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CHAPTER III
LA BELLE SAUVAGE
The premises in La Belle Sauvage, on the north side of Ludgate Hill, into which John Cassell moved in 1852 formed part of one of the oldest inns in the City of London. The "Bell Savage" was certainly in existence in the middle of the fifteenth century. How much farther back it dates is doubtful, but in the year 1453 one John French, whose father had been a goldsmith in the City, confirmed to his mother, by a deed recorded in the Close Roll for that year, "totum ten. sive hospicium cum suis pertin. vocat Savagesynne alias vocat le Belle on the Hope"—all that tenement or inn, with its appurtenances, called Savage's Inn, otherwise called the Bell on the Hoop." The location of the inn is given as "the parish of St. Bridget [Bride], in Fleet Street."
Little question that the name Savage was that of a proprietor of the inn—perhaps the original owner. It is on record that towards the end of the preceding century—in 1380—a rogue was pilloried for attempting to defraud William Savage, "of Fleet Street, in the parish of St. Bridget." As for the "Bell," that has always been a favourite sign for taverns, while "hope" is no doubt a variant of "hoop," an ivy bush fashioned into a garland, which often formed part of the sign of an inn: "good wine needs no bush."
By the next century the alternative titles had been combined into one, the "Bell Savage." So the inn appears in John Stow's contemporary narration of an incident of the Wyatt rising in 1554. He tells how Wyatt and his followers marched from Charing Cross to Temple Bar and through Fleet Street, "till he came to Bell Savage, an inn nigh unto Lud Gate." At this gate of the City he knocked for admission, but it was held for Queen Mary by a strong force under Lord William Howard, who replied: "Avaunt, traitor, thou shalt not come in here." Wyatt thereupon "rested him awhile upon a stall over against the Bell Savage gate," a few yards farther down Ludgate Hill, and then fought his way back to Temple Bar, where he surrendered. Lambarde also, writing in the second half of the same century, calls the inn the "Bell Savage" in mentioning it as one of the places to which people repaired to see bear-baiting, or interludes, or fence play; while in a "discourse" published in 1595, entitled "Marococcus Extaticus," the name appears as "'Belsavage." In "Kenilworth" Sir Walter Scott gives the name in the form in which we find it in Stow and Lambarde, describing how Wayland, the smith, after his visit to Zacharias, the Jew, to procure drugs, returned to "the famous Bell Savage" and there compounded them. In the seventeenth century, in an advertisement in the London Gazette for February 15, 1676, the name is still cited as the "Bell Savage," but a few years later (1683) it appears in the same periodical as the "Bell and Savage."
There is little mystery, then, about the origin of "Bell Savage" as the title of the inn. But some antiquaries prefer ingenious surmise to plain fact, and at least half a score of theories have been elaborated to account for the name. In one of them, adopted in no very responsible mood by Thackeray in "The Four Georges," La Belle Sauvage is identified with Pocahontas, because Captain John Smith, the gallant adventurer whose life the daughter of Powhatan saved is buried in the church of St. Sepulchre, Holborn, but a stone's-throw away from the old tavern. Another theory, which found some favour with Walter Thornbury, author of the early part of "Old and New London," traces the name to a Mistress Isabel, or Isabella, Savage, assumed to have kept the inn once upon a time, after whom it was called the "Bell Savage," and later "La Belle Sauvage." This derivation has the merit of simplicity, and its only defect is that no one has ever shown that a Mistress Isabel, or Isabella, Savage ever kept the inn. It is true that Samuel Pegge, an eighteenth-century anecdotist, averred that a friend of his had seen an old lease in which an Isabella Savage figured as the tenant, but this is merely a case of "what the soldier said," and it is quite superfluous seeing that as far back as the middle of the fifteenth century the house was known alternatively as Savage's inn and as the "Belle on the Hope."
For the transformation of "Bell Savage" into the more musical "La Belle Sauvage," Addison appears to be chiefly responsible—and small blame to him. It should be premised that by the time he wrote, and probably long before, the name had materialized into a sign which represented a savage standing beside a bell. So we find Addison confiding to his readers in the Spectator (No. 82): "As for the Bell Savage, which is the Sign of a Savage Man standing by a Bell, I was formerly very much puzzled upon the Conceit of it, till I accidentally fell into the reading of an old Romance translated out of the French, which gives an account of a very beautiful Woman who was found in a Wilderness, and it is called in the French La Belle Sauvage, and is everywhere translated by our Countrymen the Bell Savage." So pleased was the essayist with his discovery in the lore of signs that he was moved to communicate others. "I can give a shrewd Guess," he proceeds, "at the Humour of the Inhabitant by the Sign that hangs before his Door. A surly, choleric Fellow generally makes choice of the Bear; as Men of milder Dispositions frequently live at the Lamb." All this, of course, was just delightful whimsicality, but Pennant, the eighteenth-century antiquary, took Addison's persiflage seriously, and declared it to be "the real derivation."
