The inscription has long been obliterated, and no trace is to be seen of the little wings with which, in Pennant’s illustration, the boy is furnished; in 1816, however, they were still conspicuous, and were painted bright yellow. In that curious work—the ‘Vade-Mecum for Malt-worms’—which was written about the year 1715, the Fortune of War is mentioned as a well-known tavern. Within the memory of man it had the unpleasing reputation of being a house of call for resurrectionists, who supplied the surgeons of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital with subjects for dissection. It was here that John Bishop, the body-snatcher, met his accomplice Williams, before the murder of the Italian boy Ferrari, for which and similar crimes they were hanged in 1831.
Our quaint old chronicler, John Stow, says that Pie Corner was ‘a place so called of such a sign, sometime a fair inn for receipt of travellers, but now divided into tenements.’ Strype in 1720 describes it as noted chiefly for ‘Cooks’ Shops and Pigs drest there during Bartholomew Fair.’ There are several allusions to it in Ben Jonson’s ‘Alchemist’ and other plays. The sign of the Pie probably implied the bird now usually called a magpie, but it might have been derived from the Pye,[4] or rules for finding out the service of the day in the Roman Breviary, or from the good cheer provided in this immediate neighbourhood. Larwood and Hotten mention a stone sign of a Naked Boy with the date 1633 at Skipton-in-Craven.
A stone bas-relief of that mythical person, Guy, Earl of Warwick, is still preserved on a house at the corner of Warwick Lane and Newgate Street. The figure is represented standing on a pedestal in chain armour, with a conical helmet, a sword in his right hand, and on his left arm a shield chequy, or and azure, with a bend sinister ermine. This seems to be wrongly copied from Guy’s shield in the Rows Roll, which has a chevron ermine, but one arm of the chevron is, from the position of the shield, so foreshortened that it can hardly be seen; hence the mistake. Above is the date 1668, on one side the letters G. C., standing, I suppose, for guido comes; on the other a coat of arms, three mascles on a bend, to whom belonging I cannot say, so many families have this charge. Below is the inscription: ‘Restored 1817. J. Deakes, Archt.’
The general design somewhat resembles that of a large figure in the chapel of St. Mary Magdalen at Guy’s Cliff, near Warwick, which, as we learn from a modern inscription in Latin, was hewn out of the living rock by order of Richard de Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, in the reign of Henry VI., to mark the spot where Guy was thought to have ended his days. This Richard de Beauchamp obtained license to found here a chantry for two priests, and annexed land thereto to the value of twenty-four marks per annum. It had before been a hermitage. Stow tells us that ‘Eldernesse lane, which stretcheth north to the high street of Newgate market, is now called Warwicke lane, of an ancient house there, built by an Earl of Warwicke, and since called Warwicke Inn.’ Elsewhere he says: ‘In the 36th of Henry VI. the greater estates of the realm being called up to London, Richard Nevill Earl of Warwick came with six hundred men all in jackets embroidered with ragged staves before and behind, and was lodged in Warwicke Lane, in whose house there were oftentimes six oxen eaten at breakfast, and every tavern was full of his meat, for he that had any acquaintance in that house might have there so much of sodden and roast meat as he could prick and carry away upon a long dagger.’ At the beginning of this century the house to which the statuette belonged was occupied by a Mr. Parry; an inscription over the door stated that it had been a tobacconist’s shop since 1660, no doubt rebuilt.
