from the time of Queen Elizabeth, which survived until the nineteenth
century, but we only have space briefly to allude to three. The "King's
Head" and the "Queen's Head" was each famous in its way. The former
had been originally the "Pope's Head," the sign being changed at the
Reformation. In 1534 the Abbot of Waverley, whose town house was not
far off, writes, apparently on business, that he will be at the "Pope's
Head" in Southwark--eight years afterwards it appears as the "King's
Head." In a deed belonging to Mr. G. Eliot Hodgkin, F.S.A., the two
names are given. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the house
belonged to various noteworthy people; among the rest, to Thomas Cure,
a local benefactor, and to Humble, Lord Ward. It was burnt in the
Great Southwark Fire, and the last fragment of the galleried building,
erected immediately afterwards, was pulled down in January, 1885.
The "Queen's Head" was the only one of the Southwark houses we are
describing that escaped the Fire of 1676, perhaps owing to the fact
that, by way of precaution, a tenement was blown up at the gateway. It
stood on the site of a house called the "Crowned or Cross Keys," which
in 1529 was an armoury or store-place for the King's harness. In 1558
it had a brew-house attached to it, and had lately been rebuilt. In
1634 the house had become the "Queen's Head," and the owner was John
Harvard, of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, who afterwards migrated to
America, and gave his name to Harvard University, Massachusetts. About
this time it was frequented by carriers, as we learn from John Taylor,
"the water-poet." The main building, destroyed in 1895, was found to
be of half-timbered construction, dating perhaps from the sixteenth
century. A galleried portion, also of considerable age, survived until
the year 1900.
Of another Southwark inn, the "George," we can fortunately speak in
the present tense. It seems to have come into existence in the early
part of the sixteenth century, and is mentioned with the sign of "St.
George" in 1554:--
"St. George that swindg'd the Dragon, and e'er since
Sits on his horseback at mine hostess' door."
The owner in 1558 was Humfrey Colet, or Collet, who had been Member
of Parliament for Southwark. Soon after the middle of the seventeenth
century, in a book called _Musarum Deliciæ, or the Muses' Recreation_,
compiled by Sir John Mennes (Admiral and Chief Comptroller of the Navy)
and Dr. James Smith, appeared some lines, "upon a surfeit caught by
drinking bad sack at 'the George' in Southwark." Perhaps the landlord
mended his ways; in any case, the rent was shortly afterwards £150 a
year--a large sum for those days. The "George" was a great coaching
and carriers' inn. Only a fragment of it, but a picturesque one,
now exists; it is still galleried, and dates from shortly after the
Southwark Fire of 1676. The rest of the building was pulled down in
1889-90. All the inns to which allusion has been made were clustered
together on the east side of the Borough High Street, the gateways of
those most distant from each other being only about 140 yards apart.
Another leading thoroughfare from London to the east was the
road through Aldgate to Whitechapel. Here, though the houses of
entertainment were historically far less interesting than those of
Southwark, they flourished for many years. Where a modern hotel with
the same sign now stands, next to the Metropolitan railway station on
the north side of Aldgate High Street, there was once a well-known
inn, the "Three Nuns," so called, perhaps, from the contiguity of
the nuns of St. Clare, or _sorores minores_, who gave a name to the
Minories. The "Three Nuns" inn is mentioned by Defoe in his _Journal
of the Plague_, which, though it describes events that happened
when he was little more than an infant, has an air of authenticity
suggesting personal experience. We are told by him that near this inn
was the "dreadful gulf--for such it was rather than a pit"--in which,
during the Plague of 1665, not less than 1,114 bodies were buried
in a fortnight, from the 6th to the 20th of September. Throughout
the eighteenth and the early part of the nineteenth centuries this
house was much frequented by coaches and carriers. The late Mr.
