg was to pay them one half of any profits, the other half being for himself. After a certain time the association broke up, differences arose about the liquidation, and a lawsuit was the consequence. The documents of this lawsuit are still in existence; from them it appears that they kept their invention a secret, and called themselves “Spiegelmachers,” (makers of looking-glasses,) which looking-glasses, according to the evidence of witnesses, had found a very ready sale amongst the pilgrims who at that period congregated at Aix-la-Chapelle on the occasion of some religious festival. But as apparently no extra number of mirrors were sold on that occasion, and there does not appear to have been any new invention in the art of making them, it is evident that the looking-glasses sold were the Speculum books, which undoubtedly would be readily purchased by the pilgrims to the holy shrine. This opinion is still more corroborated by the mention made in the evidence of a Press, which could scarcely be used in the manufacture of looking-glasses. It is therefore most probable that, as the art of printing was at this period still in its infancy, and the printed works were sold rather as an imitation or facsimile[565] of the written manuscripts, this art was still kept a secret; by so doing, its early practitioners were not only safe from competition, but also from the attacks and opposition by which the new invention would have been assailed by all those connected with the business of transcribing and illuminating.[566]

Other pieces of furniture are the Cabinet, a common upholsterer’s sign in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the Three Crickets, or little stools, which we gather from a trades token of the seventeenth century, was in Crooked Lane; and the Cradle, a peculiar sign, occurs in Taylor’s “Carrier’s Cosmography,” 1637, where he gives a rather curious insight into the postal arrangements of that time:—

“Those that will send any letter to Edinbourgh, that so they may be conveyed to and fro to any parts of the kingdome of Scotland, the poste doth lodge at the signe of the kings armes or the Cradle at the upper end of Cheapside, from whence every Monday any that have occasion may send.”

Generally, however, it did not designate so respectable a business; the “Compleat Vintner,” 1720, explains the secret arcana of that sign:—

“The pregnant Madam drawn aside,
By promise to be made a bride,
If near her time and in distress
For some obscure convenient place,
Let her but take the pains to waddle
About till she observes a Cradle
[394] With the foot hanging towards the door,
And there she may be made secure
From all the parish plagues and terrors,
That wait on poor weak woman’s errors.
But if the head hang tow’rds the house,
As very often we see it does,
Avaunt, for she’s a cautious bawd
Whose business only lies abroad.”

From the last interpretation of this sign to the Colt in the Cradle (see under Humorous Signs) is but a step.

The Trunk was the sign of Caleb Swinock, a bookseller in St Paul’s Churchyard in 1684, for which it is difficult to find any rational explanation; almost equally incomprehensible is the sign of the Green Bellows, (le soufflet vert,) which was that of Johan Stoll and Peter Cesaris, booksellers and printers in the Rue St Jacques, Paris, in 1473.[567] This sign was also to be seen in other towns of France, as in Abbeville, where a stone bas-relief sign of the seventeenth century, with the inscription “le vert soufflet,” remains at the present day in the front of a house in the Rue des Jacobins. It may have been adopted in allusion to the occult sciences and alchemy, green being the emblematical colour of Hope.

The Golden Candlestick was the sign of a Marriage Insurance office in Newgate Street, in 1711, a time when there was a mania for insurance offices of every description; the Three Candlesticks occurs on a trades token of the Old Bailey in 1649. A publican in Tamworth, Staffordshire, has taken the Coffee-pot for a sign, probably on the strength of the derivation of “lucus a non lucendo,” because he sells no coffee; the Royal Coffee-mill was the more appropriate sign of Paul Greenwood, in Clothfair, for he was a seller of “Coffee-powder.”[568] Then there is the Sugar-loaf, a common grocer’s sign of former times, the selection of which showed great disinterestedness on their part, the article being that on which the least profit was made. Campbell said, in 1757:—

“There is indeed one article which they [the Grocers] must sell to their loss, sugars. A custom has prevailed (but why?) amongst the Grocers, to sell sugar for the prime cost, and are out of pocket by the sale,[395] with paper, packthread, and their labour in breaking and weighing it out. The expense of some shops in London, for the article of paper and packthread for sugars, amounts to £60 or £70 per annum; but this they lay upon the other articles. The customer had much better allow him a profit upon his sugars, than pay extravagant prices for tea and other comodities.”

At present, we understand, loaf-sugar is not sold exactly at cost price, but moist sugar is, whence many grocers refuse to sell that article to strangers unless something else be bought at the same time. At No. 44 Fenchurch Street, a very old established grocery firm still carries on business under the sign of the Three Sugar Loaves. The house presents much the same appearance it had in the last century, with the gilt sugar-loaves above the doorway, and is one of the few places of business in London conducted in the ancient style. The small old-fashioned window panes, the complete absence of all show and decoration, the cleanliness of the interior, and the quiet order of the assistants in their long white aprons, betoken the respectable old tea-warehouse, and impress the passer-by with a complete conviction as to the genuineness of its articles. That the sugar-loaf was not always exclusively a grocer’s sign, nor the Three Balls a pawnbroker’s, appears from the following advertisement in the Postman, February 3-6, 1711:—

“THOMAS SETH at the Sugarloaf in Fore Street, Pawnbroker, is going to leave his house, and to leave off the said business: all persons concerned are desired to fetch away their Goods on or before the fourth of March next, else they will be disposed off and sold.”

Here is another curious advertisement:—

“A TANNY MORE [tawny Moor] with short bushy hair, very well shaped, in a grey livery lined with yellow, about 17 or 18 years of age, with a silver collar about his neck with these directions:—‘Captain George Hastings’ Boy, Brigadier in the King’s Horse guards.’ Whosoever brings him to the Sugarloaf in the Pall Mall shall have forty shillings Reward.”—London Gazette, March 23, 1685.

The Sugar-loaf is also a public-house sign, though not a very appropriate one. The Blue Bowl, suggestive of punch-making, occurs on three public-houses in Bristol; but much more significant for a resort of thirsty souls is that of the Three Funnels, (les Trois Entonnoirs,) which in the time of Louis XIV. was the sign of a tavern in Paris, mostly patronised by the University people. An equally expressive sign, the Sieve, was used by John Johnson, in Aldermansbury, 1669, and “Richard Harris in Trinity Minories.”

We now arrive at kitchen utensils: foremost amongst these ranks the Gridiron, which was very common in the sixteenth century, and may perhaps have been a jocular rendering of the Portcullis. The Frying Pan is still a constant ironmonger’s sign—thus in Highcross Street, Leicester, there is a gigantic gilt specimen with the inscription “the Family Fry Pan.” There are trades tokens of “John Vere, at ye Frying Pan in Islington, Mealman,” which, considered in connexion with pancakes, one can understand; but it certainly looks out of place at the door of Samuel Wadsell, bookseller at the Golden Frying Pan, in Leadenhall Street, 1680. The Copper Pot (le Pot de Cuivre) at Dijon, in France, was the sign of one of the oldest inns in that country. It was opened in 1250 and continued till the middle of the seventeenth century. The society of the Mère Folle held their meetings at this house.

The Pewter Platter occurs both in France and in England; it was famous as a carriers’ inn in St John Street, Clerkenwell, in 1681. At this inn Curll’s translators, in pay, were lodged, and had to sleep three in a bed, and there “he and they were for ever at work to deceive the publick.”[569] In mediæval Paris it was a common sign, and gave its name to several streets. Two of the inns victimised by that incorrigible scamp Villon, bore this sign:—

“Le cas advint au Plat d’etain
Emprès saint Pierre-des-Arsis.”[570]—Repues Franches.

Probably it was a very early sign for eating-houses.

The Pump is a common ale-house sign, and occurs as such on a token of Tooley Street, with the following lines:—

“The Pump runs cleer
Wh. Ale and Beer.”

which, as Mr Burn (Beaufoy Tokens) observes, may be a travesty of a verse in Histrio-Mastrix, 1610:—

“Yet a verse may run cleare,
That is tapt out of Beere.”

Another token belonging to Chick Lane, West Smithfield, represents a hand grasping the handle of a pump; and a publican in Old Swinford, who combines engineering with his trade, has a similar sign with the words, “Hands to the Pump.” In the reign of Charles I. there was a public-house, the Blue Pump, in Blackfriars, near the famous Hollands Leaguer. It represented a man, evidently a sailor, pumping with all his might, and the legend ran:—“Poor Tom’s last refuge.”[571] With the pump we may place the Bucket, which was the sign of a shop in Aldersgate Street, of which there are trades tokens extant, and the Tub, the name of a tavern in Jermyn Street, in the reign of Charles II., as appears from a letter sent, (not written, for she could not write,) by Nell Gwynn, from Windsor in 1684, to her milliner and factotum, addressed “To Madam Jennings, over against the Tub tavern in Jermyn Street, London.” Another utensil, the Dust-pan, is common with hardware shops. There is one in Islington, at a shop next to the house in which Charles Lamb lived; at night it is illuminated, and hence called the Illuminated Dust-pan. Lastly, there is the Hour-glass, a colossal specimen carved in wood, in Upper Thames Street, near All Hallows Church, and the Golden Jar, which was the sign of a china shop, as we see in the Country Journal, or Craftsman, for April 25, 1730, where Anne Cibber acquaints the public that she is removed from Charles Street to the Golden Jar in Tavistock Street, carrying on two trades which now are rarely associated in London, viz., “All sorts of chinaware, and the best teas, coffees, chocolate,” &c. Now-a-days the jars, painted red and green, are the usual oilman’s sign, representing those vessels in which oil is kept in Eastern countries, and in which Ali Baba’s forty thieves came to such an untimely end. Formerly oil used to be imported in this country in similar jars, hence their adoption as trade emblems.

We may close this chapter, not inappropriately with the Key, a sign once largely used, not only by locksmiths, as at present, but by all manners of shops; thus there was a celebrated tavern, at the corner of Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, circa 1690, and many others that could be mentioned. The Golden Key is named in an old advertisement, speaking of some sports and pastimes which many English gentlemen are now attempting to revive:—

“RICHARD FENNEY, Esquire of Alaxton in Leicestershire, about a forthnight since, lost a lanner from that place; she has neither Bells nor Varvels; she is a white Hawk, and her long feathers and sarcels are both in the blood. If any one give tidings thereof to Mr Lambert at the Golden Key, in Fleet Street, they shall have 40 shillings for their pains.”—Mercurius Publicus, August 30 to September 6, 1660.

The Lock and Key is a sign of a public-house in West Smithfield, and was, during the Commonwealth, that of a house in the parish of St Dunstan, belonging to Praise God Barebones, citizen and leather-seller of London. There is a MS. in the British Museum,[572] containing a petition of Barebones against Elisabeth and James Spight, the latter an infant under age, offered to the court of judicature for determination of differences touching houses burned or demolished by the fire of 1666. From that paper it appears that Elisabeth Spight paid £40 a year for the rent of the Lock and Key.

[543] London Gazette, August 28 to Sept. 1, 1679.

[544] “Itinerarium Curiosum,” 1776, p. 14.

[545] Letter of John Paston to Sir John Paston, Sept. 21, 1472.

[546] Marston’s Antonio and Mellida, 1633.

[547] Tom Brown’s Works, vol. iii, p. 243.

[548] Tom Brown’s Amusements for the Meridian of London, 1706.

[549] “It represented a burning lamp, such as some pastry-cooks have to amuse the children, on which geese, monkeys, elephants, dogs, cats, hares, foxes, and many strange animals are to be seen running after each other.”

[550]

“My lamp is kept burning by the produce of the East.
Oil, figs, and currants sold here.”

[551] There is a drawing of this very curious relic in a number of the Illustrated London News, published shortly after the sale.

[552] Also demolished to make room for the streets leading to London Bridge.

[553] Lansdowne MSS. No. 889, art. 73.

[554] Harleian MSS No. 256.

[555] Bagford Bills, Harleian MSS.

[556] This loses much by translation:—

“I contain
A curious kind of condiment—
There are not many people in this town
Which I have not had by the nose.”

This is a pun in Dutch, on the sensation produced in the nose by mustard, the expression meaning, at the same time, “to take in.”

[557] Decker’s English Villanies Seven Times Pressed to Death.

[558] Cocoa-nuts. The word is still pronounced in that manner by the lower classes.

[559] A face or dial-plate, sometimes also called pendulum dial.

[560] Book iii., p. 294.

[561] What would old Randle Holme have said, had he seen the elegant (!) breast-pins displayed in the shop-windows of one of the principal West End jewellers, forming the tasteful device of a tobacco-pipe on a quart pot; another with a rebus for: “You are an art[a heart]ful card;” and a third with: “O my eye!” and similar distingué ornaments.

[562]

“When you see this Rummer you may praise or blame it,
But come in, and taste its liquor, you will like that better.”

[563]

“This Rummer which you see here cannot give you much pleasure.
Come in, and taste its liquor, you will like that better,
But first, see what is written on the other side.”

On the other side:—

“Pay before you go away,
Otherwise you will have to leave your hat or your cloak.”

[564] Liber Albus, Book iii., Part ii.

[565] Even after the art got to be known, it continued to be still called writing. Thus, Gaspar Hedion (Paral. ad Chron. Conradi) calls it “novo scribendi genere reperto,” and Fulgosus (Lib. viii., Dict. & Fact. Memor.) says that Guttenberg could “uno die imprimendo plura scribere quam uno anno calamis.”

[566] See the whole of the documents of this law-suit in Count Leon de Laborde’s Débuts de l’Imprimerie à Strasbourg.

[567] This De Cesaris family seemed to have a predilection for puzzling signboards. When Peter de Cesaris, a bookseller and printer in the Rue St Jacques, circa 1480, had for a sign the Swan and Soldier, (le cygne et soldat,) in the absence of his colophon, we can only suppose that it was a representation of the legend of the Knight of the Swan, i.e., a knight in a boat drawn by a swan. The steel armour of the knight might easily have bestowed upon him the title of “the soldier.”

[568] London Gazette, Nov. 10-13, 1679.

[569] Loyd’s Evening Post, Jan 9-12, 1767.

[570]

“It happened at the Pewter Platter,
Near Saint Pierre des Arsis.”

[571] Whether it would be just to conclude from this that sailors in that time went by the generic name of Tom instead of Jack, we leave to the reader to judge. That Tom was in former times a more common name than now, (owing, it is said, to the respect at one time paid to the great saint Thomas a-Becket,) appears from the many words to which it is an affix, and from many imaginary names, as:—Tomtit, Tomcat, Tomfoolery, Tomboy, Tommyshop, Tommy, (slang for bread,) double Tom, (a sort of plough,) Tom the Piper, (in the morris dance,) Tom Tiddler, Tom of Bedlam, Tom of Westminster, (a bell,) Tom and Jerry, Tom Telltruth, Tom Hickathrift, Tom, (the knave of Trumps,) Whipping Tom, an itinerant flogger of wandering maids, Tom Tapster, “Tib’s rush for Tom’s forefingers,” (all’s well that ends well.)

“Then every wanton may dance at her will,
Both Tomkin with Tomlin and Jenkin with Gill.”

Tusser’s Plowman’s Fasting Day

[572] Additional MSS., 5079.

CHAPTER XII.
DRESS; PLAIN AND ORNAMENTAL.

Of this class only a few signs are to be found; one of the most common is the Hat, the usual hatter’s sign, although it may also be found before taverns and public-houses, in which case, however, it is probable that it was the previous sign of the house, which the publican on entering left unaltered; or it may have been used to suggest “a house of call” to the trade. The age of each individual hat-sign may sometimes be gathered from its shape; thus there is one in Whitechapel, made out of tin, representing the cocked hat worn at the end of the last century; it is evidently a relic of that time. The continental hatters using this sign, occasionally indulged in a little humour. A hatter at Ghent in the sixteenth century added to it this distich:—

“Onder den Hoedt
Schuylt quaedt & goet.”[573]

And a Dutch hatter made a still more unpleasant allusion to the brains of his customers:—

“Hier maakt men sterke hoeden om de hersens in te sluyten
Opdat het los verstand daar niet mag vliegen buyten.”[574]

Dr Franklin used to tell an amusing story of a journeyman hatter, his companion when young, who on commencing business for himself, was anxious to get a handsome signboard, with a proper inscription. This he composed himself as follows:—

JOHN THOMPSON, HATTER,
Makes and Sells Hats
for Ready Money

Above the inscription was the ordinary figure of a hat. But he thought he would submit the composition to his friends for amendment. The first he showed it to thought the word “hatter” tautologous, because followed by the words “makes hats,” which showed he was a hatter; it was struck out. The next observed that the word “makes” might as well be omitted, because his customers would not care who made the hats; if good, and to their mind, they would buy, by whomsoever made. He struck that out also. A third said he thought that the words “for ready money” were useless, as it was not the custom of the place to sell on credit—every one who purchased expected to pay. These, too, were parted with, and the inscription then stood, “John Thompson sells Hats.” “Sells Hats!” says his next friend; “why, who expects you to give them away? What, then, is the use of the word?” It was struck out, and HATS was all that remained attached to the name John Thompson. Even this inscription, brief as it was, was reduced ultimately to “John Thompson,” with the figure of the hat above it.

The Hat and Feathers was almost equally common in those days, when no full-fledged gallant could be deemed complete without his fluttering ribbons and plume. The puritanical Philip Stubbe in his “Anatomie of Abuses,” 1585, is very hard upon this fashion:—

“Another sort, (as phantasticall as the rest,) are content with no kind of hat, without a great bunch of feathers of divers and sondrie colours, peaking on top of their heades, not unlike (I dare not saie) cockes combes, but as Sternes of Pride and ensignes of vanitie and these fluttering sailes and feathered flagges of defiaunce to virtue, (for so they are,) are so advanced in Ailgnia [Anglia] that euery child has thē in his Hatte or Cappe. Many get good living by deying and selling of them, and not a fewe proue themselues more than fooles in wearyng of them.”

Decker calls the “swell” of his day “our feathered ostrich,” and in his comedy of the “Sun’s Darling” he mentions “some alderman’s son wondrous giddy and light-headed, one that blew his patrimony away in feathers and tobacco.” There is one sign of the Hat and Feathers still in existence, a publican’s, at Grantchester, in Cambridgeshire.

Another old hatter’s sign is the Hat and Beaver, which at present may be seen at the door of a publican’s in Leicester. Shopbills of this once common sign occur amongst the Banks Collection, representing a beaver seated on the edge of a stream, with a hat above him. The relation between the two is evident, and about as gratifying to the beaver as it was to the widow of the hanged man to hear the gallows named. The beaver hats worn in England at the time of Edward III., and long after, were made in Flanders and Picardy. From the Privy Purse expenses of Henry VIII. we see that the king paid in 1532:—

“Item, the xxiij day [of October] for a hath and plume for the King in Boleyn, xv shillings.”

“On 27 May MDLV. (ij of Queen Mary) Sir William Cecil [afterwards Lord Burghley] being then at Callice [Calais] bought [as appears from his MS. Diary] three hats for his children at xxd each.”

The Protestant refugees, however, from Flanders and France, introduced the manufacture of these hats into England when they settled in Norwich; by a statute 5 and 6 Edw. VI., the manufacture of felt and thrummed hats was confined to Norwich and the corporate and market towns in that county.[575] As for the shapes of the hats worn at that period we must again refer to Stubbe’s satirical account:—

“Some tymes they use them sharpe on the crowne, pearking up like the speare or shaft of a steeple, standing a quarter of a yarde above the crowne of their heades, some more, some lesse, as pleases the fantasies of their inconstant mindes; othersome be flat and broad in the crowne like the battlements of a house. Another sort have round crownes, sometymes with one kinde of bande, sometymes with another, now blacke, now whyte, now russet, now red, now green, now yellowe, now this, now that, never content, with one colour or fashion two daies to an ende.”[576]

Felt hats for a long time were exclusively worn by the aristocracy. Stow tells us that “about the beginning of Henry VIII. began the making of Spanish feltes in England, by Spaniardes and Dutchmen, before which time, and long since the English used to ride, and goe winter and sommer in knitcapps, cloth hoods, and the best sort in silk throm’d Hatts.” These caps were enforced by a statute of 13th Queen Elizabeth, which gives, at the same time, a curious picture of the fashions of that period:—

“If any person above six yeares of age, (except maidens, ladies, gentlewomen, nobles, knights, gentlemen of twenty marks by year in lands, and their heirs, and such as have borne office of worship,) have not worn upon the Sundays and Holidays, (except it be in the time of his travell out of the citie, towne, or hamlet, where he dwelleth,) uppon his head one cap of wool knit, thicked, and dressed in England, and onely dressed and finished by some of the trade of cappers, shall be fined 3s. 4d. for each day’s transgression.”

These caps, termed statute caps, are frequently alluded to by the dramatists and authors of that period. Rosalind, for instance, in “Love’s Labour Lost,” taunts her lover with the words: “Well, better wits have worn plain statute caps.” The act was repealed in the year 1597. The sign of the Cap and Stocking, still in Leicester, commemorates the once-flourishing trade of that town in those articles. The quantity of workmen who found occupations in the manufacture of the above-named “statute caps,” (which came chiefly from Leicestershire and the surrounding districts,) was one of the principal reasons why it was so often protected by parliamentary statutes. Fuller enumerates not less than fifteen callings, “besides other exercises,” all employed in the trade of capmaking, beginning with the woolcarder, and ending with the bandmaker. The Hat and Star, which occurs on the bill of Master Bates in St Paul’s Churchyard, who sold all sorts of fine “caines, whippes, spurres,”[577] &c., if not a simple quartering of two signs, possibly originated in the clasp ornament of precious stones, formerly worn in the hat. The Leghorn Hat, at the end of the last century, was generally a turner’s sign, because the members of that trade sold straw hats imported from Leghorn. In St John Street, Clerkenwell, there was an old established public-house, and place of resort, called the Three Hats. It is mentioned by Bickerstaff in his comedy of “The Hypocrite,” where Mawworm thus alludes to it:—

“Till I went after him, [Dr Cantwell,] I was little better than the devil, my conscience was tanned with sin, like a piece of neat’s leather, and had no more feeling than the sole of my shoe; always a roving after fantastical delights; I used to go every Sunday evening to the Three Hats at Islington; it’s a public-house . . . mayhap your Ladyship may know it. I was a great lover of skittles, too, but now I cannot bear them.”

At this house the earliest prototypes of Astley used to perform in 1758. There was Thomas, an Irishman, surnamed Tartar; then came Johnson, Sampson, Price, and Cunningham. The great Dr Johnson went here to see his namesake.

“Such a man, sir, said he, should be encouraged; for his performance show the extent of human powers in one instance, and thus tend to raise our opinion of the faculties of man. He shows what may be obtained by persevering application; so that every man may hope, by giving as much application, although, perhaps, he may never ride three horses at a time, or dance upon a wire, yet he may be equally expert in whatever profession he has chosen to pursue.”

Royalty also visited the place: “Yesterday his Royal Highness the Duke of York was at the Three Hats, Islington, to see the extraordinary feats of horsemanship exhibited there. There were near five hundred spectators.”[578] Sampson’s wife was the first female equestrian.

Horsemanship

At Mr Dingley’s, the Three Hats, Islington.

“MR SAMPSON begs leave to inform the public, that besides the usual feats which he exhibits, Mrs Sampson, to diversify the entertainment, and prove that the fair sex are by no means inferior to the male, either in Courage or Agility, will, this and every Evening during the Summer, perform various exercises in the same art, in which she hopes to acquit herself to the universal approbation of those Ladies and Gentlemen whose curiosity may induce them to honour her attempt with their company.”[579]

The Three Hats occurs amongst the trades tokens of the seventeenth century. There is one of the Three Hats and Nag’s Head in Southwark. In the seventeenth century the sign of the Three Hats at Leeuwarden, in Friesland, was accompanied by the following stanza:—

“Dit is in de drie Hoeden
Om ’t hoofd te behoeden,
Voor wind en koud.
Tromp was stout,
Voor der staten kroon,
Hier maakt men hoeden schoon.”[580]

The Locks of Hair was the very appropriate sign of John Allen, a hairdresser on London Bridge in the last century, who sold “all sorts of hair, Curled or Uncurled; Bags, Roses, Cauls, Ribbons, Weaving Silk, Sewing Cards, and Blocks. With all Goods made use of by Peruke makers, at the lowest prices.”[581] The locks of hair were represented curled and tied. This sign appears to have been not unusual with the hairdressers of a former age. In 1649, there was one in St Dunstan’s-in-the-East, who had the Lock and Shears; which are represented on his trades token by a lock of hair between a pair of shears, intimating that the “unlovely lovelocks” were curtailed by him. What he would require the tokens for in his profession (they were used as farthings) it is difficult to guess, as apparently no such small change was needed. This sign was in accordance with the spirit of the times; short hair was the unmistakable mark of the godly puritan, just as the straggling love-lock hanging over the shoulder denoted the cavalier. For this reason, Decker advises the young cavalier Gull:—

“Thy hair, whose length before the rigorous edge of any puritanical pair of scissors should shorten the breadth of a finger, let the three house-wifely spinsters of Destiny rather curtail the thread of thy life. Oh, no! long hair is the only net that women spread abroad to entrap man in, and why should not men be as far above women in that comodity as they go far beyond them in others.”[582]

The Periwig was another common hairdresser’s sign. Even this had to submit to the favourite blue colour, for amongst the Banks bills there is one of John Thompson, in Brewer Street, Golden Square, who lived at the Blue Peruke and Star. The star evidently was the original sign, to which the wig had been added on account of the profession of the occupant of the house.

The White Peruke, in Maiden Lane, was the sign of the barber, at whose lodgings Voltaire lived when on a visit to London; some of his letters to Swift are dated from that place. A white periwig was a highly fashionable object:—“Now, I think he looks very humorous and agreeable; I vow, in a white periwig he might do mischief; could he but talk and take snuff, there’s never a fop in town wou’d go beyond him.”—Cibber’s Double Gallant, 1707. So Shadwell, in “The Humorist,” 1671, describes Brisk, one of the dramatis personæ, as “a fellow that never wore a noble and polite garniture, or a white periwig.” Well might the barbers give the peruke the honour of this signboard, for the profits on that article must have been enormous. In Charles II.’s time, for instance, a fine peruke cost as much as £50; and hence the great respect Cibber paid to the one he wore in the character of Sir Fopling Flutter, which was brought on the stage in a sedan, and put on before the public. As the glory of Miltiades prevented Epaminondas from sleeping, so the beauty of this periwig disturbed the slumbers of Mr (afterwards Colonel) Brett, who in the end bought it from Cibber.[583] The thieves as well as the beaux knew the value of those wigs, and practised all manner of tricks to obtain them. Sometimes a boy, carried in a basket on the shoulders of a man, would snatch the “curly honour” off the head of the unsuspecting beau;[584] at other times they would cut holes in the leather backs of the coaches,[585] whilst the highwaymen were sure to include the periwig with the rest of the booty captured on the road. Though this article is now shorn of its honours, there is still a publican at Great Redisham, Suffolk, who carries on his trade under the sign of the Wig.

The French have a sign quite as absurd as our Blue Peruke—viz., The Golden Beard, (la barbe d’or,) which is carved in stone in the Rue des Bourdonnais, Paris, and also in the Marché aux Herbes, Amiens: both these signs date from the eighteenth century, but their origin is much older, as appears from the following:—

“The Duke of Lorraine, after the Battle of Nancy, wherein he killed Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy, went in procession to visit the body, clothed in deep mourning, with a golden beard fixed on, that reached down to his waist, (after the manner of the old heroes that were knighted for their prowess, who, on a signal victory over an enemy, were honoured with such a beard.)”—Richardsoniana, London, 1776, p. 47.

The Anodyne Necklace was as notorious in the eighteenth century, as Holloway’s Pills and Rowland’s Macassar Oil are in our day. Advertisements concerning it were continually appearing in the papers:—

“THE Anodyne Necklace for children’s teeth, women in labour, and distempers of the head; price 5s. Recommended by Dr Chamberlain. Sold up one pair of stairs at the sign of the Anodyne Necklace, without Temple Bar; at the Spanish Lady at the Royal Exchange, next Threadneedle Street; at the Indian Handkerchief, facing the New Stairs in Wapping,” &c.[586]

To attract attention, there was frequently some book of not very delicate character, advertised as “given away gratis” at this house. But as this kind of literature was sure to find a great many readers—more especially when the book could be had for nothing—a restriction was sometimes added that “this curious book will not be given away to any boys or girls, or any paultry person.” Such a pamphlet, for instance, was:—

“THE RABBIT-AFFAIR made clear in a full account of the whole matter, with the pictures engraved of the pretended rabbit-breeder herself, Mary Tofts, and of the rabbits, and of the persons who attended her during her pretended deliveries, showing who were and who were not deceived by her. ’Tis given gratis nowhere, but only up one pair of stairs at the sign of the Anodyne Necklace, recommended by Dr Chamberlain,” &c.—Daily Courant, Jan. 11, 1726.

This alluded to one of the most impudent frauds ever committed. A certain profligate woman, Mary Tofts by name, a native of Godalming, in Surrey, pretended to give birth to rabbits. The first delivery was a family of seventeen; she actually found people who believed her, and gave their attention to this phenomenon. Amongst them were Sir Richard Manningham, Dr St André, surgeon and anatomist to his Majesty, Dr Mowbray, &c. By these gentlemen she was brought to Lacy’s Bagnio, and the case was watched with intense interest; yet she succeeded in baffling and deluding their attention. At last the fraud came out by one of her accomplices informing upon her. Prints, books, and ballads were published upon the subject, Dr St André coming in for an extra share of ridicule; but whether the woman was in any way punished, is not on record. The last information respecting her was in the Weekly Miscellany, April 19, 1740:—“The celebrated rabbit-woman, of Godalmin’, in Surrey, was committed to Guilford gaol for receiving stolen goods.” She died in January 1763.

The Pearl of Venice is named in an advertisement of a watch lost, “made at Paris, not so broad as a shilling, in a case of black leather with gold nails.”[587] It was the sign of “Mr Leroy, in St James’ Street, Covent Garding.” The pearls of Venice were celebrated:—

“Is your pearl orient, sir?
Corv. Venice was never owner of the like.”

—Ben Jonson, The Fox, a. i., s. i.

At the same time that city was celebrated for its mock jewellery and glass imitations.

From the Bagford shopbills, it appears that the Blue Boddice was, in Queen Anne’s reign, a milliner’s shop in the Long Walk, near Christchurch Hospital. At the same period another member of the same fraternity (there were men-milliners in those days) had the Hood and Scarf, articles of female apparel; this shop was in Cornhill, “over against Wills’ Coffee-house.”[588] At the present time there is in the North a public-house called the Blue Stoops; this also seems to refer to an ancient garment, worn in the beginning of the seventeenth century, and named by Ben Jonson—“Alchymist,” a. iv., s. ii.—“Your Spanish stoop is the best garment.”

The Bonny Cravat, at Woodchurch, Tenterden, to judge from the adjective, seems rather to have been suggested by the old song of “Jenny, come tie my bonny cravat,” than by the introduction of the cravat as an article of dress. The fashion is said to have been brought over from Germany, in the seventeenth century, by some of the young French nobility, who had served the emperor in the wars against the Turks, and had copied this garment from the Croats, whence the name.

The Doublet, formerly the Harrow and Doublet,[589] is still the sign of an iron warehouse in Upper Thames Street; it bears the date 1720, and the letters T. C., the initials of one of the Crowley family, to whom this warehouse has belonged “time out of mind.” It is made of cast and painted iron, and is said to represent the leather doublet in which the founder of the firm came to London as a day-labourer. The doublet was a kind of vestment which originated from the gambason or pourpoint worn under the armour; sleeves were added when it was worn without armour, and so it became a universal garment.

There are trades tokens extant of the Child-coat, in Whitecross Street, probably a shop where children’s apparel was sold. Randle Holme, in his heraldic Omnium Gatherum, b. iii., ch. i, p. 18, gives a representation of a child’s coat, which is very similar to the “Knickerbocker” suit of the present day, with a short kilt added to it. He adds the following explanation:—“A boy’s coat is the last coat used for boys, after which they are put into breeches. If it has hanging sleeves, they would term it a child’s coat.” In the same manner as the child’s coat, the Minister’s Gown figured at the door of the shop where this article was sold. There is a shopbill of such a one in Booksellers’ Row, St Paul’s Churchyard, among the Bagford bills.

The Tabard was the well-known inn in Southwark whence Chaucer and the other pilgrims started on their way to Canterbury. Mr Edmund Ollier has recently contributed a very interesting paper on this old inn to All the Year Round, and several paragraphs have appeared in other journals upon the same subject. A very few words, therefore, will be sufficient for the present purpose. Originally, it was the property of the Abbot of Hyde, near Winchester, who had his town residence within the inn-yard. The earliest record relating to this property is in 33d Edw. I., (1304,) when the Abbot and convent of Hyde purchased of William of Lategareshall two houses in Southwark, held by the Archbishop of Canterbury at the annual rent of 5s. 1

1

2

d., and suit to his court in Southwark, and 1d. a year for a purpresture of one foot wide on the king’s highway; £4 per annum to John de Tymberhutts, and 3s. to the Prior and convent of St Mary Overie, in Southwark; value clear, 40s.

It is a fact on record that Henry Bayley, the hosteller of the Tabard, was one of the burgesses who represented the borough of Southwark in the Parliament held in Westminster in the 50th Edw. III., (1376;) and he was again returned to the Parliament held at Gloucester in the 2d Richard II., in 1378.[590] The tavern itself is named, at the very period when Chaucer’s poem is supposed to have been written, in one of the rolls of Parliament, where, 5th Richard II., (1381,) in a list of malefactors who had participated in the rebellion of Jack Cade, occurs the name of “Joh’es Brewersman, manens apud le Tabbard, London.” Stow thus notices the old inn:—

“From thence to London, on the same side, be many fair inns for receipt of travellers, by their signs—the Spurre, Christopher, Bull, Queen’s Head, Tabarde, George, Hart, King’s Head, &c. Amongst the which the most ancient is the Tabard; so called of the sign, which, as we now term it, is a jacket or sleeveless coat, whole before, open on both sides, with a square collar, winged at the shoulders, a stately garment of old time, commonly worn of noblemen and others, both at home and abroad in the wars, but then, (to wit, in the wars,) their arms embroidered or otherwise depict upon them, that any man by his coat of arms might be known from others; but now these tabardes are only worn by the heralds, and be called their coate of armes in service.”—Stow, p. 154.

Formerly there stood in the road, in front of the Tabard, a beam laid crosswise upon two uprights, upon which was the following inscription:—“This is the Inne where Sir Jeffrey Chaucer and the nine-and-twenty pilgrims lay in their journey to Canterbury, anno 1583.” Over this the sign was hung, but that disappeared with the rest of them in 1766. The writing of this inscription seemed ancient, yet Tyrwhitt is of opinion that it was not older than the seventeenth century, since Speght, who describes the Tabard in his edition of Chaucer 1602, does not mention it. Perhaps it was put up after the fire of 1676, when the Tabard changed its name into the Talbot.

At the present day the inn is known by the name of the Talbot; and although the building is by no means the same that sheltered Chaucer and his merry pilgrims, yet it is full of traditionary lore concerning them. In the centre of the gallery there was a picture, said to be by Blake, and well painted, representing the Canterbury Pilgrimage, almost invisible from dirt, age, and smoke. Behind this picture was a door opening into a lofty passage, with rooms on either side, one of which, on the right hand, was still designated as the Pilgrims’ Room. The house was repaired in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and from that period, probably, dated the fireplace, carved oak panels, and other parts spared by the fire of 1676, which were still to be seen in the beginning of this century.

As leather breeches were much used for riding in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the occupations of breeches-maker and glover were frequently combined; hence the sign of the Breeches and Glove on old London Bridge, the shop of “Walter Watkins, Breeches-maker, Leather-seller, and Glover.” But what made a Cornish publican of the present day, (at Camelford,) choose the sign of the Cotton Breeches, is more than we can pretend to explain.

Stockings or Legs are of constant occurrence in the seventeenth century trades tokens, as the signs of hosiers—frequently real, not painted, stockings were suspended at the door.

“On hosier’s poles depending stockings ty’d,
Flag with the slacken’d gale from side to side.”—Gay’s Trivia.

Boots and shoes occur in greater variety and abundance than any other article of dress. The Boot is a very common inn sign, either owing to the thirsty reputation of cobblers, or from the premises where they are found having been at one time occupied by shoemakers. The Boot and Slipper may be seen at Smethwick, near Birmingham; the Golden Slipper at Goodrange, in West Riding; the Hand and Slippers was a sign in Long Lane, Smithfield, in 1750. The Shoe and Slap occurs in the following handbill:—

“AT MR CROOME’S, at the sign of the Shoe and Slap, near the Hospital
Gate, in West Smithfield, is to be seen
The Wonder of Nature,

A Girl above Sixteen Years of Age, born in Cheshire, and not above Eighteen inches long, having shed her Teeth seven several Times, and not a perfect Bone in any Part of her, only the Head, yet she hath all her senses to Admiration, and Discourses, Reads very well, Sings, Whistles, and all very pleasant to hear.

“Sept. 4, 1667.

‘God save the King.’”

A slap was a kind of “ladies shoe, with a loose sole,”[591] the origin, probably, of the present word slipper. Another kind of shoe is also mentioned in an advertisement—the Laced Shoe in Chancery Lane.[592] “Laced shoes,” says Randle Holme, “have the over leathers and edges of the shoe laced in orderly courses with narrow galloon lace of any colour;” this places the use of laced boots much earlier than we would have been apt to imagine. The Clog is often used as a shoemaker’s sign in Lancashire and the midland counties, and also in those parts of London where that article is worn. The Five Clogs was, in 1718, the sign of William Wright, a quack, who lived over against Prescott Street, Goodman’s Fields.[593] Perhaps he occupied apartments at a clog-maker’s. Even the primitive Wooden Shoe (sabot) of France has figured as a tavern sign in that country. In a farce of the fourteenth century, entitled, “Pernet qui va au Vin,” the husband names the following taverns:—

“Au Sabot ou à la Lanterne
J’ai mis en oubli la taverne.”

Ronsard addressed some of his verses to the hostess of this tavern, which was situated in the Faubourg St Marcel:—

“Je ne suis point, ma guerrière Cassandre,
Ni Mirmidon, ni Dolope soudard.”

“Il n’y a personne,” says Furretière in his Roman Bourgeois, “qui ne se figure qu’on parle d’une Pentasilée ou d’une Talestris; cepandant cette guerrière Cassandre n’était reellement qu’une grande hallebreda qui tenit le cabaret du Sabot dans le faubourg Saint Marcel.”[594]

This sign has given its name to a street in Paris.

The Patten, the quaint little contrivance in which our great-grandmothers tripped through the winter’s sludge, was the sign of a toy-shop in the Haymarket, “over against Great Suffolk Street, and by Pall Mall;”[595] at the present day it is still extant as a fishmonger’s shop in Whitecross Street, near the prison.

The very common sign of the Star and Garter refers to the insignia of the Order of the Garter. Anciently it was simply called the Garter, and thus it is designated by Shakespeare in his “Merry Wives of Windsor.” Charles I. added the star to the insignia, and his example was followed on the signboard. At that time the Garter was treated with a great deal more respect than at present, for Sandford, Lancaster Herald in 1686, complained that several coffee-houses had the sign of the Garter with coffee-pots, &c., painted inside, which he considered downright desecration; hence, order was given to those offenders, “to amend the same, or else they should be pulled down.”

The Garter Inn at Windsor, where Falstaff lived in such grand style, “as an emperor in his expense,” was not a creation of Shakespeare’s fancy, but did really exist, and most probably on the same site at present occupied by the Star and Garter.[596] The first Star and Garter at Richmond was built in 173

8

9

, on what was then a portion of the waste of Petersham Common; it was rented at 40s. a year. A drawing by Hearne, of the comparatively insignificant tenement then raised, is still preserved at the hotel.

It was also the sign of a famous ordinary in Pall Mall. Here the Duke of Ormond, in the reign of Queen Anne, gave a dinner to a few friends, and was charged £21, 6s. 8d. for the two courses, each of four dishes, without any wine or dessert, which, considering the value of money in those days, was certainly a considerable sum. In this house, in 1765, Lord Byron, the poet’s grandfather, killed Mr Chaworth in an irregular duel, the result of a dispute whether Mr Chaworth, who preserved his game, or Lord Byron, who did not, had more game on his estate. About the same time there was another Star and Garter tavern at the end of Burton Street, near the famous Five Fields in Chelsea, “a place where robbers lie in wait,”[597] the site now occupied by Eaton Square and Belgrave Square. At this tavern, Johnson the equestrian rode in July 1762, for the gratification of the Cherokee king, when on a visit in this country. The newspapers of the day describe the feats he performed:—“He rides three horses, and when in full speed, tosses his cap and catches it several times; he stands with both feet on the horse whilst it goes three times round the green in full speed,” and similar “astounding” acts, which would now be thought very little of.

The Glove is, in France, the common sign of the glove-makers; generally it is a colossal representation of a glove in tin painted red. This article of dress has had more honour conferred upon it than any other; anciently it was given, by way of delivery or investiture, in sales and conveyances of lands and goods; it was worn by magistrates on certain occasions, presented to them on others; it was the challenge and sacred pledge of a duel; the rural bridegroom in the time of Queen Elizabeth wore gloves on his hat as a sign of good husbandry; noblemen wore their ladies’ gloves in front of their hats; in some parts of England it used to be the custom to hang a pair of white gloves on the pew of unmarried villagers, who had died in the flower of their youth; it is used in marriage by proxy, and is connected with innumerable other customs and ceremonies.

The Fan, the Crowned Fan, the Two Fans, &c., were the ordinary signs of milliners who sold fans.

The Pincushion is the sign of a public-house at Wyberton, Boston, but why chosen it is difficult to say; and the Purse occurs amongst the trades tokens of W. Smithfield, with the date 1669. This last object was also the sign of one of the taverns visited at Barnet by Drunken Barnaby, where he had the misfortune with the bears.

The Ring was the sign of one of the booksellers in Little Britain, in the reign of Queen Anne; and the Golden Ring was, in 1723, the sign of G. Coniers on Ludgate Hill, who published a black letter edition of “The Merry Tales of the Mad Men of Gotam.” An old tradition that Guttenberg received the first idea of printing from the seal of his ring impressed in wax, may have led those booksellers to adopt that object for their sign.

“Respicit archetypos auri vestigia lustrans,
Et secum tacitus talia verba refert:
Quam belle pandit certas hæc orbita voces,
Monstrat et exactis apta reperta libris.”[598]

A red or a bipartite Umbrella or Parasol is the invariable sign of the umbrella-maker. This now indispensable article was brought into fashion by Hanway the philanthropist, towards the end of the eighteenth century. Before his time, a cloak was the only protection against a shower. Pepys writes in his Diary, “This day in the afternoon, stepping with the Duke of York into St James’ Park, it rained, and I was forced to lend the duke my cloak, which he wore through the park.” On another occasion Pepys was out with no less than four ladies, “and it rained all the way, it troubled us; but, however, my cloak kept us all dry.” Pepys sheltering the four ladies under his cloak of charity would make a very pretty picture. In the reign of Queen Anne, good housewives defied the winter’s shower, “underneath th’ umbrella’s oily shed,”[599] but Hanway was the first who, braving laughter and sarcasm, accustomed the Londoners to the sight of a man carrying that useful contrivance. John Pugh, who wrote Hanway’s life, says:—

“When it rained, a small parapluie defended his face and wig; thus he was always prepared to enter into any company without impropriety or the appearance of negligence. And he was the first man who ventured to walk the streets of London with an umbrella over his head; after carrying one near thirty years he saw them come into general use.”

