Near Basingstoke there is a public-house sign representing a grenadier in full uniform, holding in his hand a foaming pot of ale; it is called the Whitley Grenadier, and bears the following disinterested verses:—

This sign seems to have been suggested by the tragical death of a grenadier, which is thus recorded on a tombstone in the churchyard of Winchester Cathedral:—

To which a wag appended the following lines:—

The Flitch of Dunmow is a common sign in Essex, and is sometimes seen in other counties. The custom of giving a flitch of bacon, on the well-known conditions, is not peculiar to Dunmow. In the reign of Edward III., the Earl of Lancaster, lord of the honour of Tutbury, granted a manor near Wichnor village, Burton-upon-Trent, to Sir Philip de Sommerville, stipulating that he was to give a flitch of bacon on the same conditions as at Dunmow.[601] At the abbey of St Milaine, near Rennes, in Normandy, the same custom was observed, but the practice was still less successful, for Dunmow at least has six times given the side of bacon away, but—

“A l’abbaye de Saint Milaine près Rennes y a plus de six cents ans ont un costé de lard encore tout frais et non corrompu; et néanmoins ont voué et ordonné aux premiers qui par an et jour ensemble mariez ont vescu sans debat, grondement et sans s’en repentir.”[602]

Our next sign is geographical only in its relationship. At Wansford Bridge, which crosses the river Nen in Northampton, there is the Haycock Inn, deriving its name from a curious incident: the river overflowed its banks and carried away a haycock with a man upon it. Taylor, the Water poet, says of the circumstance:—

The stone bridge, of thirteen arches, carries the Great North Road across the river, so much traversed in the coaching times; and well known to many a traveller in those days was the Haycock Inn, at one end of the bridge, which has on the signboard a pictorial representation of the scene.

Scotland, which, besides Edinburgh ales and Highland whisky, produces a great many publicans, is honoured in numberless signs. Land o’ Cakes, the name given by Burns to the country of the “brighter Scotch,” is a sign at Middle Hill Gate, near Stockport. And here we may observe the popularity of Burns among the publicans, for not only is the poet himself, and several of his amusing heroes, exalted in innumerable places among the “living dead,” but at Kirby Moor some of his verses are even introduced on the sign:—

Very good advice indeed.

Since the Highlander’s love for snuff and whisky was such, that he wished to have “a Benlomond of snuff, and a Loch Lomond of whisky,” nobody could make a better public-house sign than the Highland Laddie, nor a better snuff-shop sign than the kilted Highlander who stands generally at the door of these establishments. Two others of the lares and penates of the tobacconist are the Sailor and the Moor or Oriental. The first presiding over the snuff, the second over the chewing, the third over the smoking “department,”—as the drapers term the divisions of their shop. After the rebellion of 1745, when everything was done by the Government to extinguish the nationality of the Scotch, when Scotch ballads were forbidden, and the names of some clans were deemed more odious than the word raka to the Jews, the kilt was forbidden by the legislature as an abomination. On that occasion the following trifle appeared in the newspapers:—

“We hear that the dapper wooden Highlanders, who guard so heroically the doors of snuff-shops, intend to petition the Legislature, in order that they may be excused from complying with the act of Parliament with regard to their change of dress: alledging that they have ever been faithful subjects to his Majesty, having constantly supplied his Guards with a pinch out of their Mulls when they marched by them, and so far from engaging in any Rebellion, that they have never entertained a rebellious thought; whence they humbly hope that they shall not be put to the Expense of buying new cloaths.”

The ubiquity of the Scotch packman produced the sign of the Scotchman’s Pack, St Michael’s Hill, Bristol, and in some other places. From the following passage it appears that these Scottish packmen, in the sixteenth century, penetrated even as far as Poland:—“Ane pedder is called are merchõd or cremar quha beirs are pack or creame[603] upon his bak, quha are called beirares of the puddill be the Scottesmen in the realme of Polonia, quhair I saw an greate multitude in the town of Cracovia, anno Dom. 1569.”[604]

