PUNS AND REBUSES.
Punning on names, or a figurative rendering of names, was probably at
first adopted not so much with any intent at joking, as means to assist
the memory, giving the name a visible token, which would take the place
of writing at a time when but few persons could either read or write. At
the revival of learning, and the spread of what we may term the
refinement of society, punning was one of the few accomplishments at
which the fine ladies and gentlemen aimed. From the twelfth to the
sixteenth century, it was at its greatest height. The conversation of
the witty gallants and ladies, and even of the clowns and other inferior
characters, in the comedies of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, which
we may be sure was painted from the life, is full of puns and plays upon
words. The unavoidable result of such an excess was a surfeit, and the
consequent _dégout_, which lasted for more than a century.[666] Like
other diseases, it broke out again subsequently with redoubled
virulence, and made great havoc in the reign of Queen Anne. “Several
worthy gentlemen and critics,” says the _Tatler_ for June 23, 1709,
“have applied to me to give my censure of an enormity, which has been
revived after being long suppressed, and is called Punning. I have
several arguments ready to prove that he cannot be a man of honour who
is guilty of this abuse of human society.”
Bagford makes the following remark on this subject:--
“As for rebuses or name devices, thei ware brought into use heare in
England after King Edward ye 3 had conquered France, and this was
taken up by most people heare in this nation, espesially by them which
had none armes; and if their names ended in _ton_, as Haton; Boulton;
Luton; Grafton; Middellton; Seton; Norton; they must presently have
for their signes or devises a hat and a tun; a boult and a tun; a lute
and a tun, and so on, which signifies nothing to ye name, for all
names ending in _Ton_ signifieth a toune from whence they tooke their
name. It would make one very merry to loke ouer ye learned Camden in
his ‘Remaines,’ and to consider ye titles of our ould books printed by
Haryson, Kingston, Islip, Woodcooke, Payer, Bushell,” &c.--_Harl.
MSS._, 5910, p. ii.
Camden, in his “Remains,” mentions these punning signs, and gives a like
statement with Bagford, that they were introduced from France, where
they are still much in fashion. “These,” says Camden, “were so well
liked by our English there and, sent hither ouer the streight of Calice
with full sayle, were so entertained here although they were most
ridiculous, by all degrees of the learned and unlearned, that he was
nobody that could not hammer out of his name an invention by this
witcraft, and picture it accordingly: whereupon who did not busy his
brain to hammer his device out of this forge.” After many examples too
long to quote, he concludes with the following:--
“Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury, a man of great wisedome, and borne
to the universall good of this realme, was content to use _mor_ upon a
ton, and sometimes a mulberry-tree, called _Morus_ in Latine, out of a
ton. So _Luton_, _Thornton_, _Ashton_, did note their names with a
Lute, a Thorn, and an Ash upon a Ton. So an hare on a bottle for
_Harebottle_, a Maggot-pie upon a Goat for _Pigot_. _Med_ written on a
Calf for _Medcalfe_; _Chester_, a chest with a starre over it;
_Allet_, a Lot; _Lionel Ducket_, a Lion with L on his head, where it
should have beene in his tayle; if the lion had been eating a ducke it
had been a rare device,--worth a Duckat or a duck-egge. And if you
require more, I refer you to the wittie inventions of some Londoners;
but that for Garret Dewes is most memorable: two in a garret casting
dews at dice.[667] This for rebus may suffice, and yet if there were
more, I think some lips would like such kind of Lettice.”[668]
How punning signboards were concocted we may gather from a scene in Ben
Jonson’s “Alchymist,” act ii., scene 1, where a rebus sign is to be
found for Abel Drugger, who for that purpose goes to a kind of
fortune-teller, styling himself an alchymist, and who provides our
shopkeeper in the following manner:--
“He shall have a _bell_, that’s Abel,
And by it standing one whose name is _Dee_
In a _rug_ gown, there’s _D_ and _rug_, that’s _drug_,
And right anenst him a dog snarling _er_,
There’s _Drugger_, Abel Drugger. That’s his sign,
And here’s no mystery and hieroglyphic.”
This wonderful sign the Alchymist terms a “mystic character,” the
“radii” of which are to produce no end of good results to Abel’s trade.