There is a small umbrella shop in Old Street, Shoreditch, called the Umbrella Hospital; two placards are in the window, one setting forth the analogy between a human being and an umbrella, the second giving a list of the prices charged for curing the several ills an umbrella is heir to, thus:—

| s. | d.
Restoring a broken rib, | 0 | 6
Restoring a spine, | 0 | 6
Inserting a new spine, | 1 | 0
Resuscitating the muscularia, | 0 | 6
A new membranous attachment, | 2 | 6
Restoring a shattered constitution, | 1 | 0
Setting a dislocated neck, | 0 | 6
Restoring a broken neck, | 0 | 9
A new set of nerves, | 1 | 0
A new rib, | 0 | 6
A new muscle, | 0 | 3
A new motive power, | 0 | 6
A crenated attachment, | 0 | 6
Restoring the muscular power, | 1 | 6
Fixing on a new head, | 0 | 3
Supplying a new head, | 1 | 0

[573]

“The hat
Covers evil and good.”

[574]

“Strong hats made here to enclose the head,
In order that the soft (loose) brains may be kept together.”

[575] J. S. Burn, History of Foreign Refugees, p. 257.

[576] Stubbe’s Anatomie of Abuses, p. 21.

[577] Bagford Bills.

[578] British Chronicle, July 17, 1766.

[579] Publick Advertiser, July 1767.

[580]

“This is in the Three Hats,
Which are worn on the head,
To keep it from cold and wind.
Tromp was a brave man
Who supported the crown of the states
Hats cleaned here.”

[581] Shopbill, quoted in Thomson’s Chronicles of London Bridge, vol. ii., p. 277.

[582] Decker’s Gull’s Hornbook.

[583] Cibber’s Apology, p. 303.

[584] Gay’s Trivia, book iii.

[585] Weekly Journal, March 30, 1717.

[586] Weekly Journal. Jan. 4, 1718.

[587] Mercurius Publicus, Jan. 8 to 15, 1662.

[588] London Gazette, March 12 to 16, 1673. This was not the famous Will’s Coffee-house, which was situated in Bow Street, Covent Garden.

[589] Banks Bills.

[590] G. A. Corner, on the Inns of Southwark.

[591] Randle Holme, b. iii., ch. i., p. 14.

[592] London Gazette, July 31 to Aug. 4, 1679.

[593] Weekly Journal, Jan. 4, 1718.

[594]

“I am, my warlike Cassandra,
Neither a Myrmidon nor a Dolopian warrior.”

“Everybody that reads those lines,” says Furretière in his Roman Bourgeois, “will certainly imagine that he alludes to some Pentasilea or Talestris; yet this warlike Cassandra was after all neither more nor less than a tall manly looking wench who kept the Wooden Shoe (Sabot) public-house in the Faubourg Saint Marcel.”

[595] Bagford Bills.

[596] See J. O. Halliwell’s folio Shakespeare, vol. ii., p. 468.

[597] The Tatler.

[598] “He looked intently at the seal, observing the impression left by the gold, and spoke these words to himself, ‘How beautifully and distinctly does this impression render the words,’ and he proved his useful discovery in exact books.”

[599] Gay’s Trivia, book i., p. 221.

CHAPTER XIII.
GEOGRAPHY AND TOPOGRAPHY.

Foremost in this division stands the Globe,—“the great Globe itself,” a trade emblem common to publicans, outfitters, and others, who rely upon cosmopolitan customers. One of the theatres, where Shakespeare used to perform, was called The Globe, from its sign representing Atlas supporting the world. It was accompanied by the motto, Totus Mundus agit Histrionem; upon which Ben Jonson made the following epigram:—

“If but stage actors all the world displays,
Where shall we find spectators to their plays?”

To which Shakespeare is said to have returned this answer:—

“Little or much of what we see we do,
We are all actors and spectators too.”

The house stood on the Bankside, Southwark, and was burnt down in June 1613, having been set on fire during one of the plays by a piece of wadding fired from a cannon falling on the thatched roof. It was rebuilt, but finally taken down in 1644 to make room for dwelling-houses.

One of the most famous Globe taverns stood, till the beginning of this century, in Fleet Street. It had been one of the favourite haunts of Oliver Goldsmith, who, it appears, was never tired of hearing a certain “tun of a man” sing “Nottingham Ale.” Goldsmith’s face was so well known here that a wealthy pork-butcher, another habitué of the house, used to drink to him in the familiar words, “Come, Noll, old boy, here’s my service to you.” Several actors, also, “used” the house,—amongst others, the centenarian Macklin, Tom King, and Dunstall. Many amusing anecdotes concerning the place have been preserved in the “Fruits of Experience,” a delightful book of city gossip, written in his eightieth year by Joseph Brasbridge, a silversmith in Fleet Street. Brasbridge was a constant visitor at this tavern.

At Aldborough, near Boroughbridge, there is a Globe public-house, in which a tessellated pavement, part of a Roman villa, may be seen. The publican informs passers-by of this by the following inscription on his signboard:—

“This is the ancient manor-house, and in it you may see
The Romans work a great curiositee.”

And the absence of the apostrophe certainly makes it so. Finally, John Partridge, the almanac-making shoemaker, so amusingly ridiculed in the Tatler, lived at the Globe in Salisbury Street. From the pursuits of that great man, we may surmise his globe to have been a celestial one.

Sometimes the Globe was gilt, “for a difference.” Thus the Golden Globe was the sign of William Herbert, printseller, and editor of Joseph Ames’s well-known work on “Typographical Antiquities.” This shop was under the Piazza on London Bridge, where he continued till 1758, when the house was taken down.

Of all the signs which may be termed “Geographical,” those referring to our own island are, of course, the most common in this country. Britannia is very general. Hone, in his “Every-day Book,” mentions a public-house in the country where London porter was sold, and the figure of Britannia was represented in a languishing, reclining posture, with the motto,

“PRAY, SUP-PORTER.”

The first inhabitants are commemorated by the sign of the Ancient Briton; but this is not one of the “Cærulei Britanni,” though true blue for all that, but refers simply to a true patriot in the best sense of the word. Thus Boswell uses the expression in one of his letters to Dr Johnson:—

“I trust that you will be liberal enough to make allowance for my differing from you on two points, [the Middlesex election and the American war,] when my general principles of government are according to your own heart, and when, at a crisis of doubtful event, I stand forth with honest zeal as an ancient and faithful Briton.”

That this is the meaning attached to the word is evident from other signs of the same family, as True Briton, Generous Briton, &c., all common signatures to political letters in the newspapers of the Junius period. The modern John Bull, and the still later Old English Gentleman, descend from the same stock, and are all equally common.

England, Scotland, and Ireland was, in 1673, the sign of John Thornton, in the Minories, hydrographer to the Hon. East India Company. As he also sold maps, he had probably a map of the United Kingdom as his sign. Formerly signs representing buildings or localities in London were common, though generally they bore very little resemblance to the places intended. Among the trades tokens we find the Exchange, a tavern in the Poultry in 1651; the East India House, in Leadenhall Street, like most of this description of signs, prompted by the vicinity of the building represented; Charing Cross, the sign of a shop in that locality where they sold canaries in 1699, and also a sign at Norwich in 1750; The Old Prison, in Whitechapel—this Old Prison was intended for King’s Cross; Camden House, in Maiden Lane, 1668,—this must have been in honour of Baptist Hicks, the opulent mercer, at the White Bear, in Cheapside, who died as Viscount Camden in 1628. He built Hicks Hall on Clerkenwell Green, and presented it to the county magistrates as their session-house.

Further, there was the Temple, the sign of Mr Buck, bookseller, near the Inner Temple Gate, in Fleet Street, in 1700; and at the same period, Hyde Park, a shop or tavern in Gray’s Inn Lane. A public-house in Bridge Row, Chelsea, mentioned before 1750, and still in existence, bears the name of the Chelsea Waterworks. The Waterworks, after which it was named, were constructed circa 1724; a canal was dug from the Thames, near Ranelagh, to Pimlico, where an engine was placed for the purpose of raising the water into pipes, which conveyed it to Chelsea, Westminster, and various parts of western London. The reservoirs in Hyde and Green Park were supplied by pipes from the Chelsea Waterworks, which, in 1767, yielded daily 1740 tons.

The Lancashire Witch, a sign of an exhibition of shell-work and petrifactions in Shoreditch, 1754, was doubtless named after our old friend, Mother Shipton, born near the Petrifying Well at Knaresborough.

Even on the Continent we meet with a London sign,—viz., at Verona, where, in 1825, the Tower of London was one of the inns which recommended itself to English travellers in the following grand circular:—

“Circulatory.—The old inn of London’s Tower, placed among the more agreeable situation of Verona’s Course, belonging at Sir Theodosius Ziguoni, restored by the decorum most indulgent to good things, of life’s eases, which are favoured from every art at same inn, with all object that is concern’d, conveniency of stage-coaches, proper horses, and good foragers, and coach-house; do offers at innkeeper the constant hope to be honoured from a great concourse, where politeness, good genius of meats to delight of nations, round table, [table d’hôte,] coffee-house, hackney-coach, men servant of place, swiftness of service, and moderacion of prices, shall arrive to accomplish in him all satisfaction, and at Sir’s who will do the favour honouring him a very assur’d kindness.”

PLATE XVI.

VER GALANT. (Rue Henri, Lyons, 1759.) | GOAT IN BOOTS. (Fulham Road; said to be by Morland.)

A LATTICE.
(Roxburghe Ballads, circa 1650.)

THREE PIGEONS. (Banks’s collection.) | UNICORN. (A Bookseller’s at Cologne, 1630.)

York figures more frequently on the signboard than any other place in England. From the trades tokens we see that the City of York was a sign in Middle Row, Holborn, in the seventeenth century. The York Minster is one of the few cathedrals ever seen represented out of its own city, probably for no other reason than because it stands in the capital of the county from whence the Yorkshire stingo comes. York, however, seems to have been a right merry city, second only to the city of London, for one of the oldest Roxburghe ballads, dated 1584, says:—

“Yorke, Yorke, for my monie, of all the cities that ever I see,
For mery pastime and companie, except the cittie of London.”

The Castle being such a general sign, many traders adopted some particular castle. Dover Castle, or Walmer Castle, is amongst the most frequent. The first is mentioned in the following amusing advertisement:—

“For Female Satisfaction.

“WHEREAS the mystery of Freemasonry has been kept a profound secret for several Ages, till at length some Men assembled themselves at the Dover Castle, in the parish of Lambeth, under pretence of knowing the secret, and likewise in opposition to some gentlemen that are real Freemasons, and hold a Lodge at the same house; therefore, to prove that they are no more than pretenders, and as the Ladies have sometimes been desirous of gaining knowledge of the noble art, (sic,) several regular-made Masons, (both ancient and modern,) members of constituted Lodges in this metropolis, have thought proper to unite into a select Body at Beau Silvester’s, the sign of the Angel, Bull Stairs, Southwark, and stile themselves Unions, think it highly expedient, and in justice to the fair sex, to initiate them therein, provided they are women of undeniable character; for tho’ no Lodge as yet (except the Free Union Masons) have thought proper to admit Women into the Fraternity, we, well knowing they have as much Right to attain to the secrets as those Castle Humbugs, have thought proper so to do, not doubting but they will prove an honour to the Craft; and as we have had the honour to inculcate several worthy Sisters therein, those that are desirous, and think themselves capable of having the secret conferred on them, by proper Application, will be admitted, and the charges will not exceed the Expences of our Lodge.”—Publick Advertiser, March 7, 1759.

The sign of the Angel at Beau Silvester’s was certainly well chosen by those gallant soi-disant Masons; but would not the Silent Woman have been still more appropriate? Be that as it may, Lodges for ladies there were—witness the following advertisement, a good specimen of “Stratford-le-Bow” French:—

“C. Loge C.

“AVERTISSEMENT AUX DAMES, etc. Pour vincre que les Francs Massons ne sont pas telles que le public les a representées en particulier la sexe Feminine, cet Loge juge a propos de recevoir des Femmes aussi bien que des Hommes.

[418]

“N.B.—Les Dames seront introduits dans la Loge avec la Ceremonie accoutumée ou le Serment ordinaire et le reel Secret leur seront administrées. On commencera a recevoir des Dames Jeudy 11 de Mars 1762, at Mrs Maynard’s, next door to the Lying-in Hospital, Brownlow Street, Longacre. La Porte sera ouverte a 6 Heures du Soir. Les Dames et Messieurs sont priées de ne pas venir après sept. Le prix est £1, 1s.”—(Newspaper, 1762.)

How the ladies were initiated—or, as the worthy secretary of Beau Silvester’s Lodge calls it, “inculcated,”—we are not informed; but certainly some modification must have been made in the usual ceremony attending the initiation of novices.

Llangollen Castle is painted on a sign in Deansgate, Manchester: under it is the following rhyme:—

“Near the above place in a vault,
There is such liquor fixed,
You’ll say that water, hops, and malt,
Were never better mixed.”

Many other castles occur, such as Jersey Castle, on the token of Philip Crosse in Finch Lane, in the seventeenth century; Rochester Castle, Mitford Castle, Hereford Castle, Warwick Castle, Edinburgh Castle, &c.

Towns are often adopted for signs as a point de ralliement for the natives of such places, the birthplace of the landlord being generally the town which has the honour of his selection. The City of Norwich was the sign of a house in Bishopsgate Street in the seventeenth century, either for the reason just alleged, or because “the fall of Niniveh with Norwich built in an hour,” was one of the penny sights at that period. Coventry Cross was the sign of a mercer in New Bond Street at the end of the last century, evidently chosen on account of the silk ribbons manufactured in that town; and the Chiltern Hundred, a public-house at Boxley, near Maidstone, doubtless refers to the well-known range of hills extending from Henley-on-Thames to Tring in Herts. In old times these hills were covered with forests, and infested by numerous bands of thieves. To protect the people in the neighbourhood, an officer was appointed by the Crown, called the steward of the Chiltern Hundreds, and although the duties have long ceased the office still exists, and is made use of to afford members of the House of Commons an opportunity of resigning their seats when they desire it. Being a Government appointment, though without either duties or salary, the acceptance of it disqualifies a member from retaining his seat.

The Wiltshire Shepherd was a sign in St Martin’s Lane in the seventeenth century. The Wiltshire downs were famous for their flocks of sheep. Aubrey, himself a Wiltshireman, says that the innocent lives of those shepherds “doe give us a resemblance of the golden age.” He also states that their sight inspired Sir Philip Sidney in charming pastorals, which on those very downs he sketched from nature, as some of his old relations well remembered. “’Twas about these purlieus,” says he, “that the muses were wont to appeare to Sir Philip Sidney, and where he wrote down their dictates in his table-book, though on horseback.” Many of the customs of these shepherds Aubrey traces down from the Romans.[600] The Gentle Shepherd of Salisbury Plain is the name given to Farmer Peek’s house, on the road from Cape Town to Simon’s Bay, Cape of Good Hope. On his signboard is the following mosaic inscription:—

“Multum in parvo, pro bono publico
Entertainment for man or beast all of a row.
Lekker host as much as you please;
Excellent beds without any fleas.
Nos patriam fugimus—now we are here,
Vivamus, let us live by selling beer.
On donne à boire et à manger ici;
Come in and try it, whoever you be.
The Gentle Shepherd of Salisbury Plain.”

Near Basingstoke there is a public-house sign representing a grenadier in full uniform, holding in his hand a foaming pot of ale; it is called the Whitley Grenadier, and bears the following disinterested verses:—

“This is the Whitley Grenadier,
A noted house for famous beer.
My friend, if you should chance to call,
Beware and get not drunk withal;
Let moderation be your guide,
It answers well whene’er ’tis try’d.
Then use, but not abuse, strong beer,
And don’t forget the Grenadier.”

This sign seems to have been suggested by the tragical death of a grenadier, which is thus recorded on a tombstone in the churchyard of Winchester Cathedral:—

“Here sleeps in peace a Hampshire Grenadeer,
Who caught his death by drinking cold small beer.
Soldiers be warned by his untimely fall,
And when you’re hot, drink strong, or none at all.”

To which a wag appended the following lines:—

“An honest soldier never is forgot,
Whether he die by musket or by pot.”

The Flitch of Dunmow is a common sign in Essex, and is sometimes seen in other counties. The custom of giving a flitch of bacon, on the well-known conditions, is not peculiar to Dunmow. In the reign of Edward III., the Earl of Lancaster, lord of the honour of Tutbury, granted a manor near Wichnor village, Burton-upon-Trent, to Sir Philip de Sommerville, stipulating that he was to give a flitch of bacon on the same conditions as at Dunmow.[601] At the abbey of St Milaine, near Rennes, in Normandy, the same custom was observed, but the practice was still less successful, for Dunmow at least has six times given the side of bacon away, but—

“A l’abbaye de Saint Milaine près Rennes y a plus de six cents ans ont un costé de lard encore tout frais et non corrompu; et néanmoins ont voué et ordonné aux premiers qui par an et jour ensemble mariez ont vescu sans debat, grondement et sans s’en repentir.”[602]

Our next sign is geographical only in its relationship. At Wansford Bridge, which crosses the river Nen in Northampton, there is the Haycock Inn, deriving its name from a curious incident: the river overflowed its banks and carried away a haycock with a man upon it. Taylor, the Water poet, says of the circumstance:—

“On a haycock sleeping soundly,
The river rose, and took me roundly
Down the current; people cried,
As along the stream I hied.
‘Where away?’ quoth they, ‘From Greenland?’
‘No; from Wansford Bridge, in England.’”

The stone bridge, of thirteen arches, carries the Great North Road across the river, so much traversed in the coaching times; and well known to many a traveller in those days was the Haycock Inn, at one end of the bridge, which has on the signboard a pictorial representation of the scene.

Scotland, which, besides Edinburgh ales and Highland whisky, produces a great many publicans, is honoured in numberless signs. Land o’ Cakes, the name given by Burns to the country of the “brighter Scotch,” is a sign at Middle Hill Gate, near Stockport. And here we may observe the popularity of Burns among the publicans, for not only is the poet himself, and several of his amusing heroes, exalted in innumerable places among the “living dead,” but at Kirby Moor some of his verses are even introduced on the sign:—

“When neebors anger at a plea,
An’ just as wud as wud can be,
How easy can the barley bree
Cement the quarrel?
It’s aye the cheapest lawyer’s fee,
To taste the barrel.”

Very good advice indeed.

Since the Highlander’s love for snuff and whisky was such, that he wished to have “a Benlomond of snuff, and a Loch Lomond of whisky,” nobody could make a better public-house sign than the Highland Laddie, nor a better snuff-shop sign than the kilted Highlander who stands generally at the door of these establishments. Two others of the lares and penates of the tobacconist are the Sailor and the Moor or Oriental. The first presiding over the snuff, the second over the chewing, the third over the smoking “department,”—as the drapers term the divisions of their shop. After the rebellion of 1745, when everything was done by the Government to extinguish the nationality of the Scotch, when Scotch ballads were forbidden, and the names of some clans were deemed more odious than the word raka to the Jews, the kilt was forbidden by the legislature as an abomination. On that occasion the following trifle appeared in the newspapers:—

“We hear that the dapper wooden Highlanders, who guard so heroically the doors of snuff-shops, intend to petition the Legislature, in order that they may be excused from complying with the act of Parliament with regard to their change of dress: alledging that they have ever been faithful subjects to his Majesty, having constantly supplied his Guards with a pinch out of their Mulls when they marched by them, and so far from engaging in any Rebellion, that they have never entertained a rebellious thought; whence they humbly hope that they shall not be put to the Expense of buying new cloaths.”

The ubiquity of the Scotch packman produced the sign of the Scotchman’s Pack, St Michael’s Hill, Bristol, and in some other places. From the following passage it appears that these Scottish packmen, in the sixteenth century, penetrated even as far as Poland:—“Ane pedder is called are merchõd or cremar quha beirs are pack or creame[603] upon his bak, quha are called beirares of the puddill be the Scottesmen in the realme of Polonia, quhair I saw an greate multitude in the town of Cracovia, anno Dom. 1569.”[604]

Gretna Green used at one time to be a not very uncommon sign on the Border; there is one at Ayeliffe, Darlington. The origin of marriages at this place is not so generally known that it would be superfluous to introduce it here. Marriages in Scotland at all times having been considered legal if two parties accepted each other for man and wife in the presence of witnesses, a dissipated tobacconist, named Joseph Paisley, about a century ago, conceived the idea of opening an establishment on the Border to unite runaway couples in wedlock. For this purpose he selected the common, or green, between Graitney and Springfield, in Dumfries-shire, a place called Megshill, the first Scottish ground on entering the country from Cumberland; there he commenced business. In 1791 he settled in the then newly-built village of Springfield, but the reputation of his impromptu marriage-temple on Graitney Common, (or Gretna Green, as the English called it,) had already so widely spread that the name of the place had passed into a by-word for clandestine marriages. Paisley died in 1814, but marriage-mongering had become a trade in Springfield, and several self-appointed parsons started up to fill the office. Pennant says that in 1771 a young couple might be united “from two guineas a job to a dram of whisky” by a fisherman, a joiner, or a blacksmith; but the prices rose much higher afterwards, varying from £40 to half-a-guinea, and this last sum was only accepted from pedestrian couples. As a rule, the fee was settled by the post-boys from Carlisle, each patronising certain houses, and the hymeneal priests, knowing the value of their patronage, permitted them to go snacks in the proceeds. It is estimated that about 300 couples a year used to get married in this off-hand manner.

Of our colonies, Gibraltar and the Cape of Good Hope seem to be almost the only ones considered worthy the honour of the signboard. Gibraltar became popular as soon as the acquisition had been esteemed at its proper value. As for the Cape of Good Hope, the frequency of this sign all over England seems to render it probable that it was not so much adopted in honour of the colony as to express the landlord’s hope of success, and therefore as a sort of equivalent to the Hope and Anchor, or the Hope.[605] The Jamaica tavern, too, may have been christened in compliment to the birth-place of rum. There is a house with this name in Bermondsey, which is one of the many houses stated in our time to have been a residence of Oliver Cromwell. “The building, of which only a moiety now remains, and that very ruinous, the other having been removed years ago to make room for modern erections, presents probably almost the same features as when tenanted by the Protector. The carved quatrefoils and flowers upon the staircase beams, the old-fashioned fastenings of the doors—‘bolts, locks, and bars’—the huge single gable, (which in a modern house would be double,) even the divided section, like a monstrous amputated stump, imperfectly plastered over, patched here and there with planks, slates, and tiles, to keep the wind and weather out, though it be very poorly—all are in keeping; and the glimmer of the gas, by which the old and ruinous kitchen into which we strayed was dimly lighted, seemed to ‘pale its ineffectual fires’ in striving to illumine the old black settles, and still older wainscot.”[606] After the Restoration, this house seems to have become a tavern, and here, according to the homely, kind-hearted custom of the times, Pepys, on Sunday, April 14, 1667, took his wife and her maids to give them a day’s pleasure. “Over the water to the Jamaica house, where I never was before, and then the girls did run wagers on the bowling green, and there with much pleasure spent little, and so home.” Subsequently, he frequently returned to this place, which seems to have been the same he elsewhere calls The Halfway House. Besides this, there is the Jamaica and Madeira coffee-house, a well-known business club or tavern in St Michael’s Alley, Cornhill.

Only a few European nations and towns are represented. Amongst the Bagford shopbills there is one of a perfumer, named Dighton, who, in the reign of Queen Anne, sold “true Hungary Water, all sorts of snuff and perfumes,” &c. His shop was next door to the King’s Head Tavern at Chancery Lane End, and had the sign of the City of Sevilla; the woodcut above his shop-bill presents a distant family resemblance to that place, and with a little goodwill one may recognise the Alcazar, the Giralda, San Clementi, and San Juan de la Palma; the view is taken from the suburb of Triana, on the other side of the river. This “famous Henry Dighton,” as he styles himself in an advertisement in 1718, “sworn perfumer in ordinary to H. M. King George,” had chosen the sign of the City of Sevilla from the fact of his importing Spanish snuff, the fashionable mixture in those days, which the gallants dislodged with such airy elegance from among the lace frills of their shirts and neckties. His successor, Henry Coulthurst, promised “to furnish greater variety of the choicest and truest snuff than any perfumer in England, viz., Havana, Port St Mary’s, Barcelona, Port Mahon, Seville, plain Spanish, and fine Lisbon.” These Spanish snuffs had come greatly into fashion at the capture of Puerta St Maria, near Cadiz, when the fleet, under Sir George Rooke, captured several thousand barrels of snuff. But long before that time enormous quantities of Spanish tobacco had been yearly imported into England.

“There was wont to come out of Spain,” said Sir Edwin Sandys, in 1620, “a great mass of money to the value of £100,000 per annum for our cloths and other merchandises; and now we have from thence for all our cloth and merchandises nothing but tobacco: nay, that will not pay for all the tobacco we have from thence, but they have more from us in money every year, £20,000; so there goes out of this kingdom as good as £120,000 for tobacco every year.”[607]

The Three Spanish Gypsies, in the New Exchange, was the shop of the future “Monkey Duchess,” the nickname given by her aristocratic friends to Anne Monk, Duchess of Albemarle. “She was the daughter of John Clarges, a farrier in the Savoy, and horse-shoer to Colonel Monk. In 1632 she was married, in the church of St Lawrence Poultney, to Thomas Radford, son of Thomas Radford, late a farrier, servant to Prince Charles, and resident in the Mews. She had a daughter who was born in 1634, and died in 1638. She lived with her husband at the Three Spanish Gypsies, in the New Exchange, and sold wash-balls, powder, gloves, and such things, and taught girls plain work. About 1647, being a sempstress to Colonel Monk, she used to carry him his linen. In 1648 her father and mother died. The year after she fell out with her husband, and they parted. But no certificate from any parish register appears reciting his burial. In 1652 she was married in the church of St George, Southwark, to General Monk, and in the following year was delivered of a son, Christopher, (afterwards the second and last Duke of Albemarle,) who was suckled by Honour Mills, who sold apples, herbs, and oysters.”[608] What became of her first husband, and when he died, is not known.

Venice was the sign of B. Martin, a bookseller in the Old Bailey, circa 1640, adopted probably in honour of the Aldi, the famous printers, who carried on business in this city. In the reign of Charles II. there was a house of indifferent fame in Moorfields, called the Russia House, whether opened during the time that the Russian ambassadors visited the king, or how it obtained its name, is not known. The house became notorious in 1667 through the trial of Gabriel Holmes and a band of incendiaries, among whom were two young boys, sons of James Montague of Lackham, grandsons of the Earl of Manchester. The boys turned king’s evidence, and Holmes was hanged. Russia House was one of the places where they planned their expeditions and spent their money: the object of their incendiarism, it came out at the trial, was simply that they might steal the goods which would be flung into the streets by the terrified inmates of the burning houses.

The Antwerp tavern was a famous house behind the Exchange, in the seventeenth century, of which tokens are extant, representing a view of Antwerp from the river. The extensive trade of Flanders, in the middle ages and long after, made Antwerp a favourite subject for signboards, it being the best harbour in Flanders. In Dieppe there is still a house on the Quai Henri IV., bearing a stone bas-relief sign of Antwerp, (la ville d’Anvers,) with the date 1697; but this house and sign are named, as early as 1645, in a MS. list of rents of houses in Dieppe, due to the Archbishop of Rouen.

Dutchmen, in some instances, have been appointed the tutelar saints of public-houses, on account of their reputed love for drink; thus we have the Two Dutchmen at Marsden, near Huddersfield, and the Jovial Dutchman at Crick, in Derbyshire. Now, though the Dutchman’s joviality is questionable, yet he certainly has at all times been reputed a heavy drinker. Shakespeare names, “your swag-bellied Hollander,” along with the Dane and German, as the only (though unsuccessful) rival of the English in the art of hard drinking. Massinger, in his “Duke of Florence,” has a similar remark; and Sir Richard Baker, in his “Chronicles,” says that the English “in these Dutch wars learned to be drunkards, and as we do not like to do things by halves in this country, we soon surpassed our masters.” Decker remarks that “Drunkenness, which was once the Dutchman’s headake, is now become the Englishman’s.”[609] Upsy Dutch and upsy freeze (for “op zyn Dutch,” and “op zyn Vriesch,” à la Dutch and à la Vriesch) are terms constantly used by Decker to denote a very drunken condition. Yet there was a time, long before the “Dutch wars,” when the English did not want any foreign masters to teach them drinking; how could it have been otherwise with descendants of the beer-drinking Saxons and Danes? Malmesbury complains that in his time “the English fashion was to sit bibbing whole hours after dinner, as the Normane guise was to walke and get up and downe in the stretes with great waines of idle serving men following them;”[610] and Hollinshed, who wrote at the very time of the Dutch wars, mentions among the improvements which old men in his time observed, was that the farmers could pay their rent without selling a cow or a horse, as they had been wont to do in former times, “owing to too much attention to the ale-house, and too little to work.”

Notwithstanding this, the Jovial Dutchman is a very good sign for licensed victuallers, since the general opinion is:—

“Death’s not to be—, so Seneca doth think,
But Dutchmen say ’tis death to cease to drink.”[611]

Besides drinking, the Dutchman has long had a reputation for smoking, whence the tobacconists of the last century used frequently to have on their sign, a Scotchman, a Dutchman, and a sailor, with the following rhyme:—

“We three are engaged in one cause,
I snuffs, I smokes, and I chaws.”

A tobacconist in Kingsland Road had the same men, but a different reading of the text:—

“This Indian weed is good indeed,
Puff on, keep up the joke,
’Tis the best, ’twill stand the test,
Either to chew or smoke.”[612]

The introduction of coffee produced signs of various sultans, but the Turk’s Head may, perhaps, date from earlier times, possessing an origin similar to the Saracen’s Head. The Turks throughout the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, were a common topic of conversation, and the bugbear of the European nations. This is well exemplified in the church-wardens’ accounts of St Helen’s, Abingdon, where the following entry occurs:—“Anno MDLXV—8 of Q. Eliz.—payde for two bokes of common prayer agaynste invading of the Turke, 0. 6.” That year the Turks had made a descent upon the isle of Malta, where they besieged the town and castle of St Michael; but upon the approach of the fleet of the Order, they broke up the siege and suffered a considerable loss in their flight. During the war of Emperor Maximilian against the Turks in Hungary, similar prayer-books were annually purchased for the parish. The first prototypes of newspapers, also, were the printed despatches concerning the battles and engagements of the emperor with the Turks,[613] and even at the end of the seventeenth century no newspaper was complete without its news from the Danube and “movements of the Turks.” One of the earliest patents granted for pistols, contains a clause that square balls are not to be used, “except against the Turks.” The number of Turk’s Heads in London in the seventeenth century was considerable; not less than eight trades tokens of different houses with this sign are known to exist.

In 1667, Robert Boulter, at the Turk’s Head in Bishopsgate, published the first edition of Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” It was with difficulty that the author sold the copy for five pounds! he was to receive £5 more after the sale of the 1300 copies which comprised the first impression, and £5 more after the sale of each new impression of 1300 copies each. “And what a poor consideration was this,” says one of his biographers, “for such an inestimable performance,” and how much more do others get by the works of great authors than the authors themselves! And yet we find that Hoyle, the author of the “Treatise on the Game of Whist,” after having disposed of the whole of the first impression, sold the copyright to the bookseller for two hundred guineas.

Dr Johnson used often to take supper at the Turk’s Head in the Strand: “I encourage this house, (said he;) for the mistress of it is a good, civil woman, and has not much business.”[614] At another Turk’s Head, Gerrard Street, Soho, Johnson formed, in 1763, that well-known club, which was long without a name, but which after Garrick’s funeral became distinguished by the name of the Literary Club.

“Sir Joshua Reynolds had the merit of being the first proposer of it, to which Johnson acceded, and the original members were Sir Joshua Reynolds, Dr Johnson, Mr Edmund Burke, Dr Nugent, Mr Beauclerck, Mr Langton, Dr Goldsmith, Mr Chamier, and Sir John Hawkins. They met at the Turk’s Head in Gerrard Street, Soho, one evening every week, at seven, and generally continued their conversation till a pretty late hour. This club has been gradually increased to its present [1791] number thirty-five. After about ten years, instead of supping weekly, it was resolved to dine together once a fortnight during the meeting of Parliament.”[615]

After the death of the landlord of this house, the club removed to the Prince in Sackville Street; and after two or three more changes, it finally settled down at the Thatched House, St James’s. The original portrait of Sir Joshua Reynolds, presented to the club by the painter himself, is still preserved; one of its peculiarities is, that the artist has represented himself wearing spectacles. The club is still in existence, under the name of the Dilettanti Club. “The Turk’s Head in Gerrard Street, Soho,” says Moser in his Memorandum-book, “was, more than fifty years since, removed from a tavern of the same sign, the corner of Greek and Compton Streets. This place was a kind of head-quarters for the Loyal Association during the rebellion of 1745.”[616]

About that time there was a waiter in this tavern, who, like Tennyson’s waiter at the Cock, Templebar, had obtained considerable celebrity. His name was Little Will. On an engraving dated 1752, he is represented as a small man with a large head and a periwig, dressed in a long apron, with a pair of snuffers suspended from the waist. The Rev. Mr Huddersford, of Trinity College, Oxford, in a letter to Granger, says,—

“Little Will, as I have heard, was a great favourite with the gentlemen of the coffee-house; there is a print representing him in his constant attitude, apparently insensible to anything around him, but swallowing every article of politicks that dropped, which, I am told, he understands better than any of his masters.”

The Three Turks was a sign at Norwich in 1750,[617] and even now, though the crescent is decidedly in the “last quarter,” there are still signs of Turks to be found, as the Turk and Slave, Brick Lane, Spitalfields; the Great Turk (i.e., the Sultan) at Wolverhampton—the last is of considerable antiquity, for in 1600 it was the sign of John Barnes, a bookseller in Fleet Street. One of the most opulent Turkish towns was commemorated by the Smyrna coffee-house, in Pall Mall, a fashionable coffee-house in the reign of Queen Anne, when the wits and beaux used to take their constitutional in St James’ Park, and then go to the Smyrna, where, sitting before the open windows, they could see the ladies carried past in their sedans or coaches, on their return from the Mall. This coffee-house seems to have had a reputation for politics. In the Tatler, (No. 10,) a “cluster of wise heads” is said to sit every evening from the left side of the fire at the Smyrna to the door; and in No. 78, the public is informed that “the seat of learning is now removed from the corner of the chimney on the left hand towards the window, to the round table in the middle of the floor, over against the fire; a revolution much lamented by the porters and chairmen, who were greatly edified through a pane of glass that remained broken all the last summer.” Prior, Swift, and Pope, were constant visitors at this house.

There was a Grecian coffee-house in Devereux Court, Strand, which for nearly two centuries was equally well frequented. It derived its name probably from having been opened by a Greek, the natives of that country having been among the first to open coffee-houses in London. It was a very fashionable house in the time of the Spectators and Tatlers: “My face is likewise very well known at the Grecian,” says Addison in Spectator, No. 1. It seems generally to have been frequented by literati and savants, some of them rather hot-headed:—

“I remember two gentlemen, who were constant companions, disputing one evening at the Grecian coffee-house, concerning the accent of a Greek word. This dispute was carried to such a length that the two friends thought proper to determine it with their swords; for this purpose they stept into Devereux Court, where one of them (whose name, if I remember right, was Fitzgerald) was run through the body, and died on the spot.”[618]

In this coffee-house Mrs Mapp, the famous bone-setter, (see p. 113) performed her cures before Sir Hans Sloane:—

“On Saturday and yesterday, Mrs Mapp performed several operations at the Grecian coffee-house, particularly one upon a niece of Sir Hans Sloane,[430] to his great satisfaction and her credit. The patient had her shoulder-bone out for about nine years.”—Grub Street Journal, October 21, 1736.

The coffee-house was closed in 1843; a bust of Essex is in front of the house it formerly occupied with the inscription, “This is Devereux Court, 1676.”

Various reasons are given to account for the sign of the Saracen’s Head. “When our countrymen came home from fighting with the Saracens, and were beaten by them, they pictured them with huge, big, terrible faces, (as you still see the sign of the Saracen’s Head is,) when, in truth, they were like other men. But this they did to save their own credit.”[619] Or the sign may have been adopted by those who had visited the Holy Land, either as pilgrims or when fighting the Saracens. Others, again, hold that it was first set up in compliment to the mother of Thomas à Becket, who was the daughter of a Saracen: formerly the sign was very general. During the time of the Commonwealth, the Saracen’s Head in Islington was a place of resort for the Londoners. In the “Walks of Islington and Hogsden, with the Humours of Wood Street Compter,” a comedy by Thomas Jordan, gentleman, 1648, the scene is laid at that tavern. It was also the sign of the house occupied by Sir Christopher Wren in Friday Street, which remained almost unchanged till it was taken down in 1844. The Saracen’s Head, Snow Hill, is one of the last remaining, and, at the same time, one of the oldest, being named in Dick Tarlton’s Jests as “the Sarracen’s Head without Newgate;” and Stow says, “next to this church [St Sepulchre’s in the Bailey] is a fair and large inn for receipt of travellers, and hath to sign the Sarrazen’s Head.” The courtyard has still many of the characteristics of an old English inn, with galleries all round leading to the bed-rooms, and a spacious gate, through which the dusty mail-coaches used to rumble in, the tired passengers creeping forth, and thanking their stars in having escaped the highwaymen, and the holes and sloughs of the road. How many hearts, beating with hope on their first entry into London, have passed under this gate, that now lie mouldering in the quiet little churchyards of the metropolis: some finding a resting-place in Westminster, whilst others ceased to beat at Tyburn. It was at this inn that Nicholas Nickleby and his uncle waited upon Squeers, the Yorkshire schoolmaster. Mr Dickens describes the old tavern as it was in the last years of our mail-coaching, when it was one of the most important places for arrivals and departures in London:—

“Near to the jail, and by consequence near to Smithfield also, and the Compter and the bustle and noise of the city; and just on that particular part of Snow Hill where omnibus horses going eastwards seriously think of falling down on purpose, and where horses in hackney cabriolets going westwards not unfrequently fall by accident, is the coach-yard of the Saracen’s Head Inn, its portals guarded by two Saracens’ heads and shoulders, which it was once the pride and glory of the choice spirits of this metropolis to pull down at night, but which have for some time remained in undisturbed tranquillity, possibly because this species of humour is now confined to Saint James’s parish, where door-knockers are preferred as being more portable, and bell-wires esteemed as convenient toothpicks. Whether this be the reason or not, there they are, frowning upon you from each side of the gateway; and the inn itself, garnished with another Saracen’s Head, frowns upon you from the top of the yard; while from the door of the hind boot of all the red coaches that are standing therein, there glares a small Saracen’s Head with a twin expression to the large Saracen’s Head below, so that the general appearance of the pile is of the Saracenic order.”

Blackamoors and other dark-skinned foreigners have always possessed considerable attractions as signs for tobacconists, and sometimes also for public-houses. Negroes, with feathered headdresses and kilts, smoking pipes, are to be seen outside tobacco-shops on the Continent, as well as in England. Thus, in the seventeenth century, there was one in Amsterdam with the following inscription:—

“Josua badt den Heere van herten aan
Dat de zon en maan bleef stille staan.
Puik van Verinis en gœ Blaan
Haalt men hier in den Indiaan.”[620]

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Virginian was the most common in England, owing to the first tobacco having been imported from that country:—

“They returned homewards, passing by Virginia, a colony which Sir Walter Raleigh had there planted, from whence Drake brings home with him Walter Lane, who was the first that brought tobacco into England, which the Indians take against crudities of the stomach.”[621]

Publicans have a strange fancy for Indian Kings, Queens, and Chiefs, thus bearing out Trinculo’s assertion of the nation at large:—“When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian.” There is a sculptured sign of an Indian Chief at Shoreditch, having all the appearance of an old ship’s figure-head; and, as a nomen ac præterea nihil, it figures in many places. In Dolphin Lane, Boston, (Linc.,) there used formerly to be a sign with some fanciful, masked-ball dressed figures on it, which were meant to represent the Three Kings of Cologne; but they conveyed so little the idea of those holy personages, that the profanum vulgus called them the Three Merry Devils. Eventually, by a metamorphosis more strange than any in Ovid, these three merry devils were transformed into one very strangely dressed female called the Indian Queen. The African Chief, in Sommerstown, is evidently a variety of these Indian chiefs.

Another sign of venerable antiquity is the Black Boy. That this is of old standing, appears from an entry in Machyn’s Diary: “The XXX day of Desember 1562, was slayne in John Street, Gylbard Goldsmith, dwellyng at the sene of the Blake Boy, in the Cheap, by ys wyff’s sun.”

This Black Boy seems to have been a tobacconist’s sign from the first; for in Ben Jonson’s “Bartholomew Fair” we find:—“I thought he would have run mad o’ the Black Boy in Bucklersbury, that takes the scurvy roguy tobacco there.”—Act i., Scene 1.

In the seventeenth century, it was the sign of a celebrated ordinary in Southwark:—

“Jove, and all his hous’hold a’ter
Him, yesterday went crosse the water,
To th’ signe of the Black Boy in Southwarke,
To th’ ordinary, to find his mouth worke.
Here he intends to fuddle’s nose
This fortnight yet, under the rose.”

Homer à la Mode, 1665.

At the Black Boy in Newgate Street, the Calves’ Head Club was sometimes held. It was not restricted to any particular house, but moved yearly from one place to another, as it was found most convenient. An axe was hung up in the club-room crowned with laurel: the bill of fare consisted of calves’ heads, dressed in various ways; a large pike, with a small one in his mouth, (an emblem of tyranny;) a large cod’s head; and a boar’s head, to indicate stupidity and bestiality.[622]

One of the early editions of Cocker’s Arithmetic was published at the Black Boy. Such was the fame of this work, that even as the Pythagorians swore in verba magistris, and αυτος ἑφη settled all questions, so our ancestors proved their points “according to Cocker.” The title of the work we must not abbreviate:—

“Cocker’s Arithmetic: Being a plain and familiar method, suitable to the meanest capacity, for the full understanding of that incomparable art, as now taught by the ablest schoolmasters in city and country. Composed by Thomas Cocker, late practioner in the art of writing, arithmetic, and engraving. Being that so long since promised to the world. Perused and published by John Hawkins, writing-master, near St George’s Church, in Southwark. By the author’s correct copy, and commended to the world by many eminent Mathematicians and writing-masters in and near London. Licensed September 1677. London: printed by J. R. for T. P., and are to be sold by John Back, at the Black Boy, on London Bridge. 1694. 12o.”

The Black Girl is a variety of this sign at Clareborough, Notts. So, too, appears to be the Arab Boy, an ale-house on the road between Putney and East-Sheen. The Two Black Boys occurs on one of the London trades tokens, where they are represented shaking hands. The Black Boy and Comb was, in 1730, a shop on Ludgate Hill, either a perfumer’s or a mercer’s, for he advertises “right French Hungary water, at 1s. 3d. a half pint bottle; fine Florence oil, at 2s. per flask; right orange flower water, at 1s. 6d. per flask; Barbadoes citron water, at 14s. per quart; and all sort of Bermudas, Leghorn, and fine silk hats for ladies,” &c.[623] The combination on the sign arose from the combs dangling at the doors of the shops where they were sold.

The Black Boy and Camel (doubtless a black boy leading a camel) was not many years ago the sign of a tavern in Leadenhall Street, where it was already in existence in the year 1700.

“The Annual feast for the Parish of St Dunstan, in Stepney, being revived, will be kept the 29th instant, at the King’s Head, in Stepney, where Tickets may be had, and at Tho. Warham’s, at the Black Boy and Camel, Leaden Hall Street,” &c.—London Gazette, August 15-19, 1700.