Gretna Green used at one time to be a not very uncommon sign on the Border; there is one at Ayeliffe, Darlington. The origin of marriages at this place is not so generally known that it would be superfluous to introduce it here. Marriages in Scotland at all times having been considered legal if two parties accepted each other for man and wife in the presence of witnesses, a dissipated tobacconist, named Joseph Paisley, about a century ago, conceived the idea of opening an establishment on the Border to unite runaway couples in wedlock. For this purpose he selected the common, or green, between Graitney and Springfield, in Dumfries-shire, a place called Megshill, the first Scottish ground on entering the country from Cumberland; there he commenced business. In 1791 he settled in the then newly-built village of Springfield, but the reputation of his impromptu marriage-temple on Graitney Common, (or Gretna Green, as the English called it,) had already so widely spread that the name of the place had passed into a by-word for clandestine marriages. Paisley died in 1814, but marriage-mongering had become a trade in Springfield, and several self-appointed parsons started up to fill the office. Pennant says that in 1771 a young couple might be united “from two guineas a job to a dram of whisky” by a fisherman, a joiner, or a blacksmith; but the prices rose much higher afterwards, varying from £40 to half-a-guinea, and this last sum was only accepted from pedestrian couples. As a rule, the fee was settled by the post-boys from Carlisle, each patronising certain houses, and the hymeneal priests, knowing the value of their patronage, permitted them to go snacks in the proceeds. It is estimated that about 300 couples a year used to get married in this off-hand manner.

Of our colonies, Gibraltar and the Cape of Good Hope seem to be almost the only ones considered worthy the honour of the signboard. Gibraltar became popular as soon as the acquisition had been esteemed at its proper value. As for the Cape of Good Hope, the frequency of this sign all over England seems to render it probable that it was not so much adopted in honour of the colony as to express the landlord’s hope of success, and therefore as a sort of equivalent to the Hope and Anchor, or the Hope.[605] The Jamaica tavern, too, may have been christened in compliment to the birth-place of rum. There is a house with this name in Bermondsey, which is one of the many houses stated in our time to have been a residence of Oliver Cromwell. “The building, of which only a moiety now remains, and that very ruinous, the other having been removed years ago to make room for modern erections, presents probably almost the same features as when tenanted by the Protector. The carved quatrefoils and flowers upon the staircase beams, the old-fashioned fastenings of the doors—‘bolts, locks, and bars’—the huge single gable, (which in a modern house would be double,) even the divided section, like a monstrous amputated stump, imperfectly plastered over, patched here and there with planks, slates, and tiles, to keep the wind and weather out, though it be very poorly—all are in keeping; and the glimmer of the gas, by which the old and ruinous kitchen into which we strayed was dimly lighted, seemed to ‘pale its ineffectual fires’ in striving to illumine the old black settles, and still older wainscot.”[606] After the Restoration, this house seems to have become a tavern, and here, according to the homely, kind-hearted custom of the times, Pepys, on Sunday, April 14, 1667, took his wife and her maids to give them a day’s pleasure. “Over the water to the Jamaica house, where I never was before, and then the girls did run wagers on the bowling green, and there with much pleasure spent little, and so home.” Subsequently, he frequently returned to this place, which seems to have been the same he elsewhere calls The Halfway House. Besides this, there is the Jamaica and Madeira coffee-house, a well-known business club or tavern in St Michael’s Alley, Cornhill.

Only a few European nations and towns are represented. Amongst the Bagford shopbills there is one of a perfumer, named Dighton, who, in the reign of Queen Anne, sold “true Hungary Water, all sorts of snuff and perfumes,” &c. His shop was next door to the King’s Head Tavern at Chancery Lane End, and had the sign of the City of Sevilla; the woodcut above his shop-bill presents a distant family resemblance to that place, and with a little goodwill one may recognise the Alcazar, the Giralda, San Clementi, and San Juan de la Palma; the view is taken from the suburb of Triana, on the other side of the river. This “famous Henry Dighton,” as he styles himself in an advertisement in 1718, “sworn perfumer in ordinary to H. M. King George,” had chosen the sign of the City of Sevilla from the fact of his importing Spanish snuff, the fashionable mixture in those days, which the gallants dislodged with such airy elegance from among the lace frills of their shirts and neckties. His successor, Henry Coulthurst, promised “to furnish greater variety of the choicest and truest snuff than any perfumer in England, viz., Havana, Port St Mary’s, Barcelona, Port Mahon, Seville, plain Spanish, and fine Lisbon.” These Spanish snuffs had come greatly into fashion at the capture of Puerta St Maria, near Cadiz, when the fleet, under Sir George Rooke, captured several thousand barrels of snuff. But long before that time enormous quantities of Spanish tobacco had been yearly imported into England.

