The Mitre also is found in a few combinations, as the Mitre and Dove, i.e., the Holy Ghost, in King Street, Westminster; the Mitre and Keys, in Leicester—evidently the Cross Keys, which are a charge in the arms of several bishoprics; and the Mitre and Rose, which, from trades tokens, appears to have been the sign of a tavern in the Strand, as well as in Wood Street, Cheapside.

That the friars were also honoured on the signboard appears from “Fryar Lane, on the south side of Thames Street, near Dowgate. It was formerly called Greenwich Lane, but of later years Fryar’s Lane, from the sign of a Fryar sometime there.”[469] Probably it was a Black Friar, or Dominican Monk, for that order, above all others, had the reputation of being great topers, and therefore were not out of place on a signboard. There is a prayer extant of the holy fathers, addressed to St Dominic:—

And an old French couplet gives the following gradations of the potatory capacities of the different orders, in which the Franciscans only are said to beat the Dominicans:—

Tokens are extant of a music-house, with the sign of the Black-friar, dated 1671. In Paris also, the Bacchic propensities of the Black-friars made a tavern-keeper of the seventeenth century choose St Dominic as the patron saint of his tavern. His principal customers, who formed a sort of club, were called Dominicans; a contemporary song thus gives the rule of this order:—

Nuns also figured on the signboard as the Three Nuns, which was constantly used by drapers; not exactly, as Tom Brown says, “very dismally painted to keep up young women’s antipathy to popery and” single blessedness, but because the holy sisterhoods were generally very expert in making lace embroidery, and other fancy work—as the handkerchiefs made by the nuns of Pau, and sold by our drapers, fully prove even at the present day. In the seventeenth century, the Three Nuns was the sign of a well-known coaching and carriers’ inn in Aldgate, which gave its name to Three Nuns’ Court close at hand; near this inn was the “dreadful gulf, for such it was rather than a pit,” in which, during the Plague of 1665, not less than 1114 bodies were buried in a fortnight, from the 6th to the 20th of September.[473] Not improbably this sign, after the Reformation, was occasionally metamorphosed into the Three Widows: Peter Treveris, a foreigner, erected a press and continued printing until 1552 at the Three Widows in Southwark; he printed several books for William Rastell, John Reynor, R. Copeland, and others in the city of London. It is still the sign of a cap and bonnet shop in Dublin. The Matrons, also, may have originally represented Nuns; this last hung, in the seventeenth century, at the door of John Bannister, crutch and bandage maker, near the hospital, (Christ’s Hospital School,) Newgate Street.[474]

At the present day the Church is a very common ale-house sign, either on account of the esteem in which good living has been held by churchmen in all ages, “superbis pontificum potiore cœnis,” or, from the proximity of a church to the ale-house in question; thus, one inn in the town would be known as the “Market House,” whilst another might be known as the “Church Inn.” It has been said the name was given that topers might equivocate and say that they “frequently go to church.” Be this as it may, there is generally an ale-house close to every church, (in Knightsbridge the chapel of the Holy Trinity is jammed in between two public-houses,) whereby a good opportunity is offered to wash a dry sermon down. In Bristol, at the beginning of the present century, it was still worse—a Methodist meeting-room was immediately over a public-house, which gave rise to the following epigram:—

Other signs connected with the church are the Chapel Bell, at Suton, in Norfolk, and the Church Stile or Church Gates, which is very common. The origin of this last comes from an old custom of drinking ale on the parish account, on certain occasions, at the church stile. Pepys mentions this when he was at Walthamstow, April 14, 1661:—“After dinner we all went to the church stile, and there eat and drank.” To this a correspondent in the Gent. Mag. (Nov. 1852, p. 442) makes the following note:—“In an old book of accounts belonging to Warrington parish, the following minute occurs:—“Nov. 5, 1688. Paid for drink at the church steele, 13s.;” and in 1732, “It is ordered that hereafter no money be spent on ye 5th of November or any other State day on the parish account, either at the church stile or any other place.” Though certainly the parish now does not pay for any ale drunk at the church stile, the sign is evidently set up in remembrance of the good old time when such things were.

