Philip Norman

“ 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. ”

“ It is a satisfactory thing that the relics of former fashions of decoration should be registered for the information of those who desire to keep themselves in touch with the history of the past. Even in this materialistic age there are many who love to live in imagination in a former age, and a sculptured sign or inscription on an old house will often help them to do this.
For centuries London was remarkable for its gardens, but this has been changed at the end of the nineteenth century. ”

“ The shafts of the columns are set off with a wreath of foliage running round them. On the frieze are the arms of Sir John Lawrence, in the attic are the City arms, and the whole structure is crowned with the arms of Charles II., supported by two gilt angels, and surmounted with the royal crown.’ I hope that this interesting memento of a great City worthy, though not ‘Gothic’ in style, will be carefully preserved during the far more wholesale restoration which is now in progress.
Sir John Lawrence’s arms were: argent, a cross raguly gules, a canton ermine. ”

“ On this jug, Balthazar has the star and crescent moon; Casper, as he is here called, the seven stars; and the Ethiopian is assigned to Melchior. A work of art truly delightful, but conveying no heraldic lesson, is the long fresco of the journey of the Three Kings by Bennozzo Gozzoli, in the Riccardi Palace at Florence, wherein the rich cavalcade is shown, winding about by rock and river and wooded landscape, on which the painter has lavished all his poetry of invention and feeling for fresh nature. ”

“ In the following pages I shall try to describe all the London sculptured signs of which we have any record; for convenience I have classified them, and naturally begin with those in which human beings are represented. One of the most interesting and best known is the sign of the Boy and Panyer, which is still to be seen, its base resting on the ground, and let into the wall between two houses on the eastern side of Panyer Alley, a narrow passage leading from Paternoster Row to Newgate Street. ”

“ The accumulation of earth and débris in the City is so great, that the present town is raised many feet above Roman London. Now that excavations for new buildings are carried down much deeper than formerly, valuable objects are not unfrequently brought to light. The Roman [174] antiquities in the Museum are many and important; of these perhaps the most striking is a large piece of tessellated pavement from Bucklersbury, in almost perfect condition. It was found no less than 19 feet below the level of the roadway, on which account it is thought to be an early relic of the Roman occupation. ”

“ Chad’s Well seems in the last century to have been famous for its tulips; at least, if one may believe an advertisement in my possession, which has the date 1779. It speaks of ‘The largest and richest collection of early Dutch tulips ever yet seen in Great Britain, now in bloom, with many fine double hyacinths of various colours raised by Van Hawsen, to be had of Richard Morris at St. Chad’s Wells, Battle Bridge, near London; the lowest prices marked in the catalogue, which may be had as above, and the flowers seen gratis. No person admitted with a dog. ”

“ The Running Footman, of which there are two specimens in Hays Mews, [168] Charles Street, Berkeley Square, is particularly interesting on account of the costume, and because it is a record of the days when carriages moved at little more than a foot’s pace, [78] and there were no police to regulate the traffic. It is supposed to date from about 1770. Such a servant as this would be singularly out of place in modern London; but in the East, retainers of the same kind, who run in front and clear the way, still naturally form part of a great man’s equipage. ”

“ To supply the demand, some enterprising person discovered a spring with rare healing powers; some doctor wrote it up, and the place became, for a time at least, fashionable. Such a spa in St. George’s Fields I have already described. Let me say a few words about others equally interesting, in the neighbourhood in which we now find ourselves.
Not far from the site of the Myddleton’s Head, on the north side of the New River, no longer visible, and close to the New River Head, stands Sadler’s Wells Theatre, built on the site of one of these places of health-resort. ”

“ At the Ben Jonson tavern in Shoe Lane a curious old wooden panel is preserved, which bears on its two sides what are supposed to be portraits of ‘rare Ben’; as it is nailed against the wall, one side only is now visible. The person portrayed is a lean hungry-looking man, the very reverse of the poet; it seems likely, nevertheless, that this was the old signboard. A more ambitious effort is the full-length portrait of the Duke of Cumberland—the hero of Culloden—which is on a public-house at the corner of Bryanston Street and Great Cumberland Place, built about 1774. ”

“ The little towns and villages of three hundred years ago, then some distance from London, and numbering among their inhabitants people of high birth unconnected with trade, became by degrees half rural suburbs, where well-to-do citizens sought amusement and repose. Folks of this class have now gone further afield, and for many years the speculative builder has been at work, providing for a humbler and far more numerous population. ”

“ 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. [72] 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. ”

“ 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 [60] 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. ”

“ The swans on the upper reaches of the Thames are owned respectively by the Crown, and the Dyers’ and Vintners’ Companies of the City of London, and, according to ancient custom, the representatives of these several owners make an expedition each year up the river and mark the cygnets. The royal mark used to consist of five diamonds, the dyers’ of four bars and one nick, the vintners’ of the chevron or letter V and two nicks. The word ‘nicks’ has been corrupted into necks, and as the vintners were often tavern-keepers, the Swan with Two Necks became a common sign. ”

“ On a squalid house at the corner of this narrow opening, and facing the space lately cleared in what was the market, I have observed with interest a fine stone bas-relief of the Holles arms, surmounted by an earl’s coronet, namely, ermine, two piles in point sable, and the motto ‘Spes audaces adjuvat,’ the supporters being a lion and that nondescript beast, a heraldic tiger, which is supposed to have a dragon’s head. The date beneath is 1659, showing [150] that they were put up for John Holles, second Earl of Clare, no doubt on a building in the market-place. ”

