The Banquerout to the World’s End,
The Fool to the Fortune his,
Unto the Mouth the Oyster-wife,
The Fiddler to the Pie.
The Punk unto the Cockatrice,[23]
The Drunkard to the Vine,
The Begger to the Bush, there meet,
And with Duke Humphrey dine.”[24]
After the great fire of 1666, many of the houses that were rebuilt, instead of the former wooden signboards projecting in the streets, adopted signs carved in stone, and generally painted or gilt, let into the front of the house, beneath the first floor windows. Many of these signs are still to be seen, and will be noticed in their respective places. But in those streets not visited by the fire, things continued on the old footing, each shopkeeper being fired with a noble ambition to project his sign a few inches farther than his neighbour. The consequence was that, what with the narrow streets, the penthouses, and the signboards, the air and light of the heavens were well-nigh intercepted from the luckless wayfarers through the streets of London. We can picture to ourselves the unfortunate plumed, feathered, silken gallant of the period walking, in his low shoes and silk stockings, through the ill-paved dirty streets, on a stormy November day, when the honours were equally divided between fog, sleet, snow, and rain, (and no umbrellas, be it remembered,) with flower-pots blown from the penthouses, spouts sending down shower-baths from almost every house, and the streaming signs swinging overhead on their rusty, creaking hinges. Certainly the evil was great, and demanded that redress which Charles II. gave in the seventh year of his reign, when a new Act “ordered that in all the streets no signboard shall hang across, but that the sign shall be fixed against the balconies, or some convenient part of the side of the house.”
The Parisians, also, were suffering from the same enormities; everything was of Brobdignagian proportions. “J’ai vu,” says an essayist of the middle of the seventeenth century, “suspendu aux boutiques des volants de six pieds de hauteur, des perles grosses comme des tonneaux, des plumes qui allaient au troisième étage.”[25] There, also, the scalpel of the law was at last applied to the evil; for, in 1669, a royal order was issued to prohibit these monstrous signs, and the practice of advancing them too far into the streets, “which made the thoroughfares close in the daytime, and prevented the lights of the lamps from spreading properly at night.”
| PLATE II. | |
 |  |
| BUSH. (MS. of the 14th century.) | BUSH. (Bayeux tapestry, 11th cent.) |
 |  |
| CROSS. (Luttrell Psalter, 11th century.) | |
 | |
| ALE-POLE. (Picture of Wouwverman, 17th cent.) | BLACK JACK AND PEWTER PLATTER. (Print by Schavelin, 1480.) |
 |  |
| NAG’S HEAD. (Cheapside. 1640.) | BUSH. (MS. of the 15th cent.) |
Still, with all their faults, the signs had some advantages for the wayfarer; even their dissonant creaking, according to the old weather proverb, was not without its use:—
“But when the swinging signs your ears offend
With creaking noise, then rainy floods impend.”
Gay’s Trivia, canto i.
This indeed, from the various allusions made to it in the literature of the last century, was regarded as a very general hint to the lounger, either to hurry home, or hail a sedan-chair or coach. Gay, in his didactic—flâneur—poem, points out another benefit to be derived from the signboards:—