CHAPTER IV

SECULAR HOSPITALITY: KNIGHTLY AND POPULAR SIGNS

“In bibliis ich selten las viel lieber in dem Kruge sass.”

RINGWALDT, 1582.

The heavy castle gates in mediæval times were gladly opened to the minstrels who came to charm with their art the banquets of the noble lords and ladies--troubadours and minstrels, the ancestors of that vast and still thriving fraternity of poets whose blood runs too quickly through their veins to keep them content in the quiet monotony of a home. With the sailing clouds, with the migrating birds, and the rising sun they wander through woods and fields “to be like their mother the wandering world.” With Walt Whitman they love the open road and hate the confinement of the stuffy room:--

“Afoot and light-hearted, I take the open road, Healthy, free, the world before me, The long brown path before me, leading wherever I choose.”

Never do they feel happier than when the long, long road lies before them, which now seems to dip down into the green sea of the forests and now to climb straight into the bright blue heaven. Jean Richepin, himself a “chemineau,” now well settled as an honorable member of the French Academy, has sung the open road’s praise. All poets feel deeply the words of Kleist, “Life is a journey.” And how bitter the journey often was in the days of the minstrels, how glad they were when the dark forests and unsafe roads lay behind them and the big hearth-fire of the castle hall brightened face and soul! Gratefully they praised the noble lord for his hospitable reception and his kindly welcome. Thus Walter von der Vogelweide, Germany’s greatest minstrel:--

“Nun ich drei Höfe weiss, wo Ehrenmänner hausen, Fehlt mir es nicht an Wein, kann meine Pfanne sausen... Mir ist nicht not, dass ich nach Herberg fernumher noch streiche.”

Impoverished knights may have occasionally hung out an iron helmet over the castle door as a sign that they were willing to receive and to entertain paying guests: certainly a more honorable method of gaining one’s livelihood than to plunder the passing merchant or even one’s own peasants, as was the noble fashion at the end of mediæval times. But it is more likely that such poor noblemen would first think of using their city houses for such commercial purposes and not their lonely and uninviting fortified castles. Here on one of their city houses, where they used to lodge in time of markets or city festivities, the first iron helmet perhaps appeared as a knightly sign. Certain it is that we find inns of such name in France as well as in Germany, the most famous one in Rothenburg on the Tauber, the best preserved mediæval city in existence, infinitely more charming than the much-talked-about Carcassonne, reconstructed by Viollet-le-Duc with such cold correctness. Here in the quaint hall of the “_Eisenhut_,” under the glittering arms of knights dead and gone, we will rest awhile and gladden our heart with the golden Tauber wine. Let the comfort-seeker go to the modern prosaic hotel outside the city wall!

The iron helmet is not the only martial tavern sign. Other names sounded equally well to the soldier’s ear: in France “Le Haubert” (iron shirt), for instance, that might remind us of the old English inn, “The Tabard,” in which Chaucer gathered his joyous pilgrims for happy meals and amusing conversations; the sword, St. Peter’s attribute, was used as tavern sign in his holy city Rome in the sixteenth century (“alla spada”); the cannon was very popular as “canone d’oro” in northern Italy; and many others.

Like chicks under the wings of the hen, the little huts of the villagers cluster around the protecting mountain castle of the knightly lord. Most naturally the village innkeeper, therefore, chooses his master’s escutcheon as a tavern sign. And the landlord in the town feels equally honored when noble guests leave him, as parting presents, their coats of arms neatly painted on the panels or the windows of the dining-room as Montaigne informs us: “Les Alemans sont fort amoureux d’armoiries; car en tous les logis, il en est une miliasse que les passans jantilshomes du païs y laissent par les parois, et toutes leurs vitres en sont fournies.” Although a philosopher Montaigne himself was vain enough to follow the pretty custom, and occasionally to dedicate his escutcheon to the innkeeper as a sign of his satisfaction; so in “The Angel” at Plombières, already a popular resort even in his day, and in Augsburg at “The Linde,” situated near the palace of the rich Fuggers. Like a good housekeeper, who daily writes his expenses down, he tells us that the painter, who did his work very well, received “deux escus” or two dollars, the carpenter “vint solds” or a whole quarter, for the screen on which the escutcheon was painted and which was placed before the big green stove.

