ANIMALS REAL AND IMAGINARY.
‘Lions, talbots, bears,
The badges of your famous ancestries.’
DRAYTON: _Barons’ Wars_.
ONE or two of the signs to be dealt with under this heading are purely
heraldic; others are allied to nature, and have, as far I am aware, no
connection with heraldry. The stone carving of an ape seated on its
haunches and eating an apple belonged to this class; it had on it the
initials B M with date 1670, and some years ago was to be seen built
into a wall on the west side of Philip Lane, exactly opposite the Ward
School of Cripplegate Within. The space at the back was occupied by
a court, the whole being now swallowed up in the premises of Messrs.
Rylands and Sons. This marked the site of an ancient galleried inn of
which it had been the sign. A similar piece of sculpture is or was
lately in a street called the Sporrengasse at Basle. A little further
east in Philip Lane a modern sculptured cock commemorates Cock Court,
now destroyed, where another ancient inn had once stood. Drawings of
both are preserved in the British Museum.
Not far from Philip Lane, at 17a, Addle Street, there is a fine
bas-relief of a bear with collar and chain; it is above the first-floor
window of a house rebuilt about twelve years ago, and has on it the
initials N T E and date 1670--not 1610, as we are told by Archer.
Munday and Dyson, in the fourth edition of Stow’s ‘Survey’ (1633),
assert that Addle Street derived its name from Athlestane or Adlestane,
whose house was supposed to have been hard by, in Wood Street, with a
door into Addle Street.
An interesting sculptured sign of a Bear was dug up in 1882, when the
house numbered 47, on the south side of Cheapside, was being rebuilt.
It was found in a damaged state 7 or 8 feet below the surface, and
is now let into the wall inside the shop of Messrs. Cow and Co.,
india-rubber manufacturers. An old arched cellar or undercroft of
considerable height still exists in the basement, and extends to a
distance of some 30 feet below the street. This sign, which represents
a bear chained and muzzled,[26] and in heraldic language _contourné_,
or facing to the right instead of the left, has neither date nor
initials. A suggestion has been made that this is the White Bear, the
sign of Robert Hicks, a mercer at Soper’s Lane end, and father of Sir
Baptist Hicks, born there in 1551, who built Hicks Hall[27] and who,
says Strype, was one of the first citizens that after knighthood kept
their shops (eventually he became Lord Campden). This, however, is by
no means probable; the sign resembles others put up after the Great
Fire; moreover, Soper’s Lane, now Queen Street, is some distance east
of St. Mary-le-Bow Church, while No. 47 is to the west, near Bread
Street. On the opposite side of the way was a house with a similar
sign, as appears from the following advertisement in the _London
Gazette_ of October 5, 1693:
‘Lost from the Brown Bear, next door to Mercers’ Chapel, in Cheapside,
a large broken silver candlestick, having on the bottom James Morris
engraven; also two double silver scroles of sconces, and a small
scrole of a silver sconce, &c.’
Yet another sculptured sign of a chained bear exists in the City, more
or less in its former position. It has on it the initials M E with
date 1670, and is to be found let into a modern wall at the entrance
to Messrs. Cox and Hammond’s quays, between Nos. 5 and 6, Lower Thames
Street, having fortunately escaped a fire which in part destroyed the
premises some years since. A far more terrible fire occurred in the
neighbourhood in January, 1714-15, when above 120 houses were said
to have been either burnt or blown up, and many persons perished. It
was caused by an explosion in a little gunpowder shop near Bear Quay,
and burned eastward as far as Mark Lane. The sign belonged perhaps
originally to this Bear Quay, the site of which is now covered by
the Custom House, and which in the eighteenth century was chiefly
appropriated to the landing and shipment of wheat.
