From this we learn it was a Cupid or Amorino supporting a crown; the sign of the house had doubtless originally been the Crown, and the Cupid, so common in the Renaissance style, had been added by way of ornament, but was mistaken by the public as a constituent of the sign. The verses probably applied to the Angel and Crown, a famous tavern in Broad Street, behind the Royal Exchange. There was another Angel and Crown in Islington, where convivial dinners were held in the olden time. It was a common practice in the last and preceding centuries for the natives of a county or parish to meet once a year and dine together. The ceremony often commenced by a sermon, preached by a native, after which the day was spent in pleasant conviviality, after-dinner speeches, and mutual congratulations. The custom now has almost died out; but this is one of the invitation tickets:

St Mary, Islington.

Sir,

You are desidered to meet many other Natives of this place on Tuesday [271]ye 11th day of April 1738 at Mrs Eliz. Grimstead’s ye Angel and Crown, in ye Upper Street, about ye hour of One; Then and there wth Full Dishes, Good Wine and Good Humour to improve and make lasting that Harmony and Friendship which have so long reigned among us.

Walter Sebbon.
John Booth.
Bourchier Durrell.
James Sebbon.
Stewards.

N.B. The Dinner will be on the table peremptorily at Two.
Pray pay the Bearer Five Shillings.

That same year, another Angel and Crown Tavern in Shire Lane obtained an unenviable notoriety, for it was there that a Mr Quarrington was murdered and robbed by Thomas Carr, an attorney from the Temple, and Elisabeth Adams. They were hanged at Tyburn, January 18, 1738.

The [Angel and Gloves] at first sight seems a whimsical combination, but is easily explained when we advert to the woodcut above the shop-bill of Isaac Dalvy, in Little Newport Street, Soho, who, in the reign of Queen Anne, sold gloves, &c., under this sign, which simply represented two Cupids, each carrying a glove,—in fact, exactly the same conceit as that of the Herculanese shoemaker, noticed in a former chapter. It is more difficult to find a rational explanation for the Angel and Stilliards. The Steelyard, or Stilliard, in Upper Thames Street, was the place where the Hanse merchants exposed their goods for sale, and was so called from the king’s steelyard, or beam, there erected for weighing the tonnage of goods imported into London.[392] Whether this sign represented a Cupid with such a weighing machine, or a view of the hall of the Hanse merchants, with a Fame flying over it, is now impossible to decide. It may be suggested that a variation of the well-known figure of Justice, with steelyards in place of the usual scales, was the origin. Be this as it may, the only mention we have found of the sign is in the following advertisement:—

“WILLIAM DEVAL, at the Angel & Stilliards, in St Ann’s Lane, near Aldersgate, London, maketh Castle (Castille), Marble, and white Sope as good as any Marseilles Sope; Tryed and Proved and sold at very Reasonable Rates.”[393]—Domestic Intelligencer, January 2d, 1679.

A few years later we find the Angel and Still noticed, as in the following advertisement:—

“A WELL-SET Negro, commonly called Sugar, aged about twenty years, teeth broke before, and several scars in both his cheeks and forehead, having absented from his Master, whosoever secures him and gives notice to Benjamin Maynard, at the Angel and Still, at Deptford, shall have a Guinea Reward and reasonable charges.”—Weekly Journal, October 18, 1718.

In this case the still was simply added to intimate the sale of spirituous liquors.

The Angel and Sun, apparently a combination of two signs, is named as a shop or tavern near Strandbridge, in 1663,[394] and is still the name of a public-house in the Strand. The Angel and Woolpack, at Bolton, is the same sign which, near London Bridge, is called the Naked Boy and Woolpack. A woolpack, with a negro seated on it, was at one time very common; for a change or distinction, this negro underwent the reputed impossible process of being washed white, and thus became a naked boy, which, in signboard phraseology, is equivalent to an angel.

The Virgin was unquestionably a very common sign before the Reformation, and it may be met with even at the present day, as, for instance, at Ebury Hill, Worcester, and in various other places. In France it was, and is still, much more common than in England, as might be expected. Tallemant des Réaux tells of a miraculous tavern sign of Notre Dame, on the bridge of that name, in Paris, which was observed by the faithful to cry and shed tears, probably on account of the bad company she had to harbour. It was taken down by order of the archbishop. At the end of the seventeenth century there was, in the Rue de la Seine, Paris, a quack doctor, who pretended to cure a great variety of complaints. He put up a holy Virgin for his sign, with the words, “Refugium Peccatorum,” which is one of the usual epithets of the holy Virgin in the Roman Catholic Church service, very wittily, although profanely, applied in this instance. The sign of the Virgin was also called Our Lady, as: “Newe Inne was a guest Inne, the sign whereof was the picture of our Lady, and thereupon it was also called Our Lady’s Inne.”[395] Our Lady of Pity was the sign of Johan Redman, a bookseller in Paternoster Row, in 1542. Johan Byddell, also a bookseller, had introduced this sign in the beginning of that century. This Byddell, or Bedel, (who lived in Fleet Street, next to Fleet Bridge,) had evidently borrowed it from a nearly similar figure in Corio’s History of Milan, 1505. He afterwards lived at the Sun, in Fleet Street, the house formerly occupied by Wynkyn de Worde.