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!