The Crescent and Anchor is a sign at Norton-in-Hales, near Market Drayton; the Half-Moon and Seven Stars at Aston Clinton, near Tring; and the Sun, Moon, and Seven Stars at Blisworth, in Northampton. These Seven Stars have always been great favourites; they seem to be the same pleiad which is used as a Masonic emblem—a circle of six stars, with one in the centre; but to tell to ears profane, what this emblem means, would be disclosing the sacred arcana. The Seven Stars was the sign of Richard Moone, before he was so ambitious as to place the whole firmament on his sign: in 1653 he printed—
“The first addresses to his Excellence the Lord General, &c., by John Spittlehouse, a late Member of the Army, and a servant to the Saints of the Most High God, &c. London, printed by J. C., for himself and Richard Moon, at the Seven Stars, in Paul’s Churchyard, near the great North Door. 1653.”
As a change upon the Seven Stars, a publican at Counterslip, Bristol, has put up the Fourteen Stars.
We have seen ([p. 492]) that the sign of the Star was “calculated for every lewd purpose;” a great change certainly from mediæval times, when a star was the emblem of the Holy Virgin, who was thus styled Maris Stella (star of the sea)—the signification of the name Miriam in Hebrew—or Stella Jacobi, (star of Jacob,) Stella Matutina, (morning star,) Stella non erratica, (fixed star, unerring star,) &c.; a star being always painted either on her right shoulder, or on her veil, as may be readily observed in the works of the early Italian masters in our National Gallery. A star of sixteen rays is the crest of the Innholders’ Company. Oliver Cromwell used to meet some of his party at the Star in Coleman Street, as was deposed by one of the witnesses in the trial of Hugh Peters:—
“Gunter. My Lord, I was servant at the Star in Coleman Street, with one Hildesley. That house was a house where Oliver Cromwell and several of that party did use to meet in consultation.”
John Bunyan died in 1682 at the Star, on Snowhill, in the house of his friend, Mr Strudwick, a grocer.
The Pole Star is now a not uncommon sign. To make this device more intelligible, tavern-keepers ought to attach to it the motto it bore in the middle ages, when it was a symbol of the Church: “qui me non aspicit errat.” (He who does not look at me goes astray.) The Star and Crown was the sign of a haberdasher in Princes Street, Coventry Street, 1785, who, among other things, sold “dress and undress hoops.”
The signs of the zodiac appear occasionally to have been adopted by conjurors and astrologers. Ned Ward describes them as figuring, in his time, on the door of “a star-peeper,” in Prescot Street.[705]
The Two Twins, or Naked Boys, was the sign of a quack in Moorfields, “near the steps going out of the Lower Field into the Middle Field. There is a door above the steps, and another below the steps, with the Twins, and the name Langham on both doors;—keep the bill to prevent mistaking the house or being sent to a wrong place.”[706] To such lengthy explanations our ancestors were compelled to resort in the absence of numbers on their houses. Either this quack had adopted the Two Twins on account of his obstetrical pretensions, or he was an astrologer as well as a quack, for Moorfields was the head-quarters of