Hentzner, who visited London in the autumn of 1598, says:[1384]
‘Est et alius postea locus Theatri quoque formam habens, Ursorum & Taurorum venationibus destinatus, qui à postica parte alligati à magnis illis canibus & molossis Anglicis, quos lingua vernacula Docken appellant, mire exagitantur, ita tamen, ut saepe canes isti ab Ursis vel Tauris, dentibus arrepti, vel cornibus impetiti, de vita periclitari, aliquando etiam animam exhalare soleant, quibus sic vel sauciis vel lassis statim substituuntur alii recentes & magis alacres. Accedit aliquando in fine hujus spectaculi Ursi plane excaecati flagellatio, ubi quinque, vel sex, in circulo constituti, Ursum flagellis misere excipiunt, qui licet alligatus auffugere nequeat, alacriter tamen se defendit, circumstantes, & nimium appropinquantes, nisi recte & provide sibi caveant, prosternit, ac flagella e manibus cadentium eripit atque confringit.’
To 1599 belongs the account of Thomas Platter of Basle:[1385]
‘The London bearbaitings usually take place every Sunday and Wednesday, across the water. The play house is built in circular form; above are a number of seated galleries; the ground space under the open sky is unoccupied. In the midst of this a great bear is fastened to a stake by a long rope. When we came down the stairs, we went behind the play house, and saw the English dogs, of which there were about 120 chained up, each in his separate kennel, in a yard.’
Platter also describes the actual baiting of the bull and bear and of the blind bear, much as did his predecessors. On 7 September 1601 the Duc de Biron was taken to the Bear Garden, as one of the sights of London, by no less a cicerone than Sir Walter Raleigh.[1386] A visit of 16 September 1602 is described in the diary of Philip Julius, Duke of Stettin in Pomerania.[1387] The vogue of the Bear Garden amongst foreigners evidently lasted into James’s reign, but the notices are briefer. Lewis Frederick of Württemberg, saw on 26 April 1610 the baiting both of bears and bulls ‘and monkeys that ride on horseback’;[1388] and Justus Zingerling of Thuringia, who was in London about the same year, mentions the ‘theatra comoedorum, in which bears and bulls fight with dogs’.[1389] Even more summary is the reference in an itinerary of Prince Otto von Hesse-Cassel in 1611.[1390] But the extracts given sufficiently describe the nature of the sport, and show that bulls continued to be baited up to a late date, as well as bears, and that the serious business of the spectacle was diversified by regular humorous episodes, such as the monkey on horseback and the whipping of the blind bear. He, by the way, was called Harry Hunks, and is named by Sir John Davies in his Epigrams[1391] of c. 1594, in company with the Sackerson who gave rise to a boast on the part of Master Slender,[1392] and at a later date by Dekker[1393] and Henry Peacham.[1394] Two other famous bears were Ned Whiting and George Stone. Both are alluded to in Ben Jonson’s Epicoene (1609),[1395] and the latter also in The Puritan (1607).[1396] The death of the ‘goodlye beare’ George Stone at a baiting before the King of Denmark in 1606 is lamented in the petition of Henslowe and Alleyn to the King for increased fees already described. One other interesting notice of the sport may be added from the Dulwich collection, and that is an advertisement or ‘bill’ of the entertainment, which runs as follows:
‘Tomorrowe beinge Thursdaie shalbe seen at the Beargardin on the banckside a greate mach plaid by the gamstirs of Essex who hath chalenged all comers what soeuer to plaie v dogges at the single beare for v pounds and also to wearie a bull dead at the stake and for your better content shall haue plasant sport with the horse and ape and whiping of the blind beare. Viuat Rex.’[1397]
Where then was the Bear Garden? This is a point upon which the foreign visitors are not very explicit. From them we could infer little more than that it was transpontine. It has already been pointed out that in official documents, at any rate those of a less formal character than a patent under the great seal, the Mastership is described as the Mastership of the Game of, or at, Paris Garden. With this common parlance agrees.[1398] In the allusions of the pamphleteers and poets, from the middle of the sixteenth to the middle of the seventeenth century, Paris or Parish Garden is regularly the place of baiting.[1399] ‘The Beare-garden, commonly called Paris Garden’, says Stowe, speaking of 1583.[1400] At Paris Garden, or as it is sometimes corruptly spelt, ‘Pallas Garden’, Henslowe and Alleyn have their office as Masters[1401] in 1607, and near it Alleyn is living in 1609. Now the Liberty and Manor of Paris Garden is a quite well defined part of the Bankside. It lay at the extreme west end, bordering upon Lambeth Marsh, with the Clink upon its east. In it stood from about 1595 the most westerly of the theatres, the Swan.[1402] Historians of Southwark are fond of suggesting that it had been the abode of the bears from an almost immemorial antiquity, and follow a late edition of Blount’s seventeenth-century Glossographia in connecting it with the domus of a certain Robert de Parys, near which the butchers of London were ordered to throw their garbage in 1393.[1403] I think the idea is that the garbage was found useful for feeding the bears. This theory I believe to be as much a myth as Taylor the water-poet’s derivation of the name from Paris, son of Priam. Parish, rather than Paris Garden, seems, in fact, to be the earlier form, although there is nothing in the history of the place that very particularly explains it.[1404] Many residents in London were of course ‘de Parys’ in the fourteenth century, and the domus of the Robert in question, who lived some time after the first mention of ‘Parish’ Garden, was pretty clearly on the City and not the Surrey side of the river.[1405] It is, however, the case that before the Civil War the Butchers’ Company had been accustomed to send their offal by a beadle to ‘two barrow houses, conveniently placed on the river side, for the provision and feeding of the King’s Game of Bears’, and were directed to resume the practice after the Restoration; and possibly this is what misled Blount.[1406] Obviously, however, what the butchers did in the seventeenth century is no proof of what they did in the fourteenth. And, in fact, the ordinance of 1393 is explicit in its direction that the offal is ultimately to be, not devoured by bears, but cast into mid-stream.
