Or so the story goes. The Black Prince supposedly took them from a dead Bohemian at Crecy. The evidence is thin and the story is unkillable.
The Prince of Wales holds a 4.4 from two thousand seven hundred and eighty-four people, and above the door – if the sign is doing its job – are three ostrich feathers and the motto Ich Dien.
I serve. In German.
The story
At the battle of Crecy, in 1346, one of the men fighting on the French side was John of Bohemia. He was fifty and he was completely blind.
He insisted on being led into the fighting. His knights tied their horses’ bridles together so they could not lose him, and rode him into the English line, and he was killed, and the horses were found afterwards still roped to each other.
The story is that Edward the Black Prince – sixteen years old, in his first battle – was so moved by this that he took the dead king’s badge of three feathers and his motto, Ich Dien, and adopted them as his own.
They have been the badge of every Prince of Wales since.
And it is very probably not true
The blind king is real. He genuinely was led into the battle roped to his knights and he genuinely died there – that part is well attested and it is one of the great images of medieval warfare.
The feathers are the problem. Historians have looked for John of Bohemia’s supposed feather badge and struggled to find it. The Ich Dien motto has other candidate origins, including a Welsh phrase, and the whole account first appears in a form that looks distinctly like a story assembled after the fact to explain a badge that was already in use.
Which is precisely what we have found in every article of these two surveys.
The pattern, restated
The Elephant and Castle is a cutler’s badge, not a Spanish princess. The Churchill Arms was named in 1826, forty-eight years before Winston was born. Old Speckled Hen is a car. Brydges Place is thirty-three inches and not fifteen. The Pig and Whistle has four confident etymologies and no evidence.
And the feathers on this sign are almost certainly not looted from a corpse at Crecy.
In every single case the truth is administrative and the legend is heroic, and the legend wins, and it wins because nobody ever loses an argument by telling a better story.
Which Prince, anyway
We asked this question in Covent Garden about the Princess of Wales and concluded that the pub had made a brilliant accidental decision: by naming itself after a title rather than a person, it can never become dated, never be embarrassed, and never have to change the sign.
The same applies here. The title has been held by twenty-one men. Some were disastrous. One was Edward VIII. The pub does not have to have an opinion about any of them.
The pub
Ten to twenty pounds, cheerful, well-run, busy, and a 4.4 across a serious sample – which is a harder number to hold than anything in this file with three digits.
Verdict
Good pub, cheap for the postcode, and three feathers on the sign that a sixteen-year-old is supposed to have taken off a blind man he had just helped kill.
He probably did not. It remains the best story on any pub sign in London.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
The specific bureaucratic language suggests someone’s actually suffered through the meetings they’re describing. Their pain is our comedy.