Belonging to the church was also the sign of the Three Brushes, or Holy Water Sprinklers, which was that of an old house near the White Lion prison, Southwark, in which there was a room with panelled wainscoting and ceiling ornamented with the royal arms of Queen Elizabeth. Probably it had been the court-room at the time the White Lion Inn was a prison. Amongst the Beaufoy trades tokens there is one of “Rob. Thornton, haberdasher, next the Three Brushes in Southwark, 1667.”

Innumerable signs were borrowed from the army and navy; thus, at the present day, every uniform in the service is represented near barracks or in other haunts of soldiers. The Recruiting Sergeant is generally the sign of the public-house, where that worthy spreads his nets. Cross Guns, Cross Lances, Cross Swords, and Cross Pistols, respectively, are meant to allure artillerymen, lancers, and various cavalry men. But above all the Standard, the Banner, or the Waving Flag—“the glorious rag that for a thousand years has stood the battle and the breeze,” is of common occurrence, not only in the neighbourhood of military quarters, but everywhere in towns and villages. At the Standard Tavern in the Strand, Edmund Curll the bookseller used to meet the mysterious Rev. Mr Smith, who sold him Pope’s correspondence.

“I am just going to the Lords to finish Pope,” writes Curll to this person. “I desire you to send me the sheets to perfect the first fifty books, and likewise the remaining three hundred books, and pray be at the Standard Tavern this evening and I will pay you £20 more.”

The Kettledrum is a sign at St George-in-the-East; the Drum and the Trumpet are both of frequent occurrence, and the last is of old standing. One of the characters in “The Ball,” a play by Shirley, 1633, thus commends the beer of the Trumpet:—

Possibly this was the Trumpet in Shire Lane, immortalised in the Tatler, and one of the favourite haunts of merry good-natured Dick Steele. Bishop Hoadley was once present at one of the meetings in this tavern, when Steele rather exposed himself in his efforts to please, a double duty devolving upon him, as well to celebrate the “glorious memory” of King William III., it being the 4th of November—as to drink up to conversation pitch his friend Addison, the phlegmatic constitution of whom was hardly warmed for society by the time Steele was no longer fit for it. One of the company, a red hot Whig, knelt down to drink the health with all honours. This rather disconcerted the bishop, which, Steele seeing, whispered to him—“Do laugh, my lord, pray laugh; it is humanity to laugh.” Shortly after Steele was put into a chair and sent home. Next morning he was much ashamed, and sent the Bishop this distich:—

Some trades tokens are extant of houses with the sign of the Trumpet in King Street, Wapping, and in the Minories. At the same period there was a sign of the Trumpeter in Trump Alley, probably suggested by the name of the thoroughfare.

The Buckler is a very old sign, and occurs in “Cocke Lorell’s Bote:”—

“Here is Saunder Sadeler of Froge Street Corner, With Jelyan Joly at signe of the Bokeler.”

More general was the sign of the Sword and Buckler, which was frequently set up by haberdashers for the following reason:—

“And whereas, until about the twelve or thirteenth yeere of Queene Elisabeth, the auncient English fight of sword and buckler was only had in use, the bucklers then being only a foot broad, with a pike of four or five inches long; then they beganne to make them full half ell broad, with sharpe pikes 10 or 12 inches long, wherewith they meant either to breake the swordes of their enemies, if it hitte uppon the pike, or else sodainely to runne within them and stabbe, and thrust their buckler with the pike into the face, arme, and body of their adversary, but this continued not long;[475] every haberdasher then sold bucklers”.—Stow’s Chronicle.

The great prevalence of this sign originated in the so-called sword and buckler play, once so common in England. Misson, who visited this country in the beginning of the eighteenth century, says:—

“Within these few years you should often see a sort of gladiators marching through the streets, in their shirts to the waste, their sleeves tucked up, sword in hand, and preceeded by a drum to gather spectators. They give so much a head to see the fight, which was with cutting swords and a kind of buckler for defence. The edge of the sword was a little blunted, and the care of the prize fighters was not so much to avoid wounding one another, as to avoid doing it dangerously; nevertheless as they were obliged to fight till some blood was shed, without which nobody would give a farthing for the show, they were sometimes forced to play a little roughly. The fights are become very rare within these eight or ten years.”[476]

In the seventeenth century it was not a little rough play, which is evident from those matches at which Pepys was present, and which he describes at large. Jouvin, another Frenchman who visited England in 1672, gives a detailed account of these divertisements, which, at that period, at all events, were anything but play; and Maitland was right when he designated them as “a barbarous performance, by those whom necessity (occasioned by a scandalous laziness and indolence) induces to expose themselves to be horribly mangled for a little money, while the bloodily-minded spectators satiate themselves with human gore to the great reproach of religion.”