A well-modelled bas-relief of a woman’s head, probably intended to represent Minerva, is on a house belonging to the Leathersellers’ Company, at the corner of Old Jewry and Gresham Street. She has a helmet or diadem, and on her breast the Gorgon’s head; an ægis also seems to be suggested. On each side are festoons of fruit and flowers; the material I believe to be terra-cotta, but it is so thickly coated with paint that one cannot be sure. Archer, who drew this sign, thought it was a fragment of sculpture from a building of the early part of the sixteenth century, and it seems to have something in common with Italian terra-cotta work of that period; for instance the medallions[5] executed by Joannes Maiano for Cardinal Wolsey, and still existing at Hampton Court. Before the house was modernized, on the brick wall, below the head of Minerva, there was a carving of the Leathersellers’ Arms; and so, being used as a tavern during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, until 1871 it was known by the sign of the Leathersellers’ Arms, or latterly the Three Bucks’ Heads. Of the sculptured head of Minerva no record exists. This property seems to have belonged to the Leathersellers’ Company ever since the year 1565, when Edward Taylor, who had been its master, left by will to the company two messuages in St. Olave’s, Jewry, to distribute among the poorest people in the Poultry Compter a kilderkin of beer and twelve pennyworth of bread, and the same to Wood Street Compter, Newgate, the Fleet, King’s Bench, and the Marshalsea. In 1878 all arrears of these payments to each prison at £1 1s. per quarter, viz. for a kilderkin of beer £1, and for bread 1s., having been paid to this date, and the full payment being £25 4s. a year, the company transferred to the official trustees of charities stock sufficient to produce that amount. The name of Cateaton Street was in 1845 changed to Gresham Street, no one knows why. Here, in the days of John Taylor the water-poet, there was an important inn called the Maidenhead, but this, I imagine, had for its sign the arms of the Mercers’ Company, whose headquarters were in its immediate neighbourhood. Later a seventeenth-century trade token was issued from the Roxalana’s Head in Cateaton Street, the sign no doubt commemorating Elizabeth Davenport the actress, whose favourite part was Roxalana in the ‘Siege of Rhodes.’ Her sham marriage with the last Earl of Oxford of the de Vere family, who deceived her by disguising a trumpeter of his troop as a priest, is told in ‘Gramont,’ and in the ‘Countess Dunois’ Memoirs.’ Pepys saw her in 166⅔, in the chief box at the Duke’s theatre, ‘in a velvet gown, as the fashion is, looking very handsome.’
The Woman’s Head, dated 1671, which was on a house in Paternoster Row, and has been lately added to the Guildhall Museum, was hardly a sign. Similar heads are still on the keys of a first and second floor window belonging to the old-fashioned house of Messrs. W. and R. Chambers, 47, Paternoster Row. Another bas-relief in the Guildhall Museum represents a gardener holding a spade in his right hand, with the date 1670; it is rudely designed. This is a street rather than a house sign; as late as the year 1856 it was in Gardiner’s Lane, Upper Thames Street, near Broken Wharf. Mr. J. T. Smith, who drew it, in 1791, for his ‘Antiquities of London,’ adds this description: ‘Against Mr. Holyland’s stables, Gardiner’s Lane, the corner of High Timber Street, is this sculpture, but why put up I cannot learn. Tradition says the site was once gardens.’ Perhaps it was a rebus on the name of Gardiner.
Two bas-reliefs of St. George and the Dragon were erected as signs in London soon after the Great Fire, and, on the principle Detur digniori, should be described in this chapter. It was only natural that the figure of St. George should become one of our most popular inn signs; for he was regarded as the patron saint and special protector of this our realm of England. Shakespeare speaks of
‘St. George that swindg’d the Dragon, and e’er since
Sits on his horseback at mine hostess’ door.’
‘King John,’ Act i., Scene I.
A capital specimen of such a sign, though unfortunately in bad condition, is at the Guildhall Museum—presented by Mr. W. Hayward, C.E. It came from a house—81, Snow Hill—which had formed part of a famous old galleried inn. Snow Hill was the thoroughfare between Holborn and the City, till in 1802 it was superseded by Skinner Street, named after Alderman Skinner, which has now in its turn ceased to exist. Snow Hill is called in Stow’s ‘Survey’ Snor or Snore Hill, and by Howell Sore Hill, perhaps from the steepness and difficulty of the ascent. Strype, in 1720, speaks of the George Inn as ‘very large and of a considerable trade, the passage to the yard being through Cow Lane.’ In Sampson’s ‘History of Advertising,’ an advertisement is given from the British Chronicle of January 18 to 20, 1762, which informs us that