Note 14 — Chapter VIII
Reading edition
Since our tramp in Dickens-Land, Messrs. Winch and Sons have, with liberality and good taste, restored the old sign at this historic hostelry with which the memory of Charles Dickens is associated. It has been suggested that the sign may possibly have had its origin from the Battle of Agincourt fought on the day of "Saints Crispin-Crispian," 25th October, 1415. Victories in more recent times have been thus commemorated on sign-boards, such as the Vigo expedition, and the fights at Portobello, Trafalgar, Waterloo, Alma, and elsewhere, and the heroes who won them thus celebrated.
The sign, which is very well painted, represents the patron saints of the shoe-making fraternity, the holy brothers, Crispin and Crispian, at work on their cobbler's bench. The legend runs that it was at Soissons, in the year 287, while they were so employed "labouring with their hands," that they were seized by the emissaries of the Emperor Maximinian, and led away to torture and to death. The sign is understood to have been faithfully copied from a well-known work preserved to this day, at the church of St. Pantaléon at Troyes.—Abstract of a note in the Rochester and Chatham Journal, October 5th, 1889.