Plaque number 44 can be found at this location.
The plaque is on the wall of The Pheasant Inn which is on the corner of Salt Lane and Rollestone Street.
The O/S grid position is SU 14568 East 30192 North.
Originally the Crispin Inn. This
building incorporates the
Shoemakers guildhall. Left to
the Guild in 1683 by Philip Crewe
in memory of his father.
Plaque presented by Courage (Central) Ltd.
The site on the corner of Salt Lane and Rollestone Street is first mentioned in a will of 20 January 1638 when it was owned by Phillip Crew, a schoolmaster who had been churchwarden of St Edmund's in 1618/19. Crew's father had been a shoemaker and to honour him Crew, who was childless, decided to leave his house, orchard and garden to the Company of Shoemakers. In his will he asked the Company to enlarge the house to provide themselves with a hall, towards which he bequeathed them some building materials. The house had previously been two tenements, and is believed to date from the late 15th century. It is timber framed and has two storeys, the lower walls having at some time been rebuilt externally in brickwork.
Deeds show that soon after the Company had acquired the freehold they put up a new building in the garden at the rear of what had been Crew's house. The lower part of the building was described as a buttery, above which was the hall, which was accessed from a courtyard opening onto Hog Lane (now Salt Lane). The hall is part timber framed and part brick.
On 29 December 1677 the Company bought two adjoining tenements on Hog Lane, one from Thomas Ray, a merchant of Ford, and the other from John St Barbe of the Close (perhaps a descendent of William St Barbe who purchased the former St Edmund's College in 1544 - see note on plaque 78). The Shoemakers' holding now comprised five tenements - Crew's house (which counted as two), the hall/buttery, "Ray's land" and "Barbe's land". These make up the site as it stands today.
The date of the conversion of Crew's house into an inn can only be guessed at. A list of 1743 shows John Fort as licensee of "the Crispin" (in the records of the St Edmunds overseers it is called the "Crispin and Crispinian"). The Shoemakers' ownership was vested in a body of feoffees (in effect, trustees). Initially, these were all shoemakers or cordwainers, but in a lease of 1772, the feoffee list includes Daniel Payson, described as a "maltster and brewer". Licensees thereafter were J Gatehouse (1785), James Stead (name unclear -1795), Thomas Kapps (1809), "Mr Rogers" (1824) and Elizabeth Wheatley (1836). In the meantime, there had been a change of name. In 1795 the inn was still called the Crispin but in 1821 a lessee of the hall was given access via the yard of "the premises heretofore called the Crispin but now known by the name and sign of the Pheasant". It is still called the Pheasant, and now has a very helpful web site.
For much of its history, the city's workforce included a high proportion (somewhere between 10% and 20%) of workers in leather, and as late as 1851 shoemakers still formed 8% of the male working population. The fraternity of shoemakers and curriers appears on the first Corporation list of Salisbury craft guilds in 1440. As the fraternity of cordwainers it was one of the guilds which supplied men and money for Edward IV's expedition to France in 1475. Under the charter of James I (1613) the City was given the power to regulate guilds, and orders were made for the shoemakers including prohibitions on-
Previously, there had been demarcation between trades: shoemakers made new shoes and cobblers repaired them. By 1613, this distinction was disappearing: the Sunday prohibition applied to both manufacture and repair. The shoemakers were not the only body using the hall: between 1780 and 1790 the Clothworkers met there, as did the Methodists after 1800. The shoemakers' connection with the Crispin/Pheasant ceased in March 1828 when the whole site was sold to George Pain, brewer and maltster. Thereafter the shoemakers met as the Rainbow Club (a branch of the Friendly Society of Cordwainers of England) at the Rainbow in Milford Street.
The original name of the inn (Crispin and Crispinian) probably commemorated two martyrs who died circa 285 AD. The tradition is that Saints Crispin and Crispinian were noble Romans who became missionaries to Gaul. There they took up shoemaking in order to avoid having to rely on charity, and hence they became patron saints of shoemakers. English readers will need no reminding that their feast day (25 October) is the anniversary of the battle of Agincourt.
However, the footwear industry is not short of patron saints, for there is a rival claimant. He emerges in Thomas Dekker's comedy The Shoemaker's Holiday, published in 1599, which provides a lively if romantic picture of the trade in London. The play's main character is Simon Eyre, master shoemaker, entrepreneur, bon vivant, folk hero and (eventually) Lord Mayor of London. Eyre frequently invokes Saint Hugh, not Saint Crispin, as the patron of shoemakers, and the tools of the trade are referred to as "Saint Hugh's bones". Addressing the king, Eyre describes his companions as: -
"All shoemakers, my liege; gentlemen of the gentle craft, true Trojans, courageous cordwainers, they all kneel to the shrine of holy Saint Hugh"
and the shoemakers are shown celebrating Shrove Tuesday as "Saint Hugh's holiday"*
Why, then, were Crispin and Crispinian remembered by shoemakers, and Hugh forgotten? Perhaps because, while Crispin/Crispinian have the advantage of uniqueness, there are at least four saints who are named Hugh, and none of them appears to have any connection with shoemaking.
*to add to the confusion, the orders under the 1613 City charter require that "the [shoemakers] Company shall keep their feast on the Monday before the feast of St Bartholomew the Apostle", which would be in the week before 24 August. This coincides with neither of the dates given above. Perhaps the answer is that, in the wake of the Reformation, the link between saints' days and guild feasts had been weakened.
Royal Commission on Historical Monuments (England) report on Salisbury 1980 (for details of building construction - see page 145)
Endless Street - John Chandler, Hobnob Press 1983 (for details of the Salisbury workforce - page 70)
The Inns of Salisbury - Roland Graham Gordon 1988 - manuscript book held by Salisbury library (SAL647) - for details of Licensees of the Crispin/Pheasant - page 229.
The ancient trade guilds and companies of Salisbury - Charles Haskins, published Bennett 1912 - for almost everything else - pages 220-236
The Oxford Dictionary of Saints, D H Farmer, 2003 - pages 256 -259
Thomas Dekker - the Mermaid Series, published Ernest Benn Ltd, 1949
Thanks are once again due to the staff of the local studies library in Salisbury.
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