“ It is hard to say whether the sign of the Seven Stars had its origin from the shield of an Astronomer King, Gaspar or Melchior, or from the seven bright stars of the constellation usually called the Great Bear, [23] or whether it was suggested by the mystic pages of the Apocalypse; but from whatever source derived, it was common in London about the time of the Great Fire. A fine sculptured specimen with ornamental border was to be seen in Cheapside as [40] late as the year 1851, when Archer drew it. ”

“ It is of red brick, the bases, bands and capitals of the pilasters and the architraves being of stone, and it has, like the others, the rose and fleur-de-lys in relief. But the best-preserved specimen, externally, of work of this character now existing in London is the harmonious red-brick building on the south [155] side of Great Queen Street, hard by, which was either designed by Inigo Jones or by Webb under his influence. Let those who wish to study its fine proportions and pleasant details lose no time, for an ominous board has appeared in front, and much I fear that its days are numbered. ”

“ The fourth of the great Inns of Court—Gray’s Inn—derived its name from the noble family of the Greys of Wilton, having been originally their dwelling, just as Lincoln’s Inn had been the dwelling of an Earl of Lincoln, and several of the Inns of Chancery were originally the homes of other well-known personages. The society seems first to have used the arms of the Grey family ”

“ If the tradition of Sir Walter’s residence at Islington is true, they must have lived within a stone’s throw of each other at one time. [145] Before being knighted, Thomas Fowler had married Jane, daughter of Gregory Charlet, citizen and tallow-chandler, who bore him two sons. His second wife, to whom he was married at St. James’s Church, Clerkenwell, on March 17, 1604, was Mary, widow of Sir John Spencer, of Althorp—not to be confused with his neighbour the rich merchant of Crosby Place and Canonbury, who lived on till 1609. ”

“ The Spread Eagle is in fair condition, though the sinister head has been badly restored with cement. It has on it the initials rm and the date 1669. I have no proof as to the original position of this sign, but in the absence of fuller information one can, I think, fairly hazard the conjecture, that after the Great Fire it may have been put up in Bread Street to perpetuate the memory of the house in which John Milton, the poet, was born. We know that his father, a scrivener, but a man of good family, had adopted his own coat of arms as a sign. ”

“ In connection with the æsthetic revival there has been a considerable reappearance of signs in different parts of London, mostly of artistic ironwork; but although this helps to relieve the dull monotony of many streets it is not a custom that [ix] would be popular if it became universal. There can, however, be no objection to the more general adoption of artistic sculpture on the fronts of houses. When an old house is rebuilt, its story (if it have a story) may with advantage be graphically represented on the front of the new one. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ Shakespeare, too, praises the quality of the strawberries in Ely Garden, though little more than sixty years afterwards we have John Evelyn complaining in his ‘Fumifugium’ that smoke is [118] ‘suffering nothing in our gardens to bud, display themselves, or ripen; so as our anemones and many other choycest flowers, will by no industry be made to blow in London or the precincts of it.’ Ely Place seems to have been let by the see to John of Gaunt, ‘time-honoured Lancaster,’ and here in 1399 he breathed his last. ”

“ The neighbourhood was at one time rich in astronomical signs. In 1532 Richard Collier, citizen and mercer of London, left his messuage called the Sun, in the parish of St. Mary le Bow, to be sold, and the proceeds to be devoted to the founding of a free school at Horsham in Sussex, which still exists, and is in the hands of the Mercers’ Company. Other signs of this description in Cheapside, were the Star, the Man in the Moon, and the Half-Moon—the sign of a celebrated tavern on the north side, close to Gutter Lane, rebuilt after the Great Fire. ”

“ The present building must have been erected soon after the Great Fire, for a staircase, to which there is access from Friday Street, evidently dates from that century. Indeed, in the Creed Collection at the British Museum (vol. xiii.) there is a newspaper cutting said to be from the Builder, but without a date, in which it is, no doubt erroneously, asserted that the house was there before the year 1666, and remained standing when all around was swept away, and that inside traces of the fire may be observed on the massive beams. The Chained Swan is undoubtedly of heraldic origin. ”

“ In 1699 a narrative poem was published under the title of ‘A Walk to Islington, with a Description of New Tunbridge Wells and Sadler’s Musick House,’ in which the fame of the wells is ascribed to its medicinal water, and that of the music-house to such good cheer as cheesecakes, custards, bottled ale and cider, and the diversions of singing and dancing. An article in the Gentleman’s Magazine for December, 1813, puts the matter beyond a doubt; and their relative positions are clearly marked in Horwood’s map of 1799. ”

“ Under an arch at the end of the counting-house was a strong-room lined throughout with Dutch tiles. Mounting the staircase, one came upon the dining-room, with its ingeniously contrived cupboard, and the drawing-room, which looked out on what was, till within the last few years, the pleasant and ample garden of the Drapers’ Company, now covered, all but a fragment, with bricks and mortar. A view of this garden is given in Cassell’s ‘Old and New London,’ vol. i., p. 517, with No. 21, Austin Friars showing itself beyond the trees in the middle distance ”