The Red Cow, in Bow Street, was the sign of a noted tavern, (afterwards called the Red Rose,) which stood at the corner of Rose Alley. It was when going home from this tavern that Dryden was cudgelled by bravoes, hired by Lord Rochester, for some remarks in Lord Mulgrave’s Essay on Satire, in the composition of which Dryden had assisted his lordship. The king offered £50, and a free pardon, but “Black Will with a cudgel,” to whom Lord Rochester had intrusted the task of thrashing the laureate, showed that there was such a thing as honour amongst rogues, and did not betray him for the king’s £50. In all probability, however, he received a larger sum from his lordship. In Dryden’s old age, Pope, then a boy, came here to look at the great man whose fame in after years he was to equal if not to eclipse. This tavern was the famous mart for libels and lampoons; one Julyan, a drunken dissipated “secretary to the Muses,” as he calls himself, was the chief manufacturer.
Near Marlborough, Wilts, there is an alehouse having the sign of the RED COW, with the following rhyme:--
That under a BROWN COW at Oldham is still more sublime:--
“This Cow gives such Liquor, ’Twould puzzle a Viccar (_sic_.)”
The Heifer is to be met with sometimes in Yorkshire, but always with some local adjective, as the CRAVEN HEIFER; the AIRESDALE HEIFER, the DURHAM HEIFER, &c. The PIED CALF at Spalding seems to present a solitary instance of a calf on the signboard. Neither are sheep very common; the RAM was a noted carrier’s inn in the seventeenth century, in West Smithfield, and, indeed, continued as such until the recent destruction of this old cattle market. The crest of the cloth-workers was a mount vert, thereon a ram statant; so that this sign in that locality was very well chosen, being in honour of the cattle-dealers on ordinary occasions, and serving for the cloth-workers in the time of Bartholomew fair, for whose benefit the fair was founded. In 1668 there were two RAM’S HEAD inns in Fenchurch Street; one of them was a carriers’ inn for the Essex people. The RAM’S SKIN, which occurs at Spalding in Lincolnshire, is another name for the Fleece. The BLACK TUP figures on a sign near Rochdale, perhaps in allusion to the black ram frail matrons used to bestride in the old custom of _Free Bench_, thus related in Jacob’s “Law Dictionary:”--
