The Hat and Tun is a pun on the name of Hatton, and is still preserved on a public-house sign in Hatton Wall. A man named Nobis, at the beginning of the present century opened an inn on the road to Pappenburgh, which he called Nobis Inn, and made free with grammar in order to find a punning motto, viz.: “Si Deus pro nobis quis contra Nobis.” Bells have been used by innumerable persons of the name of Bell. The Salmon was the sign of Mrs Salmon, the Madame Tussaud of the eighteenth century; her gallery was first in St Martin’s-le-Grand, near Aldersgate, whence she removed to Fleet Street, opposite what is now Anderton’s Hotel, then called the Horns Tavern. The Brace Tavern, in Queen’s Bench prison, was so called on account of its being kept by two brothers of the name of Partridge. The Golden Heart was the sign of Thomas Hart, a tailor in Monmouth Street, St Giles. (Harl. MSS., Bagford Bills, 5931.) Bat Pidgeon, the hairdresser immortalised in the Spectator, lived at the [Three Pigeons], “the corner house of St Clement’s churchyard, next to the Strand,” says Pennant, where he “cut my boyish locks in the year 1740.”
The Black Swan in Bartholomew Lane, nicknamed Cobweb Hall, was kept by Owen Swan, parish clerk (hence the Black Swan?) of St Michael’s, Cornhill. It was a tavern of great resort for the musical wits in the seventeenth century. Failing in this business, Owen set up as a tobacconist in St Michael’s Alley; on the papers in which he wrapped tobacco for his customers, were the following rhymes:—
“The dying Swan in sad and mourning strains
Of his near end and hapless fate complains,
[474] In pity then your kind assistance give,
Smoke of Swan’s best that the poor bird may live.”
To which a friend of his wrote the following reply:—
“The aged Swan opprest with time and cares,
With Indian sweets his funeral prepares.
Light up the pile! thus he’ll ascend the skies
And Phœnix-like from his own ashes rise.”
There is a well-known anecdote of a man named Farr, who opened a tobacco shop on Fish Street Hill, and soon obtained a good custom from the pun over his door, “The best tobacco by Farr,” rather than from the quality of his tobacco. Opposite him there was another tobacconist who lost his customers through his pun, but he regained them in the same way as he lost them, for he fought Farr with his own weapons, and wrote up “Far better tobacco than the best tobacco by Farr.” This joke was thought so good that all his customers returned. Tobacco-papers of the original “finest tobacco by Farr” are preserved among the Banks hand-bills in the British Museum, as a proof of the truth of this history.
A Ling, or codfish, strange to say, entwined with honeysuckles, was the sign of Nicholas Ling, at the north-west door of St Paul’s, where, in 1595, he published “Pierce Pennylesse his Supplicacion to the Divell.” An Oak was the sign of Nicholas Okes, a bookseller dwelling at Gray’s Inn, publisher of some of Taylor the Water Poet’s works. His colophon represents Jupiter seated on an eagle between two oak trees. A French publisher, Nicholas Cheneau, in the Rue St Jacques, Paris, in 1580, had also an oak for his sign, (chêne, an oak.)
John Day, another publisher of the time of Queen Elizabeth, had a sort of pun, or charade, on his name in the sign of the Resurrection, his device representing a man waking a sleeper, with the words, “Arise, for it is day.” The Castle and Falcon was another of his signs. Richard Grafton, the first printer of the Common Prayer, who also printed the proclamation of Lady Jane Grey as Queen of England, for which he fell under the displeasure of Queen Mary, had a tun with a grafted fruit-tree growing through it. Stow made a pun upon this sign, saying that one of Grafton’s works was “a noise of empty tonnes and unfruitful grafftes,” to which Grafton retaliated by calling Stow’s Chronicle “a collection of lyes foolishly stowed together.” Hugh Singleton had a Golden Tun; Harrison, 1560, a hare sheltering under a corn-sheaf tied with a ribbon, and with the letters ri and a sun shining above; but the most absurd rebus of all was that of one Newberry, who, according to Camden, had a Yew Tree with several berries upon it, and in the midst a great golden N upon one of the branches, which by the help of a little false spelling made N-yew-berry.
A few punning signs still remain. At Oswaldstwistle, near Accrington, a man named Bellthorn has the Bell in the Thorn; at Warbleton, in Sussex, an old public-house has the sign of a war-bill in a tun, which sign of the Axe and Tun is further intended as an intimation to “axe for beer”! Another innkeeper named Abraham Lowe, who lives half way up Richmond Hill, near Douglas in the Isle of Man, has the following innocent attempt at punning on his name:—
“I’m Abraham Lowe, and half way up the Hill,
If I were higher up, what’s funnier still,
I should be lowe. Come in and take your fill,
Of porter, ale, wine, spirits, what you will,
Step in, my friend, I pray, no farther go;
My prices, like myself, are always low.”