In the Spectator, No. 436, there is an amusing essay on those “Hockley-in-the-Hole Gladiators,” and in No. 449 a letter appears, in which the deceits of the champions are shown:—

“I overheard two masters of the science agreeing to quarrel on the next opportunity. This was to happen in the company of a set of the fraternity of the basket hilts who were to meet that evening. When this was settled, one asked the other: ‘Will you give cuts or receive?’ The other answered, ‘Receive.’ It was replied, ‘Are you a passionate man?’ ‘No, provided you cut no more, nor no deeper than we agree.’”

A few other instances of the Sword occur on signs, as the Sword and Cross, a sort of emblem of the Church militant, or perhaps an inversion of the Cross Swords: this was a sign “next door to the Savoy Gate in 1711.” The Swordblade, a coffee-house in Birchen Lane in 1718, and the Sword and Dagger, a combination of arms that evokes the phantom of many a desperate duel amongst the ruffling gallants of the reign of James I. This sign of ill omen was, in the seventeenth century, in St Catherine Lane, Tower, as appears from the traded tokens issued there.

The Dagger was once common in London—

says Captain Face, in Ben Jonson’s “Alchymist,” and various trades tokens testify the prevalence of the sign. Probably this arose from its being a charge in the city arms, which was supposed to represent the dagger Sir William Walworth used in slaying Wat Tyler. This at least was asserted in the inscription below the niche in which Sir William’s statue was erected in Fishmonger’s Hall:—

Stow says that this is erroneous, as, when in the 4 Richard II. a new seal was made for the city, “the armes of this city were not altered, but remayne as afore; to witte, argent, a playne cross gules a sword of Saint Paul in the first quarter and no dagger of William Walworth as is fabuled.”[477] The Dagger and Pie was in the seventeenth century the sign of a celebrated pie-shop in Cheapside, the Pie being added to the original sign; but from the trades tokens of this house we see that this was represented by a rebus of a dagger with a magpie on the point. Dagger-pies are frequently mentioned in the plays of that period; for instance, in Decker’s “Satyro-Mastrix:”—“I’ll not take thy word for a dagger-pie;” and in Prynne’s “Histrio-Mastrix,” “and please you, let them be dagger-pies.” The London apprentices appear to have been good customers to this house. Whenever, for example, old Hobson, the merry haberdasher, went abroad, “his prentices wold ether bee at the Taverne filling their heds with wine or at the Dagger in Cheapside cramming their bellies with minced pyes.”[478] And in Heywood’s comedy of “If you Know not me you Know Nobody,” the worthy citizen bitterly inveighs against the temptations held out to apprentices by the dainties of this house:—

A rather curious sign was that of the Red M and Dagger. The letter M was the initial of Mrs Milner’s name, who, at this sign in Pope’s Head Alley, “over against the Royal Exchange in Cornhill,” sold the “Grand Restorative,” which cured consumption, stone, dropsy, and all evils flesh is heir to. The sign occurs among the Bagford bills; there is a similar one amongst the Banks bills, the Pistol and C, the sign of John Crook, a razor-maker at the Great Turnstile, Holborn, circa 1787: the bill represents a renaissance scutcheon with a pistol, above it a C, and surgical instruments disseminated on the field.

Though we have the authority of Cicero that cedant arma togæ, yet booksellers, who flourish by the arts of peace, choose the Helmet for their sign. Humphrey Joy, a bookseller and printer in St Paul’s Churchyard in 1550, and another, celebrated in the reigns of Henry VIII., Edward VI., and Queen Mary, Rowland Hall by name, had both a Helmet for their sign. This Hall changed his sign more frequently than is generally the custom; thus, besides the Helmet, he is known to have traded at the signs of the Cradle, in Lombard Street; the Half Eagle and Key, in Gutter Lane; and the Three Arrows, in Golden Lane, near Cripplegate. There is still a stone carving of the helmet fixed in the front of a house in London Wall, with the date 1668 and the initials H. M. Ned Ward mentions the Helmet in Bishopsgate; he says at the battles without bloodshed of the Trainbands in Moorfields, the gallant warriors wish

Trades tokens are extant of the Blue Helmet in Tower Street. From the same source we learn that there was, in the seventeenth century, a sign of the Plate, i.e., the Breastplate, in Upper Shadwell; and a Handgun in Shadwell. This weapon was a sort of musket of early times, fired in the hand without a rest; “gunners with handguns or half-hakes” are named by Stow in his enumeration of the troops marching in the city watch on St John’s night.

A few other old weapons remain to be mentioned, as the Arrow, once a great favourite when this weapon made the English name terrible whenever our troops took the field. In the last century there was a beer-house at Knockholt, in Kent, the sign an Arrow, with the following poetical effusion beneath:—

The Cross-bullets, a name puzzling at first sight, was a sign in Thames Street in the seventeenth century, representing two bar-shot crossed, which the trades token elucidates by the equally puzzling legend, “at the Crose bvlets;” this was an instrument of destruction formerly used in naval engagements, and for that reason set up in the neighbourhood of the shipping.

If we may believe a jocular article on a quack handbill in the Spectator, No. 444, there was a Cannon-ball in Drury Lane; for he mentions that—

“In Russell Court, over against the Canonball, at the Surgeons’ Arms, in Drury Lane, is lately come from his travels a surgeon who has practised surgery and physic both by sea and land these twenty-four years. He (by the blessing) cures the Yellow Jaundice, Green sickness, Scurvey, Dropsy, Surfeits, Long sea voyages, Campaigns, and women’s miscarriages, lyings in, etc., as some people that has been lamed these thirty years can testify; in short he cureth all diseases incident on man, women, or children.”

Undoubtedly this bill had been slightly touched up in passing through the hands of the Spectator, who, like the mythological king, “quodcunque tetigit inaurat,” for it is rather “too good to be true.”

The Halbert and Crown was, in 1791, the sign of Paul Savigne, a cutler in St Martin’s Churchyard; whilst the Spear in Hand is at the present day the sign of a public-house at Norwich, being undoubtedly a popular version of some family crest.

In Jews’ Row, or Royal Hospital Row, Chelsea, there is a sign which greatly mystifies the maimed old heroes of the Peninsula and Waterloo, and many others besides; this is the Snow-shoes. It is the sign of a house of old standing, and was set up during the excitement of the American war of independence, when snow-shoes formed part of the equipment of the troops sent out to fight the battles of King George against “Mr Washington and his rebels.”

One of the low public-houses that stood on the outskirts of London, towards Hyde Park Corner, at the end of the last century, was called the Triumphal Car. There were a great many other houses of the same description in that neighbourhood, viz., the Hercules Pillars, the Red Lion, the Swan, the Golden Lion, the Horse-shoe, the Running Horse, the Barleymow, the White Horse, and the Half-moon, which two last have given names to two streets in Piccadilly. The sign of the Triumphal Car was in all probability bestowed upon the house in honour of the soldiers who used to visit it.

“These public-houses, about the middle of last century, were much visited on Sundays, but those contiguous to Hyde Park were chiefly resorted to by soldiers, particularly on review days, when there were long wooden seats fixed in the street before the houses for the accommodation of six or seven barbers, who were employed on field days in powdering those youths who were not adroit enough to dress each other’s hair. Yet it was not unusual for twenty or thirty of the older soldiers to bestride a form in the open air, where each combed, soaped, powdered, and tied the hair of his comrade, and afterwards underwent the same operation himself.”[479]

The grenadiers of Frederick the Great managed those things still better, for twenty or thirty of them used to sit in a circle, each dressing, plaiting, and powdering the pigtail of the man before him, so that all hands were employed at the same time, and none was lost in waiting. There is still a Triumphant Chariot public-house in Pembroke Mews, Chelsea, a house of more than fifty years’ standing.

