THE PACK-HORSE IN ·CHIPPENHAM·
A great rôle is played by the horse, not only as the heraldic animal in the coat of arms of the Saxons and of the House of Hanover, but the real beast, from the good old pack-horse to the lithe-limbed racer. In the early Middle Ages, when the roads were so bad that it was impossible for heavy wagons to travel on them, the pack-horse was the only medium for the transportation of goods, post-packages, and mail. Those were hard days for impatient lovers, who would have preferred to send their billets-doux in Shakespearean fashion, “making the wind my post-horse.” Sometimes the horse’s burden, the wool-pack—the wool business being the chief trade in England in the twelfth century—appears on the signboard. In fact, in the time of Ben Jonson “The Woolpack” was one of the leading hostelries of London.
Another sign is the race-horse, celebrated by Shakespeare in such lines as:—
“And I have horse will follow where the game
Makes way, and run like swallows o’er the plain.”
from “Titus Andronicus” (ii, ii), or those other lines in “Pericles” (ii, i):—
“Upon a courser, whose delightful steps
Shall make the gazer joy to see him tread.”
In the reign of Henry VIII, a tavern called “The Running Horses” existed in Leatherhead, a place not exactly fitted for noble hunters, since a contemporary poet complains about the beer being served there “in rather disgusting conditions.” Not infrequently we find more or less happy portraits of famous race-horses, such as “The Flying Dutchman” and “Bee’s Wing”; sometimes even a hound was honored in this way, guarding the entrance of a tavern as his famous Roman colleague, pictured in mosaic, did in the days of antiquity. “The Blue Cap” in Sandiway (Cheshire) was such a sign.