The Cockneys (“gentle dulness dearly loves a joke”) have at all times
been celebrated for this kind of pleasantry. The mention of a few of
their signs will be sufficient to show the extent of their wit and
originality in this direction. The well-known bird-bolt through a tun,
or BOLT IN TUN, for Bolton, the device of one of the priors of St
Bartholomew, is still in existence in Fleet Street.
“It may seem doubtful,” says Camden, “whether Bolton, prior of St
Bartholomew, in Smithfield, was wiser when he invented for his name a
bird-bolt through his Tun, or when he built him a house upon Harrow
Hill, for fear of an inundation after a great conjunction of planets
in the watery triplicity.”
From an entry in the Patent Roll of 21 Henry VI., (1443,) this house in
Fleet Street appears to have been an inn at that period. In a licence of
alienation to the Friars Carmelites of London, of certain premises in
the parish of St Dunstan, Fleet Street, “_Hospitium vocatum le
Boltenton_” is mentioned as a boundary. On some of the seventeenth
century trades tokens, we meet with a tun pierced by three arrows; this
variation of the Bolt in Tun was called the TUN AND ARROWS, (or
_h_arrows, as the Cockney tokens have it.) There was one in Bishopsgate
Street Within, and another in Bishopsgate Street Without, in the reign
of Charles II.
A HAND AND COCK was the punning sign of John Hancock, in Whitefriars.
George Cox, in the Minories, tallow-chandler by trade, had TWO COCKS for
his sign. Thomas Cockayne, a distiller in Southwark, had the same sign,
as a feeble pun on part of his name; whilst Christopher Bostock, not
seeing any possibility “to hammer” a rebus out of his own patronym,
fortunately for him lived at Cock’s Key, and so could make up for this
misfortune by punning on the name of that place, whence his sign
triumphantly exhibited the COCK AND KEY. John Drinkwater, a publisher,
intimated his name by a FOUNTAIN; and William Woodcock, a bookseller in
St Paul’s Churchyard in the seventeenth century, happily rendered his by
a cock standing on a bundle of wood. William Hill, another bookseller in
St Paul’s Churchyard in 1598, lived at the sign of the HILL. John
Buckland, who followed the same profession in Paternoster Row, in 1750,
was modestly content with half a pun, and adopted the sign of the BUCK,
while, in the same manner, another of his colleagues, Samuel Manship,
who in 1720 lived “against the Royal Exchange, Cornhill,” was satisfied
with the SHIP. The SUN AND RED CROSS, in Jewin Street, was the sign of
John Cross, who, taking a house with the sign of the _Sun_, added to it
a _Cross_. In the same manner Pelham More, in _Moors_gate, had the SUN
AND MOOR’S HEAD. John Cherry, of Maidenhead, adopted a CHERRY-TREE as
his sign, showing in this as much wit as the ancestor of the Crequi
family in France, who chose a _Crequier_ (old French for cherry-tree) as
his coat of arms. Hugh Conny, of Caxton and Elsworth, Cambridge, had in
1666 THREE CONIES, or rabbits, for a sign. Richard Lion, in the Strand,
had the LION. Bartholomew Fish, at Queenhithe, in 1667, THREE FISHES.
William Horne, in Oak Lane, 1671, the HORNS. Thomas Fox, in Newgate
Market, a FOX. William Geese, King Street, Westminster, THREE GEESE.
Ellinor Gandor, Upper Shadwell, 1667, a GANDER; whilst H. Goes, a native
of Antwerp, printer at York in 1506, next at Beverley, and finally, in
London, had for his sign a GOOSE with an H above it. Joseph Parsons, “at
the sign of PARSON’S GREEN,” Market Place, St James, seems to have had a
view of Parson’s Green, Fulham, for his sign; though why he did not
simply take a parson is, we fear, a secret he has carried with him to
the grave. John Hive, St Mary’s Hill, 1667, had the sign of the BEEHIVE.
