On May-day, which in those merry days was the merriest of all the year, they came out in full force, and, along with the milkmaids dancing with piles of plate on their heads, contributed not a little to give the streets and thoroughfares a merry aspect. The May-dance of the sweeps is perhaps the “last stage of decomposition” of this amusement of our forefathers; their sooty complexions, their clowns, their Lord and Lady and Jack in the Green, may be all that remain of the morris-dance, the fool, the Lord and Lady, the hobby-horse, and the rest.

In treating of games, we may advert to a rendering of the Flying Horse, overlooked on a former occasion. Besides its mythological and heraldic origin, there was another reason which sometimes prompted the choice of this sign. It was the name of a popular amusement, which consisted in a swing, the seat of which formed a wooden horse. This the flying equestrian mounted, and as he was swinging to and fro he had to take with a sword the ring off a quintain. If he succeeded, his adroitness was no doubt rewarded either with a number of swings gratis, or a quotum of beer. Such a Flying Horse served for a sign to an ale-house of that denomination in Moorfields, in the time of Queen Anne. Swings, round-abouts, and such-like amusements, were in those days the usual appendages of suburban ale-houses, and to a certain extent have even come down to our time.

Oil and colour-shops generally, and some public-houses—mostly near theatres—adopt the sign of the Harlequin. One of the most noted amongst the latter was kept in the beginning of this century in Drury Lane, by the eccentric Richardson, the showman, or, rather, the “Prince of Showmen,” as he called himself. In this tavern he saved some money, which enabled him to fit up a travelling theatre, by which he realised so much, that when he died in 1836, he left £20,000. It used to be one of his boasts that he had brought out Edmund Kean, and several other eminent actors. He desired in his will to be buried at Marlow, in Bucks, (where he was born in the workhouse,) in the same grave with the “Spotted Boy,” a natural phenomenon which had been one of his luckiest hits, and brought him a considerable amount of money.

It is curious to observe how the same simple thing has made mankind laugh for nearly thirty centuries, and that is a black face. In our age a large proportion of the public seem to find inexhaustible pleasure in pseudo-negroes, their songs and antics. The Greeks on their stage had a young satyr, dressed in goat or tiger-skin, with a short stick in his hand, a white hat on his head, his hair cut short, and a brown mask. This satyr performed some antics, and was the prototype of the harlequin. The Romans adopted a somewhat similar character under the name of planipes, because he did not wear the tragic cothurna; he also wore a variegated dress, for Apuleius, in his “Apology,” speaks of the “mimus centunculus.” From the Romans it descended to the Italians, and as early as the sixteenth century we find the whole troop complete, playing in Spain, namely, Harlequin, Pantaloon, Pagliacico, the Doctor, &c. At a masked ball at the court of Charles IX., in 1572, the king represented Brighella; the Cardinal of Lorraine, Pantaloon; Catherine de Medici, Columbine; and the Duke of Anjou, (afterwards Henry III.,) Harlequin. At that time, or shortly after, the troop of the Gelosi played the Italian pieces in Paris, in which these characters were introduced.

For the sign of the Green Man there is a twofold explanation. 1^o. That it represents the green, wild, or wood men of the shows and pageants, such as described by Machyn in his Diary on Lord Mayor’s Day, October 29, 1553:—“Then cam ij grett wodyn with ij grett clubes all in grene and with skwybes [squibs] bornyng . . . . with gret berds and ryd here and ij targets a-pon their bake.” This green in which they were dressed consisted of green leaves. When Queen Elizabeth was at Kenilworth Castle, in 1575, “on the x of Julee met her in the Forest as she came from hunting one clad like a savage man all in ivie,”[529] who made a very neat speech to the queen, in which he was kindly assisted by the echo. Besides wielding sticks with crackers in pageants, these green men sometimes fought with each other, attacked castles and dragons, and were altogether a very favourite popular character with the public. One of their duties seems to have been to clear the way for processions. In one of the Harleian MSS., entitled “The maner of the showe, that is, if God spare life and health, shall be seen by all the behoulders upon St Georges Day next, being the 23 of Aprill, 1610,” we see amongst the requirements:—

