“Boire à la Capucine,
C’est boire pauvrement;
Boire à la Célestine,
C’est boire largement;
Boire à la Jacobine,
C’est chopine à chopine;
Mais boire en Cordelier,
C’est vider le cellier.”[471]
Tokens are extant of a music-house, with the sign of the Black-friar, dated 1671. In Paris also, the Bacchic propensities of the Black-friars made a tavern-keeper of the seventeenth century choose St Dominic as the patron saint of his tavern. His principal customers, who formed a sort of club, were called Dominicans; a contemporary song thus gives the rule of this order:—
“Nous sommes dix, tous grands buveurs;
Bons ivrognes et grands fumeurs,
Qui ne cessant jamais de boire,
Et de remuer la machoire,
Méprisons d’amour les faveurs.”[472]
Nuns also figured on the signboard as the [Three Nuns], which was constantly used by drapers; not exactly, as Tom Brown says, “very dismally painted to keep up young women’s antipathy to popery and” single blessedness, but because the holy sisterhoods were generally very expert in making lace embroidery, and other fancy work—as the handkerchiefs made by the nuns of Pau, and sold by our drapers, fully prove even at the present day. In the seventeenth century, the Three Nuns was the sign of a well-known coaching and carriers’ inn in Aldgate, which gave its name to Three Nuns’ Court close at hand; near this inn was the “dreadful gulf, for such it was rather than a pit,” in which, during the Plague of 1665, not less than 1114 bodies were buried in a fortnight, from the 6th to the 20th of September.[473] Not improbably this sign, after the Reformation, was occasionally metamorphosed into the Three Widows: Peter Treveris, a foreigner, erected a press and continued printing until 1552 at the Three Widows in Southwark; he printed several books for William Rastell, John Reynor, R. Copeland, and others in the city of London. It is still the sign of a cap and bonnet shop in Dublin. The Matrons, also, may have originally represented Nuns; this last hung, in the seventeenth century, at the door of John Bannister, crutch and bandage maker, near the hospital, (Christ’s Hospital School,) Newgate Street.[474]
| PLATE XIII. | |
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| MERCURY AND FAN. (Banks’s Collection, 1810.) | NOBODY. (From an old print, circa 1600.) |
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| RUNNING FOOTMAN. (Charles Street, Berkeley Square, circa 1790.) | QUEEN ELIZABETH. (Banks’s Collection.) |
At the present day the Church is a very common ale-house sign, either on account of the esteem in which good living has been held by churchmen in all ages, “superbis pontificum potiore cœnis,” or, from the proximity of a church to the ale-house in question; thus, one inn in the town would be known as the “Market House,” whilst another might be known as the “Church Inn.” It has been said the name was given that topers might equivocate and say that they “frequently go to church.” Be this as it may, there is generally an ale-house close to every church, (in Knightsbridge the chapel of the Holy Trinity is jammed in between two public-houses,) whereby a good opportunity is offered to wash a dry sermon down. In Bristol, at the beginning of the present century, it was still worse—a Methodist meeting-room was immediately over a public-house, which gave rise to the following epigram:—
“There’s a spirit above and a spirit below,
A spirit of joy and a spirit of woe—
The spirit above is the spirit divine;
But the spirit below is the spirit of wine.”
Other signs connected with the church are the Chapel Bell, at Suton, in Norfolk, and the Church Stile or Church Gates, which is very common. The origin of this last comes from an old custom of drinking ale on the parish account, on certain occasions, at the church stile. Pepys mentions this when he was at Walthamstow, April 14, 1661:—“After dinner we all went to the church stile, and there eat and drank.” To this a correspondent in the Gent. Mag. (Nov. 1852, p. 442) makes the following note:—“In an old book of accounts belonging to Warrington parish, the following minute occurs:—“Nov. 5, 1688. Paid for drink at the church steele, 13s.;” and in 1732, “It is ordered that hereafter no money be spent on ye 5th of November or any other State day on the parish account, either at the church stile or any other place.” Though certainly the parish now does not pay for any ale drunk at the church stile, the sign is evidently set up in remembrance of the good old time when such things were.
Belonging to the church was also the sign of the Three Brushes, or Holy Water Sprinklers, which was that of an old house near the White Lion prison, Southwark, in which there was a room with panelled wainscoting and ceiling ornamented with the royal arms of Queen Elizabeth. Probably it had been the court-room at the time the White Lion Inn was a prison. Amongst the Beaufoy trades tokens there is one of “Rob. Thornton, haberdasher, next the Three Brushes in Southwark, 1667.”