Club Life of London Volume Ii Part 10

In _Look about You_, 1600, we read that "the drawers kept sugar folded up in paper, ready for those who called for _sack_;" and we further find in another old tract, that the custom existed of bringing two cups of _silver_ in case the wine should be wanted diluted; and this was done by rose-water and sugar, generally about a pennyworth. A sharper in the _Bellman of London_, described as having decoyed a countryman to a tavern, "calls for two pintes of sundry wines, the drawer setting the wine with _two cups_, as the custome is, the sharper tastes of one pinte, no matter which, and finds fault with the wine, saying, "tis too hard, but rose-water and sugar would send it downe merrily'--and for that purpose takes up one of the cups, telling the stranger he is well acquainted with the boy at the barre, and can have two-pennyworth of rose-water for a penny of him; and so steps from his seate: the stranger suspects no harme, because the fawne guest leaves his cloake at the end of the table behind him,--but the other takes good care not to return, and it is then found that he hath stolen ground, and out-leaped the stranger more feet than he can recover in haste, for the cup is leaped with him, for which the wood-c.o.c.k, that is taken in the springe, must pay fifty shillings, or three pounds, and hath nothing but an old threadbare cloake not worth two groats to make amends for his losses."

Bishop Earle, who wrote in the first half of the seventeenth century, has left this "character" of a tavern of his time. "A tavern is a degree, or (if you will) a pair of stairs above an alehouse, where men are drunk with more credit and apology. If the vintner's nose be at the door, it is a sign sufficient, but the absence of this is supplied by the ivy-bush. It is a broacher of more news than hogsheads, and more jests than news, which are sucked up here by some spungy brain, and from thence squeezed into a comedy. Men come here to make merry, but indeed make a noise, and this music above is answered with a clinking below. The drawers are the civilest people in it, men of good bringing up, and howsoever we esteem them, none can boast more justly of their high calling. 'Tis the best theatre of natures, where they are truly acted, not played, and the business as in the rest of the world up and down, to wit, from the bottom of the cellar to the great chamber. A melancholy man would find here matter to work upon, to see heads, as brittle as gla.s.ses, and often broken; men come hither to quarrel, and come here to be made friends; and if Plutarch will lend me his simile, it is even Telephus's sword that makes wounds, and cures them. It is the common consumption of the afternoon, and the murderer or the maker away of a rainy day. It is the torrid zone that scorches the face, and tobacco the gunpowder that blows it up. Much harm would be done if the charitable vintner had not water ready for the flames. A house of sin you may call it, but not a house of darkness, for the candles are never out; and it is like those countries far in the north, where it is as clear at midnight as at mid-day. After a long sitting it becomes like a street in a dashing shower, where the spouts are flushing above, and the conduits running below, etc. To give you the total reckoning of it, it is the busy man's recreation, the idle man's business, the melancholy man's sanctuary, the stranger's welcome, the inns-of-court man's entertainment, the scholar's kindness, and the citizen's courtesy. It is the study of sparkling wits, and a cup of comedy their book, whence we leave them."

The conjunction of vintner and victualler had now become common, and would require other accommodation than those mentioned by the Bishop, as is shown in Ma.s.singer's _New Way to pay Old Debts_, where Justice Greedy makes Tapwell's keeping no victuals in his house as an excuse for pulling down his sign:

"Thou never hadst in thy house to stay men's stomachs, A piece of Suffolk cheese, or gammon of bacon, Or any esculent as the learned call it, For their emolument, but _sheer drink only_.

For which gross fault I here do d.a.m.n thy licence, Forbidding thee henceforth to tap or draw; For instantly I will in mine own person, Command the constable to pull down thy sign, And do't before I eat."

And the decayed vinter, who afterwards applies to Wellborn for payment of his tavern score, answers, on his inquiring who he is:

"A decay'd vintner, Sir; That might have thriv'd, but that your worship broke me With trusting you with muscadine and eggs, And _five-pound suppers_, with your after-drinkings, When you lodged upon the Bankside."

