or—
“A toutes les figures dédiant mes rasoirs,
Je nargue la critique des fidèles mirroirs.”[505]
Tools belonging to various handicrafts are common public-house signs at the present day. The Axe is a very old sign; it was a well-known carriers’ inn in Aldermanbury in the seventeenth century, and was one of the places visited in 1634 by that thirsty tourist, Drunken Barnaby. From this inn, the first regular line of stage waggons from London to Liverpool was established towards the middle of the seventeenth century. There were constantly some of them on the road, for they left every Monday and Thursday, and it took them ten days in summer, and as many as twelve in winter to perform the journey.
In 1642 there appeared “A Petition from the Towne and County of Leicester unto the King’s most excellent Majestie,” which was “printed for William Gay, and to be sold at his shop in Hosier Lane, at the signe of the Axe, July 29, 1642.” When we consider that “the King’s most excellent Majestie,” was Charles I., we may come to the conclusion that there is something in a sign, as well as in a name; it was certainly an ominous and bad sign for the king. The Cross Axes is a sign at Preston, Bolton, &c. The axe is also found combined with various other carpenter’s tools, as the Axe and Saw, Carlton, Newmarket; Axe and Compasses in many places; Axe and Cleaver, in Boston, Yorkshire. Another sign, complimentary to the same class of workmen, was the Two Sawyers, which, at the end of the last century, was to be seen near the garden wall of the archiepiscopal palace at Lambeth; not unlikely, this was the same house, of which trades tokens are extant from the time of Charles II., when it was kept by John Raines, and its locality is described as the “New Plantation, Narrow Wall, Lambeth.”
Signs referring to iron in its various states are very common on public-houses, as the smith is generally a good customer to them. Iron seems to have a dyspeptic effect even in the bowels of the earth, if we may judge from the quantity of Miners’ Arms in Staffordshire, Warwickshire, and the black country, in which latitudes teetotalism evidently has made but little progress; the Davy Lamp is another sign intended to court the custom of miners, but being almost exclusively for workmen in coal pits, it only occurs in Northumberland. The Forge, or the Three Forges, is common in the Midland iron districts. The Cinder-oven occurs in Norwich. The Anvil, the Anvil and Blacksmith, the Anvil and Hammer, the Smith and Smithy, &c., are all common about Sheffield. So are Hammers, combined with various instruments, as Pincers, Vice, Stithy, &c. The Two Smiths was a sign in the Minories in 1655; the trades tokens of the house represent two men working at the anvil. Hobnails is a sign in Dudley, that town having been famous for the manufacture of nails of every description, even as early as the time of Henry VIII., for the nails used in building the hall at Hampton Court came from there, and the original accounts preserved in the Public Record Office state that there was “Payde to Raynalde Warde, of Dudley, for 7350 of dubbyll tenpenny nayles inglys at 11s. the 1000.”
The Bag of Nails was once a very common sign; there is one still remaining in Arabella Row, Pimlico. “About fifty years ago, the original sign might have been seen at the front of the house, which was a satyr of the woods, and a group of jolly dogs, ycleped Bacchanals. But the satyr having been painted with cloven feet, and painted black, it was by the common people called the Devil, while the Bacchanalians were transmuted by a comical process into a Bag of Nails.”[506] This was, however, only an old slang name for the house, for, in the trial of Catlin, Patterson, and others, for conspiracy, one of the witnesses describing the place where the conspirators used to meet, says: “He went into a public-house, the sign of the Devil and Bag of Nails, for so that gentry called it amongst themselves, (though it was the Blackmoor’s Head and Woolpack,) by Buckingham Gate.”[507]
A bona fide representation of a bag of nails was also used as a sign, as may be seen on the trades token of Henry Hurdam in Tuttle (Tothill) Street, Westminster, 1663, where the bag of nails is combined with a hammer crowned. And as it would be difficult to guess what the bag contained, and nobody cares to buy “a pig in a poke,” the nails were sometimes represented protruding through it, as on the token of Samuel Hincks of Whitechapel, 1669. A somewhat similar sign is expressed in Rouen, Rue des Bons Enfans; it is carved in stone, and represents a bag, with smith’s tools protruding out of it.
Bakers and millers also are represented by a variety of signs. Beginning at the Bushel, a sign on the Bankside in the seventeenth century, and the Shovel and Sieve, the sign of a brush and turnery warehouse among the Bagford Bills, we next accompany the corn to the mill, where we meet the Dusty Miller, a favourite sign in some parts of Yorkshire and Lancashire. A reminiscence of childhood may have suggested the epithet in this sign, for there is the well known nursery rhyme,
“Millery, Millery, Dusty poll,
How many sacks have you stole?”