Ces billets ont touché aux trois testes de SS. Roys à Cologne. Ils sont pour les voyageurs contre les malheurs de chemins, maux de teste, mal caduque, fievres, forçellerie, toute sorte de malefiee, mort subite.’
This paper had a rude illustration: Mr. Roach Smith gives a copy of it from a drawing by Fairholt. A similar prayer is still distributed at the shrine of the Three Kings.
Throughout Christendom the feast of the Epiphany, or Twelfth Day, holds an honoured place, as commemorating the appearance or manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles, more especially to the Kings or Wise Men, who came from the East to do Him homage. In Spain it is called Fiesta de los Reyes, in France La Fête de Rois. In the year 1792 it was there pronounced an anti-civic feast which made every priest that kept it a Royalist, and the name was for a time changed to Fête de Sans-Culottes.
It is hard to say whether the sign of the Seven Stars had its origin from the shield of an Astronomer King, Gaspar or Melchior, or from the seven bright stars of the constellation usually called the Great Bear,[23] or whether it was suggested by the mystic pages of the Apocalypse; but from whatever source derived, it was common in London about the time of the Great Fire. A fine sculptured specimen with ornamental border was to be seen in Cheapside as late as the year 1851, when Archer drew it. A cognate sign was the Sun,[24] a stone carving of which was formerly imbedded in the front of a house in the Poultry. It had at the corners the date 1668. The neighbourhood was at one time rich in astronomical signs. In 1532 Richard Collier, citizen and mercer of London, left his messuage called the Sun, in the parish of St. Mary le Bow, to be sold, and the proceeds to be devoted to the founding of a free school at Horsham in Sussex, which still exists, and is in the hands of the Mercers’ Company. Other signs of this description in Cheapside, were the Star, the Man in the Moon, and the Half-Moon—the sign of a celebrated tavern on the north side, close to Gutter Lane, rebuilt after the Great Fire. Here in 1682 Elias Ashmole presided at a dinner, given at the charge of newly accepted Freemasons; and, from a rare print of the early part of the eighteenth century, it seems that here one of their lodges was held. The following appeared in the General Advertiser in 1748:
‘Half-Moon Tavern, Cheapside.—Saturday next, the 16 April, being the anniversary of the Glorious Battle of Culloden, the Stars will assemble in the Moon, at six in the evening. Therefore, the choice spirits are desired to make their appearance and to fill up the joy.’
The house belonged to the Saddlers’ Company, and was burnt down in 1821; No. 140 is said to occupy the site.
A sculptured bas-relief of a Half-Moon still appears to the left of a doorway, on the north side of the Half-Moon Inn Yard, Borough High Street. It is about four feet from the ground and has on it the initials i t e, with date 1690; the size is only 13 by 10-1/2 inches. This, as far as I know, is the only inn sign of the kind in London which still remains in its original position and retains its use. The Half-Moon, though not one of the most famous Southwark hostelries, has a record of its own worth alluding to. In a rough map of about the year 1542, now in the Record Office, an inn appears to be marked on this site, but the name cannot clearly be made out. The great Southwark fire of 1676 did not extend so far east. The first undoubted note I have of it, is contained in a broadsheet printed at Fleet Bridge, September, 1689, and now in the Guildhall Library, entitled ‘A Full and True Account of the Sad and Dreadful Fire that happened in Southwark, September 22, 1689;’ from which we learn that houses were blown up, and the Falcon and Half-Moon on opposite sides of the High Street were on fire at the same time. Our sign gives the date of rebuilding in the following year, and the initials of the owner or landlord. In 1720 Strype speaks of the Half-Moon as ‘a pretty large inn and of a good trade.’ It was then in the thick of Southwark Fair, and is alluded to in the following advertisement (September, 1729):
‘At Reynolds’ Great Theatrical Booth, in the Half-Moon Inn, near the Bowling Green, during the Fair, will be presented the Beggar’s Wedding, or the Sheep Shearing, an opera called Flora, and the Humours of Harlequin.’