Note 121 — Chapter III · HERALDIC AND EMBLEMATIC SIGNS.
Reading edition
History of Musick.
[122] Harl. MSS. 5910, vol. i. fol. 193. The reader will be amused with the spelling of this extract from the original manuscript, written when Addison was penning “Spectators,” and many classic English compositions were issuing from the press. Old Mr Bagford was a genuine antiquary, and despised new hats, new coats, and anything approaching the new style of spelling, with other changes then being introduced.
[123] Misson’s Memoirs and Observations in his Travels over England. London, 1719.
[124] England is the country, par excellence, for gigantic dinners, amongst which agricultural repasts stand foremost; even that nuptial dinner of Camacho, at which honest Sancho Panza did such execution, would scarcely rank as a lunch beside the Homeric dinners of our farmers. In our times we have seen Soyer roast a whole ox for the Agricultural Society at Exeter; the details of this culinary feat are somewhat interesting: it was called a “baron with saddle back of beef à la magna charta, weighing 535 lbs., the joints being the whole length of the ox, rumps, rounds, loins, ribs, and shoulders to the neck. It was roasted in the open air within a temporary enclosure of brick work, the monster joint steaming and frizzling away over 216 jets of gas from pipes of an inch diameter, the whole being covered in with sheet iron; when in 5 hours the beef was dressed for 5 shillings.”—Hints for the Table.
[125] Various examples of it occur in the Banks Bills.
[126] Original Weekly Journal, March 29 to April 3, 1718.
[127] Banks Bills.
[128] Historical and Topographical Account of the Parish of Fulham, 1813, p. 271.
[129] Boswell’s Johnson, vol. iv. p. 60.
[130] Hawkins’s Life of Dr Johnson, p. 433.
[131] This corncutter was probably the antique statue of the boy picking a thorn out of his foot, and was usual with pedicures. See under the sign “Old pick my toe.”
[132] Diary of the Rev. John Ward, M.A., 1648-1679. London, 1839.
[133] Diary of Rev. John Ward, M.A., 1648-1679, p. 122.
[134] Memoirs of Charles Macklin, Esq. By J. F. Kirkman. Vol. ii. p. 419.
[135] “A dragon in the manner of a banner, of a certain red silk embroidered with gold; its tongue like a flaming fire must always seem to be moving; its eyes must be made of sapphire, or of some other stone suitable for that purpose.”
[136] Peter Langtoffe’s Chronicle of Robert of Brunne, p. 217.
[137] “The king’s place was between the Dragon and the standard.”
[138] Caxton’s Chronicle at the end of Polychronicon, lib. ult. chap. vi.
[139] Hist., lib. ix. cap. vi.
[140] Nat. Hist., lib. viii. cap. ii.
[141] Chronicle of the Grey Fryars, Camden Society, p. 19.
[142] Grub Street Journal, Sept. 2, 1736.
[143] Badges of Cognizance of Richard, Duke of York, written on a blank leaf at the beginning of Digby MS. 82. Bodleian Library, Oxford. Archæologia xvii. 1814.
[144] The Cat, William Catesby; the Rat, Sir Richard Ratcliffe; Lovell our dog, Lord Lovel.
[145] Sir Roger Twisden’s Commonplace Books, 1653, as quoted in extenso in Notes and Queries, Aug. 8, 1857. Mr James Thompson, in his “History of Leicester,” informs us that one man was hanged and a woman burned for this crime, and not seven persons capitally executed, according to the popular tradition.
[146] Harl. MS. 5910; of this printer Bagford says: “I do not find he prented many books, or at lest few of them have come to my hand.”
[147] Reginald Scot, The Discovery of Witchcraft, b. xii. ch. xviii. p. 268, 1584.
[148] Archæologia. vol. xxix. 1840.
[149] Aubrey, iii. 438.
[150] Owen Glendower also bore a lion rampant sable, “the black lion of Powyss;” his arms were Paly of eight, arg. and gules, over all a lion sable. The black lion was the royal ensign of his father Madoc ap Meredith, last sovereign prince of Powyss; he died at Winchester in 1160. The black lion consequently might sometimes be set up by Welshmen.
[151] Daily Courant, January 1, 1711.
[152] “And observe that such a white feather was borne on his crest by Edward the eldest son of K. Edward; and this feather he conquered from the King of Bohemia whom he killed at Cressy in France, and so he assumed the feather, called the ostrich feather, which that most noble king had formerly worn on his crest.”—Sloane MSS. No. 56.
[153] Added to this were two vultures, sprinkled all over with finely-gilt linden leaves. Therefore I know this is King John of Bohemia.
[154] See the engraving in Pennant’s History of London, vol. i. p. 100.
[155] Lyson’s Berkshire, vol. i. p. 442.
[156] London Gazette, Sept. 18-21, 1682.
[157] London Gazette, March 12, 1672-3.
[158] Little London Directory for 1677, the oldest printed lists of bankers and merchants in London, reprinted, with historical introduction by John Camden Hotten, 1863.
[159] A very amusing French author of the time of Louis XIV., celebrated for his witty letters.
[160] “Let England amuse herself with idle fancies, and imagine that her kings are kings of France; but that there be Frenchmen who are ignorant enough, or bad subjects enough, to quarter the arms of France with those of England, that is a thing which such zealous subjects as M. d’Argenson, and the other police magistrates, ought by no means to permit.”
