The bear or the young devil?

The claim that the Bear in the Strand was the site of the foundation meeting was first made by an unnamed author (but certainly Richard Gough) in an article in 1770 on the early history of the Society.Footnote 1 This claim was accepted by Joan Evans and more recently by Pearce and MacGregor.Footnote 2 The 1770 article is itself based on the account given in the minutes drawn up by Humfrey Wanley of the meetings of the 1707 Society in late 1707 and early 1708,Footnote 3 the first two of which were attended only by Wanley himself with John Talman and John Bagford.Footnote 4 Copies of the Wanley minutes are readily available: Joan Evans illustrated and transcribed the earliest minutes,Footnote 5 starting with Friday 5 December 1707, and an illustration of the first page, which is also the most relevant to what follows, can be found in MacGregor and the catalogue of the 2007 Royal Academy exhibition.Footnote 6

All the minutes are described as being in Wanley’s hand, but while the letter forms seem consistent, the letters are larger in the minutes of the very first meeting of 5 December 1707 and the lines are more widely spaced than in the later minutes. The minutes repeat the phrase ‘Friday night’ twice within a short space and the crossings-out and amendments have the immediacy of a text produced at the time, rather than in tranquil recollection. Given the convivial nature of the occasion and that Wanley, at his own admission, was wont to eat too little and drink too much, it would not be too outrageous to speculate that these minutes were produced at the time of the meeting and under the influence of alcohol.Footnote 7

There are several alterations in the smaller hand used in the second set of minutes of 12 December 1707. In the minutes of 5 December Mr Talman, Mr Bagford and Mr Wanley agreed first to meet together each Friday ‘night’. The word ‘night’ is crossed out and above is inserted: ‘in the evening by five [itself crossed out and replaced by ‘six’] of the clock’. This amendment is made in the neater hand and looks as if it were made on a different occasion – probably at the 12 December meeting. Crucially, for our examination, the next sentence then says: ‘Agreed that we will meet each Friday night at ye Young Devill Taverne The Bear in the Strand till we shall Order otherwise’. Here the amendment is in the larger hand and it looks as if, in writing this first minute (alcoholic liquor having been taken), Humfrey Wanley originally wrote ‘Young Devil’ but then changed the location of the next meeting place to the ‘Bear in the Strand’ at the time of writing. Is it not more likely that the first place mentioned – The Young Devil – is where they were actually meeting at the time of writing? The alternative explanation – that they were meeting in the Bear, agreed to meet in the Young Devil and then changed their minds – seems less likely. It is easy to see how a later interpretation of the minutes might read the Bear as the meeting place, but if this is correct, the Young Devil Tavern, in Fleet Street, should be given the primacy for the 1707 Society’s first meeting.Footnote 8

Whatever the truth, the meetings of 12 December 1707 and 2 January 1708 were presumably held at the Bear on the Strand. A hint of strain in the fledgling Society must be read into the sentence in the 12 December minutes that declares: ‘Agreed that while we meet at a Tavern, no person shall be oblig’d to pay for more than he shall call for’ (a statement which will be understood by all who have tried to divide the bill at the end of a prolonged evening out). It must also imply that consideration was being given to meeting elsewhere than at a tavern, and other evidence suggests that the founders had already conceived the idea of working towards accommodation in Whitehall under royal patronage.Footnote 9

The arrival of Le Neve as a member of the fledgling Society coincides with the decision to move (back?) to the Young Devil. At the meeting of 2 January 1708 it was ‘Agreed that for the future we will Meet at the Young Divel Tavern in Fleetstreet’, and indeed the meetings of 16 and 23 January 1708 are recorded as being at the Young Devil Tavern. But then, as is recorded by Joan Evans, ‘Wanley’s Minutes end abruptly on 20 February 1707/8’.Footnote 10

Where was the bear?

