A statuette, also representing a naked boy, not sculptured in stone, but carved in wood, is placed on a pedestal affixed to the wall of a public-house, at the corner of Giltspur Street and Cock Lane, called the Fortune of War. The spot was commonly known as Pie Corner: it is hardly necessary to add that here ended the Great Fire of London. The figure in question was put up after that event; an engraving of it in Pennant’s account of London shows the following inscription on the breast and arms:

‘This boy is in Memory Put up for the late Fire of London, occasioned by the Sin of Gluttony, 1666.’

Burn tells us that its propriety was on one occasion thus supported by a Nonconformist preacher on the anniversary of the Fire. He asserted that the calamity could not be occasioned by the sin of blasphemy, for in that case it would have begun in Billingsgate; nor lewdness, for then Drury Lane would have been first on fire; nor lying, for then the flames had reached them from Westminster Hall. ‘No, my beloved; it was occasioned by the sin of gluttony, for it began at Pudding Lane and ended at Pie Corner.’

The inscription has long been obliterated, and no trace is to be seen of the little wings with which, in Pennant’s illustration, the boy is furnished; in 1816, however, they were still conspicuous, and were painted bright yellow. In that curious work—the ‘Vade-Mecum for Malt-worms’—which was written about the year 1715, the Fortune of War is mentioned as a well-known tavern. Within the memory of man it had the unpleasing reputation of being a house of call for resurrectionists, who supplied the surgeons of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital with subjects for dissection. It was here that John Bishop, the body-snatcher, met his accomplice Williams, before the murder of the Italian boy Ferrari, for which and similar crimes they were hanged in 1831.

Our quaint old chronicler, John Stow, says that Pie Corner was ‘a place so called of such a sign, sometime a fair inn for receipt of travellers, but now divided into tenements.’ Strype in 1720 describes it as noted chiefly for ‘Cooks’ Shops and Pigs drest there during Bartholomew Fair.’ There are several allusions to it in Ben Jonson’s ‘Alchemist’ and other plays. The sign of the Pie probably implied the bird now usually called a magpie, but it might have been derived from the Pye,[4] or rules for finding out the service of the day in the Roman Breviary, or from the good cheer provided in this immediate neighbourhood. Larwood and Hotten mention a stone sign of a Naked Boy with the date 1633 at Skipton-in-Craven.

A stone bas-relief of that mythical person, Guy, Earl of Warwick, is still preserved on a house at the corner of Warwick Lane and Newgate Street. The figure is represented standing on a pedestal in chain armour, with a conical helmet, a sword in his right hand, and on his left arm a shield chequy, or and azure, with a bend sinister ermine. This seems to be wrongly copied from Guy’s shield in the Rows Roll, which has a chevron ermine, but one arm of the chevron is, from the position of the shield, so foreshortened that it can hardly be seen; hence the mistake. Above is the date 1668, on one side the letters G. C., standing, I suppose, for guido comes; on the other a coat of arms, three mascles on a bend, to whom belonging I cannot say, so many families have this charge. Below is the inscription: ‘Restored 1817. J. Deakes, Archt.’

The general design somewhat resembles that of a large figure in the chapel of St. Mary Magdalen at Guy’s Cliff, near Warwick, which, as we learn from a modern inscription in Latin, was hewn out of the living rock by order of Richard de Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, in the reign of Henry VI., to mark the spot where Guy was thought to have ended his days. This Richard de Beauchamp obtained license to found here a chantry for two priests, and annexed land thereto to the value of twenty-four marks per annum. It had before been a hermitage. Stow tells us that ‘Eldernesse lane, which stretcheth north to the high street of Newgate market, is now called Warwicke lane, of an ancient house there, built by an Earl of Warwicke, and since called Warwicke Inn.’ Elsewhere he says: ‘In the 36th of Henry VI. the greater estates of the realm being called up to London, Richard Nevill Earl of Warwick came with six hundred men all in jackets embroidered with ragged staves before and behind, and was lodged in Warwicke Lane, in whose house there were oftentimes six oxen eaten at breakfast, and every tavern was full of his meat, for he that had any acquaintance in that house might have there so much of sodden and roast meat as he could prick and carry away upon a long dagger.’ At the beginning of this century the house to which the statuette belonged was occupied by a Mr. Parry; an inscription over the door stated that it had been a tobacconist’s shop since 1660, no doubt rebuilt.

A well-modelled bas-relief of a woman’s head, probably intended to represent Minerva, is on a house belonging to the Leathersellers’ Company, at the corner of Old Jewry and Gresham Street. She has a helmet or diadem, and on her breast the Gorgon’s head; an Ægis also seems to be suggested. On each side are festoons of fruit and flowers; the material I believe to be terra-cotta, but it is so thickly coated with paint that one cannot be sure. Archer, who drew this sign, thought it was a fragment of sculpture from a building of the early part of the sixteenth century, and it seems to have something in common with Italian terra-cotta work of that period; for instance the medallions[5] executed by Joannes Maiano for Cardinal Wolsey, and still existing at Hampton Court. Before the house was modernized, on the brick wall, below the head of Minerva, there was a carving of the Leathersellers’ Arms; and so, being used as a tavern during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, until 1871 it was known by the sign of the Leathersellers’ Arms, or latterly the Three Bucks’ Heads. Of the sculptured head of Minerva no record exists. This property seems to have belonged to the Leathersellers’ Company ever since the year 1565, when Edward Taylor, who had been its master, left by will to the company two messuages in St. Olave’s, Jewry, to distribute among the poorest people in the Poultry Compter a kilderkin of beer and twelve pennyworth of bread, and the same to Wood Street Compter, Newgate, the Fleet, King’s Bench, and the Marshalsea. In 1878 all arrears of these payments to each prison at £1 1s. per quarter, viz. for a kilderkin of beer £1, and for bread 1s., having been paid to this date, and the full payment being £25 4s. a year, the company transferred to the official trustees of charities stock sufficient to produce that amount. The name of Cateaton Street was in 1845 changed to Gresham Street, no one knows why. Here, in the days of John Taylor the water-poet, there was an important inn called the Maidenhead, but this, I imagine, had for its sign the arms of the Mercers’ Company, whose headquarters were in its immediate neighbourhood. Later a seventeenth-century trade token was issued from the Roxalana’s Head in Cateaton Street, the sign no doubt commemorating Elizabeth Davenport the actress, whose favourite part was Roxalana in the ‘Siege of Rhodes.’ Her sham marriage with the last Earl of Oxford of the de Vere family, who deceived her by disguising a trumpeter of his troop as a priest, is told in ‘Gramont,’ and in the ‘Countess Dunois’ Memoirs.’ Pepys saw her in 166?, in the chief box at the Duke’s theatre, ‘in a velvet gown, as the fashion is, looking very handsome.’

The Woman’s Head, dated 1671, which was on a house in Paternoster Row, and has been lately added to the Guildhall Museum, was hardly a sign. Similar heads are still on the keys of a first and second floor window belonging to the old-fashioned house of Messrs. W. and R. Chambers, 47, Paternoster Row. Another bas-relief in the Guildhall Museum represents a gardener holding a spade in his right hand, with the date 1670; it is rudely designed. This is a street rather than a house sign; as late as the year 1856 it was in Gardiner’s Lane, Upper Thames Street, near Broken Wharf. Mr. J. T. Smith, who drew it, in 1791, for his ‘Antiquities of London,’ adds this description: ‘Against Mr. Holyland’s stables, Gardiner’s Lane, the corner of High Timber Street, is this sculpture, but why put up I cannot learn. Tradition says the site was once gardens.’ Perhaps it was a rebus on the name of Gardiner.

