In spite of these acknowledged facts, however, I am happy to say there is not a single “Drunkard” in the London Directory. Nevertheless, in our older registers the tale is not so assuring. There has been a tendency during the last two hundred years to shuffle off certain objectionable names, which our earlier forefathers did not seem to be ashamed of. Who of my readers would like to have been officially registered as “Maurice Druncard,” or “Jakes Drynk-ale,” or worse still, “Geoffrey Dringke-dregges”? Who of my readers would like to sign himself in a marriage record as “Robert le Sot,” or as “Thomas Sour-ale”? Even “John Swete-ale” would scarcely have relished the sobriquet if he had lived in this more punctilious age of ours. Where could the young lady be found who would forego the charms of spinsterhood to be wedded to an “Arnold Scutel-mouth”—(what a capacious mouth it must have been!) “Alice Gude-ale-house” may have been a thoroughly honest and respectable landlady, but I don’t think she would have said “no,” if some smart and worthy younker had offered her the refusal of his name.
Every one of these entries I have myself copied from authentic registers. Curious, and yet not curious, is it that not one of them has survived. So far as the Directory shows, we are the soberest and most temperate nation on the face of the earth. Thus do we throw a mantle over our great national vice. Even when we cannot get rid of the fact, we manage to smooth it over with a sesquipedalian gloss. A woman in the middle and higher ranks never gets drunk now-a-days. She is a suffering martyr to dipsomania! How thankful we should be for a Bible that says “Be not drunk.”
Who was the first English teetotaler? If we could find him, I suspect our temperance friends would erect a monument to him. There are seven “Drinkwaters” in the Metropolitan register; and I am glad to say that Camden’s statement is wrong—it was only a guess—that Drinkwater is a corruption of “Derwentwater.” In the first place it is an impossible corruption; for the corruptive changes that pass over words and names are not accidental, but follow fixed rules, so to say. In the second place, I have been able to discover the name in its present guise up to the very time when hereditary surnames were established. “John Drinkwater” occurs in the Hundred Rolls, and “Richard Drynkwatere” in the Parliamentary Writs. [120] No wonder their posterity has survived, no wonder their name endures, for they can boast that in their sobriquet lies the record of the first English temperance movement. In a word, Mr. Drinkwater number one must have been the forerunner of total abstinence. None of his neighbours could have pointed to him as a man who habitually, or occasionally upon days of festival, “got tight”; his name, whereby they had nicknamed him, was in itself a safeguard. His very title pledged him to the principles it professed. No, he never “got tight,” or if he did, like a good sailing craft, he was watertight. Some day I hope there will be a monument erected to “Drinkwater Number One.” It might be in the shape of a drinking fountain. What a heap of people there are buried in state in Westminster Abbey who ought to give place to “Drinkwater Number One”! But, alas! we don’t all get our deserts.
But enough of this. We have reminiscences in our directories of meat as well as drink. Chaucer, speaking of the “Franklein,” says,—
“Withoute bake mete never was his house,
Of fish, and flesh, and that so plenteous,
It snowèd in his hous of mete and drink,
Of allè deintiès that men coud thinke.* * * * *
Wo was his cook, but if his saucè were
Poignant and sharpe, and redy all his gear.”
This short and piquant description is important because of the language used. We still use the word flesh in the alliterative phrase, “fish, flesh, and fowl;” but we should never ask for a “pound of flesh” in a butcher’s shop now, any more than we should talk of the importation of “American flesh.” We should say “meat.” The distinction, however, is preserved in this account, and we are reminded that before the Norman “Butcher” or “Boucher,” and French “Labouchere” came in, the seller of flesh-meat was called a “Fleshmonger” or “Flesher.” So late as 1528, William Fleshmonger, D.C.L., was Dean of Chichester. I fear the name is now obsolete. Our “Fleshers” still exist, but most of them have become absorbed in “Fletcher,” which represented the trade of feathering arrows: we still employ the word “fledge.” The Bowyers and Fletchers and Arrowsmiths always marched abreast in the old trades’ processions of London, or York, or Norwich. Harking back to Fletcher, however, I may add, that in Scotland a butcher is still a flesher.
So far for the butcher. But the old rhyme speaks of—
“The butcher, the baker,
The candlestick-maker.”
We next turn, therefore, to the bread and biscuit department. We have all heard how that foolish and imprudent
“Miss Baxter,
Refused a man before he axed her,”