“I lodged at the Eagle and the Child, Whereas my hostesse (a good ancient woman) Did entertain me with respect not common, She caused my linnen, shirts, and bands be washt, And on my way she caused me be refresht; She gave me twelve silke points, she gave me baken, Which by me much refused at last was taken. In troath she proued a mother unto me, For which I ever more will thankefull be.”[183]
Another crest of the Derby family also occurs as a sign--namely, the EAGLE’S FOOT, which was adopted in the sixteenth century by John Tysdall, a bookseller at the upper end of Lombard Street.
The frequency of eagles in heraldry made them very common on the signboard, although it is now impossible to say whose armorial bearings each particular eagle was intended to represent. The SPREAD EAGLE occurs as the sign of one of the early printers and booksellers, Gualter Lynne, who, in the middle of the sixteenth century, had two shops with that sign,--one on Sommer’s Key, near Billingsgate, and another next St Paul’s Wharf. In 1659 there was a BLACK SPREAD EAGLE at the west end of St Paul’s, which shop was also a bookseller’s, one Giles Calvert. As the signs in large towns and cities were generally not altered when the house changed hands, it is not improbable but that this may be the same Black Eagle mentioned by Stow in the following words:--
“During a great tempest at sea, in January 1506, Philip, King of Castille, and his queen, were weather-driven at Falmouth. The same tempest blew down the Eagle of brass off the spire of St Paul’s Church in London, and in the falling the same eagle broke and battered the Black Eagle that hung for a sign in St Paul’s Churchyard.”
Milton’s father, a scrivener by trade, lived in Bread Street, Cheapside, at the sign of the Spread Eagle, which was his own coat of arms, and in this house the great author of “Paradise Lost” was born, December 9, 1608. When the poet’s fame had gone forth, strangers used to come to see the house, until it was destroyed by the fire of 1666. Perhaps its memory is preserved in Black Spread Eagle Court, which is the name of a passage in that locality.
Another Spread Eagle was a noted “porter-house” in the Strand at the end of the last century:--