Grace Pestell, in Fig-tree Yard, Ratcliffe, the PESTLE AND MORTAR. John
Atwood, in Rose Lane, the MAN IN THE WOOD. Andrew Hind, over against the
Mews, Charing Cross, a HIND. Taylor, the Water poet, mentions a similar
sign at Preston:--
“There at the Hinde, kinde Master Hinde, mine host,
Kept a good table, bak’d, and boyld, and rost.”[669]
Jane Keye, Bloomsbury Market, 1653, a KEY. The LION AND KEY was, in
1651, a sign in Thames Street, punning perhaps on the neighbouring
Lion’s Quay; it is still the sign of a public-house in Hull, whilst the
RED LION AND KEY still occurs in Mill Lane, Tooley Street. A grocer,
named Laurence Green, proved that to the “_fortem ac tenacem propositi
virum_” nothing is impossible, and found means to pun upon his
untractable name by painting his doorposts _green_, and called his shop
the GREEN POSTS. We meet with him in a newspaper advertisement, which,
as it gives the price of various articles at that date, is not
uninteresting. Green sold--
“Chocolate, made of the best nuts, at 3s. a pound; the best, with
sugar, at 2s. a pound; a good sort of all nut, at 2s. 6d.; with sugar,
1s. 8d. To the buyers of three pounds, a quarter gratis. The best
coffee, at 5s. 4d. a pound; to the buyer of three pounds, 1s. allowed.
Bohee tea, at 16, 20, 24s., the very finest, at 28s. a pound. Fine
green tea, at 14s., good, at 10s. a pound. Fine Spanish snuff, at 4s.
a pound.” &c.[670]
The HARP was the sign of Richard Harper, West Smithfield; it occurs on a
trades token. The house seems afterwards to have assumed the sign of the
BIBLE AND HARP. What occupation Richard Harper followed does not appear
from his token, but in 1641 a Richard Harper at the sign of the Bible
and Harp, published a tract called
“BARTHOLOMEW FAYRE,
or
Varieties of Fancies where you may find,
A fayre of Wares and all to please your mind.”
In 1670 the house was occupied by a certain J. Clarke, and at a
subsequent period by J. Bisset; both these men published numerous
ballads.
The HAT AND TUN is a pun on the name of Hatton, and is still preserved
on a public-house sign in Hatton Wall. A man named Nobis, at the
beginning of the present century opened an inn on the road to
Pappenburgh, which he called NOBIS INN, and made free with grammar in
order to find a punning motto, viz.: “SI DEUS PRO NOBIS QUIS CONTRA
NOBIS.” BELLS have been used by innumerable persons of the name of Bell.
The SALMON was the sign of Mrs Salmon, the Madame Tussaud of the
eighteenth century; her gallery was first in St Martin’s-le-Grand, near
Aldersgate, whence she removed to Fleet Street, opposite what is now
Anderton’s Hotel, then called the Horns Tavern. The BRACE Tavern, in
Queen’s Bench prison, was so called on account of its being kept by two
brothers of the name of _Partridge_. The GOLDEN HEART was the sign of
Thomas Hart, a tailor in Monmouth Street, St Giles. (Harl. MSS., Bagford
Bills, 5931.) Bat Pidgeon, the hairdresser immortalised in the
_Spectator_, lived at the THREE PIGEONS, “the corner house of St
Clement’s churchyard, next to the Strand,” says Pennant, where he “cut
my boyish locks in the year 1740.”
The BLACK SWAN in Bartholomew Lane, nicknamed Cobweb Hall, was kept by
Owen Swan, parish clerk (hence the _Black_ Swan?) of St Michael’s,
Cornhill. It was a tavern of great resort for the musical wits in the
seventeenth century. Failing in this business, Owen set up as a
tobacconist in St Michael’s Alley; on the papers in which he wrapped
tobacco for his customers, were the following rhymes:--
“The dying Swan in sad and mourning strains
Of his near end and hapless fate complains,
In pity then your kind assistance give,
Smoke of Swan’s best that the poor bird may live.”
To which a friend of his wrote the following reply:--
“The aged Swan opprest with time and cares,
With Indian sweets his funeral prepares.
Light up the pile! thus he’ll ascend the skies
And Phœnix-like from his own ashes rise.”
There is a well-known anecdote of a man named Farr, who opened a tobacco
shop on Fish Street Hill, and soon obtained a good custom from the pun
over his door, “The best tobacco _by Farr_,” rather than from the
quality of his tobacco. Opposite him there was another tobacconist who
lost his customers through his pun, but he regained them in the same way
as he lost them, for he fought Farr with his own weapons, and wrote up
“_Far_ better tobacco than the best tobacco _by Farr_.” This joke was
thought so good that all his customers returned. Tobacco-papers of the
original “finest tobacco _by Farr_” are preserved among the Banks
hand-bills in the British Museum, as a proof of the truth of this
history.
A LING, or codfish, strange to say, entwined with honeysuckles, was the
sign of Nicholas Ling, at the north-west door of St Paul’s, where, in
1595, he published “Pierce Pennylesse his Supplicacion to the Divell.”
An OAK was the sign of Nicholas Okes, a bookseller dwelling at Gray’s
Inn, publisher of some of Taylor the Water Poet’s works. His colophon
represents Jupiter seated on an eagle between two oak trees. A French
publisher, Nicholas Cheneau, in the Rue St Jacques, Paris, in 1580, had
also an oak for his sign, (_chêne_, an oak.)
John Day, another publisher of the time of Queen Elizabeth, had a sort
of pun, or charade, on his name in the sign of the RESURRECTION, his
device representing a man waking a sleeper, with the words, “Arise, for
it is _day_.” The Castle and Falcon was another of his signs. Richard
Grafton, the first printer of the Common Prayer, who also printed the
proclamation of Lady Jane Grey as Queen of England, for which he fell
under the displeasure of Queen Mary, had a tun with a grafted fruit-tree
growing through it. Stow made a pun upon this sign, saying that one of
Grafton’s works was “a noise of empty _tonnes_ and unfruitful
_grafftes_,” to which Grafton retaliated by calling Stow’s Chronicle “a
collection of lyes foolishly _stowed_ together.” Hugh Singleton had a
GOLDEN TUN; Harrison, 1560, a hare sheltering under a corn-sheaf tied
with a ribbon, and with the letters _ri_ and a sun shining above; but
the most absurd rebus of all was that of one Newberry, who, according to
Camden, had a YEW TREE with several berries upon it, and in the midst a
great golden N upon one of the branches, which by the help of a little
false spelling made N-yew-berry.
A few punning signs still remain. At Oswaldstwistle, near Accrington, a
man named Bellthorn has the BELL IN THE THORN; at Warbleton, in Sussex,
an old public-house has the sign of a war-bill in a tun, which sign of
the AXE AND TUN is further intended as an intimation to “axe for beer”!
Another innkeeper named Abraham Lowe, who lives half way up Richmond
Hill, near Douglas in the Isle of Man, has the following innocent
attempt at punning on his name:--
“I’m Abraham Lowe, and half way up the Hill,
If I were higher up, what’s funnier still,
I should be _lowe_. Come in and take your fill,
Of porter, ale, wine, spirits, what you will,
Step in, my friend, I pray, no farther go;
My prices, like myself, are always low.”
Besides rebuses, and puns on names, the French have another class of
punning signs, for which we have only very few equivalents, namely,
rebus signboards. One of the most common is the BŒUF À LA MODE, which
some twenty or thirty years ago was thus Englished in golden letters on
a low boarding-house at Brussels:--
“_The Board House of the Fashionable Beef._”
It is the usual sign for eating-houses, being the standard dish of the
French _bourgeoisie_. The picture represents an ox dressed up in the
height of female elegance, with bonnet, shawl, &c. A good repartee is
told, originating in this method of representing the sign: a citizen’s
wife, of aldermanic proportions, was coming out of a _magasin de
nouveautés_ in Paris, just as two “social evils” were going in;
“_Dis-donc, Pelagie_,” said one of the girls to her companion, “look at
that Bœuf-à-la-Mode who is going out.” “Yes,” replied the indignant
matron, who had overheard the remark, “and now _game_ is coming in!”
Other French punning signs, such as ST JEAN BAPTISTE, _Au Juste Prix_,
LE BOUT DU MONDE, LE SIGNE DE LA CROIX, and many more, have been noticed
in former chapters, and need not, therefore, be again mentioned here.
[666] In the old sermons and religious treatises of the seventeenth
century, however, we occasionally find punning resorted to by the
preachers of the time.
[667] He was a printer who kept his shop at the sign of the Swan in St
Paul’s Churchyard in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. This Garatt D’Ewes
was grandfather of the celebrated antiquary, Sir Symond D’Ewes; he
amassed a handsome fortune, which enabled him to purchase the manor of
Gains near Upminster, Essex, and thus laid the foundation of the future
greatness of his family. D’Ewes was of Dutch origin, being a native of
the province of Gelderland. Some of the letters of this early printer
are preserved in the Harl. MS., No. 381.
[668] Camden’s Remains, p. 140, _et seq._ 1629.
[669] Taylor’s Pennylesse Pilgrimage, 1630.
[670] _Postman_, January 25-27, 1711.