These parish feasts show most unmistakably the general conviviality of the time. Natives of the same county used also to have their public feasts. Thus the London Gazette for May 30 to June 3, 1700, advertises “the annual feast for gentlemen of the county of Huntingdon;” and the Gazette for October 21-24, “the anniversary feast for the gentlemen, natives of the county of Kent.” It is easy to imagine the attraction of such festivals in times when travelling was both very expensive and very dangerous,—when the post was badly conducted and extravagant in its charges; and, moreover, but few people could write. Such meetings, then, were the only ties that connected the provincial residing in London with the home of his childhood. At such times friends brought up in the same town or village could meet each other, talk over bygone times, call up the recollections of early years, remember mutual friends, and drink a bumper to those left behind. Sometimes these feasts took a religious turn, when a native of the county or district preached in the neighbouring church or chapel. Blessed occasions were these religious yet merry feasts of the olden time. But the “march of intellect”—that is to say, improved locomotion, the spread of reading, writing, and high notions—have done away with these meetings of warm hearts and jovial tempers as things low and vulgar.

Jerusalem was sure to figure early on signboards of those inns at which pilgrims, on their way to the Holy Land, were wont to put up; and long after pilgrimages were discontinued it was still retained as a sign. In 1657 we find it in Fleet Street. What the sign was like it is impossible now to say, but on the trades token of the house the Holy City is represented by one single building. There is another token extant of a house, also in Fleet Street, without date or name of the shop, on which there is a view of a town, with the usual conventional representation of the temple of Solomon. It was equally common in France. Regnard mentions one in Nogent:—

“Entrant dans la bonne ville
Cité Nogent
Jerusalem fut l’asile
Soleil couchant,
Bon sejour pour le pelerin,
Vin du Vaulx, et le bon vin.”[624]

On a house in the Rue Etoupée, at Rouen, there is a stone carved sign of Jerusalem, represented as a fortified town, with a figure arriving on each side, evidently meant for pilgrims. A similar idea seems to be conveyed by the sign of Trip to Jerusalem, a public-house in Nottingham, and the Pilgrim in Coventry. There is still an Old Jerusalem tavern in Clerkenwell, so called after the Knights of St John, of whose hospital this house was the principal gateway.

Mount Pleasant is a name frequently bestowed upon public-houses, not always with any allusion to such a locality, but simply on account of its being an alluring name of the same maudlin class as Cottage of Content, Bank of Friendship, &c. There is said to be a mountain of that name in America, which obtained some celebrity from being the locality on which the sassafras (Orchis mascula) was gathered, the plant which produces the saloop. This drink came in vogue at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Reide’s coffee-house in Fleet Street was the first respectable house where it was sold. When it was opened in 1719, the following lines, painted on a board, hung in front of the house; in latter times, until the closing of the establishment in 1833, they were preserved in the coffee-room:—

“Come all degrees now passing by,
My charming liquor taste and try;
To Lockyer[625] come and drink your fill,
Mount Pleasant has no kind of ill.
The fumes of wines, punch, drams, or beer,
It will expel; your spirits cheer;
From drowsiness your spirits free;
Sweet as a rose your breath shall be.
Come taste and try, and speak your mind,
Such rare ingredients here are joined.
Mount Pleasant pleases all mankind.”

Lockyer had begun life with half-a-crown, and by selling salop, or saloop, at Fleet-ditch, amassed sufficient to open the above place in Fleet Street, where he died worth £1000, in March 1739.[626]

Our old friend Pepys mentions going to China Hall, but gives no further particulars. It is not unlikely that this was the same place which, in the summer of 1777, was opened as a theatre. Whatever its use in former times, it was at that period the warehouse of a paper manufacturer. In those days the West-end often visited the entertainments of the East, and the new theatre was sufficiently patronised to enable the proprietors to venture upon some embellishments. The prices were—boxes, 3s.; pit, 2s.; gallery, 1s.; and the time of commencing varied from half-past six to seven o’clock, according to the season. “The Wonder,” “Love in a Village,” the “Comical Courtship,” and the “Lying Valet,” were among the plays performed. The famous Cooke was one of the actors in the season of 1778. In that same year the building suffered the usual fate of all theatres, and was utterly destroyed by fire.

One name we omitted to notice when speaking of signs derived from European cities—Copenhagen House. Until very recently, this stood isolated in the fields north of the metropolis, near the old road to Highgate. It was said to have derived its name from the fact of a Danish prince or ambassador having resided in it during a great plague in London. Another tradition is to the effect that, early in the seventeenth century, upon some political occasion, great numbers of Danes left that kingdom, and came to London; whereupon the house was opened by an emigrant from Copenhagen, as a place of resort for his countrymen resident in the metropolis. This tradition probably refers to the reign of James I., who was visited in London by his brother-in-law, the King of Denmark, at which time it is very probable that there was a considerable influx of persons from the Danish capital. Coopen-Hagen is the name given to the place in the map accompanying Camden’s Britannia, 1695. For many years previous to its demolition, the house had a great reputation amongst Cockney excursionists, and its tea-gardens, skittle-ground, Dutch pins, and particularly Fives Play, were great attractions. For this last game especially the place was very famous. The house possessed another attraction. From its windows a very fine view of London, the Thames, and the Surrey hills beyond, was obtainable. The New Cattle Market now occupies its site, and a modern public-house only perpetuates the name.

Besides the above-mentioned geographical signs, we have others of more modern introduction, such as the South Australian in Cadogan Street, Chelsea, and the North Pole in Oxford Street, which last commemorates one of those equally brave and unsuccessful expeditions that have taken place every now and then since Admiral Frobisher first started on the discovery of the Meta Incognita.

There exists a class of signs in some respects geographical, yet, from their indefinite character, they are more adapted for insertion in the following chapter than here. We allude to such tavern decorations as that picture of the fiery sun going down behind a hill, which is called The World’s End, at St George’s, near Bristol; The First and Last Inn in England, a sign which may be seen in many other localities besides at the Land’s End, in Cornwall; and No Place Inn, a public-house in the suburbs of Plymouth, the sign representing an old woman standing at the door, accosting her husband, just arrived—“Where have you been?” “No place.” Many others of an equally indefinite character might be given here, but they would be found to be even less topographical than those just named.

[600] Aubrey, Remains of Judaisme and Gentilisme. MS. Lansdowne Collection.

[601] See Gent.’s Mag., Jan. 1819, where the conditions are given in extenso.

[602] “At the abbey of Saint Milaine, near Rennes, there has been for more than 600 years a flitch of bacon, still perfectly fresh and good; yet it is promised and ordered to be given to the first couple that has been married for a year and a day without quarrelling, scolding, or regretting that they were married.”—Contes d’Eutrap.

[603] Creame—Dutch, kraam—a temporary booth erected in fair-time to serve as a shop. Even at the present day those men that go from village to village selling cheap jewellery and other articles, which they carry in a box or basket, are called mars-kramers—apparently from marcher, to walk, and the above kraam.

[604] Skene, De Verborum Significatione at the End of his Lawes and Actes. Edinburgh, 1597.

[605] See in this same chapter, p. 417, for particulars of a signboard at the Cape, exhibited by Farmer Peek.

[606] “Fly Leaves,” 1854.

[607] Parliamentary History, vol. i., p. 1195.

[608] See Gent’s Mag., Jan. 1792, p. 19.

[609] Tho. Decker’s A Knight’s Conjuring.

[610] Quoted in Lambarde’s Perambulation of Kent, p. 356.

[611] Witt’s Recreation, 1640.

[612] Banks collection of shopbills, where amateurs of tobacco curiosities may find a very rich collection of all sorts of tobacco-paper rhymes, signs, &c.

[613] In the Typographical Antiquities of Great Britain, London 1816, vol. iii., p. 116, such a paper is given, entitled: “The triumphant victory of the Imperyall Mageste against the Turkes the xxvi day of Septembre, the yere of our lord mcccccxxxii. in Steuermarke by a Capytayne named Michael Meschsaer.”

[614] Boswell’s Johnson, vol. i., p. 304.

[615] Ibid., vol. i., p. 327.

[616] Moser’s Memorandum-Book, M.S. dated 1799, as quoted in Notes and Queries, December 22, 1849.

[617] Gent.’s Mag., March 1842.

[618] Dr King’s Anecdotes, p. 117.

[619] Selden’s Table-Talk.

[620]

“Joshua prayed to the Lord from the bottom of his heart,
That the sun and moon might stand still.
The best Varinas and good tobacco in the leaf
Are sold here at the Indian.”

[621] Sir Richard Baker’s Chronicles, anno 1588.

[622] See Secret History of the Calves’ Head Club. London, 1705.

[623] Country Journal, or Craftsman, Saturday, April 25, 1730.

[624] “On entering the good town of Nogent by sunset, I put up at the Jerusalem, which offers good accommodation for travellers, wine of Vaulx, and that good.”

[625] The landlord.

[626] Read’s Weekly Journal, March 31, 1739.

CHAPTER XIV.
HUMOROUS AND COMIC.

Animals performing human actions, or dressed in human garments, are great items in signboard humour. This is a kind of comicality undoubtedly dating from the first development of human wit. The “Batromyomachia” is one of the oldest performances of the same description in literature, but the joke was already too well understood at the period that piece was produced to have been a first attempt. The Fable was the higher walk of art in this branch, the simple Caricature the lower.

Numerous Egyptian, Greek, and Roman caricatures of animals personating men have come down to us; from them this conceit was borrowed by the mediæval limners. Their MSS. teem with such subjects; and so much was this kind of humour relished at that period, that even in church decoration the caricatures of animals were liberally mixed up with the sacred subjects of biblical history. Not only the fable, conferring a moral lesson, but even the plain and unpretending animal-caricature was admitted indiscriminately with representations of saints and miracles. Thus the well-known sign of Pig and Whistle is seen in more than one church. In the stall carving of Winchester Cathedral a sow is represented sitting on her haunches, playing on a whistle, the companion carving to which is a pig playing on a violin, in accompaniment to which another pig appears to be singing. These musical pigs are also common in illustrated MSS. In Harl. MS., 4379, a sow is represented dressed in the full fashion of the fifteenth century, with horned head-dress and stilted heels, playing on a harp.

In old towns, such as Chester, Macclesfield, Coventry, &c., the Pig and Whistle is still found on signboards. Very different and learned explanations have been given for its origin, some saying it was a corruption of the pig and wassail bowl, or of the pix and housel; others that it is a facetious rendering of the Bear and Ragged Staff. Very lately the correspondents of a learned periodical have busied themselves in claiming for it a Danish-Saxon descent, as pige-washail, our Ladies’ Salutation. The Scotch also claim it as their own; pig being a pot or pot-sherd; whistle, small change; and “to go to pigs and whistles,” a free translation of “going to pot,” which Mr Jamieson states (quoting two examples) to have been at one time a colloquial phrase. Non nostrum est tantas componere lites; but the proverb says, “a hog though in armour is still but a hog;” and therefore we are inclined to think that a pig with a whistle is still but a pig, and not relating in any way to the Virgin; and we can see nothing in the Pig and Whistle but simply a freak of the mediæval artist.

As little hidden meaning is there in the Cat and Fiddle, still a great favourite in Hampshire, the only connexion between the animal and the instrument being that the strings are made from the cat’s entrails, and that a small fiddle is called a kit, and a small cat a kitten. Besides, they have been united from time immemorial in the nursery rhyme—

“Heigh diddle diddle,
The cat and the fiddle.”

Amongst other explanations offered is, the one that it may have originated with the sign of a certain Caton fidèle, a staunch Protestant in the reign of Queen Mary, and only have been changed into the cat and fiddle by corruption; but, if so, it must have lost its original appellation very soon, for as early as 1589 we find “Henry Carr, signe of the Catte and Fidle in the Old Chaunge.” Formerly, there was a Cat and Fiddle at Norwich, the cat being represented playing upon a fiddle, and a number of mice dancing round her. The bagpipes being the national instrument of the Irish, the sign is there frequently changed into the Cat and Bagpipes. This was also, some twenty or thirty years ago, a public- and chop-house, of considerable notoriety, at the corner of Downing Street, Westminster, where the clerks of the Foreign Office used to lunch; at the present day, it is the sign of a public-house near Moate, King’s Co., Ireland. The Ape and Bagpipes occurs on trades tokens as the sign of John Tayler, in St Ann’s Lane. This, too, was a joke not confined to our country, for in the marginal illustrations to the title-page of “P. Dioscoridæ Pharmacorum Simplicum,” &c., printed at Strasburg by John Schot in 1529, an ape is represented playing on the bagpipes, and a camel dancing to the tune, with these words, χαμηλον αλλαπτεν. The French were equally fond of this kind of caricature. The Spinning Sow (la Truie qui file) is common even at the present day, and has given its name to more than one street in Paris and other cities. It is said to have originated from a legend:—A certain Christian queen, Pedauca, whose honour was in danger, imitated the chaste heroines of mythology; but, instead of praying to be metamorphosed into a tree or a bird, she merely asked to have one of her feet changed into a goose’s foot, which was enough to frighten her ardent lover away.[627] Another young lady, under similar circumstances, preferred going the whole hog,—to use a colloquialism,—and was changed into a sow, merely praying to be permitted to keep her spindle, as a token of her former condition: hence the sign. It is also—(and hence, probably, the legend of the metamorphosis, to remove the prejudices of the godly)—represented in relief carving on the exterior of the cathedral of Chartres. In the Fishmarket of the same town there is a stone carved sign of a Donkey playing on a Hurdy-gurdy, (L’Ane qui veille.) Both this sign and another, representing a Cat playing at Racket, (La Chatte qui pelote,) have transmitted their names to streets in Paris. The French seem to have delighted above all things in such comicalities. Besides those named above, they had the Fishing Cat, (La Chatte qui pêche,) the Dancing Goat, (La Chèvre qui dance,) both of which Walpole mentions. We have one modern sign in London of this class—namely, the Whistling Oyster, the name of an oyster-shop in Drury Lane.

The Jackanapes on Horseback was, unfortunately for the monkeys, a painful truth. A jackanapes or monkey on horseback was generally the winding-up of a bear or bull baiting at Paris Garden. Hollinshed, in his Chronicles, anno 1562, relates how, at the reception of the Danish ambassadors at Greenwich—

“For the diversion of the populace, there was a horse with an ape on his back which highly pleased them, so that they expressed their inward conceived joy and delight with shrill shouts and variety of gestures.”

The “inward conceived joy,” we may safely conclude, was not expressed by either the monkey or the horse, particularly when we remember that in those days dogs were often let in the ring to frighten both the horse and its animal Mazeppa. The prevalence of this sport is to be inferred from an admonition to Parliament by Tho. Cartwright, published in 1572, in order to show the impropriety of an established form of prayer for the church services, in which he remarks that the clergyman

“Posteth it over as fast as he can galope, for eyther he has two places to serve, or else there are some games to be playde in the afternoon, as lying for the whetstone,[628] heathenish dauncing for the ring, a beare or a bull to be baited, or else a jackanapes to ride on horsebacke, or an interlude to be playde in the church. We speak not of [bell-] ringing after matins is done.”

Not much more than ten years ago, the good people of Paris were, every Thursday afternoon, in the summer, entertained in the Hippodrome, with “jackanapes on horseback,” dressed up like Arabs, and followed by miniature chasseurs d’Afrique, to the great gratification of our martial neighbours. This sign is named in an advertisement, of the year 1700, for a mare stolen by a “lusty black man with a brown coat,”[629] notice of the mare to be given “to Mr John Wright, at the Jackanapes on Horseback,” in Cheapside. The grinning, or, as it was written, “Grenning Iackanapes,” is a sign mentioned by Eliot in his “Fruits for the French,” or “Parlement of Pratlers,” 1593, “ouer against the Vnicorne in the Iewrie.” The Hog in Armour, in Hanging Sword Court, Fleet Street, is mentioned in an advertisement,[630] in 1678, as the place where there was to be sold “seacole sutt for the great improvement of all sorts of lands, as well as gardens and hop grounds.” It is named amongst the absurd London signs in the Spectator 28, April 2, 1711, and is still occasionally seen, as in James’ Street, Dublin. Though the sign does not exist any longer in London, yet the name is not lost among the lower orders, it being a favourite epithet applied to rifle volunteers by costermongers, street fishmongers, and such like. A jocular name for this sign is the “pig in misery.” There is also a Goat in Armour on the Narrow Quay, Bristol, and a Goat in Boots on the Fulham Road, Little Chelsea. In 1663 this house was called the Goat, and enjoyed the right of commonage for two cows and one heifer upon Chelsea Heath.

“How the goat became equipped in boots, and the designation of the house changed, have been the subject of various conjectures, the most probable of which is, that it originated in a corruption of the latter part of the Dutch legend—

‘Mercurius is der Goden Boode,’
(Mercury is the messenger of the gods,)—

which being divided between each side of the sign, bearing the figure of a Mercury—a sign commonly used in the early part of the last century [?] to denote that post-horses were to be obtained—‘der Goden Boode’ became freely translated into English, ‘the Goat in Boots.’ To Le Blond[631] is attributed the execution of this sign and its motto; but whoever the original artist may have been, or the intermediate re-touchers or re-painters of the god, certain it is that the pencil of Morland, in accordance with the desire of the landlord, either transformed the Petasus of Mercury into the horned head of a goat, his talaria into spurs upon boots of huge dimension, and his caduceus into a cutlass, or thus decorated the original sign, thereby liquidating a score which he had run up here, without any other means of payment than what his pencil afforded. The sign, however, has been painted over, with additional embellishments from gold leaf, so that not the least trace of Morland’s work remains, except, perhaps, the outline.”[632]

With all deference to the opinion of Mr Croker, we cannot help thinking of this, as of many other signboard explanations, “Se non è vero è ben trovato.” 1o. the house was called the Goat in 1663; 2o. there is no proof that it ever was called the Mercury, (nor was that sign ever so common as Mr Croker asserts.) From the following quotation it will appear that as early as 1738 some Goats in Boots had already appeared, not the result of any mythological metamorphosis. The Craftsman for June 17, 1738, in ridiculing some lenient measures taken by Government, blames the signs for putting a martial spirit in the nation, and proposes that “no lion should be drawn rampant, but couchant; and none of his teeth ought to be seen without this inscription, ‘Though he shows his teeth he wont bite.’ All bucks, bulls, rams, stags, unicorns, and all other warlike animals ought to be drawn without horns. Let no general be drawn in armour, and instead of truncheons let them have muster-rolls in their hands. In like manner, I would have all admirals painted in a frock and jockey cap, like landed gentlemen. The common sign of the two Fighting Cocks might be better changed to a Cock and Hen, and that of the Valiant Trooper to a Hog in Armour, or a Goat in Jackboots, as some Hampshire and Welsh publicans have done already for the honour of their respective countries.” The sign, then, seems to be a sort of caricature of a Welshman, the Goat having always been considered the emblem of that nation, and the jackboots an indispensable article of Taffy’s costume. Thus, Captain Grose, in his “Essay on Caricatures,”[633] mentions a Welshman with his goat, leek, hay-boots, and long pedigree, as a standard joke. Not improbably the switch carried by the goat on this sign was originally a leek. Of the same origin is the well-known Welsh Trooper, representing a man with a leek in his hat riding on a goat. This sign may still be seen in London. In the Roxburghe ballads the Welshman with his jackboots and leek occurs in an old woodcut; in other places he is drawn riding a goat, and similarly dressed.

Puss in Boots occurs at Windley, Duffield, near Derby. The Goat in Boots may have suggested the idea of making a sign of this nursery-tale hero. The Dutch shoemakers, in pursuance of the proverb, seem to have taken a particular delight in these booted animals. Various creatures in boots occur amongst the Dutch signboard inscriptions of the seventeenth century. One was the Ox in Boots, (in den gelaarsden os,) with this inscription:—

“’t Leer geeft den Schoenmaker de os daar hy schoenen van maakt om te verslyten;
Ik heb den os weer met leer tot dank gelaerst en gespoord doen conterfyten.”[634]

Another innkeeper put up the Cow in Boots, (de gelaersden koe,) and wrote beneath:—

“Ziet dees koe heeft laarzen aan
Was ’t noch een Bul dan kon het gaan.”[635]

A third, in Amsterdam, had the Cock in Boots, (de gelaarsde Haan,) with the following extraordinary rhymes:—

“Dit is de gelaarsde haan
Christus is naar ’t kruys gegaan,
Met een doornenkroon op ’t hoofd.
Hy slacht Thomas die ’t niet gelooft.”[636]

The Jackass in Boots (de gelaarsde ezel) was the sign of a publican, with this inscription:—

“In den gelaarsden ezel zeer kloek,
Verkoopt men toebak, brandewyn, en knapkoek.”[637]

The Dog also appears dressed, as the Dog in Doublet, a sign which may be seen at Pyebridge, Derby, at Northbank, Cambridge, and a few other out-of-the-way places. Dr Johnson did this sign the honour of applying it as a metaphor. Speaking of an old idea newly expressed, he said: “It is an old coat with a new facing.” Then (laughing heartily) “it is the old dog in a new doublet!”[638]

The Dog occurs in various other humorous combinations. Ned Ward mentions a famous inn, in Petty Cury, Cambridge—

“the sign of the Devil’s Lapdog, kept by an old grizly curmudgeon, corniferously wedded to a plump, young, gay, brisk, black, beautiful, good landlady, who I afterwards heard had so great a kindness for the University, that she had rather see two or three gowns’ men come into her house, than a c—— crew of aldermen in all their pontificalibusses.”[639]

The Dog’s Head in the Pot is mentioned on the Pardoner’s Roll in “Cocke Lorell’s Bote:”—

“Also Annys Angry with the croked buttocke
That dwelled at ye sygne of ye Dogges hede in ye Pot,
By her crafte a brechemaker.”

It seems originally to have been a mock sign to indicate a dirty, slovenly housewife. A woodcut above the second part of the Roxburghe ballad of “The Coaches’ Overthrow” represents various dirty practices. From the upper windows of one of the houses a woman is emptying the unsavoury contents of a domestic vase almost on the heads of the people underneath, and the sign of that house is the Dog’s head in the Pot, representing a dog licking out a pot. A coarse woodcut sheet of the commencement of the last century—evidently copied from a much older original—to judge by the costumes, represents two ancient beldames with high-crowned hats, starched ruffs and collars, and high-heeled boots, in a very disorderly room or kitchen; one of the women wipes a plate with the bushy tail of a large dog, whose head is completely buried in a capacious pot, which he is licking clean; under it:—

“All sluts behold, take view of me,
Your own good housewifry to see.
[444] It is (methinks) a cleanly care,
My dishclout in this sort to spare,
Whilst Dog, you see, doth lick the pot,
His taile for dishclout I have got,” &c.

One of the Roxburghe Ballads, vol. i., fol. 385, entitled, “Seldome Cleanely,” has the same idea:—

“If otherwise she had
But a dishcloute faile,
She would set them to the dog to licke,
And wipe them with hys tayle.”

In Holland there is a proverb still in use, to the effect that when a person is late for dinner he is said to “find the dog in the pot,” (hy vindt den hond in de pot,) meaning that he has arrived late,—that the empty pot has been given to the dog to lick out, previously to being washed, a custom still daily practised by the peasantry of that country. This sign is sometimes also called the Dog and Crock, as in the Blackfriars’ Road; at Michelmouth, Romsey, Hants, and elsewhere. In the western counties the word “crock” is indiscriminately applied to iron or earthen pots. From the latter application comes the term “crockery ware.”

The Dancing Dogs was a sign at Battlebridge in 1668, as appears from the trades tokens. This kind of canine entertainment was one of the attractions of Bartholomew Fair, where Ben Jonson mentions “dogs that dance the Morris.”

The Laughing Dog (le chien qui rit) was formerly a sign in Rouen, and gave its name to a street, now called Du Guay Troin, from the name of a celebrated admiral. This was one of those quaint signs of which we have some specimens in this country, as the Two Sneezing Cats, which is said to be somewhere in London; the Flying Monkey, Lambeth; the Monkey Island, at Bray, near Maidenhead; the Gaping Goose, at Leeds, Oldham, and various parts of Yorkshire; and the Loving Lamb, two in Dudley. In Paris there was the old sign of the Green Monkey, (le singe vert,) and some fifteen years ago Lille could boast of the Hunchbacked Cats (les chats bossus) in the Rue Sec-Arembault.

Equally absurd is the Cow and Snuffers, at Llandaff, Glamorgan. In a play of George Colman, entitled the “Review, or the Wags of Windsor,” the following lines occur:—

“Judy’s a darling; my kisses she suffers;
She’s an heiress, that’s clear,
[445] For her father sells beer,
He keeps the sign of the Cow and the Snuffers.”

The same song also occurs in the “Irishman in London, or the Happy African.” At Llandaff the sign is represented by a cow standing near a ditch full of reeds and grasses, with a pair of snuffers, placed as if they had fallen from the cow’s mouth. The oddity of the combination in all probability pleased a publican who had heard the song, and adopted it forthwith as his sign, leaving the arrangement of the objects to the taste of the sign-painter.

The Colt and Cradle might have been seen in St Martin’s Lane in 1667. It is still a common sign for houses of evil repute in Holland, as may be seen from two examples in the Zandstraat, Rotterdam, where the cradle is carved above the door, with the colt in it lying on his back: the inscription is, “Het paard in de Wieg,” (the horse in the cradle.) And since, according to Stow, in ancient times “English people disdayned to be bawdes, froes of Flaunders were women for that purpose,” it is more than probable that these “froes” introduced this sign from their own country. In the Dutch language paar means “a couple,” and is constantly used for a man and woman, either united by the bands of lawful marriage or otherwise. The original form of the sign, then, we suppose was “the couple in the cradle,” (het paar in de wieg.) But the Dutch have an inveterate habit of adding diminutives, so that with this appendix it became paartje—from paartje to paardje, a small horse, the transition was easy enough; and, covered with that transparent veil, the indelicate sign has come down to the present day. This seems so much the more probable to be the meaning, since the Cradle in London also was a “bad sign,” (see p. 394.)

The Goose and Gridiron occurs at Woodhall, Lincolnshire, and in a few other localities: it is said to owe its origin to the following circumstances:—The Mitre (see p. 319) was a celebrated music-house in London House Yard, at the N.-W. end of St Paul’s. When it ceased to be a music-house, the succeeding landlord, to ridicule its former destiny, chose for his sign a goose stroking the bars of a gridiron with his foot, in ridicule of the Swan and Harp, a common sign for the early music-houses. Such an origin does the Tatler give; but it may also be a vernacular reading of the coat of arms of the Company of Musicians, suspended probably at the door of the Mitre when it was a music-house. These arms are, a swan with his wings expanded, within a double tressure, counter, flory, argent. This double tressure might have suggested a gridiron to unsophisticated passers-by. Paddy’s Goose is, at the present day, a nickname for a public-house in Shadwell called the White Swan; but why it was thus travestied non liquet. This tavern acquired some notoriety during the Crimean campaign. When the Government wanted sailors to man the fleet, the landlord of the house used to go among the shipping in the river and enlist numbers of men. His system of recruiting was to go in one of the small steamers, with flags and colours flying and a band playing, the heart-stirring or heart-rending notes of which used to awaken the martial ardour of the merchant sailors, and make them enlist in the Royal Navy. This sign also triumphantly proclaims the presence of British gin and Irish whisky in a low public-house near the harbour of La Valette at Malta.

Not a few signs represent proverbs or proverbial expressions. The Bird in Hand, for instance, with occasionally the Book in Hand,—the former denoting the landlord’s full appreciation of the truth of the proverb, “One bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” It is frequently accompanied by the following truthful rather than grammatical distich:—

“A bird in hand far better ’tis
Than two that in the bushes is.”

This sign occurs among the trades tokens, being literally rendered by a hand holding a bird. Innumerable are the jokes resorted to by landlords to intimate that hard truth that no credit is given.[640] Frequently the pill is gilt in the most agreeable manner: a deceptive hope of “better luck to-morrow” is frequently held out, as

“Drink here, and drown all sorrow;
Pay to-day, I’ll trust to-morrow.”

Or:—

“Pay to-day and trust to-morrow,
And so endeth all our sorrow.”

The same in Holland:—

“Vandaag voor geld, morgen voor niet.”[641]

In Italy a cock is sometimes painted, with the following inscription:—

“Quando questo gallo cantarà
Allora credenza si farà.”[642]

The inventive genius of the French, with its usual fondness for romance, has constructed a little dramatic incident to express the idea:—

“Crédit est mort; les mauvais payeurs l’ont tué.”[643]

Which phrase was seen by Coryatt, nearly two centuries ago, on one of the inns where he put up at in France: a similar idea is expressed at Smethwick in the following inscription:—

“Sacred to the memory of Poor Trust, who fought hard at the battle of Deception, but fell under General Bad Pay.”

A print hung up in a public-house in Nottingham, depicting a black tombstone (or signboard,—it is difficult to say which) spotted with briny white tears, gives the inscription with still greater force:—

“This monument is erected to the memory of Mr Trust, who was some time since most shamefully and cruelly murdered by a villain called Credit, who is prowling about, both in town and country, seeking whom he may devour.”

Others have the picture of a dead dog, and under him:—

“Died last night, Poor Trust! Who killed him? Bad Pay.”

A very general inscription is:—

“This is a good world to live in,
To lend, or to spend, or to give in;
But to beg or to borrow, or to get a man’s own,
It is such a world as never was known.”

Or:—

“The rule of this house, and it can’t be unjust,
Is to pay on delivery, and not to give trust;
I’ve trusted many to my sorrow,
Pay to-day, I’ll trust to-morrow.”

Stuck up in many tap-rooms may be seen the following:—

“All you that bring tobacco here
Must pay for pipes as well as beer;
And you that stand before the fire,
I pray sit down by good desire,
That other folks as well as you
May see the fire, and feel it too.
[448] Since man to man is so unjust,
I cannot tell what man to trust.
My liquor’s good, ’tis no man’s sorrow,
Pay to-day, I’ll trust to-morrow.”

At an ale-house in Ranston, Norfolk, the usual information is conveyed in the following manner, (to be read upwards, beginning from the bottom of the last column):—

MORE | BEER | SCORE | CLERK
FOR | MY | MY | THEIR
DO | TRUST | PAY | SENT
I | I | MUST | HAVE
SHALL | IF | I | BREWERS
WHAT | AND | AND | MY

At other places it comes in a still more “questionable shape,” reminding us of the curious literary conceits of the old monkish rhymesters. In the following, the letters must be connected into words, thus—The brewer, &c.

Th.  ebr:  Ewe  !  Rh.  eH.  Ass?
en  .  THI.S.  cLEr
k a N d  !  IM.  ustp,  A.  YM.  Ys
cO.  r.  ef,  O
r IFIT  r US. ?  tandam,  No  tpA.
i D wha.  ts; Ha:
LL i D  ,  O?  Fo Rm.  Or  .e.

The little wayside inn, between Pateley Bridge and Ripon, has the following plaintive appeal to a stiffnecked race:—

“The malster doth crave
His money to have,
The exciseman says have I must.
By that you can see
How the case stands with me;
So I pray you don’t ask me for trust.”

A small beer-house at Werrington, in Devonshire, yclept the Lengdon Inn, has:—

“Gentlemen, walk in, and sit at your ease,
Pay what you call for, and call what you please;
As trusting of late has been to my sorrow,
Pay me to-day, and I’ll trust ee to-morrow.”

The Maypole, near Hainault Forest, has:—

“My liquor’s good,
My measures just;
Excuse me, sirs!
I cannot trust.”

At Preston, in Lancashire:—

“Greadley Bob, he does live here,
And sells a pot of good strong beer;
His liquor’s good, his measure just,
But Bob’s so poor he cannot trust.”

PLATE XVII.

HAT AND BEAVER. (Banks’s Collection, 1750.) | SWAN WITH TWO NECKS. (Banks’s Collection, 1785.)

HARROW AND DOUBLET.
(Banks’s Collection, 1700.)

MAN IN THE MOON. (Vine Street, Regent Street; modern.) | THE APE. (Stone carving, Philip Lane, Barbican, 1670.)

The Green Man, on Finchley Common, under a trophy composed of two pipes crossed and a pot of beer, presents us with the following:—

“Call . Softly,
Drink . Moderate
Pay . Honourably,
Be Good . Company
Part . FRIENDLY
Go . HOME . quietly.
Let those lines be no MANS Sorrow
Pay to DAY and i’ll TRUST to Morrow.”

At Middleton, Co. Cork, the verses usually accompanying the sign of the Bee-hive are slightly altered to meet the emergency of the case, surgit amari aliquid:—

“Within this hive we’re all alive
With whisky sweet as honey;
If you are dry, step in and try,
But don’t forget the money.”

So old is the necessity of informing the public that they must pay for what they obtain, that even in the ruined city of Pompeii a similar caution is found. Above the door of a house, once inhabited by a surgeon, occurs the following laconic intimation:—“Eme et habebis.” And so widely spread is the evil, that even in Chinese towns the shopkeepers have found it necessary to inform the public on their signs—

“Former customers have inspired us with caution; no credit given here.”

One publican, at Littletown, in Durham, seems to have taken a somewhat opposite view, putting up, for a sign, the Bird in the Bush, but it may be doubted if his experience has confirmed him in a preference of the bird in the bush to the bird in the hand.

Another proverb illustrated is the Cow and Hare, at Stafford, Bottisham, (near Newmarket,) and other places, evidently suggested by the adage, “A cow may catch a hare.” This sign is mentioned, about 1708, in a rather curious memorandum from the pen of Partridge, the almanac-maker, at the commencement of a book of “the Cælestial Motions and Aspects for the years of our Lord 1708 to 1720.”[644] The MS. note is as follows:—“At the Cowe and Hare by Whitechappel Church, a rare rogue lives there, a pickpocket.” Of the same class as the Cow and Hare is Who’d ha’ thought it? which sometimes is seen on an ale-house sign, as, for instance, at North End, Fulham. A wag suggested this as the motto to the coat-of-arms of a certain baronet-brewer:

“Who’d ha’ thought it?
Hops had bought it.”

The sign of the Jolly Brewer—Who’d ha’ thought it? occurs in the Jersey Road, Hounslow. Originally, it seems to have implied that, after a hard struggle in some other walk of life, the landlord had succeeded in opening the long-wished-for ale-house. So in Holland: many country retreats of retired tradespeople bear such names as “Nooit gedacht,” (never expected,) &c.

Why not, the name of a public-house at Essington, in Staffordshire, seems to imply quite the reverse, and to have been adopted as the motto of a more sanguine landlord; unless it may be considered as a ready answer to the often-repeated question, before “popping in round the corner,” “Shall we have a drop?”

The Lame Dog is very common; but is particularly appropriate at Brierley Hill, near Dudley, the establishment being kept by a collier, rendered lame in a pit accident. Under a pictorial representation of a lame dog trying to get over a stile, the following appeal is made to the thirsty and benevolent public:—

“Stop, my friends, and stay awhile
To help the Lame Dog over the stile.”

Sometimes, as at Bulmer, Essex, we see a somewhat similar idea expressed by a man struggling through a globe—head and arms protruding on one side, his legs on the other—with the inscription, “Help me through this World.” The same allegory might have been seen on a beer-house in Holland in the seventeenth century, but the inscription was different—“Dus na ben ik door de wereld,” (“Thus far I have got through the world.”) This sign is also called the Struggler, or the Struggling Man, and at Hampton, where the house is kept by a widow, the Widow’s Struggle. In Salop Street, Dudley, the struggle is represented by a man, with a dog beside him, walking against a strong head wind. The Live and let Live has a somewhat similar meaning; it occurs at North End, Fulham, and in many other places. To this class, also, the following seems to refer:—“A witty, though unfortunate, fellow having tryed all trades, but thriving by none, took the pot for his last refuge, and set up an ale-house, with the sign of the Shirt, inscribed under it, ‘This is my last shift.’ Much company was brought him thereby, and much profit.”[645] Nathaniel Oldham, the friend of Sir Hans Sloane, Doctor Mead, and the leading virtuosi of that time, himself a collector, as well as a sporting man, at last got so reduced in circumstances that he had to dispose of his curiosities and superfluities. He opened his house, therefore, as a curiosity shop, and wrote over the door, Oldham’s last Shift. Unfortunately, it was his “last shift,” for scarcely had he opened his shop when one of his innumerable creditors had him arrested and sent to King’s Bench Prison, where he died. J. T. Smith, in his “Cries of London,” tells a similar device of a sailor, maimed at the battle of Trafalgar, who used to go about town with a wheelbarrow of ginger nuts, which he called “Jack’s last shift.”

The uncertainty of success in trade is expressed by the sign of the Two Chances; and Hit or Miss, the good and the bad chance which innkeepers, as well as all other mortals, have to run in this transitory world. This sign occurs at Hannington, Northampton, and at Clun, in Salop. At Openshaw, near Manchester, a similar idea is expressed by a sign representing two men running a race, which seems to promise a dead heat, with the inscription, Luck’s all.

Others have a sort of satirical humour in them, such as the well-known Four Alls, representing a king who says, “I rule all;” a priest who says, “I pray for all;” a soldier who says, “I fight for all;” and John Bull, or a farmer, who says, “I pay for all.” Sometimes a fifth is added in the shape of a lawyer, who says, “I plead for all.” It is an old and still common sign, and may even be seen swinging under the blue sky in the sunny streets of La Valette, Malta. In Holland, in the seventeenth century, it was used, but the king was left out, and a lawyer added; each person said exactly the same as on our signboards, but the farmer answered:—

“Of gy vecht, of gy bidt, of gy pleyt,
Ik ben de boer die de eyeren leyt.”[646]

The author of “Tavern Anecdotes” observes that he used to notice in Rosemary Street, the sign of the Four Alls, but passing that way some time after, he found it altered into the Four Awls; the sign painter who renewed the picture had probably found himself not equal to a representation of the four human figures. In Ireland, a similar corruption may be observed, the four shoemaker’s awls taking the place of the four representatives of society. Although having no connexion with the Four Alls, it may be mentioned that three and four awls constitute the charges in the shoemakers’ arms of some of the continental trade societies or guilds.

This enumeration of the various performances coupled with the word all has been used in numerous different epigrams: an address to James I. in the Ashmolean MSS., No. 1730, has:—

“The Lords craved all, The Queene graunted all, The Ladies of honour ruled all, The Lord-Keeper seal’d all, The Intelligencer marred all, The Parliament pass’d all, He that is gone oppos’d himself to all, The Bishops soothed all, The Judges pardon’d all, The Lords buy, Rome spoil’d all, Now, Good King, mend all, Or else the Devil will have all.”

This again seems to have been imitated from a similar description of the State of Spain in Greene’s “Spanish Masquerade,” 1589:—

“The Cardinalls solicit all, The King grauntes all, The Nobles confirm all, The Pope determines all, The Cleargie disposeth all, The Duke of Medina hopes for all, Alonso receives all, The Indians minister all, The Soldiers eat all, The People paie all, The Monks and friars consume all, And the Devil at length will carry away all.”

The Naked Boy was a satirical sign reflecting upon the constant changes of the fashions of our ancestors. William Herbert has this observation in his manuscript memoranda, “I remember very well when I was a lad seeing on Windmill Hill, Moorfields, a taylor’s sign, a naked boy with this couplet:—

“So fickle is our English nation,
I wou’d be clothed if I knew the fashion.”[647]

The same idea is expressed in the “Introduction to Knowledge,” by Andrew Borde, (the original “Merry Andrew,”) Doctor of Physick, 1542, where a naked man is introduced undecided as to the style of dress he should adopt on account of the continual change in the fashions:—

“Now am I a frysker, all men doth on me looke,
What should I do but set cocke on the hoope,
What do I care yf all the worlde me fayle,
I will get a garment shall reche to my tayle.”

Coryatt also reflects upon this ever-varying change in his “Crudities:”—“For whereas they [the gentlemen of Venice] have but one colour, we use many more than are in the rainbow; all the most light garish and unseemly colours that are in the world. Also for fashion we are much inferior to them: for we weare more phantastical fashions than any nation vnder the Sunne doth, the French onely excepted; which hath given occasion to the Venetians and other Italians to brand the Englishmen with a notable mark of levity by painting him stark naked with a pair of shears in his hand, making his fashion of attire according to the vain conception of his brain sick head, not to comeliness and decorum.”

So ancient is this complaint as to the versatility of our fashions that we verily believe even our tattooed forefathers must have been constantly altering the hue of their blue stencilling, and bedaubing themselves with new patterns. John Harding, in his “Chronicles,” of the reign of Richard II., describing the various materials and cuts of the “unpayed doublettes and gownes,” even long before his time, says, ch. 193:—

“Broudur and furres and goldsmith werke ay newe,
In many a wyse eche day they did renewe.”

Douglas, the monk of Glastonbury, wrote not less angrily in the days of Edward III:

“Englyshmen hawnted so moche unto the folye of strawngers that fro that tyme every yere thei chaungedde them in diverse schappes and disgisingges of clothengge now long, now large, now wide, now streite, and every day clothingges newe destitute and deserte from alle honeste of holde array and gode usage.”[648]

Indeed so angry does the good monk become about these extravagant fashions, that he says,—“If I sethe shalle say, they weren more like to turmentours and Diviles in their clothing and also in schoyng and other aray that they semed no menne.”

Not only did we invent, but we borrowed absurd foreign fashions. Samuel Rowland, in “The Letting of Humours Blood in the Head Vaine,” 1611, says:—

“Behold a most accomplish’d cavaleere,
That the world’s ape of fashions doth appeare;
Walking the streete his humours to disclose,
In the French dowblet and the German hose,
The muffes, cloake, Spanish hat, Tolledo blade,
Italian ruffe, a shoe right Flemish made,
Like the Lord of Misrule, where he comes he’ll revel.”

And Heywood, in the “Rape of Lucrece,” 1638, epigr. xxvi., has:—

“The Spaniard loves his ancient slop,
The Lombard his Venetian;
And some like breechless women go,
The Russ, Turk, Jew, and Grecian;
The thrifty Frenchman wears small waist,
The Dutchman his belly boasteth,
The Englishman is for them all,
And for each fashion coasteth.”

Shakespeare seems to allude to the sign of the Naked Boy in his “Comedy of Errors,” act iv., scene 3, where Dromio says, “What, have you got the picture of old Adam new apparell’d.” At Skipton-in-Craven, there is still a stone bas-relief of the Naked Boy, fixed in the front of a house, with the date 1633.

The Good Woman, or the Silent Women, and at Pershore, in Worcestershire, the Quiet Woman, represent a headless woman carrying her head in her hand. Brady, in his “Clavis Calendaria,” vol. ii., p. 203, says, “The martyrs who had been decapitated were, therefore, usually represented with headless trunks, and the head on some adjoining table, or more commonly in their hands; and it was easy for ignorance and credulity not only to mistake that type, but to be led into belief that those holy persons had actually carried their heads about for the benefit of believers.” The sign, yet preserved, particularly by the oilshops, of the Good Woman, although originally meant as expressive of some female saint, holy or good woman, who had met death by the privation of her head, has been converted into a joke against the females whose alleged loquacity is considered to be satirised by this representation, which, to conform to such meaning, they now more commonly call the Silent Woman. The fact, however, of it being particularly an oilman’s sign, makes it possible that it may have some reference to the heedless [head anciently was pronounced heed] or foolish virgins of the parable, who had no oil in their lamps when the bridegroom came. Where is your head? is still a question addressed to forgetful people.

There is a very curious example of this sign at Widford, near Chelmsford, representing on one side a half-length portrait of Henry VIII., on the reverse, a woman without a head, dressed in the costume of the latter half of the last century, with the inscription Forte Bonne. The addition of the portrait of Henry VIII. has led to the popular belief that the headless woman is meant for Anna Boleyn, though probably it is simply a combination of the King’s Head and Good Woman.

