The Barber's Pole: What the Records Show and What Came Later

Ask why a barber’s pole is striped and you will usually hear one tidy answer: red for blood, white for bandages, and, in the United States, blue for veins. The answer is repeated in trivia columns and popular histories. Its core is plausible, because barbers in early modern Europe really did let blood. But most of the specific details turn out to be explanations written down long after the poles were in use, and some have no early source at all.

What follows separates the strands. The documentary record for London, where the barbers’ guild kept unusually full books, says a good deal about basins, poles, blood and the law. It says much less about stripes.

Barbers who let blood

For most of recorded medical history, letting blood was a standard treatment. Its rationale came from humoral medicine, in which illness was an imbalance of blood, phlegm and two kinds of bile, and removing the excess was meant to restore health. Venesection, the most common method, usually opened the median cubital vein at the elbow with a lancet or a multi-bladed fleam; cupping, scarification and leeches were local alternatives. The practice reached a peak in Europe in the nineteenth century before it was abandoned for nearly every condition.¹

Physicians prescribed bleeding, but much of the cutting was done by barbers, who already worked with sharp blades. Comenius’s illustrated schoolbook Orbis Pictus (1658), translated into English by Charles Hoole in 1659, shows the range of the trade in one scene. The barber cuts hair and beards, shaves his customer and washes him over a basin; then, in the English text of the 1727 edition, the passage continues, “Sometimes he cutteth a Vein with a Pen-knife, where the Blood spirteth out.” Wound care is assigned to a different figure: “The Chirurgeon cureth Wounds.”²

In London the overlap was old enough to need policing. In about 1307 the City recorded an ordinance that “no barbers shall be so bold or so hardy as to put blood in their windows, openly or in view of folks, but let them have it privily carried unto the Thames,” on pain of a two-shilling fine.³ The rule implies that some barbers were displaying vessels of blood as advertisement. When Edward IV granted the barbers a royal charter in 1462, it described their members as practicing surgery, including “letting blood, and drawing the teeth.”³ (Early modern London had stranger remedies than bleeding; see corpse medicine in early modern England.)

The Act of 1540 and the united company

The barbers were not London’s only surgical body. A separate Guild of Surgeons existed alongside them, and the two bodies had long been rivals.⁴ In 1540 Parliament joined them by the Act 32 Henry VIII, chapter 42, creating a single company of barbers and surgeons. Henry VIII’s presentation of the Act became the subject of a painting by Holbein.⁴³

The statute did not blur the two trades; it separated their work while uniting their government. Its text, printed from a black-letter copy by the Company’s Victorian historian Sidney Young, says that no one in London practicing barbery or shaving may “occupy any surgery lettyng of bloud, or any other thynge belongyng to surgery drawing of teeth only excepte,” and that surgeons must not shave.³ The stated reason was infection: surgeons were taking patients with plague and the “great pockes” into their houses while also washing and shaving customers.³ Four masters governed the company, two of them barbers and two surgeons, and the company received the bodies of four executed criminals each year for anatomical dissection.³

One clause bears directly on signs. Surgeons in and around the City were required to “have an open signe on the strete syde wher they shall fortune to dwell,” so that passers-by would know where to go “for theyr remedies in time of necessity.”³ The Act says nothing about what the sign should look like. It mentions no pole, no color and no basin.

On paper, then, barbers lost bloodletting in 1540. Whether practice followed the law is another matter. The Company’s own later orders, discussed below, still refer to barbers who bled, which suggests the line was not strictly kept.

What the Company’s books say about poles

Young’s Annals, compiled from the Company’s minutes, contains the firmest early evidence for the barber’s pole as a shop sign. Among the laws enacted by the Company’s court in 1566, one forbade barbers on Sundays and holy days to “hange upp set or put out any bason or basons pott or potts uppon his poule Racke shoppe windowes or otherwise.” Young calls this “the earliest mention of the ‘Barbers’ pole’ in our Books.”³ The sign, in other words, was a pole from which brass basins and pots were hung, and its display marked the shop as open for business.

The same list of 1566 shows that blood was still part of the trade. Another order forbade “Barbours excercyseinge fleabothomye or bloud lettinge” to show blood in vessels in their windows, a restatement of the medieval rule.³ In 1635 the court ordered an unqualified barber who had set up shop in Blackfriars “to take in his barbars pole & basons,” that is, to take down his sign and close.³ An entry of 1557 concerns a different trade sign: a widow who drew teeth was told no longer to “hange oute any signe or clothe w{th} teethe.”³

These records establish three things. By the 1560s a pole was the London barber’s recognized sign. Its distinctive feature in the records is the basins hung from it. And the guild regulated its display. None of the entries Young transcribes describes stripes, colors or bandages.

The split of 1745

The partnership of 1540 lasted two centuries, uneasily. The Royal College of Surgeons attributes the break to the growth of London’s hospitals in the early eighteenth century, which raised the number and standing of surgeons and their wish for independence; the surgeon and anatomist William Cheselden pressed Parliament to act.⁴ On January 31, 1745 the surgeons petitioned Parliament; on February 6 the barbers petitioned against the separation and asked to be heard by counsel; and a committee found the surgeons’ case made.³

The Act 18 George II separated the two bodies in June 1745. The surgeons became a separate corporation, and the barbers were re-incorporated as the Company of Barbers of London, holding their first court on June 25.³ The Company of Surgeons received a royal charter in 1800 as the Royal College of Surgeons in London, renamed the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 1843.⁴ The barbers kept the pole.

Early explanations, tested one by one

When writers began to ask why barbers used a pole, they disagreed from the start. The earliest answers do not mention blood or bandages at all.