Can we ascertain precisely where the Bear on the Strand and the Young Devil, Fleet Street, were situated? Locating smaller establishments in the early eighteenth century is complicated by the lack of street numbers and of detailed maps. Buildings were located in relation to each other and to other well-known places. So, for example, an important piece of evidence in our attempts to locate the Bear in the Strand lies with a trade card for Charles Blunt, a bookseller around 1678–80, who was located ‘at Black Raven between Worcester House and the Savoy near the Bear Tavern, Strand by the New Exchange’.Footnote 11 Another important source for locating taverns lies in the work of Lillywhite who has tracked down numerous references to London inns, taverns and coffee houses.Footnote 12 These were often confusing as to name (there are several ‘Bear’ taverns), colours or other attributes, and dates are often imprecise. Of the Bear Tavern in the Strand, Lillywhite says:

Lillywhite also mentions the White Bear, Strand, where there was an unnamed Masonic Lodge in 1738, which had lapsed about 1743,Footnote 14 and he wonders whether the Bear and the White Bear are one and the same. If so, this would help us, as the White Bear is in existence in 1761 when there is more evidence from maps and other location information. However, the 1761 reference is to White Bear Yard, Holiwell Street. If the Holiwell (or Holywell) Street is the one shown on the 1746 Roque map, then the White Bear was near St Clement Danes Church. This would mean that it was right at the far end of the Strand and a different tavern from the Bear in the Strand. There are no ‘Holywell’ street names in the area where the Bear in the Strand seems to be, so we can probably dismiss any connection between the two taverns.

Taking the late seventeenth-century references to the Bear in the Strand given above, we can locate the sites of Hungerford Market, Worcester House and the Savoy and also of the New Exchange. Hungerford Market was on a site now covered by Charing Cross Station. Moving ‘Estwas in the Strand’, we come to the site of the New Exchange, which was developed as a commercial venture in 1608 on the site of the stables of Durham House.Footnote 15 The New Exchange was subsequently demolished and redeveloped in 1737 and these New Exchange Buildings lasted until they too were demolished in 1923. Because of this redevelopment of the site we know that the New Exchange occupied 54 to 64 Strand.Footnote 16 As the 1608 buildings covered the old entry to Durham House, a new gatehouse was built between 64 and 65 Strand, and this lasted until it was demolished in 1790.Footnote 17 The new entry stood on the line of the ‘modern’ Durham Street, although, with the widening of the Strand, the steep slope has been replaced with steps and the right of passage under the Royal Society for Arts building, which can still be seen as an arch, has now been filled in. So, counting from the west, the first possible location for the site of the Bear in the Strand is number 66 (65 was part of the gateway).

We can now work backwards from the east. The Savoy parish ran from 137 Strand and extended to 107. The Savoy had shops on the Strand frontage, with the remains of the Savoy Palace between them and the river. The Savoy was in use as a military prison in the early eighteenth century.Footnote 18 Worcester House was not named after the residence of the Bishop of Worcester, which lay to the east of the Savoy Palace,Footnote 19 but rather after the Cecil family (who built Worcester and Salisbury Houses and developed the Strand frontage of Durham House as the ‘New Exchange’ or ‘Britain’s Bourse’, which we have already considered). The boundary of the Cecil estate lay around Ivy Bridge Lane.Footnote 20 Since Salisbury House was demolished in 1673 and Worcester House in 1694,Footnote 21 this fits with the description on the trade card. In terms of Strand house numbers, this takes us roughly from 107 to about 75 or 76, which straddle Ivy Bridge Lane (the lane still exists as a passage).Footnote 22

The site of the Bear in the Strand should therefore be between numbers 66 and 74 or 75. We have a problem with the numbering in this area because, as part of his Adelphi development (1768–74), John Adam purchased numbers 72 to 75, demolished them to make the current Adam Street and rebuilt them on a larger scale, so that ‘here, in 1750, stood ten houses’.Footnote 23 In this area an analysis of the list of occupants and their means of livelihood around 1750 does not assist with any identification of the site of the Bear. So, while we cannot at the moment precisely tie down the site of the Bear in the Strand, it is reasonable to conclude that it lay somewhere in between the modern Ivy Bridge Lane and Durham Street, and that because of the widening of this side of the Strand, it now lies under the modern pavement. If we are looking for a close heir to the Bear in the Strand it might be found (in 2009) in the coffee bar that stands on the corner of Adam Street.