This sign is equally common on the Continent; the book of Dutch signboard inscriptions of the seventeenth century, from which we have constantly quoted, gives several verses which figured under various signs of the Good Woman. Amongst them the following are worth noticing:—

“Hier is de goede vrouw te vinden,
Na ’t leven zeer net afgebeeld,
Daar niet als ’t hoofd maar aan en scheeld,
Dewyl dat draait met duizend winden;
Indien er ’t hoofd was aangebleven
Sy was nooit goed haar gansche leven.”[649]

Another had:—

“De vrouw die is een mannen-plaag,
Al zyn snot-leepels daarna graag;
Dies als dat vuur is uitgedoofd
Dan wenschen zy, haar zonder hoofd.”[650]

In Italy, also, it is known, and serves as a sign to many an inn. Readers who may have visited Turin will remember the kind reception of “la buona Moglie” in that town. In Paris it gives its name to a street, Rue de la Femme sans Tête. The picture in France is generally accompanied by the legend, “Tout en est bon,” the absence of the head probably implying “fors la tête,” except the head; ergo, everything is good in woman except her head—her ever-changing whims and fancies. At the present day there is, in the Rue St Marguerite, a pork butcher who has made the following use of this sign: Under the usual representation of the Good Woman he has written in golden letters, “Tout en est bon, depuis les” (a representation of four pigs’ feet) “jusqu’à la,” (a representation of an enormous boar’s head.) This ungallant association of ideas of a woman and a pig is, we are sorry to say, not without an example in our nation, though fortunately our rudeness was two hundred years ago, and we have grown more refined since:—

“One Ambrose Westrop, vicar of the Parish church Much to Sham (?) in the county of Essex, taught in a Sermon That a Woman is worse than a sow in two respects; First: because a sowskin is good to make a cart saddle and her bristles good for a sowter. Secondly: because a sow will run away if a man cry but hoy, but a woman will not turn her head, though beaten down with a leaver, and that all the difference between a woman and a sow is in the nape of the neck, where a woman can bend upwards, but a sow cannot, etc. The said Westrop is a great malignant and very envious and full of venome against the Parliament. But his benefit is sequestered, as well he deserves, from his filthiness and unfitnesse to the place.”—Remarkable Passages and Occurrences of Parliament, &c. December 8 to 15, 1644.

Lawyers, priests, and women have, at all times and in all countries, received a liberal share of abuse and slander; no wonder, then, that the Lawyer kept the Good Woman in countenance. In a sign derived from the Good Woman the man of law is “damned to fame” as the Honest Lawyer, the sign representing him with his head in his hand, as the only condition in which by any possibility he could be honest. Another sign abusive of the softer sex is the Man loaded with Mischief, the sign of an ale-house in Oxford Street. The original, said to be painted by Hogarth, is fastened to the front of the house, and has the honour of being specified in the lease of the premises as one of the fixtures. An engraving of it is exhibited in the window. It represents a man carrying a woman, a magpie, and a monkey, the woman with a glass of gin in her hand. In the background, on the left-hand side, is a public-house with a pair of horns as a “finial” on the gable end; this house is called “Cuckhold’s Fortune;” a woman is passing in at the door, and a sow is asleep in a pot-house, with a label above, “She is as drunk as a sow,” whilst two cats are making love on the roof. On the right-hand side is the shop of S. Gripe, Pawnbroker, which a carpenter enters to pledge his tools. The engraving is signed: “Drawn by Experience; engraved by Sorrow.” Under it is the following rhyme:—

“A monkey, a magpie, and a wife,
Is the true emblem of strife.”

This sign has been imitated in other places, sometimes called the Mischief, as at Blewbury, Wallingford, or the Load of Mischief, as at Norwich. About twenty years ago there was one to be seen in the neighbourhood of Cambridge, with this expressive addition, that the man was tied to the woman by a chain and padlock. A similarly malicious reflection on the “softer sex” is seen in many parts of France, as in Paris, Troyes, and various other towns. It is called “Le trio de Malice,” (the three bad ones,) the trio being composed of a cat, a woman, and a monkey.

Nobody was the singular sign of John Trundell, a ballad-printer in Barbican in the seventeenth century. In one of Ben Jonson’s plays Nobody is introduced, “attyred in a payre of Breeches, which were made to come up to his neck, with his armes out at his pockets and cap drowning his face.” This comedy was “printed for John Trundle and are to be sold at his shop in Barbican at the sygne of No-Body.” A unique ballad, preserved in the Miller Collection at Britwell House, entitled “The Well-spoken No-Body,” is accompanied by a woodcut representing a ragged barefooted fool on pattens, with a torn money-bag under his arm, walking through a chaos of broken pots, pans, bellows, candlesticks, tongs, tools, windows, &c. Above him is a scroll in black-letter:—

“Nobody . is . my . Name . that . Beyreth . Every . Bodyes . Blame.”

The ballad commences as follows:—

“Many speke of Robin Hoode that never shott in his bowe,
So many have layed faultes to me, which I did never knowe;
But nowe, beholde, here I am,
Whom all the worlde doeth diffame;
Long have they also scorned me,
And locked my mouthe for speking free.
As many a Godly man they have so served
Which unto them God’s truth hath shewed;
Of such they have burned and hanged some,
That unto their ydolatrye wold not come:
The Ladye Truthe they have locked in cage,
Saying of her Nobodye had knowledge.
For as much nowe as they name Nobodye
I thinke verilye they speke of me:
Whereffore to answere I nowe beginne—
[458] The locke of my mouthe is opened with ginne,
Wrought by no man, but by God’s grace,
Unto whom be prayse in every place,” &c.

In J. O. Halliwell’s “Shakespeare,” vol. i., p. 450, from whence we borrow the above, the subject is still further illustrated by the following quotation:—

“Nobody keeps such a rule in every bodies house that from the mistresse to the basest maide, there is not a shrewde turne done without him: for if the husband finde his study opened and enquire who did it? he shall finde Nobody: if the goodwife see her utensils disordered and demand who displast them, the issue of every servant’s reply will bee, Nobody: if the servants discover the beds towsed and the chambers durtied it will bee, Nobody; when every child is examined; nay, if the children fall and break their noses, or scratch one another’s faces, and either mother or nursse seeme angry and aske, who hurt them, they will quickly answer Nobody toucht them; and their desire of excuse hath brought lying to a custom.”—Rich Cabinet furnished with Variety of Excellent Description, 1616.

At present there is an inn in Plymouth called No Place inn; and formerly there was at Norwich a public-house called Nowhere—a name which would, to the truant husband returning home in the small hours of night, suggest a ready answer to the warm reception of his partner for better and for worse, who, for the last few hours, has been

“Gath’ring her brows, like gath’ring storm—
Nursing her wrath to keep it warm.”

Another ancient sign, to which constant allusions are made in the old writers, is the Three Loggerheads, which, old as it is, and stale as the joke may be, has not yet lost its charms for the inhabitants of many of our villages and quiet inland towns. It represents two silly-looking faces, with the inscription—

“We three
Loggerheads be,”

—the unsuspecting spectator being, of course, the third. Douce, in his “Illustrations to Shakespeare,” suggests that the original picture should have represented three fools. Thus, in Shirley’s “Bird in Cage,” Morello, who counterfeits a fool, says, “We be three of old, without exception to your lordship, only with this difference, I am the wisest fool.” In Day’s “Comedy of Law Tricks,” 1608, Julia says, “Appoint the place prest,” to which the answer is, “At the three fools.” Sometimes, as Mr Henley has stated, it was two asses. Thus, in Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Queen of Corinth.” ac. iii., sc. 1:—

“Nean. He is another ass, he says; I believe him.
Uncle. We be three, heroical prince.
Nean. Nay, then we must have the picture and the word Nos sumus.”

In this form it is still seen on valentines and humorous cartes de visite. Shakespeare, too, alludes to this sign in “Twelfth Night,” ac. ii., sc. 2:—“How now, my hearts? did you never see the picture of We Three?” Decker, ridiculing the manners and customs of his day, speaks of the fast men sitting on the stage at theatrical representations—“but assure yourself, by continual residence, you are the first and principal man in election, to begin the number of We three.”[651] In a pamphlet, entitled, “Heads of all Fashions; being a plain Disection or Definition of Divers and Sundry Sorts of Heads,” London, 1642, the Loggerheads are thus mentioned:—

“A Logerhead alone cannot well be,
At scriveners’ windows many time hang three.
A country lobcocke, as I once did heare,
Upon a penman put a grievous jeare.
If I had been in place, as this man was,
I should have called this country coxcomb asse.”

This alludes to one of the jokes in “Mother Bunch’s Merriments,” 1604, where a country fellow asks a poor scrivener, sitting in his shop, “I pray you, master, what might you sell in your shop, that you have so many ding-dongs hang at your dore?” “Why, my friend,” quoth the obligation-maker, “I sell nothing but loggerheads.” “By my fay, master,” quoth the countryman, “you have a fair market with them, for you have left but one in your shop, that I see;” and so, laughing, went his way, leaving much good sport to them that heard him. This old anecdote may have given rise to scriveners using the Loggerheads as their sign, which otherwise seems a not very pleasant reflection on their customers. We can scarcely think that any symbolism was intended, and that the Loggerheads were emblematical of the secretary’s silence and discretion. In the seventeenth century the sign might have been seen in London. There was one in Tooley Street in 1665, having on its trades token the inscription, “We are 3;” another variety had “We three Logerheads” underneath the usual heads. In the ballad of the “Arraigning and Indicting of Sir John Barleycorn, Knt., printed for Timothy Tosspot,” the trial takes place at the Three Loggerheads, by the Justices Oliver and Old Nick. The witnesses are cited at the sign of the Three Merry Companions in Bedlam—viz., Poor Robin, Merry Tom, and Jack Lackwit.

The Labour in Vain occurs among the trades tokens, and such a sign gave its name to Old Fish Street, which Hatton, in his “New View of London,” 1708, p. 405, calls “Old Fish Street, or Labour in Vain Hill.” The sign represented two women scrubbing a negro; hence it was called by the lower classes, the Devil in a Tub. “To wash an Æthiop,” is a proverbial expression, often met with in ancient dramatists, for labour in vain.[652] The Case is Altered, generally alludes to some alteration in the affairs of the landlord, either “for better or for worse.” A public-house near Banbury was so called on account of being built on the site of a mere hovel. Another house of the same name was, in 1805, erected on the road between Woodbridge and Ipswich, to meet the demand of the thirsty sons of Mars then quartered in those two towns. Its sign in those days was the Duke of York, or some such name. But when, after the downfall of the “Corsican Tyrant,” and the subsequent declaration of peace, the barracks were pulled down, the soldiers disbanded, and the benches of the ale-house remained empty, the old sign was removed, and in its place put up the sad truth—“The Case is Altered.” In another instance, the sign was adopted at Oxford as a quiet hint by a sharp business man, who succeeded as landlord to an easy-going Boniface, under whose sway the customers had been allowed to run up debts; but the case was altered under the new regulations. A correspondent of Notes and Queries (Nov. 21, 1857) gives the following example:—“I saw this sign once pictorially represented in the West of England thus:—A person, with a large wig and gown, and seated at a table; another, dressed like a farmer, stood talking to him. In the distance, seen through the open door, was a bull. The story, of course, is that related of Plowden, the celebrated lawyer,[653] and which is now in most books of fables. The farmer told Plowden that his (the farmer’s) bull had gored and killed the latter’s cow. ‘Well,’ said the lawyer, ‘the case is clear, you must pay me her value.’ ‘Oh! but,’ said the farmer, ‘I have made a mistake. It is your bull which has killed my cow.’ ‘Ah! the case is altered,’ quoth Plowden. The expression had passed into a proverb in Old Fuller’s time.” This sign also occurs in some London localities, as at Upper Kensal Green, and elsewhere.

The Grinding Young is a very curious sign at Harold’s Cross, Dublin. The subject is taken from the old ballad of the “Miller’s Maid Grinding Old Men Young,” commencing—

“Come, old, decrepit, lame, or blind,
Into my mill to take a grind.”

It is also a favourite subject on old chap-prints, which represent a kind of hand-mill, into the funnel-shaped top of which various decrepit-looking old men creep by a ladder, most of them glass in hand, greatly elated at the prospect of a renewal of youth. Meanwhile, a young maid is turning the handle of the mill, from the bottom of which the patients come out, quite young and new—if not better—men. Pretty girls stand at the side, ready to receive the rejuvenated creatures and walk off with them, their arms affectionately twined round their necks, and evidently preparing to play the old game over again, for “the cordial drop of life is love alone”—the whole affair a very decided improvement upon the usual way of entering the stage of this world.

A somewhat similar sign, though not quite so anacreontic, is of frequent occurrence in France, namely The Fountain of Juvenca,—la Fontaine de Jouvence. A stone bas-relief of this subject, a carving of the sixteenth century, still remains in the Rue du Four, in Paris. The story was borrowed by the French romancers from the Eastern tales.

The sign of the last house in a row on the outskirts of a town, used frequently to be the World’s End. This was represented in various punning ways; sometimes by a globe in clouds, as on the trades token of Margaret Tuttlesham, of Golden Lane, Barbican, in 1666. Others rendered it by a fractured globe in a dark background, with fire and smoke bursting through the rents, and thus it was represented at the World’s End in the King’s Road, Chelsea, in 1825. At Ecton, Northampton, it is typified, with a truly classical notion of physical geography, by a horseman whose steed is rearing over an abyss on the edge of a world terminated perpendicularly. A fourth, and more homely, way of representing it was a man and a woman walking together on the margin of a landscape, with this distich:

“I’ll go with my friend
To the world’s end.”

The out-of-the-way sites of such houses was the cause of their not enjoying the very best of reputations. Those, at least, of the World’s End at Chelsea and at Knightsbridge were rather exceptionable. Both these houses were much patronised by the gallants of the reign of Charles II. when breaking the seventh commandment; hence the altercation between two sisters in Congreve’s play of “Love for Love:”

“Mrs Foresight. I suppose you would not go alone to the World’s End?

“Mrs Frail. The World’s End! What, do you mean to banter me?

“Mrs Foresight. Poor innocent; you don’t know that there is a place called the World’s End. I’ll swear you can keep your countenance—surely you’ll make an admirable player.

“Mrs Frail. I’ll swear you have a great deal of impudence, and in my mind too much for the stage.

“Mrs Foresight. Very well, that will appear who has most. You never were at the World’s End? eh.”

Pepys also honoured a World’s End, the “drinking-house by the Park,” with an occasional visit. On Sunday, the 9th of May 1669, for instance, he went to church at St Margaret’s, Westminster, and that duty performed, walked “towards the park, but too soon to go in, so went on to Knightsbridge, and there eat and drank at the World’s End, where we had good things, and then back to the park, and there till night, being fine weather and much company, and so home.” The “good things” evidently proved a strong attraction, for three weeks after he went again, “and there was merry, and so home late.” In 1708 Tom Brown thus alluded to its equivocal reputation. “The lady must take a tour as far as Knightsbridge or Kensington, stop, maybe, at the World’s End or the Swan; offer my spark a small treat,” &c.[654] Under the name of le Bout du Monde, the same sign was common in France, where in ancient Paris it gave a name to the street now called Rue du Cadran. With that inveterate weakness for punning inherent to sign-painters—those of the French nation in particular—it was sometimes represented by a he-goat (bouc) and a world.

The World turned Upside down is still common, being generally represented by a man walking at the south pole; in that guise it was to be seen some twenty-five years ago on the Greenwich Road. But the meaning of the sign is a state of things the opposite of what is natural and usual,—a conceit in which the artists of former ages took great delight, and which they represented by animals chasing men, horses riding in carriages, and similar pleasantries. This also was a Dutch sign under the name of De Verkeerde Wereld, (the world reversed.) It was used by a publican in the seventeenth century in Holland, with this inscription:

“De wereld staat niet regt,
Voor de deur hangt hy verkeerd
’K Heb wyn en bier, en ’t geen gy meer begeert.”[655]

Of the Moonrakers we only know one instance, that in Great Suffolk Street, Borough, where it has been for at least half a century. The original of this may have been one of the stories of the Wise Men of Gotham. A party of them going out one bright night, saw the reflection of the moon in the water; and, after due deliberation, decided that it was a green cheese, and so raked for it. Another version is, that some Gothamites, passing in the night over a bridge, saw from the parapet the moon’s reflection in the river below, and took it for a green cheese. They held a consultation as to the best means of securing it, when it was resolved that one should hold fast to the parapet whilst the others hung from him, hand-in-hand, so as to form a chain to the water below, the last man to seize the prize. When they were all in this position, the uppermost, feeling the load heavy, and his hold giving way, called out, “Halloo! you below, hold tight while I take off my hand to spit on it!” The wise men below replied, “All right!” upon which he let go his hold, and they all dropped down into the water, and were drowned.

A Moonraker is also the nickname for a native of Wiltshire, and a very silly story is told there as its origin. Some Wiltshire smugglers, on one of their nightly expeditions, being surprised by excisemen, were compelled to hide a barrel of brandy in a pond, which one of the gang at the first opportunity privately fished out for his own personal benefit. A few nights after, when the Argus eyes of the Excise were soundly closed, the rest of the band availed themselves of a clear moonlight to return to the spot in order to “call the spirits from the vasty deep,” and began raking the water to their hearts’ content, for, taking the reflection of the moon to be the top of the barrel, they could not be convinced that the “spirit was departed,” till morning came and showed them that their barrel was all “moonshine.” Another version substitutes thieves and a cheese for the smugglers and the brandy barrel.

The Cradle and the Coffin, or First and Last, was formerly a sign in Norwich, and one can still be seen on the South Quay, Yarmouth. This combination may have its moral; not so the equally serious Mortal Man, in the little village of Troutbeck, near Ambleside, for there the denomination is simply borrowed from the beginning of the inscription which has nothing of the memento mori about it:—

“Thou mortal man that liv’st by bread,
What is it makes thy nose so red?”

“Thou silly elf with nose so pale,
It is with drinking Burkett’s ale.”

This imaginary dialogue is supposed to be held by the two figures on the signboard, the one a poor miserable-looking object, the other, who indulged in Burkett’s ale, the chubby picture of health, with a nose like that of Bardolph, “clothed in purple.” This sign was the work of Ibbetson; the picture is now gone, but the verses remain.[656]

At Hedenham, on the road between Norwich and Bungay, there is a sign called Tumble-down Dick, representing on one side Diogenes, on the other, a drunken man, with the following distich:

“Now Diogenes is dead and laid in his tomb,
Tumble-down Dick is come in his room.”

At Alton, in Hants, a drunken man is represented upsetting a table covered with cups and glasses. The verses underneath this picture are the same as at Hedenham, except that it is “Barnaby” who is said to be defunct, and not Diogenes. At Woodton in Norfolk, another sign with this name represents a jolly old farmer in a red coat, with bottle and glass in his hand, falling off his chair in a state of Bacchi plenus. The earliest mention we find of the sign is in the Original Weekly Journal for April 26—May 3, 1718, where a murder is reported to have been committed at the Tumbling-down Dick in Brentford. “Tumble-down Dick, in the borough of Southwark,” says the Adventurer, No. 9, 1752, “is a fine moral on the instability of greatness, and the consequences of ambition.” As such it was set up in derision of Richard Cromwell, the allusion to his fall from power, or “tumble down,” being very common in the satires published after the Restoration, and amongst others, Hudibras; thus, part iii., canto ii., 231:—

“Next him his son and heir apparent
Succeeded, though a lame viceregent,
Who first laid by the Parliament,
The only crutch on which he leant;
And then sunk underneath the state
That rode him above horseman’s weight.”

The same idea, and almost the identical words, occur again in his “Remains,” in the tale of the Cobbler and the Vicar of Bray:—

“What’s worse, old Noll is marching off,
And Dick, his heir apparent,
Succeeds him in the Government,
A very lame Vice-regent;
He’ll reign but little time, poor tool,
But sinks beneath the state,
That will not fail to ride the fool
‘Bove common horseman’s weight.”

We meet it also in the ballad, “Old England is now a brave Barbary,” i.e. horse, from a “Collection of Loyal Songs,” reprinted in 1731, vol. ii., p. 231,—

“But Nol, a rank rider, gets first in the saddle,
And made her show tricks, and curvate, and rebound;
She quickly perceiv’d he rode widdle-waddle,
And like his coach-horses[657] threw his highness to ground.

“Then Dick, being lame, rode holding the pummel,
Not having the wit to get hold of the rein;
But the jade did so snort at the sight of a Cromwell,
That poor Dick and his kindred turn’d footmen again.”

Dick’s bacchic propensities are also sung in many an old song. Two of the Luttrell Ballads, vol. ii., pp. 11 and 36, allude to his weakness in this respect:—

“Then thirdly Oliver he took place,
And set up young Dick the fool of his race;
Dick loved a cup of nectar.”

In another:—

“Drunken Dick was a lame Protector.”

Perhaps to the same origin may be referred the sign of Soldier Dick, which occurs near Disley, Stockport; and Happy Dick, at Abingdon. Tumbling-down Dick was also the name of a dance in the last century, which gives additional strength to the supposition that Dick Cromwell was intended, since otherwise an ordinary signboard would scarcely have come to such honour.

The Jolly Toper is a common public-house sign, probably put up as a good example to the customers; in London, there is a Tippling Philosopher, “the right man in the right place,” for he “hangs out” in Liquor Pond Street, opposite Reid’s great brewery. Here we have l’embarras du choix; which philosopher was intended by the sign, for they all, more or less, “pleaded guilty to the soft impeachment.” Theophrastus, in his “Treaty on Drunkenness,” tells us that the seven sages of Greece often met together to indulge in a cheerful glass. Plato not only excuses a drop too much occasionally, but even orders it. Heraclitus, the weeping philosopher, never laughed but when he was “half seas over.” Xenocrates gained a golden crown, awarded by Dionysius the tyrant to the deepest drinker. Seneca states that Solon and Arcesilaus are believed to have “indulged in wine,” and Cornelius Gallus says that Socrates “carried off the palm from his contemporaries by his drinking capacities.” Cato, we know from various sources, liked his glass; Horace tells us—

“Narratur et prisci Catonis
Sæpe mero caluisse virtus;”[658]

and Seneca says of him: “Cato vinum laxabat animum curis publicis fatigatum;”[659] elsewhere he remarks: “Catoni ebrietas objecta est, at facilius efficiet quisquis qui objecerit honestum quam turpe Catoni.”[660] Seneca was certainly a biassed judge, for he says: “Habebitur aliquando ebrietas honor et plurimum meri cepisse virtus erit.”[661] Other tippling philosophers are enumerated in the following quaint Latin verses, the author of which is not known:—

“Tunc vix Democritus poterat compescere risum,
Riderent cum sibi vina labris.
Tergeret ut fletus contrarius alter amaros,
Sugebat lacrymas saepe, lagena, tuas.
Divinum ut Bacchi semper spiraret odorem,
Diogenes medii vixit in orbe cadi.
Dicitur ardentem cum sese misit in Æthnam,
Empedocles modico non caluisse mero.
[467] Teque ferunt veteres guttas, Epicure, Lyæi
Vel minimas atomis antetulisse tuis.
Talia ne dubiter potare exempla secutus,
Qui sapit ille bibit, qui bibit ergo sapit.”[662]

In Holland they have a curious practice, which the Spectator thus describes:—

“The Dutch who are more famous for their industry than for their wit and humour, hang up in several of their streets what they call the sign of the Gaper; that is, the head of an idiot dressed in a cap and bells and gaping in a most immoderate manner; this is a standing jest in Amsterdam.”

But the statement is slightly—probably wilfully—incorrect. Carved wooden busts of Gapers are still used at the present day in Holland, but are, and have always been, chemists’, or rather, druggists’ signs, to intimate that narcotics are sold within, as gaping or yawning is a precursor of sleep. The costume of these busts is generally somewhat Oriental, as Eastern nations were supposed to be not only expert in herbs and medicines, but also, because opium came from Eastern climes.

A very curious and rare sign is to be seen in the little village of Nidd, near Knaresborough; this is the Ass in the Band-Box. We find it mentioned in 1712 in Partridge’s MS. book of “Celestial Motions.”[663] In the month of October of that year he entered the following memorandum:—“At the end of this month the villains made the Band-box plot, to blow up Robin and his family with a couple of inkhorns, and that rogue Swift was at the opening of the band-box and the discovery of the plot. The truth of it all was: ‘—— in a Band-box.’”[664] It figured also as one of the signs in Bonnel Thornton’s signboard exhibition of 1762.[665] It seems to have originated from an extremely indelicate joke called “selling bargains,” with which the maids of honour amused themselves in Swift’s time, (see his “Polite Conversation;”) unless it be a vernacular reading of some crest, such as an antelope or a unicorn issuing out of a mural crown.

In the borough of Southwark is a sign on which is inscribed “The Old Pick-my-toe,” which, in the absence of any better origin, we may suppose to be a vulgar representation of the Roman slave who, being sent on some message of importance, would not stop to pick a thorn out of his foot, until he had completed his mission. Probably this was the same sign as that represented on the trades token of Samuel Bovery in George Lane, a naked figure picking one of its feet; but the name of the house is not given on the token. Jack of Both Sides, at Reading, is so named because the house stands at a point where two roads meet in the form of a Y, and the house being wedge-shaped, has an entry at each side. Such a house in London is often called by the vulgar a “Flat-iron.”

The Old Smugs is a sign on the trades token of Joseph Hall, at Newington Butts, 1667, representing a smith and an anvil; but whether John Hall himself was “old Smvgs,” or whether he kept a tavern frequented by blacksmiths, history does not inform us. This last is also the name of one of the characters in the “Merry Devil at Edmonton.” The Battered Naggin (sic for Noggin) is an Irish sign, it being in that country a figurative expression for a man who has got more than is good for him,—“he has got a lick of a battered naggin.” The Noggin, without the adjective, occurs at a few places in Lancashire and Yorkshire. The Tumbling Sailors, representing three seamen “half-seas-over,” and reeling arm-in-arm down a street, may be seen near Broseley, at Dudley, and in other places. The Cripple’s Inn at Stockingford, Warwick, is doubtless nothing more than a very “lame” attempt at comicality. The Hat in Hand, in Portsea, promises a polite host; but what can be expected of Old Careless, the ominous name of a public-house at Stapleford, Notts, of Spite Hall at Brandon, Durham, or of Old No, which occurs in Silver Street, Sheffield? Slow and Easy is the unpromising name of an ale-house at Lostock, Chester; let us hope that it may be meant for a version of the Italian proverb, “chi va piano va sano,” meaning that the landlord will be content with small and fair profits, and acquire fortune by slow and easy steps.

[627] The “goose’s foot” she obtained was most probably that at the corner of her eye—i.e., she became an old woman—for the French call patte d’oie—goose’s foot—that first attack of time upon beauty which we term the crow’s foot.

[628] A whetstone was anciently the name given in derision to a liar. The reason of it is explained in the following rhymes under an old engraving in the Bridgewater collection, representing a man with a whetstone in his hand:—

“The whettstone is a man that all men know,
Yet many on him doe much cost bestowe:
Hee’s us’d almost in every shoppe, but why?
An edge must needs be set on every lye.”

How old is this connexion between lies and whetstones may be seen from Stow:—“Of the like counterfeit physition have I noted (in the Summarie of my Chronicles, anno 1382,) to be set on horsebacke, his face to the horsetaile, the same taile in his hand as a bridle, a collar of jordans about his necke, a whetstone on his breast, and so led through the citie of London with ringing of basons, and banished.”—Stow’s Chronicle, Howe’s edition, 1614, p. 604. It is a curious coincidence that in France and Germany a knife—the Rodomont knife—was handed over to outrageous liars. A vestige of this custom was still preserved at the university of Bonn at the end of the last century, where, when one of the company at the students’ mess drew the long bow a little too strongly, it was customary for all who sat at the table, without making any remarks, to lay their dinner knives on the top of their glasses, all pointing towards the offender.

[629] London Gazette, Dec. 23-26, 1700.

[630] Ibid., Jan. 10-14, 1678.

[631] James Christopher le Blond, a Fleming by birth, obiit 1740, made preparations to copy the Hampton Court tapestry cartoons. For this purpose he built a house in Mulberry Gardens, Chelsea, but the project failed.

[632] A Walk from London to Fulham. By the late T. C. Croker. 1860.

[633] Antiquarian Repertory, vol. i.

[634] “The ox gives the shoemaker leather of which he makes boots to be worn. As a grateful return I have ordered the ox to be portrayed here in boots and spurs.”

[635]

“Look here, this cow wears boots;
Were it a bull it would be less odd.”

[636] “This is the Cock in Boots. Christ has been crucified, with a crown of thorns on His head. He that does not believe it is as bad as Thomas.”

[637]

“At the brave Jackass in Boots,
There is tobacco, brandy, and gingerbread for sale.”

[638] Boswell’s Life of Johnson, vol. iii., p. 261. 1819.

[639] A Trip to Stirbitch Fair, 1703.

[640] Sometimes it is conveyed in an ingenious manner by a watch face without pointers accompanied by the significant words, No Tick.

[641] “To-day for money, to-morrow for nought.”

[642]

“When this cock shall crow,
Credit will be given.”

[643] “Credit is dead: he has been killed by bad payers.”

[644] Harl. MSS., No. 6200.

[645] Cambridge Jests; or, Witty Alarums for Melancholy Spirits. Printed at the Looking-Glass, on London Bridge, for Thomas Morris.

[646]

“You may fight, you may pray, you may plead,
But I am the farmer who lays the eggs,”—i.e., finds the money.

[647] Annotations to Ames’s Typographical Antiquities.

[648] MS. Harleian. 4690, 19 Edw. III.

[649]

“Here you may find a good woman,
Faithfully portrayed from the life.
Nothing is wanting but her head,
Because that turns about with every wind.
If the head had been left her,
She would never have been good in all her life.”

[650]

“Women are a plague to man,
And though young ‘spoons’ are fond of them.
As soon as their fire is quenched,
They wish her head was off.”

[651] Gull’s Hornbook.

[652] Massinger’s Parliament of Love, ac. ii., sc. 2; Roman Actor, ac. iii., sc. 2, &c.

[653] Edmund Plowden, obiit 1584, was buried and has a monument in the Temple Church.

[654] Walk round London and Suburbs, 1708, p. 46.

[655]

“The world does not go right,
Before my door it hangs upside down.
I sell wine and beer, and all that you may desire.”

[656] A somewhat different version of these rhymes is given on page 40.

[657] In allusion to Cromwell’s accident in Hyde Park, October 1654, when his coach-horses ran away, and his highness, who was driving, fell from the box between the traces, and was dragged along for a considerable distance.

[658] “It is said that the virtue of Cato the elder was frequently warmed by wine.”

[659] “Cato refreshed his mind with wine when it was wearied with the cares of the commonwealth.”

[660] “Cato has been blamed for drunkenness, but it is easier to find reason to praise, than to blame Cato.”

[661] “Drunkenness will be sometimes considered as honourable, and to drink a great quantity of pure wine as a virtue.”

[662] “When the wine sparkled on the lips of Democritus, it was then that he could not restrain himself from laughter. Another [Heraclius] on the contrary, often drank thy tears, O bottle, in order to dry his own tears. Diogenes lived in a barrel so that he might always smell the odour of divine wine. It is said that Empedocles, when he jumped down burning Etna, had first warmed himself with no small quantity of wine. They also say that thou, O Epicurus, didst prefer even the smallest drops of old wine to thine atoms. In imitation of these examples, I do not hesitate in drinking, for he who tastes drinks, consequently he that drinks is wise.” It is almost impossible to translate this last line, on account of the pun contained in the verb sapere, which at the same time means “to taste” and “to be wise.” The second line is evidently imperfect.

[663] Harl. MSS., 6200, p. 68.

[664] This alludes to the well-known plot of a bandbox sent to the Lord Treasurer, containing a very poor infernal machine, made of inkhorns. The affair, however, has never been satisfactorily cleared up. Swift is called a rogue by the indignant Partridge, because he had made a droll ballad and epitaph upon the “Supposed death of Partridge, the Almanac-maker,” which Swift had predicted and Partridge publicly denied.

[665] See Appendix.

CHAPTER XV.
PUNS AND REBUSES.

Punning on names, or a figurative rendering of names, was probably at first adopted not so much with any intent at joking, as means to assist the memory, giving the name a visible token, which would take the place of writing at a time when but few persons could either read or write. At the revival of learning, and the spread of what we may term the refinement of society, punning was one of the few accomplishments at which the fine ladies and gentlemen aimed. From the twelfth to the sixteenth century, it was at its greatest height. The conversation of the witty gallants and ladies, and even of the clowns and other inferior characters, in the comedies of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, which we may be sure was painted from the life, is full of puns and plays upon words. The unavoidable result of such an excess was a surfeit, and the consequent dégout, which lasted for more than a century.[666] Like other diseases, it broke out again subsequently with redoubled virulence, and made great havoc in the reign of Queen Anne. “Several worthy gentlemen and critics,” says the Tatler for June 23, 1709, “have applied to me to give my censure of an enormity, which has been revived after being long suppressed, and is called Punning. I have several arguments ready to prove that he cannot be a man of honour who is guilty of this abuse of human society.”

Bagford makes the following remark on this subject:—

“As for rebuses or name devices, thei ware brought into use heare in England after King Edward ye 3 had conquered France, and this was taken up by most people heare in this nation, espesially by them which had none armes; and if their names ended in ton, as Haton; Boulton; Luton; Grafton; Middellton; Seton; Norton; they must presently have for their signes or devises a hat and a tun; a boult and a tun; a lute and a tun, and so on, which signifies nothing to ye name, for all names ending in Ton signifieth a toune from whence they tooke their name. It would make one very merry to loke ouer ye learned Camden in his ‘Remaines,’ and to consider ye titles of our ould books printed by Haryson, Kingston, Islip, Woodcooke, Payer, Bushell,” &c.—Harl. MSS., 5910, p. ii.

Camden, in his “Remains,” mentions these punning signs, and gives a like statement with Bagford, that they were introduced from France, where they are still much in fashion. “These,” says Camden, “were so well liked by our English there and, sent hither ouer the streight of Calice with full sayle, were so entertained here although they were most ridiculous, by all degrees of the learned and unlearned, that he was nobody that could not hammer out of his name an invention by this witcraft, and picture it accordingly: whereupon who did not busy his brain to hammer his device out of this forge.” After many examples too long to quote, he concludes with the following:—

“Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury, a man of great wisedome, and borne to the universall good of this realme, was content to use mor upon a ton, and sometimes a mulberry-tree, called Morus in Latine, out of a ton. So Luton, Thornton, Ashton, did note their names with a Lute, a Thorn, and an Ash upon a Ton. So an hare on a bottle for Harebottle, a Maggot-pie upon a Goat for Pigot. Med written on a Calf for Medcalfe; Chester, a chest with a starre over it; Allet, a Lot; Lionel Ducket, a Lion with L on his head, where it should have beene in his tayle; if the lion had been eating a ducke it had been a rare device,—worth a Duckat or a duck-egge. And if you require more, I refer you to the wittie inventions of some Londoners; but that for Garret Dewes is most memorable: two in a garret casting dews at dice.[667] This for rebus may suffice, and yet if there were more, I think some lips would like such kind of Lettice.”[668]

How punning signboards were concocted we may gather from a scene in Ben Jonson’s “Alchymist,” act ii., scene 1, where a rebus sign is to be found for Abel Drugger, who for that purpose goes to a kind of fortune-teller, styling himself an alchymist, and who provides our shopkeeper in the following manner:—

“He shall have a bell, that’s Abel,
And by it standing one whose name is Dee
In a rug gown, there’s D and rug, that’s drug,
And right anenst him a dog snarling er,
There’s Drugger, Abel Drugger. That’s his sign,
And here’s no mystery and hieroglyphic.”

This wonderful sign the Alchymist terms a “mystic character,” the “radii” of which are to produce no end of good results to Abel’s trade.

The Cockneys (“gentle dulness dearly loves a joke”) have at all times been celebrated for this kind of pleasantry. The mention of a few of their signs will be sufficient to show the extent of their wit and originality in this direction. The well-known bird-bolt through a tun, or Bolt in Tun, for Bolton, the device of one of the priors of St Bartholomew, is still in existence in Fleet Street.

“It may seem doubtful,” says Camden, “whether Bolton, prior of St Bartholomew, in Smithfield, was wiser when he invented for his name a bird-bolt through his Tun, or when he built him a house upon Harrow Hill, for fear of an inundation after a great conjunction of planets in the watery triplicity.”

From an entry in the Patent Roll of 21 Henry VI., (1443,) this house in Fleet Street appears to have been an inn at that period. In a licence of alienation to the Friars Carmelites of London, of certain premises in the parish of St Dunstan, Fleet Street, “Hospitium vocatum le Boltenton” is mentioned as a boundary. On some of the seventeenth century trades tokens, we meet with a tun pierced by three arrows; this variation of the Bolt in Tun was called the Tun and Arrows, (or harrows, as the Cockney tokens have it.) There was one in Bishopsgate Street Within, and another in Bishopsgate Street Without, in the reign of Charles II.

A Hand and Cock was the punning sign of John Hancock, in Whitefriars. George Cox, in the Minories, tallow-chandler by trade, had Two Cocks for his sign. Thomas Cockayne, a distiller in Southwark, had the same sign, as a feeble pun on part of his name; whilst Christopher Bostock, not seeing any possibility “to hammer” a rebus out of his own patronym, fortunately for him lived at Cock’s Key, and so could make up for this misfortune by punning on the name of that place, whence his sign triumphantly exhibited the Cock and Key. John Drinkwater, a publisher, intimated his name by a Fountain; and William Woodcock, a bookseller in St Paul’s Churchyard in the seventeenth century, happily rendered his by a cock standing on a bundle of wood. William Hill, another bookseller in St Paul’s Churchyard in 1598, lived at the sign of the Hill. John Buckland, who followed the same profession in Paternoster Row, in 1750, was modestly content with half a pun, and adopted the sign of the Buck, while, in the same manner, another of his colleagues, Samuel Manship, who in 1720 lived “against the Royal Exchange, Cornhill,” was satisfied with the Ship. The Sun and Red Cross, in Jewin Street, was the sign of John Cross, who, taking a house with the sign of the Sun, added to it a Cross. In the same manner Pelham More, in Moorsgate, had the Sun and Moor’s Head. John Cherry, of Maidenhead, adopted a Cherry-tree as his sign, showing in this as much wit as the ancestor of the Crequi family in France, who chose a Crequier (old French for cherry-tree) as his coat of arms. Hugh Conny, of Caxton and Elsworth, Cambridge, had in 1666 Three Conies, or rabbits, for a sign. Richard Lion, in the Strand, had the Lion. Bartholomew Fish, at Queenhithe, in 1667, Three Fishes. William Horne, in Oak Lane, 1671, the Horns. Thomas Fox, in Newgate Market, a Fox. William Geese, King Street, Westminster, Three Geese. Ellinor Gandor, Upper Shadwell, 1667, a Gander; whilst H. Goes, a native of Antwerp, printer at York in 1506, next at Beverley, and finally, in London, had for his sign a Goose with an H above it. Joseph Parsons, “at the sign of Parson’s Green,” Market Place, St James, seems to have had a view of Parson’s Green, Fulham, for his sign; though why he did not simply take a parson is, we fear, a secret he has carried with him to the grave. John Hive, St Mary’s Hill, 1667, had the sign of the Beehive. Grace Pestell, in Fig-tree Yard, Ratcliffe, the Pestle and Mortar. John Atwood, in Rose Lane, the Man in the Wood. Andrew Hind, over against the Mews, Charing Cross, a Hind. Taylor, the Water poet, mentions a similar sign at Preston:—

“There at the Hinde, kinde Master Hinde, mine host,
Kept a good table, bak’d, and boyld, and rost.”[669]

Jane Keye, Bloomsbury Market, 1653, a Key. The Lion and Key was, in 1651, a sign in Thames Street, punning perhaps on the neighbouring Lion’s Quay; it is still the sign of a public-house in Hull, whilst the Red Lion and Key still occurs in Mill Lane, Tooley Street. A grocer, named Laurence Green, proved that to the “fortem ac tenacem propositi virum” nothing is impossible, and found means to pun upon his untractable name by painting his doorposts green, and called his shop the Green Posts. We meet with him in a newspaper advertisement, which, as it gives the price of various articles at that date, is not uninteresting. Green sold—

“Chocolate, made of the best nuts, at 3s. a pound; the best, with sugar, at 2s. a pound; a good sort of all nut, at 2s. 6d.; with sugar, 1s. 8d. To the buyers of three pounds, a quarter gratis. The best coffee, at 5s. 4d. a pound; to the buyer of three pounds, 1s. allowed. Bohee tea, at 16, 20, 24s., the very finest, at 28s. a pound. Fine green tea, at 14s., good, at 10s. a pound. Fine Spanish snuff, at 4s. a pound.” &c.[670]

The Harp was the sign of Richard Harper, West Smithfield; it occurs on a trades token. The house seems afterwards to have assumed the sign of the Bible and Harp. What occupation Richard Harper followed does not appear from his token, but in 1641 a Richard Harper at the sign of the Bible and Harp, published a tract called

“Bartholomew Fayre,
or
Varieties of Fancies where you may find,
A fayre of Wares and all to please your mind.”

In 1670 the house was occupied by a certain J. Clarke, and at a subsequent period by J. Bisset; both these men published numerous ballads.

The Hat and Tun is a pun on the name of Hatton, and is still preserved on a public-house sign in Hatton Wall. A man named Nobis, at the beginning of the present century opened an inn on the road to Pappenburgh, which he called Nobis Inn, and made free with grammar in order to find a punning motto, viz.: “Si Deus pro nobis quis contra Nobis.” Bells have been used by innumerable persons of the name of Bell. The Salmon was the sign of Mrs Salmon, the Madame Tussaud of the eighteenth century; her gallery was first in St Martin’s-le-Grand, near Aldersgate, whence she removed to Fleet Street, opposite what is now Anderton’s Hotel, then called the Horns Tavern. The Brace Tavern, in Queen’s Bench prison, was so called on account of its being kept by two brothers of the name of Partridge. The Golden Heart was the sign of Thomas Hart, a tailor in Monmouth Street, St Giles. (Harl. MSS., Bagford Bills, 5931.) Bat Pidgeon, the hairdresser immortalised in the Spectator, lived at the Three Pigeons, “the corner house of St Clement’s churchyard, next to the Strand,” says Pennant, where he “cut my boyish locks in the year 1740.”

The Black Swan in Bartholomew Lane, nicknamed Cobweb Hall, was kept by Owen Swan, parish clerk (hence the Black Swan?) of St Michael’s, Cornhill. It was a tavern of great resort for the musical wits in the seventeenth century. Failing in this business, Owen set up as a tobacconist in St Michael’s Alley; on the papers in which he wrapped tobacco for his customers, were the following rhymes:—

“The dying Swan in sad and mourning strains
Of his near end and hapless fate complains,
[474] In pity then your kind assistance give,
Smoke of Swan’s best that the poor bird may live.”

To which a friend of his wrote the following reply:—

“The aged Swan opprest with time and cares,
With Indian sweets his funeral prepares.
Light up the pile! thus he’ll ascend the skies
And Phœnix-like from his own ashes rise.”

There is a well-known anecdote of a man named Farr, who opened a tobacco shop on Fish Street Hill, and soon obtained a good custom from the pun over his door, “The best tobacco by Farr,” rather than from the quality of his tobacco. Opposite him there was another tobacconist who lost his customers through his pun, but he regained them in the same way as he lost them, for he fought Farr with his own weapons, and wrote up “Far better tobacco than the best tobacco by Farr.” This joke was thought so good that all his customers returned. Tobacco-papers of the original “finest tobacco by Farr” are preserved among the Banks hand-bills in the British Museum, as a proof of the truth of this history.

A Ling, or codfish, strange to say, entwined with honeysuckles, was the sign of Nicholas Ling, at the north-west door of St Paul’s, where, in 1595, he published “Pierce Pennylesse his Supplicacion to the Divell.” An Oak was the sign of Nicholas Okes, a bookseller dwelling at Gray’s Inn, publisher of some of Taylor the Water Poet’s works. His colophon represents Jupiter seated on an eagle between two oak trees. A French publisher, Nicholas Cheneau, in the Rue St Jacques, Paris, in 1580, had also an oak for his sign, (chêne, an oak.)

