CHAPTER XI

THE ENGLISH SIGN AND ITS PECULIARITIES

“Freedom I love, and form I hate And choose my lodgings at an inn.”

WILLIAM SHENSTONE.

We cannot resist the temptation to quote as an introduction the _ipsissima verba_ of England’s classical historian Macaulay on the evolution of public hospitality in his country. Most naturally the evolution of the sign runs parallel to the evolution of the tavern, and in a time of flourishing inns we may expect to find highly developed tavern signs. “From a very early period,” says Macaulay, in a chapter on the social condition of England in 1685, “the inns of England had been renowned. Our first great poet had described the excellent accommodation which they afforded to the pilgrims of the fourteenth century. Nine and twenty persons, with their horses, found room in the wide chambers and stables of the Tabard in Southwark. The food was of the best, and the wines such as drew the company on to drink largely. Two hundred years later, under the reign of Elizabeth, William Harrison gave a lively description of the plenty and comfort of the great hostelries. The continent of Europe, he said, could show nothing like them. There were some in which two or three hundred people could without difficulty be lodged and fed. The bedding, the tapestry above all, the abundance of clean and fine linen was a matter of wonder. Valuable plate was often set on the tables. Nay, there were signs which had cost thirty or forty pounds. In the seventeenth century England abounded with excellent inns of every rank. The travelers sometimes, in a small village, lighted on a public-house such as Walton has described, where the brick floor was swept clean, where the walls were stuck round with ballads, where the sheets smelled of lavender, and where a blazing fire, a cup of good ale, and a dish of trout fresh from the neighboring brook, were to be procured at small charge. At the larger houses of entertainment were to be found beds hung with silk, choice cookery, and claret equal to the best which was drunk in London.”

A sign that costs one hundred and fifty to two hundred dollars would be, even in our days of high-paid labor, a thing worth looking at. In the times of the Renaissance it certainly was a work of excellent craftsmanship, sculptured in wood and richly gilded. On an extensive tour through England which brought us to the charming western fishing-village of Clovelly, with its “New Inn” and the more romantic “Red Lion” down by the little harbor, and to Chester, in the north, founded by the Romans, we were disappointed to find so few old signs of artistic value. We found very few carved in wood like “The Blue Boar” in Lincoln or “The Swan” in Wells, from whose windows the beautiful western façade of the cathedral, unusually rich in sculptures, is seen through the green veil of huge old trees. This swan sign shows certain characteristics of the period of the First Empire, and surely does not date back beyond 1800. Also the famous “Four Swans” in the little town of Waltham Cross, north of London, perhaps the only existing example of an old English custom to construct the sign like a triumphant arch across the street, are not so old as the tavern, which a bold inscription dates in the year 1260. How could a sign delicately carved in wood resist the inclemency of the weather, when the stone sculptures of the cathedrals,--as in Exeter, for instance, or in Salisbury,--although leaning against the protecting walls of these gigantic structures, suffered so much? To please the lovers of antiquity some owners of old houses put the most arbitrary dates of their foundation on the neatly-painted fronts. In the street in Chester that leads down to “The Bear and Billet,” one of England’s oldest frame houses, we saw the date 1006 painted on a façade, evidently built in Renaissance times. Other burghers and house-owners who have more respect for exact historic truth, see, of course, in such misleading inscriptions an unfair competition.

Signs wrought in iron seem to have been rare in England, the art of forging being less developed there than in the south of Germany. Curiously enough the South-Kensington Museum in London, an enormous storehouse of old works of arts and crafts, contains not a single English sign, but a very beautifully forged iron sign from Germany, dated 1635,--a baker’s sign, as the great crown and the heraldic lions reveal to us. A friendly assistant at the Museum showed us another German sign dating from the end of the seventeenth century, charmingly carved and gilded, representing the workshop of a shoemaker. These two were the only signs that the Museum possessed.

The old London signs have all found a very dismal refuge in the dimly lighted cellar of the Guild Hall. Some of them are stone sculptures of considerable size like the giant sign “Bull and Mouth.” Here too we find certain technical curiosities, as, “The Dolphin” of 1730 painted on copper, and more unusual still, “The Cock and Bottle,” a neat and dainty design composed of blue-and-white Dutch tiles. The foggy and damp climate has often injured not only the carved woodwork of the signboard, but still more the painting on it. The beam on which it hangs might be very old; the painting itself is always of recent date even if the artist, following an old tradition, sometimes produces quaint effects. As an example of how quickly the work of the sign-painter darkens beyond recognition, we may cite “The Falstaff” in Canterbury. It was not a year since the landlady had hung out this picture of the blustering knight in a bold fencing-pose that we saw it last, and it was already very difficult to distinguish the details of the composition; while another painting--the immediate predecessor of the sign in the street--which the friendly Dame showed us on the staircase was as black and bare as a slate. Sometimes the frames of the pictures are carved and allow us to guess the date of their origin; but, as a rule, the perfectly plain signboard hangs out on a strong beam. A typical example is “The Falcon” in Stratford-on-Avon.

