The short answer
A pub sign is a message written for people who could not read, and from 1393, when Richard II required every ale house to display one, it was also a legal requirement. It tells you, in pictures, one of about six things: who owned the land, which king you were supposed to admire, what the house sold, which trade drank there, what battle everyone was talking about, or a joke. Learning the vocabulary takes an afternoon, and it changes how a high street looks.
The important structural point is that the sign came first. In medieval and early modern England, the picture gave the house its name rather than the other way about — the sign was the address.
Ale-stakes and vine leaves
The habit is Roman. The tabernae along the roads of Roman Britain hung out bunches of vine leaves to show they had wine, an advertisement that needed no words in any language. When wine became scarce in medieval England the practice adapted: innkeepers hung out an ale-stake, a pole with a bush or garland on the end, or used iron hoops and painted boards, according to what was to hand and what the house sold.
Then it became law. In 1393 Richard II required ale house keepers to display an exterior sign. The purpose was administrative rather than decorative: the king’s inspectors needed to find the premises they were supposed to check, and the Crown needed to tax them. From that point a sign was a legal requirement, and the craft of painting them was an industry.
Heraldry: badges made to be recognised
By far the largest category is heraldic, because heraldry was already a working visual code — strong colours, few elements, legible at a distance. Sign painters liked heraldic devices for the practical reason that they fit a number of symbols neatly into a limited space.
- Red Lion — the most common heraldic name in Britain, with three competing explanations: the arms of a local landowner, the badge of John of Gaunt (1340–1399), or the Scottish royal arms after the union of crowns in 1603. We have set out the evidence in why so many pubs are called the Red Lion.
- White Hart — the livery badge of Richard II, so ubiquitous during his reign that in the fifteenth century “White Hart” was used almost as a generic word for a tavern.
- White Boar — the badge of Richard III. Blue Boar — the Earls of Oxford. Bear and Ragged Staff — the Earls of Warwick. Eagle and Child — the Earls of Derby. Rising Sun — Edward III.
- White Horse — associated with the Hanoverian kings, and therefore a political statement in the eighteenth century. Red Dragon — Wales.
A pub with a family badge on the board was usually standing on that family’s land. The naming convention that makes this explicit is the “Arms” suffix, which we cover in why so many pub names end in “Arms”.
Kings, and the safety of loyalty
The Crown has signified loyalty to the monarch since the fifteenth century, and the variants — Crown and Cushion, Crown and Glove, Crown and Mitre, Rose and Crown with its Tudor rose — are refinements of the same message. In periods when the wrong allegiance could cost a licence or worse, a royal sign was cheap insurance.
The Royal Oak is the outstanding case, and the most numerous historical commemoration in British pub naming: our own count of OpenStreetMap finds 391 pubs named exactly the Royal Oak, second only to the Red Lion. It refers to Charles II hiding in the Boscobel Oak after his defeat at the Battle of Worcester in 1651, an escape commemorated on his birthday, 29 May, as Royal Oak Day. Our own Royal Oak in Winchester carries the name over a far older story about Queen Emma, which is a good illustration of how a sign and a legend can be centuries apart.
The politics ran the other way too. Religious symbolism in pub names fell away sharply after Henry VIII’s break with Rome, and pubs called the Pope’s Head were widely renamed the King’s Head — a change of sign as a change of side.
Religion, half-erased
Enough survives to see what was lost.
- Cross Keys — the crossed keys of the arms of the popes, from St Peter receiving the keys of heaven.
- Lion and Lamb — Christ’s resurrection and sacrifice in one board.
- Shaven Crown, at Shipton-under-Wychwood, which once belonged to the monks of Bruern Abbey — the tonsure as a sign.
- Cardinal’s Hat at Harleston in Norfolk, recorded as an inn since at least 1591.
Monastic houses brewed on a large scale, and several pubs in this collection stand on their ground. Adam and Eve in Norwich takes its name from the same religious stock and is traditionally linked to a brewhouse serving the cathedral’s workmen.
What the sign told you to drink
This is the most useful and least known category, because these names amount to a menu.
Wine imports had their own heraldry. A sign showing a Castle indicated Spanish wines, from the arms of Castile. A Spread Eagle — an eagle “displayed”, in heraldic terms — meant German wines. The Hoop and Grapes in Aldgate, one of the few City buildings to survive the Great Fire, was originally the Hops and Grapes, announcing that it sold both beer and wine.
Brewing had a whole vocabulary. Barley Mow (a sheaf of barley), Hop Pole, Malt Shovel (for turning soaked barley), Mash Tun, Three Barrels, John Barleycorn (the folk figure who is barley), and Cock and Bottle, from the stopcock used to draw beer from the barrel. Names of this kind may indicate houses founded as early as the twelfth century, when the sign really was the only advertisement.
Trades, transport and the news
Occupational signs mark local economies with some precision. The Coach and Horses became popular in the seventeenth century as stagecoaches made land travel possible — for the working detail see what is a coaching inn. The Plough is agricultural. The Railway is Victorian and extremely common: CAMRA’s 2007 count found 420 of them.
Current events named pubs the way headlines name things now. Saracen’s Head and Turk’s Head belong to the Crusades; there is a Magna Charta at Lowdham in Nottinghamshire; the Battle of Minden in Portsmouth commemorates 1759; Trafalgar and Nelson names follow 1805; Waterloo Inns follow 1815; and a pub was renamed the Man on the Moon on the day of the landing in 1969. The Turks Head in Penzance sits squarely in that tradition, even though its own explanation — a Turkish raid on the town — is local folklore rather than record.
Jokes, puns and curiosities
The tradition has always had room for humour. I Am the Only Running Footman in Mayfair is named for the servant who ran ahead of a carriage to pay the tolls. Stalybridge holds both the shortest pub name in Britain, Q, and the longest, the Old Thirteenth Cheshire Astley Volunteer Rifleman Corps Inn. Modern chains have adopted the device deliberately: Wetherspoon’s Moon Under Water name comes from George Orwell’s 1946 essay about an imaginary perfect pub.
What a sign proves, and what it does not
Signs are repainted, and names change with owners, fashions and politics. That makes them evidence of when a pub last wanted to say something about itself, not of when it opened.
The examples are everywhere in this collection. Ye Olde Fighting Cocks in St Albans was the Round House, then the Three Pigeons from 1756, and only took the Fighting Cocks name around 1800. The Prospect of Whitby in Wapping was the Pelican and then the Devil’s Tavern before it was named after a collier ship. The Garrick Inn in Stratford was the Greyhound and then the Reindeer, and was renamed for the actor David Garrick in 1795. The Pandora Inn in Cornwall was the Passage House until it took the name of the ship sent after the Bounty mutineers, which sank in 1791. The Chequers in Oxford is named for the chequerboard of the money-changers who worked on the site, and Hand & Shears near Smithfield for the shears with which the Lord Mayor cut cloth to open Bartholomew Fair.
So read the board as a document with a date of its own. It will often tell you exactly what a landlord wanted customers to believe in about 1890, which is interesting, and occasionally it will tell you who held the manor in 1450, which is better. For how the two get separated, see our methodology and our guide to how historians date an old pub.
Sources
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