John Day, another publisher of the time of Queen Elizabeth, had a sort of pun, or charade, on his name in the sign of the Resurrection, his device representing a man waking a sleeper, with the words, “Arise, for it is day.” The Castle and Falcon was another of his signs. Richard Grafton, the first printer of the Common Prayer, who also printed the proclamation of Lady Jane Grey as Queen of England, for which he fell under the displeasure of Queen Mary, had a tun with a grafted fruit-tree growing through it. Stow made a pun upon this sign, saying that one of Grafton’s works was “a noise of empty tonnes and unfruitful grafftes,” to which Grafton retaliated by calling Stow’s Chronicle “a collection of lyes foolishly stowed together.” Hugh Singleton had a Golden Tun; Harrison, 1560, a hare sheltering under a corn-sheaf tied with a ribbon, and with the letters ri and a sun shining above; but the most absurd rebus of all was that of one Newberry, who, according to Camden, had a Yew Tree with several berries upon it, and in the midst a great golden N upon one of the branches, which by the help of a little false spelling made N-yew-berry.

A few punning signs still remain. At Oswaldstwistle, near Accrington, a man named Bellthorn has the Bell in the Thorn; at Warbleton, in Sussex, an old public-house has the sign of a war-bill in a tun, which sign of the Axe and Tun is further intended as an intimation to “axe for beer”! Another innkeeper named Abraham Lowe, who lives half way up Richmond Hill, near Douglas in the Isle of Man, has the following innocent attempt at punning on his name:—

“I’m Abraham Lowe, and half way up the Hill,
If I were higher up, what’s funnier still,
I should be lowe. Come in and take your fill,
Of porter, ale, wine, spirits, what you will,
Step in, my friend, I pray, no farther go;
My prices, like myself, are always low.”

Besides rebuses, and puns on names, the French have another class of punning signs, for which we have only very few equivalents, namely, rebus signboards. One of the most common is the Bœuf à la Mode, which some twenty or thirty years ago was thus Englished in golden letters on a low boarding-house at Brussels:—

“The Board House of the Fashionable Beef.”

It is the usual sign for eating-houses, being the standard dish of the French bourgeoisie. The picture represents an ox dressed up in the height of female elegance, with bonnet, shawl, &c. A good repartee is told, originating in this method of representing the sign: a citizen’s wife, of aldermanic proportions, was coming out of a magasin de nouveautés in Paris, just as two “social evils” were going in; “Dis-donc, Pelagie,” said one of the girls to her companion, “look at that Bœuf-à-la-Mode who is going out.” “Yes,” replied the indignant matron, who had overheard the remark, “and now game is coming in!”

Other French punning signs, such as St Jean Baptiste, Au Juste Prix, Le Bout du Monde, Le Signe de la Croix, and many more, have been noticed in former chapters, and need not, therefore, be again mentioned here.

[666] In the old sermons and religious treatises of the seventeenth century, however, we occasionally find punning resorted to by the preachers of the time.

[667] He was a printer who kept his shop at the sign of the Swan in St Paul’s Churchyard in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. This Garatt D’Ewes was grandfather of the celebrated antiquary, Sir Symond D’Ewes; he amassed a handsome fortune, which enabled him to purchase the manor of Gains near Upminster, Essex, and thus laid the foundation of the future greatness of his family. D’Ewes was of Dutch origin, being a native of the province of Gelderland. Some of the letters of this early printer are preserved in the Harl. MS., No. 381.

[668] Camden’s Remains, p. 140, et seq. 1629.

[669] Taylor’s Pennylesse Pilgrimage, 1630.

[670] Postman, January 25-27, 1711.

CHAPTER XVI.
MISCELLANEOUS SIGNS.

Signs which could not well be classed under any of the former divisions will find their place in this chapter, and hence a motley gathering may be expected. As in all inquiries it is proper to begin with the a. b. c., we shall do so here. The A. B. C. was the sign of Richard Fawkes, a bookseller, as the imprint of his works says:—

“In the suburbss of the famous Cytye of Lōdon, withoute Templebarre dwellynge in Durresme rentes [part of Durham House, where now the Adelphi stands] or else in Powles churche-yerde at the sygne of the A. B. C. The year of our Lorde MCCCCCXXX.”

This, we must admit, was a very reasonable sign for a “man of letters.” Continental booksellers also employed it; amongst others, Jacob Pietersz Paetsy, of Amsterdam, in 1597; in the Hague such a sign gave its name to a street. About 1825 there was a public-house in Clare Market called the A. B. C., where the alphabet from A to Z was painted over the door. Even at the present day many public-houses are called the Letters; thus there are two in Shrewsbury, two in Carlisle, one in Oldham, and others in various places. Grand A is a public-house near East Dereham, Norfolk. Little A was the sign of a tobacconist in Leadenhall Street, circa 1780; his tobacco-papers, preserved among the Banks bills, were adorned with a portrait of “Sir Jeffrey Dunstan, or Old Wigs,” one of the mayors of Garrat, styled “Old Wigs” from his practice of buying those articles, by which he made an honourable living before ambition flamed his soul and he entered upon a political career. Grand B may be seen at Long Framlington, Morpeth; Q Inn at Staleybridge; and Q in the Corner in Sheffield. Rhyming alphabets and nursery rhymes present us with the first and last, but the second we confess is somewhat mysterious: the Crowned Q, (au Q Courronne,) which was an old sign in the Rue de la Ferronière, Paris, is easy enough to understand, and one of those broad Rabelaisian strokes of humour which the public delighted in a century or two ago; indeed the sign continued in its old quarters until 1828. The Y was formerly a mercer’s sign in France, and may have originated from the custom of tying ribbons up in festoons, when they would assume somewhat the shape of that letter. It was also the sign of Nicholas Duchemin, a bookseller in Paris, 1541-1576. He, however, took a Pythagorean view of this letter, and considered it, as the freemasons do, an emblem of the double path of life, the broad way leading to destruction, the narrow way unto life; hence the top of the left hand branch terminated in flames, the right hand in a crown. The idea was evidently borrowed from Matt. vii. 13, unless it be from Persius, who says—

“Et tibi quæ Samios deduxit litera ramos,
Surgentem dextro monstravit limite callem.”

Pythagorean Y

Z was formerly a grocer’s sign in this country, and was said to stand for Zinzibar, (ginger,) but this Z after all was perhaps only a corruption of the figure 4 which, we are informed, is or was a constant grocer’s sign in some parts of Scotland, as for instance in Stirling, implying that their provisions came from the four quarters of the world. Number IV is still the sign of an ale-house at 74 Hope Street, Salford, Manchester. Number Three is to be seen at Great Layton, near Blackpool. In 1633 it was the sign of a bookseller, Jean Brunet, in the Rue Neuve S. Louis, Paris. He says on the imprints of his books, au Trois de chiffres, in contradistinction to the Roman numerals, which at that time were not named chiffres but nombres; chiffres applied only to the Arab numerals. The latter were introduced by Pope Silvester II. (999-1003) who, having studied at Seville, acquired them from the Moors.

The Bell is one of the commonest signs in England, and was used as early as the fourteenth century, for Chaucer says that the “gentil hostelrie that heighte the Tabard,” was “faste by the Belle.” Most probably bells were set up as signs on account of our national fondness for bell-ringing, which procured for our island the name of the “ringing island,” and made Handel say, that the bell was our national musical instrument; and long may it be so! We confess to have derived infinitely more pleasurable feelings from hearing the melodious bells on a summer afternoon ringing through the clear air and sending their sweet sounds over corn-field and meadow, over brook and stream, than from any cavatina or cantata, sung by the dearest paid Italians in crowded operas, and at over-heated concerts. Paul Hentzner, a German traveller, who visited this country in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, says, “the English are vastly fond of noises that fill the air, such as firing of cannon, beating of drums, and ringing of bells; so that it is common for a number of them to go up into some belfry, and ring bells for hours together for the sake of exercise.” Aubrey makes a similar remark; and, for further reference, we may go to Sir Symonds D’Ewes, who writes in his “Memoirs,” that, in 1618, he was ringing the large bell of St John’s College, Cambridge, for exercise, when the great comet was in the heavens; the consequence was, that he got entangled in the ropes, and nearly fractured his skull, whereupon he wisely resolved not to ring so long as the mischievous comet was to be seen. Generally, for a merry peal, the different toned octave bells are rung in succession; then changes are introduced, which, by continually altering, the succession of the bells produces a most pleasing effect. A peal of bells usually consists of eight, hence the frequency of the Eight Bells; besides these, there are the Four Bells, the Five Bells, the Six Bells, the Ten Bells; the Eight Ringers, (Norwich and elsewhere,) the Old Ring o’ Bells, Wolverhampton, Birmingham, &c. Three Swans and Peal, Walsall, Staffordshire; the Nelson and Peal, also in Warwickshire, and many others mentioned in a previous chapter. In some old belfries, the rules and fines of the ringers are painted in rhymes on the walls; as for instance, in St John’s Church, Chester, (dated 1687,) in All Saints’ Church, Hastings, (dated 1756,) &c. One of the oldest Bell taverns in Middlesex stood in King Street, Westminster; it is named in the expenses of Sir John Howard, (Jockey of Norfolk,) in 1466. Pepys dined at this house, July 1, 1660, invited by purser Washington; but came away greatly disgusted, for, says he, “the rogue had no more manners than to invite me, and let me pay my club.” In November of the same year, he was there again, “to see the 7 flanders mares that my Lord has bought lately.” In Queen Anne’s reign, the October club, consisting of about one hundred and fifty county members of Parliament, all unmitigated Tories, used to meet at this tavern. The Bell, in Warwick Lane, Newgate Street, is another example of the old London coaching inns, still in its original condition, the galleries being propped up to prevent their falling down: everything about the place has a seventeenth century look,—the country carts, the chickens here in the very heart of the city, the inn kitchen with its old black clock, its settles and white benches, the very smell of the cookery going on seems more homely and old English than the hot greasy vapours emanating from the areas of modern taverns. Coming into this yard from the adjacent crowded streets, is like entering a latter-day Pompeii. It was at this inn that Archbishop Leighton, the honest, steady advocate of peace and forbearance, died in 1684.

“He often used to say that if he were to choose a place to die in, it should be an Inn; it looks like a pilgrim’s going home, to whom this world was all as an Inn, and who was weary of the noise and confusion in it. He added, that the officious tenderness and care of friends was an entanglement to a dying man; and that the unconcerned attendance of those that could be procured in such a place would give less disturbance. And he obtained what he desired.”[671]

At the Bell, in the Poultry, lived, in the reign of King William and Queen Anne, Nathaniel Crouch, the famous bookseller, who was the first to condense great and learned works into a small and popular form. He generally wrote under the name of “John Burton.” His “Historical Rarities in London and Westminster,” was one of the books Dr Johnson, in his old age, desired to read again in remembrance of the pleasure derived from their teaching in the days of his youth.

At Finedon, three miles from Wellingborough, there is an old inn, called the Bell, having for a sign the portrait of a female with the following lines beneath:—

“Queen Edith, lady once of Finedon,
Where at the Bell good fare is dined on.”

The Bell Inn, kept by John Good, at Oxford, has:—

“My name, likewise my ale, is good,
Walk in and taste my own home brew’d;
For all that know John Good can tell,
That, like my sign, it bears the Bell.”

There was a Golden Bell, in St Bride’s Lane, Fleet Street, in the reign of Queen Anne, next door to which lived Lydia Burcraft, a female hairdresser, who, as appears from her bill,[672] sold an infallible pomatum to make the hair grow long and curly. The Black Bell is mentioned by Stowe, p. 81:—

“Above this lane’s [Crooked Lane] end upon Fish Hill Street, is one great house, for the most part built of stone, which pertained some time to Edward the Black Prince, son to Edward III., who was in his lifetime lodged there. It is now altered to a common hostelry, having the Black Bell for a sign.”

The Monument now stands on the site of this house.

The Bell occurs in innumerable combinations, most of which seem to have no particular meaning, but simply to arise from the old custom of quartering signs. Among them, we may mention the Bell and Anchor, Hammersmith, which was much visited by the fashion in the beginning of the reign of George III. Representations of the place and its visitors may be seen in several of the caricatures of that period, published by Bowles and Carver, of St Paul’s Churchyard. It is still in existence, but its days of glory are past, for, instead of youth and beauty, and “names known to chivalry,” its customers now mostly consist of the Irish labourers who live in the lanes and back slums of North End. Further, we meet with the Bell and Lion, Crew, Cheshire; the Bell and Bullock, Netherem, Penrith, probably united on account of the alliteration; the Bell and Cuckoo, Erdington, near Birmingham; and the Bell and Candlestick, also in Birmingham.

The Bell and Crown is very common, and withal is a reasonable combination, for the bell has, from time immemorial, been rung to express the loyalty of the nation on royal entries, whether into the world or into a town, on occasion of royal marriages or deaths, at times of great victories and declarations of peace, and other loyal celebrations. Hence many bells are inscribed with the words, “Fear God, honour the King,” which, in the beginning of the eighteenth century, seems also to have been a common inscription on the sign of the Bell.[673] This sentiment was thus versified by a sign-painter, who evidently had more loyalty than poetical genius:—

“Let the King
Live Long,
Dong Ding,
Ding Dong.”

PLATE XVIII.

THREE ANGELS.
(Banks’s Bills, 1770.)

NAKED MAN. (From a print, 1542.) | FIRE BALLOON. (Banks’s Collection, 1780.)

THREE MORRIS DANCERS.
(Formerly in Old Change, Cheapside, circa 1668.)

Few signs have so often been wrongly explained as the Bell Savage, on Ludgate Hill. Stow, generally so accurate, says it received its name from one Isabella Savage, who had given the house to the company of cutlers. Where he gathered that information we do not know, but he was “burning,” as the children say, and was certainly much nearer the truth than the Spectator, who states that it was called after a French play of “la Belle Sauvage.” The “Antiquarian Repertory,” following Stow, asserts that the inn was once the property of the Lady Arabella Savage, familiarly called “Bell Savage,” which name was represented in a rebus by a wild man and a bell, and so it was always drawn on the panels of the coaches that used to run to and from it, until the railways changed our style of travelling. The true origin of the name is manifest from a document in the Clause Roll, 31 Henry VI.[674]

“D. Script, irrot. Frenssh.

Omnib; Xpi fidelib; ad quos p’sens Scriptum p’ven. Joh’nes Frenssh, filius primogenitus Joh’is Frenssh, Gentilman, quondam civis et aurifabri London’ salutem in Domino. Sciatis me dedisse, concessisse, et hoc p’senti scripto meo confirmasse, Johanne Frenssh, vidue, matri mee, totum teñ sive hospicium, cum suis p’ten’, vocat’ Savagesynne, alias vocat’ le Belle on the Hope, in parochia S’ce Brigide in Fletestreet, London’, h’end et tenend, totum p.’dc̃m ten’ sive hospicium, cum suis p’t’ in p’fat’ Johanne ad t’minū vite sue, absq’ impeticõe vasti. In cugis rei testimoniū, &c.”[675]

In the sixteenth century, the Belle Savage appears to have been a place of amusement. “Those who go to Paris garden, the Bel Savage, or theatre, to behold bear-baiting, interludes, or fence play, must not account of any pleasant spectacle unless they first pay one penny at the gate, another at the entry of the scaffold, and a third for quiet standing.”[676] One of the attractions about that period was Banks’s wonderful horse, Marocco, which here performed his tricks before a half-admiring, half-awe-stricken audience, many of whom doubtless considered the animal a witch, if not a devil. “To mine host of the Bel Sauage and all his honest guests,” was dedicated the satirical tract of “Marocco Extaticus,” in which this horse is introduced.[677] During the civil wars we find this inn mentioned as apparently a Royalist house: “Upon search at Bell Savage (by order of Parliament) great quantities of plate were found, intended for York, but stayed by order.”[678] A very odd accident happened in this inn during the terrific storm of November 26, 1703. A Mr Hempson, we are told, was blown in his sleep out of an upper room window, and knew nothing of the storm nor of his aerial voyage, till awaking, he found himself lying in his bed on Ludgate hill. No doubt the good wine of mine host must have had something to do with this miraculous flight.[679] Having been for centuries a coaching inn, its name spread to the provinces, and some inn-keepers copied its sign, whence we meet with La Belle Sauvage, Macclesfield, and in one or two other places.

Balls were extremely common in former times, frequently in combination with other objects; this arose from the custom of the silk mercers in hanging out a Golden Ball. Constantine the Great adopted a golden globe (termed Hesa) as the emblem of his imperial dignity, on which, after he embraced Christianity, he placed a cross, and with this addition it continues as one of the insignia of royalty at the present day. The early silk-mercers adopted this golden globe, or ball, as their sign, because in the middle ages, all silk was brought from the East, and more particularly from Byzantium and the imperial manufactories there, whence it was called serica Constantinopolitana, pannus imperialis, Basilica, de Basilicio, ρηγικον, &c. The Golden Ball continued as a silk-mercer’s sign until the end of the last century, when it gradually fell to the Berlin wool shops, and with them it continues at the present day.

Balls of various colours were invariably the signs of quacks and fortune-tellers in the eighteenth century; the Bagford Bills are full of Red, Blue, Black, White, and Green Balls, all signs of those gentry who profess to cure all the evils flesh is heir to. How they came to choose this sign is hard to say, for we can scarcely imagine that they were intended to represent magnified pills. Moorfields[680] was the head-quarters of this trade:—

“If in Moorfields a Lady stroles
Among the Globes and Golden Balls,
[483] Where ere they hang she may be certain
Of knowing what shall be her fortune.
Her husband too, I dare to say,
But that she better knows than they.”

Compleat Vintner, London, 1720, p. 38.

The Golden Ball was the sign of J. Osborne, bookseller in Paternoster Row, circa 1740, who printed one of the earliest “London Directories;” also of Doctor Forman in Lambeth Marsh, who was deeply implicated in the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury in 1613. The Two Golden Balls at the upper end of Bow Street, Covent Garden, was a place famous for concerts, balls, and other amusements, in the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century. Prince Eugene once attended a concert at this house. The Two White Balls, in Marylebone Street, was the sign of a school in 1712, where Latin, French, mathematics, &c., were taught; in the same house there also lived a clergyman who taught “to write well in three days.”[681]

The balls of the silk mercers and the quacks, suspended from an iron above the door, were generally added (in name at least) to the painted sign, when the house possessed one; as, for instance, the Ball and Cap, Hatton Garden, 1668; the Ball And Raven, Spitalfields, in the seventeenth century, (both on trades tokens;) the Red Ball and Acorn, Queen Street, Cheapside, “a [quack] gentlewoman, daughter of an eminent physician in 1722;”[682] the Plough and Ball, at Nuneaton; the Salmon and Ball, several in London; the Bible and Ball, a bookseller’s in Ave Maria Lane, 1761; the Heart and Ball, a silk-mercer’s in Little Britain, 1710; the Green Man and Ball, on a trades token of Charter House Lane, where the man is represented throwing a ball; and thus innumerable other combinations with the Ball might be mentioned.

The Three Blue Balls, generally a pawnbroker’s sign, was also in old times used for taverns and other houses, while pawnbrokers used at pleasure such signs as the Blackamoor’s Head, the Black Dog and Still, &c.[683] On 26th March 1668, Pepys tells us that, coming from the theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, he and his party went to the Blue Balls tavern in the same locality, where they met some of their friends, including Mrs Knipp;

“And after much difficulty in getting of musick, we to dancing and then to a supper of French dishes, which yet did not please me, and then to dance and sing, and mighty merry we were till about eleven or twelve at night, with mighty great content in all my company, and I did, as I love to do, enjoy myself. My wife extraordinary fine to-day, in her flower tabby suit, bought a year and more ago, before my mother’s death put her into mourning, and so not worn till this day, and everybody in love with it, and, indeed, she is very fine and handsome in it. I having paid the reckoning, which came to almost £4, we parted.”

What a delightful flow of animal spirits that old Secretary of the Admiralty enjoyed! Alas, for the awful dignity of his modern successors!

There is still a public-house sign of the Blue Balls, at Newport, I.W.

The Ring and Ball, Fenchurch Street, 1700, seems suggested by the game of pall mall, recently revived under the name of croquet, in which a ball was struck by a mallet through an iron ring. This sign is mentioned in an advertisement of some valuable trinkets which had been lost:—

“A gold watch in a plain case, made by Thompson, with the hours of the day only; a gold chain, pear fashion, two lengths, with a gold watch-hook of Filegrin Indian work, and hung on it a diamond locket, large diamonds with hair in the middle and death at length on a tombstone; another diamond locket, less diamonds, with a cypher in hair; a red cornelian set in gold engraved with a head; a plain locket with A. K. in golden letters; a civet-box with a white stone, and engraved on it outwards a small head and a camel [cameo?] Whosoever stops them if offered to be pawned or valued, and gives notice to Mr Hankey at the Ring and Ball in Fenchurch Street, shall have 5 guineas for the whole, or proportionable for any part.”[684] A small inducement to honesty!

The Bat and Ball is a common sign for public-houses frequented by cricketers; also the Cricketers’ Arms, the Five Cricketers, and many others. The Wrestlers obtain their name from a sport formerly in great favour in this country, and still cultivated in some parts. At Yarmouth an inn of that name is more celebrated for the jeu d’esprit of the immortal Nelson than anything else. When the fleet was riding in the Yarmouth roads, the landlord, desirous of the patronage of the blue-jackets, requested permission to call his house the Nelson Arms. His lordship gave him full power to do so, but at the same time reminded him that his arms were only in the singular number.

“Odium quod certaminibus ortum ultra metum durat,”

says Velleius Paterculus, and the truth of the assertion is exemplified in the old national antipathy betwixt this country and our neighbours across the channel, whence the Antigallican (the name assumed by a London association in the middle of the last century) could not fail to be a favourite sign. At present this feeling exists to only a very small extent in the minds of our lower orders; but formerly a Frenchman could not pass through the streets of London with impunity. Stephen Perlin, a French ecclesiastic, who wrote in 1558 a description of England, Scotland, and Ireland, says:—

“The people of this country have a mortal hatred for the French as their ancient enemies, and in common call us France chenesve [French knave], France dogue, which is to say, French rascals and French dogs. They also call us or son.”

Grosley[685] devotes a whole chapter to this subject, and tells us that the French were ridiculed on the stage, and insulted and ill-treated in the streets. Even at the present day, when the penny romances are in want of a melodramatic villain, a Frenchman is sure to have the honour of personating him.

At the beginning of this century there was a tavern of this name in Shire Lane, Temple Bar, kept by Harry Lee, of sporting notoriety, and father of Alexander Lee, the first and “original tiger,” in which capacity he was produced by the notorious Lord Barrymore. This tavern was much frequented by his lordship and other gentlemen fond of low life, pugilism, and so-called sport. The nicknames of the brothers Barrymore will give a tolerably good idea of their amiable qualities; the eldest was called Hellgate; the second Cripplegate, (he was lame,) and the third Newgate, so styled, because, though an honourable and a reverend, he had been in almost every gaol in England except Newgate. This interesting family circle was completed by a sister, called Billingsgate, on account of the forcible and flowery language she made use of. The Antigallican is still in vogue, as there are three public-houses with that sign in London, besides some in the country, and an Antigallican Arms at New Charlton, Kent.

On the 29th of September 1783, the first balloon—or air-balloon as it was then called—was let off at Versailles, in the presence of Louis XVI. and the Royal Family. A sheep was the first aeronaut, and with this freight, in a cage, the balloon rose to a height of about 200 yards, floated over a part of Paris, and came down in the Carrefour Maréchal. The novelty was at once taken hold of by caricaturists, ballad-mongers, writers of comic articles, and also by the sign-painters. One of the first balloon-signs in London was that of the Balloon Fruit-shop, in Oxford Street, near Soho Square.[686] As those primitive balloons were, in the opinion of the vulgar, filled with smoke, the tobacconists considered them as within their province, and thus it became a favourite device with this class of shops. Several of their tobacco papers are preserved in the Banks collection. One has the following legend:—“The best Virginia under the Balloon.” Another, “Smoke the best balloon.” A third, “The best air-balloon tobacco,” &c. Some of these balloon-cuts will be found in our illustrations. One of them represents a balloon ascending, and two smokers standing beneath; one says, “I wish them a good voyage;” the other, “Smoak the balloon.” As a sign, the Balloon, or Air-balloon, is still not uncommon, and may be seen at Kingston, Hants, Birdlip, Gloucester, &c.

The Black Doll, hung at the doors of rag and marine store-dealers, probably originated in these shops buying old clothes and finery, which was sold to the buccaneers and coasting-traders, who exchanged them with the natives of Africa and America, for gold, ivory, furs, &c.; just as we see at the present day, Mr Abraham, or Mr Isaacs, constantly advertising in the Times for our “Left-off clothes for Australia and the Colonies.” The popular legend, however, has spread a halo of romance around the black doll. Once upon a time, an ancient dame came to a rag-shop in Norton Folgate, with a bundle of old clothes, which she desired to sell, but having no time to spare, she left them with the man to examine, promising to call for the money next day. The rag-merchant opened the bundle and found amongst the clothes a pair of diamond ear-rings, and a black doll. Anxious to restore the diamonds, (as may be imagined,) he expected the old woman to call day after day, but in vain; at last, thinking that she might have forgotten the house, he hung up the black doll at the door, but the old woman never came, and the doll hung until it rotted away, when it was replaced by a new one. The novelty of the object attracted many customers to the house, other ragmen imitated it, and so it finally became a sign, one which is now fast dying away, and being supplanted by coarse coloured prints, with absurd rhymes.

At the castles of the nobility the weary traveller formerly found food, shelter, and good “herborow;” the lower hall was always open to the adventurer, the tramp, the minstrel, and the pilgrim; the upper hall to the nobleman, the squire, the wealthy abbot, and the fair ladies. It was natural, then, that the Castle should at an early period have been adopted as a sign of “good entertainment for man and beast.” Such a sign became historical in the Wars of the Roses; for the Duke of Somerset, who had been warned to “shun castles,” was killed by Richard Plantagenet, at an ale-house, the sign of the Castle.

“For underneath an ale-house’ paltry sign,
The Castle in Saint-Albans, Somerset
Hath made the Wizard famous in his death.”

2 Henry VI., ac. v., sc. 2.

According to Hatton,[687] in 1708, the Castle Tavern in Fleet Street had the largest sign in London; next to it came the White Hart Inn, on the east side of the Borough, in Southwark.

In the reign of George I., the Castle, near Covent Garden, was a famous eating-house, kept by John Pierce, the Soyer of his day. Here the gallant feat was performed of a young blood taking one of the shoes from the foot of a noted toast, filling it with wine, and drinking her health, after which it was consigned to the cook, who prepared from it an excellent ragout, which was eaten with great relish by the lady’s admirers.

The Castle and Falcon (probably a combination of two signs, as there is a Falcon Court close by,) is the sign of an inn in Aldersgate, which house, or one on its site, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, was occupied by John Day, the most considerable printer and publisher of his time. In after years the house became a famous coaching inn, and its reputation spread to all parts of England, whence we meet, at present, with Castles and Falcons in various towns, as at Birmingham, Chester, &c. Although we incline to the opinion that the sign arose from a combination, still it is worthy of remark, that the crest of Queen Catherine Parr was a crowned falcon, perched on a castle, and of course represented as large as the castle.

The Three Old Castles occurs at Mandeville, near Somerton; the Castle and Banner at Hunny Hill, Carisbrooke, originating in the banner floating from the castle turret, when the Lord of the Manor was residing there. Castles in the Air is to be seen at Lower Quay, Fareham; the origin seems to be an allusion to the ordinary sign swinging in mid-air—a piece of humour on the part of the landlord. The Castle and Wheelbarrow, at Rouse Lench, was, doubtless, another innkeeper’s notion of suggestive humour—but he was a dull wit.

Perhaps the most patriarchal of all signs is the Chequers, which may be seen even on houses in exhumed Pompeii. On that of Hercules, for instance, at the corner of the Strada Fullonica, they are painted lozenge-wise, red, white, and yellow, and on various other houses in that ancient city, similar decorations may still be observed. Originally it is said to have indicated that draughts and backgammon were played within. Brand, in his “Popular Antiquities,” ignorant of any existence of the sign in so remote a period as that mentioned, says that it represented the coat of arms of the Earls of Warenne and Surrey, who bore checqui or and azure, and in the reign of Edward IV., possessed the privilege of licensing ale-houses. A more plausible explanation, and one which is not set aside by the existence of the sign in Pompeii, is that given by Dr Lardner:—

“During the middle ages, it was usual for merchants, accountants, and judges, who arranged matters of revenue, to appear on a covered banc, so called from an old Saxon word, meaning a seat, (hence our Bank.) Before them was placed a flat surface, divided by parallel white lines, into perpendicular columns; these again divided transversely by lines crossing the former, so as to separate each column into squares. This table was called an Exchequer, from its resemblance to a chess-board, and the calculations were made by counters placed on its several divisions, (something after the manner of the Roman abacus.) A money-changer’s office was generally indicated by a sign of the chequered board suspended. This sign afterwards came to indicate an inn or house of entertainment, probably from the circumstance of the innkeeper also following the trade of money-changer—a coincidence still very common in seaport towns.”[688]

Chaucer’s Merry Pilgrims put up in Canterbury, at the sign of the “Checker of the Hope,” (i.e. the Chequers on the Hoop.)

“They took their in and loggit them at mydmorowe, I trowe,
Atte cheker of the Hope that many a man doth knowe.”

Ludgate’s Continuation of the Canterbury Tales.

This inn (says Mr Wright, in his edition of the above work) is still pointed out in Canterbury, at the corner of High Street and Mercery Lane, and is often mentioned in the Corporation Reports, under the title of the Chequer. It is situated in the immediate vicinity of the Cathedral, and was therefore appropriate for the reception of the pilgrims.

When the inn had another sign besides the Chequers, these last were invariably painted on the door-post; an example of this may still be seen at the Swiss Cottage, Chelsea. In or near Calcots Alley, Lambeth, was formerly situated an inn or house of entertainment called the Chequers. In the year 1454 a licence was granted to its landlord, John Calcot, to have an oratory in the house and a chaplain for the use of his family and guests, as long as his house should continue orderly and respectable, and adapted to the celebration of divine service.[689] The Black Chequers in Cowgate, Norwich, is so called on account of the chequers being black and white, whilst others are red and white, blue and white, or in such other contrast as may be fancied by the publican.

The Crooked Billet is a sign, for which we have not been able to discover any likely origin; it may have been originally a ragged staff, or a pastoral staff, or a baton cornu—the ancient name for a battle-axe.[690] It is also the name for a part of the tankard. Frequently the sign is represented by an untrimmed stick suspended above the door, as at Wold Newton, near Bridlington, where it is accompanied by the following poetical effusion on one side of the signboard:—

“When this comical stick grew in the wood,
Our ale was fresh and very good;
Step in and taste, O do make haste,
For if you don’t ’twill surely waste.”

On the other side:—

“When you have viewed the other side,
Come read this too before you ride,
And now to end we’ll let it pass;
Step in, kind friends, and take a glass.”

Though a very rustic sign, it was also used in towns; thus it occurs among the trades tokens of Montague Close, and was the sign of Andrew Sowle, a bookseller in Holloway Lane, Shoreditch, in 1683.

The Golden Head appears to have been a favourite with artists, probably a classic or modern bust gilded. It was the sign of Hogarth’s master and of himself.

“Hogarth made one essay in sculpture. He wanted a sign to distinguish his house in Leicester Fields; and thinking none more proper than the Golden Head, he out of a mass of cork made up several thicknesses compacted together, carved a bust of Van Dyke, which he gilt and placed over his door. It is long since decayed, and was succeeded by a head in plaister, which has also perished, and is succeeded by a head of Sir Isaac Newton.”—Nichols’s Anecdotes of Hogarth.

At this sign in 1735 Hogarth published the “Harlot’s Progress,” and several other engravings. Sir Robert Strange the engraver (1721-92) lived at the Golden Head, Henrietta Street, Covent Garden; and in 1762 the portrait of Cunneshote, one of the Cherokee chiefs, then on a visit to this country, was for sale at the Golden Head in Queen Square, Ormond Street; it was engraved after a painting by Francis Parsons. In 1700 it was the sign of a Monsieur Desert, “almost over against the King’s Bagnio in Long Acre, who sold guitars from 30 gs. to 30 sh. a piece.”[691] Thomas Carte the historian (1686 to 1754) lived at Mr Ker’s at the Golden Head, Newport Street, Long Acre. This sign also occurs in a most amusing advertisement:—

“An Exceeding Small Lap Spaniel.

ANY ONE THAT has (to dispose of) such a one, either dog or bitch, and of any colour or colours, that is very, very small, with a very short round snub nose, and good ears, if they will bring it to Mrs Smith, at a coachmaker’s over against the Golden Head in Great Queen Street, near Lincoln’s Inn Fields, they shall (if approved of) have a very good purchaser. And to prevent any further trouble, if it is not exceeding small, and has anything of a longish peaked nose, it will not at all do. And nevertheless after this advertisement is published no more, if any person should have a little creature that answers the character of the advertisement, if they will please but to remember the direction and bring it to Mrs Smith; the person is not so provided but that such a one will still at any time be hereafter purchased.”—Daily Advertiser, Nov. 1744.

The Two Heads was the sign of a dentist in Coventry Street in 1760. One head probably represented the mouth as possessing a fine set of teeth; the other doubtless showed how unfortunate is their absence. The advertisements of this man are gems in their way:—

“Ye Beauties, Beaux, ye Pleaders at the Bar,
Wives, Husbands, lovers, every one beside,
Wh’d have their heads deficient rectify’d,
The Dentist famed who by just application
[491] Excels each other operator in the Nation,
In Coventry’s known street, near Leicester Fields,
At the Two Heads full satisfaction yields.
Teeth artificial he fixes so secure,
That as our own they usefully endure;
Not merely outside show and ornament
But ev’ry property of Teeth intent;
To eat, as well as speak, and form support
The falling cheeks and stumps from further hurt.
Nor is he daunted when the whole is gone,
But by an art-peculiar to him known,
He’ll so supply you’ll think you’ve got your own.
He scales, he cleans, he draws; in Pain gives Ease,
Nor in each operation doth fail to please.
Doth the foul scurvy fierce your Gums assault?
In this he also rectifies the Fault
By a fam’d Tincture. And his Powder nam’d
A Dentifrice is also justly fam’d.
Us’d as directed ’tis excellent to serve
Both teeth and gums, cleanse, strengthen, and preserve;
Foul mouth and stinking breath can ne’er be loved.
But by his aid those evils are removed.”

London Evening Post, July 1760.

Taylor the Water poet (1632) mentions two taverns with the sign of the Mouth, the one without Bishopsgate, the other within Aldersgate. Trades tokens of the first house are extant, representing a human head with a huge mouth wide open. An inventory is still extant of the stock in trade of this house in the year 1612,[692] which is not uninteresting. From it we gather that the wines drunk at that period in taverns were white wine, Vin de Grave, (a small white Burgundy wine,) Orleans wine, Malaga, sherry, sack, Malmsey, (Malvasia, a wine from the coast of Morea, sweet and white,) Alicante, (also sweet,) claret, &c. Beer seems to have been but little asked for by those that frequented this house; for whilst some of the wines were kept in such large quantities as seven hogsheads, there were only two dozen and eight bottles of ale. The names of the rooms in the house were “the Pomegranate,” “the Portcullis,” “Three Tuns,” “Cross Keys,” “Vine,” “King’s Head,” “Crown,” “Dolphin,” and “Bell,” all of them favourite tavern signs, and (as remarked on page 280) the usual names for tavern rooms. Among the utensils may be remarked fifteen silver bowls.

The Merry Mouth is still a sign at Fifield, Chipping Norton.

The Hand was the sign of a victualler near the Marshalsea in Southwark, in 1680. Hands occur in many combinations, owing to the custom of draughtsmen and sign-painters representing a hand issuing from the clouds to perform some action or hold some object; thus a hand holding a coffee-pot was a very general coffee-house sign. The “Hand” seems to have been a bad or evil sign:—

“I’ll go back to the country of the coffee-houses, [Fleet Street,] where being arrived I’m in a wood, there are so many of them I know not which to enter; stay, let me see, where the sign is painted with a woman’s hand in it, ’tis a bawdy house, where a man’s it has another qualification; but where it has a star in the sign ’tis calculated for every lewd purpose.”[693]

Though this is a sweeping denunciation, yet we find the Hand and Star occurring as the sign of a very respectable bookseller, Richard Tothill in Fleet Street, within Temple Bar, who in 1553 printed the “Dialogue of Comfort,” by Sir Thomas More. Not unlikely Tothill had adopted this sign from the watermarks in paper, for one of the most ancient of them is a hand, either in the position of giving benediction, or in that position called the upright hand, with a star above it. Messrs Butterworth, the law-publishers, who now occupy Tothill’s premises, possess all the leases and documents from the time of that old printer down to the present day.

Quacks, also, were very fond of a hand in their sign, pointing to an eye or an ear, to intimate that the great doctor cured the blind or the deaf. Thus, in the Harleian collection (5931) there is a handbill of S. Ketelby, sworn physician, who lived at the Hand and Ear, in Exeter Street near the Strand, and who professed to cure deafness, lameness, &c.

“He is capable now, not only of curing those incurable by others, but even those he could not cure himself six months ago! Note: He resolves all persons deaf from external causes, whether curable or not, in two minutes, in the dark as well as at noonday, which no other pretender can do,” &c.

The Hand and Face was the sign of another quack, who lived in Water Lane, Blackfriars, near Apothecaries’ Hall, in 1735.[694]

A few combinations of the hand refer to games, as the Hand and Ball, Barking, (trades token,) 1650, which seems to be derived from some of the innumerable games at ball in which our ancestors delighted, such as handball, tennis, balloon or windball, stoolball, hurling, football, stowball, pallmall, clubball, trapball, northen-spell, cricket, bowling, &c. The Hand and Tennis, Whitcombe Street, Haymarket, is so called from the adjoining Tennis Court, erected in 1678. The Old Hand and Tankard is a public-house sign at Wheatly, near Halifax. The Hand and Tench seems to point to a connexion with the followers of Isaac Walton; it was a mug-house in Seven Dials in 1717. The mugs in those days used to be suspended above the door, or on the sign-iron, not only in this, but in all the mug-houses, for the mug might be considered as much a badge of King George’s friends, as the white cockade was the badge of the Jacobites.

The Hand and Heart was, in 1711, the very appropriate sign of a marriage insurance office in East Harding Street, Shoe Lane.[695] Two right hands holding a heart was a very old symbol of concord. Aubrey gives quotations from Tacitus, by which he derives it from the Romans, and adds:—

“I have seen some rings made for sweethearts with a heart enamelled held between two hands. See an Epigrame of G. Buchanan, on two rings that were made by Q. Elisabeth’s appointment, which, being laid one upon the other, shewed the like figure. The heart was two diamonds, wch joyned, made the Heart. Q. Elisabeth kept one moietie, and sent ye other as a token of her constant friendship to Mary Q. of Scotts; but she cutt off her head for all that.”[696]

The Heart in Hand is still a common ale-house sign. A similar meaning is conveyed by the equally common Hand in Hand or Cross Hands; at Turnditch, Derby, this sign is called the Cross o’ the Hands, and a corruption of this again is the Cross in Hand, at Waldron, Sussex. The Hand in Hand was also one of the usual signs of the marriage-mongers in Fleet Street. Pennant says:—

“In walking along the streets in my youth, on the side next this prison, (the Fleet,) I have often been tempted by the question, ’Sir, will you be pleased to walk in and be married.’ Along this most lawless space was most frequently hung up the sign of a male and female hand conjoined, with ‘Marriages performed within’ written beneath. A dirty fellow invited you in; the parson was seen walking before his shop, a squalid, profligate figure, clad in a tattered plaid nightgown, with a fiery face, and ready to couple you for a dram of gin or a roll of tobacco.”

The two hands conjoined is also common in France—where it is called à la bonne Foi. In 1624 it was the sign of Pierre Billaine, bookseller and printer in the Rue St Jacques, Paris.

The Leg used formerly to be at the door of every hosier. It was also the sign of a tavern in King Street, Westminster, frequented by Pepys. Trades tokens are extant of the Leg and Star, kept by Richard Finch, in Aldersgate, in the seventeenth century. It may have represented a leg with the garter round it, and the star of that order; but more probably it was a combination of two signs.

The Old Man, Market Place, Westminster, was probably intended for Old Parr, who was celebrated in ballads as “The Olde, Olde, Very Olde Manne.” The token represents a bearded bust in profile, with a bare head. In the reign of James I. it was the name of a tavern in the Strand, otherwise called the Hercules Tavern, and in the eighteenth century there were two coffee-houses, the one called the Old Man’s, the other the Young Man’s Coffee-house.

The Fountain was a favourite sign with the Londoners before the Reformation, perhaps on account of its connexion with the martyrdom of St Paul, whose head, says the legend, on being struck off, rebounded three times, when a fountain gushed up at each spot where the sacred head had touched the ground. Hence there is a church near Rome, in the midst of the desolate Campagna, called San Paolo delle Tre Fontane, where altars are raised over each of those three fountains. There is also a fountain connected with the martyrdom of St Alban, the English protomartyr, and Saints’ Wells may be met with all over the kingdom.

During the Plague of 1665, the following advertisement used to figure constantly in the papers:—

“MONSIEUR Augier’s famous Remedies for stopping and preventing the plague having not only been recommended by several certificates from Lyons, Paris, Thoulouse, &c., but likewise experimented here by the special directions of the Lords of his Majesty’s most honourable Privy Council, and proved by Witnesses upon oath, and several Tryals, to be of singular virtue and effect, are to be had at Mr Drinkwater’s, at the Fountain, in Fleet Street, &c.”[697]

Mr Drinkwater had evidently intended a pun by selecting a fountain as his sign.

The Fountain Tavern in the Strand was famous as the meeting-place of the ultra-loyal party in 1685, who here talked over public affairs before the meeting of Parliament. Roger Lestrange, who had been recently knighted by the king, took a leading part in these consultations. But “the fate of things lies always in the dark;” in the reign of George II. this same house became a great resort for the Whigs, who sometimes used to meet here as many as two hundred at a time, making speeches and passing resolutions.

For this reason it was proposed that Master Jephson the landlord should write under his sign:—

“Hoc Fonte derivata libertas
In Patriam, Populumq: fluxit.”

“From this fam’d Fountain Freedom flow’d,
For Britain’s and the People’s good.”

In this tavern, Law, subsequently famous as the Mississippi schemer, quarrelled with the magnificent and mysterious Beau Wilson; they left the house, adjourned to Bloomsbury Square, and fought a duel, in which the Beau was killed. The Kit Cat Club, in winter, used to meet at this house. This club was first established in an obscure house in Shire Lane; it consisted of thirty-nine distinguished noblemen or gentlemen, zealously attached to the Protestant succession of the house of Hanover. Among the members were the Dukes of Richmond, Devonshire, Marlborough, Somerset, Grafton, Newcastle, and Dorset, the Earls of Sunderland and Manchester, some lords, and Steele, Addison, Congreve, Garth, Vanbrugh, Manwaring, Stepney, Walpole, and Pulteney; Lord Mohun (implicated in the murder of Mountford the actor, and killed in a duel by the Duke of Hamilton) was also a member.

“The day Lord Mohun and the Earl of Berwick were entered of it, Jacob [Tonson, the secretary] said he saw they were just going to be ruined. When Lord Mohun broke down the gilded emblem on the top of his chair, Jacob complained to his friends, and said a man who would do that would cut a man’s throat.”[698]

Tonson, for fulfilling the duties of this honorary office, was presented with the portraits of all the members. After Jacob’s death, his brother Richard removed the pictures to his residence at Water Oakley, near Windsor. A list of them is to be found in Bray’s “History of Surrey,” vol. iii., p. 318. Forty-three of them have been engraved by Faber in mezzotint. The name of the club is said to have been derived from the first landlord, who was called Christopher Cat; he excelled in the making of mutton-pies, which were named after him Kit Cat, and were the standard dish of the club.

