At Nortwich and Altringham, Chester, there is a sign called the Bleeding Wolf, which has not been found anywhere else. Its origin is difficult to explain, and the only explanation that can be immediately offered for it is the crest of Hugh Lupus and Richard, first and second Earls of Chester, which was a wolf’s head erased; the neck of the animal being erased may, by primitive sign-painters, have been represented less conventionally than is done now, and probably exhibited some of the torn parts, whence the name of the Bleeding Wolf. As for the use of the term “wolf,” instead of “wolf’s head,” we have a parallel instance in one of the gates of Chester, which, from this crest, was called Wolfsgate instead of Wolfshead Gate. There is another equally puzzling sign, peculiar to this county and to Lancashire—namely, the Bear’s Paw. Of this sign, it must be confessed that no explanation can be offered; it certainly looks heraldic, and lions jambs erased are the crest of many families.
Easy enough to explain is the sign of Parta Tueri, (Cellarhead, Staffordshire,) which is the motto of the Lilford family: this is the only instance as yet met with of a family motto standing for a sign; though in Essex a public-house sign, representing a sort of Bacchic coat of arms, with the motto, In Vino Veritas, may be seen. The Oakley Arms, at Maidenhead, near Bray, deserves passing mention, on account of some amusing verses connected with the place. As it is frequently the custom with publicans to choose for their sign the name or picture of some real or imaginary hero connected with the locality in which their house stands, the following verses were written on the Oakley Arms, near Bray:—
“Friend Isaac, ’tis strange you that live so near Bray
Should not set up the sign of the Vicar.[191]
Though it may be an odd one, you cannot but say
It must needs be a sign of good liquor.”
Answer:
“Indeed, master Poet, your reason’s but poor,
For the Vicar would think it a sin
To stay, like a booby, and lounge at the door,—
’Twere a sign ’twas bad liquor within.”
The Wentworth Arms, Kirby Mallory, Leicestershire, may also be mentioned on account of its peculiar inscription, which has a strange moral air about it, as if a pious Boniface drew beer and uncorked wine, and wished to compromise matters on high moral grounds, and limit with puritanical rigidity the government regulation above his door, “to be Drunk on the Premises”:—
“May he who has little to spend, spend nothing in drink;
May he who has more than enough, keep it for better uses.
[145] May he who goes in to rest never remain to riot,
And he who fears God elsewhere never forget him here.”
Other heraldic animals, different from those just mentioned, belong to so many various families, that it is utterly impossible to say in honour of whom they were first set up: such, for instance, is the [Griffin], the armorial bearing of the Spencers, and innumerable other houses. Besides being an heraldic emblem, the griffin was an animal in whose existence the early naturalists firmly believed. Its supposed eggs and claws were carefully preserved, and are frequently mentioned in ancient inventories and lists of curiosities. “They shewed me,” [in a church at Ratisbonne,] says Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, in one of her letters, “a prodigious claw, set in gold, which they called the claw of a griffin; and I could not forbear asking the reverend priest that shewed it, whether the griffin was a saint? The question almost put him beside his gravity, but he answered, ‘They only kept it as a curiosity.’” The supposed eggs (no doubt ostrich eggs) were frequently made into drinking cups. The Tradescants had one in their collection, kept in countenance by an egg of a dragon, two feathers of the tail of a phœnix, and the claw of a ruck, “a bird able to trusse an elephant.” Sir John Mandeville gives the natural history of the griffin, in his “Right Merveylous Travels,” chap. xxvi. From him we learn that the body of this dreadful beast was larger and stronger than “8 lions or 100 eagles,” so that he could with ease fly off to his nest with a great horse, or a couple of oxen yoked together, “for,” says he, “he has his talouns so large and so longe, and so gret upon his feet as thowghe thei weren hornes of grete oxen, or of bugles or of kijgn.”
In the original edition of the Spectator, No. xxxiii.,[192] the griffin is mentioned as the sign of a house in Sheer Lane, Temple Bar. The advertisement begins oddly enough:—“Lost, yesterday, by a Lady in a velvet furbelow scarf, a watch,” &c. The Golden Griffin was a famous tavern in Holborn, of which there are trades tokens extant of the seventeenth century. Tom Brown talks of a “fat squab porter at the Griffin Tavern, in Fulwood’s rents,” which is the same house, as appears from Strype:—“At the upper end of this court is a passage into the Castle Tavern, a house of considerable trade, as is the Golden Griffin Tavern, on the west side, which has a passage into Fulwood’s rents,” (Book iii., p. 253.)
The variously-coloured lions come under the same category of heraldic animals. Amongst them the Golden Lion stands foremost. A public-house with that sign in Fulham ought not to be passed unnoticed; it is one of the most ancient houses in the village, having been built in the reign of Henry VII. The interior is not much altered; the chimney-pieces are in their original state, and in good preservation. Formerly there were two staircases in the thick walls, but they are now blocked up. Tradition says that the house once belonged to Bishop Bonner, and that it has subterraneous passages communicating with the episcopal palace. When the old hostelry was pulled down in 1836, a tobacco-pipe of ancient and foreign fashion was found behind the wainscot. The stem was a crooked bamboo, and a brass ornament of an Elizabethan pattern formed the bowl of the pipe. This pipe Mr Crofton Croker[193] tries to identify as the property of Bishop Bonner, who, on the 15th June 1596, died suddenly at Fulham, “while sitting in his chair and smoking tobacco.” If Mr Croker be right, this inn should also have been honoured by the presence of Shakespeare, Fletcher, Henry Condell, (Shakespeare’s fellow actor,) John Norden, (author of A Description of Middlesex and Hertfordshire,) Florio, the translator of Montaigne, and divers other notabilities.
The Blue Lion is far from uncommon, and may possibly have been first put up at the marriage of James I. with Anne of Denmark. The Purple Lion occurs but once—namely, on a trades token of Southampton Buildings.
Signs borrowed from Corporation arms form the last subdivision of this chapter. Such, for instance, is the Three Compasses, a change in the arms of both the carpenters and masons. This sign is a particular favourite in London, where not less than twenty-one public-houses make a living under its shadow. Perhaps this is partly owing to the compasses being a masonic emblem, and a great many publicans “worthy brethren.” Frequently the sign of the compasses contains between the legs the following good advice:—