CHAPTER IV.
ANIMALS REAL AND IMAGINARY—(Continued).
‘Figures strange—and sweet,
All made out of the carver’s brain.’
Coleridge: Christabel, pt. I.
THE sign of the Dog and Duck is to be found imbedded in the garden wall of Bethlehem Hospital, in the district formerly called St. George’s Fields. Size, 4 feet by 2 feet 6 inches.
It is in two divisions, and is dated 1716; the part to the right represents a spaniel sitting on its haunches with a duck in its mouth, and appears to me a capital specimen of grotesque art. This was the sign of the Dog and Duck public-house.
In 1642, when London was threatened by Charles I., the citizens hastily encircled it with a trench and a series of forts. Among these was one with four half bulwarks at the Dog and Duck, in St. George’s Fields. In 1651 a trade-token was issued from the Dog and Duck; it has the initials E M S, and on the obverse is a design almost identical with the one I have described. There were, however, other houses with this sign in Southwark: one in Deadman’s Place near St. Saviour’s Park, and another in Bermondsey Square. Till about the middle of the eighteenth century the Dog and Duck in St. George’s Fields seems to have been only a small public-house, doubtless with a pond attached to it, in which was carried on the cruel sport of duck-hunting, then dear to cockneys. The amusement consisted in the duck diving among the reeds with the dog in fierce pursuit; a good idea of it is given by Davenant in the ‘Long Vacation in London,’ p. 289, where reference is made to another district famous for ducking-ponds:
‘Ho ho to Islington; enough!
Fetch Job my son, and our dog Ruffe!
For there in Pond,[33] through mire and muck,
We’ll cry hay Duck, there Ruffe, hay Duck.’