These are the opening lines of a ballad of 1672, entitled “The Glory of the Sun Tavern, behind the Exchange.”[702] From this ballad it is evident that the tavern was splendidly furnished, and offered comforts not generally to be met with at that time.
“There every chamber has an aquaeduct,
As if the sun had fire for water truckt,
Water as’t were exhal’d up to heavens sprouds,
To cool your cups and glasses in the clouds.”
Pepys was a frequent visitor at this house, and, in fact, all the pleasure-seekers of that mad reign patronised it; the profligate Duke of Buckingham, in particular, was a constant customer. Simon Wadloe, the landlord, had made his fortune at the Devil in St Dunstan’s, whereupon he went to live in the country, and spent his money in a couple of years. He then “choused” Nick Colbourn out of the Sun, and Nick, who had amassed a handsome competence in the house, was easily persuaded to retire, and left it “to live like a prince in the country,” says Pepys. During the reign of Charles II., the house appears to have had an excellent custom, and was from morning till night full of the best company. The Sun Tavern, in Clare Street, was one of the haunts of the witty Joe Miller, and is often given as the locality of his jokes:—
“Joe Miller, sitting one day in the window of the Sun Tavern, Clare Street, a fish woman and her maid passing by, the woman cried: ‘Buy my soals, buy my maids!’ ‘Ah! you wicked old creature,’ cry’d honest Joe, ‘what, are you not content to sell your own soul, but you must sell your maid’s too?’”
A stereotype joke of the publican connected with the Sun is the motto, “the best liquor [generally beer] under the Sun,” which, of course, must be believed, for Solem quis dicere falsum audeat? Sometimes the sign is called the Sun in Splendour, as at Nottinghill, the “splendour” having reference simply to the golden beams or rays usually drawn by the painter. There is still a carved stone sign of the Sun, now gilt, dating from the seventeenth century, walled in the front of a house in the Poultry.
The Golden Sun was the sign of Ulrich Gering, in the Rue St Jacques, Paris, printer of the first Bible in France, in 1475. At the end of the volume the Bible thus addresses the reader:—
“Jam tribus undecimus lustris Francos Ludovicus
Rexerat; Ulricus, Martinus, itemque Michael
Orti Teutonia, hanc mihi composuere figuram
Parisii arte sua; me correctam vigilanter
Venalem in vico Jacobi Sol Aureus offert.”[703]
Their successor, Berthold Rumbold, on removing the business to another house in the same street, opposite the Rue Fromentel, kept the same sign, and there it continued as late as 1689, having constantly been in the hands of booksellers. Not improbably the first printers, both in England and abroad, adopted the sign of the Sun, as an emblem of the new era opened to the world by the invention of printing, which, when they reflected on their discovery, they saw would, at no distant period, spread an intellectual light over the world, as brilliant and as vivifying as that of the radiant sun.[704]
The sign of the Sun occurs in endless combinations, often capricious, without any other reason than a whim, and an alliteration, as the Sun and Sawyers; the Sun and Sword; the Sun and Sportsman; or quartered with other signs, as the Sun and Anchor; Dial; Falcon; Last; Horseshoe, &c. All these, and innumerable others of the same sort, occur among the London public-house signs of the present day. The Sun and Hare is a stone carved sign, walled up in the façade of a house in the High Street, Southwark. Were it not for the initials H. N. A., it might be taken for a rebus on the name Harrison; as it is, it may be a jocular corruption of the Sun and Hart, the badge of Richard II. (See [p. 109].)
The Rising Sun is nearly as common as the sun in his meridian; perhaps on account of the favourable omen it presents for a man commencing business. In 1726 it was the sign of a noted tavern in Islington, where some merry doings went on occasionally:—