The basin on a pole as a beacon. The Athenian Oracle, as quoted by Brand and later by Andrews, said that barbers, once “the surgeons of old times,” “used to hang their basons out upon poles to make known at a distance to the weary and wounded traveller where all might have recourse.”⁵⁶ This fits the Company records, which also center on basins, though those records say nothing about wounded travellers.

A Roman origin. In 1708 the British Apollo printed a reader’s question asking “Why a barber at port-hole / Puts forth a party-coloured pole?” The verse answer credited ancient Rome, where surgeons supposedly hung a basin on a long pole and later, short of wars, “joyn’d the other trade of trimming.”⁶ It is a joke in rhyme, not evidence. Its value is that it shows the pole was already “party-coloured,” of more than one color, by 1708, and that this answer offered no blood-and-bandage reading.⁶⁵

A pun on “poll.” Some writers derived the pole from “poll,” the head. The Antiquarian Repertory rejected this in 1775 as one of several conceits “as far-fetched and as unmeaning.”⁷⁵ Brand also records a joke from Gayton’s Festivous Notes upon Don Quixote that a barber’s pole with the word “money” on it made “poll-money.”⁵ Both are wordplay; neither is an origin.

The bleeding staff and fillet. The explanation that underlies today’s version first appears in the Antiquarian Repertory of 1775. Its writer said, in the wording Brand reprinted, “the true intention of that party-coloured staff was to show that the master of the shop practised surgery, and could breathe a vein as well as mow a beard,” since village practitioners still put such a staff into the hand of a patient being bled. “The white band, which encompasses the staff, was meant to represent the fillet thus elegantly twined about it.”⁵⁷ The fillet was the band tied round the arm. The antiquary John Brand, who preferred this account, pointed to the barber’s-shop picture in Orbis Pictus and to an Edward I missal as evidence.⁵ The idea is reasonable, but it is an eighteenth-century inference about a sign already centuries old. No earlier text found for this article states it.

A statute requiring stripes. On July 17, 1797, opposing a bill to incorporate the surgeons, Lord Thurlow told the House of Peers “that by a statute still in force, the barbers and surgeons were each to use a pole”: blue and white striped for barbers, and for surgeons the same with “a galley-pot and a red rag.”⁵ This is often repeated as if it were law. The 1540 Act, the statute governing the two trades, requires only an “open signe” for surgeons and describes no pole or colors.³ No statute matching Thurlow’s description was found for this article. The speech is known here only through later quotation, and it may have been a debating flourish against the surgeons; it is not good evidence for a legal rule.

Red for blood, white for bandages, blue for veins

The fuller modern story adds details the early writers did not. In 1866 Jacob Larwood and John Camden Hotten wrote that the patient grasped the pole during bleeding, that because the pole was liable to be stained with blood “it was painted red,” and that it was hung outside wrapped in white linen bands, which later “gave rise” to poles painted red and white, black and white, or red, white and blue.⁸ Beyond a passing remark that the grasped pole “is illustrated in more than one illuminated MS,” they cite no source, and none at all for the bloodstains or the hanging bandages. The Antiquarian Repertory had already read the white band as a fillet in 1775, but this is the earliest version found of the story that real linen bands were hung on the pole. The now familiar detail of bloody bandages drying on the pole and twisting in the wind does not appear even there.

Two things weigh against reading the colors as a code with fixed meanings. The early record is about basins, not stripes, and the first explicit color scheme found for this article, Thurlow’s, has barbers in blue and white, with red assigned to surgeons.⁵ Larwood and Hotten themselves list black-and-white poles beside red ones.⁸ And the striking display of blood that the guild banned in 1307 and 1566 was real; John Gay’s fable of 1727 described a barber’s window where cups were “Lin’d with red rags, to look like blood.”³⁶ Red rags as a stand-in for blood are documented. Red stripes as a stand-in for blood are an inference.

The blue stripe is the weakest link. Popular accounts today say that “One theory holds that blue is symbolic of the veins cut during bloodletting,” while another links it to the American flag.⁹ No early source for either theory was found. Larwood and Hotten mention red, white and blue poles in 1866 without explaining the blue.⁸

The fairest summary is this. The barber’s link to bloodletting is documented in charters, statutes and guild orders. The pole as a barber’s sign, hung with basins, is documented in London by 1566. The idea that the pole stands for the staff a patient held is an eighteenth-century antiquary’s explanation, plausible but unproven. White as a bandage was first proposed in 1775, as a painted image of the fillet. Red as bloodstains and the hanging linen bands were first set down in 1866. Bandages drying in the wind, and blue as veins, are later stories for which no early source was located.

Footnotes

1. Greenstone 2010, BCMJ 52(1). ↩

2. Comenius, Orbis Pictus, ch. 76, “The Barbers Shop.” ↩

3. Young 1890, Annals of the Barber-Surgeons, c. 1307 ordinance; 1462 charter; 1540 Act (Appendix C); 1557, 1566 and 1635 orders; 1745 separation. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵

4. Royal College of Surgeons of England, “Brief College History.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

5. Brand 1849, vol. 2, pp. 358-360, “Barbers’ Signs.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸

6. Andrews 1904, “The Barber’s Pole” and “The Barber’s Shop.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

7. Antiquarian Repertory, vol. 1 (1775), no. III. ↩ ↩²

8. Larwood and Hotten 1866, History of Signboards, “Trades’ Signs” (barber’s pole). ↩ ↩² ↩³

9. Nix, history.com, 2014 (updated 2025). ↩