“Here did th’ assembly’s title first arise,
And Kit Cat’s wits sprung first from Kit Cat’s pies.”

Next door to the Fountain Tavern lived Charles Lillie, the celebrated snuff-seller of the Spectators and Tatlers, but “he was burnt out when he began to have a reputation in his way.”—(Tatler, xcii.)

The Fountain and Bear is a sign named in the following quaint imprint:—

“A Present for Teeming Women, or Scripture Directions for Women with childe; how to prepare for the hour of Travel. Written first for the private use of a Gentlewoman of quality in the West, and now published for the common good by John Oliver, less than the least of saints. Sold by Mary Rothwell, at the Fountain and Bear, in Cheapside, 1663.”

The Sun and the Moon have been considered as signs of Pagan origin, typifying Apollo and Diana. Whether or no this conjecture be true, would be difficult to prove, but certain it is that they rank among the oldest and most common signs, not only in England but on the Continent. Early in the sixteenth century the French poet Desiré Arthus wrote in his “Loyaulté Consciencieuse des Taverniers:”—

“Sur les chemins des grands villes et champs,
Ne trouverez de douze maisons l’une,
Qui n’ait enseigne d’un soleil, d’une lune.
Tous vendant vin, chascun à son quartier.”[699]

Like the Star, (see p. 501,) the Sun did not enjoy a good reputation. Henry Peacham thus cautions young men from the country:—

“Let a monyed man or gentleman especially beware in the city, ab istis calidis et callidis solis filiabus as Lipsius: these overhot and crafty daughters of the Sunne, your silken and gold laced harlots, everywhere (especially in the suburbs) to be found.”[700]

The reason of this sign having been especially adopted by that description of houses, we are unable to state, unless it be the one Tom D’Urfey gives in “Collin’s Walk through London,” where, speaking of a frail and fair one, he says:—

“And like the Sun, was understood
To all mankind a common good.”

But as the sun shines alike over good and evil, so respectable as well as disreputable persons have used him for a sign; thus Wynkyn de Worde, in Fleet Street, and Anthony Kytson, another early printer, and the publisher of some works of Master John Skelton, poet laureate, carried on business under this device. Taylor the Water poet mentions three Sun taverns: being compelled one day on his “pennylesse pilgrimage,” to dine à la belle étoile, he says:—“I made virtue of necessity, and went to breakefast in the Sunne: I have fared better at three Sunnes many a time before now: in Aldersgate Street, Criplegate, and New Fish Street; but here is the oddss: at those Sunnes they will come vpon a man with a tauerne bill as sharp cutting as a taylor’s bill of items: a watchman’s bill or a watch hooke falls not halfe so heauy vpon a man.”[701] The Sun on Fish Street Hill is also named by Pepys:—

“Dec. 22, 1660.—Went to the Sun Tavern on Fish Street Hill, to a dinner of Captain Teddimans, where was my Lord Inchequin, (who seems to be a very fine person,) Sir W. Penn, Captain Cuttance, and Mr Laurence, (a fine gentleman now going to Algiers,) and other good company, where we had a very good dinner, good music, and a great deal of wine. I very merry—went to bed, my head aching all night.”

But the finest of all the Sun Taverns did not exist in Taylor’s time; it was built after the fire of 1666, behind the Exchange.

“Behind? I’ll ne’er believe it; you may as soon
Persuade me that the sun stands behind noon.”

These are the opening lines of a ballad of 1672, entitled “The Glory of the Sun Tavern, behind the Exchange.”[702] From this ballad it is evident that the tavern was splendidly furnished, and offered comforts not generally to be met with at that time.

“There every chamber has an aquaeduct,
As if the sun had fire for water truckt,
Water as’t were exhal’d up to heavens sprouds,
To cool your cups and glasses in the clouds.”

Pepys was a frequent visitor at this house, and, in fact, all the pleasure-seekers of that mad reign patronised it; the profligate Duke of Buckingham, in particular, was a constant customer. Simon Wadloe, the landlord, had made his fortune at the Devil in St Dunstan’s, whereupon he went to live in the country, and spent his money in a couple of years. He then “choused” Nick Colbourn out of the Sun, and Nick, who had amassed a handsome competence in the house, was easily persuaded to retire, and left it “to live like a prince in the country,” says Pepys. During the reign of Charles II., the house appears to have had an excellent custom, and was from morning till night full of the best company. The Sun Tavern, in Clare Street, was one of the haunts of the witty Joe Miller, and is often given as the locality of his jokes:—

“Joe Miller, sitting one day in the window of the Sun Tavern, Clare Street, a fish woman and her maid passing by, the woman cried: ‘Buy my soals, buy my maids!’ ‘Ah! you wicked old creature,’ cry’d honest Joe, ‘what, are you not content to sell your own soul, but you must sell your maid’s too?’”

A stereotype joke of the publican connected with the Sun is the motto, “the best liquor [generally beer] under the Sun,” which, of course, must be believed, for Solem quis dicere falsum audeat? Sometimes the sign is called the Sun in Splendour, as at Nottinghill, the “splendour” having reference simply to the golden beams or rays usually drawn by the painter. There is still a carved stone sign of the Sun, now gilt, dating from the seventeenth century, walled in the front of a house in the Poultry.

The Golden Sun was the sign of Ulrich Gering, in the Rue St Jacques, Paris, printer of the first Bible in France, in 1475. At the end of the volume the Bible thus addresses the reader:—

“Jam tribus undecimus lustris Francos Ludovicus
Rexerat; Ulricus, Martinus, itemque Michael
Orti Teutonia, hanc mihi composuere figuram
Parisii arte sua; me correctam vigilanter
Venalem in vico Jacobi Sol Aureus offert.”[703]

Their successor, Berthold Rumbold, on removing the business to another house in the same street, opposite the Rue Fromentel, kept the same sign, and there it continued as late as 1689, having constantly been in the hands of booksellers. Not improbably the first printers, both in England and abroad, adopted the sign of the Sun, as an emblem of the new era opened to the world by the invention of printing, which, when they reflected on their discovery, they saw would, at no distant period, spread an intellectual light over the world, as brilliant and as vivifying as that of the radiant sun.[704]

The sign of the Sun occurs in endless combinations, often capricious, without any other reason than a whim, and an alliteration, as the Sun and Sawyers; the Sun and Sword; the Sun and Sportsman; or quartered with other signs, as the Sun and Anchor; Dial; Falcon; Last; Horseshoe, &c. All these, and innumerable others of the same sort, occur among the London public-house signs of the present day. The Sun and Hare is a stone carved sign, walled up in the façade of a house in the High Street, Southwark. Were it not for the initials H. N. A., it might be taken for a rebus on the name Harrison; as it is, it may be a jocular corruption of the Sun and Hart, the badge of Richard II. (See p. 109.)

The Rising Sun is nearly as common as the sun in his meridian; perhaps on account of the favourable omen it presents for a man commencing business. In 1726 it was the sign of a noted tavern in Islington, where some merry doings went on occasionally:—

“ON Tuesday next, being Shrove Tuesday, will be a fine hog barbygu’d whole at the house of Peter Brett, at the Rising Sun, in Islington Road, with other diversions. It is the house where the ox was roasted whole at Christmas last.”—Mist’s Journal, February 9, 1726.

To barbecue a hog, was a West Indian term for roasting a whole pig, stuffed with spice, and basted with Madeira wine.

The Rising Sun and Seven Stars was the very appropriate sign, at which was printed a work on “Astrological Optics;” but better still, it was printed for R. Moon, whose shop was “in Paul’s Churchyarde, in the New Building, between the two North Doors. 1655.” An old jest-book says that an Irishman, seeing the sign of the Rising Sun was kept by A(nthony) Moon, accused the said Moon of having made a bull, for saying that the Sun was kept by the Moon.

One of the learned questions propounded by Hudibras to that cunning man, Sidrophel, the Rosicrucian, was:—

“Tell me but what’s the natural cause
Why on a sign no painter draws
The full moon ever, but the half.”—Hudibras, part iii., c. 3.

This might be true in Butler’s time, but is no longer so; at Leicester, for instance, there are two signs of the Full Moon, and it occurs in many other places. The Crescent, or Half-Moon, was the emblem of the temporal power, as the Sun was the distinction of the spiritual.

Ben Jonson once desiring a glass of sack, went to the Half-Moon Tavern, in Aldersgate Street, but found it closed, so he adjourned to the Sun Tavern, in Long Lane, and wrote this epigram:—

“Since the Half Moon is so unkind,
To make me go about,
The Sun my money now shall have,
And the Moon shall go without.”

The Half-Moon, Upper Holloway, was famous in the last century for excellent cheesecakes, which were hawked about the streets of London, by a man on horseback, and formed one of the London cries. This circumstance is noticed in a poem in the Gentleman’s Magazine for 1743, entitled “A Journey to Nottingham.” In April 1747, the following advertisement appeared in the same magazine:—

“HALF-MOON Tavern, Cheapside, April 13. His Royal Highness the Duke of Cumberland having restored peace to Britain, by the ever memorable Battle of Culloden, fought on the 16th of April 1745, the choice spirits have agreed to celebrate that day annually by A Grand Jubilee in the Moon, of which the Stars are hereby acquainted and summoned to shine with their brightest Lustre by 6 o’clock on Thursday next in the Evening.”

The Crescent and Anchor is a sign at Norton-in-Hales, near Market Drayton; the Half-Moon and Seven Stars at Aston Clinton, near Tring; and the Sun, Moon, and Seven Stars at Blisworth, in Northampton. These Seven Stars have always been great favourites; they seem to be the same pleiad which is used as a Masonic emblem—a circle of six stars, with one in the centre; but to tell to ears profane, what this emblem means, would be disclosing the sacred arcana. The Seven Stars was the sign of Richard Moone, before he was so ambitious as to place the whole firmament on his sign: in 1653 he printed—

“The first addresses to his Excellence the Lord General, &c., by John Spittlehouse, a late Member of the Army, and a servant to the Saints of the Most High God, &c. London, printed by J. C., for himself and Richard Moon, at the Seven Stars, in Paul’s Churchyard, near the great North Door. 1653.”

As a change upon the Seven Stars, a publican at Counterslip, Bristol, has put up the Fourteen Stars.

We have seen (p. 492) that the sign of the Star was “calculated for every lewd purpose;” a great change certainly from mediæval times, when a star was the emblem of the Holy Virgin, who was thus styled Maris Stella (star of the sea)—the signification of the name Miriam in Hebrew—or Stella Jacobi, (star of Jacob,) Stella Matutina, (morning star,) Stella non erratica, (fixed star, unerring star,) &c.; a star being always painted either on her right shoulder, or on her veil, as may be readily observed in the works of the early Italian masters in our National Gallery. A star of sixteen rays is the crest of the Innholders’ Company. Oliver Cromwell used to meet some of his party at the Star in Coleman Street, as was deposed by one of the witnesses in the trial of Hugh Peters:—

“Gunter. My Lord, I was servant at the Star in Coleman Street, with one Hildesley. That house was a house where Oliver Cromwell and several of that party did use to meet in consultation.”

John Bunyan died in 1682 at the Star, on Snowhill, in the house of his friend, Mr Strudwick, a grocer.

The Pole Star is now a not uncommon sign. To make this device more intelligible, tavern-keepers ought to attach to it the motto it bore in the middle ages, when it was a symbol of the Church: “qui me non aspicit errat.” (He who does not look at me goes astray.) The Star and Crown was the sign of a haberdasher in Princes Street, Coventry Street, 1785, who, among other things, sold “dress and undress hoops.”

The signs of the zodiac appear occasionally to have been adopted by conjurors and astrologers. Ned Ward describes them as figuring, in his time, on the door of “a star-peeper,” in Prescot Street.[705]

The Two Twins, or Naked Boys, was the sign of a quack in Moorfields, “near the steps going out of the Lower Field into the Middle Field. There is a door above the steps, and another below the steps, with the Twins, and the name Langham on both doors;—keep the bill to prevent mistaking the house or being sent to a wrong place.”[706] To such lengthy explanations our ancestors were compelled to resort in the absence of numbers on their houses. Either this quack had adopted the Two Twins on account of his obstetrical pretensions, or he was an astrologer as well as a quack, for Moorfields was the head-quarters of

“Augurs and soothsayers, astrologers,
Diviners, and interpreters of dreams.”

In the last case he might have chosen it as being the ascendant of the city of London, which “stands in a benign and temperate climate, in the latitude of 52° and longitude of 19° 15´,—having (as artists reckon) the celestial twins, the house of Mercury, patron of merchandise and ingenious arts, for her ascendant.”[707]

The Rainbow, in Fleet Street, opposite Chancery Lane, is the oldest coffee-house in London:—

“I find it recorded that one James Farr, a barber, who kept the coffee-house, which is now the Rainbow, by the Inner Temple gate, (one of the first in England,) was, in the year 1657, presented by the inquest of St Dunstan’s in the West, for making and selling a sort of liquor called Coffee, as a great nuisance and prejudice to the neighboorhood, &c., and who would have thought London would ever have had near three thousand such nuisances, and that coffee would have been (as now) so much drank by the best of quality and physicians.”[708]

The presentation here alluded to is still preserved among the records of St Sepulchre’s Church. It says:—

“We present James Farr, Barber, for making and selling a drink called coffee, whereby, in making the same, he annoyeth his neighboors by evill smells, and for keeping of fire the most part night and day, whereby his chimney and chamber has been set on fire, to the great danger and affreightment of his neighboors.”

This danger of fire was so much the greater, as a bookseller, Samuel Speedal, had his shop in the same house. In 1682, the Phœnix Fire Office, one of the first in this country, was established at this place.

The Thunder Storm is the sign of a public-house at Framwellgate Moor, Durham; and the Hailstone, at Knowle, Staffordshire; both these houses may have taken their names from a severe storm, which visited the neighbourhood at or about the time of their opening, just as the Haylift, at Wansforth, Northampton, is said to owe its origin to the fact of a man floating a long way down the river on a haycock, during an inundation, and landing near that place.

As for the Wild Sea, the sign of John Horton, over against Parson’s Brewhouse, Croydon,[709] in 1718, no more plausible explanation occurs to us than that John Horton might have been a sailor in his younger days.

The Hole-in-the-Wall is believed to have originated from the hole made in the wall of the debtors’ or other prison, through which the poor prisoners received the money, broken meat, or other donations of the charitably inclined. The old sign of the Hole-in-the-Wall (see our illustrations) shows such an opening in a square piece of brickwork. Generally, it is believed to refer to some snug corner, perhaps near the town walls; but at the old public-house in Chancery Lane the legend is as we have given it. Hard by, in Cursitor Street, prisoners for debt found a temporary lodging up to a very recent date. Trades tokens are extant of this house, which, about 1820, was kept by Jack Randall, alias Nonpareil, a famous member of the P.R.; on one occasion some verses were made containing the following lines:—

“Then blame me not, swells, kids, or lads of the fancy,
For opening a lush crib in Chancery Lane,
An appropriate spot ’tis, you doubtless all can see,
Since heads I’ve oft placed there, and let out again.”

The poet, Thomas Moore, in the fast days when George IV. was king, and when pugilism and gin drinking were fashionable accomplishments, used to visit Mr Randall’s parlour. It was here that he picked up his materials for those rhyming satires on the politics and general topics of his time:—“Tom Crib’s Memorials to Congress, by one of the Fancy;” “Randall’s Diary of Proceedings at the House of Call for Genius;” “A Few Selections from Jack Randall’s Scrap Book, with Poems on the late Fight for the Championship.”

At the Hole-in-the-Wall in Chandos Street, Claude Duval the highwayman was taken prisoner; whilst the Hole-in-the-Wall in Baldwin’s Gardens was the citadel in which Tom Brown used to intrench himself from duns and bailiffs, with Henry Purcell the musician, as his companion in revelry and merriment. Tom Brown’s introductory verses, prefixed to Playford’s “Musical Companion,” 1698, are dated “from Mr Stewart’s at the Hole-in-the-Wall, in Baldwin’s Gardens.” Another Hole-in-the-Wall still exists in Kirby Street, Hatton Garden. It is a curious fact that the refreshment-room, or liquor-bar, attached to the House of Representatives at Washington, is known to most thirsty American politicians as The Hole-in-the-Wall.

Anciently, instead of being a painted board, the object of the sign was carved and hung within a hoop, hence (as we had occasion to remark on a former page) nearly all the ancient signs are called the “—— ON THE HOOP.” In the Clause Roll, 43 Edward III., we find the George on the Hoop; 26 Henry VI., the Hart on the Hoop; 30 Henry VI., the Swan, the Cock, and the Hen on the Hoop. Besides these we find mentioned the Crown on the Hoop, the Bunch of Grapes on the Hoop, the Mitre on the Hoop, the Angel on the Hoop, the Falcon on the Hoop, &c. In 1795, two of these signs were still extant, for a periodical of the time says:—“A sign of this nature is still preserved in Newport Street, and is a carved representation of a Bunch of Grapes within a Hoop. The Cock on the Hoop may be seen also in Holborn, painted on a board, to which, perhaps, it was transferred on the removal of the sign-posts.”[710] These hoops seem to have originated in the highly ornamented bush or crown, which latterly was made of hoops, covered with evergreens. In France, the Hoop (le Cerceau) was used as a sign. Jacques Androuet, a celebrated architect, and author of a work entitled “Les plus excellents Batiments de France,” lived at the sign of the Hoop, whence he adopted the surnames of Jacques Androuet du Cerceau. In 1570 he published a book on metal-work, containing several designs for ornamental iron frames and posts to suspend signboards from. That names in this country also were occasionally derived from signboards, has been stated in our introduction. Of this practice, Sir Peter Lely, the portrait painter, was an illustrious example. He belonged to a Dutch family named Van der Vaas. His grandfather was a perfumer, and lived at the sign of the Lily, (perhaps a vase of lilies, with a pun on his name.) When his son entered the English army he discarded his Dutch name, and from the paternal sign, adopted the more euphonious one of Lilly or Lely; and this name he and his children afterwards retained. The famous Rothschild family is another case in point. From the Red Shield (the roth schild) above the door of an honest old Hebrew, in the Juden-gasse, (or Jews’ Alley,) at Frankfort, has been derived the name of the richest family in the world.

The Hoop and Bunch of Grapes was the sign of a public-house, in St Albans Street, (now part of Waterloo Place,) kept at the beginning of the present century, by the famous Matthew Skeggs, who obtained his renown from playing, in the character of Signor Bumbasto, a concerto on a broomstick, at the Haymarket Theatre, adjoining. His portrait was painted by King, a friend of Hogarth, engraved by Houston, and published by Skeggs himself. The Hoop and Griffin was a coffee-house in Leadenhall Street, circa 1700;[711] and the Hoop and Toy is a public-house in Thurloe Place, Brompton. Here the original meaning of the hoop seems entirely lost, as its combination with the toy seems to allude to the hoop trundled by children.

The Toy at Hampton used to be a favourite resort with the Londoners till 1857, when it was pulled down to make room for private houses. Trades tokens of this house of the seventeenth century are extant. “In the survey of 1653 (in the Augmentation office) mention is made of a piece of pasture ground near the river, called the Toying place, the site, probably, of a well-known inn near the bridge now called the Toy.”[712]

Cardmakers usually took a card for their sign, as the Queen of Hearts and King’s Arms, which was the sign of a cardmaker in Jermyn Street in 1803.[713] One of the Bagford Bills has: “At the Old Knave of Clubs at the Bridgefoot, in Southwark, liveth Edward Butling, who maketh and selleth all sorts of hangings for rooms,” &c.[714] Possibly he sold also playing-cards. These knaves, however, seem at one time to have been a badge, for at the creation of seventeen knights of the Bath by Richard III., the Duke of Buckingham was “richely appareled, and his horse trapped in blue velvet embroudered with the knaves of cartes burnyng of golde, which trapper was borne by foteman from the grounde.”[715] The Queen of Trumps is a public-house sign at West Walton, near Wisbeach.

The Heart and Trumpet is a somewhat curious sign at Pentre-wern near Oswestry, perhaps a corruption of Hearts and Trumps. Other games have produced the sign of the Golden Quoit, in Whitehaven, and the Corner Pin, which is so common that it figures in a Seven Dials ballad, a parody on the Low-back Car:—

“When first I saw Miss Bailey,
‘Twas on a Saturday,
At the Corner Pin she was drinking gin,
And smoking a yard of clay,” &c.

All bowlers know that the corner pins are the most difficult to strike, and that from their fall with the rest depends whether the throw counts double or not.

Formerly the merriest day of the year in “Merry England” was certainly the first of May, but of its many festivities scarcely a trace is left except the dance of the sweeps and the sign of the Maypole. Stubbe, with puritanical horror, thus describes the Maypole:—

“They have twenty or fourtie yoke of oxen, every one having a sweet nosegay of flowers tyed on the tippe of his hornes, and these oxen draw home this Maie pole (this stinckyng Idoll rather) which is couered all ouer with flowers and hearbes bounde rounde aboute with stringes, from the toppe to the bottome, and sometyme painted with variable colours with two or three hundred men, women, and children following it with great devotion. And thus being reared up with handkerchiefs and flagges streaming on the toppe they strawe the ground aboute, binde green boughes aboute it, sett up sommer houses, Bowers, and Arbours hard by it. And then fall they to banquet and feast, to leape and daunce aboute it, as the Heathen people did at the dedication of their Idolles, whereof this is a perfect pattern, or rather the thing itself.”[716]

The same author also reports that it was customary for lads and lasses to go the night before May-day to the hills and woodlands to gather branches and flowers to deck the houses with on that day, and that they used to “spende all the night in pastymes” to the great detriment of female virtue; Featherstone, another sulky puritan, scandalised the fair sex by the assertion that “of tenne maydens which went to fetch May, nine of them came home with childe.”[717] The consequence of all this grumbling was that the Maypole was abolished in the godly times of the Commonwealth, and as a matter of course, revived at the Restoration—but its prestige was gone. At present it is only commemorated by hundreds of signboards. There is one on the outskirts of Hainault Forest, immortalised in “Barnaby Rudge,” which has all the regulations of the house laid down in rhyme; part of these have been quoted on p. 449. There is on the stable door:—

“Whosoever smokes tobacco here
Shall forfeit sixpence to spend in beer.
Your pipes lay by, when you come here,
Or fire to me may prove severe.”

An old, and not uncommon sign, is the Wheel of Fortune, which may be seen at Alpington, Norwich, and in other places. This wheel is sometimes represented with four kings, one on each quadrant. In the middle ages it was a very common symbol, as well in England as on the continent, being frequently painted in churches; there is one still to be seen among the half obliterated frescoes of Catfield church in Norfolk. Other instances occur in the church of St Etienne, at Beauvais; in St Martin, at Basle; in San Zeno, at Verona; and in the beautiful pavement of the Duomo, at Sienna. Not only in those countries, but all over Europe, this device occurs as a sign. Peacham thus accounts for the wheel being chosen as the emblem of Fortune:—

“For like ourselves, the spoke that was on high
Is to the bottom in a moment cast,
As fast the lowest riseth by and by,
All human things thus find a change at last.”

Peacham’s Minerva Brittana, p. 76.

The Monster, at one period an inn of some resort in Willow Walk, Chelsea, now a starting-point for the Pimlico omnibuses, is perhaps a corruption of the Monastery. Robert de Heyle in 1368 leased the whole of the manor of Chelsea to the abbot and convent of Westminster for the term of his own life, for which they were to allow him a certain house within the convent for his residence, to pay him the sum of £20 per annum, to provide him every day two white loaves, two flagons of convent ale, and once a year a robe of esquire’s silk. At this period, or shortly after, the sign of the Monastery may have been set up, to be handed down from generation to generation, until the meaning and proper pronunciation were forgotten, and it became “the Monster.” In still older times, viz., during the Norman rule, Chelsea appears to have been one of the manors of Westminster, so that the connexion between the village of Chelsea and the monastery of Westminster had been of very old standing. This tavern, we believe, is the only one with such a sign. Ned Ward mentions a Green Monster tavern in Prescott Street, but that may have been one of Ned’s jokes on the very common Green Dragon. The tavern in question was a very unlucky house, and not less than three or four landlords had failed in it, which was not to be wondered at, for the street appears at that time to have been one of the soberest in London. According to Ned, one “would walk by forty or fifty houses and not an alehouse.”[718]

The Million Gardens, Strutton Ground, Westminster, was the singular name of the house where tickets might be obtained for a lottery of plate in 1718.[719] The name in reality refers to the “Melon Gardens,” which fruit was pronounced after the signboard orthography in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Pepys, on the 3d of August 1660, informs us that he dined at an ordinary called the Quaker, a somewhat unusual godfather for a sinful tavern. This house was situated in the Great Sanctuary, Westminster, and was only pulled down in the beginning of the present century to make way for a market-place, which in its turn has made room for a new sessions-house. Tull, the last landlord, opened a new public-house in Thieving Lane, and adorned the doorway of this house with twisted pillars decorated with vine-leaves, brought from the old Quaker tavern. J. T. Smith presents us with a view of this house in the additional plates to his “Antiquities of Westminster.”

The Pilgrim has been mentioned incidentally (on p. 434) as a sign at Coventry. There is another public-house of this name in Kew Lane. In 1833 a figure of a pilgrim was placed upon the roof of this house, which by concealed machinery moved to and fro like the Wandering Jew, doomed to wander up and down until the end of the world; it was, however, of contemptible workmanship, and very soon got out of order.

The Gipsy’s Tent occurs at Hagley, Stourbridge; the Gipsy Queen at Highbury and other places; and the Queen of the Gipsies was the sign of the so-called gipsy house near Norwood. The queen alluded to was Margaret Finch, who died at the great age of 109 years; Norwood was her residence during the last years of her life, and there she told fortunes to the credulous. She was buried October 24, 1760, in a deep square box, as from her constant habit of sitting with her chin resting on her knees, her muscles had become so contracted that she could not at last alter her position. This woman, when a girl of seventeen, may have been one of the dusky gang pretty Mrs Pepys and her companions went to consult, August 11, 1668, which her lord duly chronicled in the evening: “This afternoon my wife and Mercer and Deb went with Pelling to see the gypsies at Lambeth, and have their fortunes told, but what they did I did not enquire.” A granddaughter of Margaret Finch, also a so-styled queen, was living in an adjoining cottage in the year 1800.

The True Lover’s Knot is a sign at Uxbridge, the only example of it we have met with. In the North of England and in Scotland it is still the custom with betrothed lovers of the lower class to present each other with a curious kind of knot called “a true lover’s knot.” Brand says the word is not derived from true love, but from trulofa, Danish for fidem do. It was formerly a common present between lovers of all stations of life in England.

The Folly is not unusual; it is generally applied to a very ambitious, extravagantly furnished, or highly ornamented house; in such a sense it was already used in Queen Elizabeth’s reign:—

“Kirby Castle and Fisher’s Folly
Spinola’s Pleasure and Megse’s Glory.”

One of the most notorious “Follies” was an edifice of timber divided into sundry rooms, with a platform and balustrade on the top, which in the reign of Charles II. floated in the Thames above London Bridge. At first it was very well frequented, and the beauty and fashion of the period (Pepys amongst them, April 13, 1668,) used to go there on summer evenings, partake of refreshments on the platform, and enjoy the breeze on the river (then guiltless of the modern sewers and filth.). On one occasion Queen Mary honoured it with a visit, accompanied by some of her courtiers. Gradually, however, it took to evil courses; loose and disorderly females were admitted, and unrestrained drinking and dancing soon gave it an unenviable notoriety. In this condition it was visited by Tom Brown, who describes it with his usual coarse vigour: “This whimsical piece of Architecture was designed as a musical Summer-house for the entertainment of quality where they might meet and ogle one another; but the Ladies of the Town finding it as convenient a rendez-vous, overstock’d the place with such an inundation of harlotry, that dashed the female quality out of countenance, and made them seek some more retired conveniency.” He next describes the company in very glowing colours, but found it such a confused scene of folly, madness, and debauchery, that he—no very bashful person—was compelled to return to his boat “without drinking!”[720] At length the place became so scandalous that it had to be closed; it went to decay, and at last was sold for firewood.

The sign of the Blue-Coat Boy, usually chosen by toy-shops, printsellers, and colourmen, was either in compliment to the scholars of King Edward VI.’s foundation, Christ’s Hospital,—commonly called “the Blue Coat School,” from the blue tunic of the lads, or was named after the Bridewell Boys, i.e., foundlings and deserted children, who wore a blue coat and trousers, with a white hat. Until the end of the last century they used to attend at all the fires with the Bridewell engine, but on the whole they were an unruly mischievous set. There was a Blue Coat coffee-house in Sweeting’s Alley, near the Exchange, in 1711.[721] At present it is generally called the Blue Boy, as at Old Swinford, Stourbridge; Minchinhampton, Gloucester, and in a few other places. In Islington there is still such a sign, and in Aldersgate Street, if we remember rightly, there is an ironmonger with such a decoration.

A very strange sign occurs amongst the Banks Bills. On a shop-bill dated 1698, is the following inscription: “At the signe of the Tare lives one Mr Grenier who makes all sorts of good rasors, lancets, sisers, very well, and all other sorts of instruments for chirugeons.” The engraving represents two angels holding a tear by a string, surrounded by a quantity of surgical instruments, after the true meat-axe type, and vicious-looking enough to “draw tears of molten brass from the eyes of Pluto himself.”

The Weary Traveller occurs at Sutton Road, Kidderminster; the Traveller’s Rest in a great many places, sometimes accompanied by the phrase Rest and be Thankful, which last advice serves as a sign to two public-houses at Whitehaven. Finally the Finish was the sign of a notorious night-house in Covent Garden, kept at the beginning of the present century by a Mrs Butler. Here, according to “Tom Crib’s Memorial to Congress,” the gentlemen of the road used to divide their spoil in the gray dawn of the morning, when it was time for the night-birds to fly to their roost. Crib (in reality Thomas Moore the poet, see p. 503) says that the congress is:—

“Some place that’s like the Finish, lads,
Where all your high pedestrian pads
That have been up and out all night,
Running their rigs amongst the rattlers,[722]
At morning meet, and, honour bright,
Agree to share the blunt and tatlers.”

This house was originally named the Queen’s Head, but was nicknamed the Finish from its being the place where the fast men of the day generally “finished off.” Ned Shuter was at one time a drawer in this house, but, inspired by the neighbourhood of the theatres, he left the pots and bottles and took to the stage. Down to a recent date it was a gloomy disreputable coffee-house, kept by one Smith, and here, in interdicted hours, beer and spirits could be obtained when all the public-houses were closed. It was pulled down very recently. These last four signs have in a measure been the expression of the authors’ minds: who, weary of their long task, and fearful of having fatigued their readers, will now betake themselves to rest, and be thankful if they have given a few hours’ entertainment upon the subject of signboards. They now take their leave in the words of an old ballad:—

“Then faire fall all good tokens,
And well fare a good heart,
For by all signs and tokens
’Tis time for to depart.”

[671] Burnet’s Own Times, vol. ii., p. 426, ed. 1823.

[672] Harl. MSS., 5931. Bagford Bills.

[673] See Craftsman, Sept. 30, 1738.

[674] Archæologia, xviii., p. 198.

[675] “To all true Christian people to whom this present writing shall come: John Frenssh, eldest son of John Frenssh, gentleman, late citizen and goldsmith of London, sends greeting in our Lord. Know ye that I have given, granted, and by this my present writing confirmed to Joan Frenssh, widow, my mother, all that tenement or inn, with its appurtenances, called Savage’s Inn, otherwise called the Bell on the Hoop, in the parish of St Bride, in Fleet Street, London, to have and to hold the aforesaid tenement or inn, with its appurtenances, to the said Joan, for the term of her life, without impeachment of waste. In witness whereof,” &c. (here follow the names of six witnesses.) Dated at London the 5th day of February, in the thirty-first year of the reign of King Henry VI. after the conquest.

[676] Lambarde’s Perambulation of Kent. 1576.

[677] See Bosom’s or Blossoms Inn, under “Legendary and Biblical Signs,” p. 297.

[678] Speciall Passages from Westminster, London, York, &c., June 26-July 5, 1642.

[679] Pamphlet in the Harleian Miscellany. Index, vol. x. This dreadful storm is said to have caused more damage than the fire of 1666. Bishop Kedder and his wife were killed in it by the fall of a house in which they were sleeping. Admiral Beaumont was shipwrecked and lost with nearly the whole of his ship’s company. The Eddystone lighthouse was blown down and swallowed by the sea, with its architect, Mr Henry Winstanley. A sermon is still yearly preached at Little Wild Street Baptist Chapel, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, in memory of this fearful storm, a Mr John Taylor, bookseller of Paternoster Row, having left £40 to it as a thank-offering for his miraculous preservation at the time of the occurrence.

[680] After having been for a long time one of the most secure strongholds of the devil, a godly garrison was sent into Moorfields at the end of the last century. The Gazetteer, 10th September 1790, has the following paragraph:—“So numerous are become the Gospel shops in the vicinity of Moorfields, that like Monmouth Street, the proprietors employ “pluckers in” on Sundays to inveigle customers. The cant phrase at the door is, “Good sound doctrine here in perfection.””

[681] Postboy, Jan. 1, 1711-12.

[682] Advertisements in the Weekly Journal for that year.

[683] Both named in the Daily Courant for 1718.

[684] London Gazette, Nov. 18-21, 1700.

[685] Tour to London, vol i., p. 84. “A perfectly fair judge, and writing in the true spirit of a philosopher,” says his translator. Grosley remarks that the foreigners would be in the wrong to complain of the rude insults of the lower classes, since even “the better sort of Londoners” liberally show their hatred to the French whenever they can find an opportunity.

[686] Banks Bills, dated 1787.

[687] “New View of London.” 1708, p. 9.

[688] Dr Lardner’s Arithmetic, p. 44.

[689] Allen’s History of Lambeth.

[690] Siege of Carlaeverock, c. 11:—

“— on li respont
De grosses pierres et cornues.”

[691] London Gazette, April 29-May 2, 1700.

[692] Printed in Nichols’s Illustrations of Manners and Expenses in Ancient Times, 1797.

[693] Tom Brown’s Amusements for the Meridian of London, p. 71.

[694] Country Journal or Craftsman, Feb. 1, 1734-5.

[695] Postman, 1711.

[696] Aubrey, Remains of Gentilisme and Judaisme. Lansdowne MSS., No. 231.

[697] The Intelligencer, Sept. 4, 1665.

[698] Spence’s Anecdotes, ed. by Singer, p. 337.

[699] “On the roads near large towns and in the country, you will not find one house in twelve but it does exhibit the sign of the Sun or the Moon. They all sell wine, each of them to his own neighbourhood.”

[700] Henry Peacham’s Art of Living in London, 1642.

[701] Taylor’s Pennylesse Pilgrimage, 1630.

[702] Luttrell Ballads, ii., fol. 92.

[703] “Already had Louis XI. reigned fifteen years over the French when Ulrich and Martin [Crantz] and Michel [Friburger,] all natives of Germany, produced me in this shape at Paris by their art; carefully corrected, I am now offered for sale in the Rue St Jacques, at the Golden Sun.”

[704] This idea is in a measure set forth in some lines on the titlepage of “Gasparini Pergamensis Epistolarium opus per Joannem Lapidarium Sorbonensis Scholæ Priorem multis vigiliis ex corrupto integrum affectum ingeniosa arte impressoria in luce redactum,” 1470, beginning:—

“Ut sol lumen sic doctrinam fundis in Orbem.”

[705] London Spy, part xiii., p. 319, 1706.

[706] Handbill in Harleian Collection, p. 5964.

[707] A Compleat Description of London, Harl. MSS., 5953, vol. i.

[708] Hatton’s New View of London, 1708, p. 30.

[709] Weekly Journal, Sept. 27, 1718.

[710] Looker-On, Jan. 1795.

[711] London Gazette, Dec. 9-12, 1700.

[712] Lyson’s Historical Account of Parishes in Middlesex, p. 75.

[713] Banks Bills.

[714] Harleian MSS., 5962.

[715] Grafton’s prose continuation of John Harding’s Chronicle, p. 189.

[716] Stubbe’s Anatomy of Abuses, London, 1585, p. 94.

[717] Featherstone’s Dialogue against Light and Lascivious Dancing.

[718] London Spy, part xiii., p. 320, 1706.

[719] Weekly Journal, Jan. 18, 1718.

[720] Tom Brown’s Walk round London.

[721] Daily Courant, Jan. 27, 1711.

[722] Carriages.

APPENDIX.
BONNELL THORNTON’S SIGNBOARD EXHIBITION.

On the evening of Tuesday, 23d of March 1762, the ladies and gentlemen of London were informed at their tea-tables, by means of the St James’s Chronicle, of the following fact:—

“Proscript.”

INTELLIGENCE EXTRAORDINARY.

“Strand. The Society of Manufactures, Art, and Commerce, are preparing for the annual Exhibition of Polite Arts, hoping by Degrees to render this Nation as eminent in Taste as War; and that, by bestowing Præmiums, and encouraging a generous Emulation, among the Artists, the Productions of Painting, Sculpture, &c., may no longer be considered as Exotics, but naturally flourish in the Soil of Great Britain.”

Immediately under this notice was the following:—

“Grand Exhibition. The Society of Sign-painters are also preparing a most magnificent Collection of Portraits, Landscapes, Fancy Pieces, Flower Pieces, History Pieces, Night Pieces, Sea Pieces, Sculpture Pieces, &c., &c., designed by the ablest Masters, and executed by the best Hands in these kingdoms. The Virtuosi will have a new Opportunity of displaying their Taste on this Occasion, by discovering the different Stile of the several Masters employed, and pointing out by what Hand each Piece is drawn. A remarkable Cognoscente who has attended at the Society’s great Room, with his Glass, for several Mornings, has already piqued himself on discovering the famous Painter of the Rising Sun, a modern Claude Lorraine, in an elegant Night-piece of the Man-in-the-Moon. He is also convinced that no other than the famous Artists who drew the Red Lion at Brentford, can be equal to the bold figures in the London ‘Prentice, and that the exquisite Colouring in the Piece called Pyramus and Thisbe must be by the same hand as the Hole-in-the-Wall.”

Shortly after this advertisement, the Exhibition was opened. It was held in Bonnell Thornton’s chambers in Bow Street: the hours were from nine till four, admission one shilling. The tickets had a catalogue prefixed to them. The names of the signboard-painters given in this catalogue were those of the journeymen printers in Mr Baldwin’s office, where it was printed. Hagarty alone was a transparent variation on the name of Hogarth, who had largely contributed to the fun and humour of the Exhibition.

PLATE XIX.

THREE NUNS. (Banks’s Collection, 1814.) | ABEL DRUGGER. (Banks’s Collection, 1780.)

WELSH TROOPER.
(From an old print, 1750.)

ELEPHANT AND CASTLE. (Belle Sauvage Yard, circa 1668.) | BLACK PRINCE. (Banks’s Collection, 1790.)

The opening of the saloons was the signal for a perfect storm among the newspapers. The artists and their friends were terribly ruffled, and persisted in seeing in it a persifflage of their exhibition just then opened in the Strand. To this animosity, however, we owe all the particulars of the signs exhibited. Catalogues, criticisms, and reviews of the Exhibition were daily brought before the public, giving full details. The most important of them we present to our readers:—

By Permission.

A CATALOGUE of the Original Paintings, Busts, Carved Figures, &c., &c., &c., Now exhibiting by the Society of Sign-Painters, at the Large Rooms, the Upper End of Bow Street, Covent Garden, nearly opposite the Play-House Passage.

In the Large Passage Room.

[N.B.—That the Merit of the Modern Masters may be fairly examined into, it has been thought proper to place some admired Works of the most eminent Old Masters in this Room, and along the Passage thro’ the Yard.]

No.

[Over the Door.] A Coach and Four, Supposed to be by Stanhope.

Windsor, or any other Castle. By Mason. The Centinel and Great Gun by another Hand.

Hand and Lock of Hair. Hand unknown.

A Pandour, or Indian Prince, uncertain which. Stanhope’s undoubtedly.

A Ship and Castle. Thomas Knife written under. But it is not known whether this is the name of the Artist or the Publican.

A Hen and Chickens. By Lodge.

Three Nuns. The Drapery copied from a Bas-Relief at Rome. By Soames.

An original Whole-Length of Guy of Warwick. By the same.

A Major Wig. By Harrison. [N.B.—The Tails appear to have been added.]

A Barge, in Still-Life. By Van der Trout. [He cannot properly be called an English artist; not being sufficiently encouraged in his own Country, he left Holland with William the Third, and was the first artist who settled in Harp Alley.[723]]

The Hercules Pillars. The Architecture by Young Soames. The Figure (from the Farnesian Hercules) by the Father.

An Heroe’s Head, unknown. By Moses White. With the least alteration, may serve for an Heroe past, present, or to come.

An original Three Quarters Length of King Charles the Second: a striking Likeness. By Ditto.

In the Passage through the Yard.

A Flying Swan,—by some supposed to be a Dying one. By Goustry.

An Half-Moon. By Masmore.

An Original Half Length of Camden, the great Historian and Antiquary, in his Herald’s Coat. By Van der Trout. [As this Artist was originally Colour Grinder to Hans Holbein, it is conjectured there are some of the great Master’s Touches in this Piece.]

A Buttock of Beef stuft. By Lynne.

An Hair-cutter. By the same.

Adam and Eve. The first Attempt of that famous Artist, Barnaby Smith.

A Black Prince. By Hitchcock.

[Over the Entrance.] An Holy Lamb; highly finished. By the same.

Grand Room.

[The Society of Sign-Painters take this Opportunity of refuting a most malicious Suggestion, that their Exhibition is designed as a Ridicule on the Exhibitions of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, &c., and of the Artists. They intend theirs as only an Appendix, or (in the Stile of Painters) a Companion to the others. There is nothing in their Collection, which will be understood by any Candid Person as a Reflection on any Body, or any Body of Men. They are not in the least prompted by any mean Jealousy to depreciate the Merits of their Brother Artists. Animated by the same Public Spirit, their sole View is to convince Foreigners as well as their own blinded Countrymen, that however inferior this Nation may be unjustly deemed in other Branches of the Polite Arts, the Palm for Sign-Painting must be universally ceded to Us, the Dutch themselves not excepted.]

Portrait of a justly celebrated Painter, though an Englishman and a Modern.

A Crooked Billet, formed exactly in the Line of Beauty,[724] its Companion. These by Adams.

The Good Woman. A Whole Length, but no Portrait. By Sympson. [N.B.—It is done from Invention, not being able to find one to sit for it.]

A Star. By * *

The Light Heart. A Sign for a Vintner. By Hogarty. [N.B.—This is an elegant Invention of Ben Jonson, who in The New Inn or Light Heart, makes the Landlord say (speaking of his Sign:)—

An Heart weighed with a Feather, and outweighed too:
A Brain-child of my own and I am proud on’t.]

The Hog in Armour. By Thurmond.

A Buttock of Beef. By Simmes.

The Vicar of Bray. The Portrait of a Beneficed Clergyman, at Full Length. By Allison.

The Irish Arms. By Patrick O’Blaney. [N.B.—Captain Terence O’Cutter STOOD for them.]

The Gentleman of Wales. By David Rice.

Butter and Eggs. By Simmes.

The Scotch Fiddle. By McPharson, done from Himself.

The Barking Dogs. A Landscape at Moonlight. The Moon somewhat eclipsed by an Accident. Whitaker.

Three Apothecaries’ Gallipots. D’aeth’s first Attempt.

Three Coffins. Its Companion. Finished by Shrowd.

A Man. By Hagarty.

The Rising Sun. A Landscape. Painted for The Moon, alias Theophilus Moon. By Morris.

The Magpie. By Whitaker.

Nobody, alias Somebody. A Character.

