strip of land retained the name.[1] It can only have been a very little one. The lease describes the Globe site as consisting of two plots lying apparently on opposite sides of a way or alley (venella) by which access was obtainable to them. One of these, that next the Park, had been the gardens of Thomas Burt, Isbrand Morris, and Lactantius Roper. It was 220 feet in length and lay between the garden of John Knowles on the east and John Cornish on the west. The southern plot, bounded by Maiden Lane on the south, had similarly been the gardens of John Roberts and Thomas Ditcher. This was only 156 feet long and 100 feet deep, and lay between the gardens of William Sellers to the east and John Burgram to the west. Now the whole space between Maiden Lane and the Thames is only from 200 to 350 feet at various points, so that there could not have been room for much of a 'park' between the Globe site and the Bankside houses.
The evidence of the lease is confirmed in various ways by the records of presentments made by the Commissioners of Sewers for Kent and Surrey against negligent occupiers in this marshy neighbourhood. The most important entry is one of 14 February 1606:
'It is ordered that Burbidge and Heminges and others, the owners
of the Playhouse called the Globe in Maid-Lane shall before the xx^{th}
day of Aprill next pull vp and take cleane out of the Sewar the props
or postes which stand vnder their bridge on the north side of Mayd-lane
vpon paine to forfeit xx^s.'
This is endorsed 'done', but another order of the same day
requiring the same men to 'well and sufficientlye pyle
boorde and fill vp viij poles more or lesse of theire wharfe
against theire said Playhouse' needed a repetition on 25 April
before it received attention.[2] Earlier records, before the Globe
came into existence, relate to some of the garden-holders
named in the lease. A plot of John Bingham or Burgram
abutted on a Maiden Lane sewer in 1596, and this is probably
identical with the 'common sewer leading from Sellors
gardin to the beare garden', which William Sellers and others
were ordered to cleanse on 5 December 1595. Certainly the
bear garden was to the north and not the south of Maiden
- ↑ A Clink poor relief assessment of 1609 (Collier, Alleyn Memoirs, 91; Warner, 49) shows two names, each assessed for 'halfe the parke'; this would hardly be the Bishop's. The token-books also show persons resident in the park, but here the order of the entries points to a locality south of Maiden Lane, near the gate of the Bishop's Park (11 N. Q. xii. 143).
- ↑ Wallace in The Times (1914). Dr. Martin explains (11 N. Q. xii. 161) that, in order to conduct their patrons from Bankside to the playhouse south of Maiden Lane, 'the owners of the Globe had erected a bridge over the ditches and quagmire of Maid Lane'.
