XIV. HUMOROUS AND COMIC…

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.” 1^{o}. the house was called the Goat in 1663; 2^{o}. 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 y^{e} 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. 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, 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 paar_t_je to paar_d_je, 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. 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.”

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-- 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. 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.Return to passage

[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.Return to passage

[658] “It is said that the virtue of Cato the elder was frequently warmed by wine.”Return to passage

[659] “Cato refreshed his mind with wine when it was wearied with the cares of the commonwealth.”Return to passage

[660] “Cato has been blamed for drunkenness, but it is easier to find reason to praise, than to blame Cato.”Return to passage

[661] “Drunkenness will be sometimes considered as honourable, and to drink a great quantity of pure wine as a virtue.”Return to passage

[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.Return to passage

[663] Harl. MSS., 6200, p. 68.Return to passage

[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.Return to passage

[665] See Appendix.Return to passage

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 _h_arrows, 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 _Moors_gate, 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, 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.Return to passage

[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.Return to passage

[668] Camden’s Remains, p. 140, et seq. 1629.Return to passage

[669] Taylor’s Pennylesse Pilgrimage, 1630.Return to passage

[670] Postman, January 25-27, 1711.Return to passage

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.”

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.”

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, 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 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, w^{ch} joyned, made the Heart. Q. Elisabeth kept one moietie, and sent y^{e} 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.Return to passage

[706] Handbill in Harleian Collection, p. 5964.Return to passage

[707] A Compleat Description of London, Harl. MSS., 5953, vol. i.Return to passage

[708] Hatton’s New View of London, 1708, p. 30.Return to passage

[709] Weekly Journal, Sept. 27, 1718.Return to passage

[710] Looker-On, Jan. 1795.Return to passage

[711] London Gazette, Dec. 9-12, 1700.Return to passage

[712] Lyson’s Historical Account of Parishes in Middlesex, p. 75.Return to passage

[713] Banks Bills.Return to passage

[714] Harleian MSS., 5962.Return to passage

[715] Grafton’s prose continuation of John Harding’s Chronicle, p. 189.Return to passage

[716] Stubbe’s Anatomy of Abuses, London, 1585, p. 94.Return to passage

[717] Featherstone’s Dialogue against Light and Lascivious Dancing.Return to passage

[718] London Spy, part xiii., p. 320, 1706.Return to passage

[719] Weekly Journal, Jan. 18, 1718.Return to passage

[720] Tom Brown’s Walk round London.Return to passage

[721] Daily Courant, Jan. 27, 1711.Return to passage

[722] Carriages.Return to passage