ANIMALS REAL AND IMAGINARY—(Continued).
‘Figures strange—and sweet,
All made out of the carver’s brain.’
Coleridge: Christabel, pt. I.
THE sign of the Dog and Duck is to be found imbedded in the garden wall of Bethlehem Hospital, in the district formerly called St. George’s Fields. Size, 4 feet by 2 feet 6 inches.
It is in two divisions, and is dated 1716; the part to the right represents a spaniel sitting on its haunches with a duck in its mouth, and appears to me a capital specimen of grotesque art. This was the sign of the Dog and Duck public-house.
In 1642, when London was threatened by Charles I., the citizens hastily encircled it with a trench and a series of forts. Among these was one with four half bulwarks at the Dog and Duck, in St. George’s Fields. In 1651 a trade-token was issued from the Dog and Duck; it has the initials E M S, and on the obverse is a design almost identical with the one I have described. There were, however, other houses with this sign in Southwark: one in Deadman’s Place near St. Saviour’s Park, and another in Bermondsey Square. Till about the middle of the eighteenth century the Dog and Duck in St. George’s Fields seems to have been only a small public-house, doubtless with a pond attached to it, in which was carried on the cruel sport of duck-hunting, then dear to cockneys. The amusement consisted in the duck diving among the reeds with the dog in fierce pursuit; a good idea of it is given by Davenant in the ‘Long Vacation in London,’ p. 289, where reference is made to another district famous for ducking-ponds:
‘Ho ho to Islington; enough!
Fetch Job my son, and our dog Ruffe!
For there in Pond,[33] through mire and muck,
We’ll cry hay Duck, there Ruffe, hay Duck.’
When this ceased to be an attraction in St. George’s Fields is not recorded, but towards the middle of last century the place came into the hands of a Mrs. Hedger, who had been a barmaid. While she was landlady, Sampson, an equestrian performer, who had previously ridden at the Three Hats, Islington, set up his temporary circus in a field opposite the Dog and Duck. Crowds followed him, and caused a great increase in Mrs. Hedger’s business, so she sent for her son, afterwards called ‘the King of the Fields,’ who was said to have been at the time a post-boy at Epsom, and he shrewdly made the most of his chance. The money as it came in was invested in building and other improvements; soon a mineral spring was discovered—or invented—and the place became for a time a popular health resort. A correspondent of the St. James’s Chronicle in 1761 asks, as a matter not admitting denial, ‘Does Tunbridge or Cheltenham or Buxton Wells come up to (inter alia) the Dog and Duck in St. George’s Fields?’ No less a man than Dr. Johnson recommended the waters to his friend Mrs. Thrale. An advertisement tells us of a bath there 200 feet long, and nearly 100 in breadth, and old newspapers record dinners, concerts, assemblies and all kinds of gaiety at St. George’s, or the Dog and Duck Spa. It must already have begun to go downhill when Garrick described it thus in his Prologue to ‘The Maid of the Oaks,’ 1774:
‘St. George’s Fields, with taste and fashion struck,
Display Arcadia at the Dog and Duck;
And Drury misses, here in tawdry pride,
Are there Pastoras by the fountain side,
To frowsy bowers they reel through midnight damps,
With fauns half drunk, and dryads breaking lamps.’
Finally it was closed by the magistrates, and after being occupied for a time by the School for the Indigent Blind, was pulled down in 1811, when, the Committee of the Bridge House Estate having, in the previous year, agreed to exchange 11 acres 3 roods here for the ground then covered by Bedlam in Moorfields, which amounted to about 2½ acres, the erection of the present Bethlehem Hospital was begun on the site.[34] It was then or soon afterwards that our stone sign was built into the new garden wall. Several illustrations of the Dog and Duck Inn have been preserved. A water-colour in the Crace collection by T. H. Shepherd, purporting to be from a drawing of 1646, represents it as a gable-ended public-house, with a gallery on one side, standing in the fields. A view of the outside in Hedger’s time shows a brick building of considerable dimensions. Then there is a rather indecent design called ‘Beauty in distress,’ with the Dog and Duck in the distance. Lastly, a rare stippled engraving of the interior, dated 1789, shows us ladies frail and fair, with their attendant beaux, walking about and seated at tables in a long room, which has an organ at the end; the sign appears below.
Much might be written about the curious device which appears in the left-hand division of the stone sign imbedded in the wall of Bethlehem Hospital. This is the mark of the Bridge House Estate, and though in no sense heraldic, has been described as an annulet ensigned with a cross pattÉe, interlaced with a saltire conjoined in base. It is sometimes, but wrongly, called the Southwark Arms, for arms cannot in truth be borne by any public body, which has not received a charter of incorporation, with a right to use a common seal; and Southwark was never more than a ward of the City. The device resembles a merchant’s mark, but its origin has not hitherto been satisfactorily explained. Perhaps a letter in the Gentleman’s Magazine for October, 1758, from Joseph Ames, secretary to the Society of Antiquaries, may throw some light on the subject. It seems that in pulling down a part of old London Bridge, three inscriptions were found engraved on stone tablets. The oldest dated from 1497. The second, which most concerns us, had perhaps been inserted in the building on the completion of repairs, rendered necessary by a great fire at the northern end of the bridge which occurred in 1504, and has now found a home in the Guildhall Museum. It measures 10 inches by 13-3/4, and is inscribed in Gothic characters ‘Anno Domini 1509.’ At the end of the date appears a cross[35] charged with a small saltire, which seems to suggest the present mark, and was not unlikely the old device for the estate of London Bridge. The third stone, dated 1514, had on it the City sword and the initials of Sir Roger Achiley, draper and alderman of Bridge ward; they are represented below.
Here, perhaps, by way of illustration, a few words may be introduced on the subject of merchants’ marks. These, as early as the beginning of the fifteenth century, were adopted instead of armorial bearings by traders, to whom arms were not permitted.[36] They were used for stamping goods, were engraved on rings, and often placed on monuments as if they conveyed a certain honourable distinction. Mr. J. G. Waller, F.S.A.,[37] has pointed out that these merchants’ marks have commonly one essential feature in common—a cross. A simple form of mark was a cross surmounting a mast or staff, with streamers or other devices, apparently taken from parts of a ship; it had a forked base. When after a time initials of names were introduced, they at first formed part of the mark, the letter A being often made by crossing the forked base. The cross, being an emblem of Christianity, was considered to counteract the wiles of Satan; merchants, therefore, naturally placed a cross on their bales as a preservative against the tempests, which it was thought were caused by him. Mr. W. de Gray Birch, on the other hand, suggests that the cross and streamers so often incorporated in merchants’ marks, were derived from the banner of the Holy Lamb, which was the usual emblem of St. John Baptist, the patron saint of wool merchants—that is, merchants of the staple; but it seems that such devices were also used by the Merchant Adventurers, Salters, etc.; moreover, the cross with streamers is, in mediÆval art, a symbol of the victory of Christ over death and the powers of darkness, which seems to confirm Mr. Waller’s view. The Lamb and Flag, as I shall have occasion to show, sometimes appeared on the seals of the Knights Templars.
As to the Bridge House Estate, it is held in trust by the corporation of the City of London, and is, strictly speaking, intended for the support, lighting and cleansing of the City bridges, and two bridges over the Lea at Stratford, where the City authorities hold some land. This property is said to have originated in small offerings by pious citizens to the Chapel of St. Thomas À Becket[38] on London Bridge. The earliest document relating to it which is still in existence appears to be a small volume on vellum, probably dating from the earlier part of the fourteenth century, with additions made in the reign of King Edward IV. A thorough examination of all the records would be a work of great labour, but would bring to light many interesting facts.
The property has by degrees increased in value, till out of it they have been able to rebuild London Bridge and Blackfriars Bridge, and are now creating the huge structure by the Tower. Much of St. George’s Fields belonged to the estate; it had been Crown land, once attached to Suffolk House, and was included in the grant to the City, in the fourth year of Edward VI.’s reign. The land on which stood the Dog and Duck Tavern formed part of this Bridge House Estate. The Bridge House itself stood on the Surrey side of the water, in Tooley Street, and was originally a storeplace for material belonging to the City which was used in the repair of London Bridge. In course of time it became a granary and a bakehouse, with public ovens. The grain was for the relief of poor citizens in time of distress, and the ovens were used for baking it. Stow tells us that they were ten in number, six of them very large, and that ‘Sir John Throstone, Knight, sometime an embroiderer, then a goldsmith, one of the sheriffs in 1516, gave by his testament towards the making of these ovens two hundred pounds, which thing was performed by his executors.’