Dekker tells us, near this time, of regular ordinaries of three kinds: 1st. An ordinary of the longest reckoning, whither most of your courtly gallants do resort: 2nd. A twelvepenny ordinary, frequented by the justice of the peace, a young Knight; and a threepenny ordinary, to which your London usurer, your stale bachelor, and your thrifty attorney, doth resort. Then Dekker tells us of a custom, especially in the City, to send presents of wine from one room to another, as a complimentary mark of friendship. "Inquire," directs he, "what gallants sup in the next room; and if they be of your acquaintance, do not, after the City fashion, send them in a pottle of wine and your name." Then, we read of Master Brook sending to the Castle Inn at Windsor, a morning draught of sack.

Ned Ward, in the _London Spy_, 1709, describes several famous taverns, and among them the Rose, anciently, the Rose and Crown, as famous for good wine. "There was no parting," he says, "without a gla.s.s; so we went into the Rose Tavern in the Poultry, where the wine, according to its merit, had justly gained a reputation; and there, in a snug room, warmed with brash and f.a.ggot, over a quart of good claret, we laughed over our night's adventure."

"From hence, pursuant to my friend's inclination, we adjourned to the sign of the Angel, in Fenchurch-street, where the vintner, like a double-dealing citizen, condescended as well to draw carmen's comfort as the consolatory juice of the vine.

"Having at the King's Head well freighted the hold of our vessels with excellent food and delicious wine, at a small expense, we scribbled the following lines with chalk upon the wall." (See page 98.)

The tapster was a male vendor, not "a woman who had the care of the tap," as Tyrwhitt states. In the 17th century ballad, _The Times_, occurs:

"The bar-boyes and the tapsters Leave drawing of their beere, And running forth in haste they cry, 'See, where Mull'd Sack comes here!'"

The ancient drawers and tapsters were now superseded by the barmaid, and a number of waiters: Ward describes the barmaid as "all ribbon, lace, and feathers, and making such a noise with her bell and her tongue together, that had half-a-dozen paper-mills been at work within three yards of her, they'd have signified no more to her clamorous voice than so many lutes to a drum, which alarmed two or three nimble fellows aloft, who shot themselves downstairs with as much celerity as a mountebank's mercury upon a rope from the top of a church-steeple, every one charged with a mouthful of coming, coming, coming." The barmaid (generally the vintner's daughter) is described as "bred at the dancing-school, becoming a bar well, stepping a minuet finely, playing sweetly on the virginals, 'John come kiss me now, now, now,'

and as proud as she was handsome."

Tom Brown sketches a flirting barmaid of the same time, "as a fine lady that stood pulling a rope, and screaming like a peac.o.c.k against rainy weather, pinned up by herself in a little pew, all people bowing to her as they pa.s.sed by, as if she was a G.o.ddess set up to be worshipped, armed with the chalk and sponge, (which are the princ.i.p.al badges that belong to that honourable station you beheld her in,) was the _barmaid_."

Of the nimbleness of the waiters, Ward says in another place--"That the chief use he saw in the Monument was, for the improvement of vintners' boys and drawers, who came every week to exercise their supporters, and learn the tavern trip, by running up to the balcony and down again."

Owen Swan, at the Black Swan tavern, Bartholomew Lane, is thus apostrophized by Tom Brown for the goodness of his wine:--

"Thee, _Owen_, since the G.o.d of wine has made Thee steward of the gay carousing trade, Whose art decaying nature still supplies, Warms the faint pulse, and sparkles in our eyes.

Be bountiful like him, bring t'other _flask_, Were the stairs wider we would have the _cask_.

This pow'r we from the G.o.d of wine derive, Draw such as this, and I'll p.r.o.nounce thou'lt live."

THE BEAR AT THE BRIDGE FOOT.

This celebrated tavern, situated in Southwark, on the west side of the foot of London Bridge, opposite the end of St. Olave's or Tooley-street, was a house of considerable antiquity. We read in the accounts of the Steward of Sir John Howard, March 6th, 1463-4 (Edward IV.), "Item, payd for red wyn at the Bere in Southwerke, iij_d._"

Garrard, in a letter to Lord Strafford, dated 1633 intimates that "all back-doors to taverns on the Thames are commanded to be shut up, only the Bear at Bridge Foot is exempted, by reason of the pa.s.sage to Greenwich," which Mr. Burn suspects to have been "the avenue or way called Bear Alley."

The Cavaliers' Ballad on the funeral pageant of Admiral Deane, killed June 2nd, 1653, while pa.s.sing by water to Henry the Seventh's Chapel, Westminster, has the following allusion:--

"From Greenwich towards the Bear at Bridge foot, He was wafted with wind that had water to't, But I think they brought the devil to boot, Which n.o.body can deny."

Pepys was told by a waterman, going through the bridge, 24th Feb.

1666-7, that the mistress of the Beare Tavern, at the Bridge foot, "did lately fling herself into the Thames, and drown herself."

The Bear must have been a characterless house, for among its gallantries was the following, told by Wycherley to Major Pack, "just for the oddness of the thing." It was this: "There was a house at the Bridge Foot where persons of better condition used to resort for pleasure and privacy. The liquor the ladies and their lovers used to drink at these meetings was canary; and among other compliments the gentlemen paid their mistresses, this it seems was always one, to take hold of the bottom of their smocks, and pouring the wine through that filter, feast their imaginations with the thought of what gave the zesto, and so drink a health to the toast."

The Bear Tavern was taken down in December, 1761, when the labourers found gold and silver coins, of the time of Elizabeth, to a considerable value. The wall that enclosed the tavern was not cleared away until 1764, when the ground was cleared and levelled quite up to Pepper Alley stairs. There is a Token of the Bear Tavern, in the Beaufoy cabinet, which, with other rare Southwark tokens, was found under the floors in taking down St. Olave's Grammar School in 1839.

MERMAID TAVERNS.

The celebrated Mermaid, in Bread-street, with the history of "the Mermaid Club," has been described in Vol. I. pp. 8-10; its interest centres in this famous company of Wits.

There was another Mermaid, in Cheapside, next to Paul's Gate, and still another in Cornhill. Of the latter we find in Burn's Beaufoy Catalogue, that the vintner, buried in St. Peter's, Cornhill, in 1606, "gave forty shillings yearly to the parson for preaching four sermons every year, so long as the lease of the Mermaid, in Cornhill, (the tavern so called,) should endure. He also gave to the poor of the said parish thirteen penny loaves every Sunday, during the aforesaid lease." There are tokens of both these taverns in the Beaufoy Collection.

THE BOAR'S HEAD TAVERN.

This celebrated Shakspearean tavern was situated in Great Eastcheap, and is first mentioned in the time of Richard II.; the scene of the revels of Falstaff and Henry V., when Prince of Wales, in Shakspeare's Henry IV., Part 2. Stow relates a riot in "the cooks'

dwellings" here on St. John's eve, 1410, by Princes John and Thomas.

The tavern was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666, but was rebuilt in two years, as attested by a boar's head cut in stone, with the initials of the landlord, I. T., and the date 1668, above the first-floor window. This sign-stone is now in the Guildhall library.

The house stood between Small-alley and St. Michael's-lane, and in the rear looked upon St. Michael's churchyard, where was buried a _drawer_, or waiter, at the tavern, d. 1720: in the church was interred John Rhodoway, "Vintner at the Bore's Head," 1623.

Maitland, in 1739, mentions the Boar's Head, as "the chief tavern in London" under the sign. Goldsmith (_Essays_), Boswell (_Life of Dr.

Johnson_), and Washington Irving (_Sketch-book_), have idealized the house as the identical place which Falstaff frequented, forgetting its destruction in the Great Fire. The site of the Boar's Head is very nearly that of the statue of King William IV.