Somebody, alias Nobody. A Caricature. Its Companion. Both these by Hagarty.[515]

The World’s End. By Sympson.

The Strugglers. A Conversation. By Ransbey.

A Freemason’s Lodge, or the Impenetrable Secret. By a Sworn Brother.

The Blackamoor. By Sympson. [N.B.—This is not intended as any Reflection on the Gentlemen who have been lately Whitewashed.]

A Man running away with the Monument. By Whitaker.

Devil hugging the Witch. A Conversation. By Ransbey.

The Spirit of Contradiction. Ditto. By Hagarty.

The Loggerheads. Ditto. By Ditto.

The Man in the Moon drinks Claret. By Blackman.

The Dancing Bears. A Sign for N. Dukes, or A. Hart, or any other Dancing-Master to Grown Gentlemen. By Hagarty.

My A—— in a Bandbox. By Sympson.

A Man struggling through the World. By the same.

St John’s Head in a Charger.

A Dog’s Head in the Porridge Pot. Its Companion. Both these by Blackman.

A Man in his Element. A Sign for an Eating House.

A Man out of his Element. A Sign for a Publick House at Wapping, Rotherhithe, or Deptford. Both these by Stainsley.

The Barley Mow. By Whitaker.

A Bird in the Hand. A Landscape. By Allison.

Absalom hanging. A Peruke-Maker’s Sign. By Sclater.

Welcome Cuckolds to Horn Fair. By Hagarty.

The Cat o’ Nine Tails. A Kit-Cat. By Masmore.

King Charles in the Oak. A Land-schape. By Allison. The Face in Miniature. By Sclater.

An Owl in an Ivy Bush. Its Companion. By Allison.

Foote in the Character of Mrs Cole. A Sign for a Boarding-School. By Stainsley.

Peeping-Tom. A Sign for a Shoemaker. By the same.

A Pair of Breeches.

A Green Canister. Its Companion. Both these by Blackman.

An Ha! Ha!

[On a parallel line with the foregoing on the other side of the chimney.] The Curiosity. Its Companion. [These two by an unknown Hand, the Exhibitors being favoured with them from an unknown Quarter.] *** Ladies and Gentlemen are requested not to finger them, as Blue Curtains are hung on purpose to preserve them.

[Over the Chimney.] A Star of the first Magnitude.

The Renowned Seven Champions of Christendom, from an entire New Design. 1. St George for England. 2. St Andrew for Scotland. 3. St Denis for France. 4. St Anthony for Italy. 5. St James for Spain. 6. St David for Wales. 7. St Patrick for Ireland. This by Bransley.

An Original Portrait of the present Emperor of Russia.

Ditto of the Empress Queen of Hungary. Its Antagonist. These by Sheerman.

The Silent Woman, or A Good Riddance. A Family Piece. By Barnsley.

[516]The Ghost of Cock Lane. By Miss Fanny ——.[725]

Three Portraits in One.

All the World and his Wife. By Blackman.

Cat and Bagpipes. By Forster.

A perspective view of Billingsgate, or Lectures on Elocution.

The Robin Hood Society, a Conversation; or Lectures on Elocution.[726] Its Companion. These two by Barnsley.

An Author in the Pillory. By ——, Bookseller. First Attempt.[727]

Liberty crowning Britania. By command of his Majesty.

View of the Road to Paddington, with a Presentation (sic) of the Deadly Never-Green[728] that bears Fruit all the Year round. The Fruit at full length. By Hagarty.

The Salutation, or French and English Manners. By Blackman.

Good Company. A Conversation. Intended as a Sign for a Tobacconist. By Bransley.

Death and the Doctor; in Distemper. By Hagarty.

Hogs Norton.[729] A Sign for a Music Shop. By Bransley.

St Dunstan and the Devil.

St Squintum[730] and the Devil. Its Companion. By ——.

Shave for a Penny. Let Blood for Nothing.

Teeth drawn with a Touch. A Caricature. Its Companion. These two by Bransley.

A Man loaded with Mischief. By Sympson.

Entertainment for Man and Horse. A Landscape. By Bransley.

First and Last. By Blackman.

The Constitution; Alderman Pitt’s Entire. By Hagarty.

BUSTS, CARVED FIGURES, &c., &c., &c.

A Blue Boar. By Lester.

Two Indian Kings. By Taverner.

A Flaming Sword of Paradise.

St Peter’s Key. Both these by Carey.

A Bunch of Grapes from Portugal. By Pendred.

A Divided Crown. By Ward.

Birmingham Case of Knives and Forks. [See at the other end of this a Sheffield Case. Its Companion.] Both these by Asgill.

A Nag’s Head, after the Manner of the Antient Bronzes. By Millwich.

A Block, done from the Life. By Brown.

An exact Representation of the famous Running Horse. Black and All Black.

[517]Underneath, an Escutcheon, shewing his Pedigree, as warranted by the Herald’s office. These by Fishbourne.

Bust of a celebrated Beauty. By Edley.

Head of the Thoughtless Philosopher. By Masmore.

Take Time by the Forelock. By Clark.

A Dumb Bell. By the same.

The British Lion, and

Unicorn. [The Lion in excellent Condition.] By Jones.

A French Fleur-de-Lys [tarnished.] By Garthy.

Two Bronzes. By Millwich.

A Gold Fish, considerably larger than the Life. By Cook.

A Mitre, and

Crown. By Hughes.

A Dolphin, painted with the true Verd Antique. By Quarterman.
*** Several Tobacco Rolls, Sugar Loaves, Hats, Wigs, Stockings, Gloves, &c., &c., &c., hung round the Room. By the above-mentioned Artists.

[On the Left Hand of the Door, going out.] A Stand of Cheeses, with a Bladder of Lard on the Top.

A Westphalian Ham. These two by Bricken.

—St James’s Chronicle, Ap. 20-22. 1762.

The next number of the St James’s Chronicle contained an article on the Exhibition from another journal, written with great animosity:—

“As your paper is always ready to expose any Abuses on the Publick, I beg you will give place to the following Observations:—

“I acknowledge myself to have been one of the Curious who went yesterday morning to see the Grand Exhibition, as it is called, of the Sign-Painters, from which I did not indeed expect any great Entertainment; however, I did not imagine any Set of Gentlemen would have been concerned in a senseless Attempt at Satire, and along with it the most impudent and pickpocket Abuse that I ever knew offered to the Publick.

“The Exhibition is really of Signs, and those, in general, worse executed than any that are to be seen in the meanest streets. The Busts, carved Figures, &c., are of corresponding Excellence, all of them being the very worst of Signpost Work, and such as seem collected for an Insult on the Human understanding.

“But that your Readers may All save their Time, Money, and Credit, by not falling into this Hum-trap, I shall give them an Account of some of the choicest Articles of this Collection as a sample that must damp their Curiosity for seeing the Whole.”

GRAND ROOM.

1. Mr Hogarth, or a wretched Figure done for him drawing his five orders of Periwigs.

2. A Crooked Billet, hung under it, on which is written, The Exact Line of Beauty.

3. The Good Woman. The old stale Device of a Woman without a Head, badly executed.

[518]

5. The Light Heart. A Feather weighing down a Heart in a pair of Scales.

9. The Irish Arms. A great clumsy pair of Legs.

10. The Gentleman of Wales. A Taffey with a great Leek in his Hat.

19. Nobody. A man all Legs.

20. Somebody. A man all Belly, with a Constable’s Staff.

23. A Freemason’s Lodge. A new Member blinded and befouling himself.

27. The Spirit of Contradiction. Two Brewers bearing a cask. The Men going different ways.

30. The Dancing Bears. Bears in Men’s cloaths, learning to dance, a great one amongst them, with a gold Chain round his Neck; the Dancing Master a Monkey, holding a Kitten on his Breast with one hand, and pincing its tail with the other.

31. Band-box. An Ass standing in a great Band-box.[731]

32. A Man Struggling through the World. The Sign of a Pasteboard Terrestrial Globe, with a Man creeping through it, his Head being out at one End, and his Heels at the other.

35. A Man in his Element. A man gluttonizing.[732]

36. A Man out of his Element. A Sailor fallen off his Horse.

44. Foote in the Character of Mrs Cole. The wit lies in the writing under it, which is, Young Ladies educated here.

45. Peeping Tom.[733] A Shoemaker trying on a Shoe on a Woman.

But the Cream of the whole Jest is (49 and 50) two Boards behind two Curtains, (one on each side of the Chimney,) which, when the Curtains are lifted up, show the written Laughs of HA HA HA and HE HE HE.

53 and 54 are two old Signs of a Saracen’s Head and a Queen Anne’s, with their Tongues lolling out at one another, designed to represent the Czar and the Queen of Hungary. Over them is a great wooden Bill, with this inscription, The present State of Europe.

64. A view of the Road to Paddington, with a Representation of the Deadly Never Green that bears Fruit all the year round. This is Tyburn, with three felons hanging on it.

65. The Salutation, or French and English Manners, which shows a Frenchman cringingly bowing, and an Englishman taking him by the Nose.

66. Good Company. Three Men drunk, and burning one another’s Faces with their Pipes.

69. St Dunstan and the Devil. The Saint taking the Devil by the Nose with a Pair of Tongs.

70. Its Companion. Doctor Squintum doing the same.

71. Shave for a Penny, Let Blood for Nothing. A man under the hands of a barber surgeon, who shaves and lets blood at the same time, by cutting at every stroke of his razor.

[519]73. A Man loaded with Mischief. A Fellow with a Woman, a Monkey, and a Magpie on his Back.

74. Entertainment for Man and Horse. A Woman and a Hay Mow.

75. First and Last. A Cradle and a Coffin.

76. The Constitution. Alderman Pitt’s Entire. A tall Grenadier and a short Sailor.

“Such is the Entertainment that these wits have been able to prepare for the curious, with all the assistance of the Virtuosi which they have been long advertising to procure. If there is any Satyre in this Design, it must be in humming their Customers. Wit or taste there is certainly none; but there is a Magnitude of Imposition that is surely deserving of Punishment.

It is well known that the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, are at a great Expense for making their elegant Exhibition, and give their Tickets all away. The Artists, indeed, sell Catalogues there to those who chuse to buy them, and dispose of the Money that is got by them to Charities.

The Body of Artists made their Catalogues Tickets to serve last year for the whole Time of Exhibition in Spring Gardens, and sold them but a shilling a-piece, the Profits of which were likewise distributed in Charities.

The Society, as they call themselves, of Signpainters, or rather of Bites who borrow that Name, have the Assurance to fix a Ticket to each Catalogue, which they sell for their own Profit at a shilling; and, by obliging the Ticket to be torn off at the Second Door, make the Purchase of a New Catalogue absolutely necessary for a Second Admission. It is true most Gentlemen do refuse to let their Catalogues be torn; and many of those who had submitted to the tearing of them, insisted upon their being exchanged for whole ones, resolving, like Men of Spirit, not to be bubbled every Way.

In fine, this Mock Exhibition is a most impudent and scandalous Abuse and Bubble. An Insult on Understanding, and a most pickpocket Imposture. The best entertainment it can afford is that of standing in the street, and observing with how much shame in their Faces People come out of the House. Pity it will be, if all who are employed in the carrying on this Cheat, are not seized and sent to serve the King. And those who are Sharers in the Booty deserve likewise to be severely chastised.

I am, Sir, yours, &c.,
A DESPISER OF ALL TRICKERY.”

“The Signpainters return their Thanks to the author of the above most excellent Letter, which is seemingly abusive of their Design, but is in Fact a most admirable Irony.

The Ledger of this Morning, after having pillaged the Catalogue of Signpainting, is candid enough to abuse it. But it is plain that the author has not seen the Exhibition, or could not find out the Humour of it.”

From the GAZETTEER.—(St James’ Chronicle, Ap. 24-27, 1762.)—“The Society of Signpainters, in their Catalogue, tell us they take the opportunity of refuting what they are pleased to call a malicious Suggestion—viz., ‘Their Exhibition being designed as a Ridicule on the Exhibition of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, etc., and the Artists,’ and[520] that they intend theirs only as an Appendix or (in the Style of Painters) ‘Companion’ to the others. What is that but ridiculing, or an attempt towards it? They say ‘there is nothing in their Collection which will be understood by any candid person as a Reflection on any Body or any Body of Men.’ They might have spared this Assertion, for no Person, endued with the least Share of common Sense, can imagine so impotent and futile an Attempt at Satire or Ridicule on any Thing except the few Spectators who go there; which would have been better understood had it opened on the First of April.

“They also say, ‘They are not in the least prompted by any mean jealousy to depreciate the Merits of their Brother Artists.’ Which is owing to their Inability, not want of Assurance; for an Attempt in them to depreciate the Merit of the Professors of Painting and Sculpture, whom they are impudently pleased to call their Brother Artists, would be (to borrow a Simile from one of their own Productions) like Dogs barking at the Moon.

“Their sole View, etc., etc.—‘Their sole View’ (without any Breach of Charity) we may infer is that of filling their own Pockets by duping the Publick; for no private Men would by an Advertisement invite People to their House, and place a Porter at the Door to take a Shilling of them, with a Pretence of being animated by a public Spirit, for any other Motive.

“Bow Street, Covent Garden, April 27.

“The Society of Sign-painters are obliged to the GAZETTEER for the above Remarks.”

Articles and letters abusive of the Exhibition appeared in most of the newspapers, and not a day passed but it was attacked in no very measured terms. The committee, however, generally reprinted the articles in their own organ, thanking the critics for so successfully advertising their efforts, after which no more was heard from them. The following review, having very similar annotations upon the signs to those in the letter signed “A Despiser of all Trickery,” may have come from one of their own pens. It appeared in a monthly sheet, entitled, “The London Register,” for April:[734]—

“Humour is confessedly one of the chief characteristics of the English nation. There is no Country that delights in it so much, exerts it on such various occasions, or shows it in so many Shapes. In conversation, in Books, on the Stage, we meet with it every Day; and it has sometimes been introduced, not without success, even into the Pulpit. To an Artist of our own Country, and of our own Times, we owe the Practice of enriching Pictures with Humour, Character, Pleasantry, and Satire. Such an Artist could not fail of Applause in such a Nation as ours, and his Fame is equal to his Merit.

The original Paintings, etc., the Catalogue of which now lies before us, are the Project of a well-known Gentleman, in whose house they are exhibited;[521] a Gentleman who has, in several instances, displayed a most uncommon Vein of Humour. His Burlesque Ode on St Cecilia’s Day,[735] his Labours in the Drury Lane Journal, and other papers, all possess that singular Turn of Imagination so peculiar to himself. This Gentleman is perhaps the only Person in England (if we except the Artist above mentioned) who could have projected, or have carried tolerably into Execution, this scheme of a Grand Exhibition. There is a whimsical drollery in all his Plans, and a Comical Originality in his Manner, that never fail to distinguish and to recommend all his Undertakings. To exercise his Wit and Humour in an innocent Laugh, and to raise that innocent Laugh in others, seems to have been his chief Aim in the present Spectacle. The Ridicule or Exhibition, if it must be accounted so, is pleasant without Malevolence; and the general Strokes on the common Topics of Satire are given with the most apparent Good-humour. . . . . .

On entering the Grand Room, . . . . you find yourself in a large and commodious Apartment, hung round with green Bays, on which this curious collection of Wooden Originals is fixt flat, (like the Signs at present in Paris,) and from whence hang Keys, Bells, Swords, Poles, Sugar-Loaves, Tobacco-Rolls, Candles, and other ornamental Furniture, carved in Wood, that commonly dangle from the Penthouses of the different Shops in our streets. On the Chimney-Board (to imitate the Stile of the Catalogue) is a large, blazing Fire, painted in Water-colours; and within a kind of Cupola, or rather Dome, which lets the Light into the Room, is written in Golden Capitals, upon a blue Ground, a Motto from Horace, disposed in the Form following:—

Grand-Room

From this short Description of the Grand-Room, (when we consider the singular Nature of the Paintings themselves, and the Peculiarity of the other Decorations,) it may be easily imagined that no Connoisseur, who has made the Tour of Europe, ever entered a Picture-Gallery that struck his Eye more forcibly at first Sight, or provoked his Attention with more extraordinary Appearance.

We will now, if the Reader pleases, conduct him round the Room, and take a more accurate Survey of the curious Originals before us. To which End we shall proceed to transcribe the ingenious Society’s Catalogue, adding (as we proposed before) such Notes and Illustrations as may seem necessary for his Instruction or Entertainment.

[522]

8. The Vicar of Bray: The Portrait of a Beneficed Clergyman, at Full Length. [The vicar of Bray is an Ass in a Feather-topped Grizzle, Band, and Pudding Sleeves.—This is a much droller Conceit, and has more Effect when executed, than the old Design of The Ass loaded with Preferment.]

9. The Irish Arms. By Patrick O’Blaney. [N.B. Captain Terence O’Cutter stood for them.] [A Pair of extremely thick Legs in white Stockings and black Garters.]

12. The Scotch Fiddle. By McPharson, done from Himself. [The Figure of a Highlander sitting under a Tree, and enjoying that greatest of Pleasure of scratching where it itches.]

16. A Man. [Nine Taylors at Work; in Allusion to the old Saying of nine Taylors make a Man.]

19. Nobody, alias Somebody. A Character. [The Figure of an Officer, all Head, Arms, Legs and Thighs.—This Piece has a very odd Effect, being so drolly executed that you don’t miss the Body.]

20. Somebody, alias Nobody. A Caricature. Its Companion. Both these by Hagarty. [A rosy figure with a little Head and a huge Body, whose Belly swags over, almost quite down to his Shoe-Buckles. By the Staff in his Hand it appears to be intended to represent a Constable.—It might also have been mistaken for an eminent Justice of Peace.]

22. The Strugglers. A Conversation. By Bransley. [Represents a Man and Wife fighting for the Breeches.]

23. A Free-Mason’s Lodge, or the Impenetrable Secret. By a Sworn Brother. [The supposed Ceremony and probable Consequences of what is called making a Mason, representing the Master of the Lodge with a red hot Salamander in his Hand, and the new Brother blindfold, and in a comical Situation of Fear and Good-Luck.]

25. A Man running away with the Monument. By Whitaker. [This Picture of a London Night, like the Farmer Returned, represents

—— the Watchmen in Town,
Lame, feeble, half blind.——

Two of these Cripples are pursuing the Thief, one crying out, Stop Thief! and the other, I can’t catch him.]

27. The Spirit of Contradiction. Ditto. By Hagarty. [Two Brewers with a Barrel of Beer, pulling different Ways.]

28. The Logger Heads. Ditto. By Ditto. [Underwritten, the old Joke of We are Three. Shakespeare plainly alludes to this sign in his Twelfth Night, where the Fool comes between Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and, taking each by the Hand, says, “How now, my Hearts, did you never see the Picture of We Three?”]

30. The Dancing Bears. By Hagarty. [Most drolly conceived and comically executed.—Represents Four Bears on their hind Legs, drest in different Characters, one with a gold Chain round his Neck, giving Right Paw and Left, gravely practising Country-Dances, under the Tuition of a Monkey, drest like a Dancing-Master, and fiddling on a Kit-ten.—The Seriousness and Solemnity of each of these Figures is incomparable. Underneath is written, “Grown Gentlemen taught to Dance.”]

31. Band Box. By Sympson. [Hieroglyphically expressed . . . . an Ass standing in a Bandbox.]

33. St John’s Head in a Charger. [The dead Saint’s Eyes, like those in most Portraits, seem to be looking at you.]

[523]

35. A Man in his Element. A Sign for an Eating-House. [A Cook roasted upon a Spit at the Kitchen-Fire and basted by the Devil.]

36. A Man out of his Element. [A Sailor fallen off his Horse, with his Skull lighting against the ten mile Stone from Portsmouth.]

38. A Bird in the Hand, a Landscape. By Allison. [A common sign in various Parts of England, which has usually this Inscription,

A Bird in Hand is better far
Than two that in the Bushes are.

But these Lines are much improved in the Inscription that is under this Sign in the Exhibition:

A Bird in Hand far better ’tis
Than two that in the Bushes is.]

39. Absalon Hanging, a Peruke Maker’s Sign. By Sclater. [Underneath is written—

If Absalon had not worn his own Hair
Absalon had not been hanging there.]

40. Welcome Cuckholds to Horn-Fair. By Hagarty. [Whimsically imagined, and drolly executed—Being a Picture of Horn-Fair containing various Figures of Cuckholds in different Characters; some with large staring Bulls’, Goats’-Horns, &c., others with their Horns just budding. The center Figure is that of a fine Gentleman (copied from the fine Gentleman in Lethe) with Rams’-Horns. On a Bank, fast asleep, sits a Citizen-like Figure, with large branching antlers, and on the other side of the Picture, is a jemmy Figure in Boots, who has no Horns upon his Head, but carries them in his Pocket, out of which the tops appear tipt with Gold. This last Gentleman’s Horse (to make the Picture complete) is also represented as a Cuckhold, having a Horn in his Forehead like an Unicorn’s.]

49. An Ha! Ha!

50 [On a parallel Line with the foregoing on the other Side of the Chimney] The Curiosity, its Companion. [These two by an unknown Hand, the Exhibitors being favoured with them from an unknown Quarter.] *** Ladies and Gentlemen are requested not to finger them, as blue Curtains are hung over in purpose to preserve them. [Behind the blue Curtains on one of these Boards is written Ha! Ha! Ha! and on the other He! He! He! At the first opening of the Exhibition the Ladies had infinite Curiosity to know what was behind the Curtain, but were afraid to gratify it. This covered Laugh is no bad satire on the indecent Pictures in some Collections, hung up in the same Manner with Curtains over them.]

52. [Over the Chimney] The Renowned Seven Champions of Christendom, from an entire New Design. [A Capital Piece. The Seven Champions are represented in the following Manner. 1. St George is an English Sailor mounted on a Lion, with a Spit (by Way of Lance) bearing a Sirloin of Beef in one Hand, and a full Pot of Porter marked only Three Pence a Quart in the other. By the Lion’s Foot are two Scrolls, like Ballads, the one inscribed O the Roast Beef of Old England: the other, Hearts of Oak are our Men. 2. St Andrew is a Highlander mounted on a Scotch Galloway, with a Broad Sword, bearing an Oat Cake at the End of it in one Hand, and a Flask of Whisky in the other. 3. St Dennis is a Frenchman, mounted on a Deer, a timorous swift-footed Animal with a small Sword in one Hand on which a Frog appears to be spitted, and a Dish of[524] Soupe Maigre in the other. 4. St Anthony is the Pope, mounted on a Bull, with a Crosier and a Vessel of Holy Water dangling from it, in one Hand, and a Cod-Fish inscribed Food for Lent in the other. From his Right Foot hangs a Scroll inscribed Kiss my Toe, and on the Ground several Rolls of Paper, on which are written, Pardons, Indulgencies, &c. &c. 5. St James is a Spaniard mounted on a Mule with an Ingot of Gold in one Hand and a Padlock in the other. 6. St David is Taffy mounted on a Goat brandishing a Leek in one Hand, and bearing a Cheese, by Way of Target, in the other. 7. St Patrick is an Irish Soldier, mounted on a large Stone-Horse, at whose Feet is a kind of Bill with this Inscription—To cover this Season Black and All Black. He has a Sword, bearing a Potatoe on the End of it in one Hand, and a three-square Bottle, inscribed Green Usquebaugh in the other.]

53. An original Portrait of the present Emperor of Russia.

54. Ditto of the Empress Queen of Hungary, its Antagonist. [These are two old signs of the Saracen’s Head and Queen Anne. Under the first is written The Zarr, and under the other the Empres Quean. They are lolling their tongues out at each other, and over their heads runs a wooden label, inscribed, The present State of Europe.]

56. The Ghost of Cock Lane. By Miss Fanny ——. [The figure of two hands, one bearing a hammer, the other a curry-comb, in allusion to knocking and scratching.]

58. All the World and his Wife. By Blackman. [The figure of a foolish-looking fellow, with the globe round his body, (like Orbis in the Rehearsal,) and his wife cudgelling him.]

60. A Prospective View of Billingsgate, or Lectures on Elocution.

61. The Robin Hood Society, a Conversation; or Lectures on Elocution. Its Companion. These two by Barnsley. [These two Strokes at a famous Lecturer on Elocution,[736] and The Reverend Projector of a Rhetorical Academy, are admirably conceived and executed: and (the latter more especially) almost worthy the Hand of Hogarth. They are full of a Variety of droll Figures, and seem indeed to be the Work of a great Master, struggling to suppress his Superiority of Genius, and endeavouring to paint down to the common Stile and Manner of the School of Sign-painting.]

64. View of the Road to Paddington, with a Presentation of the Deadly-Never-Green, that bears Fruit all the year round. The Fruit at full Length. By Hagarty. [Tyburn with three Felons on the Gallows. This Piece is remarkable for the Execution.]

65. The Salutation, or French and English Manners. By Blackman. [An English Jack Tar, kicking, and taking a tawdry Mounseer, cringing and bowing, by the Nose.]

66. Good Company. A Conversation. Intended as a Sign for a Tobacconist. By Bransley. [The Conceit and Execution are admirable. It represents a Common-Council-Man, and two Friends, drunk, over a Bottle and a Pipe. The Common-Council-Man is fallen back on his Chair as asleep. One of the Friends, an officer, is lighting a Pipe at his red Nose, while the other, a Doctor, is using his Thumb for a Tobacco Stopper.]

68. Hogs-Norton. A Sign for a Musick-Shop. By Bransley. [Represents (in allusion to the old saying concerning Hog’s Norton) an Hog drest in a Laced Suit, and an enormous Tye Wig, playing upon the Organ.]

[525]

69. St Dunstan and the Devil. [The Saint Taking the Devil by the Nose.]

70. St Squintum and the Devil, its Companion. By ——. [Dr W——d doing the same. The Portrait is not unlike the Doctor.[737]]

71. Shave for a Penny, Let Blood for Nothing. [A Man under the Hands of a Barber-Surgeon, who shaves and lets Blood at the same Time, by cutting at every Stroke of his Razor.]

72. Teeth Drawn with a Touch. A Caricature. Its Companion. [A Man in much the same circumstances, mutatis mutandis, under the Hands of a Tooth-Drawer.]

“Such,” says the London Register, “are the Original Paintings in the Society’s Collection.” It may be remarked that there is some humour in placing many of the signs, which of themselves would not be very striking: for instance, The Three Apothecaries’ Gallipots, with The Three Coffins as its companion; King Charles in the Oak, and by its side The Owl in the Ivy Bush. Some of the signs are very indelicate, but this objection does not appear amongst the many charges brought against Mr Thornton and his friends. The opinion of society upon this point was very different in the last century from what it is now.

Besides the official catalogue there also appears to have been a comic or satirical guide, for the newspapers of the day advertise—

This Day was published, Price 6d.,

HA! HA! HA! Or the Laugher’s Companion to the GRAND EXHIBITION of the SIGN PAINTERS. Also He! He! He! Or the Artist’s Guide to the Society’s Exhibition.

Printed for W. Nicholl, at the Papermill, in St Paul’s Churchyard.

We shall close this subject with a paper in favour of the much abused exhibition, a weak, but well meant, effusion in doggerel rhyme:—

To the Printer of the ST JAMES’S CHRONICLE.

SIR,

As the Sign Painters in this Catalogue have directed any Essays on their Exhibition to be sent to you, I have troubled you with the enclosed Trifle, by inserting which in your Chronicle, you will oblige

Your humble Servant

And constant Reader

A Friend to the Sign Painters.

[526]

Addressed to the Gentlemen of the Society of Sign Painters. Though Malice darts around malignant Rays
And pow’rful Envy all its Spleen displays:
Go on, great Chiefs, pursue your noble Play,
And nobly end, what nobly you began.
Spite of Detraction shall your Mirth rise
With odorif’rous Flavour to the Skies,
And Masmore’s, Lester’s, Ward’s, and Fishbourne’s Name,
With thine, Van Dyke, shall live to endless Fame;
For your Collection Wit and Skill combine,
And Humour flows in ev’ry well chose Sign;
To you the Palm, th’ admiring World must give,
To you the Honour ev’ry Artist leave.
Regard not they the little-minded’s Rage,
Nor dread the snarling Critic’s angry Page;
For conscious Worth shall be your safest Guard,
And Immortality your sure Reward.
April 27-29, 1762.E. N.

[723] In Farringdon Street; the head-quarters of the London Sign-Painters.

[724] In allusion to a well-known art-theory of Hogarth’s.

[725] Fanny Parsons was the girl who played such an active part in the Cock Lane ghost performances, Jan. and Feb. 1762.

[726] A famous discussion club held at the Robin Hood Tavern, Essex Street, Strand.

[727] Evidently an allusion to Edmund Curll, the notorious bookseller, who stood in the Pillory at Cheapside.

[728] The gallows at Tyburn.

[729] A corruption of Hook-Norton, the name of a small village in Oxfordshire, where the hogs formerly played upon the church organ. So, at least, the story runs.

[730] “St Squintum” was probably intended for John Whitfield, the famous preacher, whose personal appearance was the subject of numerous lampoons and caricatures at this time.

[731] This seemed to be a sort of slang phrase equivalent to the present—“It’s all my eye;” it occurs in “Tom Brown,” vol. ii., p. 13, 1708. See also p. 467 of this work.

[732] 35. From another source we learn that this was very different:—“No. 35. A Man in his Element, a sign for an Eating-house,”—a cook roasted on a spit at a kitchen fire, and basted by the devil.

[733] In allusion to Peeping Tom, the shoemaker of Coventry.

[734] Under the title of—“Particular Account of the Grand Exhibition in Bow Street, with Remarks and Illustrations of it.”

[735] Bonnell Thornton composed an ode on St Cecilia’s Day, which was set to music by Dr Burney, and performed by the aid of those national instruments, the marrow bones and cleavers. The affair came off at Ranelagh, and gave general satisfaction. In a former chapter we have given full particulars of this event. Thornton was born in London 1724, educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford. In connection with Geo. Colman the elder he started the Connoisseur, the St James’ Chronicle, and other periodicals. He died May 9, 1768, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

[736] Orator Henley is doubtless intended.

[737] The celebrated preacher, George Whitfield, who was chaplain to Selina, Countess of Huntingdon.

INDEX.

A. B. C., 476.

Abel Drugger, 85.

Abercrombie, Sir Ralph, 58.

Abraham Offering his Son, 259.

Absalom, 263.

Acorn, 246.

Adam’s Arms, 136.

Adam and Eve, 257, 258.

Addison’s Head, 68.

African Chief, 432.

Air-Balloon, 486.

Airesdale Heifer, 190.

Albemarle, Duke of, 59.

Albion, 329.

Ale-stakes, 6.

Ale-pole, 233.

Alfred’s Head, 45.

Almond Tree, 245.

Anchor, 332.

Anchor and Castle, 333.

Anchor and Can, 333.

Anchor and Shuttle, 333.

Ancient Briton, 415.

Andrew Marvel, 63.

Angel, 266, 267, 268.

Angel and Bible, 270.

Angel and Crown, 270.

Angel and Gloves, 271.

Angel and Still, 271.

Angel and Stilliards, 271.

Angel and Sun, 272.

Angel and Woolpack, 272.

Angel on the Hoop, 504.

Angler, 361.

Annunciation, 279.

Anodyne Necklace, 405.

Antelope, 110.

Antigallican, 485.

Antigallican Arms, 136, 485.

Antwerp, 425.

Anvil, 346.

Anvil and Blacksmith, 346.

Anvil and Hammer, 346.

Ape, 161.

Ape and Bagpipes, 438.

Apollo, 69.

Apple-tree, 239.

Apple-tree and Mitre, 239.

Arabian Horse, 175.

Archimedes, 62.

Arethusa, 329.

Arrow, 326.

Artichoke, 250.

Ash-tree, 246.

Ass in the Bandbox, 467.

Atlas, 71.

Auld Lang Syne, 81.

Australian, 436.

Ave Maria, 280.

Axe, 346.

Axe and Cleaver, 346.

Axe and Compasses, 346.

Axe and Saw, 346.

Axe and Tun, 475.

Babes in the Wood, 76.

Bacchus, 69.

Bag o’ Nails, 347.

Baker and Basket, 348.

Baker and Brewer, 348.

Balaam’s Ass, 261.

Balcony, 375.

Bald Face, 165.

Bald Hind, 164.

Bald-faced Stag, 164.

Ball, 482.

Ball and Cap, 483.

Ball and Raven, 483.

Balloon, 355, 486.

Barrel, 349.

Bang Up, 355.

Bank of Friendship, 434.

Banner, 322.

Baptist Head, 273.

Barber’s Pole, 341.

Barber’s signs, 344, 345.

Barley Broth, 384.

Barleycorn, Sir John, 79.

Barley Mow, 244, 327.

Barley-Stack, 244.

Bat and Ball, 484.

Battered Naggin, 468.

Battle of the Nile, 61.

Battle of Pyramids, 61.

Battle of Waterloo, 61.

Bay Childers, 175.

Bay Horse, 171.

Beadle, 336.

Beagle, 194.

Bear, 152, 153, 154.

Bear and Bacchus, 155.

Bear and Harrow, 155.

Bear and Ragged Staff, 136.

Bear and Rummer, 155.

Bear’s Paw, 144.

Bear’s Head, 155.

Bedford Head, 99.

Beech-tree, 246.

Beef Steaks, 378.

Beehive, 231, 472.

Bee’s Wing, 384.

Bel and Dragon, 256.

Bell, 473, 477, 478, 479.

Bell and Anchor, 480.

Bell and Black Horse, 174.

Bell and Bullock, 480.

Bell and Candlestick, 480.

Bell and Crown, 480.

Bell and Cuckoo, 480.

Bell and Horse, 174.

Bell and Lion, 480.

Bell and Mackerel, 230.

Bell and Talbot, 165.

Bell in the Thorn, 475.

Bell Savage, 480, 481.

Benbow, Admiral, 57.

Bess of Bedlam, 370.

Bible, 253.

Bible and Ball, 256, 483.

Bible and Crown, 103.

Bible, Crown, and Constitution, 254.

Bible and Dial, 256.

Bible and Dove, 255.

Bible and Harp, 473.

Bible and Key, 285.

Bible and Lamb, 255.

Bible and Peacock, 255.

Bible and Sun, 256.

Bible and Three Crowns, 127.

Bible, Sceptre, and Crown, 255.

Birch-tree, 246.

Bird and Bantling, 138.

Birdbolt, 361.

Bird in the Bush, 449.

Bird in Hand, 446, 447, 448, 449.

Bishop Blaize, 283.

Bishop Blaize and Two Sawyers, 252.

Bishop of Canterbury, 64.

Bishop’s Head, 315.

Blackamoor’s Head, 485.

Black Ball and Lillyhead, 64.

Black Bell, 479.

Blackbird, 202.

Black Boy, 432.

Black Boy and Camel, 433.

Black Boy and Cat, 105.

Black Boy and Comb, 433.

Black Bull and Looking-Glass, 187.

Black Cock, 209.

Black Crow, 203.

Black Dog, 193.

Black Dog and Still, 483.

Black Doll, 486.

Black Girl, 433.

Black Friar, 319.

Black Goat, 192.

Black Greyhound, 195.

Black Jack, 384, 385, 386.

Black Lion, 120.

Blackmoor’s Head and Woolpack, 347.

Black Posts, 373.

Black Prince, 46.

Black Ram, 190.

Black Spread Eagle, 139.

Black Swan, 215, 216, 473.

Blaize, Bishop, 283.

Bleeding Heart, 300.

Bleeding Horse, 175.

Bleeding Wolf, 143.

Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green, 73.

Blink Bonny, 175.

Block, 363.

Blossom’s Inn, 297.

Blue Anchor, 333.

Blue Anchor and Ball, 333.

Blue and Gilt Balcony, 376.

Blue Balls, 483.

Blue Bible, 253.

Blue Boar, 116, 288.

Blue Bowl, 395.

Blue Boy, 510.

Blue Bull, 195.

Blue-coat Boy, 509.

Blue Cock, 209.

Blue Cow, 195.

Blue Dog, 194, 195.

Blue Flower Pot, 377.

Blue Fox, 195.

Blue Garland, 236.

Blue Greyhound, 195.

Blue Helmet, 326.

Blue Horse, 170.

Blue Lion, 146.

Blue Man, 195.

Blue Peruke and Star, 404.

Blue Pig, 116, 195.

Blue Posts, 373.

Blue Pump, 397.

Blue Ram, 195.

Blue Stoops, 406.

Board, 377.

Boar’s Head, 378, 379, 380.

Boat, 334.

Boatswain, 332.

Boatswain’s Call, 332.

Bœuf à la Mode, 475.

Bolt in Tun, 471.

Bombay Grab, 328.

Bonny Cravat, 406.

Book in Hand, 446.

Booksellers’ Signs, 6, 7.

Boot, 409.

Boot and Slipper, 409.

Bosom’s Inn, 297, 298.

Bottle, 387.

Bottle and Glass, 387.

Bowman, 363.

Bowls and Candle-poles, 362.

Boy and Barrel, 349.

Boy and Cap, 349.

Brace, 473.

Brandy Cask, 349.

Brass Knocker, 376.

Brawn’s Head, 381.

Brazen Serpent, 7, 261.

Breeches and Glove, 409.

Britannia, 415.

British Oak, 246.

Brood Hen, 178.

Broughton, 87.

Brown Bear, 152.

Brown Bill, 336.

Brown Cow, 190.

Brown Jug, 387.

Brown Lion, 150.

Brunswick, The, 50.

Buchanan Head, 63.

Buck, 471.

Buck and Bell, 165.

Bucket, 397.

Buck in the Park, 127.

Buckthorn Tree, 246.

Buffalo Head, 186.

Bugle, 188.

Bugle Horn, 340.

Bull, 182, 183.

Bull and Bedpost, 187.

Bull and Bell, 165.

Bull and Bitch, 187.

Bull and Butcher, 187.

Bull and Chain, 182.

Bull and Dog, 187.

Bull and Gate, 62.

Bull and Garter, 252.

Bull’s Head, 185.

Bull Inn, 92.

Bull and Magpie, 187.

Bull and Mouth, 61.

Bull and Oak, 188.

Bull and Stirrup, 116.

Bull and Swan, 188.

Bull and Three Calves, 177.

Bullen Butchered, 47.

Bull in the Oak, 188.

Bull in the Pound, 188.

Bull’s Neck, 186.

Bumper, 390.

Bunch of Carrots, 243.

Bunch of Grapes, 243.

Bunch of Roses, 236.

Burdett, Sir Francis, 63.

Burnt Tree, 246.

Bush, 3, 4, note, 233, 234.

Bushel, 347.

Butler’s Head, 63.

Butt and Oyster, 381.

Cabbage, 251.

Cabbage Hall, 251.

Cabinet, 393.

Cæsar’s Head, 45.

Camden Arms, 68.

Camden Head, 68.

Camden House, 416.

Camel, 162.

Camel’s Head, 162.

Canary House, 384.

Cannon Ball, 327.

Canute Castle, 45.

Cap and Stocking, 402.

Cape of Good Hope, 422.

Cardinal’s Hat or Cap, 315.

Case is Altered, 460.

Castle, 130, 417, 487.

Castle and Banner, 488.

Castle and Falcon, 487.

Castle and Wheelbarrow, 488.

Castles in the Air, 488.

Castor and Pollux, 70.

Cat, 197.

Cat and Bagpipes, 438.

Cat and Cage, 198.

Cat and Fiddle, 438.

Cat and Kittens, 177.

Cat and Lion, 198.

Cat and Parrot, 198.

Cat and Wheel, 299.

Caterpillar Hall, 251.

Catherine Wheel, 298, 357.

Cat in the Basket, 198.

Centurion’s Lion, 151.

Chaffcutter’s Arms, 352.

Chained Bull, 182.

Chaise and Pair, 176.

Chapel Bell, 321.

Charing Cross, 416.

Charles the First’s Head, 48.

Charles the Second’s Head, 49.

Charter about signs granted by Charles I., 10.

Chase, 361.

Chelsea Waterworks, 416.

Chequers, 488.

Cherry Garden, 240.

Cherry Tree, 240, 472.

Cheshire Cheese, 383.

Chestnut, 246.

Child-Coat, 407.

Chiltern Hundred, 418.

China Hall, 435.

Church, 321.

Church Gates, 321.

Church Stile, 321.

Cinder Oven, 346.

Circe, 329.

Civet, 162.

Cleaver, 358.

Clog, 410.

Clown, 85.

Coach and Horses, 355, 356.

Coach and Dogs, 357.

Coble, 334.

Cock, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209.

Cock and Anchor, 212.

Cock and Bear, 212.

Cock and Bell, 211.

Cock and Blackbird, 202.

Cock and Bottle, 207, 211.

Cock and Breeches, 212.

Cock and Bull, 212.

Cock and Crown, 212.

Cock and Dolphin, 212.

Cock and House, 212.

Cock and Key, 471.

Cock and Lion, 151.

Cock and Magpie, 382.

Cock and Pie, 382.

Cock and Pynot, 383.

Cock and Trumpet, 211.

Cock and Swan, 212.

Cockatrice, 161.

Cock in Boots, 442.

Cocoa Tree, 248.

Cock on the Hoop, 504.

Cock’s Head, 209.

Coffee-house, 249.

Coffee-pot, 394.

Colt and Cradle, 445.

Complete Angler, 80.

Comus, 70.

Copper Pot, 396.

Corner Pin, 505.

Cottage of Content, 434.

Cotton Breeches, 409.

Cotton-tree, 248.

Coventry Cross, 418.

Cow and Calf, 177.

Cow and Hare, 449.

Cow and Snuffers, 444.

Cow and Two Calves, 177.

Cow in Boots, 442.

Cow Roast, 378.

Cow’s Face, 186.

Crab and Lobster, 381.

Crab-tree, 247.

Cradle, 130, 393.

Cradle and Coffin, 464.

Craven Arms, 59.

Craven Head, 59.

Craven Heifer, 190.

Craven Ox, 188.

Craven Ox Head, 188.

Crawfish, 381.

Crescent and Anchor, 500.

Cricketers, 39.

Cricketers’ Arms, 484.

Cripples’ Inn, 468.

Crispin and Crispian, 281.

Crocodile, 162.

Cromwell, 46.

Cromwell, Oliver, 121.

Crook and Shears, 353.

Crooked Billet, 489.

Cross, 275, 276.

Cross Axes, 346.

Cross Bullets, 327.

Cross Foxes, 142.

Cross Guns, 322.

Cross Hands, 493.

Cross in Hand, 493.

Cross Keys, 131.

Cross Keys and Bible, 131.

Cross Lances, 322.

Cross o’ the Hands, 493.

Cross Pistols, 322.

Cross Scythes, 353.

Cross Swords, 322.

Crow in the Oak, 203.

Crown, 101, 239, 258.

Crown and Anchor, 103.

Crown and Can, 106.

Crown and Column, 103.

Crown and Cushion, 102.

Crown and Dove, 105.

Crown and Fan, 105.

Crown and Glove, 102.

Crown and Halbert, 106.

Crown and Harp, 126.

Crown and Leek, 126.

Crown and Last, 105.

Crown and Mitre, 103.

Crown and Punchbowl, 388.

Crown and Rasp, 105.

Crown and Rolls, 337.

Crown and Sceptre, 103.

Crown and Tower, 103.

Crown and Trumpet, 106.

Crown and Woolpack, 103.

Crown and Woodpecker, 103.

Crowned Q, 476.

Crowned Fan, 412.

Crown of Thorns, 275.

Crown on the Hoop, 504.

Crow’s Nest, 178.

Cumberland, Duke of, 54.

Czar’s Head, 52.

Dagger, 325.

Dairymaid, 353.

Daisy, 238.

Dancing Dogs, 444.

Dancing Goat, 439.

Dandie Dinmont, 81.

Dapple Grey, 171.

Darby and Joan, 79.

David and Harp, 263.

Davy Lamp, 346.

