Daily entries from the 17th century London diary
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Following the Restoration of the Monarchy, the taverns of Covent Garden gained a bad reputation for
“Far less fashionable [than hatelaine’s] was the Fleece tavern, where Pepys found pleasant entertainment on several occasions. His earliest reference to the house is in his account of meeting two gentlemen who told him how a Scottish knight was ‘killed basely the other day at the Fleece,’ but that tale did not prevent him from visiting the tavern himself. Along with a ‘Captain Cuttle’ and two others he went thither to drink, and ‘there we spent till four o’clock, telling stories of Algiers, and the manner of life of slaves there.’ And then he tells how one night he dropped in at the Opera for the last act ‘and there found Mr. Sanchy and Mrs. Mary Archer, sister to the fair Betty, whom I did admire at Cambridge, and thence took them to the Fleece in Covent Garden; but Mr. Sanchy could not by any argument get his lady to trust herself with him into the taverne, which he was much troubled at.’”
— From Henry Shelley’s “Inns and Taverns of Old London”
Definition: \Fleeced\, a.
1. Furnished with a fleece; as, a sheep is well fleeced. —Spenser.
2. Stripped of a fleece; plundered; robbed.
http://www.hyperdictionary.com/dictionary/fleeced
Me flees OE fleos
General Patrick Ruthven lived near the Fleece Tavern in Covent Garden in 1641. See Rev. Wm. Macray, The Ruthven Correspondence (London, 1868).