4 Charles Wiliam Wallace 
penter, who wotked on them and helped Burbage convert them 
into habitable places, described them in 1600 as being in 1576 
“ould decayed and ruynated for want of reparacions and the 
beft of them was but of twoe ftories hie.” A man whom Bur- 
bage long employed about the Theatre, Randolph May, who knew 
the property all his life, likewise remembered them in 1600 as 
“very fymple buyldinges but of twoe ftoryes hye of the ould 
fafhion and rotten,’ and adds that they were “ould houfes of 
office and fome of them open that Roges and beggars harbored 
in them.” 
The principal building was a long, rickety old tile-roofed barn, 
eighty feet long and twenty-four feet wide, built of timber, one 
end used as a barn by Hugh Richards of Coleman street, the 
other end as a slaughter house by Robert Stoughton, butcher. 
Part of the barn served also as tenements, and one of its occu- 
pants at that time, Oliver Tilt, deposed in 1600 that “yt was lyke 
to have fallen downe and was fo weake as when A greate wynd 
had come the tenantes for feare have bene fayne to goe out of 
yte.” In fact, to keep it from falling down, when making it 
over into eleven tenements, Burbage had it cross-beamed and 
strengthened and shored up by the carpenters, Bryan Ellam and 
his son-in-law Hudson, as they testified, to the Theatre, which 
was built wholly new only a few feet from it. 
Such was the uninviting site, just adjoining Finsbury Fields, 
chosen for the first London theatre, the cradle of the young Eng- 
lish drama. But Burbage was a builder, a planner, and saw 
possibilities in it. The buildings could be renovated, repaired, 
made decent, even habitable, and the rent from them would pay 
back the annual expense of the lease. If a theatre could be built, 
the income from it would be clear profit. The plan was alluring. 
So on April 13, 1576, James Burbage secured a lease of the prop- 
erty from the owner, Gyles Alleyn, for twenty-one years at 141. 
a year, plus a “fine” or bonus of 201., with provision for a ten- 
year extension if Burbage should expend 200/. on buildings and 
repairs aside from the cost of building his proposed ‘theatre, and 
with further provision that such building as he should erect for 
a playhouse might be taken down and removed by him within the 
4 