“There was wont to come out of Spain,” said Sir Edwin Sandys, in 1620, “a great mass of money to the value of £100,000 per annum for our cloths and other merchandises; and now we have from thence for all our cloth and merchandises nothing but tobacco: nay, that will not pay for all the tobacco we have from thence, but they have more from us in money every year, £20,000; so there goes out of this kingdom as good as £120,000 for tobacco every year.”[607]

The Three Spanish Gypsies, in the New Exchange, was the shop of the future “Monkey Duchess,” the nickname given by her aristocratic friends to Anne Monk, Duchess of Albemarle. “She was the daughter of John Clarges, a farrier in the Savoy, and horse-shoer to Colonel Monk. In 1632 she was married, in the church of St Lawrence Poultney, to Thomas Radford, son of Thomas Radford, late a farrier, servant to Prince Charles, and resident in the Mews. She had a daughter who was born in 1634, and died in 1638. She lived with her husband at the Three Spanish Gypsies, in the New Exchange, and sold wash-balls, powder, gloves, and such things, and taught girls plain work. About 1647, being a sempstress to Colonel Monk, she used to carry him his linen. In 1648 her father and mother died. The year after she fell out with her husband, and they parted. But no certificate from any parish register appears reciting his burial. In 1652 she was married in the church of St George, Southwark, to General Monk, and in the following year was delivered of a son, Christopher, (afterwards the second and last Duke of Albemarle,) who was suckled by Honour Mills, who sold apples, herbs, and oysters.”[608] What became of her first husband, and when he died, is not known.

Venice was the sign of B. Martin, a bookseller in the Old Bailey, circa 1640, adopted probably in honour of the Aldi, the famous printers, who carried on business in this city. In the reign of Charles II. there was a house of indifferent fame in Moorfields, called the Russia House, whether opened during the time that the Russian ambassadors visited the king, or how it obtained its name, is not known. The house became notorious in 1667 through the trial of Gabriel Holmes and a band of incendiaries, among whom were two young boys, sons of James Montague of Lackham, grandsons of the Earl of Manchester. The boys turned king’s evidence, and Holmes was hanged. Russia House was one of the places where they planned their expeditions and spent their money: the object of their incendiarism, it came out at the trial, was simply that they might steal the goods which would be flung into the streets by the terrified inmates of the burning houses.

The Antwerp tavern was a famous house behind the Exchange, in the seventeenth century, of which tokens are extant, representing a view of Antwerp from the river. The extensive trade of Flanders, in the middle ages and long after, made Antwerp a favourite subject for signboards, it being the best harbour in Flanders. In Dieppe there is still a house on the Quai Henri IV., bearing a stone bas-relief sign of Antwerp, (la ville d’Anvers,) with the date 1697; but this house and sign are named, as early as 1645, in a MS. list of rents of houses in Dieppe, due to the Archbishop of Rouen.

Dutchmen, in some instances, have been appointed the tutelar saints of public-houses, on account of their reputed love for drink; thus we have the Two Dutchmen at Marsden, near Huddersfield, and the Jovial Dutchman at Crick, in Derbyshire. Now, though the Dutchman’s joviality is questionable, yet he certainly has at all times been reputed a heavy drinker. Shakespeare names, “your swag-bellied Hollander,” along with the Dane and German, as the only (though unsuccessful) rival of the English in the art of hard drinking. Massinger, in his “Duke of Florence,” has a similar remark; and Sir Richard Baker, in his “Chronicles,” says that the English “in these Dutch wars learned to be drunkards, and as we do not like to do things by halves in this country, we soon surpassed our masters.” Decker remarks that “Drunkenness, which was once the Dutchman’s headake, is now become the Englishman’s.”[609] Upsy Dutch and upsy freeze (for “op zyn Dutch,” and “op zyn Vriesch,” à la Dutch and à la Vriesch) are terms constantly used by Decker to denote a very drunken condition. Yet there was a time, long before the “Dutch wars,” when the English did not want any foreign masters to teach them drinking; how could it have been otherwise with descendants of the beer-drinking Saxons and Danes? Malmesbury complains that in his time “the English fashion was to sit bibbing whole hours after dinner, as the Normane guise was to walke and get up and downe in the stretes with great waines of idle serving men following them;”[610] and Hollinshed, who wrote at the very time of the Dutch wars, mentions among the improvements which old men in his time observed, was that the farmers could pay their rent without selling a cow or a horse, as they had been wont to do in former times, “owing to too much attention to the ale-house, and too little to work.”

