Taverns had become very numerous, not only in towns and villages, but also by the roadside. They were known by a garland or bush hanging out—hence the saying, “Good wine needs no bush;” and the publicans do not seem to have enjoyed a high reputation. The writer whom we have so often quoted tells us that the taverns were the haunts of gamblers, and that the “taverner” took articles of dress in pledge for drink.[246] (So there has been a division of labour, it seems, in our day in this as in every other branch of human industry!) There, too, indecent songs were sung, and those who frequented them were made drunk by dissolute women and plundered. A manuscript of about the year 1460 warns the reader to— “Use no tavernys where be jestis and fablis, Syngyng of lewde ballettes, rondelettes, or virolais.”[247] The female publicans or “alewives” were no better than the men, and we are told that there is still a carving in a seat in Ludlow Church which represents Satan carrying off the alewife, with her gay head-dress and false measure; and in the same church there is another carving of a mediæval tapster drawing ale. This account of the taverns is quite borne out by the religious records of the period. Priests are warned, time after time, not to frequent such places, which are spoken of as being unfit for respectable people to visit. And yet it would appear that they were sometimes kept by priests themselves; for in 1255, Walter, Bishop of Durham, forbids “those in holy orders that they be not drunkards nor keep taverns, lest they die an eternal death.”[248] And, finally, if Shakspeare is to be considered a trustworthy authority concerning the manners of the times of which he treats, the frequenters of taverns were by no means confined to the lower classes; and those institutions in the Middle Ages (for we shall have occasion to refer to them as they exist to-day) must have reached their full growth and perfection when Prince Hal resented the rudeness of the “sweet knight” Falstaff in the presence of that “honest, virtuous, civil gentlewoman,” Doll Tear-Sheet, at the Boar’s Head Tavern in Eastcheap![249]