The painting of heraldic designs goes back to the time of the crusaders and soon became the principal source of income of the painters. In the Netherlands, which grew to be such a wonderful hotbed of art, the sign-painters were called “Schilderer,” for that same reason, a name which clings to them to the present day. Whoever has traveled in England knows that the same custom of the nobility, to give coats of arms to the landlords, prevailed there too. “Mol’s Coffee House” in Exeter, close to the beautiful cathedral, is a good example. Here Sir Walter Raleigh used to sit in the paneled room on the second floor, drink a cup of the beverage then quite rare, and chat with his friends. All along the walls the escutcheons of the noble visitors of days gone by decorate the quaint old room and every modern visitor admires them duly, especially that of the valiant but unhappy seafarer.

To come back to the heraldic tavern signs, we find everywhere in German lands, where once the imperial House of Hapsburg ruled, their coat of arms, the double eagle, and in the domains of the House of Savoy and the Dukes of Lorraine, the cross. In France the escutcheon of the Bourbons, the fleur de lys, hangs over the tavern door, and in England the white horse of the royal House of Hanover. Long before the Georges, the white horse was a popular symbol in England. The giant horse, roughly hewn in the chalk of the “White Horse Hill,” near Faringdon, still reminds us of Alfred the Great’s victory over the Danes at Ashdown in 871. In our days the noble white horse has been degraded into an advertisement for Scotch whiskey--O quæ mutatio rerum!

The heraldic meaning of the signs was just as quickly forgotten as was the pious significance of the religious signs. Only a few notable animals, such as lions, unicorns, and the like interested the tavern habitués.

More important than the hospitality under the protection of knights and sovereigns was the hospitality extended to the traveler behind big city walls. The city government provided not only lodgings for the poor pilgrims, tramps, and jobless people, but not infrequently offered hospitality likewise to the merchant who came to display his wares in the open vaults of the city hall. In the famous “Rathskeller” every business transaction was duly celebrated by buyer and seller; the brotherly act of drinking a glass of wine together seemed to be the essential finishing-touch which clinched the business. These old cellars are still a great attraction of the town in many German places, such as Bremen, Lübeck, or Heilbronn, for instance, and all travelers are glad to refresh themselves in their quiet vaults.

A hospitality of more intricate character was given by the guilds, in their houses, to all the members of the trade or craft. Most naturally they choose as signs symbols of the special work of each guild. The fisher and boatmen loved to see a fish, an anchor, or a ship over their tavern door; but they did not claim these signs as a special privilege, every “compleat angler,” to use Izaak Walton’s expression, as well as every incomplete one, could hang a fish out over his porch or on his house corner even if he did not keep a tavern. The house where Dr. Faustus treated his comrades in such miraculous way was called “Zum Anker” and belonged to a nobleman in Erfurt if we believe the oldest popular reports of the event. Goethe transferred the scene to Auerbach’s Keller in Leipzig, which was familiar to him from his happy student-days. Old sea-captains and blue-jackets cannot resist the temptations of “The Anchor” even if the signboard does not invite them so charmingly as the one of “The Three Jolly Sailors” in Castleford:--

“Coil up your ropes and anchor here Till better weather does appear.”

The shoemakers most naturally decorated their guild-house with a beautiful big boot, a word closely related to the old French “botte,” a large drinking cup, and its diminutive “bouteille,” the origin of the English “bottle.” The butchers seldom show the cruel axe, far oftener the poetical lamb, their oldest sign being the Pascal lamb holding the little flag of the resurrection. A patriotic English landlord in the neighborhood of Bath changed the flag into a Union Jack, forgetting all about the religious meaning of the sign as it still appears in a French relief “L’Agneau Pascal” in Caen, Rue de Bayeux. The tavern “Zum guldin Schooffe” in Strassburg, “la vieille ville allemande” as Victor Hugo called the city quite frankly, is perhaps the oldest sign of this group. It dates back to the year 1311 at least. Another butcher sign is the ox or bull, most popular, of course, in the land of John Bull, where the bull appears in the most surprising combinations as “Bull and Bell,” “Bull and Magpie,” “Bull and Stirrup,” and the like.

