“To us billmen relate,
Why you stagger so late,
And how you came drunk so soon.”
John Lilly’s Endymion. 1591.
Lawyers are only commemorated in the complimentary sign of the [Good Lawyer],[494] and in the Rolls, a tavern kept by Ralph Massie, in Chancery Lane, in the reign of Charles II. In various parts of the house, and particularly in the great room up stairs, the coats of arms of the Carew family spoke of its former possessors. Further back still, we have it as a timber tenement belonging to the knights of St John of Jerusalem, by whom it was sold to Cardinal Wolsey, who for a time inhabited it, before he had reached the summit of his pride and fame. Behind this building was the house and garden of Sir Walter Raleigh. But all these remnants of bygone glory were swept away in 1760, when the house was rebuilt, and the name changed into the Crown and Rolls. The name of Rolls, it is needless to observe, was adopted from the neighbouring Rolls House, where the rolls and records of Chancery have been kept since the reign of Richard III.
The liberal arts are as badly represented on the signboard as the Bar. The Poet’s Head was a sign in St James’s Street in the seventeenth century; who the poet was it is impossible to say now; perhaps it was Dryden, since the trades tokens represent a head crowned with bays. The same sign had been used during the Commonwealth by Taylor the Water poet, but in his case the poet was Taylor himself, (see [p. 48].) The Five Inkhorns, we gather from the trades tokens, was the sign of Walter Haddon, in Grub Street, a very appropriate trade emblem in that scribbling locality. There was also a house with this sign in Petticoat Lane, opposite which Strype’s mother lived; letters of his are extant addressed:—
These for his honoured Mother,
Mrs Hester Stryp, widow
dwelling in Petticoat Lane over
against the five Inkhorns, without
Bishopsgate
in London.
Petticoat Lane in that time was the great manufacturing place for inkhorns. The Hand and Pen was a scrivener’s sign, which was adopted by Peter Bales, Queen Elizabeth’s celebrated penman. Hollinshed says[495] that
“He writ within the Compasse of a Penie in Latine, the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed, the Ten Commandements, a praise to God, a Prayer for the Queéne, his posie, his name, the daie of the month the yeare of our Lord, and the reigne of the Queéne. And on the seuenteenth of August next following, at Hampton Court, he presented the same to the Queenes maiestie in the head of a ring of gold, couered with a christall, and presented therewith an excellent spectacle, by him devised, for the easier reading thereof; wherewith her maiestie read all that was written therein with great admiration, and commended the same to the Lords of the Councill and the ambassadors, and did weare the same manie times vpon her finger.”
Bale was employed by Sir Francis Walsingham, and afterwards kept a writing school at the upper end of the Old Bailey. In 1595, when nearly fifty years old, he had a trial of skill with one Daniel Johnson, by which he was the winner of a golden pen, of a value of £20, which, in the pride of his victory, he set up as his sign. Upon this occasion, John Davis made the following epigram in his “Scourge of Folly:”—
“The Hand and Golden Pen, Clophonion
Sets on his sign, to shew, O proud, poor soul,
Both where he wonnes, and how the same he won,
From writers fair, though he writ ever foul;
But by that Hand, that Pen so borne has been,
From Place to Place, that for the last half Yeare,
It scarce a sen’night at a place is seen.
That Hand so plies the Pen, though ne’er the neare,
For when Men seek it, elsewhere it is sent,
Or there shut up, as for the Plague or Rent,
Without which stay, it never still could stand,
Because the Pen is for a Running Hand.”[496]
The sign of the Hand and Pen was also used by the Fleet Street marriage-mongers, to denote “marriages performed without imposition.”