Notwithstanding this, the Jovial Dutchman is a very good sign for licensed victuallers, since the general opinion is:—

Besides drinking, the Dutchman has long had a reputation for smoking, whence the tobacconists of the last century used frequently to have on their sign, a Scotchman, a Dutchman, and a sailor, with the following rhyme:—

A tobacconist in Kingsland Road had the same men, but a different reading of the text:—

The introduction of coffee produced signs of various sultans, but the Turk’s Head may, perhaps, date from earlier times, possessing an origin similar to the Saracen’s Head. The Turks throughout the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, were a common topic of conversation, and the bugbear of the European nations. This is well exemplified in the church-wardens’ accounts of St Helen’s, Abingdon, where the following entry occurs:—“Anno MDLXV—8 of Q. Eliz.—payde for two bokes of common prayer agaynste invading of the Turke, 0. 6.” That year the Turks had made a descent upon the isle of Malta, where they besieged the town and castle of St Michael; but upon the approach of the fleet of the Order, they broke up the siege and suffered a considerable loss in their flight. During the war of Emperor Maximilian against the Turks in Hungary, similar prayer-books were annually purchased for the parish. The first prototypes of newspapers, also, were the printed despatches concerning the battles and engagements of the emperor with the Turks,[613] and even at the end of the seventeenth century no newspaper was complete without its news from the Danube and “movements of the Turks.” One of the earliest patents granted for pistols, contains a clause that square balls are not to be used, “except against the Turks.” The number of Turk’s Heads in London in the seventeenth century was considerable; not less than eight trades tokens of different houses with this sign are known to exist.

In 1667, Robert Boulter, at the Turk’s Head in Bishopsgate, published the first edition of Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” It was with difficulty that the author sold the copy for five pounds! he was to receive £5 more after the sale of the 1300 copies which comprised the first impression, and £5 more after the sale of each new impression of 1300 copies each. “And what a poor consideration was this,” says one of his biographers, “for such an inestimable performance,” and how much more do others get by the works of great authors than the authors themselves! And yet we find that Hoyle, the author of the “Treatise on the Game of Whist,” after having disposed of the whole of the first impression, sold the copyright to the bookseller for two hundred guineas.

Dr Johnson used often to take supper at the Turk’s Head in the Strand: “I encourage this house, (said he;) for the mistress of it is a good, civil woman, and has not much business.”[614] At another Turk’s Head, Gerrard Street, Soho, Johnson formed, in 1763, that well-known club, which was long without a name, but which after Garrick’s funeral became distinguished by the name of the Literary Club.

“Sir Joshua Reynolds had the merit of being the first proposer of it, to which Johnson acceded, and the original members were Sir Joshua Reynolds, Dr Johnson, Mr Edmund Burke, Dr Nugent, Mr Beauclerck, Mr Langton, Dr Goldsmith, Mr Chamier, and Sir John Hawkins. They met at the Turk’s Head in Gerrard Street, Soho, one evening every week, at seven, and generally continued their conversation till a pretty late hour. This club has been gradually increased to its present [1791] number thirty-five. After about ten years, instead of supping weekly, it was resolved to dine together once a fortnight during the meeting of Parliament.”[615]

After the death of the landlord of this house, the club removed to the Prince in Sackville Street; and after two or three more changes, it finally settled down at the Thatched House, St James’s. The original portrait of Sir Joshua Reynolds, presented to the club by the painter himself, is still preserved; one of its peculiarities is, that the artist has represented himself wearing spectacles. The club is still in existence, under the name of the Dilettanti Club. “The Turk’s Head in Gerrard Street, Soho,” says Moser in his Memorandum-book, “was, more than fifty years since, removed from a tavern of the same sign, the corner of Greek and Compton Streets. This place was a kind of head-quarters for the Loyal Association during the rebellion of 1745.”[616]

