“We hear that the dapper wooden Highlanders, who guard so heroically the doors of snuff-shops, intend to petition the Legislature, in order that they may be excused from complying with the act of Parliament with regard to their change of dress: alledging that they have ever been faithful subjects to his Majesty, having constantly supplied his Guards with a pinch out of their Mulls when they marched by them, and so far from engaging in any Rebellion, that they have never entertained a rebellious thought; whence they humbly hope that they shall not be put to the Expense of buying new cloaths.”
The ubiquity of the Scotch packman produced the sign of the Scotchman’s Pack, St Michael’s Hill, Bristol, and in some other places. From the following passage it appears that these Scottish packmen, in the sixteenth century, penetrated even as far as Poland:—“Ane pedder is called are merchõd or cremar quha beirs are pack or creame[603] upon his bak, quha are called beirares of the puddill be the Scottesmen in the realme of Polonia, quhair I saw an greate multitude in the town of Cracovia, anno Dom. 1569.”[604]
Gretna Green used at one time to be a not very uncommon sign on the Border; there is one at Ayeliffe, Darlington. The origin of marriages at this place is not so generally known that it would be superfluous to introduce it here. Marriages in Scotland at all times having been considered legal if two parties accepted each other for man and wife in the presence of witnesses, a dissipated tobacconist, named Joseph Paisley, about a century ago, conceived the idea of opening an establishment on the Border to unite runaway couples in wedlock. For this purpose he selected the common, or green, between Graitney and Springfield, in Dumfries-shire, a place called Megshill, the first Scottish ground on entering the country from Cumberland; there he commenced business. In 1791 he settled in the then newly-built village of Springfield, but the reputation of his impromptu marriage-temple on Graitney Common, (or Gretna Green, as the English called it,) had already so widely spread that the name of the place had passed into a by-word for clandestine marriages. Paisley died in 1814, but marriage-mongering had become a trade in Springfield, and several self-appointed parsons started up to fill the office. Pennant says that in 1771 a young couple might be united “from two guineas a job to a dram of whisky” by a fisherman, a joiner, or a blacksmith; but the prices rose much higher afterwards, varying from £40 to half-a-guinea, and this last sum was only accepted from pedestrian couples. As a rule, the fee was settled by the post-boys from Carlisle, each patronising certain houses, and the hymeneal priests, knowing the value of their patronage, permitted them to go snacks in the proceeds. It is estimated that about 300 couples a year used to get married in this off-hand manner.
Of our colonies, Gibraltar and the Cape of Good Hope seem to be almost the only ones considered worthy the honour of the signboard. Gibraltar became popular as soon as the acquisition had been esteemed at its proper value. As for the Cape of Good Hope, the frequency of this sign all over England seems to render it probable that it was not so much adopted in honour of the colony as to express the landlord’s hope of success, and therefore as a sort of equivalent to the Hope and Anchor, or the Hope.[605] The Jamaica tavern, too, may have been christened in compliment to the birth-place of rum. There is a house with this name in Bermondsey, which is one of the many houses stated in our time to have been a residence of Oliver Cromwell. “The building, of which only a moiety now remains, and that very ruinous, the other having been removed years ago to make room for modern erections, presents probably almost the same features as when tenanted by the Protector. The carved quatrefoils and flowers upon the staircase beams, the old-fashioned fastenings of the doors—‘bolts, locks, and bars’—the huge single gable, (which in a modern house would be double,) even the divided section, like a monstrous amputated stump, imperfectly plastered over, patched here and there with planks, slates, and tiles, to keep the wind and weather out, though it be very poorly—all are in keeping; and the glimmer of the gas, by which the old and ruinous kitchen into which we strayed was dimly lighted, seemed to ‘pale its ineffectual fires’ in striving to illumine the old black settles, and still older wainscot.”[606] After the Restoration, this house seems to have become a tavern, and here, according to the homely, kind-hearted custom of the times, Pepys, on Sunday, April 14, 1667, took his wife and her maids to give them a day’s pleasure. “Over the water to the Jamaica house, where I never was before, and then the girls did run wagers on the bowling green, and there with much pleasure spent little, and so home.” Subsequently, he frequently returned to this place, which seems to have been the same he elsewhere calls The Halfway House. Besides this, there is the Jamaica and Madeira coffee-house, a well-known business club or tavern in St Michael’s Alley, Cornhill.
Only a few European nations and towns are represented. Amongst the Bagford shopbills there is one of a perfumer, named Dighton, who, in the reign of Queen Anne, sold “true Hungary Water, all sorts of snuff and perfumes,” &c. His shop was next door to the King’s Head Tavern at Chancery Lane End, and had the sign of the City of Sevilla; the woodcut above his shop-bill presents a distant family resemblance to that place, and with a little goodwill one may recognise the Alcazar, the Giralda, San Clementi, and San Juan de la Palma; the view is taken from the suburb of Triana, on the other side of the river. This “famous Henry Dighton,” as he styles himself in an advertisement in 1718, “sworn perfumer in ordinary to H. M. King George,” had chosen the sign of the City of Sevilla from the fact of his importing Spanish snuff, the fashionable mixture in those days, which the gallants dislodged with such airy elegance from among the lace frills of their shirts and neckties. His successor, Henry Coulthurst, promised “to furnish greater variety of the choicest and truest snuff than any perfumer in England, viz., Havana, Port St Mary’s, Barcelona, Port Mahon, Seville, plain Spanish, and fine Lisbon.” These Spanish snuffs had come greatly into fashion at the capture of Puerta St Maria, near Cadiz, when the fleet, under Sir George Rooke, captured several thousand barrels of snuff. But long before that time enormous quantities of Spanish tobacco had been yearly imported into England.
