As late as 1866 a stone bas-relief of an Ostrich was to be seen in Bread Street, together with the arms of the Tallowchandlers’ Company. Soon afterwards the house was destroyed, and the sign disappeared for many years, till it came, by chance, into the hands of Mr. M. Pope, F.S.A., who has kindly presented it to the Guildhall Museum. The beak is a modern restoration. A rough drawing, which, however, quite serves to identify it, appeared in the Illustrated London News for December 13, 1856, when it was suggested that it might have served as the sign of a feather-dresser. Mrs. Palliser[45] tells us that Mattei Girolamo, captain of the guard to Clement VII., placed on his flag an ostrich swallowing an iron nail, with the motto, ‘Spiritus durissima coquit,’ ‘Courage digests the hardest things’; that is, the brave man is not easily daunted. Sir Thomas Browne wrote a paper on the ostrich, for the use of his son.
The Spread Eagle or ‘Eagle with two heads displayed’ was, like the Ostrich, bought by Mr. Pope some time since, and has also been presented to the Guildhall Museum; he wrote a description of these signs in the ‘London and Middlesex Notebook.’ Both signs were sold by the same person; they had been in the possession of his family for many years, and he believed that his father had obtained them from the same neighbourhood in the City. The Spread Eagle is in fair condition, though the sinister head has been badly restored with cement. It has on it the initials rm and the date 1669. I have no proof as to the original position of this sign, but in the absence of fuller information one can, I think, fairly hazard the conjecture, that after the Great Fire it may have been put up in Bread Street to perpetuate the memory of the house in which John Milton, the poet, was born. We know that his father, a scrivener, but a man of good family, had adopted his own coat of arms as a sign. Aubrey, a contemporary, says he had another house in Bread Street, called the Rose. In Masson’s Life of Milton there is a transcript of a volume in the British Museum containing miscellaneous notes, which relate to the affairs of John Sanderson, a Turkey merchant, in the early part of the seventeenth century. Among other things there is a copy of a bond dated March 4, 160-2/3, in which Thomas Heighsham, of Bethnal Green in Middlesex, and Richard Sparrow, citizen and goldsmith of London, engage to pay Sanderson a sum of money on May 5 following, the payment to be made at the new shop of John Milton, scrivener, at the Spread Eagle in Bread Street. The signature of John Milton, scrivener, is appended.
Some years since there existed in Bread Street a Black Spread Eagle Court, at the first turning on the left hand as one entered from Cheapside, with, as Strype tells us, a very good house at the upper end; in several directories of the eighteenth century it is called Spread Eagle Court. This is considered to have been on the site of Milton’s birthplace; the ground is now covered by modern warehouses—Nos. 58 to 63, occupied by one firm. The Church of All Hallows, Bread Street, in which Milton[46] had been baptized, was swept away in 1878. Its site is marked by a bust of the poet with an inscription, set up in the wall of a new building. The Spread Eagle was by no means an uncommon London sign; to the one in Gracechurch Street I shall presently refer. Collet,[47] in his ‘Common-place Book,’ gives it as his opinion that, ‘the eagle with two necks in the imperial arms, and in the arms of the King of Spain, depicted on signboards as the Spread Eagle, signified the east and west empire, the extension of their power from the east to the west.’ During a great tempest at sea in January, 1506, Philip, King of Castile and his Queen were weather driven, and landed at Falmouth. The same storm blew down the eagle of brass off the spire of St. Paul’s Church in London, and in falling the same eagle broke and shattered the black eagle that hung for a sign in St. Paul’s Churchyard, as related in Stow’s ‘Annals,’ p. 484.
An interesting sign of the Pelican is let into the string course above a corner first-floor window of No. 70, Aldermanbury. It was the crest of two merchants who formerly occupied the house. Their monument is in the neighbouring church of St. Mary, Aldermanbury, the inscription being as follows:—
‘Here lyeth the body of Richard Chandler,
Citizen and Haberdasher of London, Esquire,
Who departed this life November 8th, 1691, aged 85.
Also the body of John Chandler, Esqre, his brother,
Citizen and Haberdasher of London,
Who died October 14th, 1686, aged 69 years.’
Above is the Pelican as a crest, corresponding with the sign. The busts of these two worthy citizens in flowing periwigs appear on each side of the inscription; their names are in the Little London Directory for 1677. The church was burnt down in the Great Fire, and rebuilt by Sir Christopher Wren, the parishioners subscribing liberally; Richard Chandler gave the font in 1675. The notorious Judge Jeffreys, who died in the Tower of London and was buried in the chapel there, was afterwards, on petition of his family, reinterred in the church of St. Mary, Aldermanbury. Here also Milton was married to his second wife, Catherine Woodcock. In 1890 the churchyard was opened to the public as a recreation ground.
The pelican[48] in her piety, or feeding her young with her blood, was often represented in the Mediæval Church, being considered a mystical emblem of Christ, and a type of the Holy Eucharist. Several representations of it are to be seen in St. Mary Abchurch, the living of which is in the gift of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. It was the device of the famous Bishop Foxe, to whom I have alluded in my account of the Three Kings (ante); and as such appears on the woodwork of the banqueting hall of Durham Castle, with his usual motto, ‘Est Deo gracia;’ and on the string course of the choir of St. Saviour’s, Southwark. He died anno 1528. Heywood in his play of Edward IV. (4to. 1600), mentions a pelican sign in Lombard Street:—
‘Here’s Lombard Street, and here’s the Pelican;
And here’s the Phœnix in the Pelican’s nest.’
And by a curious coincidence, at the present day there are the signs of a Pelican and a Phœnix in Lombard Street, both belonging to famous insurance offices. The house[49] occupied by the latter was built for Sir Charles Asgill, Lord Mayor in 1757.
A bas-relief, similar in style to that last described, is the Swan with collar and chain, inserted below a second-floor window of No. 37, Cheapside, which stands at the north-east corner of Friday Street. This is on the site of the Nag’s Head tavern, whose projecting sign appears in a well-known print of the procession of Mary de Medici on a visit to her daughter, Queen Henrietta Maria—an interesting record of the appearance of Cheapside before the Great Fire. The sign was almost opposite Cheapside Cross. The Nag’s Head was the supposed scene of the consecration of Archbishop Parker, on the accession of Queen Elizabeth in 1559. This story is refuted in Strype’s Life of Parker; it probably arose from a fact mentioned by Fuller, that the commissioners who confirmed Parker’s election (at St. Mary le Bow Church ten days before the consecration), afterwards dined together at the Nag’s Head close by. The present building must have been erected soon after the Great Fire, for a staircase, to which there is access from Friday Street, evidently dates from that century. Indeed, in the Creed Collection at the British Museum (vol. xiii.) there is a newspaper cutting said to be from the Builder, but without a date, in which it is, no doubt erroneously, asserted that the house was there before the year 1666, and remained standing when all around was swept away, and that inside traces of the fire may be observed on the massive beams. The Chained Swan is undoubtedly of heraldic origin. Ritson says it was not customary to use the English language at court till King Edward III. on the occasion of a celebrated tournament, held at Canterbury in 1349, placed on his shield the device of a white swan, with the legend: