A piece of Suffolk cheese, or gammon of bacon,
Or any esculent as the learned call it,
For their emolument, but _sheer drink only_.
For which gross fault I here do damn thy licence,
Forbidding thee henceforth to tap or draw;
For instantly I will in mine own person,
Command the constable to pull down thy sign,
And do't before I eat."
And the decayed vinter, who afterwards applies to Wellborn for payment
of his tavern score, answers, on his inquiring who he is:
"A decay'd vintner, Sir;
That might have thriv'd, but that your worship broke me
With trusting you with muscadine and eggs,
And _five-pound suppers_, with your after-drinkings,
When you lodged upon the Bankside."
Dekker tells us, near this time, of regular ordinaries of three kinds:
1st. An ordinary of the longest reckoning, whither most of your
courtly gallants do resort: 2nd. A twelvepenny ordinary, frequented by
the justice of the peace, a young Knight; and a threepenny ordinary,
to which your London usurer, your stale bachelor, and your thrifty
attorney, doth resort. Then Dekker tells us of a custom, especially in
the City, to send presents of wine from one room to another, as a
complimentary mark of friendship. "Inquire," directs he, "what
gallants sup in the next room; and if they be of your acquaintance, do
not, after the City fashion, send them in a pottle of wine and your
name." Then, we read of Master Brook sending to the Castle Inn at
Windsor, a morning draught of sack.
Ned Ward, in the _London Spy_, 1709, describes several famous taverns,
and among them the Rose, anciently, the Rose and Crown, as famous for
good wine. "There was no parting," he says, "without a glass; so we
went into the Rose Tavern in the Poultry, where the wine, according to
its merit, had justly gained a reputation; and there, in a snug room,
warmed with brash and faggot, over a quart of good claret, we laughed
over our night's adventure."
"From hence, pursuant to my friend's inclination, we adjourned to the
sign of the Angel, in Fenchurch-street, where the vintner, like a
double-dealing citizen, condescended as well to draw carmen's comfort
as the consolatory juice of the vine.
"Having at the King's Head well freighted the hold of our vessels with
excellent food and delicious wine, at a small expense, we scribbled
the following lines with chalk upon the wall." (See page 98.)
The tapster was a male vendor, not "a woman who had the care of the
tap," as Tyrwhitt states. In the 17th century ballad, _The Times_,
occurs:
"The bar-boyes and the tapsters
Leave drawing of their beere,
And running forth in haste they cry,
'See, where Mull'd Sack comes here!'"
The ancient drawers and tapsters were now superseded by the barmaid,
and a number of waiters: Ward describes the barmaid as "all ribbon,
lace, and feathers, and making such a noise with her bell and her
tongue together, that had half-a-dozen paper-mills been at work within
three yards of her, they'd have signified no more to her clamorous
voice than so many lutes to a drum, which alarmed two or three nimble
fellows aloft, who shot themselves downstairs with as much celerity as
a mountebank's mercury upon a rope from the top of a church-steeple,
every one charged with a mouthful of coming, coming, coming." The
barmaid (generally the vintner's daughter) is described as "bred at
the dancing-school, becoming a bar well, stepping a minuet finely,
playing sweetly on the virginals, 'John come kiss me now, now, now,'
and as proud as she was handsome."
Tom Brown sketches a flirting barmaid of the same time, "as a fine
lady that stood pulling a rope, and screaming like a peacock against
rainy weather, pinned up by herself in a little pew, all people bowing
to her as they passed by, as if she was a goddess set up to be
worshipped, armed with the chalk and sponge, (which are the principal
badges that belong to that honourable station you beheld her in,) was
the _barmaid_."
Of the nimbleness of the waiters, Ward says in another place--"That
the chief use he saw in the Monument was, for the improvement of
vintners' boys and drawers, who came every week to exercise their
supporters, and learn the tavern trip, by running up to the balcony
and down again."