“It. ij men in greene leaves set with work upon their other habet with black heare & black beards very owgly to behould, and garlands upon their heads with great clubs in their hands with fireworks to scatter abroad to maintaine way for the rest of the show.”[530]

This interpretation is also given as the origin of the Green Man by Bagford:—

“They are called woudmen, or wildmen, thou’ at thes day we in ye signe call them Green Men, couered with grene bones: and are used for singes by stillers of strong watters and if I mistake not are y^e sopourters of y^e king of Deanmarks armes at thes day; and I am abpt to beleve that y^e Daynes learned us hear in England the use of those tosticatein lickers [intoxicating] as well as y^e breweing of Aele and a fit emblem for those that use that intosticating licker which berefts them of their sennes.”[531]

The Wild Man, therefore, on a sign at Quarry Hill, Ladybridge, Leeds, is the same as the Green Man.

2^o. The second version of this sign is, that it is intended for a forester, and in that garb the Green Man is now invariably represented; even as far back as the seventeenth century, it is evident from the trades tokens that the Green Man was generally a forester, and, in many cases, Robin Hood himself, which may be inferred from the small figure frequently introduced beside him, and meant for Little John. The ballads always described Robin and his merry men as dressed in green, “Lincoln green.” When Robin meets the page who brings him presents from Queen Katherine:—

And in the same ballad, when he is going to court, “he clothed his men in Lincolne greene,” &c. Drayton, in his “Polyolbion,” says:—

Sometimes it is called Kendal green:—

It was, in fact, the ordinary dress of foresters and woodmen, and is so still in Germany.

One of the most noted Green Man taverns was that on Stroud Green, Islington, formerly the residence of Sir Th. Stapleton, of Gray’s Court, Bart., whose initials, with those of his wife, and the date 1609, were to be seen on the façade. It was one of the suburban retreats frequented by the fashion in the days of Charles I., when it had been converted into a tavern. A century ago the sign bore the following inscription:—

A club used to meet annually at this place, styling themselves the Lord Mayor, Aldermen, and Corporation of Stroud Green.[533] At Dulwich, in the reign of George II., there was another Green Man, a place of amusement for the Londoners during the summer season; it is enumerated, with other similar resorts, in the following stanza:—

The Merry Andrew was a card-maker’s sign; in the Banks Collection there is a shopbill of the time of Queen Anne, of Edward Hall, card-maker to her Majesty at the Merry Andrew, in Piccadilly. The playing-cards at that time used to have certain heads on the wrapper, according to which they were denominated. Merry Andrew was one of them. Other sorts had the Great Mogul, Henry VII., Henry VIII., and the Duke of Savoy, (Prince Eugene;) second-class cards had the Queen of Hungary, the Spaniard, the beau, and the Merry Andrew. The original Merry Andrew is said to have been a certain Doctor Andrew Borde, born at Pevensey in the fifteenth century, and educated at Winchester and New College, Oxford, but who obtained his doctor’s degree at Montpellier. His writings abound with witticisms, which are reported also to have pervaded his speech. He is said to have frequented fairs, markets, and other “busy haunts of men,” haranguing the people in order to increase his practice in physic. He had many followers and imitators, whence it came that those who affected the same language and gestures were called Merry Andrews. Notwithstanding all this mirth and animal spirits, he professed himself a Carthusian, lived in celibacy, drank water three days in the week, wore a hair shirt, and nightly hung his shroud at the foot of his bed. He is said to have been physician to King Henry VIII., and member of the College of Physicians in London. He died a prisoner in the Fleet in 1549. More celebrated than his works on physic are his “Merry Tales of the Wise Men of Gotham,” and the “Merry History of the Miller of Abingdon.”

