Another version of the sign, which is said to have been put up about the beginning of the century, was over the entrance to the Great Northern Railway receiving-house in Angel Street, formerly the back entrance to the inn yard. This, together with the Queen’s Hotel and all the ground as far as Bull and Mouth Street north, has now been taken by the Post-Office authorities; the amount of compensation paid to the Great Northern Company having been £31,350. The Bull and Mouth was one of the most famous coaching inns. Strype, writing in 1720, describes it as ‘large and well built, and of a good resort by those that bring Bone Lace, where the shopkeepers and others come to buy it.’ He also tells us that ‘in this part of St. Martin’s is a noted Meeting House of the Quakers, called the Bull and Mouth, where they met long before the Fire.’ The name is generally supposed to be a corruption of Boulogne Mouth, the entrance to Boulogne Harbour, that town having been taken by King Henry VIII. This elucidation is said to have originated with George Steevens, who has been called a mischievous wag in literary matters. Boyne thinks it might have been originally the Bowl and Mouth, both known London signs. A seventeenth-century trade token was issued from a house with the sign of the Mouth in Bishopsgate Street, and the Mouth appears in the rhyming list of taverns, which is to be found in Heywood’s ‘Rape of Lucrece.’ Stow mentions the custom of presenting a bowl of ale at St. Giles’s Hospital to prisoners on their way from the City to Tyburn, and according to Parton there was a Bowl public-house at St. Giles’s. Bowl Yard, a narrow court on the south side of High Street, St. Giles’s, disappeared about 1846. Mr. Wheatley, points out in ‘London Past and Present’ that our inn is probably identical with ‘the house called the Mouth, near Aldersgate in London--then the usual meeting place for Quakers,’ to which the body of John Lilburne was conveyed on his death, August 29, 1657. Five years afterwards, namely on October 26, 1662, it appears from Ellwood’s ‘Autobiography’ that he was arrested at a Quakers’ meeting held at the _Bull and Mouth_, Aldersgate, and confined till December in the old Bridewell, Fleet Street.