London Signs and Inscriptions

by Philip Norman

On the east side of Shoreditch High Street, between Nos. 79 and 80, and over the passage leading into Hare Alley, is the sculptured stone sign of a Hare running, with the initials b w m and date 1725. I have observed a similar sign in Flushing. Hare Alley is mentioned in Hatton’s ‘New View of London,’ 1708. Among seventeenth century trade-tokens is one with the following inscription:

O. nicholas warrin=A hare running.
R. in aldersgate street=N.I.W

So it is given in Boyne. A pun on the name is probably intended, but unless the issuer was a veritable cockney the animal represented was a rabbit.

The Hare in combination with the Sun, having the date 1676 and the initials h n a, is still to be seen above the first-floor windows of a house, No. 71, on the east side of the Borough High Street; close to the sites of the three most famous Southwark inns, the Tabard, the White Hart, and the George; of which the last-named still exists in part at least, though doomed, I fear, to speedy destruction. This house was gutted by fire a few years ago, but the sign luckily escaped unharmed. It is now painted in various colours, which was the old method, and, I think, improves the effect. The solicitors of the property have kindly let me examine the deeds, and I have gathered from them the following particulars:

In March, 1653, John Tarlton, citizen and brewer, left to his children two tenements in Southwark. In a mortgage of 1663 they are called ‘the Hare and the Three Pidgeons.’ In May, 1676, all, or nearly all, this part of Southwark was burnt down, the number of houses destroyed being, as stated in the London Gazette, about 600. A curious little pamphlet in my possession, licensed May 29, puts the number at nearly 500. On the title-page we are told that ‘St. Mary Overy’s Church and St. Thomas’s Hospital’ were ‘shattered and defaced,’ and everything ‘from Chain-Gate to the Counter on St. Margaret’s Hill on both sides the way burnt and demolished.’ I may note that on this occasion a fire-engine with leathern hose was first used, and seems to have been of great service in defending St. Thomas’s Hospital from the fire, as recorded in the London Gazette for August 14, 1676. In the same month Nicholas Hare, grocer, surrendered to be cancelled a lease dated 1669, ‘of the messuage or tenement called the Hare and Sunne,’ the said messuage having been burnt in the fire; and the Tarltons let him the ground on building lease for eighty-one years from June, 1677. The rent had before been £24 a year, with a fine for renewal of £70; it was now reduced to £16 a year. The sign in question is therefore a punning one, having been put up by Nicholas Hare, grocer, after the great Southwark fire, as many signs of the same description had been put up in London a few years previously, after the great London fire. How the sun had got into combination with the hare one does not know.[39] In subsequent documents, down to the year 1748, when the house came into the possession of John Paris, it is described simply as the Hare. In his will, dated 1753, he speaks of ‘my dwelling-house near the George Inn, known by the sign of the Hare and Stirrup;’ and finally, in 1757, in a schedule of the fixtures, are mentioned ‘in the dining-room two large sign irons, and a large copper sign of the Hare and Stirrup;’ so the unpretentious stone bas-relief, though not taken down, appears to have been supplemented by a sign more likely to catch the eye. It may be noted that on these sculptured signs, where letters occur, the initial of the owner, builder, or first occupant, is usually placed over the initials of the Christian names of himself and his wife the former naturally being on the left. Sometimes, however, they are all in a line, in which case the initial of the surname is most likely the middle one, as on the seventeenth-century trade tokens.

Centuries ago, when Islington was a little country town separated from London by roads which were often impassable in winter, there stood near the Green a picturesque house which, by its style, appeared to have been built in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. It was an old and general tradition that this house, which in course of time became the Pied Bull Inn, had been the residence of Sir Walter Raleigh; but this seems to be nothing more than a tradition.[40] There is, however, strong evidence that Sir John Miller, knight, of Islington and Devon, lived here some years later, for a window of a room on the ground-floor was adorned with his arms in painted glass, impaling those of Grigg of Suffolk, and in the kitchen were the remains of the same arms, with the date 1624. Nelson gives an illustration of the chimney-piece in the ground-floor room; it contained the figures of Faith, Hope, and Charity in niches, with a border of cherubim, fruit and foliage. The central figure—Charity—was surmounted by two cupids supporting a crown, and beneath were a lion and unicorn couchant. Nelson thinks that the design was intended as a compliment to Queen Elizabeth. On the ceiling the five senses were represented in stucco, with their Latin names. It is not known at what time the house was converted into an inn; during the seventeenth century, no doubt, for Defoe mentions it in his fictitious narrative of the Plague.[41] The south front of the house was comparatively modern, and of different elevation to the older part, and here appeared a stone bas-relief of the Pied Bull, bearing the date 1730, the year perhaps in which this addition was made to the building. In 1740 the house and 14 acres of land were let at about £70 a year; it was pulled down in 1827. The modern public house called the Old Pied Bull, at the corner of Upper Street and Theberton Street, is about twenty or thirty yards north of the site.

In the Guildhall Museum there is a well-executed stone bas-relief in particularly good condition of a Lion statant, size 8 inches by 14-1/4 inches. No record of its origin has been preserved by the City authorities. Can this be the lion referred to by Leigh Hunt in ‘The Town’? His words are: ‘The only memorial remaining of the old palace (Somerset House) and its outhouses is in the wall of a house in the Strand, where the sign of a Lion still survives a number of other signs, noticed in a list at the time, and common at that period to houses of all descriptions.’ More likely, however, he refers to a carved lion supporting the City arms which is still to be seen on a jeweller’s shop, No. 342, Strand; but this is apparently of no great age. The occupant, who has been there thirty years, could give me no information about it. Mr. Harrison in his ‘Memorials of London Houses,’ says that Robert Haydon lodged here, when as a youth of eighteen he first came to London from Plymouth. In the seventeenth century there was a Golden Lion by York House, which, with other tenements pertaining to Denmark or Somerset House, was sold in 1650 for the benefit of the State.

Perhaps a more interesting sign than either of the above is that of the White Lion, a boldly-executed carving with the date 1724, which is still to be seen between the first-floor windows of a house, now a tobacconist’s, on the north side of Islington High Street, but in the parish of Clerkenwell. This was once the sign of an inn which existed at the beginning of the seventeenth century, if not earlier. In ‘Drunken Barnabee’s Journal,’ the date of which is 1638, there occur the following lines: