Four competing etymologies, all confidently asserted, none provable, which is the most English situation available
The Pig and Whistle holds a 4.3 from three hundred and forty people, and nobody can tell you why it is called that.
There are four theories. All four are asserted confidently by people who have not checked. None of them can be proved. It is, in miniature, the entire state of British pub etymology.
Theory one: peg and wassail
The most repeated. A “peg” was a marker inside a communal drinking vessel, showing how much each drinker was permitted before passing it on – which is where “take him down a peg” comes from. “Wassail” is the old toast.
Peg and wassail becomes pig and whistle. It is a lovely theory, it explains both words, and there is essentially no evidence for it.
Theory two: piggin and wassail
A piggin was a small wooden pail with a handle, used for drinking. Same construction, different first word, equally plausible, equally unproven.
Theory three: the Danish
From pige (girl) and vaes hael (good health). This one is popular with people who like their etymologies to involve Vikings, which is a large and persistent constituency and one that is wrong about most things.
Theory four: it is a pig, and a whistle
Somebody put a pig on a sign, and somebody put a whistle on a sign, and the two got joined, because English pub signs merged constantly – when two pubs combined, or when a landlord moved and brought his sign with him, you got a Bull and Bush, a Fox and Grapes, an Elephant and Castle.
This last theory is by far the least romantic and by far the most likely, which is the finding of nearly every article in this survey.
Why nobody knows
Because nobody wrote it down. That is the whole answer.
Pub names were not documents. They were pictures on a board, chosen by a landlord, for reasons that were obvious at the time and to nobody afterwards. There was no register, no archive, and no reason to explain a thing that everybody in the street already understood.
And so a gap opens, and into the gap rush the folk etymologists, and within a century there are four confident explanations and the true one – which was probably extremely boring – is gone.
We have seen this at the Elephant and Castle, which is a cutler’s badge and not a Spanish princess. At the Churchill Arms, which was named in 1826 for reasons nobody recorded. At Brydges Place, which is thirty-three inches wide and which the entire city insists is fifteen.
Verdict
Good little pub, cheap for the postcode, and a name that four different people will explain to you with total confidence and complete disagreement.
Go, drink, and enjoy the fact that a thing can be said in England for three hundred years without anybody once establishing whether it is true.
The merging of signs
Theory four deserves more, because it explains an enormous number of pub names and almost nobody knows it.
When two pubs merged, or when a landlord with an established sign took over a house with a different one, the two images were sometimes simply combined – and the resulting name is a collision rather than a phrase.
The Bull and Bush. The Fox and Grapes. The Eagle and Child. The Elephant and Castle, which we have already established is a cutler’s badge.
Half the “and” pubs in England are not poetic constructions. They are corporate mergers, from the fifteenth century, that nobody bothered to rebrand.
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]
