Club Life of London, Vol. 2 (of 2): With Anecdotes of the Clubs, Coffee-Houses and Taverns of the Metropolis During the 17th, 18th, and 19th CenturiesTimbs, John
History
Club Life of London, Vol. 2 (of 2): With Anecdotes of the Clubs, Coffee-Houses and Taverns of the Metropolis During the 17th, 18th, and 19th Centuries
Timbs, John
Clubs -- England -- London; Literary landmarks -- England -- London; London (England) -- Social life and customs
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]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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