“Her Grace would have you eat no more Woolsack pies nor Dagger furmety.”—Alchymist, act v., sc. 2.
In the year 1682, the Woolsack Tavern in Newgate Market attracted great attention, owing to a wonderful phenomenon there exhibited, and set forth in the following handbill from the Sloane Collection, No. 958:—
“At the sign of the Woolpack in Newgate Street, is to be seen a strange and wonderful thing, which is, an elm-board, being touch’d with a hot iron, doth express itself, as if it was a man dying, with grones and trembling, to the great admiration of all the hearers. It has been presented before the King and his nobles, and hath given them great satisfaction. Vivat Rex.”
Such a curiosity could not fail to prove an object of immense attraction with our wonder-loving ancestors, particularly after the house had been visited by his Majesty, and thus acquired additional respectability. Very soon, however, numerous London taverns claimed public attention for similar wonders. It was as if the wood used in their construction had been cut from the myrtle-tree which conversed with Æneas near the river Hebrus, (“Æneid,” lib. iii. 19,) or from the “fiera selvaggia” Dante saw in the second circle of Hades, where he
“sentia da ogni parte tragger guai
E non vedea persona che’l facesse.”[527]
Inferno, canto xiii.
The mantel-piece at the Bowman Tavern, Drury Lane, expressed its aversion of a red hot poker as unequivocally as the elm-board at the Woolsack, and the dresser at the Queen’s Arms in St Martin’s Lane was evidently a “chip of the same block.” Indeed, boards were cauterised and groaned all over London.
The Block was a hatter’s sign, or as that trade was sometimes called, Bever-cutter, the block being the mould on which the hat is formed. Beatrix, in “Much Ado about Nothing,” says: “He wears his faith, but as the fashion of his hat it ever changes with the next block.” And Decker, in the “Gull’s Hornbook:” “John, in Paul’s Churchyard, shall fit his head for an excellent block.” The word was also often used as a synonym for “hat.”
The Postboy was the sign of a fishmonger’s shop in Sherborne Lane, where in 1759 Green-native Colchester oysters were sold at 3s. 3d. a barrel, and exceeding fine “Pyfleet oysters” at 4s. 3d. a barrel. The Up and Down Post used to be, in the good old coaching times, a thriving inn on the now deserted highway between Birmingham and Coventry. The picture represented an erect and a prostrate pillar, which after all was only a rebus or a misunderstanding. In former times, before the mail-coaches were instituted, the equestrian letter-carriers of the up and down mail used to meet at this house, exchange their bags and each return whence they came, thus effecting a considerable saving of time and trouble. Even washerwomen have been exalted to the signboard, for in Norwich there was the sign of the Three Washerwomen in 1750. And one of the implements of their trade, the Golden Maid, (better known as “the Dolly,”) may still be seen at a turner’s shop in Dudley.
A few others remain, which cannot, strictly speaking, be called professions, yet are they—or at least they were—means of making a living, as the [Three Morris-dancers], once a very common sign, but now, like the custom that gave rise to it, almost extinct. There is one still left, however, at Scarisbrook, Lancashire, and in a few villages a remnant of the dance is also kept up on certain occasions. They were called Morris, or Moors, from the Spanish Morisco. Black faces were required for the dance:—