The following advertisement, which appeared in a London Gazette for 1695, has a distinctly local flavour:
‘A Black boy, an Indian, about thirteen years old, run away the 8th instant from Putney, with a collar about his neck, with this inscription: “The Lady Bromfield’s black, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.”’
Black attendants were common in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In more than one celebrated portrait a black boy serves to enhance the charm of a fair lady’s complexion. Sir John Hawkins, after his voyage of 1564, which was partly for slave-trading purposes, was authorized to have as his crest the half-length figure of a negro prisoner called heraldically a demi-Moor, bound and captive. The Black Boy was a frequent tobacconists’ sign, still sometimes seen.
CHAPTER II.
THREE KINGS—ASTRONOMICAL SIGNS.
‘Gaspar and Melchior and Balthazar
Came to Cologne on the broad-breasted Rhine,
And founded there a temple, which is yet
A fragment, but the wonder of the world.’
Lord Tennyson: MS.
AN interesting group of City signs is that connected with the Three Kings, showing as it does what a hold the sacred legend, handed down to us from a remote past, continued to have on popular imagination till comparatively recent years. In the Guildhall Museum there is a stone bas-relief of the Three Kings, brought from No. 7, Bucklersbury when the house was rebuilt some years ago. The figures are represented standing in similar attitudes; they have sceptres in their right hands, the left arm being in each case folded across the breast. The figure to the spectator’s left has flowing hair; that in the centre is of negro type; the one to the right is distinguished by a large moustache. A bas-relief from Lambeth Hill, also in the Guildhall Museum, is somewhat similar in design; the king on the left has a crown, the others diadems; it is dated 1667. Another sign from Lambeth Hill—the Three Crowns—was also put up in 1667, and may possibly have belonged to the same house.