There is in fact nothing, so far as I know, to locate the royal Game on the Bankside at all until the middle of the sixteenth century, when it was already hard by the stews in the Liberty of the Clink, and still less, except the persistence of the name, to locate it definitely in the Liberty of Paris Garden.[1407] The notice which brings Paris Garden nearest is in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, which contains an account of an adventure of one Ralph Morice, secretary to Cranmer, who was foolish enough to take a book of his master’s, containing criticisms of the Six Articles, in a wherry from Westminster Bridge to Paul’s Wharf. It chanced that Henry VIII ‘was then in his barge with a great number of barges and boats about him, then baiting of bears in the water, over against the Bank’. The waterman stopped to see the fun, and the bear broke loose, and climbed into the wherry, which upset. The dangerous book fell into the Thames and was picked up by the bearward, who was the Lady Elizabeth’s bearward and ‘an arrant Papist’. It was only through the good offices of Cromwell that Morice escaped serious trouble. This was about July 1539.[1408] Certainly it was the custom from an early date to moor the King’s barge off Paris Garden.[1409] The spot was marked later by the Old Barge Stairs, which stood at the west end of that part of the Bank lying in front of the Garden, just as Paris Garden Stairs stood at its east end. But the barge was not necessarily at its moorings when Henry was baiting from it. Mr. Ordish suggests that it was the common use of Paris Garden Stairs by visitors to the baiting, which led to the name being transferred to the Bear Garden itself, without any one troubling to inquire very minutely whether it stood a little to the east or a little to the west of the landing.[1410] On the whole, however, I regard it as reasonably probable that there was at one time a Bear Garden in the Liberty, which fixed the traditional name for the sport, even after it had been transferred farther along the Bank.[1411] It may, perhaps, be a slight confirmation of this view that the 1627 survey of Paris Garden shows a space, apparently laid out as a garden and arranged as a circle within a square, which may represent the site. It stands nearly opposite Paris Garden Stairs in a triangular bit of ground between Holland Street and the lane leading to Copt Hall. This seems to have been rather a desolate region in Elizabeth’s reign, at any rate when you got beyond the row of houses which lined the bank.[1412] If there was a Bear Garden there, it had clearly been abandoned some little time before 1546, as the Stews were then ‘the accustomed place’. Somewhat later, the maps of Höfnagel (c. 1560) and Agas (c. 1570) show, in addition to the Bull ring already mentioned, another ring marked ‘The Beare bayting’, standing immediately west of it, and like it in the Clink.[1413] The animals at the stake are discernible in the rings, and to the south of each stretches a yard with a pond in the middle and kennelled dogs along the sides. It is in the Clink, too, that Norden in 1593 shows ‘The Beare howse’, a little west and north of ‘The play howse’, which is the Rose. This evidence is consistent with what little is upon written record about the locality of the Bear Gardens. The most important document is a deposition of John Taylor, not the water-poet, in a suit of 1620:[1414]
‘He saith that he remembreth that the game of bear-bayting hath been kept in fower severall places (vizt.) at Mason Steares on the bankside; neere Maid-lane by the corner of the Pyke Garden; at the beare garden which was parcell of the possession of William Payne; and the place where they are now kept.’
Taylor was then an old man of seventy-seven and his memory would easily go back to the time of the early maps. To his testimony may be added that of Stowe, who says in his Survey of London (1598):[1415]