Old Tavern Signs: An Excursion in the History of Hospitality

by Fritz August Gottfried Endell

We cannot resist the temptation to quote as an introduction the ipsissima verba of England’s classical historian Macaulay on the evolution of public hospitality in his country. Most naturally the evolution of the sign runs parallel to the evolution of the tavern, and in a time of flourishing inns we may expect to find highly developed tavern signs. “From a very early period,” says Macaulay, in a chapter on the social condition of England in 1685, “the inns of England had been renowned. Our first great poet had described the excellent accommodation which they afforded to the pilgrims of the fourteenth century. Nine and twenty persons, with their horses, found room in the wide chambers and stables of the Tabard in Southwark. The food was of the best, and the wines such as drew the company on to drink largely. Two hundred years later, under the reign of Elizabeth, William Harrison gave a lively description of the plenty and comfort of the great hostelries. The continent of Europe, he said, could show nothing like them. There were some in which two or three hundred people could without difficulty be lodged and fed. The bedding, the tapestry above all, the abundance of clean and fine linen was a matter of wonder. Valuable plate was often set on the tables. Nay, there were signs which had cost thirty or forty pounds. In the seventeenth century England abounded with excellent inns of every rank. The travelers sometimes, in a small village, lighted on a public-house such as Walton has described, where the brick floor was swept clean, where the walls were stuck round with ballads, where the sheets smelled of lavender, and where a blazing fire, a cup of good ale, and a dish of trout fresh from the neighboring brook, were to be procured at small charge. At the larger houses of entertainment were to be found beds hung with silk, choice cookery, and claret equal to the best which was drunk in London.”

A sign that costs one hundred and fifty to two hundred dollars would be, even in our days of high-paid labor, a thing worth looking at. In the times of the Renaissance it certainly was a work of excellent craftsmanship, sculptured in wood and richly gilded. On an extensive tour through England which brought us to the charming western fishing-village of Clovelly, with its “New Inn” and the more romantic “Red Lion” down by the little harbor, and to Chester, in the north, founded by the Romans, we were disappointed to find so few old signs of artistic value. We found very few carved in wood like “The Blue Boar” in Lincoln or “The Swan” in Wells, from whose windows the beautiful western façade of the cathedral, unusually rich in sculptures, is seen through the green veil of huge old trees. This swan sign shows certain characteristics of the period of the First Empire, and surely does not date back beyond 1800. Also the famous “Four Swans” in the little town of Waltham Cross, north of London, perhaps the only existing example of an old English custom to construct the sign like a triumphant arch across the street, are not so old as the tavern, which a bold inscription dates in the year 1260. How could a sign delicately carved in wood resist the inclemency of the weather, when the stone sculptures of the cathedrals,—as in Exeter, for instance, or in Salisbury,—although leaning against the protecting walls of these gigantic structures, suffered so much? To please the lovers of antiquity some owners of old houses put the most arbitrary dates of their foundation on the neatly-painted fronts. In the street in Chester that leads down to “The Bear and Billet,” one of England’s oldest frame houses, we saw the date 1006 painted on a façade, evidently built in Renaissance times. Other burghers and house-owners who have more respect for exact historic truth, see, of course, in such misleading inscriptions an unfair competition.

THE·SWAN·IN·WELLS·

Signs wrought in iron seem to have been rare in England, the art of forging being less developed there than in the south of Germany. Curiously enough the South-Kensington Museum in London, an enormous storehouse of old works of arts and crafts, contains not a single English sign, but a very beautifully forged iron sign from Germany, dated 1635,—a baker’s sign, as the great crown and the heraldic lions reveal to us. A friendly assistant at the Museum showed us another German sign dating from the end of the seventeenth century, charmingly carved and gilded, representing the workshop of a shoemaker. These two were the only signs that the Museum possessed.

Ye Olde Four Swans·in Waltham Cross·England·1260·

The old London signs have all found a very dismal refuge in the dimly lighted cellar of the Guild Hall. Some of them are stone sculptures of considerable size like the giant sign “Bull and Mouth.” Here too we find certain technical curiosities, as, “The Dolphin” of 1730 painted on copper, and more unusual still, “The Cock and Bottle,” a neat and dainty design composed of blue-and-white Dutch tiles. The foggy and damp climate has often injured not only the carved woodwork of the signboard, but still more the painting on it. The beam on which it hangs might be very old; the painting itself is always of recent date even if the artist, following an old tradition, sometimes produces quaint effects. As an example of how quickly the work of the sign-painter darkens beyond recognition, we may cite “The Falstaff” in Canterbury. It was not a year since the landlady had hung out this picture of the blustering knight in a bold fencing-pose that we saw it last, and it was already very difficult to distinguish the details of the composition; while another painting—the immediate predecessor of the sign in the street—which the friendly Dame showed us on the staircase was as black and bare as a slate. Sometimes the frames of the pictures are carved and allow us to guess the date of their origin; but, as a rule, the perfectly plain signboard hangs out on a strong beam. A typical example is “The Falcon” in Stratford-on-Avon.

The higher the artistic value of the painting on the signboards was, the more we have to regret that so much art was wasted on such a perishable production. In the eighteenth century the coach-painters, whose craftsmanship on old equipages, sledges, and sedan-chairs we still admire in many a museum, used to produce most elegant signs and received for their work astonishingly high prices. Shaken by winds, whipped by rainstorms, their beauty was soon gone. Nowhere have we found them either in collections or in the light of the street. Only in literary tradition does there still live a part of the charm of all these burned and weather-killed things of beauty.

But one device we discovered in England to restore the old forms, namely, the so-called club signs. Just as the printer’s marks often reproduce en miniature the sign of the publisher, so the club signs give a reduced picture of the old tavern signs, especially of those that were cut as silhouettes in metal plates. The very first printers of the fifteenth century loved to introduce into their books these little designs symbolizing their names. Peter Drach in Speyer used two little shields, one containing a winged dragon and the other, as a friendly compensation, a Christmas tree and two stars. Johannes Sensenschmied, a proud “civis Nurembergensis,” had two crossed scythes (Sensen) in his escutcheon. These same designs appear later on the front page of a volume, neatly engraved on copper, often reproducing the sign of the bookshop to which one had to go if one wanted to buy this particular book. A Parisian publisher adopted “La Samaritaine,” which to-day has become the name of a great department store. Mr. Léonard Plaignard, of Lyon, called his shop “Au grand Hercule,” and put the Greek hero on the front page of his books with the inscription: “Virtus non territa monstris.” Just as these little engravings may give us an idea of the old publishers’ signs, so we may gain from the club signs some suggestions as to how the old signboards looked.