Alleyn left a record of 'what the Bear garden cost me for my owne part in December 1594'. He paid £200 to Burnaby, perhaps only for a joint interest with Henslowe or Jacob Meade, and £250 for the 'patten', that is, I suppose, the Mastership bought from Sir William Stuart in 1604. He held his interest for sixteen years and received £60 a year, and then sold it to 'my father Hinchloe' for £580 in February 1611.[1] There must have been considerable outgoings on the structure during this period. Another memorandum in Alleyn's hand shows an expenditure of £486 4s. 10d. during 1602-5, and a further expenditure during 1606-8 of £360 'p^d. for ye building of the howses'.[2] This last doubtless refers in part, not to the baiting ring itself, but to a tavern and office built on 'the foreside of the messuage or tenemente called the Beare garden, next the river of Thames in the parish of St. Saviors', for which there exists a contract of 2 June 1606 between Henslowe and Alleyn and Peter Street the carpenter.[3] But this only cost £65, and it seems to me most likely that the Bear Garden was rebuilt on the southern site at the same time. Further light is thrown on the profits of the Bear Garden by a note in Henslowe's diary that the receipts at it for the three days next after Christmas 1608 were £4, £6, and £3 14s., which may be compared with the average of £1 18s. 3d. received from the Fortune during the same three days.[4] It may be added that Crowley notes the 'bearwardes vaile' somewhat ambiguously as 1/2d., 1d., or 2d.,[5] and that Lambarde in 1596 includes Paris Garden with the Theatre and Bel Savage as a place where you must pay 'one pennie at the gate, another at the entrie of the scaffolde, and the thirde for a quiet standinge'.[6]
Yet another building enterprise was undertaken in 1613, by which time an interest in the property had certainly been leased to Jacob Meade. On 29 August a contract was entered into between Henslowe and Meade and Gilbert Katherens, carpenter, for the pulling down of the Bear Garden and the erection before the following 30 November
- ↑ Henslowe Papers, 107. I agree with Dr. Greg (Henslowe, ii. 30, 39) that it is difficult to see what a lease from Thomas Garland to Henslowe and Alleyn in 1608 of a close called Long Slip or Long Meadow in Lambeth can have had to do with the baiting. But Alleyn added the word 'Bear-*garden' to the original endorsement 'M^r Garlands lece' (Henslowe Papers, 12). Perhaps the land was used for some subsidiary purpose in connexion with the Garden.
- ↑ Henslowe Papers, 110; Architectural Review, xlvii. 152.
- ↑ Full text in Alleyn Memoirs, 78; abstract in Henslowe Papers, 102.
- ↑ Henslowe, i. 214; cf. p. 189 (supra).
- ↑ Cf. p. 458.
- ↑ Cf. ch. xviii.