The Bombay Grab in High Street, Bow, belongs to military signs, as “Grab,” or “Crab,” is a slang expression for a foot soldier; perhaps the landlord at one time may have been in the Bombay army.

Objects relating to the navy, or rather to shipping, are still more common in this seafaring nation of ours than the attributes or emblems of any other trade or profession. Ned Ward describes Deptford in 1703 as every house being distinguished by either the sign of the Ship, the Anchor, the Three Mariners, Boatswain and Call, or something relating to the sea.

“For as I suppose [says he] if they should hang up any other, the salt-water novices would be as much puzzled to know what the figure represented as the Irishman was, when he called the Globe the Golden Cabbage, and the Unicorn the White Horse with a barber’s pole in his forehead.”[480]

There is scarcely a town in the kingdom that has not a Ship inn, tavern, or public-house. Tokens exist of “the Ship without Templebar, 1649,” probably the inn granted in 1571 to Sir Christopher Hatton, along with some lands in Yorkshire and Dorsetshire, and the wardship of a minor.[481] William Faithorne the engraver (ob. 1691) seems to have occupied the same house afterwards, for Walpole informs us that—

“Faithorne now set up in a new shop at the sign of the Ship, next to the Drake, opposite to the Palsgrave Head, without Temple Bar, where he not only followed his art, but sold Italian, Dutch, and English prints, and worked for booksellers.”[482]

This sign of the Ship, next to the Drake, seems to have constituted a sort of a pun or a rebus on Admiral Drake, as observed by Mr Akerman. Among the trades tokens there was “Will Jonson at y^e Drake, Bell Yard, Temple Bar, 1667.” The Drake stood next to the Ship. It was doubtless a rebus, and alluded to the Admiral, who was very popular in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, the mint-mark of the martlet on her coins being termed by the vulgar a Drake. The situation of this sign near the Ship was appropriate enough. In the seventeenth century there was a sign of the Ship at Leeuwarden, in Friesland, (Netherlands,) with the following inscription:—

At the Ship tavern in the Old Bailey, kept by Mr Thomas Amps, on Tuesday the 14th of February 1654, a plot against Cromwell was discovered. Carlyle[484] forcibly pictures the conspirators as eleven truculent, rather threadbare persons, sitting over small drink there on that Tuesday night, considering how the Protector might be assassinated. Poor broken Royalist men, payless old captains, and such like, with their steeple hats worn very brown, and jackboots slit, projecting there what they could not execute. The poor knaves were found guilty, but not worth hanging, and got off with being sent to the Tower for a while to ponder over their wickedness.

Names of famous men-of-war are often found on the signboard, in seaports; either in honour of some brilliant feat performed by them, or simply in compliment to the crew, in the hopes of obtaining their liberal patronage. Thus the Albion, the Saucy Ajax, the Circe, and Arethusa, with innumerable others, may be met with in the vicinity of Plymouth, Portsmouth, and other seaports. The naming of signboards in this way was an old custom; as two examples among the London trades tokens very sufficiently prove. Thus, for instance, The Speaker’s Frigate, the sign of a shop in Shadwell in the seventeenth century. The frigate had been named after Sir Richard Stainer, speaker in the House of Commons in the time of the Commonwealth, who had done good service under command of Admiral Blake, in some of the naval engagements with the Spaniards. In 1652, this ship was sent to “Argier in Turkey,” (Algiers,) under command of Captain Thorowgood, with the sum of £30,000 to redeem English captives from slavery. Upon this occasion the Puritan newspapers made the following punning prayer:—

“A prosperous gale attend his motion; and a Christian vote and blessing be present, in all their debates and consultations, for doubtless, ’tis a sacrifice pleasing both to God and man, and plainly denotes unto the people of England, that our magistrates had rather bring home exiles, than make more.”[485]

After the Restoration the name of this ship was changed into the Royal Charles, (which also occurs as a sign,) that ill-fated ship taken by the Dutch in 1667, when, under Admiral de Ruyter, they made their descent on Chatham and Sheerness, and burnt a part of our fleet. The Royal Charles was one of the ships they took away. Its stern is still kept as a trophy in Rotterdam.