The tavern signs of the bakers, “The Crown,” “The Sun,” or “The Star,” lead us back to old pagan times in which the cakes offered as sacrifice to the gods were shaped in the same curious forms which we observe to-day in our various breakfast rolls. Christian legends of the holy three kings and the star that stood over the stable in Bethlehem effaced these pagan souvenirs. On the day of Epiphany especially beautiful crowns were baked; in France the bakers still follow the old tradition and offer such a crown to each of their customers as a present, not without hiding a tiny porcelain shoe in the dough. The happy finder of this shoe becomes the king of the company. Dutch masters have represented the merry family scene of the Epiphany dinner, none perhaps so convincingly as Jordaens in the famous picture, “The King Drinks,” in the great gallery of the Louvre.

“The Star” has always been one of the most popular signs, its gentle glow seemed to promise the traveler on the dark road a friendly resting-place after the long, weary day. Sometimes the modern owner of such a venerable old star-inn promises even more and advertises his place, in slangy rhyme, as the landlord of “The Star” in York.

“Here at the sign of Ye Old Starre You may sup and smoke at your ease Tip-Top cigars, port above par, A Host ever ready to please.”

Beside “The Star” and “The Golden Sun,” where you drink “the best beer under the sun,” we find “The Moon,” especially “The Half-Moon,” as great favorites of the people. The naval victory of 1571 at Lepanto, where the united Christian fleet destroyed The Turk,--in those days not a sick man, but rather a robust and aggressive one,--is perhaps the cause of the popularity of the half-moon. The Virgin Mary, to whom the pious sailors ascribed the victory, was often represented as standing on a half-moon, because she was “the woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars” whom the poet of the Revelation had seen in his immortal dreams. Crowned with her diadem of stars she was dear to the seamen, the “_stella maris_,” to whom they lifted their anguished soul in prayer: “Ave Maria, navigantium stella, quos ad portum tranquillum vocata conducis.” As “light of the world” she was praised in the old “dialogus consolatorius” where the sinner humbly begs her:--

“Festina miseris misereri, virgo beata! Virgo Maria pia splendens orbisque lucerna Per tua presidia nos duc ad regna beata!”

But it is not the half-moon, lying horizontally as a silver bowl in the Christian presentation of the heavenly queen, which we find on the tavern sign, but always the standing crescent of the Turkish flag, and we are glad of it. If we study the life in these half-moon taverns at the hand of Teniers’ pictures and etchings, we find very little that is Christian and worthy of the sacred symbol of the Revelation.

Still more popular than the stars of heaven is the animal world on the tavern sign. The ark of Noah itself and all it contained, every creeping and flying thing, was welcome over the tavern door in those days when men and beast, often living under the same roof, as in the divine inn of Bethlehem, were nearer to each other than they are now. Nothing less than a tavern zoölogy could give a complete enumeration, which we prefer to avoid. We will choose only a few which were especially dear to the people. First of all, naturally, the house companions,--the cat, “Le Chat qui dort” which found a quiet resting-place for her old days in the Musée Carnavalet in Paris; the dog, popular in sport-loving England; the ox and the donkey, even an elegant mule we find in the “Auberge de la Mule” at Avignon, praised by Abraham Gölnitz, the Baedeker of the seventeenth century, as a “logement élégant et agréable.” We have already met the cock in Rome of old, on the Forum, in Holland we see him occasionally as a cavalier in high boots. The dove, the symbol of the Holy Ghost, decorates the “Gasthäuser zum Geiste” one of which stood in the old Strassburg and saw the remarkable interview between the young Goethe and the poet Herder. Finally the stork, the true sign of German “Gemütlichkeit”; the one in Basel was honored by the visit of Victor Hugo: “Je me suis logé à la Cigogne, et de la fenêtre où je vous écris, je vois dans une petite place deux jolies fontaines côte à côte, l’une du quinzième siècle, l’autre du seizième.”

To the Philistine the strange animals of foreign distant lands had a greater attraction still. In every modern “zoo” you will always find a larger public before the monkey house than before the cage of the lion or even the elephant, whose dignity and wisdom find fewer admirers than does the foolishness of the apes. Early in the Middle Ages we find this most curious of strange animals on the tavern signs. “L’Ostel des Singes,” sometimes called “The Green Monkeys,” in Senlis, France, is first mentioned in the year 1359. Our “Affenwagen” is a Swiss sign, artfully carved in wood, and dates from the Renaissance times, as does the inn “Zum Rohraff” in Strassburg, often referred to in the sermons of Geiler von Kaisersberg.