The stone sign of a Fox sitting on its haunches, with the initials h w and date 1669, has been put up inside the house at No. 24, Lombard Street, and is in capital condition. It was found in digging up the foundations of a house in Clement’s Lane, destroyed to make room for No. 30, Lombard Street, which extends further south than its predecessor. In the seventeenth century there was a sign of a fox in Lombard Street, but some distance off; No. 73 occupies the site. A kindred sign, the Three Foxes, is said to have formerly existed, also in Clement’s Lane, but about this I am a little bit doubtful; there was a drawing of it in the Graphic of April 21, 1877, which could hardly have represented the actual tablet, for Larwood and Hotten say that it had been plastered over long before this, when the house was taken by a firm of three lawyers, who wished to avoid the rather awkward connection of ideas which might be suggested.
Of the carving of a Griffin’s Head which formerly existed in Old Jewry I know nothing, except that it was drawn by Archer in 1850. This was, perhaps, an heraldic charge of the person who built, or first possessed, the house on which it was placed. The badge of Fiennes, Lord Dacre, was a griffin’s head erased, gules, holding in its beak an annulet, or; that of Polle, a griffin’s head erased, azure, ducally gorged, or.
On the east side of Shoreditch High Street, between Nos. 79 and 80, and over the passage leading into Hare Alley, is the sculptured stone sign of a Hare running, with the initials b w m and date 1725. I have observed a similar sign in Flushing. Hare Alley is mentioned in Hatton’s ‘New View of London,’ 1708. Among seventeenth century trade-tokens is one with the following inscription:
O. nicholas warrin=A hare running.
R. in aldersgate street=N.I.W
So it is given in Boyne. A pun on the name is probably intended, but unless the issuer was a veritable cockney the animal represented was a rabbit.
The Hare in combination with the Sun, having the date 1676 and the initials h n a, is still to be seen above the first-floor windows of a house, No. 71, on the east side of the Borough High Street; close to the sites of the three most famous Southwark inns, the Tabard, the White Hart, and the George; of which the last-named still exists in part at least, though doomed, I fear, to speedy destruction. This house was gutted by fire a few years ago, but the sign luckily escaped unharmed. It is now painted in various colours, which was the old method, and, I think, improves the effect. The solicitors of the property have kindly let me examine the deeds, and I have gathered from them the following particulars:
In March, 1653, John Tarlton, citizen and brewer, left to his children two tenements in Southwark. In a mortgage of 1663 they are called ‘the Hare and the Three Pidgeons.’ In May, 1676, all, or nearly all, this part of Southwark was burnt down, the number of houses destroyed being, as stated in the London Gazette, about 600. A curious little pamphlet in my possession, licensed May 29, puts the number at nearly 500. On the title-page we are told that ‘St. Mary Overy’s Church and St. Thomas’s Hospital’ were ‘shattered and defaced,’ and everything ‘from Chain-Gate to the Counter on St. Margaret’s Hill on both sides the way burnt and demolished.’ I may note that on this occasion a fire-engine with leathern hose was first used, and seems to have been of great service in defending St. Thomas’s Hospital from the fire, as recorded in the London Gazette for August 14, 1676. In the same month Nicholas Hare, grocer, surrendered to be cancelled a lease dated 1669, ‘of the messuage or tenement called the Hare and Sunne,’ the said messuage having been burnt in the fire; and the Tarltons let him the ground on building lease for eighty-one years from June, 1677. The rent had before been £24 a year, with a fine for renewal of £70; it was now reduced to £16 a year. The sign in question is therefore a punning one, having been put up by Nicholas Hare, grocer, after the great Southwark fire, as many signs of the same description had been put up in London a few years previously, after the great London fire. How the sun had got into combination with the hare one does not know.[39] In subsequent documents, down to the year 1748, when the house came into the possession of John Paris, it is described simply as the Hare. In his will, dated 1753, he speaks of ‘my dwelling-house near the George Inn, known by the sign of the Hare and Stirrup;’ and finally, in 1757, in a schedule of the fixtures, are mentioned ‘in the dining-room two large sign irons, and a large copper sign of the Hare and Stirrup;’ so the unpretentious stone bas-relief, though not taken down, appears to have been supplemented by a sign more likely to catch the eye. It may be noted that on these sculptured signs, where letters occur, the initial of the owner, builder, or first occupant, is usually placed over the initials of the Christian names of himself and his wife the former naturally being on the left. Sometimes, however, they are all in a line, in which case the initial of the surname is most likely the middle one, as on the seventeenth-century trade tokens.
