On the 23d of January 1661/2, Pepys suffered a strong mortification of the flesh in having to dine at this tavern with some poor relations. The sufferings of the snobbish secretary must have been intense:-- “By invitation to my uncle Fenner’s and where I found his new wife, a _pitiful, old, ugly, ill-bred_ woman in a hatt, a midwife. Here were many of his and as many of her relations, _sorry mean people_; and after choosing our gloves we all went over to the Three Cranes Taverne, and though the best room of the house in such a narrow dogghole we were crammed, and I believe we were near 40, that it made me loath my company and victuals and a very poor dinner it was too.” Opposite this tavern people generally left their boats to shoot the bridge, walking round to Billingsgate, where they would re-enter them. The COCK occurs almost as frequently on the signboard as alive at the head of his family in the farm yard. It is one of the oldest signs, already in use at the time of the Romans, who record that one Eros, a freeman of Licius, Africanus Cerealis, kept an inn at Narbonne at the sign of the Cock--“a gallo gallinaceo.” In Christian times the sign acquired a new prestige. The cock is thus mentioned in “The Armory of Byrdes:”--[286] “The Cocke dyd say I use alway To crow both first and last. Lyke a Postle I am, For I preche to Man, And tell hym the nyght is past. “I bring new tydynges That the Kyng of all Kynges, In tactu profudit chorus: Then sang he mellodious Te Gloriosus Apostolorum chorus.” This bird, in the legends of the middle ages, was surrounded with a mystical, religious halo:-- “It was about the time of cock-crowing when our Saviour was born,--the circumstance of the time of cock-crowing being so natural a figure and representation of the Morning of the Resurrection; the Night as shadowing out the night of the Grave; the third Watch being as some suppose the time our Saviour will come to judgment at; the noise of the cock awakening sleepy man and telling him as it were the night is far spent, and the day is at hand, representing so naturally the voice of the Archangel awakening the dead and calling up the righteous to everlasting day; so naturally does the time of cock-crowing shadow out these things, that probably, some good, well meaning men might have been brought to believe that the very devils themselves when the cock crew and reminded them of them did fear and tremble and shun the light.”[287] Ideas such as these continued a long time in the popular mind, for Aubrey tells us that in his younger days people “had some pious ejaculation too when the cock did crow, which put them in mind of y^{e} Trumpet at y^{e} Resurrection.”[288]