Two bas-reliefs of St. George and the Dragon were erected as signs in London soon after the Great Fire, and, on the principle Detur digniori, should be described in this chapter. It was only natural that the figure of St. George should become one of our most popular inn signs; for he was regarded as the patron saint and special protector of this our realm of England. Shakespeare speaks of

‘St. George that swindg’d the Dragon, and e’er since
Sits on his horseback at mine hostess’ door.’

‘King John,’ Act i., Scene I.

A capital specimen of such a sign, though unfortunately in bad condition, is at the Guildhall Museum—presented by Mr. W. Hayward, C.E. It came from a house—81, Snow Hill—which had formed part of a famous old galleried inn. Snow Hill was the thoroughfare between Holborn and the City, till in 1802 it was superseded by Skinner Street, named after Alderman Skinner, which has now in its turn ceased to exist. Snow Hill is called in Stow’s ‘Survey’ Snor or Snore Hill, and by Howell Sore Hill, perhaps from the steepness and difficulty of the ascent. Strype, in 1720, speaks of the George Inn as ‘very large and of a considerable trade, the passage to the yard being through Cow Lane.’ In Sampson’s ‘History of Advertising,’ an advertisement is given from the British Chronicle of January 18 to 20, 1762, which informs us that

The Reading Machine

Is removed from the Three Kings, Piccadilly, to the George
Inn, Snow Hill, London; sets out from the Broad Face,[6]
Reading, every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, at seven
o’clock in the morning, and from the George Inn,
Snow Hill, every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday,
at seven o’clock in the morning; carries passengers to
And from Reading, at 6s. each; children in lap
and outside passengers at 3s.

N.B.—Takes no charge of Writings, Money, Watches, or Jewels, unless entered and paid for as such.

A second representation of the subject of the George and Dragon was formerly to be seen on Bennet Hill, opposite the Heralds’ College, and stood over the entrance to a small court, to which it gave a name. On it were the initials p r m, and date 1667. In ‘Remarks on London,’ by W. Stow, 1722, mention is made of ‘George Court, against the Heralds’ Office at Paul’s Chain.’ The ‘Constitutions of the Order of the Garter’ (c. iii.) ordain that ‘the Sovereign shall put upon his (the knight elect’s) neck a collar, or little chain or lace, having pendant therefrom a massive golden image of an armed knight (i.e., St. George) sitting on horseback.’

A relic of a most interesting old building is the figure of Gerard the Giant,[7] ‘carved from a twisted block of timber, distorted and ill at ease,’ which stood in the niche between the first-floor windows of Gerard’s Hall Hotel, on the south side of Basing Lane. It is about 6 feet high, and painted more or less to imitate life. Gerard’s Hall is described by Stow as ‘one great house, of old time built upon arched vaults, with gates of stone from Caen in Normandy. The same is now a common hostrey for receipt of travellers, commonly and corruptly called Gerrardes Hall, of a giant said to have dwelt there. In the high-roofed hall of this house sometime stood a large fir pole, which reached to the roof thereof, and was said to be one of the staves that Gerrarde the giant used in the wars to run withal.—John Gisors, mayor of London in the year 1245, was owner thereof, and Sir John Gisors, mayor and constable of the Tower 1311, and divers others of that name and family since that time, owned it.—So it appeareth that this Gisor’s Hall, of late time by corruption, hath been called Gerrard’s Hall.’ The upper part of the building was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666, but the crypt remained,[8] and on this was built a brick house, with no remarkable feature except the above-named grotesque wooden figure, by way of sign. This house was destroyed in April, 1852, when the new Cannon Street was being formed. For some months the crypt—a fine specimen of thirteenth-century Gothic—continued in existence; but as the crown of the arched roof stood 2 feet or more above the roadway, it was also pulled down. Mr. Wheatley tells us that the stones were carefully numbered, and presented to the Crystal Palace Company, with a view to its re-erection. After a time, however, they were used in making the foundations for a new engine-house. Some of the stones are even said to have found their way to Kensington, to be broken up for mending the roads. There is a good view of the crypt of Gerard’s Hall in Burn’s ‘Catalogue to the Beaufoy Trade Tokens,’ and a descriptive article in the Builder for April 10, 1852, which also gives drawings of several devices of the nature of merchants’ marks, and an unfinished inscription, cut on the wall of the entrance.

