We have, fortunately, in the British Museum, an illustration of such a house, done in the fourteenth century, and therefore contemporary with Chaucer himself. It is rough but vivid, and if the pilgrim we see drinking out of a saucer-like cup be gigantic, and the landlady, waiting with the jug, a thought too big for her inn, we are at any rate clearly made to see the life of that long ago. In this instance the actual stake is finished off like a besom, rather than with a bush. [Illustration: AN ALE-STAKE. _From the Louterell Psalter._] The connection, however, between the Roman garland to Bacchus and the mediæval “bush” is obvious. The pagan God of Wine was forgotten, but the advertisment of ale “sold on the premises” was continued in much the same form; for in many cases the “bush” was a wreath, renewed at intervals, and twined around a permanent hoop. With the creation, in later centuries, of distinctive signs, we find the hoop itself curiously surviving as a framework for some device; and thus, even as early as the reign of Edward the Third, mention is found of a “George-in-the-hoop,” probably a picture or carved representation of St. George, the cognisance of England, engaged in slaying the dragon. There were inns in the time of Henry the Sixth by the name of the “Cock-in-the-Hoop”; and doubtless the representation of haughty cockerels in that situation led by degrees to persons of self-sufficient manner being called “Cock-a-hoop,” an old-fashioned phrase that lingered on until some few years since. In some cases, when the garland was no longer renewed, and no distinctive sign filled the hoop, the “Hoop” itself became the sign of the house: a sign still frequently to be met with, notably at Cambridge, where a house of that name, in coaching days a celebrated hostelry, still survives. The kind of company found in the ale-stakes--that is to say, the beer-houses and taverns--of the fourteenth century is vividly portrayed by Langland, in his _Vision of Piers Plowman_. In that long Middle English poem, the work of a moralist and seer who was at the same time, beneath his tonsure and in spite of his orders, something of a man of the world, we find the virtuous ploughman reviewing the condition of society in that era, and (when you have once become used to the ancient spelling) doing so in a manner that is not only readable to moderns, but even entertaining; while, of course, as evidence of social conditions close upon six hundred years ago, the poem is invaluable. We learn how Beton the brewster met the glutton on his way to church, and bidding him “good-morrow,” asked him whither he went. “To holy church,” quoth he, “for to hear mass. I will be shriven, and sin no more.”