74 CHILDREN OF THE CHAPEL AT BLACKFRIARS 
made primarily to stop this use and maintenance of the Queen’s 
Children, and is therefore full of information to the same effect. 
Specific quotations may be seen under later headings.t The dec- 
laration of Evans’s Answer in the suit of Kirkham vs. Painton 
concerning “‘the dietting and ordering of the Boyes vsed about 
the plaies there’? is further evidence of the fact. The Diary of 
the Duke of Stettin? accords with these established data, and 
adds definite statements as to maintenance of the Children at 
Blackfriars by the Queen, provisions for instruction, &c. “The 
Scholehouse” at the theatre, the room above it fitted up for the 
boys “to dine & sup in,” and the newly built apartments above 
the Great Hall, where the boys probably lodged, show the mate- 
rial provisions for these conditions. 
Whether Gyles ultimately took to the Chapel Royal any of 
these lads who proved good singers, or whether he may occa- 
sionally have used some of the twelve Chapel singers in the 
special music programmes at Blackfriars, there is no present evi- 
dence to show. Although he had ample power, there was prob- 
ably no occasion for doing the latter. He may have done the 
former in carrying out the provisions for supplving the Chapel; 
for the Blackfriars was, at least ostensibly by the commission, a 
sort of preparatory school to the Chapel Royal. From the names 
of the Boys known to us, and from Clifton’s Complaint, it seems 
the provision may have been “more honour’d in the breach, then 
the obseruance.’’* 
It is with the Blackfriars division of the Chapel Children that 
this history is concerned. They are important in themselves, and 
also as the source from which the several later Children of the 
Revels companies spring. : 
The division of the Children dates from the Latin Patent and 
English Commission to Gyles, and is based upon the double func- 
tion of singing and acting previously performed by one body of 
Chapel Boys. In this functiona! division of the Children lies the 
source of the ultimate segregation of the two bodies under 
James I.° 
- The number of Boys at Blackfriars under Elizabeth cannot 
Infra, 78", 79-82, 101°, 113%, 126, Infra, 106-7. ” 
159. *Hamlet (1623 folio), I, iii, 257a. 
*Infra, 98. * Infra, vol. I, part ii. 
188 
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