A few years ago, at No. 25, the entrance might still be seen of another famous inn called the "Bull," formerly the "Black Bull." Above the gateway was a fine piece of ironwork, and the old painted sign was against the wall of the passage. This house flourished greatly a little before the advent of railways, when Mrs. Anne Nelson, coach proprietor, was the landlady, and could make up nearly two hundred beds there. Most of her business was to Essex and Suffolk, but she also owned the Exeter coach. She must have been landlady on the memorable occasion when Mr. Pickwick arrived in a cab after "two mile o' danger at eightpence," and it was through this very gateway that he and his companions were driven by the elder Weller when they started on their adventurous journey to Ipswich. The house is now wholly destroyed and the yard built over.
A common sign in former days was the "Saracen's Head." We shall have occasion to refer to several in London. One of them stood by Aldgate, just within the limits of the city. Here a block of old buildings is in existence on the south side, which once formed the front of a well-known coaching inn, with this sign. The spacious inn yard remains, the house on the east side of its entrance having fine pilasters. From the "Saracen's Head," Aldgate, coaches plied to Norwich as long ago as 1681, and here there is, or was quite recently, a carrier's booking office.
Another thoroughfare which, within the memory of some who hardly admit that they are past middle age, contained several famous inns, was that leading to the north, and known in its various parts as Gracechurch Street and Bishopsgate Street Within and Without. One of the best known was the "Cross Keys" in Bishopsgate Street, mentioned in the preface to Dodsley's Old Plays as a house at which theatrical performances took place. It was here that, in the latter part of the sixteenth century, Bankes exhibited the extraordinary feats of his horse Marocco. One of them, if we may believe an old jest-book, was to select and draw forth Tarlton with its mouth as "the veriest fool in the company." In more modern times, until the advent of railways, the "Cross Keys" was a noted coaching and carriers' establishment. Destroyed in the Great Fire, and again burnt down in 1734, but rebuilt in the old style, it was still standing on the west side of the street, immediately south of Bell Yard, when Larwood and Hotten published their History of Signboards in 1866. Another inn with this sign stood appropriately near the site of St. Peter's Church in Wood Street, Cheapside, and was pulled down probably about the same time as the more famous house in Gracechurch Street.
Of equal note was the "Spread Eagle," the site of which has mostly been absorbed by the extension of Leadenhall Market. Like the "Cross Keys," it was burnt in the Great Fire, but rebuilt in the old style with an ample galleried yard. In the basement some mediæval arches still remained. At the "Spread Eagle" that original writer George Borrow had been staying with his future wife, Mrs. Mary Clarke, and various friends, when they were married at St. Peter's Church, Cornhill, on April 23rd, 1840, her daughter, Henrietta, signing the register. Before its destruction in 1865 it had been for some time a receiving office of Messrs. Chaplin and Horne. The site, of about 1,200 square feet, was sold for no less a sum than £95,000. Another Gracechurch inn, the "Tabard," which long ago disappeared, had, like the immortal hostelry in Southwark, become the "Talbot," and its site is marked by Talbot Court.
In Bishopsgate Street Within three galleried inns lingered long enough to have been often seen by the writer. These were the "Bull," the "Green Dragon," and the "Four Swans," each with something of a history, and to them might be added the picturesque, though less important, "Vine" and the "Flower Pot," from which last house a seventeenth century trade token was issued. The "Bull," the most southern of these inns, all of which were on the west side of the highway, was at least as old as the latter part of the fifteenth century, for in one of the chronicles of London lately edited by Mr. C. L. Kingsford, I find it, under the date 1498, associated with a painful incident—namely, the execution of the son of a cordwainer, "dwellyng at the Bulle in Bisshoppesgate Strete," for calling himself the Earl of Warwick. Hall gives his name as Ralph Wilford. Anthony Bacon, elder brother of Francis, during the year 1594 hired a lodging in Bishopsgate Street, but the fact of its being near the "Bull," where plays and interludes were performed, so troubled his mother that for her sake he removed to Chelsea. Shortly afterwards, as may be learnt from Tarlton's Jests, the old drama called "The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth" was here played, "wherein the judge was to take a boxe on the eare, and because he was absent that should take the blow, Tarlton himselfe, ever forward to please, tooke upon him to play the judge, besides his own part of the clown." The "Bull" was the house of call of old Hobson, the carrier, to whose rigid rule about the letting of his saddle horses we are supposed to owe the phrase, "Hobson's Choice." Milton wrote his epitaph in the well-known lines beginning:—
"Here lies old Hobson; Death hath broke his girt,
And here, alas! hath laid him in the dirt."
