That they have eaten with the stubble goose,
For in thy shop is many a fly loose."
Footnote 1: [(return)]
A sole
But these restaurants were not long confined to one locality. From a very early date, owing perhaps to its proximity to the Tower and the Thames, East Cheap was famed for its houses of entertainment. The Dagger in Cheap is mentioned in "A Hundred Merry Tales," 1526. The Boar is historical. It was naturally at the East-end, in London proper, that the flood-tide, as it were, of tavern life set in, among the seafarers, in the heart of industrial activity; and the anecdotes and glimpses which we enjoy show, just what might have been guessed, that these houses often became scenes of riotous excess and debauch. Lydgate's ballad of "London Lickpenny" helps one to imagine what such resorts must have been in the first part of the fifteenth century. It is almost permissible to infer that the street contained, in addition to the regular inns, an assortment of open counters, where the commodities on sale were cried aloud for the benefit of the passer-by; for he says:—
"When I hied me into East Cheap:
One cries ribs of beef, and many a pie:
Pewter pots they clattered on a heap;
There was harp, fife, and sautry."
The mention of pewter is noteworthy, because the Earl of Northumberland ate his dinner off wood in 1572. Pewter plates had not long been given up when I joined the Inner Temple in 1861.
There is a still more interesting allusion in the interlude of the "World and the Child," 1522, where Folly is made to say:—