CHAPTER XIV.
HUMOROUS AND COMIC.
Animals performing human actions, or dressed in human garments, are great items in signboard humour. This is a kind of comicality undoubtedly dating from the first development of human wit. The “Batromyomachia” is one of the oldest performances of the same description in literature, but the joke was already too well understood at the period that piece was produced to have been a first attempt. The Fable was the higher walk of art in this branch, the simple Caricature the lower.
Numerous Egyptian, Greek, and Roman caricatures of animals personating men have come down to us; from them this conceit was borrowed by the mediæval limners. Their MSS. teem with such subjects; and so much was this kind of humour relished at that period, that even in church decoration the caricatures of animals were liberally mixed up with the sacred subjects of biblical history. Not only the fable, conferring a moral lesson, but even the plain and unpretending animal-caricature was admitted indiscriminately with representations of saints and miracles. Thus the well-known sign of Pig and Whistle is seen in more than one church. In the stall carving of Winchester Cathedral a sow is represented sitting on her haunches, playing on a whistle, the companion carving to which is a pig playing on a violin, in accompaniment to which another pig appears to be singing. These musical pigs are also common in illustrated MSS. In Harl. MS., 4379, a sow is represented dressed in the full fashion of the fifteenth century, with horned head-dress and stilted heels, playing on a harp.
In old towns, such as Chester, Macclesfield, Coventry, &c., the Pig and Whistle is still found on signboards. Very different and learned explanations have been given for its origin, some saying it was a corruption of the pig and wassail bowl, or of the pix and housel; others that it is a facetious rendering of the Bear and Ragged Staff. Very lately the correspondents of a learned periodical have busied themselves in claiming for it a Danish-Saxon descent, as pige-washail, our Ladies’ Salutation. The Scotch also claim it as their own; pig being a pot or pot-sherd; whistle, small change; and “to go to pigs and whistles,” a free translation of “going to pot,” which Mr Jamieson states (quoting two examples) to have been at one time a colloquial phrase. Non nostrum est tantas componere lites; but the proverb says, “a hog though in armour is still but a hog;” and therefore we are inclined to think that a pig with a whistle is still but a pig, and not relating in any way to the Virgin; and we can see nothing in the Pig and Whistle but simply a freak of the mediæval artist.
As little hidden meaning is there in the Cat and Fiddle, still a great favourite in Hampshire, the only connexion between the animal and the instrument being that the strings are made from the cat’s entrails, and that a small fiddle is called a kit, and a small cat a kitten. Besides, they have been united from time immemorial in the nursery rhyme—
“Heigh diddle diddle,
The cat and the fiddle.”
Amongst other explanations offered is, the one that it may have originated with the sign of a certain Caton fidèle, a staunch Protestant in the reign of Queen Mary, and only have been changed into the cat and fiddle by corruption; but, if so, it must have lost its original appellation very soon, for as early as 1589 we find “Henry Carr, signe of the Catte and Fidle in the Old Chaunge.” Formerly, there was a Cat and Fiddle at Norwich, the cat being represented playing upon a fiddle, and a number of mice dancing round her. The bagpipes being the national instrument of the Irish, the sign is there frequently changed into the Cat and Bagpipes. This was also, some twenty or thirty years ago, a public- and chop-house, of considerable notoriety, at the corner of Downing Street, Westminster, where the clerks of the Foreign Office used to lunch; at the present day, it is the sign of a public-house near Moate, King’s Co., Ireland. The Ape and Bagpipes occurs on trades tokens as the sign of John Tayler, in St Ann’s Lane. This, too, was a joke not confined to our country, for in the marginal illustrations to the title-page of “P. Dioscoridæ Pharmacorum Simplicum,” &c., printed at Strasburg by John Schot in 1529, an ape is represented playing on the bagpipes, and a camel dancing to the tune, with these words, χαμηλον αλλαπτεν. The French were equally fond of this kind of caricature. The [Spinning Sow] (la Truie qui file) is common even at the present day, and has given its name to more than one street in Paris and other cities. It is said to have originated from a legend:—A certain Christian queen, Pedauca, whose honour was in danger, imitated the chaste heroines of mythology; but, instead of praying to be metamorphosed into a tree or a bird, she merely asked to have one of her feet changed into a goose’s foot, which was enough to frighten her ardent lover away.[627] Another young lady, under similar circumstances, preferred going the whole hog,—to use a colloquialism,—and was changed into a sow, merely praying to be permitted to keep her spindle, as a token of her former condition: hence the sign. It is also—(and hence, probably, the legend of the metamorphosis, to remove the prejudices of the godly)—represented in relief carving on the exterior of the cathedral of Chartres. In the Fishmarket of the same town there is a stone carved sign of a Donkey playing on a Hurdy-gurdy, ([L’Ane qui veille].) Both this sign and another, representing a Cat playing at Racket, (La Chatte qui pelote,) have transmitted their names to streets in Paris. The French seem to have delighted above all things in such comicalities. Besides those named above, they had the Fishing Cat, (La Chatte qui pêche,) the Dancing Goat, (La Chèvre qui dance,) both of which Walpole mentions. We have one modern sign in London of this class—namely, the [Whistling Oyster], the name of an oyster-shop in Drury Lane.
The Jackanapes on Horseback was, unfortunately for the monkeys, a painful truth. A jackanapes or monkey on horseback was generally the winding-up of a bear or bull baiting at Paris Garden. Hollinshed, in his Chronicles, anno 1562, relates how, at the reception of the Danish ambassadors at Greenwich—
“For the diversion of the populace, there was a horse with an ape on his back which highly pleased them, so that they expressed their inward conceived joy and delight with shrill shouts and variety of gestures.”
The “inward conceived joy,” we may safely conclude, was not expressed by either the monkey or the horse, particularly when we remember that in those days dogs were often let in the ring to frighten both the horse and its animal Mazeppa. The prevalence of this sport is to be inferred from an admonition to Parliament by Tho. Cartwright, published in 1572, in order to show the impropriety of an established form of prayer for the church services, in which he remarks that the clergyman