Owen Swan, at the Black Swan tavern, Bartholomew Lane, is thus
apostrophized by Tom Brown for the goodness of his wine:--
"Thee, _Owen_, since the God of wine has made
Thee steward of the gay carousing trade,
Whose art decaying nature still supplies,
Warms the faint pulse, and sparkles in our eyes.
Be bountiful like him, bring t'other _flask_,
Were the stairs wider we would have the _cask_.
This pow'r we from the God of wine derive,
Draw such as this, and I'll pronounce thou'lt live."
THE BEAR AT THE BRIDGE FOOT.
This celebrated tavern, situated in Southwark, on the west side of the
foot of London Bridge, opposite the end of St. Olave's or
Tooley-street, was a house of considerable antiquity. We read in the
accounts of the Steward of Sir John Howard, March 6th, 1463-4 (Edward
IV.), "Item, payd for red wyn at the Bere in Southwerke, iij_d._"
Garrard, in a letter to Lord Strafford, dated 1633 intimates that
"all back-doors to taverns on the Thames are commanded to be shut up,
only the Bear at Bridge Foot is exempted, by reason of the passage to
Greenwich," which Mr. Burn suspects to have been "the avenue or way
called Bear Alley."
The Cavaliers' Ballad on the funeral pageant of Admiral Deane, killed
June 2nd, 1653, while passing by water to Henry the Seventh's Chapel,
Westminster, has the following allusion:--
"From Greenwich towards the Bear at Bridge foot,
He was wafted with wind that had water to't,
But I think they brought the devil to boot,
Which nobody can deny."
Pepys was told by a waterman, going through the bridge, 24th Feb.
1666-7, that the mistress of the Beare Tavern, at the Bridge foot,
"did lately fling herself into the Thames, and drown herself."
The Bear must have been a characterless house, for among its
gallantries was the following, told by Wycherley to Major Pack, "just
for the oddness of the thing." It was this: "There was a house at the
Bridge Foot where persons of better condition used to resort for
pleasure and privacy. The liquor the ladies and their lovers used to
drink at these meetings was canary; and among other compliments the
gentlemen paid their mistresses, this it seems was always one, to take
hold of the bottom of their smocks, and pouring the wine through that
filter, feast their imaginations with the thought of what gave the
zesto, and so drink a health to the toast."
The Bear Tavern was taken down in December, 1761, when the labourers
found gold and silver coins, of the time of Elizabeth, to a
considerable value. The wall that enclosed the tavern was not cleared
away until 1764, when the ground was cleared and levelled quite up to
Pepper Alley stairs. There is a Token of the Bear Tavern, in the
Beaufoy cabinet, which, with other rare Southwark tokens, was found
under the floors in taking down St. Olave's Grammar School in 1839.
MERMAID TAVERNS.
The celebrated Mermaid, in Bread-street, with the history of "the
Mermaid Club," has been described in Vol. I. pp. 8-10; its interest
centres in this famous company of Wits.
There was another Mermaid, in Cheapside, next to Paul's Gate, and
still another in Cornhill. Of the latter we find in Burn's Beaufoy
Catalogue, that the vintner, buried in St. Peter's, Cornhill, in 1606,
"gave forty shillings yearly to the parson for preaching four sermons
every year, so long as the lease of the Mermaid, in Cornhill, (the
tavern so called,) should endure. He also gave to the poor of the said
parish thirteen penny loaves every Sunday, during the aforesaid
lease." There are tokens of both these taverns in the Beaufoy
Collection.
THE BOAR'S HEAD TAVERN.
This celebrated Shakspearean tavern was situated in Great Eastcheap,
and is first mentioned in the time of Richard II.; the scene of the
revels of Falstaff and Henry V., when Prince of Wales, in
Shakspeare's Henry IV., Part 2. Stow relates a riot in "the cooks'
dwellings" here on St. John's eve, 1410, by Princes John and Thomas.
The tavern was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666, but was rebuilt in
two years, as attested by a boar's head cut in stone, with the
initials of the landlord, I. T., and the date 1668, above the
first-floor window. This sign-stone is now in the Guildhall library.
The house stood between Small-alley and St. Michael's-lane, and in the
rear looked upon St. Michael's churchyard, where was buried a
_drawer_, or waiter, at the tavern, d. 1720: in the church was
interred John Rhodoway, "Vintner at the Bore's Head," 1623.
Maitland, in 1739, mentions the Boar's Head, as "the chief tavern in
London" under the sign. Goldsmith (_Essays_), Boswell (_Life of Dr.
Johnson_), and Washington Irving (_Sketch-book_), have idealized the
house as the identical place which Falstaff frequented, forgetting its
destruction in the Great Fire. The site of the Boar's Head is very
nearly that of the statue of King William IV.
In 1834, Mr. Kempe, F.S.A., exhibited to the Society of Antiquaries a
carved oak figure of Sir John Falstaff, in the costume of the 16th
century; it had supported an ornamental bracket over one side of the
door of the Boar's Head, a figure of Prince Henry sustaining that on
the other. The Falstaff was the property of one Shelton, a brazier,
whose ancestors had lived in the shop he then occupied in Great
Eastcheap, since the Great Fire. He well remembered the last
Shakspearean grand dinner-party at the Boar's Head, about 1784: at an
earlier party, Mr. Wilberforce was present. A boar's head, with tusks,
which had been suspended in a room of the tavern, perhaps the
Half-Moon or Pomegranate, (see Henry IV. act ii. sc. 4,) at the Great
Fire, fell down with the ruins of the house, and was conveyed to
Whitechapel Mount, where, many years after, it was recovered, and
identified with its former locality. At a public house, No. 12,
Miles-lane, was long preserved a tobacco-box, with a painting of the
original Boar's Head Tavern on the lid.[29]
In High-street, Southwark, in the rear of Nos. 25 and 26, was formerly
the _Boar's Head Inn_, part of Sir John Falstolf's benefaction to
Magdalen College, Oxford. Sir John was one of the bravest generals in
the French wars, under the fourth, fifth, and sixth Henries; but he is
not the Falstaff of Shakspeare. In the _Reliquiæ Hearnianæ_, edited by
Dr. Bliss, is the following entry relative to this bequest:--
"1721. June 2.--The reason why they cannot give so good an
account of the benefaction of Sir John Fastolf to Magd.
Coll. is, because he gave it to the founder, and left it to
his management, so that 'tis suppos'd 'twas swallow'd up in
his own estate that he settled it upon the college. However,
the college knows this, that the _Boar's Head_ in Southwark,
which was then an inn, and still retains the name, tho'
divided into several tenements (which bring the college
about 150_l._ per ann.), was part of Sir John's gift."
The above property was for many years sublet to the family of the
author of the present Work, at the rent of 150_l._ per annum; the
cellar, finely vaulted, and excellent for wine, extended beneath the
entire court, consisting of two rows of tenements, and two end houses,
with galleries, the entrance being from the High-street. The premises
were taken down for the New London Bridge approaches. There was also
a noted Boar's Head in Old Fish-street.
Can he forget who has read Goldsmith's nineteenth Essay, his reverie
at the Boar's Head?--when, having confabulated with the landlord till
long after "the watchman had gone twelve," and suffused in the potency
of his wine a mutation in his ideas, of the person of the host into
that of Dame Quickly, mistress of the tavern in the days of Sir John,
is promptly effected, and the liquor they were drinking seemed shortly
converted into sack and sugar. Mrs. Quickly's recital of the history
of herself and Doll Tearsheet, whose frailties in the flesh caused
their being both sent to the house of correction, charged with having
allowed the famed Boar's Head to become a low brothel; her speedy
departure to the world of Spirits; and Falstaff's impertinences as
affecting Madame Proserpine; are followed by an enumeration of persons
who had held tenancy of the house since her time. The last hostess of
note was, according to Goldsmith's account, Jane Rouse, who, having
unfortunately quarrelled with one of her neighbours, a woman of high
repute in the parish for sanctity, but as jealous as Chaucer's Wife of
Bath, was by her accused of witchcraft, taken from her own bar,
condemned, and executed accordingly!--These were times, indeed, when
women could not scold in safety. These and other prudential
apophthegms on the part of Dame Quickly, seem to have dissolved
Goldsmith's stupor of ideality; on his awaking, the landlord is really
the landlord, and not the hostess of a former day, when "Falstaff was
in fact an agreeable old fellow, forgetting age, and showing the way
to be young at sixty-five. Age, care, wisdom, reflection, begone! I
give you to the winds. Let's have t'other bottle. Here's to the
memory of Shakspeare, Falstaff, and all the merry men of
Eastcheap."[30]
FOOTNOTES:
[27] This negatives a belief common in our day that a Covent Garden
tavern was the first divided into rooms for guests.
[28] A successor of Francis, a waiter at the Boar's Head, in the last
century, had a tablet with an inscription in St. Michael's
Crooked-lane churchyard, just at the back of the tavern; setting forth
that he died, "drawer at the Boar's Head Tavern, in Great Eastcheap,"
and was noted for his honesty and sobriety; in that--
"Tho' nurs'd among full hogsheads he defied
The charms of wine, as well as others' pride."
He also practised the singular virtue of drawing good wine and of
taking care to "fill his pots," as appears by the closing lines of the
inscription:--
"Ye that on Bacchus have a like dependance,
Pray copy Bob in measure and attendance.'"
[29] _Curiosities of London_, p. 265.
[30] _Burn's Catalogue of the Beaufoy Tokens._
THREE CRANES IN THE VINTRY.
This was one of Ben Jonson's taverns, and has already been
incidentally mentioned. Strype describes it as situate in "New
Queen-street, commonly called the Three Cranes in the Vintry, a good
open street, especially that part next Cheapside, which is best built
and inhabited. At the lowest end of the street, next the Thames, is a
pair of stairs, the usual place for the Lord Mayor and Aldermen to
take water at, to go to Westminster Hall, for the new Lord Mayor to be
sworn before the Barons of the Exchequer. This place, with the Three
Cranes, is now of some account for the costermongers, where they have
their warehouse for their fruit." In Scott's _Kenilworth_ we hear much
of this Tavern.
LONDON STONE TAVERN.
This tavern, situated in Cannon-street, near the Stone, is stated, but
not correctly, to have been the oldest in London. Here was formed a
society, afterwards the famous Robin Hood, of which the history was
published in 1716, where it is stated to have originated in a meeting
of the editor's grandfather with the great Sir Hugh Myddelton, of New
River memory. King Charles II. was introduced to the society,
disguised, by Sir Hugh, and the King liked it so well, that he came
thrice afterwards. "He had," continues the narrative, "a piece of
black silk over his left cheek, which almost covered it; and his
eyebrows, which were quite black, he had, by some artifice or other,
converted to a light brown, or rather flaxen colour; and had otherwise
disguised himself so effectually in his apparel and his looks, that
nobody knew him but Sir Hugh, by whom he was introduced." This is very
circumstantial, but is very doubtful; since Sir Hugh Myddelton died
when Charles was in his tenth year.
THE ROBIN HOOD.
