London (England) -- Antiquities; London (England) -- History
Of equal note was the "Spread Eagle," the site of which has mostly been
absorbed by the extension of Leadenhall Market. Like the "Cross Keys,"
it was burnt in the Great Fire, but rebuilt in the old style with
an ample galleried yard. In the basement some mediæval arches still
remained. At the "Spread Eagle" that original writer George Borrow
had been staying with his future wife, Mrs. Mary Clarke, and various
friends, when they were married at St. Peter's Church, Cornhill, on
April 23rd, 1840, her daughter, Henrietta, signing the register. Before
its destruction in 1865 it had been for some time a receiving office
of Messrs. Chaplin and Horne. The site, of about 1,200 square feet,
was sold for no less a sum than £95,000. Another Gracechurch inn, the
"Tabard," which long ago disappeared, had, like the immortal hostelry
in Southwark, become the "Talbot," and its site is marked by Talbot
Court.
In Bishopsgate Street Within three galleried inns lingered long enough
to have been often seen by the writer. These were the "Bull," the
"Green Dragon," and the "Four Swans," each with something of a history,
and to them might be added the picturesque, though less important,
"Vine" and the "Flower Pot," from which last house a seventeenth
century trade token was issued. The "Bull," the most southern of these
inns, all of which were on the west side of the highway, was at least
as old as the latter part of the fifteenth century, for in one of the
chronicles of London lately edited by Mr. C. L. Kingsford, I find
it, under the date 1498, associated with a painful incident--namely,
the execution of the son of a cordwainer, "dwellyng at the Bulle in
Bisshoppesgate Strete," for calling himself the Earl of Warwick. Hall
gives his name as Ralph Wilford. Anthony Bacon, elder brother of
Francis, during the year 1594 hired a lodging in Bishopsgate Street,
but the fact of its being near the "Bull," where plays and interludes
were performed, so troubled his mother that for her sake he removed to
Chelsea. Shortly afterwards, as may be learnt from _Tarlton's Jests_,
the old drama called "The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth" was
here played, "wherein the judge was to take a boxe on the eare, and
because he was absent that should take the blow, Tarlton himselfe, ever
forward to please, tooke upon him to play the judge, besides his own
part of the clown." The "Bull" was the house of call of old Hobson, the
carrier, to whose rigid rule about the letting of his saddle horses we
are supposed to owe the phrase, "Hobson's Choice." Milton wrote his
epitaph in the well-known lines beginning:--
"Here lies old Hobson; Death hath broke his girt,
And here, alas! hath laid him in the dirt."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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