Lower down still in the sphere of callings and professions the signs will take us. At Oswald Wistle, Accrington, we meet with the Tinker’s Budget. The budget is the tinker’s bag of instruments; we see the word thus used in Randle Holme:[535]—“A Tinker with his budget on his back, having always in his mouth this merry cry:—‘Have you any work for a Tinker?’” And Shakespeare, in the “Winter’s Tale:”

This inn, then, is certainly very modest in its pretensions; but we shall descend lower still. Even “poor Tom’s flock of wild geese,” otherwise Tom of Bedlam, we have now to introduce. We find him at Balsall, Warwick, and no doubt it was formerly not an uncommon sign, since he was such a favourite in ballads; the Merry Tom, at Kirkcumbeck, Cumberland, evidently refers to the same individual. Notwithstanding all the fantastic ballads that went under Tom’s name, he was but a sorry rogue. Randle Holme[536] says:—

“The Sow gelder and Tom of Bedlam are both wandering knaves alike, and such as are seldom or never out of their way, having their home in any place. The first is described as carrying a long staff, with a head like[370] a spear or a half pike, and a horn hung by his side from a broad leather belt or girdle cross his shoulders. Tom of Bedlam is in the same garb, with a long staff, and a Cow or Ox Horn by his side, but his cloathing is more fantastic or ridiculous, for being a mad man he is madly decked and dressed all over with Rubins, Feathers, cuttings of cloth and what not; to make him seem a madman or one distracted, when he is no other but a dissembling knave.”

“The Canting Academy,” 1674, gives them a similar attire and character:—

“Abram-men, otherwise called Tom of Bedlams; they are very strangely and antickly garbed, with several coloured ribands or tape in their hats, it may be instead of a feather, a fox tail hanging down a long stick, with ribands streaming and the like; yet for all their seeming madness they have wit enough to steal as they go.”[537]

Aubrey says:—

“Before the Civil Warre, I remember Tom o’ Bedlams went about a begging. They had been such as had been in Bedlam and there recovered and come to some degree of soberness, and when they were licensed to goe out they had on their left arme an armilla of tinne (printed) about three inches breadth, which was sodered on.”[538]

This permission, if ever it was granted, was retracted after the Restoration, for in the year 1675 the London Gazette contained in several numbers the following advertisement:—

“Whereas several Vagrant Persons do wander about the city of London and countries, pretending themselves to be Lunaticks under cure in the Hospitall of Bethlem, commonly called Bedlam, with brass plates upon their arms and inscriptions thereon, These are to give notice that there is no such liberty given to any Patients kept in the Hospital for their cure, neither is any such plate as a distinction or mark put upon any Lunatick during their being there or when discharged thence. And that the same is a false pretence to colour their wandering and begging and deceive the people to the dishonour of the Government of that Hospital.”

Not only men but also women of a roving disposition, adopted poor Tom’s horn, and went wandering, begging, and pilfering under the name of Bess of Bedlam, which is still seen as a sign in Oak Street, Norwich. Bess was an old companion of poor Tom, for in the play of King Lear, Tom sings a snatch of a song with the words, “Come over the bourn, Bessy, to me,” and in the jollities of Plough Monday the fool and Bessy are two of the principal personages.[539]

A third class of beggars called Mumpers, is also found on the signboard under the name of the Three Mumpers.

Thus, after having gone through all ranks of society, from the palace to the cottage, and from the sceptre to Tom’s staff with a fox-tail, we now come to the great leveller Death, who also was represented on the signboard. There were the Three Death’s-heads in Wapping, of which house trades tokens are extant; probably it was an apothecary’s, though it was a ghastly sign for his customers. Undertakers were also strictly professional in their choice. In the eighteenth century there were the Four Coffins over against Somerset House,[540] and another in Fleet Street, the sign of Stephen Roome,[541] whose son was the unfortunate author whom Pope has “gibbeted” in the Dunciad, as afflicted with a “funereal frown.” Savage, one of Pope’s literary sicarii, calls Roome “a perfect town-author,”[542] and has drawn his portrait in “An Author to be let, by Iscariot Hackney:”—

“Had it not been more laudable for Mr Roome, the son of an undertaker, to have borne a link and a mourning staff, in the long procession of a funeral—or even been more decent in him to have sung psalms according to education, in an Anabaptist meeting, than to have been altering the Jovial Crew or Merry Beggars into a wicked imitation of the Beggars’ Opera?”

