At the corner of Charlotte Street and the Blackfriars Road there is a figure of a dog overturning a three-legged iron pot, in its eagerness to get at the contents; this is the sign of a wholesale ironmonger’s establishment said to date from 1783. The Dog’s Head in the Pot, as it is called, seems, of late years at any rate, to have been usually adopted by members of this trade, because the vessel represented is of iron. The sign is said to indicate a dirty, slovenly housewife. Larwood and Hotten mention a coarse woodcut of the beginning of last century (to judge from the costumes, copied from an older original) which represents two old women in a disorderly room or kitchen. One of them wipes a plate with the bushy tail of a large dog whose head is buried in a pot. Under it are the lines: ‘All sluts behold, take view of me, Your own good husbandry to see.’ A Dutch saying, to anyone late for dinner, is that he will find the dog in the pot; in other words, that the remains of the dinner have been handed over to the dog to finish. The Dog’s Head in the Pot is a very old London sign, being mentioned in a tract from the press of Wynkyn de Worde called ‘Cocke Lorell’s Bote.’ The person who dwelt at this sign was therein described as ‘Annys Angry with the croked buttock--by her crafte a breche maker.’ A later notice occurs in the will (dated September 3, 1563) of Thomas Johnson, citizen and haberdasher, of London, who gave £13 4s. annually to the highways between Barkway and Dog’s Head in the Pot, otherwise called ‘Horemayd,’ probably a house of entertainment in the parish of Great or Little Hormead, in Hertfordshire, by the side of the road from Barkway to London. At a house in Westgate Street, Gloucester, some beautifully carved Tudor panels have lately come to light. One of them has on it a dog or leopard eating out of a three-legged pot. A seventeenth-century trade-token, issued from Red Cross Street, and another from Old Street, St. Luke’s, have the device of the Dog’s Head in the Pot.