Ships occur in various conditions, as the Full Ship, Hull; Ship in Dock, Dartmouth; and the Ship on Launch, in every ship-building locality. The Ship in Full Sail was the sign of the first shop of Murray the publisher, in Fleet Street—probably in opposition to Longman, who had the Ship at Anchor. The Ship in Distress is a touching appeal to the good-natured wayfarer to assist in keeping the pump going. At Brighton, there was such a sign in the last century, on which the poet had assisted the painter to invoke the sympathy of the thirsty public:—

The Ship is to be met with in innumerable combinations: the Ship and Pilot Boat, Narrow Quay, Bristol; the Ship And Anchor is not uncommon, and in one place, at Chipping Norton, it is quaintly corrupted into the Sheep and Anchor;[486] the Ship and Whale, in compliment to the Greenland Fishery, occurs at South Shields, and the Ship and Notchblock is a sailor’s coffee-house in the Ratcliff Highway. All these explain themselves; most of the other combinations seem to result from the quartering of two signs, as the Ship and Bell, Horn Dean, Hants; the Ship and Fox, “next door but one to the Five Bells tavern, near the Maypole in the Strand,” in 1711; the Ship and Star on a trades token of Cornhill, may be the north star by which ancient mariners used to navigate; the Ship and Rainbow is common to many places; the Ship and Shovel, Tooley Street; said to be a deterioration of the Sir Cloudesley Shovel, but more likely alluding to the shovels used in taking out ballast, coal, corn, (when in bulk) and various other cargoes; the Ship and Plough, Hull; the Ship and Blue Coat Boy, Walworth Road, although susceptible of explanations, are doubtless only but quarterings. The Ship and Castle, though of common occurrence, seemed to puzzle the public already in the seventeenth century:—

If not a combination of two signs, it may have some reference to our national defences. It was a sign in Cornhill as early as 1716, when, on November 9, the newspapers conveyed the following information to the metropolis:—

“We are informed that this day a fowl was roasted in a wonderful sun-kitchen on the top of the Ship and Castle tavern, Cornhill, in view of many gentlemen. The artist performer, who is a gentleman newly come from France, proposes to roast and boil meat, bake bread, prepare tea and coffee, and all kitchenwork done without common fire; some particular thing to be seen every day that the sun shines out brightly. ’Twas observable that when the fowl was dressed, it had the same taste and smell as if done by a common fire. The machine is composed of about a hundred small looking or convex-glasses.”

The scheme, seemingly, did not succeed in dethroning “old king coal,” for if we had to depend on the sun for our cookery, it is to be feared we would often have cold cheer.

Amongst all these ships, of course, Jack tar could not be forgot. The Ship Friends occur in Sunderland; the Three Mariners is an old sign, of which there are examples among the trades tokens, and which is still to be seen on two or three public-houses in London. There was formerly a tavern known by this sign in Vauxhall.

“On repairing it in 1752, in it was found a remarkably high-elbowed chair covered with purple cloth, and ornamented with gilt nails. An old fisherman told Mr Buckmaster that he had heard his grandfather say, that King Charles II. disguised, used on his water tours with his ladies to frequent the above tavern to play at chess, &c., and that the chair found, was the same as the king sat in. The chair was repaired and kept as a curiosity by the late John Dawson, Esq., but by neglect was, at the pulling down of his old dwelling at Vauxhall in 1777, destroyed. Mr Buckmaster sat in the chair many times, but his feet would not touch the ground. King Charles was very tall. No tavern of this name is known to exist now in Lambeth, but there is one of the sign of the Three Merry Boys,[487] probably a corruption of the above name.”[488]

In other places we meet with the Three Jolly Sailors; at Castleford there used to be one representing the jolly sailors “with a sheet in the wind,” and under it the following professional invitation:—

