The Shears was originally a tailor’s sign, though like most other trade emblems it had become common in the seventeenth century.

This elegant little verse is quoted by Randle Holme, and seems to have been thought such a good joke, that a canny Scotchman, buried in Paisley Abbey, had a pictorial representation of it on his headstone. Charles Mackie, who wrote the history of that Abbey, says it is an obliterated cross; more probably, however, it is a fleur de luce: this would also agree with the Scottish pronunciation of the name of the insect, which is exactly the same as the last part of that heraldic charge.

The Hand and Shears, in Cloth Fair, Smithfield, played an important part at the opening of Bartholomew Fair. It was customary to make the proclamation for opening the fair late in the afternoon of August 23d, but the showmen and traders opened their booths early in the morning:—

“Lawful objections being made to this, a riotous assembly met the night before the day of the Mayor’s Proclamation at the public-house within Cloth Fair, in which the Court of Piepoudre was held,[509] the Hand and Shears—now transformed into a tall brick gin-palace—and at midnight sallied forth, bearing along, in later years, the effigy of a woman to represent Lady Holland, (who must have been instigator, and it would seem, first leader of the mob,) and the mob—knocking at doors, ringing bells, clamouring and rioting, some five thousand strong, during three hours of the middle of the night—proclaimed for itself, in its own way, that Bartholomew Fair was open. The first irregular proclamation was for many years made by a company of tailors, who met the night before the legal proclamation at the Hand and Shears, elected a chairman, and as the clock struck twelve went out into Cloth Fair, each with a pair of shears in his hand. The chairman then proclaimed the Fair to the expectant mob, who all sped on their errand of riot, to arouse with the news of it the sleepers in the neighbourhood of Smithfield.”[510]

The Three Crowned Needles looks also like a tailor’s sign, and from the evidence of a trades token of 1669 we know that it was the sign of a shop in Aldersgate. Hatton thinks that a similar sign may have given its name to Threadneedle Street, (Three Needle Street.) Three Crowned Needles was a charge in the needle-makers’ company’s arms. It is a curious fact that all the needles used in England up to the time of Queen Elizabeth were of foreign make; those sold in Cheapside in the reign of Queen Mary were made by a Spanish negro, who carried the secret of their manufacture with him to the grave. In 1566 they were manufactured under the direction of a German, Elias Grause, and after that time only it seems that we had learned how to make them.

Among agricultural signs, the Plough leads the van, sometimes accompanied by the legend “Speed the Plough.” Of two inscriptions on the sign of the Plough that have come under our observation, both contain sound advice. That of the Plough at Filey might well be remembered by “afternoon” farmers: it says:—

whilst on the Plough Inn, Alnwick, the following is cut in stone:—

In the inventory of church goods made at Holbeach, in Lincoln, at the time of the Reformation:—

Wm. Davy bought the sygne whereon the plowghe did stond for xvj^d.

This probably refers to the signs or badges exhibited by the religious guilds in the middle ages over the altars and as decorations in their churches, which were in some measure of the nature of other signs, in pointing out certain fraternities or trades, besides possessing a secondary and religious meaning.

The Plough and Horses is a sign at Branston, Lincoln. The Plough and Harrow is very common. Two doors west from the Harrow Inn lived Isaac Walton, about 1624, carrying on the business of “milliner and sempster,” or what we should now call a linen-draper. He afterwards resided at a house in Chancery Lane, until he left London, for fear of having his morals corrupted—as he himself asserted. Goldsmith’s tailor, who lived at the sign of the Harrow, has gained immortality by the bad taste of poor Goldy. On one occasion—

“Goldsmith strutted about, bragging of his dress, and, I believe, was seriously vain of it, for his mind was wonderfully prone to such impressions. ‘Come, come,’ said Garrick, ‘talk no more of that, you are perhaps the worst—eh, eh.’ Goldsmith was eagerly attempting to interrupt him, when Garrick went on, laughing ironically, ‘Nay, you will always look like a gentleman, but I am talking of being well or ill drest.’ ‘Well, let me tell you,’ said Goldsmith, ‘when my tailor brought home my bloom-coloured coat, he said, “Sir, I have a favour to beg of you. When anybody asks you who made your clothes, be pleased to mention, John Filby, at the Harrow in Water Lane.”’ Johnson. ‘Why, sir, that was because he knew the strange colour would attract crowds to gaze at it, and then they might hear of him, and see how well he could make a coat even of so absurd a colour.’”[511]

Near Bagshot there is a public-house called the Jolly Farmer, a corruption of the Golden Farmer, a nickname obtained by one of the former possessors on account of his wealth, and his custom of paying his rent always in guineas, which—so says the legend—he obtained as a footpad on Bagshot Heath. That some such thing happened is evident from the Weekly Journal, March 29, 1718, where allusion is made to “Bagshot Heath, near the Gibbet where the Golden Farmer hanged in chains.” The use of this word Jolly, on the signboard, formerly so common in our “Merry England,” is now gradually dying away. Whatever be the opinion of our workmen upon the subject of national good humour, they no longer desire to be advertised as Jolly; it is vulgar, and they prefer Arms like their betters—hence those heraldic anomalies of the Graziers’ Arms, the Farmers’ Arms, the Chaff-Cutters’ Arms, the Puddlers’ Arms, the Paviors’ Arms, and so forth.

The Shepherd and Shepherdess is one of those signs reminding us of—

calling up pictures of rouged shepherdesses with jaunty straw hats on the top of powdered hair a foot high, short quilted petticoats and high-heeled boots, courted in madrigals by shepherds dressed in the height of the elegance of the New Exchange gallants, with ribboned crooks and flowered-satin waistcoats. It was the sign of a pleasure resort in the City Road, Islington, much frequented in the eighteenth century for amusement, and by invalids for the pure, healthy, country air of Islington, which was then a charming village, more rural in the midst of its meadows and rivulets than Richmond is now. Cakes, cream, and furmity were its great attractions:—

More business-like is the sign of the Shepherd and Dog; he, too, wears patches, but not on his face; so with the Shepherd and Crook, and the Crook and Shears. All these may be found in most villages, and refer to the inferior farm-labourer, to whom the care of the flock is intrusted, and not the elegant Corydon or Alexis.

The merry, thirsty time of haymaking is commemorated in the usual signs of a Load of Hay and the Cross Scythes. There is a Load of Hay tavern on Haverstock Hill, a favourite place for Sunday afternoon excursionists in the summer time. Many years ago the eccentricity of Davies the landlord was one of the attractions of the place. Lately the house has been re-built, and it is now only a suburban gin-palace. The Mattock and Spade, and the Spade and Becket, refer to field labour; the first is very general, the second less so; but an example occurs at Chatteris, Cambridgeshire. The Peat Spade, Longstock, Hants, tells its own tale. The Dairy Maid was in great favour with the London cheesemongers of the seventeenth century. Akerman gives a trades token of such a sign in Catherine Street, in 1653, which is an amusing specimen of the liberties the token engravers took with the king’s English, the country Phillis being transformed into a “Deary Made.” The Dutch in the seventeenth century used the sign for a rather heterogenous trade: it seems that the process of sucking or inhaling the tobacco smoke carried back their ideas to tender years of innocence and milk diet, and so the Dairy Maid became the sign, par excellence, of tobacco shops. Even at the present day that idea is not quite forgotten; tobacco boxes or other smoking implements are sometimes seen amongst that nation, with the words, “Troost voor Zuigelingen,” “consolation for sucklings.” The inscriptions under these signs were occasionally very curious:—

On the Goudsche Melkmeid in Amsterdam:—

Another had:—

Harvest-home, the pleasant time of congratulation and feasting, must be an alluring sign for the villagers, calling up recollections of all the festivities yearly celebrated on that grand occasion, when—