A Great Bear Quay and a Little Bear Quay are marked close together
in Strype’s map of the Tower Ward. Beer Lane, further east, leading
from Great Tower Street to Lower Thames Street, was in Stow’s time
called Beare Lane. From a writ dated at Windsor, October 30, in the
thirtieth year of Henry III., it appears that the Sheriffs of London
were commanded to provide a muzzle, an iron chain, and a cord, for
the King’s white bear in the Tower of London, and to use him to catch
fish in the water of the Thames; and six years afterwards, namely in
1252, the Sheriffs were commanded to supply fourpence per diem for
the maintenance of the King’s white bear and his keeper in the Tower.
Burnet tells us that on May 29, 1542, the French Ambassadors, after
they had supped with the Duke of Somerset, went to the Thames, and saw
the bear hunted in the river. Anne, daughter of the Earl of Warwick,
and consort of Richard III., adopted the white bear as a badge. In
1539 a ‘Manual of Prayers’ was printed by John Mayler, at the sign of
the White Bear in Botolph Lane. A seventeenth-century trade token was
issued by a grocer from the sign of the White Bear, Thames Street.
Another trade token, ascribed by Boyne and others to Southwark, is far
more likely to have been issued from here; it reads thus:
_O._ PHILIP STOWER.AT = a bear.
_R._ THE.BEARE.AT.BARE.KEY = P.S.S.
A curious stone bas-relief of Bel and the Dragon is preserved by
Messrs. Corbyn and Co., the eminent chemists, at No. 7, Poultry, being
let into the wall of a back room; the idol is represented by an actual
bell. Larwood and Hotten say that the sign was not uncommon, especially
among apothecaries; it is alluded to in the _Spectator_, No. 28. At
Messrs. Corbyn’s there is also a very handsome mortar of bell-metal,
said to have been used by the firm in early days, with an inscription
in Flemish or old German, and the date 1536. Messrs. Corbyn have had a
copy of the above sign inserted in the wall of their new establishment,
at the corner of Bond Street and Oxford Street; it came originally from
their old house of business in Holborn.
[Illustration]
The stone sign of the house which succeeded the Shakespearean Boar’s
Head has happily been preserved, and is now in the Guildhall Museum.
It is well designed and tastefully coloured, that fact having come to
light when a thorough process of cleansing took place some time since.
Above the snout are the initials I. T., and date 1668; size 18-1/2
by 16 inches. The Boar’s Head tavern will be famous for all time, as
the scene of the revelries of Falstaff and Prince Hal; how far it
was really connected with Shakespeare’s immortal creation has been
discussed at length by the late Mr. Halliwell Phillipps. In the time of
Henry V., Eastcheap was noted for its cooks’ shops, as appears from the
ballad of London Lickpenny, by John Lydgate, monk at Bury St. Edmunds,
in which, while giving a countryman’s description of London, he says:
‘Then I hyed me into Est-Chepe;
One cryes rybbs of befe, and many a pye;
Pewter pottes they clattered on a heape.
There was harpe, pype, and minstralsye.
Yea, by cock! nay, by cock! some began crye;
Some songe of Jenken and Julyan for there mede;
But for lack of mony I myght not spede.’
Stow, mentioning an affray in which King Henry IV.’s sons Thomas and
John were concerned, adds in a note, ‘there was no taverne then in
Eastcheape.’
Curiously enough, there is also no distinct authority in any of the
early editions of Shakespeare’s plays for the name of the tavern in
Eastcheap at which Falstaff and the Prince are supposed to meet.
Theobald was the first, in 1733, to place the Boar’s Head in the stage
directions. Shakespeare never mentions it at all, and his only apparent
allusion is in the second part of ‘Henry the Fourth,’ where the Prince
asks (speaking of Falstaff): ‘Doth the old boar feed in the old frank?’
and Bardolph answers: ‘At the old place, my lord, in Eastcheap.’ A
suggestion of the house may also possibly be intended in ‘Richard the
Second,’ where the Prince is mentioned as frequenting taverns ‘that
stand in narrow lanes.’ In the play of the ‘Famous Victories of Henry
the Fifth,’ 1594, on which Shakespeare’s drama was partly founded, the
Castle tavern is mentioned as the place of meeting in Eastcheap. An
allusion, however, to ‘Sir John of the Boar’s Head in Eastcheap,’ in
Gayton’s ‘Festivous Notes’ (1654, p. 277), may be considered to prove
that this was, in truth, the tavern to which Shakespeare referred. His
contemporary, Dekker, in the play of ‘The Shoemakers’ Holyday, or, The
Gentle Craft,’ has the following: _Eyre_. ‘Rip you chitterling, avaunt,
boy; bid the tapster of the Bores-head fill me a doozen cans of beere
for my journeymen.’
