Semi-religious signs such as the _Angel_, _Star_ and _Mitre_ are not always monastic, nor need they imply pre-reformation origin. The Angel at Islington is, comparatively speaking, a mushroom upstart. Under the sign of the _Angel_, Jacobs, a Jew, opened in 1650 one of the first coffee-houses in the parish of St. Peter, Oxford. A pious Roundhead might find chapter and verse for the sign and gloat over the conceit of entertaining an Angel--perhaps not unawares. Puritan sects have been known to give the official title of “Angel” to their itinerant preachers. The _Cock Tavern_, in Fleet Street, in spite of the splendid gilt chanticleer (generally attributed to Grinling Gibbons) has no connection with St. Peter. An advertisement, printed in the _Intelligence_ of 1665, shows that its old name was the _Cock and Bottle_. Cock is still used in some parts of the country for the spigot, or tap in a barrel; and the sign was simply a short way of informing the bibulous that they could obtain here ale both on draught and in bottle. A monastic inn far exceeding in world-wide fame all others, is that _Tabard Inn_ in the Borough, whence five hundred years ago thirty merry pilgrims set forth on a springtide morning on their three days’ journey along the old Watling Street to Canterbury. The _Tabard_ was a speculation of the Abbot of Hyde, Winchester, and no doubt a profitable one, for its landlords were always men of character and substance who would attract guests of good class. Harry Bailey, Chaucer’s friend, represented Southwark in two successive parliaments, and another landlord, William Rutton, sat in Parliament for East Grinstead in 1529. Built in 1307, together with a hostel for the clergy of the monastery, it remained in much the same condition as when Chaucer sang its praises until about 1602. The stone-coloured wooden gallery, in front of which hung a picture of the Canterbury Pilgrimage, attributed to Blake, and the so-called “Pilgrim’s room” were probably of this period; the rest was rebuilt after the great fire of Southwark, 1676. Twenty years ago all was demolished, and a gin-shop on its site of modern, vulgar red-brick mock gothic absurdly claims the title of “_The Old Tabard_.”