The higher the artistic value of the painting on the signboards was, the more we have to regret that so much art was wasted on such a perishable production. In the eighteenth century the coach-painters, whose craftsmanship on old equipages, sledges, and sedan-chairs we still admire in many a museum, used to produce most elegant signs and received for their work astonishingly high prices. Shaken by winds, whipped by rainstorms, their beauty was soon gone. Nowhere have we found them either in collections or in the light of the street. Only in literary tradition does there still live a part of the charm of all these burned and weather-killed things of beauty.

But one device we discovered in England to restore the old forms, namely, the so-called club signs. Just as the printer’s marks often reproduce _en miniature_ the sign of the publisher, so the club signs give a reduced picture of the old tavern signs, especially of those that were cut as silhouettes in metal plates. The very first printers of the fifteenth century loved to introduce into their books these little designs symbolizing their names. Peter Drach in Speyer used two little shields, one containing a winged dragon and the other, as a friendly compensation, a Christmas tree and two stars. Johannes Sensenschmied, a proud “civis Nurembergensis,” had two crossed scythes (_Sensen_) in his escutcheon. These same designs appear later on the front page of a volume, neatly engraved on copper, often reproducing the sign of the bookshop to which one had to go if one wanted to buy this particular book. A Parisian publisher adopted “La Samaritaine,” which to-day has become the name of a great department store. Mr. Léonard Plaignard, of Lyon, called his shop “Au grand Hercule,” and put the Greek hero on the front page of his books with the inscription: “Virtus non territa monstris.” Just as these little engravings may give us an idea of the old publishers’ signs, so we may gain from the club signs some suggestions as to how the old signboards looked.

On Whitsunday the club members used to fasten these small brass imitations of their beloved tavern sign to poles and carry them in solemn procession through the astonished town. At the end of the club walking, it is whispered, many were unable to hold the poles as straight as they wished. The museum of the quiet little town of Taunton possesses a remarkable series of such club signs. It has become quite a fad in England to collect these little polished brass figures, since the public has got tired of the warming-pan craze.

Morris dancers sometimes joined in the club processions, among them the green or wild man, Robin Hood, famous in song and story; they amused the crowd with such charming airs as as--

“‘O, my Billy, my constant Billy, When shall I see my Billy again?’ ‘When the fishes fly over the mountain, Then you’ll see your Billy again.’”

Our design of two gentlemen saluting each other politely is such a club sign, reproducing in miniature the sign of the “Salutation Inn” in Mangotsfield, and representing the last link in the chain of salutation signs, which began with the old religious scene of Mary saluted by the angel.

Price Collier, in his book “England and the English,” has dedicated a whole chapter to English sport, on which the nation spends every year $223,888,725, more than the cost of her entire military machine, navy and army together. On fox hunting alone she spends $43,790,000. This love of sport is an old English trait, shared by both sexes. One of the first books printed in England was a book on sport, “The Bokys of Haukyng and Huntyng,” supposed to be written by a lady, Juliana Berners, the prioress of the nunnery of Sopwell, and published for the first time in the new black art in 1486. A schoolmaster of the abbey school of St. Albans had arranged the edition, and it is therefore sometimes quoted as “The Book of St. Albans.” No wonder, then, that such a popular subject was readily chosen by the sign painters, and that they love to picture the hunted animals, the white hart and the fox, and not less often the faithful companions of the hunter, dog and horse, hawk and falcon.

A great rôle is played by the horse, not only as the heraldic animal in the coat of arms of the Saxons and of the House of Hanover, but the real beast, from the good old pack-horse to the lithe-limbed racer. In the early Middle Ages, when the roads were so bad that it was impossible for heavy wagons to travel on them, the pack-horse was the only medium for the transportation of goods, post-packages, and mail. Those were hard days for impatient lovers, who would have preferred to send their _billets-doux_ in Shakespearean fashion, “making the wind my post-horse.” Sometimes the horse’s burden, the wool-pack--the wool business being the chief trade in England in the twelfth century--appears on the signboard. In fact, in the time of Ben Jonson “The Woolpack” was one of the leading hostelries of London.

Another sign is the race-horse, celebrated by Shakespeare in such lines as:--

“And I have horse will follow where the game Makes way, and run like swallows o’er the plain.”

from “Titus Andronicus” (II, ii), or those other lines in “Pericles” (II, i):--

“Upon a courser, whose delightful steps Shall make the gazer joy to see him tread.”