If this identification of the general location of the Bear in the Strand is correct, it explains why Wanley favoured it as a meeting place: he lived just around the corner, at 4 Duke Street. The distance along this route from the approximate site of the Bear to Wanley’s house, through the archway into the Durham House complex, is around one hundred metres.Footnote 24

Can we say anything about the character of the Bear in the Strand? In the search for likely references, those of the Proceedings of the Old Bailey have proved helpful.Footnote 25 The Bear in the Strand is mentioned in the trial in January 1715 of Robert Williams for deception and forgery. He was indicted for counterfeiting ‘a Note of the Duke of Bolton for £64 1s’. A porter was ‘sent for to the Bear Tavern in the Strand, the Prisoner and one Hughs gave him a Note, and bid him go to Mr Mead’s at Temple-Bar’.Footnote 26 The evidence given showed that the note was considered suspect and Williams was arrested at the Bear, while Hughs fled to the ‘safety’ of the Marshalsea. Williams was found guilty and sentenced to the pillory, probably at Charing Cross.Footnote 27 The Bear is mentioned in a second trial held in April 1715. In March 1715 Thomas Baldwin, the landlord of the Bear in the Strand, had fifteen pewter plates and one pewter dish stolen. They were discovered in a broker’s shop in Harp Alley, with the mark of the Bear defaced. The unnamed defendant was found guilty of felony and sentenced to branding.Footnote 28 We might conclude from these two cases of almost ‘white collar’ crime that the Bear in the Strand was reasonably respectable and fairly well equipped.

The search for the young devil

Before looking at the evidence for its location, it is worth considering the derivation of the name ‘Young Devil’. As we will see, there were two taverns in Fleet Street assigned to the ‘Devil’. Given the Fleet Street location it has been plausibly suggested that the reference is to a printer’s ‘devil’, a tool used when setting type. In fact, the name has a more saintly derivation. The original name of the Devil was the Devil and St Dunstan, referring to the church of St Dunstan, which lies close to the sites of both taverns on the opposite side of Fleet Street. St Dunstan was a blacksmith and he responded to the Devil’s temptations by seizing him by the nose with red-hot pincers. In 1608 the owners of the Devil and St Dunstan were ordered to remove the ‘devil’ from the tavern name, but he returned to take over the sign later in the century.Footnote 29

The two Devil Taverns were located near to each other and were known as ‘the old and young dunstans or the 2 devil Taverns at Temple Bar’.Footnote 30 The site of the (old) Devil – which was in existence from c 1563 to c 1787 – is marked by a plaque near the Temple Bar. Child’s Bank, now the Royal Bank of Scotland, eventually expanded to take over the site. Lillywhite gives little help in locating the Young Devil other than to say that it was near Temple Bar and in existence from 1683 to the 1720s, although it might have closed some years earlier.Footnote 31 Joan Evans notes a source that placed the Young Devil at 8 Fleet Street ‘under the shop which in 1870 was occupied by Messrs Dunn and Duncan’.Footnote 32 This source can be traced back to an item in The City Press which is worth quoting in full for the evidence it contains. The story begins with an entry in the ‘Queries’ section of the ‘City Notes and Queries’ in the paper published on 2 June 1860: ‘The “Little Devil” Tavern – Will some correspondent oblige with an account of the above tavern? TCN’.Footnote 33 The reply came on 23 June:

On the same page of this issue can be found, under ‘City Scraps’, a description of the Devil Tavern, part of which states: ‘The Old Devil Tavern so named to distinguish it from a house close adjoining called the Young Devil Tavern … At the Young or Little Devil Tavern, Wanley and Le Neve first originated the present Society of Antiquaries. ALEPH’.Footnote 36 Unlike the site of the Bear, which is under the present pavement of the Strand, the site of the Young Devil will not have changed much as the later widening of Fleet Street involved the opposite or northern side.

