In Holborn there were once nine or ten galleried inns. We will only allude to those still in existence within the memory of the writer. The most famous of them, perhaps, was the "George and Blue Boar," originally the "Blue Boar," the site of which is covered by the Inns of Court Hotel. The house is named in the burial register of St. Andrew's, Holborn, as early as 1616, but it is chiefly known from a story related by the Rev. Thomas Morrice, in his Memoir of Roger Earl of Orrery (1742), that Cromwell and Ireton, in the disguise of troopers, here intercepted a letter sewn in the flap of a saddle from Charles I. to his Queen, in which he wrote that he was being courted by the Scotch Presbyterians and the army, and that he thought of closing with the former. Cromwell is supposed to have said, "From that time forward we resolved on his ruin." The writer ventured to ask that excellent historian, Dr. Samuel Gardiner, what he thought of the statement. In August, 1890, he most kindly replied by letter as follows:—"The tale has generally been repudiated without enquiry, and I am rather inclined to believe, at least, in its substantial accuracy. The curious thing is, that there are two lines of tradition about intercepted letters, as it seems to me quite distinct." We may, therefore, without being over credulous, cherish the belief that the picturesque incident referred to was one that actually occurred. There is an advertisement of December 27th, 1779, offering the lease of the "George and Blue Boar," which helps us to realize the value and capacity of an important inn of that period. We are told that it contains forty bedrooms, stabling for fifty-two horses, seven coach-houses, and a dry ride sixty yards long; also that it returns about £2,000 a year. In George Colman the younger's "Heir at Law," act i., scene 2, this house is said by one of the characters to be "in tumble downish kind of a condition," but it survived until 1864, when it made way for the Inns of Court Hotel.
A group of inns which remained more recently were Ridler's "Bell and Crown," the old "Bell," and the "Black Bull," all on the north side of Holborn. Of these, the most picturesque was the "Bell," about which I have been able to ascertain some curious facts. The earliest notice of it that has come to light was on the 14th of March, 1538, when William Barde sold a messuage with garden called the "Bell," in the parish of St. Andrew, Holborn, to Richard Hunt, citizen and girdler. The latter, who died in 1569, gave thirty sacks of charcoal yearly for ever, as a charge on the property, to be distributed to thirty poor persons of the parish. After various changes of ownership, in 1679-80 it passed into the hands of Ralph Gregge, and his grandson sold it in 1722 to Christ's Hospital. In the deed of sale three houses are mentioned and described as "formerly one great mansion-house or inn known as the Bell or Blue Bell." About two years before, the front of the premises facing Holborn had been rebuilt, when the sculptured arms of Gregge were let into the wall in front; these arms are now at the Guildhall Museum. The "Bell" became a coaching house of considerable reputation, that part of the business being about the year 1836 in the hands of Messrs. B. W. and H. Horne, who, as coach proprietors, were second only to William Chaplin. For many years, until finally closed in September, 1897, the house was managed by the Bunyer family. It was the last galleried inn on the Middlesex side of the water, the galleries being perhaps as old as the reign of Charles II. A still older portion was a cellar built of stone immediately to the left of the entrance, which might almost have been mediæval. The rest of the building seems to have dated from the early part of the eighteenth century. There is a sympathetic reference to the old "Bell" by William Black in his Strange Adventures of a Phæton. Another noteworthy "Bell" Inn was that in Carter Lane, whence Richard Quyney wrote in 1598 to his "loveing good ffrend and contreyman Mr. Willm Shackespere," the only letter addressed to our greatest poet which is known to exist. There is still a Bell yard connecting Carter Lane with Knightrider Street. The first scene of the Harlot's Progress, by Hogarth, is laid in front of an inn, with the sign of the "Bell" in Wood Street. Above the door are chequers.
A short distance west of the Holborn house was the "Crown" Inn, latterly Ridler's "Bell and Crown," destroyed about 1899. It had been a coaching centre, but years ago the yard was built over, and it flourished to the end as a quiet family hotel. Next to the "Bell" on the east side was the "Black Bull," the front of which, with the carved sign of a bull in a violent state of excitement, remained after the rest of the inn had disappeared, outliving its neighbour for a brief period. It was in existence for a couple of hundred years or more, but future generations will probably only remember it as the house where Mr. Lewson was taken ill, and placed under the tender mercies of Betsy Prig and Mrs. Gamp; whence also, when convalescent, he was assisted into a coach, Mould the undertaker eyeing him with regret as he felt himself baulked of a piece of legitimate business.
A few short years ago if, on leaving this group of Holborn inns, we had turned down Fetter Lane in the direction of Fleet Street, after passing two or three gabled buildings still standing on the right hand side, we should have come to another old hostelry called the "White Horse," of which there is a well-known coloured print from a drawing made by Pollard in 1814, with a coach in front called the Cambridge Telegraph. It gradually fell into decay, became partly a "pub" and partly a common lodging-house, and with its roomy stabling at the back was swept away in 1897-98. Most of the structure was of the eighteenth century, but there were remains of an earlier wooden building. Its northern boundary touched the precinct of Barnard's Inn, an inn of chancery, now disestablished and adapted for the purposes of the Mercers' School.