Mr. Akerman describes a Token of the Robin Hood Tavern:--"IOHN
THOMLINSON AT THE. An archer fitting an arrow to his bow; a small
figure behind, holding an arrow.--Rx. IN CHISWELL STREET, 1667. In
the centre, HIS HALFE PENNY, and I. S. T." Mr. Akerman continues:
"It is easy to perceive what is intended by the representation on the
obverse of this token. Though 'Little John,' we are told, stood
upwards of six good English feet without his shoes, he is here
depicted to suit the popular humour--a dwarf in size, compared with
his friend and leader, the bold outlaw. The proximity of
Chiswell-street to Finsbury-fields may have led to the adoption of the
sign, which was doubtless at a time when archery was considered an
elegant as well as an indispensable accomplishment of an English
gentleman. It is far from obsolete now, as several low public-houses
and beer-shops in the vicinity of London testify. One of them
exhibits Robin Hood and his companion dressed in the most approved
style of 'Astley's,' and underneath the group is the following
irresistible invitation to slake your thirst:--
"Ye archers bold and yeomen good,
Stop and drink with Robin Hood:
If Robin Hood is not at home,
Stop and drink with little John.
"Our London readers could doubtless supply the variorum copies of this
elegant distich, which, as this is an age for 'Family Shakspeares,'
modernized Chaucers, and new versions of 'Robin Hood's Garland,' we
recommend to the notice of the next editor of the ballads in praise of
the Sherwood freebooter."
PONTACK'S, ABCHURCH LANE.
After the destruction of the White Bear Tavern, in the Great Fire of
1666, the proximity of the site for all purposes of business, induced
M. Pontack, the son of the President of Bordeaux, owner of a famous
claret district, to establish a tavern, with all the novelties of
French cookery, with his father's head as a sign, whence it was
popularly called "Pontack's Head." The dinners were from four or five
shillings a head "to a guinea, or what sum you pleased."
Swift frequented the tavern, and writes to Stella:--"Pontack told us,
although his wine was so good, he sold it cheaper than others; he took
but seven shillings a flask. Are not these pretty rates?" In the
_Hind and Panther Transversed_, we read of drawers:--
"Sure these honest fellows have no knack
Of putting off stum'd claret for Pontack."
The Fellows of the Royal Society dined at Pontack's until 1746, when
they removed to the Devil Tavern. There is a Token of the White Bear
in the Beaufoy collection; and Mr. Burn tells us, from _Metamorphoses
of the Town_, a rare tract, 1731, of Pontack's "guinea ordinary,"
"ragout of fatted snails," and "chickens not two hours from the
shell." In January, 1735, Mrs. Susannah Austin, who lately kept
Pontack's, and had acquired a considerable fortune, was married to
William Pepys, banker, in Lombard-street.
POPE'S HEAD TAVERN.
This noted tavern, which gave name to Pope's Head Alley, leading from
Cornhill to Lombard-street, is mentioned as early as the 4th Edward
IV. (1464) in the account of a wager between an Alicant goldsmith and
an English goldsmith; the Alicant stranger contending in the tavern
that "Englishmen were not so cunning in workmanship of goldsmithry as
Alicant strangers;" when work was produced by both, and the Englishman
gained the wager. The tavern was left in 1615, by Sir William Craven
to the Merchant Tailors' Company. Pepys refers to "the fine painted
room" here in 1668-9. In the tavern, April 14, 1718, Quin, the actor,
killed in self-defence, his fellow-comedian, Bowen, a clever but
hot-headed Irishman, who was jealous of Quin's reputation: in a moment
of great anger, he sent for Quin to the tavern, and as soon as he had
entered the room, Bowen placed his back against the door, drew his
sword, and bade Quin draw his. Quin, having mildly remonstrated to no
purpose, drew in his own defence, and endeavoured to disarm his
antagonist. Bowen received a wound, of which he died in three days,
having acknowledged his folly and madness, when the loss of blood had
reduced him to reason. Quin was tried and acquitted. (_Cunningham,
abridged._) The Pope's Head Tavern was in existence in 1756.
THE OLD SWAN, THAMES-STREET,
Was more than five hundred years ago a house for public entertainment:
for, in 1323, 16 Edw. II., Rose Wrytell bequeathed "the tenement of
olde tyme called the Swanne on the Hope in Thames-street," in the
parish of St. Mary-at-hill, to maintain a priest at the altar of St.