About that time there was a waiter in this tavern, who, like Tennyson’s waiter at the Cock, Templebar, had obtained considerable celebrity. His name was Little Will. On an engraving dated 1752, he is represented as a small man with a large head and a periwig, dressed in a long apron, with a pair of snuffers suspended from the waist. The Rev. Mr Huddersford, of Trinity College, Oxford, in a letter to Granger, says,—

“Little Will, as I have heard, was a great favourite with the gentlemen of the coffee-house; there is a print representing him in his constant attitude, apparently insensible to anything around him, but swallowing every article of politicks that dropped, which, I am told, he understands better than any of his masters.”

The Three Turks was a sign at Norwich in 1750,[617] and even now, though the crescent is decidedly in the “last quarter,” there are still signs of Turks to be found, as the Turk and Slave, Brick Lane, Spitalfields; the Great Turk (i.e., the Sultan) at Wolverhampton—the last is of considerable antiquity, for in 1600 it was the sign of John Barnes, a bookseller in Fleet Street. One of the most opulent Turkish towns was commemorated by the Smyrna coffee-house, in Pall Mall, a fashionable coffee-house in the reign of Queen Anne, when the wits and beaux used to take their constitutional in St James’ Park, and then go to the Smyrna, where, sitting before the open windows, they could see the ladies carried past in their sedans or coaches, on their return from the Mall. This coffee-house seems to have had a reputation for politics. In the Tatler, (No. 10,) a “cluster of wise heads” is said to sit every evening from the left side of the fire at the Smyrna to the door; and in No. 78, the public is informed that “the seat of learning is now removed from the corner of the chimney on the left hand towards the window, to the round table in the middle of the floor, over against the fire; a revolution much lamented by the porters and chairmen, who were greatly edified through a pane of glass that remained broken all the last summer.” Prior, Swift, and Pope, were constant visitors at this house.

There was a Grecian coffee-house in Devereux Court, Strand, which for nearly two centuries was equally well frequented. It derived its name probably from having been opened by a Greek, the natives of that country having been among the first to open coffee-houses in London. It was a very fashionable house in the time of the Spectators and Tatlers: “My face is likewise very well known at the Grecian,” says Addison in Spectator, No. 1. It seems generally to have been frequented by literati and savants, some of them rather hot-headed:—

“I remember two gentlemen, who were constant companions, disputing one evening at the Grecian coffee-house, concerning the accent of a Greek word. This dispute was carried to such a length that the two friends thought proper to determine it with their swords; for this purpose they stept into Devereux Court, where one of them (whose name, if I remember right, was Fitzgerald) was run through the body, and died on the spot.”[618]

In this coffee-house Mrs Mapp, the famous bone-setter, (see p. 113) performed her cures before Sir Hans Sloane:—

“On Saturday and yesterday, Mrs Mapp performed several operations at the Grecian coffee-house, particularly one upon a niece of Sir Hans Sloane,[430] to his great satisfaction and her credit. The patient had her shoulder-bone out for about nine years.”—Grub Street Journal, October 21, 1736.

The coffee-house was closed in 1843; a bust of Essex is in front of the house it formerly occupied with the inscription, “This is Devereux Court, 1676.”

