The stone sign of the house which succeeded the Shakespearean Boar’s Head has happily been preserved, and is now in the Guildhall Museum. It is well designed and tastefully coloured, that fact having come to light when a thorough process of cleansing took place some time since. Above the snout are the initials i. t., and date 1668; size 18-1/2 by 16 inches. The Boar’s Head tavern will be famous for all time, as the scene of the revelries of Falstaff and Prince Hal; how far it was really connected with Shakespeare’s immortal creation has been discussed at length by the late Mr. Halliwell Phillipps. In the time of Henry V., Eastcheap was noted for its cooks’ shops, as appears from the ballad of London Lickpenny, by John Lydgate, monk at Bury St. Edmunds, in which, while giving a countryman’s description of London, he says:
‘Then I hyed me into Est-Chepe;
One cryes rybbs of befe, and many a pye;
Pewter pottes they clattered on a heape.
There was harpe, pype, and minstralsye.
Yea, by cock! nay, by cock! some began crye;
Some songe of Jenken and Julyan for there mede;
But for lack of mony I myght not spede.’
Stow, mentioning an affray in which King Henry IV.’s sons Thomas and John were concerned, adds in a note, ‘there was no taverne then in Eastcheape.’
Curiously enough, there is also no distinct authority in any of the early editions of Shakespeare’s plays for the name of the tavern in Eastcheap at which Falstaff and the Prince are supposed to meet. Theobald was the first, in 1733, to place the Boar’s Head in the stage directions. Shakespeare never mentions it at all, and his only apparent allusion is in the second part of ‘Henry the Fourth,’ where the Prince asks (speaking of Falstaff): ‘Doth the old boar feed in the old frank?’ and Bardolph answers: ‘At the old place, my lord, in Eastcheap.’ A suggestion of the house may also possibly be intended in ‘Richard the Second,’ where the Prince is mentioned as frequenting taverns ‘that stand in narrow lanes.’ In the play of the ‘Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth,’ 1594, on which Shakespeare’s drama was partly founded, the Castle tavern is mentioned as the place of meeting in Eastcheap. An allusion, however, to ‘Sir John of the Boar’s Head in Eastcheap,’ in Gayton’s ‘Festivous Notes’ (1654, p. 277), may be considered to prove that this was, in truth, the tavern to which Shakespeare referred. His contemporary, Dekker, in the play of ‘The Shoemakers’ Holyday, or, The Gentle Craft,’ has the following: Eyre. ‘Rip you chitterling, avaunt, boy; bid the tapster of the Bores-head fill me a doozen cans of beere for my journeymen.’
The earliest notice of the original house which has been handed down to us occurs in the testament of William Warden, who, in the reign of Richard II., gave all his tenement called the Boar’s Head, in Eastcheap, to a college of priests or chaplains, founded by Sir William Walworth, Lord Mayor, in the adjoining Church of St. Michael, Crooked Lane. The endowments of this college were forfeited in the year 1549, when the house above alluded to is described as all the said William Warden’s tenement called the Boar’s Head, Eastcheap, ‘worth by year £4.’
The Boar’s Head is first called a tavern in the year 1537, when it is expressly described in a lease, as ‘all that tavern called the Bore Hedde, cum sollariis et aliis suis pertinentiis in Estchepe, in parochia Sancti Michaelis, prædicti in tenura Johanne Broke vidue.’ An apparently genuine memento was discovered about the year 1834 in moving away soil from Whitechapel Mount.[28] It is a carved boxwood bas-relief of a boar’s head set in a circular frame formed by two boar’s tusks mounted in silver; diameter, 4½ inches. An inscription pricked on the back is as follows:
‘William Brooke Landlord of the Bores Hedde Estchepe 1566.’
This now belongs to Lady Burdett Coutts, and was shown two years ago at the Tudor Exhibition. In the year 1588, the inn was kept by Thomas Wright, a native of Shrewsbury: ‘Thear was chosen with me at that time out of the school, George Wrighte, son of Thomas Wrighte of London, vintener, that dwelt at the Bores Hed in Estcheap, who sithence, having good inheritance descended to him, is now clerk of the king’s stable, and a knight, a very discreet and honest gentleman;’ as we learn from the ‘Liber Famelicus’ of Sir John Whitelocke, edited by J. Bruce (p. 12). On March 31, 1602, the Lords of the Council wrote to the Lord Mayor, granting permission to the servants of the Earl of Oxford and the Earl of Worcester to play at the Boar’s Head in Eastcheap:[29] which seems to indicate that the house was an important one, probably with a yard. In the year 1623, ‘John Rhodoway, vintner at the Bore’s Head,’ was buried at St. Michael’s, Crooked Lane. This person may have kept the tavern in Shakespeare’s time. Two seventeenth-century trade tokens were issued from ‘the Bore’s Head, neere London Stone,’ as it is called in the rare tract called ‘Newes from Bartholomew Fayre.’ These tokens are undated, but it seems likely that they were struck before 1666. One of them gives the name of John Sapcott as the landlord.
The Boar’s Head tavern was burnt in the Great Fire, and rebuilt of brick four stories high, with its door in the centre. Many allusions to this second Boar’s Head have been preserved; one of the quaintest was an inscription on a tombstone in the neighbouring churchyard of St. Michael’s, Crooked Lane, which I lately saw at the back of St. Magnus Church, whither it migrated when its first resting-place was covered by the approaches to new London Bridge. The epitaph runs thus:
‘Here lieth the bodye of Robert Preston, late drawer at the Boar’s Head Tavern Great Eastcheap who departed this life March 16 Anno Domini 1730, aged twenty-seven years.’