The Young Devil also features in the Old Bailey trial records for 1692.Footnote 37 One long and complicated trial involved the conviction of Henry Harrison, Gentleman, for murdering Dr Andrew Clenche, a money-lender; here the Young Devil features incidentally as the meeting place of those who were party to the murder plot. The second trial involved the killing of John Hoyle, Gentleman of the Temple, stabbed by George Pitts, Gentleman of St Dunstan-in-the-West. Mr Pitts and friends were drinking in the Young Devil Tavern when, for some reason, Mr Hoyle was sent for. He, after a while, made anti-Government remarks and ‘spake unbecoming words against the Person of King William’. Increasingly hot words were exchanged, leading to a fight outside, near the Temple Bar. Pitts was found guilty of manslaughter but then ‘petitioned the benefit of his Clergy’. These events give the impression that the Young Devil was rather less salubrious and altogether rougher than the Bear. However, they occurred some fifteen years before the early Antiquaries first met in the Young Devil, so the character of the tavern might well have improved.

The end of the 1707 society

At least two explanations have been suggested for the end of the 1707 Society. One explanation, which is considered below, is that the bankruptcy of the owner of the Young Devil and the closure of the premises ended the 1707 Society. The second is that the fall from power of Wanley’s ‘patron’, Robert Harley, on 11 February 1708 caused the group to go in for less regular association.Footnote 38 In fact, pace Evans and MacGregor, the 1707 Society did meet in the week following Harley’s fall, so a ‘missing meeting’ cannot be used as evidence for a crisis.Footnote 39 And is Wanley’s final entry on 20 February really the ‘suspension of proceedings’ that MacGregor postulates? Wanley proposed a new member, which is hardly an action of closure, nor was the announcement by Le Neve, the chairman, that ‘business’ would not permit him to attend the next week. He had missed the meeting on 6 February. At the time Wanley was employed only on an irregular basis by Harley, not becoming his librarian until the summer of 1708, and, as we shall see, antiquaries continued to meet at the Young Devil and other taverns nearby after February 1708. The fall of Harley was dramatic, but it is difficult to see a clear connection with the demise of the 1707 Society.Footnote 40

Perhaps the truth is that the 1707 Society died not with a bang but with a whimper. In February 1708 the 1707 Society seems to have barely functioned. During these weeks, out of the possible twelve members, only four at most were present (and only once had the 1707 Society ever been attended by as many as six: on that occasion, the original three, plus le Neve, Holmes and Hare). The records of the meetings from 30 January, save the last one, are simply ones of attendance. Wanley himself was not present on 6 or 13 February. The happy momentum of the first meetings was not sustained, and it is suggested that the will to conduct a society with regular meetings was failing. In the case of Wanley there are hints that things were not well in his life, over and above any possible problems with Robert Harley. Certainly, in June 1708, Wanley resigned from his post with the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge.Footnote 41 On 8 July 1708 Wanley gave as an excuse for inactivity that his wife had been very ill.Footnote 42 It is true that these events occurred some months after the late February meeting, but his personal problems might well have started earlier in the year.

The evidence of John Talman

In trying to make sense of these minutes, assistance can be found in the letters of John Talman. Joan Evans was aware of the existence of these letters from John Talman to fellow antiquaries, but they have not figured largely in the history of the early antiquarian societies.Footnote 43 They are, however, crucially important because they cover the period from 18 March 1708 to August 1709, when Talman was still in England, and from then to April 1712, when he was in Italy, but still receiving, and asking for, news of home. Unlike the accounts of Maurice Johnson and Browne Willis, considered below, this is contemporary information from one of the original members of the 1707 Society.