The earliest notice of the original house which has been handed down
to us occurs in the testament of William Warden, who, in the reign
of Richard II., gave all his tenement called the Boar’s Head, in
Eastcheap, to a college of priests or chaplains, founded by Sir
William Walworth, Lord Mayor, in the adjoining Church of St. Michael,
Crooked Lane. The endowments of this college were forfeited in the year
1549, when the house above alluded to is described as all the said
William Warden’s tenement called the Boar’s Head, Eastcheap, ‘worth by
year £4.’
The Boar’s Head is first called a tavern in the year 1537, when it
is expressly described in a lease, as ‘all that tavern called the
Bore Hedde, cum sollariis et aliis suis pertinentiis in Estchepe, in
parochia Sancti Michaelis, prædicti in tenura Johanne Broke vidue.’ An
apparently genuine memento was discovered about the year 1834 in moving
away soil from Whitechapel Mount.[28] It is a carved boxwood bas-relief
of a boar’s head set in a circular frame formed by two boar’s tusks
mounted in silver; diameter, 4½ inches. An inscription pricked on the
back is as follows:
‘William Brooke Landlord of the Bores Hedde Estchepe 1566.’
This now belongs to Lady Burdett Coutts, and was shown two years ago
at the Tudor Exhibition. In the year 1588, the inn was kept by Thomas
Wright, a native of Shrewsbury: ‘Thear was chosen with me at that time
out of the school, George Wrighte, son of Thomas Wrighte of London,
vintener, that dwelt at the Bores Hed in Estcheap, who sithence, having
good inheritance descended to him, is now clerk of the king’s stable,
and a knight, a very discreet and honest gentleman;’ as we learn from
the ‘Liber Famelicus’ of Sir John Whitelocke, edited by J. Bruce (p.
12). On March 31, 1602, the Lords of the Council wrote to the Lord
Mayor, granting permission to the servants of the Earl of Oxford and
the Earl of Worcester to play at the Boar’s Head in Eastcheap:[29]
which seems to indicate that the house was an important one, probably
with a yard. In the year 1623, ‘John Rhodoway, vintner at the Bore’s
Head,’ was buried at St. Michael’s, Crooked Lane. This person may have
kept the tavern in Shakespeare’s time. Two seventeenth-century trade
tokens were issued from ‘the Bore’s Head, neere London Stone,’ as it is
called in the rare tract called ‘Newes from Bartholomew Fayre.’ These
tokens are undated, but it seems likely that they were struck before
1666. One of them gives the name of John Sapcott as the landlord.
The Boar’s Head tavern was burnt in the Great Fire, and rebuilt of
brick four stories high, with its door in the centre. Many allusions
to this second Boar’s Head have been preserved; one of the quaintest
was an inscription on a tombstone in the neighbouring churchyard of St.
Michael’s, Crooked Lane, which I lately saw at the back of St. Magnus
Church, whither it migrated when its first resting-place was covered by
the approaches to new London Bridge. The epitaph runs thus:
‘Here lieth the bodye of Robert Preston, late drawer at the Boar’s
Head Tavern Great Eastcheap who departed this life March 16 Anno
Domini 1730, aged twenty-seven years.’
‘Bacchus to give the toping world surprise,
Produc’d one sober son, and here he lies.
Tho’ nurs’d among full hogsheads, he defyd
The charm of wine, and every vice beside.
O reader, if to justice thou’rt inclined,
Keep honest Preston daily in thy mind.
