London--was, in fact the keeper of a cook's-shop; and in the Prologue
to the Tale, with which his name is associated, the charming story of
"Gamelin," the poet makes the Reeve charge his companion with not very
creditable behaviour towards his customers. So our host trusts that
his relation will be entertaining and good:--

"For many a pasty hast thou let blood,
And many a Jack of Dover[1] hast thou sold,
That hath been twice hot and twice cold.
Of many a pilgrim hast thou Christ's curse--
For thy parsley fare they yet the worse:
That they have eaten with the stubble goose,
For in thy shop is many a fly loose."

[Footnote 1: A sole]

But these restaurants were not long confined to one locality. From a
very early date, owing perhaps to its proximity to the Tower and the
Thames, East Cheap was famed for its houses of entertainment. The
Dagger in Cheap is mentioned in "A Hundred Merry Tales," 1526. The
Boar is historical. It was naturally at the East-end, in London
proper, that the flood-tide, as it were, of tavern life set in, among
the seafarers, in the heart of industrial activity; and the anecdotes
and glimpses which we enjoy show, just what might have been guessed,
that these houses often became scenes of riotous excess and debauch.
Lydgate's ballad of "London Lickpenny" helps one to imagine what such
resorts must have been in the first part of the fifteenth century. It
is almost permissible to infer that the street contained, in addition
to the regular inns, an assortment of open counters, where the
commodities on sale were cried aloud for the benefit of the passer-by;
for he says:--

"When I hied me into East Cheap:
One cries ribs of beef, and many a pie:
Pewter pots they clattered on a heap;
There was harp, fife, and sautry."

The mention of pewter is noteworthy, because the Earl of
Northumberland ate his dinner off wood in 1572. Pewter plates had not
long been given up when I joined the Inner Temple in 1861.

There is a still more interesting allusion in the interlude of the
"World and the Child," 1522, where Folly is made to say:--

"Yea, and we shall be right welcome, I dare well say,
In East Cheap for to dine;
And then we will with Lombards at passage play,
And at the Pope's Head sweet wine assay."

The places of resort in this rollicking locality could furnish, long
before The Boar made the acquaintance of Falstaff, every species of
delicacy and _bonne bouche_ to