One of the misfortunes of the “nimium fortunati sua si bona norint” is pictured in the Cart Overthrown, which is a public-house sign at Lower Edmonton; though how it came to be such is difficult to guess. On Highgate Hill there is an old roadside inn, the Fox and Crown, which displays on its front a fine gilt coat of arms with the following inscription underneath:—

The carriage conveying Her Majesty was proceeding down the hill without a skid on the wheel, when something started the horses, and the occurrence above narrated took place. The late landlord died in distressed circumstances, and he stoutly asserted to the last, that although he made repeated applications to the Government for recompense, he having imperilled his own life to save that of Her Majesty, all he ever received for his pains was permission to display the royal arms on his house front.

The Woodman is another very common sign, invariably representing the same woodman copied from Barker’s picture, and evidently suggested by Cowper’s charming description of a winter’s morning in the “Task.” The Drover’s Call is still seen on many roadsides, though the profession that gave rise to it is well-nigh extinct; the herds of steaming, fierce-looking oxen, formerly driven from all parts of the kingdom, along the main roads leading to London, there to be devoured, being now nearly all sent here by rail. A yet older practice produced the sign of the String of Horses, which may still be seen on many a highroad in the North, and dates from times before mail coaches and stage waggons existed, when all the goods-traffic inland had to be performed by strings of packhorses, who carried large baskets, hampers, and bales slung across their backs, and slowly, though far from surely, wound their way over miles and miles of uninhabited tracts, moors, and fens, which lay between the small towns and straggling villages.

Many signs still recall those bygone days: the Old Coach and Six may yet be seen in some places. There is one, for instance, in Westminster, but it is no longer a “sign of the times,” for alas!—

The names of the coaches were often adopted by inns on the road; for instance, the Mail, the Telegraph, the Defiance, the Balloon, the Tally-Ho, the Bang-up, the Express, &c., &c.; but alas! the modern railroad has swept away the signs as well as the coaches.

In London, there are not less than fifty-two public-houses known as the Coach and Horses, exclusive of beer-houses, coffee-houses, and similar establishments. Stow says, in his “Summary of English Chronicles,” that in 1555, Walter Ripon made a coach for the Earl of Rutland, “which was the first that was ever used in England.” But in his larger Chronicle he says:—

“In the year 1564 Guilliam Boonen, a Dutchman, became the queen’s coachman, and was the first that brought the use of coaches into England. After a while divers great ladies, with as great jalousy of the queen’s displeasure, made them coaches, and rid up and down the country in them, to the great admiration of all the beholders, but then by little they grew usual among the nobility and others of sort, and within twenty years became a great trade of coachmaking.”

Taylor the Water poet, who, as a waterman of course, bore a grudge to coaches, said, “It is a doubtful question whether the devil brought tobacco into England in a coach, for both appeared at the same time.” How common they became in a short time appears from all the satirists of that period; not only the nobility, but even the citizens could no longer do without them, after they were once introduced. Not forty years after their first appearance Pierce Pennyless, speaking of merchants’ wives, says: “She will not go unto the field to coure on the green grasse, but she must have a coach for her convoy.”[516] No wonder, then, that, according to the “Coach and Sedan,” a pamphlet of 1636, there were then in London, the suburbs, and four miles’ compass without, coaches to the number of 6000 and odd. These were nearly all private carriages, for the hackney coaches were only established in 1625 by one Captain Bailey. Their first stand was at the Maypole in the Strand. They numbered about twenty, and were attached to the principal inns. In 1636, the number of hackney coaches was confined to 50; in 1652, to 200; in 1654, to 300; in 1662, to 400; in 1694, to 700; in 1710, to 800; in 1771, to 1000; in 1802, to 1100; but in 1833 all limitation of number ceased. Besides cabs of various kinds, there are now above a thousand omnibusses regularly employed in the Metropolis, and the commissioners of stamps are authorised to license all such carriages without limitation as to number; the proprietor paying the duty of £5 for the licence, and 10s. per week during its continuance. What a difference just two centuries ago, when by proclamation of the “Merry Monarch:”—