When the first dromedary made its appearance in Germany, a circular containing a primitive woodcut invited old and young to see “the curious animal called Romdarius.” Fifty miles it could run in one day in the sand sea--i.e., desert--the text said, and in summer it could live three months without drinking “ohne sauffen.” This last-mentioned quality seemed to predestine the animal to a temperance sign, but fortunately the description added, “when it drinks it drinks much at one time,” and so the tavern-keepers did not hesitate to adopt it as a tavern sign. As an example we might quote the inn “Zum Kameeltier” in Strassburg. Somewhat later, in the first half of the seventeenth century, “The Crocodile” appears over the tavern door in Antwerp, and this reminds us of the stuffed animals in the pharmacy described by Shakespeare in “Romeo and Juliet”:--

“And in his needy shop a tortoise hung, An alligator stuff’d, and other skins Of ill-shap’d fishes.”

The zebra seems to have been known quite early if we are allowed to take “The Striped Donkey” as such. In the inn “L’Ane rayé” at Rheims, the father of Joan of Arc is reported to have lodged when he came to see the coronation in 1429. One of the last comers of the curious and rare animals was the giraffe; it appeared in Paris for the first time in 1827, and was immediately adopted as a tavern sign by a host in Étampes, near the capital. The “enseigne” represented “le dit animal conduit par un Bédouin.”

But the most curious animals of creation did not suffice. The imagination of the people created others still more strange and the landlords put these fabulous beasts on their signs too: the unicorn, the dragon, the siren. “The Siren” tavern in Lyons at the time of the Renaissance was evidently a very attractive place which the traveler found very hard to leave again, because, as a contemporary tells us, “il s’y trouve des Sirènes.” In later days, when the popular stories were forgotten, the sirens were changed to “Six Reines,” the six queens. In another chapter we shall see how Keats in his poem, The Mermaid, has celebrated one of these old Siren taverns.

How deeply rooted in the old days was this belief in “Mörwonder” or ill-shaped fishes and malformations of the human figure will appear at a glance in Schedel’s “Welt Chronik” printed by Koberger in Nuremberg in 1493, where we see them in strange woodcuts before us: the man with ears hanging to the ground and other misshaped creatures.

The same source of popular imagination created “Le Géant,” the sign “Zu den Slaraffen” in Strassburg, 1435, and the sign of “The Little and the Great Sleeper” that during three centuries, from 1400 to 1705, invited the citizens of the Alsatian capital to cross its hospitable threshold. A charming picture, “The Sleeping Giant of the Woods” by Lukas Kranach, in Dresden’s famous Gallery, will help us to imagine how the big sleeper probably looked. Is it the famous “Wild Man” or “Le Grand Hercule” who sleeps here in the shadow of the forest? One thing is sure, he has been drinking deeply and is dead asleep; nothing can wake him up, not even this little army of dwarfs around him who attack him with lances and arrows, nay, even try to saw into his strong limbs.

Since the days of the “Roman du Renard,” the first version of which dates back to the eleventh century, to the days of Goethe’s “Reineke Fuchs,” shrewd master Fox was a favorite of the people. In old miniatures we encounter him as a monk, his pointed nose buried in a prayer-book. His exploits most naturally form good themes for the tavern sign. Dancing before a hen to seduce the foolish creature by his graceful charms, he was represented on an old French sign in Le Mans: “Renard dansant devant une poule.” Preaching to ducks, “Wo der Fuchs den Enten predigt” is the name of a Strassburg tavern, which dates only from 1848. His shrewdness before the royal tribunal of the lion was well known; Montaigne, therefore, warns the tavern-keepers who desire the patronage of advocates against painting him on the signboard: “qui veut avoir la clientèle des procureurs ne doit point mettre renard sur son enseigne.”

Other animals appealed more to the culinary instincts of the passer-by, among them the swan, “l’oiseau de bon augure,” which we do not like to see turned into roasts. But in Chaucer’s times it was evidently considered a fine dish, since he lets the monk in his “Canterbury Tales” say: “A fat swan loved he best of any rost.” A picture by David Teniers in The Hague, called “The Kitchen,” shows how the bird was served in his natural glory, a crown of flowers on his proud head. This custom to serve fowl in full plumage is proved by Montaigne’s description of a dinner in Rome: “On y servit force volaille rôtie, revêtue de sa plume naturelle comme vifve ... oiseaus vifs (enplumés) en paste.”