In the reign of Henry VIII, a tavern called “The Running Horses” existed in Leatherhead, a place not exactly fitted for noble hunters, since a contemporary poet complains about the beer being served there “in rather disgusting conditions.” Not infrequently we find more or less happy portraits of famous race-horses, such as “The Flying Dutchman” and “Bee’s Wing”; sometimes even a hound was honored in this way, guarding the entrance of a tavern as his famous Roman colleague, pictured in mosaic, did in the days of antiquity. “The Blue Cap” in Sandiway (Cheshire) was such a sign.

In Chaucer’s time it was a popular fashion to decorate the horses with little bells, as we may infer from the Abbot’s Tale:--

“When he rode men his bridle hear, Gingling in a whistling wind as clere, And eke as loud as doth a chapel bell.”

Curiously enough, these bells, sometimes of silver and gold, are designated in old manuscripts by the Italian word _campane_, as if this custom had been adopted by the English gentry from Italy. The “gentyll horse” of the Duke of Northumberland, the old documents would tell us, was decorated with “campane of silver and gylt.” Most naturally such valuable bells were very welcome as prizes in the sporting world; in Chester, for instance, the great prize of the annual race on St. George’s Day consisted of a beautiful golden bell richly adorned with the royal escutcheon. But independent of this custom the bell has always been very popular in England. The great German musician Händel has even called it the national musical instrument, because nowhere else, perhaps, do the people delight so much in the chimes of their churches. We find it, therefore, everywhere on the tavern sign, sometimes in absurd combinations like “Bell and Candlestick” or “Bell and Lion”; very prettily in connection with a wild man, “Bell Savage,” which is changed under gallant French influence into “Belle Sauvage,” or even “La Belle Sauvage.” “Cock and Bell” points again to a popular sport, the cock-fight. Like the little slant-eyed Japanese, the small boys of Old England loved to watch this exciting game; on Lent-Tuesday special cock-fights were arranged for them, and the happy little owner of the victorious animal was presented with a tiny silver bell to wear on his cap. No wonder that “The Fighting Cocks” themselves appear on the signboard. We find them on taverns in Italy, too, where the popularity of this sport goes back to the Roman days. The Bluebeard King Henry VIII issued an order prohibiting all cock-fights among his subjects, all the while establishing for himself a cockpit in White Hall as a royal prerogative. In the days of Queen Victoria the rather cruel sport was definitely abolished.

Another not less cruel sport still lives in the tavern sign “Dog and Duck.” The birds were put into a small pond and chased by dogs. Watching the frightened creatures dive to escape their pursuers constituted the chief joy of the performance. We may still hear the wild cries of the spectators urging on the dogs, when we read the old rhyme:--

“Ho, ho, to Islington; enough! Fetch Job my son, and our dog Ruffe! For there in Pond, through mire and muck, We’ll cry: hay Duck, there Ruffe, hay Duck!”

An old stone sign of such a “Dog and Duck” tavern, dated 1617, can still be seen in London outside of the Bethlehem Hospital in St. George’s Field. The popular name of this lunatic asylum is Bedlam--favorite word of Carlyle to designate confusion and chaos.

Here in South London special arenas were built for the spectacle of bear-baiting, and it is no chance that as early as in the time of Richard III the most popular tavern of this quarter was called “The Bear.” It stood near London Bridge, and was frequented especially by aristocratic revelers. In these scenes of rough amusements for the people the muse of Shakespeare introduced the gentle dramatic arts. Here his “Henry V” was introduced for the first time, perhaps, with its solemn chorus: “Can this cockpit hold the vasty fields of France?”

Still more than these artificial and butchery sports of the citizen, the real joys of the hunter found their echo in the productions of the sign-painters. There is hardly an English town without a “White Hart Inn.” Since the days of Alexander the Great, who once caught a beautiful white hart and decorated his slender neck with a golden ring, since Charlemagne and Henry the Lion, the white hart has been a special favorite of the hunter, whose joys no poet perhaps has sung so charmingly as Shakespeare in these lines of “Titus Andronicus” (II, ii and iii):--

“The hunt is up, the morn is bright and grey, The fields are fragrant, and the woods are green: Uncouple here

* * * * *

The birds chaunt melody on every bush; The snake lies rolled in the cheerful sun; The green leaves quiver with the cooling wind, And make a chequer’d shadow on the ground: Under their sweet shade, Aaron, let us sit, And--whilst the babbling echo mocks the hounds, Replying shrilly to the well-tun’d horns, As if a double hunt were heard at once once-- Let us sit down....”

Another group of signs celebrates Master Reynard. We see him harassed by dogs and riders on the sign “Fox and Hounds” in Barley (Hertfordshire). We miss only the sportive ladies who dip their kerchiefs of lace in the poor devil’s blood to show that they, too, were in at the finish. This sign, by the way, was used long centuries ago, since we hear of a “Fox and Hounds Inn” in Putney that claims to be over three hundred years old.

