By the Rev. A. C. Smith. $19 
Cleverton, near Malmesbury? It may be that some of these are 
perversions of the original titles: for it is amusing to see what 
remarkable mistakes John Bull has sometimes made in regard to 
sign-boards which he cannot comprehend. 
Thus the famous old coaching inn, the “ Beld Savage,’ on Ludgate 
Hill, well known to travellers of old times, with its sign of a savage 
man painted under a bell, an emblem which it also bore on the 
coaches connected with it, and which has often puzzled the curious 
to decipher, was in reality only the “ Bell” inn; but kept by one 
Savage, it gradually assumed the landlord’s name, and in course of 
years the above device. 
The “ Swan with two necks,” again, another coaching inn of great 
renown in the last generation, with its strange and most unnatural 
figure of two long elegant necks proceeding from the single body 
of a graceful bird, was originally the “ Swan with two nicks,’ or 
heraldic marks in the upper mandible, which the royal and all other 
swan-herds were compelled to cut on the beaks of the cygnets, in 
order to identify their respective owners’ property. But when the 
custom of “ Swan-upping,” or “ Swan-hopping ” (as it was some- 
times called) died out, the meaning of the word nick was forgotten, 
and the “ Swan with two nicks”?—once the well-known swan-mark 
of the Vintners’ company—became corrupted into the more in- 
 telligible, if incongruous, sign, of the ‘ Swan with two necks.” 
— -‘The “ Bull and Mouth,’ again, another coaching inn equally well 
known, and represented in its later days by the sign of a black bull 
and a wide gaping mouth, carved over the gateway leading into its 
yard, as well as on the panels of the coaches that started therefrom, 
seemed equally inexplicable, until it was discovered to have been 
it; and he has not the least doubt that this was the identical bowl which con- 
tained the ingredients in which many a Jacobite toast was pledged. 
Whether or no this is the true origin of the name ‘‘ Cribbage Hut,” we have 
a very pretty episode of some of the most respected Wiltshire worthies of a 
_ hundred years ago; and I feel grateful to Mr. Swayne for haying unearthed 
the tradition, and to Messrs. Penruddocke and Wyndham for their letters on 
the subject. I would also refer to vol. xiii., page 125 of this Magazine, in 
_ testimony that among the Jacobite squires of South Wilts in the previous cen- 
_ tury a meet of the hounds had not always for its main object the pursuit of the fox, 
_ but was a specious opportunity for assembling to discuss more important matters. 
‘VOL. XVII.—NO. LI. ae 