To this group belongs the peacock, in the old days the official roast for marriage feasts. Its picture on the signboard promised large accommodations for people who wanted to celebrate marriages in true style. “Le Paon blanc” in Paris, Rue de la Mortelleric, now a rather shady region, was once a noble inn. Shortly after his marriage, Rembrandt painted the famous picture in Dresden, where he represents himself, a glass of champagne in hand, happily holding his beloved Saskia on his knees. The richly decorated table in the background still carries the peacock of the marriage feast. Of “The Pheasant” in Worms, before the days of gas and electricity, Victor Hugo has given us this amusing picture: “J’étais installé dans l’auberge du Faisan, qui, je dois le dire, avait le meilleur aspect du monde. Je mangeais un excellent souper dans une salle meublée d’une longue table et de deux hommes occupés à deux pipes. Malheureusement la salle à manger était peu éclairée, ce qui m’attrista. En y entrant on n’aperçevait qu’une chandelle dans un nuage. Les deux hommes dégageaient plus de fumée que dix héros.”

Sometimes a living bird served originally as a sign. The parrot of the pharmacy, “Au Perroquet Vert,” in Lyons, was a real bird, which had learned even some Latin phrases, as “ora pro nobis,” from the passing processions, and naturally attracted many people by its wisdom. He belonged to the living signs to which Balzac refers in “Les scènes de la vie privée”: “Les animaux en cage dont l’adresse émerveillait les passants.” Sometimes the cage itself was adopted as a tavern sign and in Lyons a street was named “Rue de la Cage” for a public-house of this name. A charming little French rhyme from the beginning of the seventeenth century introduces us to such a cage-tavern:--

“Mademoiselle Louizon Demeurant cher Alizon Justement au cinquième étage Près du cabaret de la Cage.”

Not only bird-cages and their musical or scholarly inhabitants, but any remarkable object that happened to stand before the tavern was readily interpreted by the people as a sign. In the little English town of Grantham, where we had already the opportunity of admiring the noble “Angel Inn,” we saw in a tree before a modest tavern a beehive with this inscription on a board beneath it:--

“Stop, traveller, this wondrous sign explore, And say when thou hast viewed it o’er and o’er, Grantham now two rarities are thine, A lofty steeple and a living sign.”

To tell the truth, the lofty tower of St. Wulfram seemed to us the only remarkable “rarity” of the two, the more so as the church was beautifully decorated for Thanksgiving Day with flowers and the fruits of the field, not to mention its unique little library with the chained old books.

We may infer the great popularity of signs by the ceremonious way in which they were changed when a guild removed to other quarters. The sign was carried in solemn procession to the new inn and hung up with blasts of trumpets. The Swabian poet Mörike has tried to express the melancholy emotions of the old landlord when he sees the sign changed and finds it hard to recognize his old inn:--

“Where is the golden lamb of yore So dear to my old guests? I see a cock with reddish breast Pecked it away from the door.”

An English author even tells us about the burial of a sign, which, he says, was not an unusual affair in Cumberland. We give the story in his own words: “It is a function always observed when an inn in the neighborhood of Lady Carlisle’s estate at Naworth has lost its license. The inn sign is solemnly removed, and in the dead of night is committed to the grave, in the presence of the old customers of the inn. As a rule it is ‘watered’ with tears in the shape of a bottle of whiskey, and the burial sentence runs as follows:--

“‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, If Lady Carlisle won’t have you The Devil must.’”

But we shall not end our chapter with this story of rather doubtful taste. If we review the wealth of popular signs, which we have in no way exhausted, we may well say that everything on earth may be adopted by the people as a sign, from the cradle in which we dream our first dreams to the cross that some day will stand over our “last inn” as a pious and scholarly man has called our grave. In the beautiful churchyard that enfolds in its greenery England’s oldest existing church, St. Martin in Canterbury, we read on the tombstone of Dean Alford the simple words: “Deversorium Viatoris Hierosolymam Proficiscentis,” last inn of a pilgrim to the heavenly Jerusalem.