Edmund, King and Martyr, "for her soul, and the souls of her husband,
her father, and mother:" and the purposes of her bequest were
established; for, in the parish book, in 1499, is entered a
disbursement of fourpence, "for a cresset to Rose Wrytell's chantry."
Eleanor Cobham, Duchess of Gloucester, in 1440, in her public penance
for witchcraft and treason, landed at Old Swan, bearing a large taper,
her feet bare, etc.
Stow, in 1598, mentions the Old Swan as a great brew-house. Taylor,
the Water-poet, advertised the professor and author of the Barmoodo
and Vtopian tongues, dwelling "at the Old Swanne, neare London Bridge,
who will teach them at are willing to learne, with agility and
facility."
In the scurrilous Cavalier ballad of Admiral Deane's Funeral, by
water, from Greenwich to Westminster, in June, 1653, it is said:--
"The Old Swan, as he passed by,
Said she would sing him a dirge, lye down and die:
Wilt thou sing to a bit of a body? quoth I,
Which nobody can deny."
The Old Swan Tavern and its landing-stairs were destroyed in the Great
Fire; but rebuilt. Its Token, in the Beaufoy Collection, is one of the
rarest, of large size.
COCK TAVERN, THREADNEEDLE-STREET.
This noted house, which faced the north gate of the old Royal
Exchange, was long celebrated for the excellence of its soups, which
were served at an economical price, in silver. One of its proprietors
was, it is believed, John Ellis, an eccentric character, and a writer
of some reputation, who died in 1791. Eight stanzas addressed to him
in praise of the tavern, commenced thus:--
"When to Ellis I write, I in verse must indite,
Come Phoebus, and give me a knock,
For on Fryday at eight, all behind 'the 'Change gate,'
Master Ellis will be at 'The Cock.'"
After comparing it to other houses, the Pope's Head, the King's Arms,
the Black Swan, and the Fountain, and declaring the Cock the best, it
ends:
"'Tis time to be gone, for the 'Change has struck one:
O 'tis an impertinent clock!
For with Ellis I'd stay from December to May;
I'll stick to my Friend, and 'The Cock!'"
This house was taken down in 1841; when, in a claim for compensation
made by the proprietor, the trade in three years was proved to have
been 344,720 basins of various soups--viz. 166,240 mock turtle, 3,920
giblet, 59,360 ox-tail, 31,072 bouilli, 84,128 gravy and other soups:
sometimes 500 basins of soup were sold in a day.
CROWN TAVERN, THREADNEEDLE-STREET.
Upon the site of the present chief entrance to the Bank of England, in
Threadneedle-street, stood the Crown Tavern, "behind the 'Change:" it
was frequented by the Fellows of the Royal Society, when they met at
Gresham College hard by. The Crown was burnt in the Great Fire, but
was rebuilt; and about a century since, at this tavern, "it was not
unusual to draw a butt of mountain wine, containing 120 gallons, in
gills, in a morning."--_Sir John Hawkins._
Behind the Change, we read in the _Connoisseur_, 1754, a man worth a
plum used to order a twopenny mess of broth with a boiled chop in it;
placing the chop between the two crusts of a half-penny roll, he would
wrap it up in his check handkerchief, and carry it away for the
morrow's dinner.
THE KING'S HEAD TAVERN, IN THE POULTRY.
This Tavern, which stood at the western extremity of the Stocks'
Market, was not first known by the sign of the King's Head, but the
Rose: Machin, in his Diary, Jan. 5, 1560, thus mentions it: "A
gentleman arrested for debt; Master Cobham, with divers gentlemen and
serving-men, took him from the officers, and carried him to the Rose
Tavern, where so great a fray, both the sheriffs were feign to come,
and from the Rose Tavern took all the gentlemen and their servants,
and carried them to the Compter."