“My lawyer’s clerk I lighted on last night
In Holborn at the Dagger,”
says Captain Face, in Ben Jonson’s “Alchymist,” and various trades tokens testify the prevalence of the sign. Probably this arose from its being a charge in the city arms, which was supposed to represent the dagger Sir William Walworth used in slaying Wat Tyler. This at least was asserted in the inscription below the niche in which Sir William’s statue was erected in Fishmonger’s Hall:—
“Brave Walworth knyght Lord Mayor yt slew
Rebellious Tyler in his alarmes—
The king therefore did give in lieu
The Dagger to the Cytyes armes.”
Stow says that this is erroneous, as, when in the 4 Richard II. a new seal was made for the city, “the armes of this city were not altered, but remayne as afore; to witte, argent, a playne cross gules a sword of Saint Paul in the first quarter and no dagger of William Walworth as is fabuled.”[477] The Dagger and Pie was in the seventeenth century the sign of a celebrated pie-shop in Cheapside, the Pie being added to the original sign; but from the trades tokens of this house we see that this was represented by a rebus of a dagger with a magpie on the point. Dagger-pies are frequently mentioned in the plays of that period; for instance, in Decker’s “Satyro-Mastrix:”—“I’ll not take thy word for a dagger-pie;” and in Prynne’s “Histrio-Mastrix,” “and please you, let them be dagger-pies.” The London apprentices appear to have been good customers to this house. Whenever, for example, old Hobson, the merry haberdasher, went abroad, “his prentices wold ether bee at the Taverne filling their heds with wine or at the Dagger in Cheapside cramming their bellies with minced pyes.”[478] And in Heywood’s comedy of “If you Know not me you Know Nobody,” the worthy citizen bitterly inveighs against the temptations held out to apprentices by the dainties of this house:—
“Ten pounds a morning! Here is the fruit
Of Dagger-pies and Ale-house guzzling.”—Act i. sc. i., 1606.
A rather curious sign was that of the Red M and Dagger. The letter M was the initial of Mrs Milner’s name, who, at this sign in Pope’s Head Alley, “over against the Royal Exchange in Cornhill,” sold the “Grand Restorative,” which cured consumption, stone, dropsy, and all evils flesh is heir to. The sign occurs among the Bagford bills; there is a similar one amongst the Banks bills, the Pistol and C, the sign of John Crook, a razor-maker at the Great Turnstile, Holborn, circa 1787: the bill represents a renaissance scutcheon with a pistol, above it a C, and surgical instruments disseminated on the field.
Though we have the authority of Cicero that cedant arma togæ, yet booksellers, who flourish by the arts of peace, choose the Helmet for their sign. Humphrey Joy, a bookseller and printer in St Paul’s Churchyard in 1550, and another, celebrated in the reigns of Henry VIII., Edward VI., and Queen Mary, Rowland Hall by name, had both a Helmet for their sign. This Hall changed his sign more frequently than is generally the custom; thus, besides the Helmet, he is known to have traded at the signs of the Cradle, in Lombard Street; the Half Eagle and Key, in Gutter Lane; and the Three Arrows, in Golden Lane, near Cripplegate. There is still a stone carving of the helmet fixed in the front of a house in London Wall, with the date 1668 and the initials H. M. Ned Ward mentions the Helmet in Bishopsgate; he says at the battles without bloodshed of the Trainbands in Moorfields, the gallant warriors wish
“For beer from the Helmet in Bishopsgate.
And why from the Helmet? Because that sign
Makes the liquor as welcome t’ a soldier as wine.”
Trades tokens are extant of the Blue Helmet in Tower Street. From the same source we learn that there was, in the seventeenth century, a sign of the Plate, i.e., the Breastplate, in Upper Shadwell; and a Handgun in Shadwell. This weapon was a sort of musket of early times, fired in the hand without a rest; “gunners with handguns or half-hakes” are named by Stow in his enumeration of the troops marching in the city watch on St John’s night.
A few other old weapons remain to be mentioned, as the Arrow, once a great favourite when this weapon made the English name terrible whenever our troops took the field. In the last century there was a beer-house at Knockholt, in Kent, the sign an Arrow, with the following poetical effusion beneath:—