“AT MR CROOME’S, at the sign of the Shoe and Slap, near the Hospital
Gate, in West Smithfield, is to be seen
The Wonder of Nature,

A Girl above Sixteen Years of Age, born in Cheshire, and not above Eighteen inches long, having shed her Teeth seven several Times, and not a perfect Bone in any Part of her, only the Head, yet she hath all her senses to Admiration, and Discourses, Reads very well, Sings, Whistles, and all very pleasant to hear.

“Sept. 4, 1667.

‘God save the King.’”

A slap was a kind of “ladies shoe, with a loose sole,”[591] the origin, probably, of the present word slipper. Another kind of shoe is also mentioned in an advertisement—the Laced Shoe in Chancery Lane.[592] “Laced shoes,” says Randle Holme, “have the over leathers and edges of the shoe laced in orderly courses with narrow galloon lace of any colour;” this places the use of laced boots much earlier than we would have been apt to imagine. The Clog is often used as a shoemaker’s sign in Lancashire and the midland counties, and also in those parts of London where that article is worn. The Five Clogs was, in 1718, the sign of William Wright, a quack, who lived over against Prescott Street, Goodman’s Fields.[593] Perhaps he occupied apartments at a clog-maker’s. Even the primitive Wooden Shoe (sabot) of France has figured as a tavern sign in that country. In a farce of the fourteenth century, entitled, “Pernet qui va au Vin,” the husband names the following taverns:—

“Au Sabot ou à la Lanterne
J’ai mis en oubli la taverne.”

Ronsard addressed some of his verses to the hostess of this tavern, which was situated in the Faubourg St Marcel:—

“Je ne suis point, ma guerrière Cassandre,
Ni Mirmidon, ni Dolope soudard.”

“Il n’y a personne,” says Furretière in his Roman Bourgeois, “qui ne se figure qu’on parle d’une Pentasilée ou d’une Talestris; cepandant cette guerrière Cassandre n’était reellement qu’une grande hallebreda qui tenit le cabaret du Sabot dans le faubourg Saint Marcel.”[594]

This sign has given its name to a street in Paris.

The [Patten], the quaint little contrivance in which our great-grandmothers tripped through the winter’s sludge, was the sign of a toy-shop in the Haymarket, “over against Great Suffolk Street, and by Pall Mall;”[595] at the present day it is still extant as a fishmonger’s shop in Whitecross Street, near the prison.

The very common sign of the Star and Garter refers to the insignia of the Order of the Garter. Anciently it was simply called the Garter, and thus it is designated by Shakespeare in his “Merry Wives of Windsor.” Charles I. added the star to the insignia, and his example was followed on the signboard. At that time the Garter was treated with a great deal more respect than at present, for Sandford, Lancaster Herald in 1686, complained that several coffee-houses had the sign of the Garter with coffee-pots, &c., painted inside, which he considered downright desecration; hence, order was given to those offenders, “to amend the same, or else they should be pulled down.”

The Garter Inn at Windsor, where Falstaff lived in such grand style, “as an emperor in his expense,” was not a creation of Shakespeare’s fancy, but did really exist, and most probably on the same site at present occupied by the Star and Garter.[596] The first Star and Garter at Richmond was built in 17389, on what was then a portion of the waste of Petersham Common; it was rented at 40s. a year. A drawing by Hearne, of the comparatively insignificant tenement then raised, is still preserved at the hotel.