In thus paradoxically tracing "Bell Savage" back to "La Belle Sauvage," Addison it certainly was who started the transformation of "Bell Savage" into its euphonious French equivalent. The process was a slow one. Early in the nineteenth century the inn which had once had two names was for a time divided, one house being known as the "Bell" and the other as the "Bell Savage."
In 1568 the "Bell Savage," together with another property known as the " Rose," was bequeathed by a citizen, John Craythorne, to one of the ancient trade guilds of the City, the Cutlers' Company, for the provision of exhibitions at Oxford and Cambridge and the benefit of the poor of St. Bride's. A portrait of the donor's wife is to be seen to this day in the Cutlers' Hall, and the Cutlers are still the ground landlords of the property. At that time it consisted of two courts, the outer one entered through an archway from Ludgate Hill, the inner one through a second archway. The inn itself surrounded the inner court, and was made picturesque by two tiers of covered balconies, which, when plays were performed in the Yard in the sixteenth century, served as the "upper circle" and the "lower circle," while the rooms of the inn were the "boxes," and the open yard formed the "pit," its patrons being derisively called the " groundlings," as in Hamlet. The stage was a scaffold built against one side of the Yard, and, with the section of balcony above it, was curtained off. In Queen Elizabeth's day a "school of defence" was carried on here for the benefit of those who wanted to acquire the art of fencing, and here, too, Bankes, the showman, delighted gaping crowds with the surprising feats of his horse, Marocco, the subject of the "discourse" already mentioned as having been published in 1595. This was the discerning beast that on one occasion sent the spectators into fits of laughter by picking out Tarleton, the low comedian who was associated with Shakespeare, as the biggest fool in the company.
In the outer court of the Yard were some private houses, one of which was occupied, for some time before 1677, by Grinling Gibbons, whose inimitable wood carving graces so many City churches and City Companies' halls. Horace Walpole notes that while living here
COACH EMERGING FROM LA BELLE SAUVAGE YARD
Gibbons carved a pot of flowers with such delicacy that they "shook surprisingly with the motion of the coaches that passed by." This reference to coaches indicates that in the reign of Charles II, at any rate, as probably long before, the inn was one of the coaching centres of the capital. The London Gazette advertisement of the year 1676 gave the number of its rooms as forty, and declared it to have stabling for 100 horses. As a coaching inn it long continued to flourish, but when the railways came it fell upon evil days, and by the middle of the nineteenth century had dwindled to a mere "tap" and a starting-place for omnibuses plying to Richmond. With an eye to the crowds that would flock to London during the Great Exhibition of 1851, a Mr. John Thorburn had taken the property, or a portion of it, on a fourteen years' lease, in order that he might fit up the disused and dilapidated hotel for the accommodation of visitors. The venture was not a success, and after Cassell had installed his printing machines in the building which he had taken over, the noise and shaking so disturbed the guests that they would not stay. So it was that Mr. Thorburn, before many months, was glad to be relieved by Cassell of his interest in the property.
When, in 1853, Thomas Frost, who subsequently joined the staff, came to La Belle Sauvage he was struck by the decayed condition of the premises. "Just under the archway on the left," he writes, "there was a dilapidated building, the greater part of which was propped up within and without to prevent the whole from crumbling and cracking until it came down with a crash. Farther up, on the same side of the Yard, but detached from the main building, was a six roomed house, the ground floor of which was used as storerooms, the apartments above being occupied by the proprietor and the members of his editorial staff." Year by year, however, as the business developed, the premises were rebuilt, until both sides of the Yard were almost entirely covered. Yet within twenty years from the coming of Cassell to La Belle Sauvage the business had far outgrown its accommodation, and in 1872 a lease was taken from the Governors of St. Thomas's Hospital of an extensive site behind the Yard, bordered by Fleet Lane on the north and by Seacoal Lane on the west. Here, in the early 'seventies, was reared around an oblong well, 70 ft. by 30 ft., with a glass roof, a huge structure in five stories, for the administrative offices and the general editorial, art, cliché, foundry, and composing departments, as well as for the warehouse, while the basement was reserved for the engines and printing machines. The excavations on the site unearthed the walls of a dock on the Fleet river, and also a Roman sarcophagus which is now in the Guildhall Museum.
The new building was ready for occupation in 1875. Before long even this was insufficient to meet the still growing needs of the business, and presently the printed stock had to be relegated elsewhere, to find a home at last under the arches of the London, Chatham and Dover (now the South-Eastern and Chatham) Railway, on the other side of Seacoal Lane, while in 1892 another block was built in La Belle Sauvage Yard. The only trace of the old inn which is now to be seen in the Yard is a stone relief of the Elephant and Castle, the crest of the Cutlers' coat-of-arms, which used to surmount one of the gateways below the sign of the Bell, and now looks down upon the Yard from the advertisement department on the eastern side.
RELIEF FROM OLD LA BELLE SAUVAGE
Showing the Crest of the Cutlers' Company
THE ENTRANCE TO LA BELLE SAUVAGE
IN 1782