Various reasons are given to account for the sign of the Saracen’s Head. “When our countrymen came home from fighting with the Saracens, and were beaten by them, they pictured them with huge, big, terrible faces, (as you still see the sign of the Saracen’s Head is,) when, in truth, they were like other men. But this they did to save their own credit.”[619] Or the sign may have been adopted by those who had visited the Holy Land, either as pilgrims or when fighting the Saracens. Others, again, hold that it was first set up in compliment to the mother of Thomas à Becket, who was the daughter of a Saracen: formerly the sign was very general. During the time of the Commonwealth, the Saracen’s Head in Islington was a place of resort for the Londoners. In the “Walks of Islington and Hogsden, with the Humours of Wood Street Compter,” a comedy by Thomas Jordan, gentleman, 1648, the scene is laid at that tavern. It was also the sign of the house occupied by Sir Christopher Wren in Friday Street, which remained almost unchanged till it was taken down in 1844. The Saracen’s Head, Snow Hill, is one of the last remaining, and, at the same time, one of the oldest, being named in Dick Tarlton’s Jests as “the Sarracen’s Head without Newgate;” and Stow says, “next to this church [St Sepulchre’s in the Bailey] is a fair and large inn for receipt of travellers, and hath to sign the Sarrazen’s Head.” The courtyard has still many of the characteristics of an old English inn, with galleries all round leading to the bed-rooms, and a spacious gate, through which the dusty mail-coaches used to rumble in, the tired passengers creeping forth, and thanking their stars in having escaped the highwaymen, and the holes and sloughs of the road. How many hearts, beating with hope on their first entry into London, have passed under this gate, that now lie mouldering in the quiet little churchyards of the metropolis: some finding a resting-place in Westminster, whilst others ceased to beat at Tyburn. It was at this inn that Nicholas Nickleby and his uncle waited upon Squeers, the Yorkshire schoolmaster. Mr Dickens describes the old tavern as it was in the last years of our mail-coaching, when it was one of the most important places for arrivals and departures in London:—

“Near to the jail, and by consequence near to Smithfield also, and the Compter and the bustle and noise of the city; and just on that particular part of Snow Hill where omnibus horses going eastwards seriously think of falling down on purpose, and where horses in hackney cabriolets going westwards not unfrequently fall by accident, is the coach-yard of the Saracen’s Head Inn, its portals guarded by two Saracens’ heads and shoulders, which it was once the pride and glory of the choice spirits of this metropolis to pull down at night, but which have for some time remained in undisturbed tranquillity, possibly because this species of humour is now confined to Saint James’s parish, where door-knockers are preferred as being more portable, and bell-wires esteemed as convenient toothpicks. Whether this be the reason or not, there they are, frowning upon you from each side of the gateway; and the inn itself, garnished with another Saracen’s Head, frowns upon you from the top of the yard; while from the door of the hind boot of all the red coaches that are standing therein, there glares a small Saracen’s Head with a twin expression to the large Saracen’s Head below, so that the general appearance of the pile is of the Saracenic order.”

Blackamoors and other dark-skinned foreigners have always possessed considerable attractions as signs for tobacconists, and sometimes also for public-houses. Negroes, with feathered headdresses and kilts, smoking pipes, are to be seen outside tobacco-shops on the Continent, as well as in England. Thus, in the seventeenth century, there was one in Amsterdam with the following inscription:—

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Virginian was the most common in England, owing to the first tobacco having been imported from that country:—

“They returned homewards, passing by Virginia, a colony which Sir Walter Raleigh had there planted, from whence Drake brings home with him Walter Lane, who was the first that brought tobacco into England, which the Indians take against crudities of the stomach.”[621]

Publicans have a strange fancy for Indian Kings, Queens, and Chiefs, thus bearing out Trinculo’s assertion of the nation at large:—“When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian.” There is a sculptured sign of an Indian Chief at Shoreditch, having all the appearance of an old ship’s figure-head; and, as a nomen ac præterea nihil, it figures in many places. In Dolphin Lane, Boston, (Linc.,) there used formerly to be a sign with some fanciful, masked-ball dressed figures on it, which were meant to represent the Three Kings of Cologne; but they conveyed so little the idea of those holy personages, that the profanum vulgus called them the Three Merry Devils. Eventually, by a metamorphosis more strange than any in Ovid, these three merry devils were transformed into one very strangely dressed female called the Indian Queen. The African Chief, in Sommerstown, is evidently a variety of these Indian chiefs.

Another sign of venerable antiquity is the Black Boy. That this is of old standing, appears from an entry in Machyn’s Diary: “The XXX day of Desember 1562, was slayne in John Street, Gylbard Goldsmith, dwellyng at the sene of the Blake Boy, in the Cheap, by ys wyff’s sun.”

This Black Boy seems to have been a tobacconist’s sign from the first; for in Ben Jonson’s “Bartholomew Fair” we find:—“I thought he would have run mad o’ the Black Boy in Bucklersbury, that takes the scurvy roguy tobacco there.”—Act i., Scene 1.

