The Bull, Bishopsgate, is noteworthy; for the yard of this inn supplied a stage to our early actors, before James Burbadge and his fellows obtained a patent from Queen Elizabeth for erecting a permanent building for theatrical entertainments. Tarleton often played here. Anthony Bacon, the brother of Francis, lived in a house in Bishopsgate-street, not far from the Bull Inn, to the great concern of his mother, who not only dreaded that the plays and interludes acted at the Bull might corrupt his servants, but on her own son's account objected to the parish as being without a godly clergyman.
Gerard's Hall, Basing-lane, had the fine Norman crypt of the ancient hall of the Sisars for its wine-cellar; besides the tutelar effigies of "Gerard the gyant," a fair specimen of a London sign, temp. Charles II. Here also was shown the staff used by Gerard in the wars, and a ladder to ascend to the top of the staff; and in the neighbouring church of St. Mildred, Bread-street, hangs a huge tilting-helmet, said to have been worn by the said giant. The staff, Stow thinks, may rather have been used as a May-pole, and to stand in the hall decked with evergreens at Christmas; the ladder serving for decking the pole and hall-roof.
Fosbroke says, that the Bell Savage is a strange corruption of the Queen of Sheba; the Bell Savage, of which the device was a savage man standing by a bell, is supposed to be derived from the French, Belle Sauvage, on account of a beautiful savage having been once shown there; by others it is considered, with more probability, to have been so named in compliment to some ancient landlady of the celebrated inn upon Ludgate-hill, whose surname was Savage, as in the Close-rolls of the thirty-first year of the reign of Henry VI. is an entry of a grant of that inn to "John Frensch, gentilman," and called "Savage's Ynne," alias the "Bell on the Hoof."
The token of the house is—"HENRY YOVNG AT Y^E. An Indian woman holding an arrow and a bow.—℞ ON LVDGATE HILL. In the field, H. M. Y."
"There is a tradition [Mr. Akerman writes] that the origin of this sign, and not only of the inn, but also of the name of the court in which it is situate, was derived from that of Isabella Savage, whose property they once were, and who conveyed them by deed to the Cutlers' Company. This, we may observe, is a mistake. The name of the person who left the Bell Savage to the Cutlers' Company was Craythorne, not Savage."
In Flecknoe's Ænigmatical Characters, 1665, in alluding to "your fanatick reformers," he says, "as for the signs, they have pretty well begun the reformation already, changing the sign of the Salutation of the Angel and our Lady into the Shouldier and Citizen, and the Catherine Wheel into the Cat and Wheel, so that there only wants their making the Dragon to kill St. George, and the Devil to tweak St. Dunstan by the nose, to make the reformation compleat. Such ridiculous work they make of their reformation, and so zealous are they against all mirth and jollity, as they would pluck down the sign of the Cat and Fiddle, too, if it durst but play so loud as they might hear it."
The sign In God is our Hope is still to be seen at a public-house on the western road between Cranford and Slough. Coryatt mentions the Ave Maria, with verses, as the sign of an alehouse abroad, and a street where all the signs on one side were of birds. The Swan with Two Nicks, or Necks, as it is commonly called, was so termed from the two nicks or marks, to make known that it was a swan of the Vintners' Company; the swans of that company having two semicircular pieces cut from the upper mandible of the swan, one on each side, which are called nicks. The origin of the Bolt-in-Tun is thus explained. The bolt was the arrow shot from a cross-bow, and the tun or barrel was used as the target, and in this device the bolt is painted sticking in the bunghole. It appears not unreasonable to conclude, that hitting the bung was as great an object in crossbow-shooting as it is to a member of a Toxophilite Club to strike the target in the bull's eye. The sign of the Three Loggerheads is two grotesque wooden heads, with the inscription "Here we three Loggerheads be," the reader being the third. The Honest Lawyer is depicted at a beershop at Stepney; the device is a lawyer with his head under his arm, to prevent his telling lies.
The Lamb and Lark has reference to a well-known proverb that we should go to bed with the lamb and rise with the lark. The Eagle and Child, vulgo Bird and Baby, is by some persons imagined to allude to Jupiter taking Ganymede; others suppose that it merely commemorates the fact of a child having been carried off by an eagle; but this sign is from the arms of the Derby family (eagle and child) who had a house at Lambeth, where is the Bird and Baby.
The Green Man and Still should be a green man (or man who deals in green herbs) with a bundle of peppermint or pennyroyal under his arm, which he brings to be distilled.
Upon the modern building of the Bull and Mouth has been conferred the more elegant name of the Queen's Hotel. Now the former is a corruption of Boulogne Mouth, and the sign was put up to commemorate the destruction of the French flotilla at the mouth of Boulogne harbour in the reign of Henry VIII. This absurd corruption has been perpetuated by a carving in stone of a bull and a human face with an enormous mouth. The Bull and Gate, palpably, has the like origin; as at the Gate of Boulogne the treaty of capitulation to the English was signed.