In North Street, Hull, there is a sign of Jack on a Cruise, not on board H.M. ship, but “out on” what the lands folk call “a spree;” the cruises, however, are generally confined to rather low latitudes. The Boatswain appears to have been a public-house in Wapping in the reign of Charles II., for Wycherly in the “Plain Dealer,” 1676, makes Jerry Blackaire say:—“I should soon be picking up all our own mortgaged apostle spoons, bowls, and beakers, out of most of the ale-houses betwixt Hercules Pillars and the Boatswain in Wapping.” The Boatswain’s Call is a public-house sign in Frederick Street, Portsea, whose invitation the sailors, no doubt, accept with much more pleasure than the boatswain’s call of “all hands on deck” on a frosty winter morning. It was the name of a patriotic sea song during one of the wars with France. Red, White, and Blue, and its synonyme, the Three Admirals, both occur in more than one instance in Liverpool.

The Anchor was, perhaps, set up rather as an emblem than as referring to its use in shipping. It is frequently represented in the catacombs, typifying the words of St Paul, who calls hope “the anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast.” St Ambrose says, “it is this which keeps the Christian from being carried away by the storm of life.” Other early writers use it as a symbol of true faith, and one of them has this beautiful idea:—

“As an anchor cast into the sand will keep the ship in safety, even so hope, ever amidst poverty and tribulation, remains firm, and is sufficient to sustain the soul; though, in the eyes of the world, it may seem but a weak and frail support.”[489]

It was a favourite sign with the early printers, probably in imitation of Aldus.[490] Thus Thomas Vautrollier, a scholar and printer from Paris and Rouen, who came to England about the beginning of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, and established his printing-office in Blackfriars, had an anchor for his sign, with the motto, “Anchora Spei.” At West Bromwich there is an ale-house having the sign of the Anchor with the following inscription:—

Sometimes a female figure in flowing garments is represented holding the anchor, in which case it is called the Hope and Anchor. The Blue Anchor was painted of that colour as a “difference” from other anchors; it is a common sign; it was the trade emblem of Henry Herringman, of the “New Exchange,” the principal London bookseller and publisher in the reign of King Charles II., the friend of Davenant, Dryden, and Cowley. The Blue Anchor and Ball was the sign of a mercer’s shop near the Conduit in Cheapside in 1707, the ball being the usual addition to intimate the sale of silks. Other distinctions are the Sheet Anchor, at Whitmore, in Staffordshire; the Foul Anchor, a sign of two public-houses at Wisbeach, implying, no doubt, that the lotus-eaters, who anchor in that harbour, get so entangled in the luxurious weeds of pleasure, that it becomes impossible for them to leave; the Raffled Anchor, Swan’s Quay, North Shields; and the Rope and Anchor, which is very common, the anchor being generally represented with a piece of cable twined round the stem.

A few combinations also occur: the Anchor and Can, at Ross, and at Putson, Hereford, which seems to allude to the Anchor as a measure; the Anchor and Shuttle, Luttendenfoot, Warley, Manchester, the shuttle being added in compliment to the weavers; the Anchor and Castle, a quartering of two signs in Tooley Street, &c.

Sometimes instead of the ship, some peculiar vessel is chosen, as, for instance, the Sloop, or the Leigh Hoy, a sort of smack, which occurs amongst the trades tokens as a sign near St Catherine’s Docks, and is still to be seen in Church Street, Mile End; the Coble, a sort of fishing-boat, common in Northumberland; the Tiltboat, Sommers Quay, Thames Street, in the XVIIth. century, and still at Billingsgate. This last was an open passenger boat for Greenwich, Woolwich, Gravesend, and other places down the river. It took twelve hours to perform the voyage to Gravesend, and much more if the wind was contrary, and the boat had not arrived before the tide turned. The tiltboats were superseded by steamers in 1815. The Dark House, Billingsgate, was their starting-place, and passengers would probably patronise the tavern with this name in the immediate neighbourhood, as they go now for a glass of ale and a sandwich to the Railway, or Steamboat Inn, during the quarter of an hour preceding departure.

The Fishing Smack was a public-house formerly standing near St Nicholas Church, Liverpool. The sign represented a man standing in a cart loaded with fish, and holding in his right hand what the artist intended to represent as a salmon. Underneath were the following lines:—