[161] Thos. Delaune’s Present State of London, 1681.
[162] These badges consisted of the master’s arms, crest, or device, either on a small silver shield or embroidered on a piece of cloth, and fastened on the left arm of servants. A ballad in the Roxburgh collection thus alludes to this custom:[163]—
“The nobles of our Land were much delighted then, To have at their command a Crue of lustie Men, Which by their Coats were knowne, of Tawnie, Red, or Blue; With crests on their sleeves showne when this old cap was new.”
[163]
“Time’s alteration; or, The old man’s rehearsall what brave days he knew A great while agone, when his old cap was new.”
Rox. Ball., i. fol. 407.
Stow gives us a good picture of a great nobleman’s retinue in the good old time, before the nobility took to hotel-keeping:—“The late Earl of Oxford, father to him that now liveth, has been noted within these forty years, to have ridden into this city and so to his house by London Stone, with eighty gentlemen, in a livery of Reading tawny, and chains of gold about their necks, before him, and one hundred tall yeomen in the like livery to follow him, without chains, but all having his cognisance of the blue boar embroidered on their left shoulder.” These badges fell into disuse in the reign of James I.
[164] Wright’s Domestic Manners and Sentiments in England during the Middle Ages, p. 333.
[165] “At Plombières he ordered me to leave with his hostess, according to the fashion of the country, an escutcheon of his arms in wood, which a painter of that town made for a crown and the hostess had it carefully hung upon the wall outside the house.”
[166] Harl. MSS., 5910, vol. ii. p. 167.
[167] Badge.
[168] Liveries.
[169] Portcullises.
[170] Leopard.
[171] Wiltshire.
[172] A transcript adds to these the names of Archbishop Parker and Jugge.
[173] This statement is modified lower down.
[174] Rivers.
[175] Raleigh.
[176] Silver.
[177] The Union Arms in Panton Street, Haymarket, was the public-house of Cribb, the pugilist champion, a fact commemorated by a poet of the prize ring, in all probability a better “fist” at smashing than at “wooing the Muses:”—
“The champion I see is again on the list, His standard—the Union Arms. His customers still he will serve with his fist, But without creating alarms. Instead of a floorer, he tips them a glass, Divested of joking or fib; Then, ‘lads of the fancy,’ don’t Tom’s house pass, But take a hand at the game of Cribb.”
[178] Sylvanus Morgan’s Sphere of Gentry. London, 1661.
[179] There is a sign of the Green Lion in Short Street, Cambridge, the only one I have ever seen.
[180] Fuller, in voce Warwickshire.
[181] Delaune’s Present State of London, 1682.
[182] Printed in the Journal of Brit. Archæolog. Assoc., vol. vii. p. 71.
[183] Taylor’s Pennylesse Pilgrimage, 1630.
[184] Catherine Street, in the Strand, was a disreputable thoroughfare in the last century. Gay alludes to it in his “Trivia:”—
“Oh, may thy virtue guard thee through the roads Of Drury’s mazy courts and dark abodes! The harlots’ guileful path, who nightly stand Where Catherine Street descends into the Strand. With empty bandbox she delights to range, And feigns a distant errand from the ‘Change. Nay, she will oft the Quaker’s hood profane, And trudge demure the rounds of Drury Lane.”
Tom Brown describes, con amore, the wickedness of that part of the town. Catherine Street at present is not quite so bad as formerly, but the hundred of Drury Lane cannot by any means be called the most virtuous part of London.
[185] Art of Living in London. Printed for William Griffin, at the Garrickshead, in Catherine Street, in the Strand, 1768.
[186] Pennant’s Account of London, 1813, p. 618.
[187] Little London Directory for 1677, the oldest list of London merchants.
[188] “Buy these books, which Richard Fax the printer has printed with the wedge, with the greatest care. This little book was printed at London, in St Paul’s Churchyard, at the Maidenhead, in the year 1509, on the 12th of December.” The printing with the wedge was the first attempt of the art, whence the books produced in this manner are sometimes called incunables.
[189] Pleasant Conceits of old Hobson the Londoner, 1607. Hobson’s answer proves the truth of Misson’s remark, that there were no inscriptions on the London signs to tell what they represented, otherwise the maid could not have been passed off as a widow.
[190] Guillim’s Display of Heraldry, folio, p. 197.
[191] The Vicar of Bray, the hero of Butler’s comic poem, appears to have been a certain Simon Aleyn, ob. 1583; he was by turns, and as the times suited, Roman Catholic and Protestant, in the times of Henry VIII., Edward VI., Queen Mary, and Queen Elizabeth.
[192] The original edition of the Spectator contained bona fide advertisements like any other newspaper.
[193] In 1847, Mr Crofton Croker read a paper at a meeting of the Brit. Arch. Assoc. at Warwick, “On the probability of the Golden Lion Inn at Fulham having been frequented by Shakespeare about the year 1595 and 1596,” in which the possible genealogy of this pipe is given.
[194] Pepys here makes a mistake, for he tells as afterwards, July 4, when he went to the Session House to hear the trial, that Basil was the murdered man.
[195] Caulfield’s Memoirs of Remarkable Persons. A curious epitaph upon her occurs in the Weekly Oracle, February 1, 1735; unfortunately it is too highly spiced to be introduced here.