The letters throw some light on the meetings at the Young Devil in that, on 11 June 1708, writing from Norfolk, Talman says he believes that Holmes and Wanley are to be found with Madox at the Young Devil.Footnote 44 The Young Devil is mentioned again as a meeting place on 10 August 1708.Footnote 45 On 11 September there is a letter in flowery Italian from Talman to Thomas Madox bewailing the closure of the Young Devil owing to the bankruptcy of its owner, with the consequent dispersal of the ‘venerabile Collegio’ or ‘Academia de Antiquarii’, but saying there may be some recompense for this great loss at the Fountain.Footnote 46 Even though we have seen that the records for the Young Devil continue into the 1720s,Footnote 47 we have no further record of it as a meeting place for antiquaries.

The first mention that we have of the Fountain as a meeting place for antiquaries is on 10 August 1708.Footnote 48 There is the further reference on 11 September 1708, mentioned above. The next mention is on 1 April 1709 when Talman says he is meeting there;Footnote 49 on 21 November 1709, writing from Florence, he makes a reference to ‘the Temple’;Footnote 50 and on 1 November 1711 he refers to the Fountain.Footnote 51 So there is clear evidence that antiquaries were meeting at the Fountain before the ‘closure’ of the Young Devil in early September 1708, and that they carried on meeting for at least another two years.

But by late summer 1708, two groups of antiquaries were meeting at roughly the same time almost next door to each other. The letter of 10 August 1708 from Talman to Madox explains at least part of the reason why. Writing from Norfolk, Talman thanks Madox:

Talman then suggests that if the Swedes have an antiquarian society, Britain too should have one. He ends with an appeal for co-operation:

Talman ended by presenting his service ‘to my good friends Mr Wanley & Mr Holmes &c’.Footnote 52 From this we can see that the ‘antiquarian society’ was apparently not yet formally in existence (‘if it be brought about’). If it were to be brought about, it would have needed set meeting times and a common purpose. But apparently there had been opposition to what had been proposed, and individual interests and/or parties were not allowing the beneficial scheme to go forward. To all intents and purposes we seem to have two ‘rival camps’ (not an unusual situation for antiquaries to be in).

It is difficult to work out who the members of the two camps were, but Thomas Madox seems to be a ‘leader’ of the ‘Fountain’ party. He had been proposed by George Holmes as a member of the 1707 Society on 9 January 1708, but is not recorded as having attended any meetings. He is said to have been a barrister of the Middle Temple and a legal antiquary. Interestingly, he is not recorded as one of the founders of the Antiquarian Society in July 1717.Footnote 53 However, for Talman to offer ‘his service’ to Wanley, as well as to Holmes, would seem to indicate that Madox was on reasonable terms, and in contact, with all of them. Further work is needed on this problem, but the evidence suggests that the Fountain Tavern accommodated a longer-lasting group of antiquaries than the Young Devil.

It was these meetings that Maurice Johnson recollected in 1754 when, as ‘the oldest member’, he responded to an enquiry about the early history of the Society with memories of meetings held around 1709 to 1710 at ‘the Temple ‘Change’ and other coffee houses and taverns about the Temple. In 1754 Browne Willis, too, mentions that antiquaries were meeting at the Fountain Tavern, by the Inner Temple gate ‘against’ (in the sense of opposite) Chancery Lane, in about 1709. These two statements are not mutually inconsistent and seem to confirm the existence of a loose grouping of like-minded people who met occasionally but did not constitute a regular Society.

The Fountain Tavern to which Browne Willis refers should not be confused with the more famous Fountain in the Strand, which was home to the anti-Walpole group known as the Fountain Club and, for a while, to Stukeley’s breakaway antiquarian society of the ‘Roman Knights’.Footnote 54 The Fountain by the Inner Temple gate is recorded in Lillywhite as being in existence from 1636 to 1744. The building at 17 Fleet Street which housed it still stands,Footnote 55 making it the only building to survive from the antiquaries’ meetings prior to the Somerset House move.

The Temple Exchange Coffee House was located near Temple Bar in 1758. It appears to have been active from c 1710 to c 1764. It has been identified as a meeting place for botanists as well as antiquaries.Footnote 56 It is noteworthy that all the places chosen to accommodate antiquarian meetings from the 1707 Society until the move from Chancery Lane to Somerset House in 1771 were in a limited area around the Temple and the west end of Fleet Street.

The Mitre tavern, July 1717

From July 1717 we have ample evidence that the Society of Antiquaries was meeting at the Mitre Tavern; we know where the Mitre was located and a plaque in Fleet Street marks the spot.Footnote 57 What is important about the Mitre is that it marks a major shift in the status of the places where antiquaries held their meetings. The Mitre was in the ‘top league’ of taverns, along with the Fountain in the Strand and the Devil in Fleet Street. Their status can be judged by their size and history and by the people and societies who met in them. In comparison with these, the Fountain in Fleet Street and, perhaps, the Bear in the Strand are very much second rate, with the Young Devil almost certainly below them, physically and literally. In terms of relative public social respectability, the 1717 Society had ‘arrived’.

The 1717 Society was also significantly different from the 1707 Society in its aims. The 1707 Society regarded the Bear and Young Devil taverns as temporary meeting places, until such time as free accommodation was provided by the Crown (a situation that was not to come about until 1770 and that lasted until 2006, when this support was arbitrarily removed). The Crown was explicitly looked to as the future ‘Head’ and practical supporter of the 1707 Society. The 1717 Society, by contrast, was founded on different principles involving a greater independence and there were no references back to the ‘charter’ of the 1707 Society.Footnote 58

1707: A foundation story?

It is current received wisdom that the present Society of Antiquaries dates from the first meeting of the 1707 Society. However, this interpretation seems to be based on the ‘origin story’ told by Gough in his introduction to the first Archaeologia in 1770.Footnote 59 Gough was anxious to establish a continuous ‘line of descent’ for the Society stretching back to the sixteenth century.Footnote 60 But Gough’s ‘history’ was not the first time that the origins of the Society had been described. Stukeley, in his 1752 history of the Society,Footnote 61 traced a line from the Elizabethan ‘College’ through Robert Cotton’s ‘Library and Academy’ and then, based on the recollections of senior Fellows (including Maurice Johnson), through the Fountain Tavern and Temple Change meetings in 1709 and 1710 to the ‘revival’ at the Mitre in 1717. There is neither mention nor hint of the 1707 Society. In early 1754 there was an exchange of letters between various senior Fellows about the origins of the Society, Dr Ducarel obtaining the advice of Maurice Johnson (who had given a paper on the subject in 1731), Browne Willis and Vertue.Footnote 62 As with Stukeley, these Fellows looked back to 1709 or 1710 for the origins of the 1717 Society, with no acknowledgement that the 1707 Society had even existed, let alone had any role to play. The ‘foundation story’ of the 1707 Society therefore seems to emerge well after the recording in the 1750s of the memories of the early members of the 1717 Society. Thus, the supposed foundation role of the 1707 Society appears as part of the ‘history writing’ of Gough in 1770, which in its own way is tied up with the change in status of the Society at the time.Footnote 63 The conclusion has to be that the 1707 Society was a short-lived phenomenon, which had no significant role to play in the eventual emergence of the present Society of Antiquaries.

Anniversaries are convenient benchmarks to consider past histories and look to the future. There is no doubt that the meetings of the short-lived 1707 Society were a part of the ferment of ideas at the beginning of the eighteenth century, which led a decade later to the formation of the present Society of Antiquaries in 1717 or 1718. But it would be wrong to look to the evening of 5 December 1707 as the foundation meeting of the present Society of Antiquaries. The ‘real’ tercentenary anniversary must be in either 2017 or 2018,Footnote 64 and not to acknowledge that date would show that we choose to believe late eighteenth-century origin legends rather than the more prosaic evidence of our own minute books.

Abbreviation and Bibliography

Abbreviation

OBP

Old Bailey Proceedings Online <www.oldbaileyonline.org> (26 May 2009)