Addison's Theory
one has ever shown that a Mistress Isabel, or Isabella, Savage ever kept the inn. It is true that Samuel Pegge, an eighteenth-century anecdotist, averred that a friend of his had seen an old lease in which an Isabella Savage figured as the tenant, but this is merely a case of "what the soldier said," and it is quite superfluous seeing that as far back as the middle of the fifteenth century the house was known alternatively as Savage's inn and as the "Belle on the Hope."
For the transformation of "Bell Savage" into the more musical "La Belle Sauvage," Addison appears to be chiefly responsible—and small blame to him. It should be premised that by the time he wrote, and probably long before, the name had materialized into a sign which represented a savage standing beside a bell. So we find Addison confiding to his readers in the Spectator (No. 82): "As for the Bell Savage, which is the Sign of a Savage Man standing by a Bell, I was formerly very much puzzled upon the Conceit of it, till I accidentally fell into the reading of an old Romance translated out of the French, which gives an account of a very beautiful Woman who was found in a Wilderness, and it is called in the French La Belle Sauvage, and is everywhere translated by our Countrymen the Bell Savage." So pleased was the essayist with his discovery in the lore of signs that he was moved to communicate others. "I can give a shrewd Guess," he proceeds, "at the Humour of the Inhabitant by the Sign that hangs before his Door. A surly, choleric Fellow generally makes choice of the Bear; as Men of milder Dispositions frequently live at the Lamb." All this, of course, was just delightful whimsicality, but Pennant, the eighteenth-century antiquary, took Addison's persiflage seriously, and declared it to be "the real derivation."
In thus paradoxically tracing "Bell Savage" back to "La Belle Sauvage," Addison it certainly was who started the transformation of "Bell Savage" into its euphonious French equivalent. The process was a slow
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