Defiance, 355.

Denmark House, 436, 437.

Devil, 291, 294, 295.

Devil and Bag of Nails, 347.

Devil and St Dunstan, 291, 292, 293.

Devil in a Tub, 460.

Devil’s Head, 295.

Dick Tarleton, 83.

Digby, Captain, 99.

Dirty Dick, 90.

Dr Johnson’s Head, 68.

Doctor Syntax, 81.

Dog, 192.

Dog and Bacon, 378.

Dog and Badger, 197.

Dog and Bear, 196.

Dog and Crock, 444.

Dog and Duck, 196, 197.

Dog and Gun, 197.

Dog and Hedgehog, 162.

Dog and Partridge, 197.

Dog and Pheasant, 197.

Dog and Punchbowl, 388.

Dog in Doublet, 443.

Dog’s Head in the Pot, 443, 444.

Dolphin, 227, 228.

Dolphin & Anchor, 228, 229.

Dolphin and Bell, 165.

Dolphin and Comb, 229.

Dolphin and Crown, 129.

Don Cossack, 99.

Don John, 68.

Don Juan, 68.

Don Saltero, 93, 94.

Donkey Playing on Hurdy Gurdy, 439.

Doublet, 407.

Dove, 219.

Dove and Rainbow, 259.

Dovecote, 219.

Dover Castle, 417.

Dragon, 111, 158.

Drake, 218.

Drake, Admiral, 56.

Dray and Horses, 349.

Drovers’ Arms, 136.

Drover’s Call, 355.

Druid and Oak, 100.

Druid’s Head, 99.

Drum and Trumpet, 323.

Dryden’s Head, 67.

Duck and Mallard, 218.

Duke’s Head, 59.

Dunciad, 67.

Dun Cow, 74.

Durham Heifer, 190.

Durham Ox, 188.

Dust Pan, 397.

Dusty Miller, 348.

Dwarf, 89.

Eagle, 199.

Eagle and Ball, 199.

Eagle and Child, 138.

Eagle and Serpent, 198.

Eagle’s Foot, 139.

Early Christian signs, 3, 4.

East India House, 415.

Edinburgh Castle, 418.

Eight Bells, 478.

Eight Ringers, 478.

Elephant and Castle, 155, 156.

Elephant and Fish, 156.

Elephant and Friar, 156.

Elisha’s Raven, 264.

Elliott, General, 58.

Elm, 246.

Elysium, 73.

England, Scotland, and Ireland, 415.

English Arms, 129.

Essex Arms, 60.

Essex, Earl of, 60.

Essex Head, 60.

Essex Serpent, 80.

Exchange, 415.

Exmouth, Lord, 57.

Experienced Fowler, 361.

Express, 355.

Ewe and Lamb, 177.

Falcon, 219.

Falcon on the Hoop, 220, 504.

Falcon and Horseshoe, 115.

Falstaff, Sir John, 67, 86.

Fan, 412.

Farmer’s Arms, 136, 352.

Father Redcap, 96.

Feathers, 122.

Ferguson, James, 63.

Fiddler’s Arms, 83.

Fifteen Balls, 127.

Fighting Cocks, 210, 252.

Fig-tree, 245.

Filho, 175.

Filho da Puta, 175.

Finish, 511.

Fire-beacon, 117.

First and Last, 436, 464.

Fir-tree, 246.

Fish, 230.

Fish and Anchor, 228.

Fish and Bell, 165, 230.

Fish and Dolphin, 230.

Fish and Eels, 231.

Fish and Kettle, 231.

Fish and Quart, 231.

Fishbone, 231.

Fishing Cat, 439.

Fishing Smack, 334.

Five Bells, 331, 478.

Five Clogs, 410.

Five Cricketers, 484.

Five Inkhorns, 337.

Flaming Sword, 258.

Flank of Beef, 378.

Flask, 387.

Fleece, 58.

Flitch of Dunmow, 420.

Flower de Luce, 128.

Flower Pot, 376.

Flowers of the Forest, 81.

Flying Bull, 73.

Flying Childers, 175.

Flying Dutchman, 175.

Flying Fox, 170.

Flying Horse, 72, 365.

Flying Monkey, 444.

Foaming Quart, 387.

Foaming Tankard, 349.

Folly, 509.

Fool, 339.

Forest Blue Bell, 238.

Fortune, 73.

Foul Anchor, 333.

Fountain, 471, 494, 495.

Fountain and Bear, 496.

Fountain of Juvenca, 461.

(Four) 4, 477.

Four Alls, 451, 452.

Four Bells, 478.

Four Coffins, 371.

Fourteen Stars, 500.

Fox, 168, 472.

Fox and Bull, 169.

Fox and Cap, 170.

Fox and Crane, 169.

Fox and Crown, 170, 354.

Fox and Duck, 169.

Fox and Goose, 168.

Fox and Grapes, 169.

Fox and Hen, 169.

Fox and Hounds, 169.

Fox and Knot, 170.

Fox and Lamb, 169.

Fox and Owl, 169.

Fox and Punchbowl, 388.

Fox’s Tail, 170.

French Arms, 128.

French Horn, 339.

French Horn and Half Moon, 339.

French Horn and Queen’s Head, 339.

French Horn and Rose, 339.

French Horn and Violin, 338.

French signs, 8, 11, 16, 17, 28, 35, 36, 37, 41, 279, 280.

Frighted Horse, 175.

Froghall, 232.

Frying Pan, 396.

Full Measure, 349.

Full Moon, 500.

Full Ship, 330.

Galloping Horse, 173.

Gander, 472.

Gaper, 467.

Gaping Goose, 444.

Garden House, 373.

Garrick’s Head, 85.

Garter, 410, 411.

Gelding, 176.

General’s Arms, 136.

Geneva Arms, 130.

Generous Briton, 415.

Gentle Shepherd of Salisbury Plain, 419.

George, 287, 288.

George and Blue Boar, 288.

George and Dragon, 40.

George and Thirteen Cantons, 289.

George and Vulture, 289.

George on the Hoop, 504.

Gibraltar, 61, 422.

Gipsy Queen, 508.

Gipsy Tent, 508.

Globe, 414.

Globe and Compasses, 147.

Glorious Apollo, 69.

Glove, 411.

Goat, 192.

Goat and Kid, 177.

Goat in Armour, 440.

Goat in Boots, 440, 441.

Godfrey, Sir Edmund, 64.

God’s Head, 279.

Golden Angel, 269.

Golden Ball, 482.

Golden Beard, 405.

Golden Bell, 479.

Golden Bottle, 386.

Golden Buck, 165.

Golden Candlestick, 394.

Golden Can, 386.

Golden Cross, 276.

Golden Crotchet, 339.

Golden Cup, 149.

Golden Eagle, 198.

Golden Farmer, 352.

Golden Field Gate, 62.

Golden Fleece, 72.

Golden Frog, 232.

Golden Fryingpan, 396.

Golden Globe, 415.

Golden Griffin, 145.

Golden Head, 490.

Golden Heart, 300, 473.

Golden Jar, 397.

Golden Key, 398.

Golden Key and Bible, 255.

Golden Lion, 146, 201, 327.

Golden Maid, 364.

Golden Measure, 349.

Golden Quoit, 505.

Golden Ring, 412.

Golden Slipper, 409.

Golden Sun, 498.

Golden Tiger, 152.

Golden Tun, 474.

Goliah, or Golias, 262.

Goliah Head, 262.

Good Samaritan, 274.

Good Woman, 454, 455.

Goose and Gridiron, 239, 445.

Goose and Gridiron, 316.

Gospel Oak, 278.

Grafton’s Head, Duke of, 386.

Granby, Marquis of, 55, 58.

Grand A., 476.

Grand B., 476.

Grasshopper, 140.

Grave Maurice, 53.

Gray Ass, 221.

Grazier’s Arms, 352.

Great Mogol, 51.

Great Turk, 429.

Grecian, 429.

Greek Signs, 1.

Green Bellows, 394.

Green Dragon, 111.

Green Lattice, 375.

Green Lettuce, 375.

Green Man, 366, 367, 368, 449.

Green Man and Ball, 483.

Green Man and Still, 148.

Green Monkey, 444.

Green Monster, 507.

Green Pales, 373.

Green Parrot, 222.

Green Posts, 472.

Green Seedling, 246.

Green Tree, 245.

Gresham, Thomas, 63.

Gretna Green, 422.

Grey Goat, 192.

Greyhound, 194.

Grey Mare, 177.

Grey Ox, 188.

Gridiron, 396.

Griffin, 145.

Griffin’s Arms, 136.

Grinding Young, 461.

Grinning Jackanapes, 440.

Grouse and Moorcock, 223.

Grouse and Trout, 223.

Guardian Angel, 269.

Guilded Cup, 387.

Gun, or Cannon, 117.

Guy of Warwick, 74.

Halbert and Crown, 327.

Half Eagle and Key, 130.

Half-Moon, 327, 500.

Half-Moon and Punchbowl, 388.

Half-Moon and Seven Stars, 500.

Hailstone, 502.

Ham, 381.

Ham and Firkin, 381.

Hammer, 347.

Hammer and Crown, 149.

Hand, 492.

Hand and Apple, 239.

Hand and Ball, 492.

Hand and Bible, 299.

Hand and Cork, 471.

Hand and Ear, 492.

Hand and Face, 492.

Hand and Flower, 235.

Hand and Heart, 493.

Hand and Hollybush, 250.

Hand and Pen, 337.

Hand and Scales, 362.

Hand and Shears, 350.

Hand and Slipper, 409.

Hand and Tench, 493.

Hand and Tennis, 493.

Handel’s Head, 83.

Handgun, 326.

Hand in Hand, 493.

Hare, 163.

Hare and Cats, 164.

Hare and Hounds, 163, 164.

Hare and Squirrel, 163.

Hark the Lasher, 361.

Hark to Bounty, 361.

Hark up to Glory, 361.

Hark up to Nudger, 361.

Harlequin, 365.

Harmer, Captain, 99.

Harp, 340, 473.

Harp and Hautboy, 338.

Harrow, 351.

Harrow and Doublet, 407.

Hart on the Hoop, 504.

Harvest Home, 354.

Hat, 399.

Hat and Beaver, 191, 400.

Hat and Feathers, 400.

Hat and Star, 402, 492.

Hat and Tun, 473.

Hautboy and Two Flutes, 338.

Have at It, 209, 210.

Hawk and Buck, 115.

Hawk and Buckle, 115.

Hawthorn, 117.

Haycock, 420.

Haylift, 502.

Heart and Ball, 300, 483.

Heart and Trumpet, 505.

Heart in Bible, 299.

Heart in Hand, 493.

Hearts of Oak, 246.

Hearty Good Fellow, 82.

Heathfield, Lord, 58.

Heaven, 300.

Hedgehog, 162.

Hell, 301.

Helmet, 326.

Help me thro’ this World, 450.

Hen and Chickens, 178.

Hen on the Hoop, 504.

Hercules, 70.

Hercules’ Pillars, 70.

Hereford Castle, 418.

Hero of Switzerland, 100.

Highland Laddie, 421.

Hill, 471.

Hind, 472.

Hippopotamus, 162.

Hit or Miss, 451.

Hob in the Well, 79.

Hobnails, 347.

Hobson’s Inn, 92.

Hog in Armour, 440.

Hog in the Pound, 192.

Hole in the Wall, 502, 503.

Hogarth’s Head, 82.

Holland Arms, 172.

Hollybush, 250.

Homer’s Head, 65.

Honest Lawyer, 456.

Hood and Scarf, 406.

Hoop, 504.

Hoop and Bunch of Grapes, 252, 504.

Hoop and Griffin, 505.

Hoop and Horseshoe, 180.

Hoop and Toy, 505.

Hop and Barleycorn, 244.

Hopbine, 244.

Hope and Anchor, 73, 333.

Hop-pole, 244.

Horace’s Head, 65.

Horn, 340.

Horn and Three Tuns, 339.

Horns, 166, 167, 168, 473.

Horns and Horseshoe, 180.

Horse, 170, 171.

Horse and Chaise, 176.

Horse and Dorsiter, 175.

Horse and Farrier, 175.

Horse and Gate, 176.

Horse and Groom, 173.

Horse’s Head, 176.

Horse and Horseshoe, 180.

Horse and Jockey, 173.

Horse and Stag, 176.

Horse and Tiger, 175.

Horse and Trumpet, 176.

Horseshoe, 178, 179, 180, 327.

Horseshoe and Crown, 181.

Hour-glass, 397.

Hunchbacked Cats, 444.

Huntsman, 361.

Hyde Park, 416.

Ibex, 162.

Illuminated Dust Pan, 397.

Indian Chief, 431, 432.

Indian Handkerchief 405.

Indian King, 51, 431.

Indian Queen, 431, 432.

In Vino Veritas, 144.

Iron Balcony, 375.

Iron Pear-tree, 239.

Ironwork, Signs suspended from ornamental, 7, 8.

Ivy Bush, 233.

Ivy Green, 233.

Jackanapes on Horseback, 439.

Jackass in Boots, 443.

Jack of Both Sides, 468.

Jack of Newbury, 78.

Jack on a Cruise, 332.

Jacob’s Well, 260, 274.

Jamaica, 423.

Jamaica and Madeira, 423.

Jane Shore, 76.

Jenny Lind, 83.

Jersey Castle, 418.

Jerusalem, 434.

Jew’s Harp, 340.

Jim Crow, 81.

Joey Grimaldi, 85.

John Bull, 415.

John of Gaunt, 46.

John of Jerusalem, 274.

John o’ Groat’s, 79.

Jolly Brewer, 450.

Jolly Butchers, 302.

Jolly Crispin, 281.

Jolly Farmer, 352.

Jolly Toper, 466.

Jonson’s Head, 66.

Jovial Dutchman, 425, 426.

Jubilee, 100.

Judge’s Head, 335.

Jug and Glass, 387.

Junction Arms, 136.

Juno, 69.

Kangaroo, 162.

Kettledrum, 322.

Key, 397, 472.

King and Miller, 74.

King Astyages’ Arms, 257.

King Charles in the Oak, 49.

King Crispin. 281.

King David, 262.

King Edgar, 46.

King John, 46.

King of Denmark, 52.

King of Prussia, 54.

King’s Arms, 106.

King’s Head, 305, 306, 307.

Kings and Keys, 302.

King’s Head and Good Woman, 455.

King’s Porter and Dwarf, 89.

Kite’s Nest, 178.

Knowles, Sheridan, 60.

Kouli Khan, 51.

La Belle Sauvage, 482.

Labour in Vain, 460.

Laced Shoe, 409.

Lads of the Village, 105.

Lady of the Lake, 81.

Lamb, 191.

Lamb and Anchor, 300.

Lamb and Breeches, 191.

Lamb and Crown, 191.

Lamb and Flag, 300.

Lamb and Hare, 191.

Lamb and Inkbottle, 229.

Lamb and Lark, 191.

Lamb and Still, 191.

Lambert, Daniel, 88.

Lame Dog, 450.

Lamp, 376.

Land o’ Cakes, 420.

Lass o’ Gowrie, 81.

Last, 349.

Lattice, 374, 375.

Laughing Dog, 444.

Leather Bottle, 386.

Lebeck’s Head, 93.

Lebeck and Chaffcutter, 93.

Leg, 409, 494.

Leg and Star, 494.

Leigh Hoy, 333.

Leopard, 152.

Leopard and Tiger, 152.

Letters, 476.

Lilies of the Valley, 238.

Linskill, Colonel, 99.

Lion, 472.

Lion and Adder, 299.

Lion and Ball, 151.

Lion and Castle, 128.

Lion and Dolphin, 150.

Lion and Goat, 299.

Lion and Horseshoe, 180.

Lion and Lamb, 299.

Lion and Pheasant, 150.

Lion and Snake, 299.

Lion and Swan, 150.

Lion and Tun, 150.

Lion in the Wood, 149.

Little A, 476.

Little Devil, 294.

Little Pig, 192.

Live Vulture, 224.

Live and Let Live, 450.

Llangollen Castle, 418.

Load of Hay, 353.

Load of Mischief, 457.

Lobster, 381.

Loch-na-Gar, 81.

Lock and Key, 398.

Lock and Shears, 403.

Locke’s Head, 63.

Locks of Hair, 403.

Looking-Glass, 392, 393.

London Apprentice, 79.

London Signs, temp. James I., 8, 9.

London Signs, temp. Charles I., 9, 10.

London Signs after the Fire, 16.

London Signs in 1803, 31, 32.

London Signs in 1865, 42, 43, 44.

London Signs, Roxburghe Ballad upon the, 13.

London Signs taken down, 28, 29.

Lord Anglesey, 64.

Lord Bacon’s Head, 63.

Lord Byron, 68.

Lord Cobham’s Head, 97.

Lord Craven, 59.

Loving Lamb, 444.

Lubber’s Head, 147.

Luck’s All, 451.

Lucrece, 80.

Mad Cat, 196.

Mad Dog, 196.

Maggoty Pie, 221.

Magna Charta, 46.

Magpie, 40, 220.

Magpie and Crown, 220, 221.

Magpie and Horseshoe, 180.

Magpie and Pewter Platter, 221.

Magpie and Punchbowl, 388.

Magpie and Stump, 221.

Maid and the Magpie, 83.

Maidenhead, 141.

Maid’s Head, 142.

Mail, 355.

Malt and Hops, 244.

Manage Horse, 175.

Man in the Wood, 472.

Man Loaded with Mischief, 456.

Man of Ross, 68.

Man in the Moon, 303, 304.

Mare and Foal, 177.

Marlborough’s Head, Duke of, 59.

Marquis of Granby, 55, 58.

Marrowbones and Cleaver, 358.

Martin’s Nest, 178.

Martyr’s Head, 48.

Marygold, 237.

Matrons, 321.

Mattock and Spade, 353.

Maypole, 506.

Mazeppa, 68.

Medieval Signs, 4, 5.

Melancthon’s Head, 97.

Mercury, 70.

Mercury and Fan, 70.

Merlin’s Cave, 77.

Merry Andrew, 368.

Merry Harriers, 194.

Mermaid, 225, 226, 227.

Merry Mouth, 491.

Merry Song, 339.

Merry Tom, 369.

Middleton, Sir Hugh, 63.

Million Gardens, 507.

Millstone, 348.

Milton’s Head, 67.

Minerva, 69.

Miraculous Draught of Fishes, 275.

Mitre, 315, 316, 317, 318, 319.

Mitre and Dove, 319.

Mitre and Keys, 319.

Mitre and Rose, 315, 319.

Mitre on the Hoop, 504.

Mischief, 457.

Mitford Castle, 418.

Minister’s Gown, 407.

Mock-Signs, 12.

Monck’s Head, 59.

Monster, 507.

Moon, 499.

Moonrakers, 105, 463.

Moore, General, 58.

Mortal Man, 40, 464.

Mortar and Pestle, 341.

Moses and Aaron, 260.

Moss-rose, 236.

Mother Huff, 97.

Mother Redcap, 96.

Mother Shipton, 76.

Mount Pleasant, 434.

Mourning Crown, 48, 49.

Mourning Mitre, 49.

Mouth, 491.

Mouth of the Nile, 61.

Mulberry Tree, 240, 241.

Mustard Pot, 383.

Myrtle Tree, 238.

Mystic Number Three, 269, note.

Nag’s Head, 176.

Naked Boy, 452, 453.

Naked Boy and Woolpack, 272.

Name of Jesus, 279.

Napier, Sir Charles, 57.

Nell Gwynne, 97.

Nelson and Peal, 166, 478.

Neptune, 70.

Newton, Sir Isaac, 62.

Next Boat by Paul’s, 335.

Nine Elms, 246.

Noah’s Ark, 258.

Nobis Inn, 473.

Noblemen’s Badges, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136.

Nobody, 457, 458.

Noggin, 468.

No Place, 436, 458.

North Pole, 436.

Norwich, City of, 418.

Nowhere, 458.

Number IV., 477.

Numbers versus Signs, 29, 30.

Number Three, 477.

Oak, 246, 474.

Oak and Black Dog, 203.

Oak and Toy, 246.

Oakley Arms, 144.

Oatsheaf, 252.

Old Barge, 334.

Old Careless, 468.

Oldcastle, Sir John, 97.

Old Coach and Six, 355.

Old English Gentleman, 81, 415.

Old Hand and Tankard, 493.

Old Hobson, 92.

Old House at Home, 82.

Old Knave of Clubs, 505.

Old Man, 494.

Old Parr’s Head, 91.

Old Pharaoh, 261.

Old Pick my Toe, 468.

Old Prison, 416.

Old Ring o’ Bells, 478.

Old Roson, 81.

Old Smuggs, 468.

Old Will Somers, 86, 87.

Olive-tree, 242.

One and All, 128.

One Tun, 148.

Orange-tree and Two Jars, 241, 242.

Ormond’s Head, 59.

Orpheus, 72.

Ostrich, 223.

Our Lady, 272.

Our Lady of Pity, 272.

Owl, 223.

Owl’s Nest, 169, 223.

Ox and Compasses, 188.

Oxford Arms, 127.

Ox in Boots, 442.

Oxnoble, 251.

Pack Horse, 175.

Paganini, 83.

Pageant, 50.

Palatine Head, 54.

Palm-tree, 248.

Panting Hart, 263.

Panyer, 348.

Paracelsus, 64.

Paradise, 301.

Parrot, 222.

Parrot and Cage, 222.

Parrot and Punchbowl, 388.

Parson’s Green, 472.

Parting Pot, 349.

Parta Tueri, 144.

Pasqua Rosee, 92.

Patten, 410.

Paltzgrave, 54.

Paul’s Head, 290.

Paul Pry, 86.

Paviors’ Arms, 352.

Peach-tree, 245.

Peacock, 222.

Peacock and Feathers, 223.

Pearl of Venice, 406.

Pear-tree, 239.

Pease and Beans, 251.

Peat Spade, 353.

Peel, 348.

Pelican, 200.

Periwig, 404.

Pestle, 341.

Pestle and Mortar, 472.

Peter’s Finger, 291.

Pewter Platter, 396.

Pewter Pot, 387.

Philpott, Toby, 81.

Phœnix, 199.

Pickled Egg, 383.

Pickwick, 81.

Pie, 382.

Pied Bull, 184.

Pied Calf, 190.

Pied Dog, 194.

Pig and Tinder-box, 156.

Pig and Whistle, 437.

Pigeon, 218.

Pigeon Bow, 219.

Pilgrim, 508.

Pindar of Wakefield, 75.

Pindar, Sir Paul, 98.

Pine Apple, 244.

Pistol and C, 326.

Pitcher and Glass, 387.

Plate, 326.

Plough, 351.

Plough and Ball, 483.

Plough and Harrow, 351.

Plough and Horses, 351.

Poet’s Head, 48, 337.

Pointer, 194.

Pole Star, 501.

Political Sign Pasquinade, 13.

Pontack’s Head, 93.

Pope’s Head, (the Poet,) 67.

Pope’s Head, 312, 313, 314.

Popinjay, 222.

Portcullis, 121.

Porter Butt, 349.

Porter and Gentleman, 361.

Porter’s Lodge, 351.

Portobello, 39, 57.

Postboy, 363.

Prince, 428.

Prince Eugene, 53.

Prince Rupert, 54.

Prince of Wales’ Arms, 122.

Prince of Wales’ Feathers, 122.

Puddlers’ Arms, 352.

Pump, 396.

Punchbowl, 388.

Punchbowl and Ladle, 388.

Purcell’s Head, 83.

Purgatory, 301.

Purple Lion, 146.

Puss in Boots, 442.

Q Inn, 476.

Q in the Corner, 476.

Quaker, 508.

Queen Anne, 47.

Queen Catherine, 47.

Queen Charlotte, 40.

Queen Eleanor, 47.

Queen Elizabeth, 47.

Queen Mary, 50.

Queen of Bohemia, 47.

Queen of Hearts and King’s Arms, 505.

Queen of Hungary, 55.

Queen of Saba, 263.

Queen of Trumps, 505.

Queen of the Gipsies, 508.

Queen’s Arms, 107.

Queen’s Arms and Corncutter, 107.

Queen’s Elm, 246.

Queen’s Head, 130, 307, 308, 309, 310, 311, 349, 510.

Queen’s Head and Artichoke, 312.

Queen Victoria, 50.

Quiet Woman, 454.

Racoon, 162.

Raffled Anchor, 333.

Railway, 334.

Rainbow, 502.

Raleigh, Sir Walter, 56.

Ram, 190.

Raven and Bell, 165.

Ram and Teazel, 149.

Ram’s Head, 190.

Ram’s Skin, 190.

Ranged Deer, 165.

Rat and Ferret, 162.

Raven, 201.

Recruiting Sergeant, 322.

Red Ball and Acorn, 483.

Red Bear, 152.

Red Bull, 185.

Red Cat, 197.

Red Cow, 188, 189.

Red Dragon, 111.

Red Horse, 171.

Red Lion, 119, 327.

Red Lion and Key, 472.

Red Lion and Punchbowl, 388.

Red M and Dagger, 325.

Red Poles, 373.

Red Rover, 81.

Red Shield, 504.

Red Streak Tree, 239.

Red, White, and Blue, 332.

Reindeer, 157.

Rembrandt’s Head, 82.

Resurrection, 277, 474.

Rest and be Thankful, 510.

Rhenish Wine House, 384.

Ribs of Beef, 378.

Ring, 412.

Ring and Ball, 484.

Rising Buck, 165.

Rising Deer, 165.

Rising Sun, 118, 499.

Rising Sun and Seven Stars, 499.

Robin Adair, 81.

Robin Hood and Little John, 75.

Robinson Crusoe, 81.

Rob Roy, 81.

Rochester Castle, 418.

Rodney, Admiral, 57.

Rodney and Hood, 57.

Rodney Pillar, 57.

Roebuck, 165, 166.

Rolls, 336.

Roman Signs, 1, 2, 3.

Rope and Anchor, 333.

Rose, 124, 125, 126, 235.

Rose and Ball, 126.

Rose and Crown, 121.

Rose and Key, 126.

Rose and Punchbowl, 388.

Rosebud, 236.

Rose Garland, 236.

Rosemary Branch, 238.

Rose of Normandy, 237.

Ross on Clinker, Captain, 99.

Round of Beef, 378.

Round Table, 79.

Roxellana, 85.

Royal Badges, 108, 109, 110.

Royal Bed, 377.

Royal Champion, 102.

Royal Charles, 330.

Royal Coffee-mill, 394.

Royal Hand and Globe, 312.

Royal Oak, 40, 49.

Royal Standard, 105.

Rummer, 389, 390.

Rummer and Grapes, 239.

Rum Puncheon, 349.

Running Footman, 360.

Running Horse, 173, 327.

Running Man, 361.

Russia House, 425.

Saddle, 357.

St Alban, 297.

St Augustine, 297.

St Clement, 297.

St Christopher, 285.

St Crispin, 281.

St Cuthbert, 296.

St Dominic, 320.

St Edmund’s Head, 296.

St George and the Dragon, 287.

St John the Evangelist, 296.

St Hugh’s Bones, 282, 283.

St Julian, 283.

St Luke, 286.

St Martin, 284.

St Mychel, 296.

St Patrick, 295.

St Peter and St Paul, 291.

St Thomas, 296.

Salamander, 158.

Salmon, 473.

Salmon and Ball, 231, 483.

Salmon and Compasses, 231.

Salt-Horn, 377.

Salutation, 264, 265.

Salutation and Cat, 265, 266.

Samaritan Woman, 274.

Samson, 70, 262.

Samson and the Lion, 262.

Saracen’s Head, 430, 431.

Saucy Ajax, 329.

Saul, 290.

Sawyers, 40.

Scales, 362.

Sceptre, 312.

Sceptre and Heart, 312.

Scotchman’s Pack, 421.

Sedan Chair, 358, 359.

Seneca’s Head, 65.

Setter Dog, 194.

Seven Sisters, 246.

Seven Stars, 500.

Sevilla, City of, 423.

Shakespeare’s Head, 66, 335.

Shamrock, 127.

Shears, 350.

Sheep and Anchor, 330.

Shepherd and Crook, 353.

Shepherd and Dog, 353.

Shepherd and Shepherdess, 352.

Sheridan Knowles, 69.

Sheet Anchor, 333.

Ship, 328, 329, 471.

Ship and Anchor, 330.

Ship and Bell, 331.

Ship and Blue Coat Boy, 331.

Ship and Castle, 331.

Ship and Fox, 331.

Ship and Notchblock, 331.

Ship and Pilot-boat, 330.

Ship and Plough, 331.

Ship and Punchbowl, 388.

Ship and Rainbow, 331.

Ship and Shovel, 331.

Ship and Star, 331.

Ship and Whale, 330.

Ship at Anchor, 330.

Ship Friends, 331.

Ship in Full Sail, 330.

Ship in Distress, 330.

Ship in Dock, 330.

Ship on Launch, 330.

Shirt, 451.

Shoe and Slap, 409.

Shoulder of Mutton and Cat, 378.

Shoulder of Mutton and Cucumbers, 378.

Shovel and Sieve, 347.

Sieve, 395.

Silver Lion, 119.

Simon the Tanner, 286.

Signboard Ballads, Modern, 32, 33.

Signboard, Heraldic, Enormities, 35.

Signboard Poetry, 17, 18.

Sign-Painters, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41.

Signs, bad spelling on, 27.

Signs temp. George II., 22, 23, 24, 25.

Signs temp. Queen Anne, 18, 19, 20, 21.

Signs during the Commonwealth, 11.

Signs, exhibition of, 28.

Signs, extravagance in, 26.

Signs, family names derived from, 42.

Signs, jocular alteration of the names of, 22.

Signs, London localities named after, 41.

Signs of the zodiac, 501.

Signs of the stews, 8.

Signs, quarterings of, 21, 22.

Silent Woman, 454.

Sir Charles Napier, 57.

Sir Edmundbury Godfrey, 64.

Sir Frances Burdett, 63.

Sir Hugh Middleton, 63.

Sir Isaac Newton, 62.

Sir John Falstaff, 67, 86.

Sir John Barleycorn, 79.

Sir John Oldcastle, 97.

Sir Paul Pindar, 98.

Sir Ralph Abercrombie, 58.

Sir Roger de Coverley, 80.

Sir Walter Raleigh, 56.

Six Bells, 478.

Six Cans, 388.

Six Cans and Punchbowl, 388.

Sloop, 333.

Slow and Easy, 468.

Smith and Smithy, 346.

Smyrna, 429.

Snowdrop, 238.

Snow-shoes, 327.

Soldier and Citizen, 264.

Sol’s Arms, 149.

South Sea Arms, 149.

Sow and Pigs, 177.

Spade and Becket, 353.

Spanish Galleon, 100.

Spanish Lady, 405.

Spanish Patriot, 100.

Sparrow’s Nest, 177.

Speaker’s Frigate, 330.

Spiller’s Head, 84.

Spinning Sow, 438.

Spinning Wheel, 362.

Spite Hall, 468.

Spread Eagle, 139.

Spur, 357.

Squirrel, 163.

Staffordshire Knot, 128.

Stag, 164.

Stag and Castle, 165.

Stag and Oak, 165.

Stag and Pheasant, 165.

Stag and Thorn, 165.

Standard, 322.

Star, 501.

Star and Crown, 501.

Star and Garter, 410.

Stave Porter, 361.

Still, 349.

Stock Dove, 219.

Stocking, 409.

Stork, 203.

String of Horses, 355.

Struggler, 450.

Struggling Man, 450.

Sugarloaf, 394.

Sugarloaf and Three Coffins, 371.

Sultan Morat, 51.

Sultan Soliman, 51.

Sun, 272, 381, 496, 497, 498.

Sun and Anchor, 499.

Sun and Dial, 499.

Sun and Falcon, 499.

Sun and Horseshoe, 180, 499.

Sun and Last, 499.

Sun and Moor’s Head, 471.

Sun and Red Cross, 471.

Sun and Sawyers, 499.

Sun and Sportsman, 499.

Sun and Whalebone, 231.

Sun in Splendour, 498.

Sun, Moon, and Seven Stars, 500.

Swan, 212, 213, 214, 215, 327, 379.

Swan and Bottle, 217.

Swan and Falcon, 118.

Swan and Harp, 445.

Swan and Helmet, 218.

Swan and Hoop, 217.

Swan and Maidenhead, 118.

Swan and Rummer, 217.

Swan and Rushes, 218.

Swan and Salmon, 217.

Swan and Soldier, 394, note.

Swan and Sugarloaf, 217.

Swan and White Hart, 118.

Swan on the Hoop, 504.

Swan with Two Necks, 216, 217.

Sweet Apple, 391.

Swiss Cottage, 489.

Sword and Ball, 312.

Sword and Buckler, 323, 324.

Sword and Cross, 324.

Sword and Dagger, 324.

Sword and Mace, 312.

Sword Blade, 324.

Sycamore, 246.

Syntax, Doctor, 81.

Tabard, 407.

Tabor, 83.

Talbot, 195, 408.

Tallow-chandler, 362.

Tally-Ho, 355.

Tam o’ Shanter, 81.

Tankard, 390.

Tarlton, General, 58.

Telegraph, 355.

Temple, 416.

Ten Bells, 478.

Thirteen Cantons, 289.

Thistle and Crown, 126.

Thomas Gresham, 63.

Thorn, 165.

Three Admirals, 332.

Three Angels, 269.

Three Arrows, 130.

Three Bad Ones, 457.

Three Balls, 128, 395.

Three Blackbirds, 203.

Three Bibles, 254.

Three Bibles and Three Ink bottles, 254.

Three Blue Balls, 483.

Three Brushes, 322.

Three Candlesticks, 394.

Three Chairs, 358.

Three Cocks, 209.

Three Coffins and Sugarloaf, 218.

Three Colts, 178.

Three Compasses, 146.

Three Conies, 162, 472.

Three Cranes, 204.

Three Crickets, 393.

Three Crosses, 277.

Three Crowned Needles, 350.

Three Crowns, 99, 102.

Three Crowns and Sugarloaf, 218.

Three Crows, 203.

Three Cups, 149.

Three Death’s-Heads, 371.

Three Elms, 246.

Three Fishes, 230, 472.

Three Flower de Luces, 129.

Three Forges, 346.

Three Frogs, 129.

Three Funnels, 395.

Three Geese, 472.

Three Goats’ Heads, 147.

Three Hats, 402.

Three Hats and Nag’s Head, 403.

Three Herrings, 230.

Three Horseshoes, 180.

Three Johns, 63.

Three Jolly Butchers, 358.

Three Jolly Sailors, 332.

Three Kings, 301, 302, 432.

Three Legs, 127.

Three Legs and Bible, 127.

Three Leopard’s Heads, 147.

Three Loggerheads, 30, 458, 459.

Three Mariners, 331.

Three Merry Devils, 432.

Three Morris-dancers, 364, 365.

Three Mumpers, 371.

Three Neats’ Tongues, 381.

Three Nuns, 320.

Three Old Castles, 487.

Three Pheasants and Sceptre, 150.

Three Pigeons, 218, 219, 473.

Three Pots, 389.

Three Radishes, 251.

Three Ravens, 202.

Three Roses, 236.

Three Spanish Ladies, 424.

Three Spies, 261.

Three Squirrels, 163.

Three Stags, 119.

Three Sugarloaves, 395.

Three Swans & Peal, 166, 478.

Three Tuns, 58, 148.

Three Turks, 428.

Three Washerwomen, 364.

Three Widows, 321.

Throstle’s Nest, 177.

Thunderstorm, 502.

Ticket Porter, 361.

Tiger, 152.

Tiger’s Head, 134.

Tiltboat, 334.

Tinker’s Budget, 369.

Tippling Philosopher, 466.

Tobacco Plant, 252.

Tobacco Roll & Sugarloaf, 218.

Tobacco Rolls, 252.

Toby Philpott, 81.

Tom of Bedlam, 369, 370.

Tom Sayers, 88.

Topham, 88.

Tower of London, 416.

Toy, 505.

Trafalgar, 61.

Trap, 361.

Traveller’s Rest, 510.

Trinity, 277.

Triumph, 50.

Triumphal Car, 327.

True Briton, 415.

True Lover’s Knot, 509.

Trumpeter, 323.

Trunk, 394.

Tub, 397.

Tulip, 238.

Tulloch Gorum, 81.

Tully’s Head, 65.

Tumble Down Dick, 464, 465.

Tumbling Sailors, 468.

Tun, 474.

Tun and Arrows, 471.

Turk’s Head, 426, 427, 428.

Turk and Slave, 429.

Two Black Boys, 433.

Two Blue Flowerpots, 377.

Two Brewers, 349.

Two Chances, 451.

Two Chairmen, 358.

Two Cocks, 471.

Two Crowns & Cushions, 102.

Two Draymen, 349.

Two Dutchmen, 425.

Two Fans, 412.

Two Flowerpots and Sundial, 377.

Two Golden Balls, 483.

Two Heads, 490.

Two Jolly Brewers, 349.

Two Pots, 389.

Two Sawyers, 346.

Two Smiths, 347.

Two Sneezing Cats, 444.

Two Spies, 261.

Two Storks, 204.

Two Twins, 501.

Two White Balls, 483.

Umbrella, 412.

Umbrella Hospital, 413.

Uncle Tom, 81.

Under the Rose, 236, 237.

Union, 100.

Unicorn, 159, 160.

Unicorn and Bible, 159.

Union Arms, 136.

Union Flag and Punchbowl, 388.

Up and Down Post, 363.

Valentine and Orson, 76.

Van Dyke’s Head, 82.

Venice, 425.

Vernon, Admiral, 57.

Vine, 243, 244.

Violin, Hautboy, and German Flute, 338.

Virgil’s Head, 65.

Virgin, 272.

Virginian, 431.

Vulcan, 70.

Wallace’s Arms, 45.

Walmer Castle, 417.

Walnut-tree, 240.

Water Tankard, 391.

Waving Flag, 322.

Weary Traveller, 510.

Welch Head, 98.

Well and Bucket, 374.

Well with Two Buckets, 374.

Wentworth Arms, 144.

Wheatsheaf, 251.

Wheatsheaf and Sugarloaf, 218.

Wheel, 367.

Wheel of Fortune, 506.

Whip, 357.

Whip and Egg, 357.

White Bait, 231.

White Bear, 93, 154, 155, 296, 416.

White Boar, 116.

White Dragon, 111.

White Greyhound, 194.

White Hart, 112, 487.

White Hart and Fountain, 263.

White Horse, 171, 172, 296, 327.

White Lion, 119.

White Peruke, 404.

Whitley Grenadier, 419.

Whittington and his Cat, 78.

Who’d ha’ Thought it? 450.

Widow’s Struggle, 450.

Wild Bull, 182.

Wild Dayrell, 175.

Wild Man, 367.

Wild Sea, 502.

Wilkes’ Head, 63.

William and Mary, 50.

Willow Tree, 247.

Wiltshire Shepherd, 419.

Windmill, 348.

Wolf and Lamb, 299.

Wolfe, General, 58.

Wolsey, Cardinal, 63.

Woodbine, 238.

Wooden Shoe, 410.

Woodman, 355.

Woolsack, 362.

World’s End, 436, 461, 462.

World Turned Upside Down, 462.

Wounded Heart, 300.

Wrestlers, 484.

Y, 476.

Yellow Lion, 150.

Yew Tree, 248, 475.

Yorick’s Head, 68.

York, city of, 416, 417.

York Minster, 417.

Yorkshire Grey, 58, 171.

Yorkshire Stingo, 384.

Young Devil, 294.

Young Man, 494.

Z, 477.

Back cover

Transcriber’s Notes

The text of the original publication, including inconsistencies in spelling, hyphenation, formatting, etc. has been retained, except as mentioned below. Names and publications that were spelled differently in various places have not been standardised. The sorting of the index has not been changed.

Depending on the hard- and software used and their settings, not all characters and symbols may display as intended.

The original work uses distinct types for handwriting and blackletter. These may be difficult to read; hovering the mouse pointer over these texts will display the text in a font type that is easier to read (this may not be available in all formats).

Phrases such as “this century,” “last century,” “the present day,” “modern,” etc. should be read with 1866 (the year of publication of the first impression) as the reference point.

Links to Plates have been provided at those places where the sign is described or explained extensively, not at every single mention of the sign.

The cover image has been made for this e-text, and is placed in the public domain.

Remarks on the text

Not all quotations presented in this book are verbatim quotations.

Wouwverman and Wouverman probably refer to Wouwerman.

Footnote [35]: The Three Balls of the Pawnbrokers are explained under Heraldic and Emblematic Signs, not under Miscellaneous Signs.

Page 103: Rivingtons the publishers: possibly an error for Rivington the publisher.

Page 134, Sussen: possibly an error for Sussex.

Page 336, reference to the Good Lawyer: presumably this is a reference to the Honest Lawyer.

Page 514, Hogarty: possibly error for Hagarty (as announced on page 512).

Footnote [677]: page 297 is in the chapter Saints, Martyrs, etc., not in the chapter Legendary and Biblical Signs. The page reference is correct.

Changes made to the text

Footnotes have been moved to the end of the chapter.

Obvious punctuation errors have been corrected silently; missing quote marks have been added only when it was clear where they should be added (therefore not all quote marks close properly).

i. e. has been standardised to i.e..

Where necessary, a space has been inserted before abbreviated Dutch words (’t, ’n, ’s etc.). Other corrections in quotations have been verified with outside sources (if possible the ones referred to in this work) or with the translation given; such corrections were only made when the printed text contained obvious errors.

Second Plate I. (opposite page 16) has been renumbered to Plate II.

Page 70: che changed to the

Page 77: footnote anchor [96] inserted after funera concors

Page 83: twelve player changed to twelve players

Page 109: Admyralyte changed to Admyraltye

Page 117: ye sign changed to ye sign

Page 122: as in merken kan changed to as ik merken kan

Page 125: dwellig changed to dwelling

Page 132: Compleat Ambssador changed to Compleat Ambassador

Page 175: me tyzer changed to met yzer

Footnote 265: bo ke changed to booke

Footnote 276: dithy rambics changed to dithyrambics

Page 201: anyrate changed to any rate

Page 209: latterry changed to latterly

Page 231: Comèdie changed to Comédie

Page 251: Alseen changed to Als een

Page 259: footnote anchor [373] added after extravagances

Page 263: Alyso changed to Also

Page 270: y Angel and Crown changed to ye Angel and Crown

Page 282: min de minsch int beeste villen changed to men de mensch uit beestevellen; gilt changed to gelt; bestillen changed to bestellen; zeep changed to zelf

Page 299: Flechnoe changed to Flecknoe

Page 305: ... the particular trade ... changed to ... of the particular trade ...

Page 346: dipsetic changed to dyspeptic

Page 353: Troost for Zuigelingen changed to Troost voor Zuigelingen

Page 354: that edel kruyt changed to dat edel kruyt; Teckere changed to Leckere; beginnez changed to beginnen; Zoekje changed to Zoek je

Page 372: Tallemant des Reaux changed to Tallement des Réaux as elsewhere; Rucholt changed to Ruckholt

Page 381: eighteeenth changed to eighteenth

Page 390: maarkomt in changed to maar komt in

Page 403: Our ’t hoofd changed to Om ’t hoofd; Voer der staten kroon changed to Voor der staten kroon

Page 404: three-house wifely changed to three house-wifely

Page 442: gelaars de haan en gelaar de haan changed to gelaarsde haan; drees changed to dees

Page 443: In den gelaars den changed to In den gelaarsden

Page 446: Van daag voor geld, morg in voor niet changed to Vandaag voor geld, morgen voor niet

Page 450: Dus na ben in changed to Dus na ben ik

Page 453: garing changed to garish

Footnote [667]: Geldorland changed to Gelderland

Page 477: Hetzner changed to Hentzner

Page 488: ckeker of the Hope changed to cheker of the Hope

Page 529: 588 changed to 388

Page 535: page number 147 added after Three Leopard’s Heads.