Edwin Edwards, who etched it in 1871, was told by the landlord that
a four-horse coach was then running from there to Southend during
the summer months. A painting of the holy nuns still appeared on the
sign-board. The house was rebuilt soon after the formation of the
Metropolitan Railway. A short distance west of the "Three Nuns," at 31,
Aldgate High Street, the premises of Messrs. Adkin and Sons, wholesale
tobacconists, occupy the site of the old "Blue Boar" coaching inn,
which they replaced in 1861. The sculptured sign of the "Blue Boar,"
let into the wall in front, was put up at the time of the rebuilding.
The former inn, described on a drawing in the Crace collection as the
oldest in London, is held by some to be the same as that referred to
in an order of the Privy Council to the Lord Mayor, dated from St.
James's, September 5th, 1557, wherein he is told to "apprehende and to
comitt to safe warde" certain actors who are about to perform in "a
lewde Playe called a Sacke full of Newse" at the "Boar's Head" without
Aldgate.
A few years ago, at No. 25, the entrance might still be seen of another
famous inn called the "Bull," formerly the "Black Bull." Above the
gateway was a fine piece of ironwork, and the old painted sign was
against the wall of the passage. This house flourished greatly a little
before the advent of railways, when Mrs. Anne Nelson, coach proprietor,
was the landlady, and could make up nearly two hundred beds there. Most
of her business was to Essex and Suffolk, but she also owned the Exeter
coach. She must have been landlady on the memorable occasion when Mr.
Pickwick arrived in a cab after "two mile o' danger at eightpence," and
it was through this very gateway that he and his companions were driven
by the elder Weller when they started on their adventurous journey to
Ipswich. The house is now wholly destroyed and the yard built over.
A common sign in former days was the "Saracen's Head." We shall have
occasion to refer to several in London. One of them stood by Aldgate,
just within the limits of the city. Here a block of old buildings
is in existence on the south side, which once formed the front of a
well-known coaching inn, with this sign. The spacious inn yard remains,
the house on the east side of its entrance having fine pilasters. From
the "Saracen's Head," Aldgate, coaches plied to Norwich as long ago as
1681, and here there is, or was quite recently, a carrier's booking
office.
Another thoroughfare which, within the memory of some who hardly admit
that they are past middle age, contained several famous inns, was that
leading to the north, and known in its various parts as Gracechurch
Street and Bishopsgate Street Within and Without. One of the best known
was the "Cross Keys" in Bishopsgate Street, mentioned in the preface to
Dodsley's _Old Plays_ as a house at which theatrical performances took
place. It was here that, in the latter part of the sixteenth century,
Bankes exhibited the extraordinary feats of his horse Marocco. One
of them, if we may believe an old jest-book, was to select and draw
forth Tarlton with its mouth as "the veriest fool in the company." In
more modern times, until the advent of railways, the "Cross Keys" was
a noted coaching and carriers' establishment. Destroyed in the Great
Fire, and again burnt down in 1734, but rebuilt in the old style, it
was still standing on the west side of the street, immediately south
of Bell Yard, when Larwood and Hotten published their _History of
Signboards_ in 1866. Another inn with this sign stood appropriately
near the site of St. Peter's Church in Wood Street, Cheapside, and was
pulled down probably about the same time as the more famous house in
Gracechurch Street.
Of equal note was the "Spread Eagle," the site of which has mostly been
absorbed by the extension of Leadenhall Market. Like the "Cross Keys,"
it was burnt in the Great Fire, but rebuilt in the old style with
an ample galleried yard. In the basement some mediæval arches still
remained. At the "Spread Eagle" that original writer George Borrow
had been staying with his future wife, Mrs. Mary Clarke, and various
friends, when they were married at St. Peter's Church, Cornhill, on
April 23rd, 1840, her daughter, Henrietta, signing the register. Before
its destruction in 1865 it had been for some time a receiving office
of Messrs. Chaplin and Horne. The site, of about 1,200 square feet,
was sold for no less a sum than £95,000. Another Gracechurch inn, the
"Tabard," which long ago disappeared, had, like the immortal hostelry
in Southwark, become the "Talbot," and its site is marked by Talbot
Court.