He drew good wine, took care to fill his pots,
Had sundry virtues that outweighed his fauts (_sic_).
You that on Bacchus have the like dependence,
Pray copy Bob in measure and attendance.’
In the second edition of Maitland’s ‘London,’ 1756, we are told that
under the sign of the Boar’s Head, the following inscription was
then to be seen: ‘This is the oldest tavern in London.’ Goldsmith
was there in 1758, getting material for his charming ‘Reverie at
the Boar’s Head,’ in which, however, he assumed that he was in the
actual tavern immortalized by Shakespeare; and in 1818 another gifted
author--Washington Irving--after a similar visit, wrote an essay as
charming and as inaccurate. During their tour to the Hebrides in 1773,
Boswell mentioned to Dr. Johnson a club held at the Boar’s Head,
the members of which all assumed Shakespearean characters, one was
Falstaff, another Prince Hal, another Bardolph, and so on. Johnson’s
remark on the occasion was: ‘Don’t be of it, sir. Now that you have a
name you must be careful to avoid many things, not bad in themselves,
but which will lessen your character.’ Scruples of this kind do not
seem to have troubled the great William Pitt, at any rate when he
was young. In the ‘Life of William Wilberforce,’[30] by his son, the
following anecdote is told by the philanthropist: ‘I was one of those
who met to spend an evening in memory of Shakespeare at the Boar’s
Head, Eastcheap. Many professed wits were present, but Pitt was the
most amusing of the party, and the most apt at the required allusions.’
This social gathering took place in the year 1780.
An interesting addition has lately been made to the Guildhall Museum,
a bequest of the late Dr. Burgon, Dean of Chichester. It is a
water-colour drawing of a figure from the house in Eastcheap, supposed
to represent Falstaff, but so lean that it by no means embodies the
idea contained in his words to the Lord Chief Justice: ‘I would that my
means were greater, and my waist slenderer.’ The costume seems to be of
the sixteenth century. This was copied no doubt from the figure carved
in oak, 12 inches high, which was exhibited by Mr. Kempe to the Society
of Antiquaries in December, 1833, and which once decorated the portal
of the tavern. The figure had supported an ornamental bracket over one
side of the door, a corresponding figure of Prince Henry sustaining
that on the other. It was at that time the property of Mr. Thomas
Shelton, brazier, Great Eastcheap, whose ancestors had lived in the
shop he occupied since the time of the Great Fire. He well remembered
the last grand dinner-party, which had taken place at the Boar’s Head
about fifty years before. The guests came from the west end of the
town, and the long string of carriages which conveyed them filled
the street at Eastcheap. Hutton, writing in 1785, gives a somewhat
different account of the figures. He says,[31] ‘On each side of the
entrance to the Boar’s Head there is a vine branch carved in wood
rising more than three feet from the ground, loaded with leaves and
clusters, and on the top of each a little Falstaff eight inches high,
in the dress of his day.’
Peter Cunningham says that the Boar’s Head stood in Great Eastcheap,
between Small Alley and St. Michael’s Lane, four taverns filling up the
intervening space--the Chicken, near St. Michael’s Alley, the Boar’s
Head, the Plough, and the Three Kings. The statue of King William IV.
is considered to be a few feet east of the site. The house had ceased
to be a tavern before Pennant wrote in 1790. It was divided into two
tenements, and became Nos. 2 and 3, Great Eastcheap. Part was occupied
by a gunsmith, when in June, 1831, the building, having been bought by
the Corporation for £3,544, was immediately pulled down to make room
for the approaches of new London Bridge. It is a curious fact that,
on the opposite side of the river, at about an equal distance, stood
another famous old Boar’s Head Inn, the site of which is also now
covered by the approaches to London Bridge, and this had without doubt
once belonged to that notable man, Sir John Fastolfe,[32] who must
at least have furnished the name to Shakespeare’s matchless creation.
The back part of the City inn looked upon the burial-ground of St.
