‘Bringing in the Boar’s Head’ for a Christmas feast. Engraving, English, 1871 (Colorized)

“IMPORTANCE OF THE BOAR’S HEAD, &c.; – The boar’s head, in ancient times, formed the most important dish on the table, and was invariably the first placed on the board upon Christmas-day, being preceded by a body of servitors, a flourish of trumpets, and other marks of distinction and reverence, and carried into the hall by the individual of next rank to the lord of the feast. At some of our colleges and inns of court, the serving of the boar’s head on a silver platter on Christmas-day is a custom still followed; and till very lately, a bore’s head was competed for at Christmas time by the young men of a rural parish in Essex. Indeed, so highly was the grizzly boar’s head regarded in former times, that it passed into a cognizance of some of the noblest families in the realm: thus it was not only the crest of the Nevills and Warwicks, with their collateral houses, but it was the cognizance of Richard III., that –

“Wretched, bloody, and usurping boar,
That spoil’d your summer fields and fruitful vines,
Swills your warm blood like wash, and makes his trough
In your embowell’d bosoms,” –

and whose nature it was supposed to typify; and was universally used as a sign to taverns. The Boar’s Head in Eastcheap, which, till within the last twenty-five years still stood in all its primitive quaintness, though removed to make way for the London-bridge approaches, will live vividly in the mind of every reader of Shakspeare, as the resort of the prince of Wales, Poins, and his companions, and the residence of Falstaff and his coney-catching knaves, Bardolph, Pistol, and Nym; and whose sign was a boar’s head, carved in stone over the door, and a smaller one in wood on each side of the doorway.”