His shop was in St Lawrence Poultney Lane. Every week the newspapers contained advertisements proving, by the most wonderful cures, the efficacy of his powders.
In the sixteenth century a publican in Paris adopted the sign of the Pestle, on account of his living in the Rue de la Mortellerie, (Mortar Street.) His house was in high repute amongst the gallants of the period, which procured him a visit from Master Villon, who thus describes it:—
“S’en vint en une hotellerie,
Rue de la Mortellerie.
Ou pend l’enseigne du Pestel,
A bon logis et bon hostel.”[500]
Villon, Franches Repues.
The Apothecary leads us to the Barber, or rather Barber-Surgeon, and the Barber’s Pole, which dates from the time when barbers practised phlebotomy: the patient undergoing this operation had to grasp the pole in order to make the blood flow more freely. This use of the pole is illustrated in more than one illuminated MS. As the pole was of course liable to be stained with blood, it was painted red; when not in use, barbers were in the habit of suspending it outside the door with the white linen swathing-bands twisted round it; this, in latter times, gave rise to the pole being painted red and white, or black and white, or even with red, white, and blue lines winding round it. It was stated by Lord Thurlow in the House of Peers, July 17, 1797, when he opposed the Surgeon’s Incorporation Bill, that, “by a statute still in force, the barbers and surgeons were each to use a pole. The barbers were to have theirs blue and white striped, with no other appendage, but the surgeons [which were the same in other respects] were to have a gallipot and a red flag in addition, to denote the particular nature of their vocation.”
Besides the well-known brass soap-basins appended to the pole, the barbers in former times used to have other and more repulsive signs of their profession:—
“His pole with pewter[501] basons hung,
Black, rotten teeth in order strung,
Rang’d cups that in the window stood,
Lined with red rags to look like blood,
Did well his threefold trade explain,
Who shaved, drew teeth, and breathed a vein.”
In Constantinople, where the barber still acts as surgeon and dentist, the teeth drawn by him are worked in ornamental patterns intermixed with blue beads, and hung as trophies in the window. Some of our London dentists even yet follow this disgusting custom, for in no less a thoroughfare than Sloane Street there is a certain chemist-dentist who exhibits in his window a whole bottleful of decayed teeth. Instead of cups “lined with red rags to look like blood,” the genuine article was formerly exhibited in the windows; but this was already prohibited at an early period, since the “Liber Albus” enjoins “that no barber be so bold or so daring as to put blood in their windows openly or in view of folks; but let them have it carried privily unto the Thames, under pain of paying two shillings unto the use of the Sheriffs.”
As “a little learning is dangerous,” the barber of the olden times generally contrived to make himself more or less ridiculous. Steele says:—“The particularity of this man [Don Saltero, see [p. 95]] put me into a deep thought whence it should proceed that of all the lower orders barbers should go further in hitting the ridiculous than any other set of men. Watermen brawl, cobblers sing: but why must a barber be for ever a politician, a musician, an anatomist, a poet, and a physician?” This love of music was at all times an idiosyncrasy of the knights of the brass basin. Morley, in his “Plain and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke,” says:—“It should seem you came lately from a barber’s shop, where you heard Gregory Walker or a Corranta plaide in the new proportions.” Henry Bold, in the beginning of the seventeenth century, speaks of ancient tunes “still sung to Barbers’ citterns”, viz., the “Lady’s Fall;” “John come kiss me now;” “Green Sleeves and Pudding Pies;” “The Punk’s Delight,” &c. And Tom Brown, in his “Amusements for the Meridian of London,” remarks:—
“In a Barber’s shop I saw a Beau so overladen with wig that there was no difference between his head and the wooden one that stood in the window. The fop it seems was newly come to his Estate, though not to the years of Discretion, and was singing the Song: ‘Happy the child whose father is gone to the Devil;’ and the Barber was all the while keeping time on his Cittern, for, you know, a Cittern and a Barber is as natural as milk to a calf, or the bears to be attended by a Bagpiper.”