Michael’s, Crooked Lane, as did the other on the Flemish burial-ground
in Southwark. Of this latter and of the man who owned it, a rather full
account is given in the ‘Inns of Old Southwark and their Associations,’
by Rendle and Norman.
From J. T. Smith and others I learn that in the early part of this
century, not far from the Boar’s Head in Eastcheap, and nearly facing
Miles Lane, there was a bold and animated figure of a Mermaid carved in
relief, with her dishevelled hair about her shoulders, and holding in
her right hand something resembling ‘a bundle of flax or a distaff’;
more likely a looking-glass. I mention the sign here for the sake of
convenience, though I own its classification is a difficulty, one
writer placing it with human signs, and another with ‘fishes and
insects.’ There still exists a Mermaid carved in relief at No. 21, East
Street, Gravesend. The material seems to be cut brick or terra-cotta;
it has an ornamental border with cleft pediment. Seafaring people are
always more or less attracted by the supernatural, and so the sign has
been a favourite one here and in Holland, where also the merman, with
helmet, sword, and buckler, was not uncommon. A merman and a mermaid
are supporters of the arms of the Fishmongers’ Company, a fine carving
of which is to be seen at the back of their present hall. The badge
of the Byrons was a mermaid argent, crined and finned or, holding in
the left hand a comb, in the right a mirror. It is recorded by Strype
that ‘Boniface Tatam of London, vintner, buried in the parish of St.
Peter’s Cornhill on the 3rd Feb., 1606, gave 40s. yearly to the parson
for preaching 4 sermons every year so long as the Mermaid, a tavern in
Cornhill so called, shall endure.’ But the most famous Mermaid, perhaps
the most famous of all Elizabethan taverns, was that in Bread Street,
Friday Street, and Cheapside, for they were all one and the same--the
house standing back from Bread Street, with passage entrances from
Cheapside and Friday Street.
‘Souls of poets dead and gone,
What Elysium have ye known,
Happy field or mossy cavern,
Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern?’
Another famous hostelry in old days was the Bull, Bishopsgate Street
Within, which stood on the west side, opposite St. Helen’s Place. This
was one of the inns used for theatrical purposes in the sixteenth
century. In 1594, Anthony Bacon, brother of Francis, was lodging in
Bishopsgate Street, to the regret of his mother, because he was near
the Bull Inn, where plays and interludes were acted, which might
corrupt his servants. It was the house frequented by old Hobson,
the Cambridge carrier, on whom Milton wrote his famous lines. Here,
as the _Spectator_ tells us, there was a portrait of Hobson, with a
hundred-pound bag under his arm, having on it the inscription:
‘The fruitful mother of a Hundred more.’
At the Bull Inn a mutiny broke out in a troop of Whalley’s regiment on
April 26, 1649, for which one of the troopers was shot in St. Paul’s
Churchyard, and others were condemned but pardoned. The inn was pulled
down in 1866. A curious relic then rescued from the ruins consisted
of a stone 9-1/2 inches wide at the top, 7 inches at the bottom,
and 10 inches deep, shaped therefore like a keystone, and having a
narrow margin, within which was a carving of a bull with a vine and
its tendrils, and a bunch of grapes; it was dated 1642. This stone
had doubtless served as a sign or commemorative decoration, and was
the oldest of its kind in London: I have not been able to find out
what became of it. The _Herts Guardian_ for March 11, 1865, records
that ‘under the yew-tree, against the steeple of All Saints’ Church,
Hertford, is a small ordinary-looking gravestone having the following
quaint inscription:
‘Here lyeth Black Tom of the Bull Inn in Bishopsgate, 1696.’
