salt 
changes in the precinct. 
BLACKFRIARS THEATRE BUILDING 23 
Sir Thomas Cawarden, the new possessor, made material 
One of his first acts was to demolish 
the noble old conventual church as well as the little church of 
St. Anne’s.? 
He seems to have planned to make his acquisition 
the residence-quarter for nobles and lords. 
The splendid man- 
sions and noble society that we find there a little later show how 
well he succeeded.? 
No material changes were made in the Priory House, for be- 
tween 1580 and 1584 we hear of plays being acted there. 
evidences establish the fact. 
made a transcript of it and am pub- 
lishing it in extenso, u.t. The orig- 
inal may be consulted in the bundle 
of Privy Seals for “December, 
1607.” 
The new office-rooms, rented 
thus on account of granting St. 
John’s to Lord Aubigny, were in 
the old Whitefriars monastery, sep- 
arated by only a wall from the 
Whitefriars theatre there, in which 
the Children of the King’s Revels 
held forth. The removal from St. 
John’s and relocation of the Revels 
office occurred, as this document 
shows, at least four years earlier 
than hitherto supposed. See, for 
example, Peter Cunningham, FE-+- 
tracts from the Accounts. of the 
Revels at Court, &c. (Shakespeare 
Society Publications, 1842), xlviii, 
where is made the statement, hith- 
erto universally accepted by schol- 
ars, that St. John’s was granted to 
Aubigny and the office of the Rev- 
els removed to St. Peter’s Hill in 
1611. On the contrary, the office 
was removed first to Whitefriars, 
as above, in or before 1607, and to 
St. Peter’s Hill later. See further 
under The Children of the King’s 
Revels at Whitefriars in my forth- 
coming work on the drama and 
stage of Shakespeare’s time, vol. I; 
also, the above document in extenso, 
vol. III. 
*In May, 1900, while tearing 
down an old building on the north 
side of Ireland Yard,—No. 7, be- 
tween Friar street and St. Anne's 
Churchyard,—and excavating for a 
new structure, workmen brought to 
Three 
light a. fine old specimen of Nor- 
man architecture in the form of 
walls and arches, 16 feet high, ca. 
27 feet wide, and 40 feet long. See 
description and colored plate from 
a painting of the ruins by Philip 
Norman, London Vanished and 
Vanishing (1905), 115-18, with fur- 
ther reference to an earlier article 
by the same author in the London 
Topographical Society's Annual 
Record (1901). 
It has been thought that these 
ruins, now demolished, were a part 
of the old Blackfriars conventual 
church. But taking the known di- 
mensions of the cemetery 90 x 200 
feet, the church 66 x 220 feet, and 
the cloisters 110 x 110 feet, a total 
of 266 feet north and south by 220 
feet east and west, and measuring 
down from Carter Lane on any 
scale map, it seems almost beyond 
doubt that the ruins occupied the 
site of one side of the ancient clois- 
ters. The nature of the architecture 
and the width of the ruin, 27 feet, 
divided into two equal aisles by a 
row of four marble pillars support- 
ing the stone vaulting of the roof, 
suggests farther that this is a ruin 
of the ancient Blackfriars cloister, 
just south of which stood the 
theatre. 
*See further John Stowe, op. cit. 
(1603), 341-43; id. (ed. 1633), 
3746-3754. 
Of course there were others also 
interested to the same end. See, 
for example, documents in Stowe, 
op. cit. (ed. 1633), 3770. 
137 
