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
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