CHAPTER XI.
THE HOUSE AND THE TABLE.
Instead of carved or painted signs hung above the doors, many shop and tavern keepers preferred to designate their houses after some external feature, such as the colour of the building—thus we find the Red house, the White house, the Blue house, the Dark house, &c. Others painted their door-posts a particular colour, whence the origin of the well-known Blue Posts. In still older times painted posts or poles in front of the houses seem occasionally to have served as signs; to some such distinction, at least Caxton’s Red Poles, as mentioned in one of his advertisements, seems to refer:—
“If it please ony man spirituel or temporel to bye our pyes of two or thre comemoracio’s of salisburi use, emprynted after the form of this prese’t letre whiche ben wel and truly correct, late hym come Westmonester into the almonestrye at the Reed Pale, and he shal have them good and chepe:
Supplico stet cedula.”
Even in the seventeenth century such a distinction was still occasionally used, as the Green Pales in Peter Street, Westminster;[543]—and Stukeley[544] speaks of Mr Brown’s garden at the Green Poles, where an urn was dug up lined with lead and filled with earth and bones. In Etheredge’s play “She Would if she Could,” the Black Posts in James Street are named, (Act i., sc. 1, 1703;) whilst the newspapers in the beginning of the eighteenth century contain advertisements stating that the mineral water from Hampstead Wells might be obtained, at the rate of 3d. a flask, from the lessee of the wells, who lived at the Black Posts in King Street, near Guildhall.
Garden-houses, or Summer-houses, attached to a building, were also used to designate shops and residences, as appears from a trades token “at the garden-house in Blackfriars,” and also from a newspaper advertisement of 1679, where the garden-house in King Street, St Giles, is mentioned. Frequent allusions to these garden-houses are found in the old plays; they appear to have been similar in all intents and purposes to the petites maisons of the profligate French nobility in the times of the Régence. Stubbe, in his “Anatomy of Abuses,” severely attacks them:—
“In the suburbes of the citie they have gardens either paled or walled round about very high, with their harbers and bowers fit for the purpose; and lest they might be espied in those open places, they have their banqueting houses, with galleries, turrets, and what not, therein sumptuously erected, wherein they may, and doubtless do, many of them, play the filthy persons.”
The young Rake in Shakespeare’s spurious play of the “London Prodigal,” (1604,) says to the lady:—
“Now, God thank you, sweet lady, if you have any friend, or a garden-house where you may employ a poor gentleman as your friend, I am yours to command in all sweet service.”