is an attempt to take a mean advantage of the unwary spectator. Sometimes two asses appear on the signboard with the inscription “When shall we three meet again?” and this sign is alluded to by Shakespeare in “Twelfth Night.” At Mabelthorpe is a unique sign called the Book in Hand. It is not so much on account of its name that it is curious, for this might have occurred to anyone, particularly in days when the ability to read was not so conspicuously common as it is to-day. But the sign itself is so odd. A rudely shaped hand and forearm sticks out straight from the brick wall and in the hand is an open book with three Latin crosses on the right page and one on the left. The origin of the sign is lost, but it seems obviously to have had at one time some ecclesiastical connection.
Many names of inns have arisen from the puns on the landlord or locality. The Black Swan in Bartholomew Lane, once a resort for musical celebrities was kept by Owen Swan, parish clerk of St. Michael’s Cornhill. The Brace Tavern, in Queen’s Bench Prison, was opened by two brothers of the name of Partridge. Hat and Tun was the sign of a public-house in Hatton Garden, and the Warbolt in Tun of the little inn at Warbleton, in Sussex. At least one Three Pigeons began business with a worthy surnamed Pigeon for landlord, although this sign is usually derived from a coat of arms charged with three martlets. According to a correspondent, the Bell Inn of a village not far from Oxford was formerly kept by John Good, who set up this inscription under a gigantic representation of a bell:
“My name, likewise my ale, is good,
Walk in, and taste my own home-brewed,
For all that know John Good can tell
That, like my sign, it bears the Bell.”
Ben Jonson in the “Alchymist” satirised this kind of wit:
“He shall have a bell that’s Abel,
And by it standing one whose name is Dee
In a rug gown, there’s D and Rug, that’s Drug;
And right anenst him a dog snarling err,
There’s Drugger, Abel Drugger. That’s his sign.”
The last Honest Lawyer in London has just ceased to exist, but there is still an Honest Miller at Withersden, near Wye, in Kent. It is approached by devious ways and difficult to find. Hence perhaps the name. Like the Silent Woman, the honest lawyer was represented with his head cut off. A very famous signboard, said to have been painted by Hogarth, was The Man loaded with Mischief, in Oxford Street. The man was carrying a woman, glass in hand, a magpie, and a monkey. Underneath was the rhyme:
“A monkey, a magpie, and a wife
Is the true emblem of strife.”
At Grantham, an eccentric lord of the manor about a century ago insisted on having all the signs of public-houses on his estate painted with the political colour which he favoured. Thus the town possessed, in 1830, the following: Blue Boat, Blue Sheep, Blue Bull, Blue Ram, Blue Lion, Blue Bell, Blue Cow, Blue Boar, Blue Horse, and Blue Inn. By way of retaliation, a neighbouring landowner and political opponent actually named one of his houses the Blue Ass. Grantham also can boast of the original Beehive Inn with the motto:
“Stop! Traveller, this wondrous sign explore,
And say when thou hast viewed it o’er,
Grantham, now, two rarities are thine,
A lofty steeple, and a living sign.”
On Gallows Tree Heath, near Reading, there stands a Reformation Inn, somewhat grim and tantalizing in its greeting to the unfortunate wretches who were led past it to execution, and had lost the opportunity to profit by the advice. A cynical humour of the same description must have suggested the Half Brick for the sign of an inn at Worthing. It is said that the aborigines of some towns in England invariably welcome a stranger by “heaving half a brick at him.”