AND THE "BULL," WHITECHAPEL



After Mr. Pickwick and Sam had been so cleverly outwitted by Jingle
and Job Trotter at Bury, they returned to London. Taking liquid
refreshment one day afterwards in a city hostelry they chanced upon
the elder Weller, who, in the course of conversation, revealed the
fact that, whilst "working" an Ipswich coach, he had taken up Jingle
and Job Trotter at the "Black Boy" at Chelmsford: "I took 'em up,"
he emphasised, "right through to Ipswich, where the manservant--him
in the mulberries--told me they was a-going to put up for a long
time." Mr. Pickwick decided to follow them, and started, as will
be seen presently, from the Bull Inn, Whitechapel, for that town.

The reference to the "Black Boy" is but a passing one, and it is
not even recorded that Mr. Pickwick stopped there on his journey
out; but the inn where Jingle was "taken up" was then one of the
best known on the Essex road, and was not demolished until 1857,
when it was replaced by a modern public-house which still displays
the old signboard. In an article in The Dickensian* Mr. G. 0.
Rickwood gives some interesting particulars concerning its history,
from which we gather that originally the "Black Boy" was the town
house of the de Veres, the famous Earls of Oxford, whose principal
seat, Hedingham Castle, was within a short distance of Chelmsford.
It was converted into a hostelry in the middle of the seventeenth
century, and was first known as the Crown or New Inn. It was an
ancient timber structure house, and some of the carved woodwork,
with the well-known device of the boar's head taken from one of
the rooms of the old inn, is still preserved in Chelmsford Museum.