THE MERMAID TAVERN
There hath been great sale and utterance of wine,
Besides beere, and ale, and ipocras fine,
In every country, region, and nation,
But chiefly in Billingsgate, at the Salutation;
And the Bore's Head, near London Stone,
The Swan at Dowgate, a taverne well known;
The Mitre in Cheape; and then the Bull Head,
And many like places that make noses red;
Th' Bore's Head in Old Fish Street, Three Crowns in the Vintry,
And now, of late, St. Martin's in the Sentree;
The Windmill in Lothbury; The Ship at th' Exchange,
King's Head in New Fish Street, where oysters do range;
The Mermaid in Cornhill, Red Lion in the Strand,
Three Tuns, Newgate Market; Old Fish Street, at the Swan.
(Newes From Bartholomew Fayre; an undated, anonymous black-letter poem.)
"Much time," says Andrews in his history of the sixteenth century, "was spent by the citizens of London at their numerous taverns."
The tavern was the lounging-place, not only of the idle and dissolute, but of the industrious also. It was the Club, the Forum, sometimes too the Theatre.
The wives and daughters of tradesmen collected here to gossip, and, strange as it now seems to us they came here, too, to picnic. An old song of the period describes a feast of this sort, and tells how each woman carried with her some goose, or pork, the wing of a capon, or a pigeon pie. Arrived at the tavern, they ordered the best wine. They praised the liquor, and, under its inspiriting influence, discussed their husbands, with whom they were naturally dissatisfied; and then went home by different streets, perfidiously assuring their lawful masters that they had been to church.
This evidence is useful and seemly to be here set down, as indicating the true origin of habits for which much undeserved censure has been in these later days inflicted upon mere imitators.
The men, whose chiefest fault has ever been their too great readiness to follow the women, fell insensibly into the habit, and have been there ever since.