“There was wont to come out of Spain,” said Sir Edwin Sandys, in 1620, “a great mass of money to the value of £100,000 per annum for our cloths and other merchandises; and now we have from thence for all our cloth and merchandises nothing but tobacco: nay, that will not pay for all the tobacco we have from thence, but they have more from us in money every year, £20,000; so there goes out of this kingdom as good as £120,000 for tobacco every year.”[607]
The Three Spanish Gypsies, in the New Exchange, was the shop of the future “Monkey Duchess,” the nickname given by her aristocratic friends to Anne Monk, Duchess of Albemarle. “She was the daughter of John Clarges, a farrier in the Savoy, and horse-shoer to Colonel Monk. In 1632 she was married, in the church of St Lawrence Poultney, to Thomas Radford, son of Thomas Radford, late a farrier, servant to Prince Charles, and resident in the Mews. She had a daughter who was born in 1634, and died in 1638. She lived with her husband at the Three Spanish Gypsies, in the New Exchange, and sold wash-balls, powder, gloves, and such things, and taught girls plain work. About 1647, being a sempstress to Colonel Monk, she used to carry him his linen. In 1648 her father and mother died. The year after she fell out with her husband, and they parted. But no certificate from any parish register appears reciting his burial. In 1652 she was married in the church of St George, Southwark, to General Monk, and in the following year was delivered of a son, Christopher, (afterwards the second and last Duke of Albemarle,) who was suckled by Honour Mills, who sold apples, herbs, and oysters.”[608] What became of her first husband, and when he died, is not known.
Venice was the sign of B. Martin, a bookseller in the Old Bailey, circa 1640, adopted probably in honour of the Aldi, the famous printers, who carried on business in this city. In the reign of Charles II. there was a house of indifferent fame in Moorfields, called the Russia House, whether opened during the time that the Russian ambassadors visited the king, or how it obtained its name, is not known. The house became notorious in 1667 through the trial of Gabriel Holmes and a band of incendiaries, among whom were two young boys, sons of James Montague of Lackham, grandsons of the Earl of Manchester. The boys turned king’s evidence, and Holmes was hanged. Russia House was one of the places where they planned their expeditions and spent their money: the object of their incendiarism, it came out at the trial, was simply that they might steal the goods which would be flung into the streets by the terrified inmates of the burning houses.
The Antwerp tavern was a famous house behind the Exchange, in the seventeenth century, of which tokens are extant, representing a view of Antwerp from the river. The extensive trade of Flanders, in the middle ages and long after, made Antwerp a favourite subject for signboards, it being the best harbour in Flanders. In Dieppe there is still a house on the Quai Henri IV., bearing a stone bas-relief sign of Antwerp, (la ville d’Anvers,) with the date 1697; but this house and sign are named, as early as 1645, in a MS. list of rents of houses in Dieppe, due to the Archbishop of Rouen.
Dutchmen, in some instances, have been appointed the tutelar saints of public-houses, on account of their reputed love for drink; thus we have the Two Dutchmen at Marsden, near Huddersfield, and the Jovial Dutchman at Crick, in Derbyshire. Now, though the Dutchman’s joviality is questionable, yet he certainly has at all times been reputed a heavy drinker. Shakespeare names, “your swag-bellied Hollander,” along with the Dane and German, as the only (though unsuccessful) rival of the English in the art of hard drinking. Massinger, in his “Duke of Florence,” has a similar remark; and Sir Richard Baker, in his “Chronicles,” says that the English “in these Dutch wars learned to be drunkards, and as we do not like to do things by halves in this country, we soon surpassed our masters.” Decker remarks that “Drunkenness, which was once the Dutchman’s headake, is now become the Englishman’s.”[609] Upsy Dutch and upsy freeze (for “op zyn Dutch,” and “op zyn Vriesch,” à la Dutch and à la Vriesch) are terms constantly used by Decker to denote a very drunken condition. Yet there was a time, long before the “Dutch wars,” when the English did not want any foreign masters to teach them drinking; how could it have been otherwise with descendants of the beer-drinking Saxons and Danes? Malmesbury complains that in his time “the English fashion was to sit bibbing whole hours after dinner, as the Normane guise was to walke and get up and downe in the stretes with great waines of idle serving men following them;”[610] and Hollinshed, who wrote at the very time of the Dutch wars, mentions among the improvements which old men in his time observed, was that the farmers could pay their rent without selling a cow or a horse, as they had been wont to do in former times, “owing to too much attention to the ale-house, and too little to work.”