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.