A curious sculptured sign, representing King Charles I.’s gigantic porter and dwarf, used to stand over the entrance to Bull Head Court, Newgate Street, but disappeared some years ago on the widening of King Edward Street, formerly Butcher Hall Lane. This part of Newgate Street was in Strype’s time named Blowbladder Street, and before that Stinking Lane, on account of the smell which arose from slaughter-houses and poultry-shops there. Pennant has an illustration of the sign, but wrongly describes it as being over Bagnio Court, farther east, which was afterwards Bath Street, and has now been ridiculously called Roman Bath Street, though the ‘Royal Bagnio,’ whence the court derived its name, was not erected till 1679. The house to which the bas-relief belonged was No. 80, occupied in 1816 by Mr. Payne, a hatter; at that time the figures were painted, their coats being red, the King’s livery, and their waistcoats white. Not unlikely, the sign may still be in existence.

The two persons represented were William Evans and Jefferey Hudson. Evans, the porter, a Monmouth man, was 7 feet 6 inches high. On one occasion, at a Court masque, he drew the dwarf out of his pocket, ‘to the amazement and amusement of all present.’ There is an allusion to him in the contemporary ballad of ‘The Little Barleycorn.’ Jefferey Hudson, the dwarf, was born at Oakham, Rutland, in 1619. His father, a butcher, kept and baited bulls for George Villiers, first Duke of Buckingham. At nine years of age he was scarcely 18 inches high, and, according to Fuller, ‘without any deformity, wholly proportionable.’ Having entered the service of the Duchess of Buckingham, at an entertainment given by her husband to Charles I. and Henrietta Maria, he was brought to table concealed in a large pie, from which he emerged before the company. The Queen took a fancy to him, so he became her page, and in 1630 was sent to France to fetch a midwife for his royal mistress, but fell into the hands of a Flemish pirate, and was taken to Dunkirk. By this misfortune he was said to have lost about £2,500. Sir William Davenant makes a supposed combat between the dwarf and a turkey-cock the subject of a burlesque poem called ‘Jeffreidos,’ published in 1638, the scene of which is laid at Dunkirk. How Hudson bore the insult is not recorded; but we shall see that he was quite capable of holding his own. During the Civil Wars the dwarf appears to have been a captain of horse, and he followed the Queen into exile. One of his adventures in France is referred to by Sir Walter Scott in ‘Peveril of the Peak.’ This was his duel with Crofts, a young gentleman of the Court, who had provoked him. The duel was fought on horseback with pistols. Crofts came on the ground armed with a syringe only; but a more serious weapon being substituted, he was killed at the first discharge. It seems to have been later that Hudson was again taken prisoner at sea, this time by Turkish pirates, and brought to Barbary, where he was sold as a slave. He asserted that his sufferings in captivity made him grow taller. After many vicissitudes he found his way back to England, probably before the year 1658. In 1679, being a Roman Catholic, he was confined in the Gatehouse at Westminster, for supposed complicity with the Popish Plot. Mr. Inchbold points out, in the ‘Dictionary of National Biography,’ that he did not die there, as Scott and others have affirmed; for, ‘in June, 1680, and April, 1681, “Captain” Jefferey Hudson received respectively £50 and £20 from Charles II.’s secret service fund.’ He died in 1682. Three portraits of him were painted by Mytens, and he also figures in a portrait of Queen Henrietta Maria, by Vandyke, at Petworth. His waistcoat, breeches and stockings are, it is said, preserved.

