“By invitation to my uncle Fenner’s and where I found his new wife, a pitiful, old, ugly, ill-bred woman in a hatt, a midwife. Here were many of his and as many of her relations, sorry mean people; and after choosing our gloves we all went over to the Three Cranes Taverne, and though the best room of the house in such a narrow dogghole we were crammed, and I believe we were near 40, that it made me loath my company and victuals and a very poor dinner it was too.”
Opposite this tavern people generally left their boats to shoot the bridge, walking round to Billingsgate, where they would re-enter them.
The Cock occurs almost as frequently on the signboard as alive at the head of his family in the farm yard. It is one of the oldest signs, already in use at the time of the Romans, who record that one Eros, a freeman of Licius, Africanus Cerealis, kept an inn at Narbonne at the sign of the Cock—“a gallo gallinaceo.” In Christian times the sign acquired a new prestige. The cock is thus mentioned in “The Armory of Byrdes:”—[286]
“The Cocke dyd say
I use alway
To crow both first and last.
Lyke a Postle I am,
For I preche to Man,
And tell hym the nyght is past.
“I bring new tydynges
That the Kyng of all Kynges,
In tactu profudit chorus:
Then sang he mellodious
Te Gloriosus
Apostolorum chorus.”
This bird, in the legends of the middle ages, was surrounded with a mystical, religious halo:—
“It was about the time of cock-crowing when our Saviour was born,—the circumstance of the time of cock-crowing being so natural a figure and representation of the Morning of the Resurrection; the Night as shadowing out the night of the Grave; the third Watch being as some suppose the time our Saviour will come to judgment at; the noise of the cock awakening sleepy man and telling him as it were the night is far spent, and the day is at hand, representing so naturally the voice of the Archangel awakening the dead and calling up the righteous to everlasting day; so naturally does the time of cock-crowing shadow out these things, that probably, some good, well meaning men might have been brought to believe that the very devils themselves when the cock crew and reminded them of them did fear and tremble and shun the light.”[287]
Ideas such as these continued a long time in the popular mind, for Aubrey tells us that in his younger days people “had some pious ejaculation too when the cock did crow, which put them in mind of ye Trumpet at ye Resurrection.”[288]
One of the oldest Cock taverns in London is the Cock in Tothill Street, Westminster, lately re-christened as the Cock and Tabard. An ancient coat of arms, carved in stone, England quartered with France, discovered in this house, is now walled up in the front of the building. In the back parlour is a jolly, bluff-looking man in a red coat, said to represent the driver of the first mail to Oxford, which started from this tavern. Tradition says that the workmen employed at the building of Westminster Abbey, in the reign of Henry VII., used to receive their wages at this house. It was formerly entered by steps; the building now exhibiting traces of great antiquity, and appears at one time to have been a house of considerable pretensions. The rafters and timber are principally of cedar wood. There is a curious hiding-place on the staircase, and a massive carving of Abraham about to offer his son Isaac; and another, in wood, representing the Adoration of the Magi, said to have been left in pledge, at some remote period, for an unpaid score. The cock may have been adopted as a sign here on account of the vicinity of the Abbey, of which St Peter was the patron, for in the middle ages a cock crowing on the top of a pillar was often one of the accessories in a picture of the apostle. This certainly was a very unkind allusion for the poor saint, particularly when accompanied with such a sneering rhyme as that under the sign of the Red Cock in Amsterdam in 1682. On the one side was written:—
“Doe de Haan begost te kraayen
Toen begost Petrus te schraayen.”