Speaking of the Green Walk, St James’s Park, Tom Brown says: “There were a cluster of senators talking of state affairs, and the price of corn and cattle, and were disturbed with the noisy Milk folk crying: A can of Milk, Ladies; a can of Red Cow’s Milk, sirs?”[264] The preference for the Red Cow’s milk may, however, have a more remote origin, namely, from the ordinance of the law contained in Numbers xix. 2, where a red heifer is enjoined to be sacrificed as a purification for sin. Hence, Red Cow’s milk is particularly recommended in old prescriptions and panacea, as, for instance, in the following receipt of “a Cock water for a Consumption and Cough of the Lunges:”—

“Take a running cock and pull him alive, then kill him and cutt him in pieces and take out his intrailes and wipe him cleane, breake the bones, then put him into an ordinary still with a pottle of sack and a pottle of Red Cow’s Milk,” &c., &c.[265]

The Red Cow, in Bow Street, was the sign of a noted tavern, (afterwards called the Red Rose,) which stood at the corner of Rose Alley. It was when going home from this tavern that Dryden was cudgelled by bravoes, hired by Lord Rochester, for some remarks in Lord Mulgrave’s Essay on Satire, in the composition of which Dryden had assisted his lordship. The king offered £50, and a free pardon, but “Black Will with a cudgel,” to whom Lord Rochester had intrusted the task of thrashing the laureate, showed that there was such a thing as honour amongst rogues, and did not betray him for the king’s £50. In all probability, however, he received a larger sum from his lordship. In Dryden’s old age, Pope, then a boy, came here to look at the great man whose fame in after years he was to equal if not to eclipse. This tavern was the famous mart for libels and lampoons; one Julyan, a drunken dissipated “secretary to the Muses,” as he calls himself, was the chief manufacturer.

Near Marlborough, Wilts, there is an alehouse having the sign of the Red Cow, with the following rhyme:—

“The Red Cow
Gives good Milk now.”

That under a Brown Cow at Oldham is still more sublime:—

“This Cow gives such Liquor,
’Twould puzzle a Viccar (sic.)”

The Heifer is to be met with sometimes in Yorkshire, but always with some local adjective, as the Craven Heifer; the Airesdale Heifer, the Durham Heifer, &c. The Pied Calf at Spalding seems to present a solitary instance of a calf on the signboard. Neither are sheep very common; the Ram was a noted carrier’s inn in the seventeenth century, in West Smithfield, and, indeed, continued as such until the recent destruction of this old cattle market. The crest of the cloth-workers was a mount vert, thereon a ram statant; so that this sign in that locality was very well chosen, being in honour of the cattle-dealers on ordinary occasions, and serving for the cloth-workers in the time of Bartholomew fair, for whose benefit the fair was founded. In 1668 there were two Ram’s Head inns in Fenchurch Street; one of them was a carriers’ inn for the Essex people. The Ram’s Skin, which occurs at Spalding in Lincolnshire, is another name for the Fleece. The Black Tup figures on a sign near Rochdale, perhaps in allusion to the black ram frail matrons used to bestride in the old custom of Free Bench, thus related in Jacob’s “Law Dictionary:”—

“In the manors of East and West-Enbourne in the Co. of Berks, and the manor of Torre in Devonshire, and other parts of the West of England, there is a custom, that when a Copyhold Tenant dies his widow shall have ‘Free Bench’ in all his customary lands ‘dum sola et casta fuerit,’ but if she commits incontinency she forfeits her estate. Yet nevertheless on her coming into the court of the manor, riding backwards on a black ram with his tail in her hand and saying the words following, the steward is bound by the custom to readmit her to her free bench; The words are these:—

Here I am
Riding upon a Black Ram
Like a w——e as I am;
And for my crincum crancum
I have lost my bincum bancum;
And for my T——’s game
Have done this worldly shame.
Therefore pray, Mr Steward, let me have my land again.

This is a kind of penance among jocular tenures to purge the offence.”

Though the ram is rarely, and the sheep never seen on the signboard, the Lamb is not uncommon. In 1586, it was the sign of Abraham Veale, (agreeably to the punning practices of the time, one would have expected the Calf from him,) a bookseller in St Paul’s Churchyard, and in 1728 of Thomas Cox, also a bookseller, under the Royal Exchange in Cornhill. Doubtless, these signs had originally represented the Lamb with the flag of the Apocalypse. The sign was used by other trades: in 1673, it was the distinctive ornament of a confectioner at the lower end of Gracechurch Street;[266] and an instance of an alehouse is found in the following advertisement, which at the same time affords us a peep at the homely proceedings of the Admiralty in those days:—