The sculptured stone sign of the Three Morris Dancers was formerly in front of a public-house numbered 36, Old Change, which is said to have been pulled down about the year 1801. An illustration of the sign exists: the central figure is a woman. A seventeenth-century trade-token issued from here reads thus:

O. iohn.lisle.at.the = Three Morris Dancers.

R. in.y^e old.change = I.A.L.

The word ‘morris’ is derived from the Spanish ‘morisco,’ and is equivalent to Moorish. The Morris or Moorish pike was a weapon much used in England in the reign of Henry VIII.; Shakespeare refers to it in the ‘Comedy of Errors,’ Act iv., Scene 3. Elsewhere he uses the word in its commoner sense; thus, in ‘All’s Well that Ends Well’ he speaks of a morris for May Day, and in ‘King Henry V.,’ Act ii., Scene 4, the Dauphin is made to say:

‘And let us do it with no sign of fear;

No, with no more than if we heard that England
Were busied with a Whitsun morris-dance.’

According to Brand, the Spanish morris was danced at puppet shows by a person habited like a Moor. Strutt, in his ‘Sports and Pastimes of the English People,’ connects it with the fandango. Some curious dancing figures carved in wood once formed part of the decorations in the mediÆval town-hall of Munich; the series was known as the Maurscha tanntz. In England the dance derived from the Moors seems to have been grafted on to the rustic May games and sports, which perhaps were falling into disuse. The characters in the English morris-dance were usually Maid Marian (a boy dressed up in girl’s clothes), Robin Hood, Friar Tuck, the Fool, Tom the piper with pipe and tabor, and the hobby-horse. A rare pamphlet[9] of 1609 tells us about a morris-dance in Herefordshire, where the united ages of the twelve dancers were supposed to amount to twelve hundred years; but, unfortunately, it does not give details of the performance. Waldron, in his edition of the ‘Sad Shepherd,’ 1783, p. 255, mentions seeing a company of morris-dancers from Abington, at Richmond in Surrey, in the summer of 1783. They appeared to be making a kind of annual circuit. Even so late as the time of the Queen’s coronation, there was morris-dancing of a kind in Hyde Park, as recorded by a writer in Notes and Queries.

One still sees occasionally on May Day, in the less-frequented streets of London, a dance performed by two or three sweeps to the sound of fife and drum. They are dressed fantastically; one of them is, as a rule, half concealed in a frame covered with leaves and flowers, and is called a Jack-in-the-green. They are generally accompanied by a woman. These may be considered to a certain extent descendants of the morris-dancers, and their black faces happen to carry out the old idea.

Over the doorway of No. 13, Clare Street, at the corner of Vere Street, Clare Market, is a stone sign carved in low relief, which represents Two Negroes’ heads facing each other, with the date 1715 and initials _w^s_m. The house is occupied by a baker; its destruction is imminent, should Government adopt the plan of the London County Council for a new street from the Strand to Holborn. The neighbourhood is now squalid, and many of the buildings have lately been cleared away, but we know that in the seventeenth century it was well inhabited. I may remark, as a curious coincidence, that the continuation of Clare Street towards Drury Lane is called Blackmoor—in old maps Blackamore—Street. Seventeenth-century trade-tokens with signs of negro heads are in existence; one was issued from Drury Lane, and is thus described by Boyne:

O. thomas.hayton.in.drvry = A negro’s head.

R. lane.his.halfe.penny = An arched crown.

The following advertisement, which appeared in a London Gazette for 1695, has a distinctly local flavour:

‘A Black boy, an Indian, about thirteen years old, run away the 8th instant from Putney, with a collar about his neck, with this inscription: “The Lady Bromfield’s black, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.”’

Black attendants were common in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In more than one celebrated portrait a black boy serves to enhance the charm of a fair lady’s complexion. Sir John Hawkins, after his voyage of 1564, which was partly for slave-trading purposes, was authorized to have as his crest the half-length figure of a negro prisoner called heraldically a demi-Moor, bound and captive. The Black Boy was a frequent tobacconists’ sign, still sometimes seen.