From the Bull in Bishopsgate it is not a far cry to the Bull and
Mouth in Aldersgate. There are two versions of this sign, and though
comparatively modern they are worth describing, partly for their
quaintness, partly from their interesting associations; they are both
preserved in the Guildhall Museum. One was placed over the front
entrance of the Queen’s Hotel, St. Martin’s-le-Grand, formerly known
as the Bull and Mouth, which was built in 1830 on the site of the old
coaching inn with that sign. A statuette of a bull appears within the
space of a gigantic open mouth; below are bunches of grapes; above,
a bust of Edward VI. and the arms of Christ’s Hospital, to which
institution the ground belonged. Beneath is a tablet, perhaps from the
old inn, inscribed with the following doggerel rhyme:
‘Milo the Cretonian an ox slew with his fist,
And ate it up at one meal, ye Gods what a glorious twist.’
Another version of the sign, which is said to have been put up about
the beginning of the century, was over the entrance to the Great
Northern Railway receiving-house in Angel Street, formerly the back
entrance to the inn yard. This, together with the Queen’s Hotel and
all the ground as far as Bull and Mouth Street north, has now been
taken by the Post-Office authorities; the amount of compensation paid
to the Great Northern Company having been £31,350.
The Bull and Mouth was one of the most famous coaching inns. Strype,
writing in 1720, describes it as ‘large and well built, and of a good
resort by those that bring Bone Lace, where the shopkeepers and others
come to buy it.’ He also tells us that ‘in this part of St. Martin’s is
a noted Meeting House of the Quakers, called the Bull and Mouth, where
they met long before the Fire.’ The name is generally supposed to be a
corruption of Boulogne Mouth, the entrance to Boulogne Harbour, that
town having been taken by King Henry VIII. This elucidation is said to
have originated with George Steevens, who has been called a mischievous
wag in literary matters. Boyne thinks it might have been originally the
Bowl and Mouth, both known London signs. A seventeenth-century trade
token was issued from a house with the sign of the Mouth in Bishopsgate
Street, and the Mouth appears in the rhyming list of taverns, which is
to be found in Heywood’s ‘Rape of Lucrece.’ Stow mentions the custom
of presenting a bowl of ale at St. Giles’s Hospital to prisoners on
their way from the City to Tyburn, and according to Parton there was
a Bowl public-house at St. Giles’s. Bowl Yard, a narrow court on the
south side of High Street, St. Giles’s, disappeared about 1846. Mr.
Wheatley, points out in ‘London Past and Present’ that our inn is
probably identical with ‘the house called the Mouth, near Aldersgate
in London--then the usual meeting place for Quakers,’ to which the
body of John Lilburne was conveyed on his death, August 29, 1657. Five
years afterwards, namely on October 26, 1662, it appears from Ellwood’s
‘Autobiography’ that he was arrested at a Quakers’ meeting held at the
_Bull and Mouth_, Aldersgate, and confined till December in the old
Bridewell, Fleet Street.
The Bull and Mouth was at its zenith as a coaching inn during the early
part of this century, just before the development of railroads. Mr.
Edward Sherman was then landlord, having succeeded Mr. Willans in the
year 1823; he also had the Oxford Arms, Warwick Lane. It was he who
rebuilt the old house, and made stabling underground for a large number
of horses. When the business of coaching came to an end, the gateway
from St. Martin’s-le-Grand was partially blocked up and became the main
entrance to the hotel, which, under a new name, flourished till its
final closing in the autumn of 1886. On September 28 of that year, the
stock of wine, amounting to 750 dozen, was sold; during the winter
the house was used as an adjunct of the General Post-Office. In July,
1887, the Jubilee fittings of Westminster Abbey were sold by auction in
the large coffee-room. They consisted of Brussels carpets, hangings,
cushions, etc., and produced upwards of £2,000. In the space cleared
shortly afterwards for the new post-office, a large piece of the City
wall has been discovered. The old Bull and Mouth Inn, destroyed in
1830, with its three tiers of galleries, was very picturesque: many
illustrations of it exist.
A seventeenth century trade-token was issued from a Bull and Mouth in
Bloomsbury, still represented by a modern public-house at No. 31, Hart
Street.
A wooden carving of a Civet Cat was some years since the appropriate
sign of an old-fashioned perfumer’s shop in Cockspur Street. An
illustration of it appears in the _Illustrated London News_ for
December 13, 1856.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]