In the seventeenth century, it was the sign of a celebrated ordinary in Southwark:—

At the Black Boy in Newgate Street, the Calves’ Head Club was sometimes held. It was not restricted to any particular house, but moved yearly from one place to another, as it was found most convenient. An axe was hung up in the club-room crowned with laurel: the bill of fare consisted of calves’ heads, dressed in various ways; a large pike, with a small one in his mouth, (an emblem of tyranny;) a large cod’s head; and a boar’s head, to indicate stupidity and bestiality.[622]

One of the early editions of Cocker’s Arithmetic was published at the Black Boy. Such was the fame of this work, that even as the Pythagorians swore in verba magistris, and αυτος ἑφη settled all questions, so our ancestors proved their points “according to Cocker.” The title of the work we must not abbreviate:—

“Cocker’s Arithmetic: Being a plain and familiar method, suitable to the meanest capacity, for the full understanding of that incomparable art, as now taught by the ablest schoolmasters in city and country. Composed by Thomas Cocker, late practioner in the art of writing, arithmetic, and engraving. Being that so long since promised to the world. Perused and published by John Hawkins, writing-master, near St George’s Church, in Southwark. By the author’s correct copy, and commended to the world by many eminent Mathematicians and writing-masters in and near London. Licensed September 1677. London: printed by J. R. for T. P., and are to be sold by John Back, at the Black Boy, on London Bridge. 1694. 12o.”

The Black Girl is a variety of this sign at Clareborough, Notts. So, too, appears to be the Arab Boy, an ale-house on the road between Putney and East-Sheen. The Two Black Boys occurs on one of the London trades tokens, where they are represented shaking hands. The Black Boy and Comb was, in 1730, a shop on Ludgate Hill, either a perfumer’s or a mercer’s, for he advertises “right French Hungary water, at 1s. 3d. a half pint bottle; fine Florence oil, at 2s. per flask; right orange flower water, at 1s. 6d. per flask; Barbadoes citron water, at 14s. per quart; and all sort of Bermudas, Leghorn, and fine silk hats for ladies,” &c.[623] The combination on the sign arose from the combs dangling at the doors of the shops where they were sold.

The Black Boy and Camel (doubtless a black boy leading a camel) was not many years ago the sign of a tavern in Leadenhall Street, where it was already in existence in the year 1700.

“The Annual feast for the Parish of St Dunstan, in Stepney, being revived, will be kept the 29th instant, at the King’s Head, in Stepney, where Tickets may be had, and at Tho. Warham’s, at the Black Boy and Camel, Leaden Hall Street,” &c.—London Gazette, August 15-19, 1700.

These parish feasts show most unmistakably the general conviviality of the time. Natives of the same county used also to have their public feasts. Thus the London Gazette for May 30 to June 3, 1700, advertises “the annual feast for gentlemen of the county of Huntingdon;” and the Gazette for October 21-24, “the anniversary feast for the gentlemen, natives of the county of Kent.” It is easy to imagine the attraction of such festivals in times when travelling was both very expensive and very dangerous,—when the post was badly conducted and extravagant in its charges; and, moreover, but few people could write. Such meetings, then, were the only ties that connected the provincial residing in London with the home of his childhood. At such times friends brought up in the same town or village could meet each other, talk over bygone times, call up the recollections of early years, remember mutual friends, and drink a bumper to those left behind. Sometimes these feasts took a religious turn, when a native of the county or district preached in the neighbouring church or chapel. Blessed occasions were these religious yet merry feasts of the olden time. But the “march of intellect”—that is to say, improved locomotion, the spread of reading, writing, and high notions—have done away with these meetings of warm hearts and jovial tempers as things low and vulgar.