In his second edition of Milton's Poems, p. 319, Wharton alludes to Hobson's "portrait in fresco" as having then lately been in existence at the inn, and it is mentioned in The Spectator, No. 509. There is a print of it representing a bearded old man in hat and cloak with a money bag, which in the original painting had the inscription, "The fruitful mother of an hundred more." He bequeathed property for a conduit to supply Cambridge with water; the conduit head still exists, though not in its original position. In 1649, by a Council of War, six Puritan troopers were condemned to death for a mutiny at the "Bull." The house remained till 1866.
Further north, at No. 86, was the "Green Dragon," the last of the galleried inns that survived in Bishopsgate Street. It is mentioned in De Laune's Present State of London, 1681, as a place of resort for coachmen and carriers, and I have before me an advertisement sheet of the early nineteenth century, showing that coaches were then plying from here to Norwich, Yarmouth, Cambridge, Colchester, Ware, Hertford, Brighton, and many other places. There is a capital etching of the house by Edwin Edwards. It was closed in 1877, its site being soon afterwards built over. At the sale of the effects eleven bottles of port wine fetched 37s. 6d. each. The "Four Swans," immediately to the north of the inn last named, although it did not survive so long, remained to the end a more complete specimen of its class, having three tiers of galleries perfect on each side, and two tiers at the west end. The "water-poet" tells us that in 1637 "a waggon or coach" came here once a week from Hertford. Other references to it might be quoted from books of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but the story told on an advertisement sheet issued by a former landlord about a fight here between Roundheads, led by Ireton, and a troop of Royalists, is apocryphal.
Not far off, in Bishopsgate Street Without, there was until lately a "Two Swan" inn yard, and a "One Swan" with a large yard—an old place of call for carriers and waggons. These lingered on until the general clearance by the Great Eastern Railway Company a few years ago, when the remains of Sir Paul Pindar's mansion, latterly a tavern, were also removed; the finely-carved timber front and a stuccoed ceiling finding their way into the Victoria and Albert Museum. Another old Bishopsgate house was the "White Hart," near St. Botolph's Church, a picturesque building with projecting storeys, and in front the date 1480, but the actual structure was probably much less ancient. It was drawn by J. T. Smith and others early in the nineteenth century, and did not long survive. The site is still marked by White Hart Court. On the opposite side of the way was an inn, the "Dolphin," which, as Stow tells us, was given in 1513 by Margaret Ricroft, widow, with a charge in favour of the Grey Friars. It disappeared in the first half of the eighteenth century. The old "Catherine Wheel," a galleried inn hard by, mentioned by De Laune in 1681, was not entirely destroyed till 1894.
Another road out of London richly furnished with inns was that from Newgate westward. The first one came to was the "Saracen's Head" on Snow Hill, an important house, to which the late Mr. Heckethorn assigned a very early origin. Whether or not it existed in the fourteenth century, as he asserts, it was certainly flourishing when Stow in his Survey described it as "a fair and large inn for receipt of travellers." It continued for centuries to be largely used, and here Nicholas Nickleby and his uncle waited on Squeers, the Yorkshire schoolmaster, whom Dickens must have modelled from various real personages. In a Times advertisement for January 3rd, 1801, I read that "at Mr. Simpson's Academy, Wodencroft Lodge, near Greta Bridge, Yorkshire, young gentlemen are boarded and accurately instructed in the English, Latin, and Greek languages, writing, arithmetic, merchants' accounts, and the most useful branches of the mathematics, at 16 guineas per annum, if under nine years of age, and above that age 17 guineas; French taught by a native of France at 1 guinea extra. Mr. Simpson is now in town, and may be treated with from eleven till two o'clock every day at the 'Saracen's Head,' Snow Hill." In the early part of last century the landlady was Sarah Ann Mountain, coach proprietor, and worthy rival of Mrs. Nelson, of the "Bull" Inn, Aldgate. The "Saracen's Head" disappeared in the early part of 1868, when this neighbourhood was entirely changed by the formation of the Holborn Viaduct. Another Snow Hill inn was the "George," or "George and Dragon," mentioned by Strype as very large and of considerable trade. A sculptured sign from there is in the Guildhall Museum.