The name of the Liberty was derived from an ancient holy well, which has now disappeared, and its status from the fact that it had been the property of a priory of Benedictine nuns. The buildings of the priory lay between Shoreditch High Street, leading north from Bishopsgate, on the east and the open Finsbury fields on the west. Its southern gate was in a lane leading from the High Street to the Fields, then and still known as Holywell Lane or Street, on the south of which lay the Prioress's pasture called the Curtain. Part of this south end of the liberty, lying on both sides of Holywell Lane, had been leased in 1537 and 1538 to the Earls of Rutland, who continued to hold it from the Crown after the dissolution in 1539, and obtained a renewed lease in 1584.[1] The rest of the property, including the main conventual buildings, was sold in 1544 to one Henry Webb, whose daughter Susan and her husband Sir George Peckham sold it in 1555 to Christopher Bumsted, and he in the same year to Christopher Allen and his son Giles. The alienation of 1555 was challenged as illegal by Susan Peckham's heirs in 1582, and ultimately, but not until about thirty years later, they appear to have made good their claim.[2] In the meantime Giles Allen had leased a part of the property, which became the site of the Theatre, to James Burbadge on 13 April 1576.[3] This was bounded to the north by the wall of Allen's own garden, probably corresponding to the main cloister of the convent, on the east or south-east by the Earl of Rutland's holding, and on the west by a ditch dividing it from the open Finsbury fields. Within the ditch and divided from it by a strip of void ground, was the old brick wall of the precinct. On the extreme south was a bit of void ground lying between an Oat Barn occupied by Rutland and another Great Barn included in the lease. The Oat Barn and the void ground were in fact debatable property claimed both by Allen and Rutland. North of the Great Barn, and immediately to the
- [Footnote: Harl. MS. 538 runs, 'Neare adjoyning are builded two houses for the
shewe of Activities, Comedies, tragedies and histories, for recreation. The one of them is named the Curtayn in Holy Well, the other the Theatre.' No contemporary map shows the Theatre, although that of Agas (c. 1561) gives a good idea of the Halliwell district before it was built. The representation from the seventeenth-century 'Ryther' map, given as the Theatre by Baker, 135, is presumably the Curtain.]
- ↑ Braines (1915), 4; Stopes, 185.
- ↑ Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 345; Braines (1915), 5, 21.
- ↑ Latin translations of parts of the lease are recited in pleadings of 1600 and 1602 (Wallace, 166, 268), and the description of parcels agrees with that in the draft lease of 1585, similarly recited in 1600 (Wallace, 169); cf. Braines (1915), 8.