The German Nimrod took no less pleasure than his English cousin in seeing a hunter’s sign on the tavern door, as is amply proved by the many golden harts, flying in great bounds, or our George sign from Degerloch, daintily wrought in iron. The German poets, too, sang many a song celebrating the adventures of the chase.

Not so often do we find on the Continent the so-called “punning sign,” which might well be called an English specialty, since England’s greatest poet used to indulge a great deal in punning,--“mistaking the word” as he calls it. In a dialogue full of quibbles in the “Two Gentlemen of Verona” he admits himself that it is a weakness to yield to it:--

“_Speed._ How now, Signior Launce? What news with your mastership?

“_Launce._ With my master’s ship? Why, it is at sea.

“_Speed._ Well, your old vice still: mistake the word. What news then in your paper?

“_Launce._ The blackest news that ever thou heard’st.

“_Speed._ Why, man, how black?

“_Launce._ Why, as black as ink.”

And thus he goes on against his better judgment and “the old vice” triumphs, not only here, but in nearly all his plays. Following the illustrious example of the great poet the English landlord puts all kinds of puns and puzzles on his signs, and the private citizen of simple birth and aristocratic ambitions created for himself the most ridiculous escutcheons by childish plays upon his own name. Thus, Mr. Haton would put a hat and a tun in his coat of arms and Mr. Luton a lute and a tun without giving a thought to etymology. Likewise the landlord’s name would account for such curious signs as “Hand and Cock,” which was simply the punning sign of a certain John Hancock in Whitefriars.

Diligent authors like Frederic Naab--who, together with Thormanby, made a special study of sign puzzles--are indefatigable in searching out the deep meaning of all these tavern sign absurdities. “The Pig and Whistle” alone has been explained in twelve different ways. We mentioned above how “The Cat and Fiddle” was a mutilation of the old religious sign of “Catherine and Wheel.” In similar fashion the noble-sounding “Bacchanals” were degraded to a common “Bag of Nails.”

Topers and tipplers, whose forte was certainly not orthography, loved to confuse “bear” and “beer,” words that might very well sound alike when pronounced by beery voices. A certain Thomas Dawson in Leeds, who evidently sold a rather heavy beer, warned his customers on his sign: “Beware of ye Beare.” Lovers of cards invented the amusing distortion of “Pique and Carreau” into “The Pig and Carrot.” The popular political sign of “The Four Alls,” representing a King (“I rule all”), a Priest (“I pray for all”), a Soldier (“I fight for all”), and John Bull as farmer (“I pay for all”), was changed into “Four Awls,” a sign which presented infinitely less difficulties to a painter of few resources. Sometimes the Devil is added as fifth figure saying, “I take all.”

Cromwell’s soldiers once took offense at the sign of a tavern where they were obliged to put up for the night. They took it down and in its place wrote over the door the words, “God encompasses us.” The next day, when they were gone, the landlord had the brilliant idea to change the pious words to the punning sign, “Goat and compasses.” Maybe, too, the compasses were a commercial trade-mark, as we see them still to-day on boxes and casks.

Very popular was the joking sign, “The Labor in Vain,” representing a woman occupied in the hopeless task of washing a colored boy:--

“You may wash and scrub him from morning till night, Your labor’s in vain, black will never come white.”

This particular sign was imported from France, where the _calembour_ sign flourished. Some even say that the punning sign became popular in England only “after Edward ye 3 had conquered France.” The French have two interpretations of the “Labor in Vain”: one corresponds with the English version; the other, “Au temps perdu,” represents a schoolmaster teaching an ass. As counterpart we find “Le temps gagné,” a peasant carrying his donkey. The French _calembours_ were decidedly less reverential than the English punning signs. Neither religion nor good morals are sacred to the Gallic wag, who is allowed to say anything if he understands how to turn it gracefully. “Le Signe de la croix” is depicted by a swan (_cygne_) and a cross, and even the tragic scene of Jesus taken prisoner in the Garden of Gethsemane--_le juste pris_--is turned into the shameless words, “Au juste prix,” to advertise the cheapness of drinks and victuals. More innocent is the distortion of the “Lion d’or” into the undeniable truth, “Au lit on dort,” or the inscription on a white-horse sign: “Ici on loge à pied et à cheval.” The temptation to use such _calembours_ no trader could resist. A corset-maker praised his goods thus: “Je soutiens les faibles, je comprime les forts, je ramène les égarés.” We shall see in the following chapter how such pointed jokes and blasphemies roused the righteous indignation of the honorable and pious citizens and increased the enemies of the sign, who finally gave it the _coup de grâce_.