More general was the sign of the Sword and Buckler, which was frequently set up by haberdashers for the following reason:—
“And whereas, until about the twelve or thirteenth yeere of Queene Elisabeth, the auncient English fight of sword and buckler was only had in use, the bucklers then being only a foot broad, with a pike of four or five inches long; then they beganne to make them full half ell broad, with sharpe pikes 10 or 12 inches long, wherewith they meant either to breake the swordes of their enemies, if it hitte uppon the pike, or else sodainely to runne within them and stabbe, and thrust their buckler with the pike into the face, arme, and body of their adversary, but this continued not long;[475] every haberdasher then sold bucklers”.—Stow’s Chronicle.
The great prevalence of this sign originated in the so-called sword and buckler play, once so common in England. Misson, who visited this country in the beginning of the eighteenth century, says:—
“Within these few years you should often see a sort of gladiators marching through the streets, in their shirts to the waste, their sleeves tucked up, sword in hand, and preceeded by a drum to gather spectators. They give so much a head to see the fight, which was with cutting swords and a kind of buckler for defence. The edge of the sword was a little blunted, and the care of the prize fighters was not so much to avoid wounding one another, as to avoid doing it dangerously; nevertheless as they were obliged to fight till some blood was shed, without which nobody would give a farthing for the show, they were sometimes forced to play a little roughly. The fights are become very rare within these eight or ten years.”[476]
In the seventeenth century it was not a little rough play, which is evident from those matches at which Pepys was present, and which he describes at large. Jouvin, another Frenchman who visited England in 1672, gives a detailed account of these divertisements, which, at that period, at all events, were anything but play; and Maitland was right when he designated them as “a barbarous performance, by those whom necessity (occasioned by a scandalous laziness and indolence) induces to expose themselves to be horribly mangled for a little money, while the bloodily-minded spectators satiate themselves with human gore to the great reproach of religion.”
In the Spectator, No. 436, there is an amusing essay on those “Hockley-in-the-Hole Gladiators,” and in No. 449 a letter appears, in which the deceits of the champions are shown:—
“I overheard two masters of the science agreeing to quarrel on the next opportunity. This was to happen in the company of a set of the fraternity of the basket hilts who were to meet that evening. When this was settled, one asked the other: ‘Will you give cuts or receive?’ The other answered, ‘Receive.’ It was replied, ‘Are you a passionate man?’ ‘No, provided you cut no more, nor no deeper than we agree.’”
A few other instances of the Sword occur on signs, as the Sword and Cross, a sort of emblem of the Church militant, or perhaps an inversion of the Cross Swords: this was a sign “next door to the Savoy Gate in 1711.” The Swordblade, a coffee-house in Birchen Lane in 1718, and the Sword and Dagger, a combination of arms that evokes the phantom of many a desperate duel amongst the ruffling gallants of the reign of James I. This sign of ill omen was, in the seventeenth century, in St Catherine Lane, Tower, as appears from the traded tokens issued there.
The Dagger was once common in London—