Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 3.djvu/402

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NOTES AND QUERIES. [io* s. in. APRIL 29, 1905.

not near the figures of the two Evangelists, may it not be probable that it was intended to represent that bird, which is an emblem of St. Edmund, to whom the church is dedicated? I shall be grateful if any reader can inform me if an instance is known where an emblem of a saint in whose honour a church is dedi- cated is attached to a screen.

DONALD R. GOODING. Southwold.

REV. EDW. WM GRINFIELD. During what year did he hold Laura Chapel, Bath ? When did he reside in London? Did he reside permanently at Brighton? and, if so, when? His best -known work 'G. Test. Ed. Helle- nistica' (1843), and its 'Scholia' (1848), are dated from Brighton. 'D.N.B.' merely says he died and was buried at Brighton (Hove).

C. S. WARD.

THE PAWNBROKER'S SIGN AND THE

MEDICI ARMS. (10 th S. Hi. 207.)

IT must have been that the wish was father to the thought when the " three balls " of the pawnbroker were first assigned an origin associated with St. Nicholas. It is true that the good St. Nicholas is identified pre- eminently with the relief of distress ; but one has never heard that his emblem, whether represented in ancient art as three balls or as three purses, was of the cerulean colour; and then we should have a right to expect that the sign was sometimes represented by the three purses of which his emblem of the three balls was merely a conventionalized form. But this is not the case. St. Nicholas's emblem, in allusion to the three bags of gold which he threw in at the window of a starv- ing nobleman, who was about to sacrifice his three daughters to a life of infamy, is un- doubtedly three golden balls ; whereas there is preponderating evidence that the pawn- broker's sign was originally the three blue balls or bowls, and that the tincture d'or was afterwards given them by way of rendering them more easily distinguishable, as in the case of " The Golden Sugar-Loaf " and many other trade signs.

The lending of money on chattel securities first became a separate trade about the end of the seventeenth century; but a study of the eighteenth-century newspapers will show as Mr. F. G. Hilton Price has pointed out, that it was only towards the middle of that century that the pawnbrokers began to advertise their trade in the newspapers

Then the sign (and this is very noteworthy) was almost invariably "The Three Bowls," " The Three Blue Bowls," " The Three Balls," or the " Three Blue Balls." Among all the instances of which I have notes as occurring at this time, not one is represented as "The Three Golden Balls"* i.e., among no fewer than sixteen distinct pawnbrokers' adver- tisements. There was a "Two Golden Balls," the sign of a pawnbroker's, " near Aldgate Church-Yard Wall," in 1742 (Daily Advert., 27 Mar.), and another " Two Golden Balls" in Great Hart Street, Covent Garden, in 1733 (C'ra/y.swaw,8Sept.) ) but there is nothing to show that this latter was the sign of a pawnbroker at all. The balls were "blue" so late even as 1818, as we learn by their being so described in Joseph Taylor's ' Anti- quitates Curiosse,' published in that year.

Now, having with a fair show of certainty established the cerulean character of the sign originally, I shall naturally be asked how it is, assuming the sign to be traceable to the cartouche of the Medici family, which was charged with six roundels azure, that but three occur on the sign. The only possible answer to this is that it was the lower part of the arms that were adopted, three being generally the popular limit of signboard objects. The arms of the Medici family have a curious and remote origin, that I do not think has ever been particularly noted ; and it will be observed that the roundels constituting these arms were not pills, either blue or golden, but " balles " or "bowles," appertaining to the giant's iron club probably a kind of " holy - water sprinkler," as such a weapon was facetiously styled. It will also be borne in mind that the founder of the family was not an Italian, but a Frenchman ; neither does there seem to be any evidence connecting them with the medical profession, as their name would imply, though this may well have been the source from which the name sprang. In the words, then, of Favyn, in his ' Theater of Honour and Knighthood,'

" Eurardo [? Everardp] de Medicis was a French Knight and ordenarie Chamberlaine to our Emperour Charlemagne, whom he followed into Italic to un-nest the Lombardes and other Strangers that overmuch commanded at Baguetta. This French Knight was entreated by the Citizens of Florence to deliver them from the tyranny of a fierce and proud Giant named Mugellus, whose

he says, as will be seen by a reference to ' The Royal Annual Kalendar ' of that year, Sir Joseph and Sir Thomas Hankey were at the sign of " The Three Golden Balls" in Fenchurch Street ('London Bankers,' p. 78).
 * One instance is given by Mr. Price. In 1765,