Centuries ago, when Islington was a little country town separated from London by roads which were often impassable in winter, there stood near the Green a picturesque house which, by its style, appeared to have been built in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. It was an old and general tradition that this house, which in course of time became the Pied Bull Inn, had been the residence of Sir Walter Raleigh; but this seems to be nothing more than a tradition.[40] There is, however, strong evidence that Sir John Miller, knight, of Islington and Devon, lived here some years later, for a window of a room on the ground-floor was adorned with his arms in painted glass, impaling those of Grigg of Suffolk, and in the kitchen were the remains of the same arms, with the date 1624. Nelson gives an illustration of the chimney-piece in the ground-floor room; it contained the figures of Faith, Hope, and Charity in niches, with a border of cherubim, fruit and foliage. The central figure—Charity—was surmounted by two cupids supporting a crown, and beneath were a lion and unicorn couchant. Nelson thinks that the design was intended as a compliment to Queen Elizabeth. On the ceiling the five senses were represented in stucco, with their Latin names. It is not known at what time the house was converted into an inn; during the seventeenth century, no doubt, for Defoe mentions it in his fictitious narrative of the Plague.[41] The south front of the house was comparatively modern, and of different elevation to the older part, and here appeared a stone bas-relief of the Pied Bull, bearing the date 1730, the year perhaps in which this addition was made to the building. In 1740 the house and 14 acres of land were let at about £70 a year; it was pulled down in 1827. The modern public house called the Old Pied Bull, at the corner of Upper Street and Theberton Street, is about twenty or thirty yards north of the site.
In the Guildhall Museum there is a well-executed stone bas-relief in particularly good condition of a Lion statant, size 8 inches by 14-1/4 inches. No record of its origin has been preserved by the City authorities. Can this be the lion referred to by Leigh Hunt in ‘The Town’? His words are: ‘The only memorial remaining of the old palace (Somerset House) and its outhouses is in the wall of a house in the Strand, where the sign of a Lion still survives a number of other signs, noticed in a list at the time, and common at that period to houses of all descriptions.’ More likely, however, he refers to a carved lion supporting the City arms which is still to be seen on a jeweller’s shop, No. 342, Strand; but this is apparently of no great age. The occupant, who has been there thirty years, could give me no information about it. Mr. Harrison in his ‘Memorials of London Houses,’ says that Robert Haydon lodged here, when as a youth of eighteen he first came to London from Plymouth. In the seventeenth century there was a Golden Lion by York House, which, with other tenements pertaining to Denmark or Somerset House, was sold in 1650 for the benefit of the State.
Perhaps a more interesting sign than either of the above is that of the White Lion, a boldly-executed carving with the date 1724, which is still to be seen between the first-floor windows of a house, now a tobacconist’s, on the north side of Islington High Street, but in the parish of Clerkenwell. This was once the sign of an inn which existed at the beginning of the seventeenth century, if not earlier. In ‘Drunken Barnabee’s Journal,’ the date of which is 1638, there occur the following lines:
‘Thence to Islington, at Lion,
Where a juggling, I did spy one,
Nimble with his mates consorting,
Mixing cheating with his sporting.’