Continuing our course southward, a short walk would formerly have taken us to the "Bolt-in-Tun," I think the only coaching establishment in Fleet Street, which possessed so many taverns and coffee-houses. The inn was of ancient origin, the White Friars having had a grant of the "Hospitium vocatum Le Bolt en ton" as early as the year 1443. The sign is the well-known rebus on the name of Bolton, the bird-bolt through a tun or barrel, which was the device of a prior of St. Bartholomew's, Smithfield, and may still be seen in the church there, and at Canonbury, where the priors had a country house. The City Press for September 12th, 1882, announces the then impending destruction of the "Bolt-in-Tun," and in the following year we are told that although a remnant of it in Fleet Street exists as a booking office for parcels, by far the larger portion, represented chiefly by the Sussex Hotel, Bouverie Street, which bore on it the date 1692, has just disappeared.
Further east, on Ludgate Hill, La Belle Sauvage Yard, where Messrs. Cassell & Co. carry on their important business, marks the site of an historic house, and perpetuates an error of nomenclature. Its original title, as proved by a document of the year 1452, was "Savage's" Inn, otherwise called the "Bell on the Hoop," but in the seventeenth century a trade token was issued from here, having on it an Indian woman holding a bow and arrow, and in 1676 "Bell Sauvage" Inn, on Ludgate Hill, consisting of about forty rooms, with good cellarage and stabling for about one hundred horses, was to be let. The mistake is repeated in The Spectator, No. 28, where we are told of a beautiful girl who was found in the wilderness, and whose fame was perpetuated in a French romance. As we learn from Howe, in his continuation of Stow's Annals, on a seat outside this inn Sir Thomas Wyat rested, after failing in an attempt to enter the city during his ill-advised rebellion in the reign of Mary Tudor. From Lambarde we gather that this was one of the houses where plays were performed before the time of Shakespeare. Writing in 1576, he says, "Those who go to Paris Garden, the Bell Savage, or the Theatre to behold bear-baiting, interludes, or fence play, must not account of any pleasant spectacle unless first they pay one pennie at the gate, another at the entrie of the scaffold, and a third for quiet standing." Here, as at the "Cross Keys," Gracechurch Street, Bankes exhibited his horse, and here, in 1683, "a very strange beast called a Rhynoceros—the first that ever was in England," could be seen daily. Stow affirms the inn to have been given to the Cutlers' Company by Isabella Savage; but, in fact, the donor was John Craythorne, who conveyed the reversion of it to them in 1568. The sculptured elephant and castle representing their crest is still on a wall in La Belle Sauvage Yard. The inn, which has left its mark in the annals of coaching, was taken down in 1873.
A thoroughfare, formerly containing several fine mansions and various inns for travellers, was Aldersgate Street, the continuation of St. Martin's-le-Grand. There are allusions in print to the "Bell," the "George" (previously the "White Hart"), and to the "Cock" Inn, where, after years of wandering, Fynes Moryson arrived one Sunday morning in 1595; but these all passed away long ago. The last to linger in the neighbourhood was the "Bull and Mouth," St Martin's-le-Grand, finally called the "Queen's" Hotel, absorbed by the General Post Office in 1886. The name is generally supposed to be a corruption of Boulogne Mouth, the entrance to Boulogne Harbour, that town having been taken by Henry VIII. George Steevens, the Shakespearean commentator, seems to have suggested this, and his idea has been generally accepted; but it is more likely that our inn was identical with the house called in 1657 "the Mouth near Aldersgate in London, then the usual meeting-place for Quakers," to which the Body of John Lilburne was conveyed in August of that year. We learn from Ellwood's Autobiography that five years afterwards he was arrested at the "Bull and Mouth," Aldersgate. The house was at its zenith as a coaching centre in the early years of the nineteenth century, when Edward Sherman had become landlord. He rebuilt the old galleried house in 1830. When coaching for business purposes ceased to be, the gateway from St. Martin's-le-Grand was partially blocked up and converted into the main entrance, the inn continuing under its changed name for many years. The sculptured signs were not removed until the destruction of the building. One, which was over the main entrance, is a statuette of a Bull within a gigantic open Mouth; below are bunches of grapes; above, a bust of Edward VI. and the arms of Christ's Hospital, to which institution the ground belonged. Beneath is a tablet inscribed with the following doggerel rhyme:—
"Milo the Cretonian an ox slew with his fist,
And ate it up at one meal, ye Gods what a glorious twist."
Another version of the sign, the Mouth appearing below the Bull, was over what had been a back entrance to the yard in Angel Street. These signs are now both in the Guildhall Museum. I had almost overlooked one house, the "Castle and Falcon," Aldersgate, closed within the last few months, and now destroyed. The structure was uninteresting, but it stood on an old site—that of John Day's printing-house in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. At the present inn on April 12th, 1799, was founded the Church Missionary Society; here also its centenary was celebrated.
Besides being plentiful in the main thoroughfares, important inns, like the churches, were often crammed away in narrow and inconvenient lanes. This was the case with the "Oxford Arms" and the "Bell," both in Warwick Lane. The former was approached by a passage, being bounded on the west by the line of the old city wall, or by a later wall a few feet to the east of it, and touching Amen Corner on the south. It was a fine example of its kind. As was said by a writer in The Athenæum of May 20th, 1876, just before it was destroyed: