All bowlers know that the corner pins are the most difficult to strike, and that from their fall with the rest depends whether the throw counts double or not.
Formerly the merriest day of the year in “Merry England” was certainly the first of May, but of its many festivities scarcely a trace is left except the dance of the sweeps and the sign of the Maypole. Stubbe, with puritanical horror, thus describes the Maypole:—
“They have twenty or fourtie yoke of oxen, every one having a sweet nosegay of flowers tyed on the tippe of his hornes, and these oxen draw home this Maie pole (this stinckyng Idoll rather) which is couered all ouer with flowers and hearbes bounde rounde aboute with stringes, from the toppe to the bottome, and sometyme painted with variable colours with two or three hundred men, women, and children following it with great devotion. And thus being reared up with handkerchiefs and flagges streaming on the toppe they strawe the ground aboute, binde green boughes aboute it, sett up sommer houses, Bowers, and Arbours hard by it. And then fall they to banquet and feast, to leape and daunce aboute it, as the Heathen people did at the dedication of their Idolles, whereof this is a perfect pattern, or rather the thing itself.”[716]
The same author also reports that it was customary for lads and lasses to go the night before May-day to the hills and woodlands to gather branches and flowers to deck the houses with on that day, and that they used to “spende all the night in pastymes” to the great detriment of female virtue; Featherstone, another sulky puritan, scandalised the fair sex by the assertion that “of tenne maydens which went to fetch May, nine of them came home with childe.”[717] The consequence of all this grumbling was that the Maypole was abolished in the godly times of the Commonwealth, and as a matter of course, revived at the Restoration—but its prestige was gone. At present it is only commemorated by hundreds of signboards. There is one on the outskirts of Hainault Forest, immortalised in “Barnaby Rudge,” which has all the regulations of the house laid down in rhyme; part of these have been quoted on [p. 449]. There is on the stable door:—
“Whosoever smokes tobacco here
Shall forfeit sixpence to spend in beer.
Your pipes lay by, when you come here,
Or fire to me may prove severe.”
An old, and not uncommon sign, is the Wheel of Fortune, which may be seen at Alpington, Norwich, and in other places. This wheel is sometimes represented with four kings, one on each quadrant. In the middle ages it was a very common symbol, as well in England as on the continent, being frequently painted in churches; there is one still to be seen among the half obliterated frescoes of Catfield church in Norfolk. Other instances occur in the church of St Etienne, at Beauvais; in St Martin, at Basle; in San Zeno, at Verona; and in the beautiful pavement of the Duomo, at Sienna. Not only in those countries, but all over Europe, this device occurs as a sign. Peacham thus accounts for the wheel being chosen as the emblem of Fortune:—
“For like ourselves, the spoke that was on high
Is to the bottom in a moment cast,
As fast the lowest riseth by and by,
All human things thus find a change at last.”
Peacham’s Minerva Brittana, p. 76.
The Monster, at one period an inn of some resort in Willow Walk, Chelsea, now a starting-point for the Pimlico omnibuses, is perhaps a corruption of the Monastery. Robert de Heyle in 1368 leased the whole of the manor of Chelsea to the abbot and convent of Westminster for the term of his own life, for which they were to allow him a certain house within the convent for his residence, to pay him the sum of £20 per annum, to provide him every day two white loaves, two flagons of convent ale, and once a year a robe of esquire’s silk. At this period, or shortly after, the sign of the Monastery may have been set up, to be handed down from generation to generation, until the meaning and proper pronunciation were forgotten, and it became “the Monster.” In still older times, viz., during the Norman rule, Chelsea appears to have been one of the manors of Westminster, so that the connexion between the village of Chelsea and the monastery of Westminster had been of very old standing. This tavern, we believe, is the only one with such a sign. Ned Ward mentions a Green Monster tavern in Prescott Street, but that may have been one of Ned’s jokes on the very common Green Dragon. The tavern in question was a very unlucky house, and not less than three or four landlords had failed in it, which was not to be wondered at, for the street appears at that time to have been one of the soberest in London. According to Ned, one “would walk by forty or fifty houses and not an alehouse.”[718]
The Million Gardens, Strutton Ground, Westminster, was the singular name of the house where tickets might be obtained for a lottery of plate in 1718.[719] The name in reality refers to the “Melon Gardens,” which fruit was pronounced after the signboard orthography in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.