There is a curious allusion in Pepys’ ‘Diary,’ January 21, 1667-8: ‘It seems, on Thursday last, he (Joyce) went sober and quiet, and behind one of the inns, the White Lion, did throw himself into a pond.’[42] This Anthony Joyce was cousin to Pepys; he had lost money by the Great Fire, and afterwards kept the Three Stags, Holborn Conduit. He was got out of the pond before life was extinct, but died soon afterwards. Pepys was afraid that his estate would be taken from his widow and children, on the ground that he had committed suicide, the legal consequences of which might have been forfeiture of goods and chattels to the Crown; but the coroner’s jury returned a verdict that he had died of a fever. A trade-token gives the name of the landlord at the time:
O. christopher.bvsbee.at = A lion passant.
R. whit.lion.in.islington. = his.half.peny. 1668.
Busby’s Folly, a house of entertainment, marked in the old maps of Clerkenwell, and of which there is an engraving in a rare volume called ‘Views of divers Noted Places near London,’ 1731,[43] possibly, as Burn suggests, originated with the issuer of this token. T. Cromwell, in his ‘History of Clerkenwell,’ published in 1828, gives us the following information: ‘The White Lion, now a public-house and wine-vaults, at the south-east corner of the street of the same name, was originally an inn much frequented by cattle-drovers and others connected with the trade of Smithfield. It then comprised the two dwelling-houses adjoining, and extended also in the opposite or northward direction, until the latter portion was pulled down to make an opening to White Lion Row, as it was then called, being that part of the existing White Lion Street which was built between 1770 and 1780. Where Mr. Becket’s shop now is was the gateway of the inn-yard, over which a lion rampant, executed in relief and painted white, was inserted in the front of the building.’ Nelson tells us that the carriage-way was immediately under the lion, and so continued till, the trade of the inn declining, the building was converted into a private house. The White Lion, one would think, must first have been used as a sign by some retainer of the Howards, who, by marriage with Lady Margaret Mowbray, inherited, as a badge, the blanch lion of the Mowbray family.
From the lion to the unicorn seems a natural transition. A stone bas-relief of the latter animal supporting a shield was formerly to be seen in Cheapside, two doors east of the Chained Swan, and opposite to Wood Street; but disappeared some years ago, when the house to which it belonged was rebuilt. Peter Cunningham, usually so accurate, described it as a Nag’s Head. It seems that Roger Harris (not Sir Roger Harrison, as stated by Archer), who died in the year 1633, had owned the property, and by will endowed the church of St. Michael’s, Crooked Lane, with a rent-charge on it of £2 12s. for the purchase of bread for the poor, which was to be distributed every Sunday in the form of one penny loaf for each one of twelve poor men or widows in the parish. This amount is still paid annually by the tenant of No. 39, Cheapside, which stands on the site of the Unicorn; under the present arrangement, it is administered by the trustees of the London Parochial Charities. The sign was of old standing. In Machyn’s ‘Diary’ the entry for 1 May, 1561, records the fact that ‘at afternoone dyd Mastyr Godderyke’s sune the goldsmyth go hup into hys father’s gylding house, toke a bowe-strynge and hanged ymselff at the syne of the Unycorne, in Chepsyd.’[44]
The unicorn first became a supporter of the royal arms in James I.’s time, when it displaced the red dragon of Wales, introduced by Henry VII. Unicorns had been supporters of the Scottish royal arms for about a century before the union of the two crowns. A representation of the unicorn often appeared in City shows. Cooke, in his ‘City Gallant,’ 1599, makes a City apprentice exclaim: ‘By this light I doe not thinke but to be Lord Mayor of London before I die, and have three pageants carried before me, besides a ship and an unicorn.’ This fabulous creature should have the tail of a lion, the legs of a buck or goat, the head and body of a horse, and a single twisted horn in the middle of its forehead. It was used as a sign by chemists and goldsmiths: by the former, because the horn was considered an antidote to all poisons; by the latter, on account of the immense value put upon it. ‘Andrea Racci, a Florentine physician, relates that it had been sold by the apothecaries at £24 per ounce, when the current value of the same quantity of gold was only £2 3s. 6d.’ (Larwood and Hotten, p. 160.) The horn thus esteemed was probably narwhal’s horn. The arms of the Apothecaries’ Company are supported by unicorns.