“The excessive number of hackney coaches [about 400] and coach horses in London, are found to be a common nuisance to the public damage of our people, by reason of their rude and disorderly standing, and passing to and fro, in and about our cities and suburbs; the streets and highways being thereof pestered and much impassable, the pavement broken up, and the common passages obstructed and made dangerous.” Hence orders are[357] given, that “henceforth none shall stand in the street, but only within their coach-houses, stables, and yards.”

At the Coach and Horses, Bartholomew Close, some vestiges of the ancient buildings of St Bartholomew’s Hospital and Convent still remain—viz., a clustered column in the beer cellar, walls of immense thickness, and an early English window in the taproom, &c. This building occupies the site of the north cloister.[517] Another Coach and Horses, in Ray Street, Clerkenwell, is also built on classic ground, for it occupies the site of the once famous Hockley-in-the-Hole of bear-baiting memory. A comical alehouse keeper in Oswestry has travestied the sign of the Coach and Horses into the Coach and Dogs.

The Wheel, an object sometimes seen on signboards, may have been derived from the Catherine Wheel, (the name of a favourite old coaching inn in Bishopsgate Street,) or from the wheel of fortune; the Saddle and the Spur are both very general on roadside inns, owing to the ancient mode of travelling on horseback; the Whip occurs in Briggate, Leeds.

In Norwich there was (and we believe is still) a curious combination, the Whip and Egg, which existed in that locality as early as the year 1750,[518] and which is enumerated in London, under the name of the Whip and Eggshell, amongst the taverns in the black letter ballad of “London’s Ordinarie, or Everie Man in his Humour,” whilst a still earlier mention occurs in Mother Bunch’s Merriment, (1604,) when the transformation of pigs into fowls, whereby one of the gulls was so “sweetly deceyved,” is laid at the Whip and Eggshell. It has been explained as a corruption of the Whip and Nag, but the combination of these two would be so obvious that a corruption would scarcely be possible. In “Great Britain’s Wonder, or London’s Admiration,” a ballad on the frost of 1685, when the Thames was frozen over, and a fair held upon it, the following lines occur:—

The Whip and Egg, therefore, figured on the ice, and may have been brought together from the whipping of eggs, in making egg-punch, egg-flip, and similar beverages, much drunk on the ice in Holland; and as there were always crowds of Dutchmen on the ice, whenever the river was frozen over, they may have introduced their favourite drink as well as their Dutch whirlings, whimsies, and flying boats, and the sign have been invented in order to indicate the sale of those liquors.

The Three Jolly Butchers used to be seen in the neighbourhood of markets and shambles, either in allusion to the three merry north-country butchers, who killed nine highwaymen, according to the ballad, or simply that favourite combination of three which is of such frequent recurrence. The Cleaver seems also to be in compliment to this profession, as well as the Marrowbones and Cleaver. This last is a sign in Fetter Lane, originating from a custom, now rapidly dying away, of the butcher boys serenading newly married couples with these professional instruments. Formerly, the band would consist of four cleavers, each of a different tone, or, if complete, of eight, and by beating their marrowbones skilfully against these, they obtained a sort of music somewhat after the fashion of indifferent bell-ringing. When well performed, however, and heard from a proper distance, it was not altogether unpleasant. A largesse of half-a-crown or a crown was generally expected for this delicate attention. The butchers of Clare market had the reputation of being the best performers. The last public appearance of this popular music was at the marriage of the Prince of Wales, when small bands of them perambulated the town, playing “God Save the Queen.” This music was once so common that Tom Killigrew called it the national instrument of England. In 1759 a burlesque Ode on St Cecilia’s day, written by Bonnell Thornton, was performed at Ranelagh. Amongst the instruments employed in this there was a band of marrowbones and cleavers, whose endeavours were admitted by the cognoscenti to have been “a complete success.”

