The Hand was the sign of a victualler near the Marshalsea in Southwark, in 1680. Hands occur in many combinations, owing to the custom of draughtsmen and sign-painters representing a hand issuing from the clouds to perform some action or hold some object; thus a hand holding a coffee-pot was a very general coffee-house sign. The “Hand” seems to have been a bad or evil sign:—
“I’ll go back to the country of the coffee-houses, [Fleet Street,] where being arrived I’m in a wood, there are so many of them I know not which to enter; stay, let me see, where the sign is painted with a woman’s hand in it, ’tis a bawdy house, where a man’s it has another qualification; but where it has a star in the sign ’tis calculated for every lewd purpose.”[693]
Though this is a sweeping denunciation, yet we find the [Hand and Star] occurring as the sign of a very respectable bookseller, Richard Tothill in Fleet Street, within Temple Bar, who in 1553 printed the “Dialogue of Comfort,” by Sir Thomas More. Not unlikely Tothill had adopted this sign from the watermarks in paper, for one of the most ancient of them is a hand, either in the position of giving benediction, or in that position called the upright hand, with a star above it. Messrs Butterworth, the law-publishers, who now occupy Tothill’s premises, possess all the leases and documents from the time of that old printer down to the present day.
Quacks, also, were very fond of a hand in their sign, pointing to an eye or an ear, to intimate that the great doctor cured the blind or the deaf. Thus, in the Harleian collection (5931) there is a handbill of S. Ketelby, sworn physician, who lived at the Hand and Ear, in Exeter Street near the Strand, and who professed to cure deafness, lameness, &c.
“He is capable now, not only of curing those incurable by others, but even those he could not cure himself six months ago! Note: He resolves all persons deaf from external causes, whether curable or not, in two minutes, in the dark as well as at noonday, which no other pretender can do,” &c.
The Hand and Face was the sign of another quack, who lived in Water Lane, Blackfriars, near Apothecaries’ Hall, in 1735.[694]
A few combinations of the hand refer to games, as the Hand and Ball, Barking, (trades token,) 1650, which seems to be derived from some of the innumerable games at ball in which our ancestors delighted, such as handball, tennis, balloon or windball, stoolball, hurling, football, stowball, pallmall, clubball, trapball, northen-spell, cricket, bowling, &c. The Hand and Tennis, Whitcombe Street, Haymarket, is so called from the adjoining Tennis Court, erected in 1678. The Old Hand and Tankard is a public-house sign at Wheatly, near Halifax. The Hand and Tench seems to point to a connexion with the followers of Isaac Walton; it was a mug-house in Seven Dials in 1717. The mugs in those days used to be suspended above the door, or on the sign-iron, not only in this, but in all the mug-houses, for the mug might be considered as much a badge of King George’s friends, as the white cockade was the badge of the Jacobites.
The Hand and Heart was, in 1711, the very appropriate sign of a marriage insurance office in East Harding Street, Shoe Lane.[695] Two right hands holding a heart was a very old symbol of concord. Aubrey gives quotations from Tacitus, by which he derives it from the Romans, and adds:—
“I have seen some rings made for sweethearts with a heart enamelled held between two hands. See an Epigrame of G. Buchanan, on two rings that were made by Q. Elisabeth’s appointment, which, being laid one upon the other, shewed the like figure. The heart was two diamonds, wch joyned, made the Heart. Q. Elisabeth kept one moietie, and sent ye other as a token of her constant friendship to Mary Q. of Scotts; but she cutt off her head for all that.”[696]
The Heart in Hand is still a common ale-house sign. A similar meaning is conveyed by the equally common Hand in Hand or Cross Hands; at Turnditch, Derby, this sign is called the Cross o’ the Hands, and a corruption of this again is the Cross in Hand, at Waldron, Sussex. The Hand in Hand was also one of the usual signs of the marriage-mongers in Fleet Street. Pennant says:—