Jerusalem was sure to figure early on signboards of those inns at which pilgrims, on their way to the Holy Land, were wont to put up; and long after pilgrimages were discontinued it was still retained as a sign. In 1657 we find it in Fleet Street. What the sign was like it is impossible now to say, but on the trades token of the house the Holy City is represented by one single building. There is another token extant of a house, also in Fleet Street, without date or name of the shop, on which there is a view of a town, with the usual conventional representation of the temple of Solomon. It was equally common in France. Regnard mentions one in Nogent:—

On a house in the Rue Etoupée, at Rouen, there is a stone carved sign of Jerusalem, represented as a fortified town, with a figure arriving on each side, evidently meant for pilgrims. A similar idea seems to be conveyed by the sign of Trip to Jerusalem, a public-house in Nottingham, and the Pilgrim in Coventry. There is still an Old Jerusalem tavern in Clerkenwell, so called after the Knights of St John, of whose hospital this house was the principal gateway.

Mount Pleasant is a name frequently bestowed upon public-houses, not always with any allusion to such a locality, but simply on account of its being an alluring name of the same maudlin class as Cottage of Content, Bank of Friendship, &c. There is said to be a mountain of that name in America, which obtained some celebrity from being the locality on which the sassafras (Orchis mascula) was gathered, the plant which produces the saloop. This drink came in vogue at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Reide’s coffee-house in Fleet Street was the first respectable house where it was sold. When it was opened in 1719, the following lines, painted on a board, hung in front of the house; in latter times, until the closing of the establishment in 1833, they were preserved in the coffee-room:—

Lockyer had begun life with half-a-crown, and by selling salop, or saloop, at Fleet-ditch, amassed sufficient to open the above place in Fleet Street, where he died worth £1000, in March 1739.[626]

Our old friend Pepys mentions going to China Hall, but gives no further particulars. It is not unlikely that this was the same place which, in the summer of 1777, was opened as a theatre. Whatever its use in former times, it was at that period the warehouse of a paper manufacturer. In those days the West-end often visited the entertainments of the East, and the new theatre was sufficiently patronised to enable the proprietors to venture upon some embellishments. The prices were—boxes, 3s.; pit, 2s.; gallery, 1s.; and the time of commencing varied from half-past six to seven o’clock, according to the season. “The Wonder,” “Love in a Village,” the “Comical Courtship,” and the “Lying Valet,” were among the plays performed. The famous Cooke was one of the actors in the season of 1778. In that same year the building suffered the usual fate of all theatres, and was utterly destroyed by fire.

One name we omitted to notice when speaking of signs derived from European cities—Copenhagen House. Until very recently, this stood isolated in the fields north of the metropolis, near the old road to Highgate. It was said to have derived its name from the fact of a Danish prince or ambassador having resided in it during a great plague in London. Another tradition is to the effect that, early in the seventeenth century, upon some political occasion, great numbers of Danes left that kingdom, and came to London; whereupon the house was opened by an emigrant from Copenhagen, as a place of resort for his countrymen resident in the metropolis. This tradition probably refers to the reign of James I., who was visited in London by his brother-in-law, the King of Denmark, at which time it is very probable that there was a considerable influx of persons from the Danish capital. Coopen-Hagen is the name given to the place in the map accompanying Camden’s Britannia, 1695. For many years previous to its demolition, the house had a great reputation amongst Cockney excursionists, and its tea-gardens, skittle-ground, Dutch pins, and particularly Fives Play, were great attractions. For this last game especially the place was very famous. The house possessed another attraction. From its windows a very fine view of London, the Thames, and the Surrey hills beyond, was obtainable. The New Cattle Market now occupies its site, and a modern public-house only perpetuates the name.

Besides the above-mentioned geographical signs, we have others of more modern introduction, such as the South Australian in Cadogan Street, Chelsea, and the North Pole in Oxford Street, which last commemorates one of those equally brave and unsuccessful expeditions that have taken place every now and then since Admiral Frobisher first started on the discovery of the Meta Incognita.

There exists a class of signs in some respects geographical, yet, from their indefinite character, they are more adapted for insertion in the following chapter than here. We allude to such tavern decorations as that picture of the fiery sun going down behind a hill, which is called The World’s End, at St George’s, near Bristol; The First and Last Inn in England, a sign which may be seen in many other localities besides at the Land’s End, in Cornwall; and No Place Inn, a public-house in the suburbs of Plymouth, the sign representing an old woman standing at the door, accosting her husband, just arrived—“Where have you been?” “No place.” Many others of an equally indefinite character might be given here, but they would be found to be even less topographical than those just named.