As the use of coaches gave rise to the sign of the Coach and Horses, so the Sedan produced some signs, as the Sedan Chair, Broad Quay, Bristol; North Searle, Newark; the Two Chairmen, &c., Warwick Street, Cockspur Street, and other parts of London; and the Three Chairs in the seventeenth century, a famous tavern in the Little Piazza, Covent Garden. The Sedan, says Randle Holme, “is a thing in which sick and crazy persons are carried abroad, which is borne up by the staves by two lusty men.”[520] The first sedan chair used in England was one that the Duke of Buckingham had received as a gift from Charles I., when Prince of Wales, on his return from that romantic “Jean-de-Paris” expedition to Spain.[521] The use of it got the Duke into trouble, and he was accused of “degrading Englishmen into slaves and beasts of burden.” Lysons, in his “Magna Britannia,” gives another origin for them; speaking of Duncombe at Battlesden, in Bedfordshire, he says:—

“It was to one of this family, Sir Saunders Duncombe, a gentleman pensioner to King James and Charles I., that we are indebted for the accommodation of the sedans or close chairs, the use of which was first introduced by him in this country in the year 1634, when he procured a patent which vested in him and his heirs the sole right of carrying persons up and down in them for a certain time.”

Sir Saunders hereupon got forty or fifty sedans made, and sent them about town, but differences soon arose between the chairmen and the coachmen. Pamphlets were written,[522] ballads were sung on the occasion, and the public sided with one or the other, according to individual taste. A ballad in favour of the sedan said:—

De Foe, in 1702, says, “We are carried to these places [coffee-houses] in chairs, which are here very cheap—a guinea a week, or a shilling per hour—and your chairmen serve you for porters to run on errands, as your gondoliers do at Venice.” The chairmen of the aristocracy wore gaudy liveries and plumed hats, and their chairs were richly gilt and painted, and provided with velvet cushions. They used to be kept in the halls of their large mansions. As for the chairmen, we may infer from Gay’s “Trivia” that they were an insolent set of fellows:—

The trumpet-like instruments in which these torches were extinguished, when arrived at their place of destination, are still seen attached to the area railings of most of the houses in Grosvenor and St James’ Squares, and various other parts of the town fashionably inhabited at that period.

Another creature of this class, now as completely extinct as the Plesiosaurus and the Megatherion, or any other monster of the pre-Adamite world, was the Running Footman. We cannot say that there is not a “sign” of him left, for there is one in Charles Street, Berkeley Square, representing a man in gaudy attire, running, with a long cane in his hand—under it, “I am the only Running Footman.” This was a class of servants used by rich families in former days to run before the carriage, to clear the way, bear torches at night, pay turnpikes, and serving also in a great measure for pomp. Generally their livery was very rich, being somewhat of the Jockey dress, with a silk sash round the waist; sometimes, instead of breeches, they wore a sort of silk petticoat with a deep gold fringe. They carried long sticks with silver heads, which have now descended to their successors the footmen. The Duke of Queensberry was one of the last noblemen who kept running footmen. A good story is told of him in connexion with one of these servants. Whenever his grace wanted to engage one it was his custom to make him put on his livery and run up and down Piccadilly, whilst he, from his balcony, watched their paces; and so it happened on a time, that after one of those fellows had gone through all his evolutions and presented himself under the balcony, the Duke said: “That will do; you will suit me very well.” “And so your livery does me,” was the answer, and off the fellow went running like a deer and was never heard of afterwards. Another feat on record, somewhat more to the credit of the fraternity, was that one of them ran for a wager to Windsor against the Duke of Marlborough in a phaeton with four horses, and lost only by a short distance; but it cost the poor fellow his life, for he died very soon after. Most of these running footmen were Irish, hence Decker[524] says—“The Devil’s footeman was very nimble of his heeles, for no wild Irishman could outrunne him,” and Brathwaite remarks:—

St Patrick’s day was generally given to them as a holiday, which they invariably celebrated by purging themselves. In various country places the sign of the Running Footman has been corrupted into the Running Man.

Another “domestic” sign is the Trusty Servant at Minstead, Hants:—

The origin of this sign is a picture on the wall of one of the rooms, near the kitchen of Winchester College, where it is accompanied by the above verses in English and Latin.

Further, there is the Stave-Porter, Dockhead, London; the Ticket-Porter, near London Bridge; the Porter’s Lodge, Leicester; and the Porter and Gentleman in three different places in London.

The Huntsman is common in the hunting districts. To the hunt, also, we must refer such signs as—Hark to Bounty, Staidburn, Clitheroe; Hark up to Nudger, Dobcross, Manchester; Hark the Lasher, near Castleton, Derby; Hark up to Glory, Rochdale, and the Chase Inn in Leamington. In Cambridge there are two signs of the Birdbolt, an implement formerly used to shoot birds; consequently it must be a sign of some antiquity. In Nightingale Lane, East Smithfield, there is an Experienced Fowler, who, no doubt, well knows the value of “a bird in the hand,” and at Oldham and Rochdale there is an equally satirical sign, that of the Trap. The Angler is common enough in the neighbourhood of trout streams and other fishing resorts frequented by the disciples of Isaak Walton.

Many professions are only represented by one or two objects relating to them. The Tallow Chandler, very common among the trades tokens, was always represented by a man dipping candles. To that trade also seems to belong the Bowls and Candle Poles, which occurs in the following rambling advertisement:—

“Stolen,
Lost, or Mislaid,

A Promissory Note for one hundred and twenty Pounds, signed by John Smallwood and indorsed by John Addams. Whoever will bring the same note to the House known by the Bowls and Candlepoles in Duke Street, in the Park, Southwark, shall receive five Guineas Reward; and if offered to be paid away or any Writ to be taken out for payment of the said Note, pray stop it and the party, and you shall have the same Reward.

^*_*^* The House is in Tenements, and some part thereof being a Pawnbroker’s, was broke open and several things of value missing. Note, This mischief arrises from a country Butcher, who did strike and kick an old Gentleman at London Bridge, about three quarters of a year ago. And all persons who did see the said Assault and will speak the truth, (for Christ’s sake,) are desired to send their Names and Place of Abode to the Bowls and Candlepoles and the favour shall be thankfully acknowledged.”[526]

The Scales is a common sign referring to various trades: one of the engraved bill-heads in the Bagford Collection gives the Hand and Scales—viz., a hand holding a pair of scales; this antiquated mode of representing a hand issuing from the clouds to perform some action, has given name to a great many signs—all combinations of the hand with some other object. The Spinning Wheel was formerly much more common than now; there is still a public-house with this sign at Hamsterley near Darlington. The Woolsack was originally a wool-merchant’s sign; it is often accompanied by the Black Boy. Machyn mentions this sign in 1555: “The xx day of July was cared to the Toure in the morning erlee iiij men; on was the goodman of the Volsake with-owt Algatt.” It seems to have been one of the leading taverns in Ben Jonson’s time, who often alludes to it in his plays; like the Dagger, it was famous for its pies.

“Her Grace would have you eat no more Woolsack pies nor Dagger furmety.”—Alchymist, act v., sc. 2.

In the year 1682, the Woolsack Tavern in Newgate Market attracted great attention, owing to a wonderful phenomenon there exhibited, and set forth in the following handbill from the Sloane Collection, No. 958:—

“At the sign of the Woolpack in Newgate Street, is to be seen a strange and wonderful thing, which is, an elm-board, being touch’d with a hot iron, doth express itself, as if it was a man dying, with grones and trembling, to the great admiration of all the hearers. It has been presented before the King and his nobles, and hath given them great satisfaction. Vivat Rex.”

