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Mispronunciations & Cock & Bull Stories
The Bricklayers Arms was one such old pub that
stood at the Elephant & Castle in South East London
and although long, long gone it’s still used as a place
name, if only to befuddle visitors to London. The
name Elephant & Castle is said to derive from the
times of Henry VIII when the Infanta de Castille, the
child of the Spanish King was brought to London to
marry first Prince Arthur and then when he died to
save returning the dowry, his younger brother Henry.
I like that version but admit it might just as well be
from the arms of the Cutlers company who used an
elephant to denote the fine ivory used for the very
best knife handles (forks didn’t make an appearance
for many more centuries).
Swans were a noble and Royal food for the table so
The Swan might have been an advert for fine dining
or, near the Thames at least, it might refer to the
royal ownership of swans other than those marked by
the Worshipful Companies of Vintners and Dyers
who mark the bills of their birds in the annual Swan
Upping Ceremony with one or two nicks respectively
– a habit leading to the rather alarming but ultimately
just mispronounced pub name The Swan with Two
Necks. Henry VIII’s capture of the harbour or mouth
of Boulogne in the 1540s slipped from The Boulogne
Mouth to the more prosaic Bull and Mouth. There
was a famous coaching inn called this near the
Aldersgate - this months cover photo is an old plate
from the Bishopsgate Institute showing the inn’s
original stone sign , Today it is remembered by a
plaque on St Martin le Grand and another old stone
sign from the inn has been mounted outside the
Museum of London.
Indeed sometimes the illiterate locals said it just as
they saw it and names became corrupted from their
original intent by very virtue of their pictorial
representation. Thus the star and garter denoting the
Order of the Garter became The Leg and Star.
The Pig & Whistle is a corruption of the Anglo-Saxon
piggin wassail
which was a toast to good health. Pub
names forms a huge subject and often the derivation
of names depart from historical authenticity into the
not un-entertaining realms of local legend. So on that
note I’ll finish this section with a mention of two old
rival coaching inns in Stony Stratford. There was a
great rivalry between the clientèles of the two houses
and they would tell increasingly unbelievable stories
of their own prowess. Thus, stories made from all
sorts of fictitious tosh are known as "cock and bull
stories".
At The Sign of My Head
I
n mediaeval towns there were a host of craftsmen
such as carpenters, bakers, butchers, blacksmiths,
bronze smiths, fletchers (arrow makers), bowyers
(bow makers), stringfellows (who made the strings for
bows), fullers (who cleaned and thickened wool be-
fore it was dyed), dyers, potters, coppers, turners (who
turned wooden bowls on lathes), horners (who made
things from horn) and barber-surgeons who both cut
hair, pulled teeth and performed operations such as
setting broken bones. Each type of trade had its own
pictorial sign forming an elaborate language of
symbols in the common understanding. Today only
the three balls of the pawn broker and the striped pole
of the barber survive as common knowledge.