In 1834, Mr. Kempe, F.S.A., exhibited to the Society of Antiquaries a carved oak figure of Sir John Falstaff, in the costume of the 16th century; it had supported an ornamental bracket over one side of the door of the Boar's Head, a figure of Prince Henry sustaining that on the other. The Falstaff was the property of one Shelton, a brazier, whose ancestors had lived in the shop he then occupied in Great Eastcheap, since the Great Fire. He well remembered the last Shakspearean grand dinner-party at the Boar's Head, about 1784: at an earlier party, Mr. Wilberforce was present. A boar's head, with tusks, which had been suspended in a room of the tavern, perhaps the Half-Moon or Pomegranate, (see Henry IV. act ii. sc. 4,) at the Great Fire, fell down with the ruins of the house, and was conveyed to Whitechapel Mount, where, many years after, it was recovered, and identified with its former locality. At a public house, No. 12, Miles-lane, was long preserved a tobacco-box, with a painting of the original Boar's Head Tavern on the lid.[29]

In High-street, Southwark, in the rear of Nos. 25 and 26, was formerly the _Boar's Head Inn_, part of Sir John Falstolf's benefaction to Magdalen College, Oxford. Sir John was one of the bravest generals in the French wars, under the fourth, fifth, and sixth Henries; but he is not the Falstaff of Shakspeare. In the _Reliquiae Hearnianae_, edited by Dr. Bliss, is the following entry relative to this bequest:--

"1721. June 2.--The reason why they cannot give so good an account of the benefaction of Sir John Fastolf to Magd.

Coll. is, because he gave it to the founder, and left it to his management, so that 'tis suppos'd 'twas swallow'd up in his own estate that he settled it upon the college. However, the college knows this, that the _Boar's Head_ in Southwark, which was then an inn, and still retains the name, tho'

divided into several tenements (which bring the college about 150_l._ per ann.), was part of Sir John's gift."

The above property was for many years sublet to the family of the author of the present Work, at the rent of 150_l._ per annum; the cellar, finely vaulted, and excellent for wine, extended beneath the entire court, consisting of two rows of tenements, and two end houses, with galleries, the entrance being from the High-street. The premises were taken down for the New London Bridge approaches. There was also a noted Boar's Head in Old Fish-street.

Can he forget who has read Goldsmith's nineteenth Essay, his reverie at the Boar's Head?--when, having confabulated with the landlord till long after "the watchman had gone twelve," and suffused in the potency of his wine a mutation in his ideas, of the person of the host into that of Dame Quickly, mistress of the tavern in the days of Sir John, is promptly effected, and the liquor they were drinking seemed shortly converted into sack and sugar. Mrs. Quickly's recital of the history of herself and Doll Tearsheet, whose frailties in the flesh caused their being both sent to the house of correction, charged with having allowed the famed Boar's Head to become a low brothel; her speedy departure to the world of Spirits; and Falstaff's impertinences as affecting Madame Proserpine; are followed by an enumeration of persons who had held tenancy of the house since her time. The last hostess of note was, according to Goldsmith's account, Jane Rouse, who, having unfortunately quarrelled with one of her neighbours, a woman of high repute in the parish for sanct.i.ty, but as jealous as Chaucer's Wife of Bath, was by her accused of witchcraft, taken from her own bar, condemned, and executed accordingly!--These were times, indeed, when women could not scold in safety. These and other prudential apophthegms on the part of Dame Quickly, seem to have dissolved Goldsmith's stupor of ideality; on his awaking, the landlord is really the landlord, and not the hostess of a former day, when "Falstaff was in fact an agreeable old fellow, forgetting age, and showing the way to be young at sixty-five. Age, care, wisdom, reflection, begone! I give you to the winds. Let's have t'other bottle. Here's to the memory of Shakspeare, Falstaff, and all the merry men of Eastcheap."[30]

FOOTNOTES:

[27] This negatives a belief common in our day that a Covent Garden tavern was the first divided into rooms for guests.

[28] A successor of Francis, a waiter at the Boar's Head, in the last century, had a tablet with an inscription in St. Michael's Crooked-lane churchyard, just at the back of the tavern; setting forth that he died, "drawer at the Boar's Head Tavern, in Great Eastcheap,"

and was noted for his honesty and sobriety; in that--

"Tho' nurs'd among full hogsheads he defied The charms of wine, as well as others' pride."

He also practised the singular virtue of drawing good wine and of taking care to "fill his pots," as appears by the closing lines of the inscription:--

"Ye that on Bacchus have a like dependance, Pray copy Bob in measure and attendance.'"

[29] _Curiosities of London_, p. 265.