Such a curiosity could not fail to prove an object of immense attraction with our wonder-loving ancestors, particularly after the house had been visited by his Majesty, and thus acquired additional respectability. Very soon, however, numerous London taverns claimed public attention for similar wonders. It was as if the wood used in their construction had been cut from the myrtle-tree which conversed with Æneas near the river Hebrus, (“Æneid,” lib. iii. 19,) or from the “fiera selvaggia” Dante saw in the second circle of Hades, where he

The mantel-piece at the Bowman Tavern, Drury Lane, expressed its aversion of a red hot poker as unequivocally as the elm-board at the Woolsack, and the dresser at the Queen’s Arms in St Martin’s Lane was evidently a “chip of the same block.” Indeed, boards were cauterised and groaned all over London.

The Block was a hatter’s sign, or as that trade was sometimes called, Bever-cutter, the block being the mould on which the hat is formed. Beatrix, in “Much Ado about Nothing,” says: “He wears his faith, but as the fashion of his hat it ever changes with the next block.” And Decker, in the “Gull’s Hornbook:” “John, in Paul’s Churchyard, shall fit his head for an excellent block.” The word was also often used as a synonym for “hat.”

The Postboy was the sign of a fishmonger’s shop in Sherborne Lane, where in 1759 Green-native Colchester oysters were sold at 3s. 3d. a barrel, and exceeding fine “Pyfleet oysters” at 4s. 3d. a barrel. The Up and Down Post used to be, in the good old coaching times, a thriving inn on the now deserted highway between Birmingham and Coventry. The picture represented an erect and a prostrate pillar, which after all was only a rebus or a misunderstanding. In former times, before the mail-coaches were instituted, the equestrian letter-carriers of the up and down mail used to meet at this house, exchange their bags and each return whence they came, thus effecting a considerable saving of time and trouble. Even washerwomen have been exalted to the signboard, for in Norwich there was the sign of the Three Washerwomen in 1750. And one of the implements of their trade, the Golden Maid, (better known as “the Dolly,”) may still be seen at a turner’s shop in Dudley.

A few others remain, which cannot, strictly speaking, be called professions, yet are they—or at least they were—means of making a living, as the Three Morris-dancers, once a very common sign, but now, like the custom that gave rise to it, almost extinct. There is one still left, however, at Scarisbrook, Lancashire, and in a few villages a remnant of the dance is also kept up on certain occasions. They were called Morris, or Moors, from the Spanish Morisco. Black faces were required for the dance:—

“Nam faciem plerumque inficiunt fuligine et peregrinum vestium cultum assumunt, qui ludicris talibus indulgent ut Mauriesse videantur, aut e longius remota patria credantur advolasse atque insolens recreationis genus advenisse.”[528]

There is a painted glass window at Betley, in Staffordshire, on which the characters performing the dance in the early part of the sixteenth century are represented; to these afterwards others were added. The earliest performers appear to have been called Robin Hood and Little John, Maid Marian, Friar Tuck, the May queen, the fool, the piper, and the plain rank and file of dancers variously dressed. To these afterwards were added a dragon, a hobby-horse, and other quaint types. Among the characters represented on the painted window are also a franklein, a churl, or peasant, and a nobleman. The hobby-horseman occupies the middle of the window, and is said to represent a Moorish king: he has two swords thrust into his cheeks, which seem to represent a feat of dexterity performed by Indian and Egyptian jugglers of throwing a somersault with two swords balanced on each side of the cheek. The horse (merely a frame covered with long trappings, and only showing the neck and limbs of a horse, in which the man capered about) held a ladle in his mouth for collecting money.

The fool was one of the features of the pageant, and on him rested a great deal of the duties to amuse the public, particularly when the hobby-horse was not present; hence Ben Jonson:—