"More great than human now and more August,
New deified she from her fires does rise:
Her widening streets on new foundations trust,
And, opening, into larger parts she flies."
It may be observed that Augusta was the Roman name for London.
Now of the old stone signs of London yet extant, one or two only bear date anterior to the Great Fire. Many of those which still remain, fixed either on the outside walls or within the houses they originally marked, are undated, but their age may be guessed with a tolerable degree of accuracy. It is also known that the custom of denoting houses by carved stone signs built into the outer walls did not come into general use until the rebuilding of the city subsequent to the year 1666.
The inconvenience of the old swinging signs, which blocked the daylight, and which, by their creaking noises, made day and night alike hideous, had long been felt—nay, more, their danger to passers-by, when wind and decay had caused a downfall, had been not a few times painfully apparent. Hence the Act of Charles II., which forbade swinging signboards, was both wise and salutary. The signboards, however, died hard, and prints as late as the middle of the eighteenth century show the streets full of them. But signs had their use in those days of unnumbered streets, and it was not until the numbering of the houses was enforced that the quaint, historic, and, in some cases, even highly artistic, landmarks vanished.
As years have rolled by, the stone signs themselves, built though they were into the walls of the houses, have in a great measure disappeared. Some are luckily preserved in the Guildhall Library Museum, others are in private hands, many have been carted away as rubbish during rebuilding, and only a few now remain in situ. It is with these few that this paper is now concerned, and of which illustrations are given.
BOY AND PANYER.
The use of the curious sign known as the "Boy and Pannier," in Panyer-alley, is threefold. It was a street sign, a trade sign, and also, it would seem, a landmark. Stow, writing in 1598, mentions a street sign there, probably the upper portion only of the present sign. He writes, "... Is another passage out of Pater Noster row, and is called, of such a sign, Panyer-Alley, which cometh out into the north over against St. Martins Lane." Along this alley the bakers' boys were wont to sit, with their baskets or panniers of bread exposed for sale, the sale of loaves at the bakers' shops for some reasons being prohibited by law. On the lower slab there yet remains a barely legible inscription, which in modern English runs thus:—
When you have sought the city round,
Yet still this is the highest ground.
August 26, 1688.