In Bishopsgate Street Within three galleried inns lingered long enough
to have been often seen by the writer. These were the "Bull," the
"Green Dragon," and the "Four Swans," each with something of a history,
and to them might be added the picturesque, though less important,
"Vine" and the "Flower Pot," from which last house a seventeenth
century trade token was issued. The "Bull," the most southern of these
inns, all of which were on the west side of the highway, was at least
as old as the latter part of the fifteenth century, for in one of the
chronicles of London lately edited by Mr. C. L. Kingsford, I find
it, under the date 1498, associated with a painful incident--namely,
the execution of the son of a cordwainer, "dwellyng at the Bulle in
Bisshoppesgate Strete," for calling himself the Earl of Warwick. Hall
gives his name as Ralph Wilford. Anthony Bacon, elder brother of
Francis, during the year 1594 hired a lodging in Bishopsgate Street,
but the fact of its being near the "Bull," where plays and interludes
were performed, so troubled his mother that for her sake he removed to
Chelsea. Shortly afterwards, as may be learnt from _Tarlton's Jests_,
the old drama called "The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth" was
here played, "wherein the judge was to take a boxe on the eare, and
because he was absent that should take the blow, Tarlton himselfe, ever
forward to please, tooke upon him to play the judge, besides his own
part of the clown." The "Bull" was the house of call of old Hobson, the
carrier, to whose rigid rule about the letting of his saddle horses we
are supposed to owe the phrase, "Hobson's Choice." Milton wrote his
epitaph in the well-known lines beginning:--
"Here lies old Hobson; Death hath broke his girt,
And here, alas! hath laid him in the dirt."
In his second edition of _Milton's Poems_, p. 319, Wharton alludes to
Hobson's "portrait in fresco" as having then lately been in existence
at the inn, and it is mentioned in _The Spectator_, No. 509. There is
a print of it representing a bearded old man in hat and cloak with a
money bag, which in the original painting had the inscription, "The
fruitful mother of an hundred more." He bequeathed property for a
conduit to supply Cambridge with water; the conduit head still exists,
though not in its original position. In 1649, by a Council of War, six
Puritan troopers were condemned to death for a mutiny at the "Bull."
The house remained till 1866.
Further north, at No. 86, was the "Green Dragon," the last of the
galleried inns that survived in Bishopsgate Street. It is mentioned
in De Laune's _Present State of London_, 1681, as a place of resort
for coachmen and carriers, and I have before me an advertisement
sheet of the early nineteenth century, showing that coaches were then
plying from here to Norwich, Yarmouth, Cambridge, Colchester, Ware,
Hertford, Brighton, and many other places. There is a capital etching
of the house by Edwin Edwards. It was closed in 1877, its site being
soon afterwards built over. At the sale of the effects eleven bottles
of port wine fetched 37s. 6d. each. The "Four Swans," immediately to
the north of the inn last named, although it did not survive so long,
remained to the end a more complete specimen of its class, having three
tiers of galleries perfect on each side, and two tiers at the west end.
The "water-poet" tells us that in 1637 "a waggon or coach" came here
once a week from Hertford. Other references to it might be quoted from
books of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but the story told
on an advertisement sheet issued by a former landlord about a fight
here between Roundheads, led by Ireton, and a troop of Royalists, is
apocryphal.
Not far off, in Bishopsgate Street Without, there was until lately a
"Two Swan" inn yard, and a "One Swan" with a large yard--an old place
of call for carriers and waggons. These lingered on until the general
clearance by the Great Eastern Railway Company a few years ago, when
the remains of Sir Paul Pindar's mansion, latterly a tavern, were also
removed; the finely-carved timber front and a stuccoed ceiling finding
their way into the Victoria and Albert Museum. Another old Bishopsgate
house was the "White Hart," near St. Botolph's Church, a picturesque
building with projecting storeys, and in front the date 1480, but the
actual structure was probably much less ancient. It was drawn by J.
T. Smith and others early in the nineteenth century, and did not long
survive. The site is still marked by White Hart Court. On the opposite
side of the way was an inn, the "Dolphin," which, as Stow tells us,
was given in 1513 by Margaret Ricroft, widow, with a charge in favour
of the Grey Friars. It disappeared in the first half of the eighteenth
century. The old "Catherine Wheel," a galleried inn hard by, mentioned
by De Laune in 1681, was not entirely destroyed till 1894.
Another road out of London richly furnished with inns was that from
Newgate westward. The first one came to was the "Saracen's Head"
on Snow Hill, an important house, to which the late Mr. Heckethorn
assigned a very early origin. Whether or not it existed in the
fourteenth century, as he asserts, it was certainly flourishing when
Stow in his _Survey_ described it as "a fair and large inn for receipt
of travellers." It continued for centuries to be largely used, and
here Nicholas Nickleby and his uncle waited on Squeers, the Yorkshire
schoolmaster, whom Dickens must have modelled from various real
personages. In a _Times_ advertisement for January 3rd, 1801, I read
that "at Mr. Simpson's Academy, Wodencroft Lodge, near Greta Bridge,
Yorkshire, young gentlemen are boarded and accurately instructed in the
English, Latin, and Greek languages, writing, arithmetic, merchants'
accounts, and the most useful branches of the mathematics, at 16
guineas per annum, if under nine years of age, and above that age
17 guineas; French taught by a native of France at 1 guinea extra.
Mr. Simpson is now in town, and may be treated with from eleven
till two o'clock every day at the 'Saracen's Head,' Snow Hill." In
the early part of last century the landlady was Sarah Ann Mountain,
coach proprietor, and worthy rival of Mrs. Nelson, of the "Bull" Inn,
Aldgate. The "Saracen's Head" disappeared in the early part of 1868,
when this neighbourhood was entirely changed by the formation of the
Holborn Viaduct. Another Snow Hill inn was the "George," or "George and
Dragon," mentioned by Strype as very large and of considerable trade. A
sculptured sign from there is in the Guildhall Museum.
In Holborn there were once nine or ten galleried inns. We will only
allude to those still in existence within the memory of the writer.
The most famous of them, perhaps, was the "George and Blue Boar,"
originally the "Blue Boar," the site of which is covered by the Inns of
Court Hotel. The house is named in the burial register of St. Andrew's,
Holborn, as early as 1616, but it is chiefly known from a story related
by the Rev. Thomas Morrice, in his _Memoir of Roger Earl of Orrery_
(1742), that Cromwell and Ireton, in the disguise of troopers, here
intercepted a letter sewn in the flap of a saddle from Charles I. to
his Queen, in which he wrote that he was being courted by the Scotch
Presbyterians and the army, and that he thought of closing with the
former. Cromwell is supposed to have said, "From that time forward
we resolved on his ruin." The writer ventured to ask that excellent
historian, Dr. Samuel Gardiner, what he thought of the statement. In
August, 1890, he most kindly replied by letter as follows:--"The tale
has generally been repudiated without enquiry, and I am rather inclined
to believe, at least, in its substantial accuracy. The curious thing
is, that there are two lines of tradition about intercepted letters,
as it seems to me quite distinct." We may, therefore, without being
over credulous, cherish the belief that the picturesque incident
referred to was one that actually occurred. There is an advertisement
of December 27th, 1779, offering the lease of the "George and Blue
Boar," which helps us to realize the value and capacity of an important
inn of that period. We are told that it contains forty bedrooms,
stabling for fifty-two horses, seven coach-houses, and a dry ride sixty
yards long; also that it returns about £2,000 a year. In George Colman
the younger's "Heir at Law," act i., scene 2, this house is said by one
of the characters to be "in tumble downish kind of a condition," but it
survived until 1864, when it made way for the Inns of Court Hotel.
A group of inns which remained more recently were Ridler's "Bell and
Crown," the old "Bell," and the "Black Bull," all on the north side of
Holborn. Of these, the most picturesque was the "Bell," about which I
have been able to ascertain some curious facts. The earliest notice of
it that has come to light was on the 14th of March, 1538, when William
Barde sold a messuage with garden called the "Bell," in the parish of
St. Andrew, Holborn, to Richard Hunt, citizen and girdler. The latter,
who died in 1569, gave thirty sacks of charcoal yearly for ever, as a
charge on the property, to be distributed to thirty poor persons of
the parish. After various changes of ownership, in 1679-80 it passed
into the hands of Ralph Gregge, and his grandson sold it in 1722 to
Christ's Hospital. In the deed of sale three houses are mentioned and
described as "formerly one great mansion-house or inn known as the Bell
or Blue Bell." About two years before, the front of the premises facing
Holborn had been rebuilt, when the sculptured arms of Gregge were let
into the wall in front; these arms are now at the Guildhall Museum. The
"Bell" became a coaching house of considerable reputation, that part of
the business being about the year 1836 in the hands of Messrs. B. W.
and H. Horne, who, as coach proprietors, were second only to William
Chaplin. For many years, until finally closed in September, 1897, the
house was managed by the Bunyer family. It was the last galleried inn
on the Middlesex side of the water, the galleries being perhaps as old
as the reign of Charles II. A still older portion was a cellar built of
stone immediately to the left of the entrance, which might almost have
been mediæval. The rest of the building seems to have dated from the
early part of the eighteenth century. There is a sympathetic reference
to the old "Bell" by William Black in his _Strange Adventures of a
Phæton_. Another noteworthy "Bell" Inn was that in Carter Lane, whence
Richard Quyney wrote in 1598 to his "loveing good ffrend and contreyman
Mr. Willm Shackespere," the only letter addressed to our greatest
poet which is known to exist. There is still a Bell yard connecting
Carter Lane with Knightrider Street. The first scene of the _Harlot's
Progress_, by Hogarth, is laid in front of an inn, with the sign of the
"Bell" in Wood Street. Above the door are chequers.
A short distance west of the Holborn house was the "Crown" Inn,
latterly Ridler's "Bell and Crown," destroyed about 1899. It had been
a coaching centre, but years ago the yard was built over, and it
flourished to the end as a quiet family hotel. Next to the "Bell" on
the east side was the "Black Bull," the front of which, with the carved
sign of a bull in a violent state of excitement, remained after the
rest of the inn had disappeared, outliving its neighbour for a brief
period. It was in existence for a couple of hundred years or more, but
future generations will probably only remember it as the house where
Mr. Lewson was taken ill, and placed under the tender mercies of Betsy
Prig and Mrs. Gamp; whence also, when convalescent, he was assisted
into a coach, Mould the undertaker eyeing him with regret as he felt
himself baulked of a piece of legitimate business.
A few short years ago if, on leaving this group of Holborn inns, we had
turned down Fetter Lane in the direction of Fleet Street, after passing
two or three gabled buildings still standing on the right hand side,
we should have come to another old hostelry called the "White Horse,"
of which there is a well-known coloured print from a drawing made by
Pollard in 1814, with a coach in front called the Cambridge Telegraph.
It gradually fell into decay, became partly a "pub" and partly a common
lodging-house, and with its roomy stabling at the back was swept away
in 1897-98. Most of the structure was of the eighteenth century,
but there were remains of an earlier wooden building. Its northern
boundary touched the precinct of Barnard's Inn, an inn of chancery, now
disestablished and adapted for the purposes of the Mercers' School.
Continuing our course southward, a short walk would formerly have taken
us to the "Bolt-in-Tun," I think the only coaching establishment in
Fleet Street, which possessed so many taverns and coffee-houses. The
inn was of ancient origin, the White Friars having had a grant of the
"Hospitium vocatum Le Bolt en ton" as early as the year 1443. The sign
is the well-known rebus on the name of Bolton, the bird-bolt through a
tun or barrel, which was the device of a prior of St. Bartholomew's,
Smithfield, and may still be seen in the church there, and at
Canonbury, where the priors had a country house. The _City Press_ for
September 12th, 1882, announces the then impending destruction of the
"Bolt-in-Tun," and in the following year we are told that although a
remnant of it in Fleet Street exists as a booking office for parcels,
by far the larger portion, represented chiefly by the Sussex Hotel,
Bouverie Street, which bore on it the date 1692, has just disappeared.