Another undertaker, James Maddox, clerk and coffin-maker of St Olave’s, had for a sign the Sugar-loaf and three Coffins. The addition of the sugar-loaf has, of course, nothing to do with his profession, for when death calls, the sweets of life are past. It was simply the sign of a former tenant, suspended in front or fixed in the wall of the house. Although the undertakers of the present day do not display signs as of old, they advertise their calling quite as effectually. The men who in their handbills solicit us to try their “economic funerals,” or to test one of their “three guinea respectable interments,—one trial only asked,” are commercial with the rest of the age, although we might wish that they would force themselves a little less upon our attention. One undertaker recently hit upon what he deemed a brilliant method of advertising his cheap funerals. He selected some good names from the “Court Guide,” and sent out hundreds of telegrams announcing the low prices at which a “body” could be interred. Some reached their destination just as the lady or gentleman “body” was sitting down to dinner, others as the “parties” were dressing, or in the act of leaving home; but although the scheme failed, the name of the undertaker and his prices were firmly fixed in people’s memories, and he received, instead of orders, numerous cautions not to telegraph in that way again.

An undertaker in Islington, some years ago, exhibited in his window some pleasing artistic efforts of his children, which must have greatly comforted the father. “Master A., aged 12 years,” had produced a grinning skeleton, garnished with worms and cross-bones; and “Miss B., aged 10,” had painted in colours a section of a vault, with coffin heads, skulls, and sexton’s tools, neatly arranged right and left. The drawings were framed and glazed, and parental pride had placed them in the best spot in the windows.

CHAPTER XI.
THE HOUSE AND THE TABLE.

Instead of carved or painted signs hung above the doors, many shop and tavern keepers preferred to designate their houses after some external feature, such as the colour of the building—thus we find the Red house, the White house, the Blue house, the Dark house, &c. Others painted their door-posts a particular colour, whence the origin of the well-known Blue Posts. In still older times painted posts or poles in front of the houses seem occasionally to have served as signs; to some such distinction, at least Caxton’s Red Poles, as mentioned in one of his advertisements, seems to refer:—

“If it please ony man spirituel or temporel to bye our pyes of two or thre comemoracio’s of salisburi use, emprynted after the form of this prese’t letre whiche ben wel and truly correct, late hym come Westmonester into the almonestrye at the Reed Pale, and he shal have them good and chepe:

Supplico stet cedula.”

Even in the seventeenth century such a distinction was still occasionally used, as the Green Pales in Peter Street, Westminster;[543]—and Stukeley[544] speaks of Mr Brown’s garden at the Green Poles, where an urn was dug up lined with lead and filled with earth and bones. In Etheredge’s play “She Would if she Could,” the Black Posts in James Street are named, (Act i., sc. 1, 1703;) whilst the newspapers in the beginning of the eighteenth century contain advertisements stating that the mineral water from Hampstead Wells might be obtained, at the rate of 3d. a flask, from the lessee of the wells, who lived at the Black Posts in King Street, near Guildhall.

Garden-houses, or Summer-houses, attached to a building, were also used to designate shops and residences, as appears from a trades token “at the garden-house in Blackfriars,” and also from a newspaper advertisement of 1679, where the garden-house in King Street, St Giles, is mentioned. Frequent allusions to these garden-houses are found in the old plays; they appear to have been similar in all intents and purposes to the petites maisons of the profligate French nobility in the times of the Régence. Stubbe, in his “Anatomy of Abuses,” severely attacks them:—

“In the suburbes of the citie they have gardens either paled or walled round about very high, with their harbers and bowers fit for the purpose; and lest they might be espied in those open places, they have their banqueting houses, with galleries, turrets, and what not, therein sumptuously erected, wherein they may, and doubtless do, many of them, play the filthy persons.”

The young Rake in Shakespeare’s spurious play of the “London Prodigal,” (1604,) says to the lady:—

“Now, God thank you, sweet lady, if you have any friend, or a garden-house where you may employ a poor gentleman as your friend, I am yours to command in all sweet service.”

And Corisca in Massinger’s “Bondsman,” (Act i., sc. 3):—

“And if need be I have a couch and banqueting-house in my orchard, where many a man of honour has not scorned to spend an afternoon.”

