CIRCUS CELEBRITIES.
CHAPTER I.
Beginnings of the Circus in England—Tumblers and Performing Horses of the Middle Ages—Jacob Hall, the Rope-dancer—Francis Forcer and Sadler’s Wells—Vauxhall Gardens—Price’s Equestrian Performances at Johnson’s Gardens—Sampson’s Feats of Horsemanship—Philip Astley—His Open-air Performances near Halfpenny Hatch—The First Circus—Erection of the Amphitheatre in Westminster Road—First Performances there—Rival Establishment in Blackfriars Road—Hughes and Clementina.
Considering the national love of everything in which the horse plays a part, and the lasting popularity of circus entertainments in modern times, it seems strange that the equine amphitheatre should have been unknown in England until the close of the last century. That the Romans, during their occupation of the southern portion of our island, introduced the sports of the arena, in which chariot-racing varied the combats of the gladiators, and the fierce encounters of wild beasts, is shown by the remains of the Amphitheatre at Dorchester, and by records of the existence of similar structures near St Alban’s, and at Banbury and Caerleon. After the departure of the Romans, the amphitheatres which they had erected fell into disuse and decay; but at a later period they were appropriated to bull-baiting and bear-baiting, and the arena at Banbury was known as the bull-ring down to a comparatively recent period. An illumination of one of the Anglo-Saxon manuscripts in the Harleian collection shows one of these ancient amphitheatres, outside a town; there is a single musician in the arena, to whose music a man is dancing, while another performer exhibits a tame bear, which appears to be simulating sleep or death; the spectators are sitting or standing around, and one of them is applauding the performance in the modern manner, by clapping his hands.
But from the Anglo-Saxon period to about the middle of the seventeenth century, the nearest approximation to circus performances was afforded by the ‘glee-men,’ and the exhibitors of bears that travestied a dance, and horses that beat a kettle-drum with their fore-feet. Some of the ‘glee-men’ were tumblers and jugglers, and their feats are pourtrayed in several illuminated manuscripts of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. One of these illuminations, engraved in Strutt’s Sports, shows a boy leaping through a hoop; another, in the Cottonian collection, represents a juggler throwing three balls and three knives alternately. What is technically called ‘the shower’ is shown in another illumination of mediæval juggling; and that there were female acrobats in those days appears from a drawing in one of the Sloane collection of manuscripts, in which a girl is shown in the attitude of bending backward. One of the Arundel manuscripts, in the British Museum, shows a dancing bear; and other illuminations, of a later date, represent a horse on the tight-rope, and an ox standing on the back of a horse.
Strutt quotes from the seventh volume of the Archæologia, the following account of a rope-flying feat performed by a Spaniard in the reign of Edward VI. ‘There was a great rope, as great as the cable of a ship, stretched from the battlements of Paul’s steeple, with a great anchor at one end, fastened a little before the Dean of Paul’s house-gate; and when his Majesty approached near the same, there came a man, a stranger, being a native of Arragon, lying on the rope with his head forward, casting his arms and legs abroad, running on his breast on the rope from the battlement to the ground, as if it had been an arrow out of a bow, and stayed on the ground. Then he came to his Majesty, and kissed his foot; and so, after certain words to his Highness, he departed from him again, and went upwards upon the rope, till he came over the midst of the churchyard, where he, having a rope about him, played certain mysteries on the rope, as tumbling, and casting one leg from another. Then took he the rope, and tied it to the cable, and tied himself by the right leg a little space beneath the wrist of the foot, and hung by one leg a certain space, and after recovered himself again with the said rope, and unknit the knot, and came down again. Which stayed his Majesty, with all the train, a good space of time.’
Holinshed mentions a similar feat which was performed in the following reign, and which, unhappily, resulted in the death of the performer. In the reign of Elizabeth lived the famous Banks, whom Sir Walter Raleigh thought worthy of mention in his History of the World, saying that ‘if Banks had lived in older times, he would have shamed all the enchanters in the world; for whosoever was most famous among them could never master or instruct any beast as he did.’ The animal associated with the performer so eulogized was a bay horse named Morocco, which was one of the marvels of the time. An old print represents the animal standing on his hind legs, with Banks directing his movements.
Morocco seems to have been equally famous for his saltatory exercises and for his arithmetical calculations and his powers of memory. Moth, in Love’s Labour Lost, puzzling Armado with arithmetical questions, says, ‘The dancing horse will tell you,’ an allusion which is explained by a line of one of Hall’s satires—
‘Strange Morocco’s dumb arithmetic.’