“In the year 1564 Guilliam Boonen, a Dutchman, became the queen’s coachman, and was the first that brought the use of coaches into England. After a while divers great ladies, with as great jalousy of the queen’s displeasure, made them coaches, and rid up and down the country in them, to the great admiration of all the beholders, but then by little they grew usual among the nobility and others of sort, and within twenty years became a great trade of coachmaking.”
Taylor the Water poet, who, as a waterman of course, bore a grudge to coaches, said, “It is a doubtful question whether the devil brought tobacco into England in a coach, for both appeared at the same time.” How common they became in a short time appears from all the satirists of that period; not only the nobility, but even the citizens could no longer do without them, after they were once introduced. Not forty years after their first appearance Pierce Pennyless, speaking of merchants’ wives, says: “She will not go unto the field to coure on the green grasse, but she must have a coach for her convoy.”[516] No wonder, then, that, according to the “Coach and Sedan,” a pamphlet of 1636, there were then in London, the suburbs, and four miles’ compass without, coaches to the number of 6000 and odd. These were nearly all private carriages, for the hackney coaches were only established in 1625 by one Captain Bailey. Their first stand was at the Maypole in the Strand. They numbered about twenty, and were attached to the principal inns. In 1636, the number of hackney coaches was confined to 50; in 1652, to 200; in 1654, to 300; in 1662, to 400; in 1694, to 700; in 1710, to 800; in 1771, to 1000; in 1802, to 1100; but in 1833 all limitation of number ceased. Besides cabs of various kinds, there are now above a thousand omnibusses regularly employed in the Metropolis, and the commissioners of stamps are authorised to license all such carriages without limitation as to number; the proprietor paying the duty of £5 for the licence, and 10s. per week during its continuance. What a difference just two centuries ago, when by proclamation of the “Merry Monarch:”—
“The excessive number of hackney coaches [about 400] and coach horses in London, are found to be a common nuisance to the public damage of our people, by reason of their rude and disorderly standing, and passing to and fro, in and about our cities and suburbs; the streets and highways being thereof pestered and much impassable, the pavement broken up, and the common passages obstructed and made dangerous.” Hence orders are[357] given, that “henceforth none shall stand in the street, but only within their coach-houses, stables, and yards.”
At the Coach and Horses, Bartholomew Close, some vestiges of the ancient buildings of St Bartholomew’s Hospital and Convent still remain—viz., a clustered column in the beer cellar, walls of immense thickness, and an early English window in the taproom, &c. This building occupies the site of the north cloister.[517] Another Coach and Horses, in Ray Street, Clerkenwell, is also built on classic ground, for it occupies the site of the once famous Hockley-in-the-Hole of bear-baiting memory. A comical alehouse keeper in Oswestry has travestied the sign of the Coach and Horses into the Coach and Dogs.
The Wheel, an object sometimes seen on signboards, may have been derived from the Catherine Wheel, (the name of a favourite old coaching inn in Bishopsgate Street,) or from the wheel of fortune; the Saddle and the Spur are both very general on roadside inns, owing to the ancient mode of travelling on horseback; the Whip occurs in Briggate, Leeds.
In Norwich there was (and we believe is still) a curious combination, the Whip and Egg, which existed in that locality as early as the year 1750,[518] and which is enumerated in London, under the name of the Whip and Eggshell, amongst the taverns in the black letter ballad of “London’s Ordinarie, or Everie Man in his Humour,” whilst a still earlier mention occurs in Mother Bunch’s Merriment, (1604,) when the transformation of pigs into fowls, whereby one of the gulls was so “sweetly deceyved,” is laid at the Whip and Eggshell. It has been explained as a corruption of the Whip and Nag, but the combination of these two would be so obvious that a corruption would scarcely be possible. In “Great Britain’s Wonder, or London’s Admiration,” a ballad on the frost of 1685, when the Thames was frozen over, and a fair held upon it, the following lines occur:—
“In this same street, before the Temple made,[519]
There seems to be a brisk and lively trade,
When ev’ry booth hath such a cunning sign
As seldom hath been seen in former time;
The Flying P—— pot is one of the same,
The Whip and Eggshell, and the Broom by name.”
The Whip and Egg, therefore, figured on the ice, and may have been brought together from the whipping of eggs, in making egg-punch, egg-flip, and similar beverages, much drunk on the ice in Holland; and as there were always crowds of Dutchmen on the ice, whenever the river was frozen over, they may have introduced their favourite drink as well as their Dutch whirlings, whimsies, and flying boats, and the sign have been invented in order to indicate the sale of those liquors.
The Three Jolly Butchers used to be seen in the neighbourhood of markets and shambles, either in allusion to the three merry north-country butchers, who killed nine highwaymen, according to the ballad, or simply that favourite combination of three which is of such frequent recurrence. The Cleaver seems also to be in compliment to this profession, as well as the Marrowbones and Cleaver. This last is a sign in Fetter Lane, originating from a custom, now rapidly dying away, of the butcher boys serenading newly married couples with these professional instruments. Formerly, the band would consist of four cleavers, each of a different tone, or, if complete, of eight, and by beating their marrowbones skilfully against these, they obtained a sort of music somewhat after the fashion of indifferent bell-ringing. When well performed, however, and heard from a proper distance, it was not altogether unpleasant. A largesse of half-a-crown or a crown was generally expected for this delicate attention. The butchers of Clare market had the reputation of being the best performers. The last public appearance of this popular music was at the marriage of the Prince of Wales, when small bands of them perambulated the town, playing “God Save the Queen.” This music was once so common that Tom Killigrew called it the national instrument of England. In 1759 a burlesque Ode on St Cecilia’s day, written by Bonnell Thornton, was performed at Ranelagh. Amongst the instruments employed in this there was a band of marrowbones and cleavers, whose endeavours were admitted by the cognoscenti to have been “a complete success.”
As the use of coaches gave rise to the sign of the Coach and Horses, so the Sedan produced some signs, as the Sedan Chair, Broad Quay, Bristol; North Searle, Newark; the Two Chairmen, &c., Warwick Street, Cockspur Street, and other parts of London; and the Three Chairs in the seventeenth century, a famous tavern in the Little Piazza, Covent Garden. The Sedan, says Randle Holme, “is a thing in which sick and crazy persons are carried abroad, which is borne up by the staves by two lusty men.”[520] The first sedan chair used in England was one that the Duke of Buckingham had received as a gift from Charles I., when Prince of Wales, on his return from that romantic “Jean-de-Paris” expedition to Spain.[521] The use of it got the Duke into trouble, and he was accused of “degrading Englishmen into slaves and beasts of burden.” Lysons, in his “Magna Britannia,” gives another origin for them; speaking of Duncombe at Battlesden, in Bedfordshire, he says:—