He also alludes to it in the “City Madam.” A remnant of this custom is still to be traced in a few country towns, (Sunderland for instance,) where the middle classes have little gardens, in the outskirts of the town, with bowers and wooden summer-houses for tea-drinkings. In Holland they still flourish; the family usually take tea in them, whilst paterfamilias placidly smokes his pipe and listens to the croaking of the frogs and the lowing of the cows in the flat meadows beyond.

The Well and Bucket is a sign in Shoreditch, not badly chosen, as it intimates an inexhaustible supply; it is of very old standing in London, for it is mentioned in the “Paston Letters” in the year 1472.[545]

“I pray God send you all your desires and me my mewed goss-hawk in haste, or, rather than fail, a scar-hawk; there is a grocer dwelling right over against the Well with Two Buckets, a little from St Helen’s Church, hath ever hawks to sell.”

The anxiety about the bird, expressed in this letter, is most amusing:—“I ask no more good of you for all the services that I shall do you, while the world standeth, but a goss-hawk,” is the commencement of the letter, which concludes:—

“Now, think on me, good lord, for if I have not an hawk I shall wax fat for default of labour, and dead for default of company by my troth.”

In old times the ale-house windows were generally open, so that the company within might enjoy the fresh air, and see all that was going on in the street; but, as the scenes within were not always fit to be seen by the “profanum vulgus” that passed by, a trellis was put up in the open window. This trellis, or lattice, was generally painted red, to the intent, it has been jocularly suggested, that it might harmonise with the rich hue of the customers’ noses; which effect, at all events, was obtained by the choice of this colour. Thus Pistol says:—

“He called me even now by word through a red lattice, and I could see no part of his face from the window.”

The same idea is expressed in the “Last Will and Testament of Lawrence Lucifer,” 1604:—

“Watched sometimes ten hours together in an ale-house, ever and anon peeping forth and sampling thy nose with the red lattice.”

So common was this fixture, that no ale-house was without it:—

“A whole street is in some places but a continuous ale-house, not a shop to be seen between red lattice and red lattice.”—Decker’s English Villanies Seven Times Pressed to Death.

At last it became synonymous with ale-house:—

“As well known by my wit as an ale-house by a red lattice.”[546]

“Trusty Rachel was drinking burnt brandy with a couple of tinder-box cryers at the next red lattice.”[547]

The lattices continued in use until the beginning of the eighteenth century, and after they disappeared from the windows were adopted as signs, and as such they continue to the present day. The Green Lattice occurs on a trades token of Cock Lane, and still figures at the door of an ale-house in Billingsgate, whilst not many years ago there was one, in Brownlow Street, Holborn, which had been corrupted into the Green Lettuce.

When balconies were newly introduced, they were also used in the place of signs. Lord Arundel was the inventor of them, and Covent Garden the first place where they became general. “Every house here has one of ’em,” says Richard Broome, in 1659. Trades tokens “of the Bellconey,” in Bedford Street, are still extant, and also tokens of “John Williams, the king’s chairman, at y^e lower end of St Martin’s Lane, at y^e Balconey. 1667.” The first house that adopted a balcony was situated at the corner of Chandos Street, “which country people were wont much to gaze on;” soon, however, they became so common that further distinctions had to be added, as the Iron Balcony, (St James’ Street, 1699,) the Blue and Gilt Balcony, (Hatton Street, 1673.) Lamps have also, for two or three centuries, frequently done duty as signs, and continue still to act as beacons to those who want the assistance of the doctor, the chemist, or the sweep. Ale and coffee-houses, too, are frequently decorated with gorgeous lamps: this was already the custom in Tom Brown’s time:—

“Every coffee-house is illuminated both without and within doors; without by a fine Glass Lanthorn, and within by a woman so light and splendid you may see through her without the help of a Perspective.”[548]

The Moorfield quacks had always lamps at their doors at night, with round glasses, having the same colours as the balls in their signs, and this custom has been handed down to our day by the chemists, who still have circular, red, green, and yellow bull’s-eye glasses in their lamps.

In Paris, in the sixteenth century, the pastry-cooks used at nights to place a kind of lamp in their windows, which acted as magic lanterns. They were made of transparent paper, covered with rudely-painted figures of men and animals. Regnier mentions them in his eleventh satire:—