South London

by Walter Besant

Wherever such sports were carried on there must needs spring up a rabble rout who made their living by them: the bearward, the serving man who kept the kennels, fed the dogs, exercised the dogs, fed the bears, looked after the amphitheatre, took the money, and above all provided the drink. In the little lane now called the Bear Garden, there is a small square place which I take to be the survival of an open court in front of the circus. There is here a small tavern: the house itself is not ancient, but I believe that it stands on the site of the house which provided wine and beer for the spectators of the bear baiting. These sports, with others such as wrestling and fighting: these great crowds of people gathering together: the music which accompanied everything: caused the creation of taverns and drinking-places. Another attraction to the place may be only hinted at in these pages. Suffice it to say that all the profligate, all the debauched, all the rowdy, all the lovers of sport among the citizens of London crossed over to Bankside every evening in the summer and every Sunday in the winter, and there they frolicked, drank, sang, quarrelled, fought, and tortured animals to their hearts' content.

It is pleasant to think of Bankside and the fields beyond it—the pleasure garden of London. It was easy to get into the open country on every side of the City walls, but there was no place so pleasant as the Lambeth Marsh and the Bankside: none that offered so many and such various attractions. The flag flying over the Theatre proclaimed that a play was forward: the number of those who loved the play more than the baiting increased daily: there was never a time when the citizens did not love the green fields and the woods: and these lay behind Paris Gardens and the Bank, beyond the barking of the dogs and the roar of the crowd and the blare of the music and the stink of the kennels. Every summer evening the river was crowded with the boats taking the people across to the stairs upon the Bank between St. Mary Overies and Old Barge House Stairs: innumerable were the boats. As for the watermen, John Taylor, the water poet, says that there were 40,000 of them plying between Windsor and Gravesend, while the number of people who were carried over every day to the plays on Bankside was three or four thousand. Forty thousand seems an enormous number, but we must remember that there were no docks: that ships were laden and unladen in mid stream by barges and boats: that the Thames was the highway between London and all riverside places; between London and Westminster; between London and Southwark, because even if one lived close to the bridge it was easier and quicker to be taken across by a boat than to walk over the bridge. The conveyance of three or four thousand people across the river every day would not want more than a thousand boats or two thousand watermen: at the same time the loss of their custom, which happened when the people went to Blackfriars instead of the Bank for their play, would be felt by the whole fraternity of watermen.

We have arrived at the time when the bear baiting attracted less than the play acting: when the amphitheatres were turned into theatres: and when Bankside became the residence of the poets and the players. They came; unfortunately the other people did not go away. There remained the tribe of them who made the music and found the dancers and the tumblers, the mummers and the conjurers: there remained the men—a rough and brutal lot—who looked after the bears and the dogs: the men who wielded quarterstaff and showed sword play, a swaggering and bullying company: there remained the young bloods who came over from their peaceful shops and warehouses to enjoy the sport and the conversation and talk of the place: there remained the ribald crew of men and women who naturally belong to such gatherings. There was another population at Westminster outside the King's House like unto this at Southwark: these, too, existed for the amusement of the King's courtiers and men-at-arms. The Southwark folk existed for the amusements of not the highest class of London City. The poets came, therefore, to this place in order to be near these theatres: they brought no improvement in example, in morals, or in manners: they lived among the people, and their lives were mostly as disorderly and their morals as loose as the company among whom they walked and talked.

Southwark in the early sixteenth century, it may be noted, consisted of two parts, the one wholly distinct from the other. The first part was the High Street with its four churches of St. George's, St. Margaret's, St. Olave's, and St. Mary Overies: in the High Street were the two Debtors' Prisons: in the High Street was the ancient hospital: there also was the long succession of inns, stately, ample, frequented by merchants and capable of stabling an immense number of packhorses, and of receiving as many waggons as could fill the courtyard. The Palaces were mostly gone, turned into inns or tenements. The whole place was a great House of Call. It had no industries, it had no crafts: it had no civic or corporate existence. But it was respectable.

The other part lay on the west of the High Street, stretching along the river nearly as far as Lambeth. This was the disreputable quarter, the place of amusement: the people who lived there, one and all, made the providing of amusement, pleasure and excitement their means of livelihood. It was like a never-ending fair where nothing was sold, and there were no booths except those of Ursula, with roast sucking pig, black puddings, custards, and gingerbread. From every tavern all day long came the tinkling of the guitar and the trolling of some lusty voice and the silvery notes of a girl who sang like the wood pigeon because nature taught her. Here marched along the bear rolling his head from side to side, a monkey chattering on his back, the tabor and pipe going before him. After him came the dogs straining at the chain which held them, barking madly in anticipation of the fight. Or it was a young bull who was led by two men to the ring where he would defend his life as long as the dogs allowed; or it was the arrival at Falcon Stairs of boats by the dozen, each turning out its complement of citizens and their wives, who made for the theatre where the flag was flying. On the open bank were placed tables for those who drank: the balladmonger sang his songs and sold them afterwards: the posturer spread his carpet and went through his performance: the boys cried nuts and apples: the drawer ran about and filled his cans. In no other part of London was there a scene of greater animation and cheerfulness than on Bankside, on an afternoon or evening in the summer. And then to go home again across the broad and peaceful river at full tide, when the sun was set, and the river, like the sky, was aglow, and the people sang softly in the boats, and still from Bankside came the dying snatches of music, the soft breath of the cornet, and the tingling touch of the harp, and the voices of those who sang, and the baying of the hounds from Paris Gardens.

The early history of the playhouses on the Bank involves many questions, and may be safely left to the antiquarian historian. The reader will find most of these questions raised and settled in a book, already quoted here, by Mr. T. Fairman Ordish ('Early London Theatres'). It appears, however, that there were players, if not playhouses, here as early as 1547. After the death of Henry VIII. Gardiner proposed to have a solemn dirge in memory of the King, but, he complained to the Council, the players of Southwark say that they also will have a 'solemn playe to trye who shall have most resorts, they in game, or I in earnest.'

Whether these players had a regular theatre, or whether they acted in the courtyard of an inn, or whether they had a moveable stage, I do not know. It is, however, quite certain that before the end of the sixteenth century there were four theatres in Bankside—the Rose, whose site was somewhere in Rose Alley: the Hope in Bear Garden Lane: the Swan in Paris Gardens—that is, on the west side of the Blackfriars Road, not far from the Bridge: and the Globe. The site of the Globe is generally allowed to have been at a spot 150 feet south of Park Street, close to the Southwark Bridge Road, and on the east of it. For twenty years, more or less, the stream of playgoers was turned steadily and continuously to the Theatres in Bankside, and poet and player lived beside the theatre, and the place was the pleasure resort of the people, and the haunt of sporting men, and the school of the citizens, in history at least: and the pride and glory of London for its dramatists, if the people knew: and the sink and shame of London for the iniquities and villanies practised there: the debauchery and the shamelessness of those who lived upon the Bank.

The Plague, not only of 1603 and of 1625, but those milder attacks which threatened from time to time were a deadly enemy to the players, for then the theatre must be closed and the Bear Garden too, for in crowds there was infection. Think what it meant to close these places of resort. The Elizabethan theatres maintained almost as many persons as our own: there were the players proper—the Company: there were the servants 'in the front' and the servants behind, the 'supers,' the money takers, the boys who went round selling nuts and cakes, wine and ale, new books and tobacco: there were the watermen required to carry the audience to and fro. Why, the shutting of the Theatres must have thrown out of employ many hundreds of men, and, if we consider their wives and families, many thousands of people. Can we wonder if the players, one and all, were Cavaliers, and were ready to fight for the side which allowed them their daily bread?