The short answer
A pub name that ends in “Arms” is naming a coat of arms: a Something Arms was a house displaying somebody’s armorial bearings on its signboard — a landowning family’s, a trade guild’s, a town’s or the monarch’s — and the name is a description of the picture rather than a title anyone chose.
That is the crucial thing to understand about pub names generally, and it runs the opposite way to modern intuition. As the standard account of British pub naming puts it, it was “the pub’s sign which gave the establishment its name (and not vice-versa, as is usually the case today)”. Nobody sat down and named the Carpenters Arms. Somebody painted the carpenters’ arms on a board, and everyone in the parish started calling the place after the picture.
Why there were signs at all
Signs became compulsory. In 1393 Richard II required ale house keepers to display an exterior sign, a rule with two purposes that had nothing to do with charm: it let the king’s ale-conners find the premises they were supposed to inspect, and it made the houses taxable. Before that, drinking places had used an ale-stake — a pole with a bush or garland on the end, a habit inherited from the Roman tabernae, which hung out vine leaves to advertise wine.
Since most people could not read, the sign had to work as an image, and the richest available stock of memorable images in medieval England was heraldry. Coats of arms and livery badges were designed to be recognised at a distance in a crowd, in strong colours, with a small number of elements. They were, in effect, a ready-made visual language, and sign painters took to them for the practical reason that a heraldic device offers “a number [of symbols] that fits nicely into a limited space”.
Whose arms, exactly?
There are four main answers, and you can usually tell which one applies by looking at the pub’s setting.
The family that owned the land
This is the commonest and the most useful historically. An inn standing on an estate took the arms of the family that owned the estate, partly as advertisement, partly as deference and partly because the family very often owned the inn too.
The Luttrell Arms at Dunster in Somerset is the cleanest example on this site: a late-fifteenth-century stone house standing on property documented as conveyed to the Luttrells in 1443, below the castle the family held for centuries. The name and the deeds agree. The Oxenham Arms at South Zeal carries the name of the Devon family associated with the granite manor house it occupies — a building with a prehistoric standing stone built into the lounge wall. The Lord Crewe Arms at Blanchland takes the name of the estate that came to include the medieval buildings of Blanchland Abbey, and the Brocket Arms at Ayot St Lawrence that of the local landed family, in a Hertfordshire hamlet where George Bernard Shaw was the best-known regular.
The pattern is worth knowing because a change of name often marks a change of ownership, and both are datable. If a pub is called the X Arms and there is no X family within twenty miles, something happened — an estate sold, a marriage, a rebuilding, a Victorian landlord looking for a bit of borrowed dignity.
The Crown
The King’s Arms is in the top ten of every attempt to count British pub names: the British Beer and Pub Association’s 2007 survey found 284, and Pubs Galore’s 2019 count 245. Displaying the royal arms signalled loyalty, which mattered a great deal in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and it was safe. The same impulse produced the Crown, the Rose and Crown and the King’s Head, and it worked in both directions: after Henry VIII’s break with Rome, pubs called the Pope’s Head were quietly repainted as the King’s Head.
Colonial pubs did the same thing at a distance. Grace Neill’s in Donaghadee claims to have opened in 1611 as the King’s Arms, on the County Down coast facing Scotland, and was renamed after a nineteenth-century landlady only later.
Trade guilds and livery companies
The second great source is occupational. Blacksmiths Arms, Bricklayers Arms, Carpenters Arms, Masons Arms, Saddlers Arms and dozens more show the heraldic arms of the relevant craft, very often those of a London livery company, and they exist for a specific reason: “people in these trades often met in these places”. A trade needed somewhere to hold its meetings, pay its members and hire its labour, and the pub was the obvious room.
The same logic sits behind names beginning with “Three”, which are frequently drawn from guild arms — the Three Compasses from the Worshipful Company of Carpenters, for instance.
Two pubs in this collection carry local versions of the idea. The Tinners Arms at Zennor is named for the Cornish tin miners, in a granite moorland village where the industry was the whole economy. Half a world away, the Shipwrights Arms in Hobart sits among the colonial cottages of Battery Point, where the shipwrights actually worked, and is still known to its regulars as Shippies.
Towns, institutions and nations
A borough’s own arms produced a run of civic names, and religious houses produced others — Abbey Arms among them, reflecting the long association between monasteries and brewing. Occasionally the “arms” are national rather than heraldic in any strict sense: the German Arms at Hahndorf in the Adelaide Hills takes its name from the Prussian Lutheran settlers who founded the village in 1839, and still pours Hofbräu.
Under whose protection
There is a further shade of meaning that explains the sheer number of these names in the eighteenth century. Adding “Arms” to a pub’s name signalled that the house stood under the protection or patronage of a noble family — a useful thing to imply when your licence depended on justices of the peace who were, very often, the same class of person. It was part deference, part marketing, and part insurance.
That is also why so many Arms names are not medieval at all. A pub renamed in the 1700s or 1800s could acquire an aristocratic sign overnight without any connection to the family beyond geography, and the arms painted on it were sometimes approximate, sometimes decorative and occasionally invented. Colonial examples are the most transparent: the Macquarie Arms at Windsor in New South Wales was built at Governor Lachlan Macquarie’s direction and opened on 31 July 1815, and named for him straightforwardly and while he was still in office.
Reading an Arms name today
A few practical rules follow from all of this.
- An Arms name is usually a clue to ownership, not to age. It tells you whose land, trade or favour the house was trading on, which is genuinely useful, but the name may be centuries younger than the building.
- Trade arms tend to mark industrial and maritime districts. Tinners, Shipwrights, Bricklayers, Masons and Carpenters cluster where those trades were, which makes them a rough map of local economies.
- A family name with no family nearby is a question worth asking. Estates were broken up, and pubs kept the sign.
- The picture on the board today proves nothing. Signs are repainted every few decades, and heraldic accuracy has never been a licensing requirement.
The single most common British pub name is not an Arms name at all, and its history is just as tangled: see why so many pubs are called the Red Lion. For the wider vocabulary of signboards — the religious ones, the royal badges, the corruptions and the puns — read pub signs and what they mean. And if the “Ye Olde” in front of an Arms name has ever puzzled you, we have taken that apart in what “Ye Olde” actually means.
Sources
Found something wrong?Suggest a correction