is living in 1609. Now the Liberty and Manor of Paris Garden is a quite well defined part of the Bankside. It lay at the extreme west end, bordering upon Lambeth Marsh, with the Clink upon its east. In it stood from about 1595 the most westerly of the theatres, the Swan.[1] Historians of Southwark are fond of suggesting that it had been the abode of the bears from an almost immemorial antiquity, and follow a late edition of Blount's seventeenth-century Glossographia in connecting it with the domus of a certain Robert de Parys, near which the butchers of London were ordered to throw their garbage in 1393.[2] I think the idea is that the garbage was found useful for feeding the bears. This theory I believe to be as much a myth as Taylor the water-poet's derivation of the name from Paris, son of Priam. Parish, rather than Paris Garden, seems, in fact, to be the earlier form, although there is nothing in the history of the place that very particularly explains it.[3] Many residents in London were of course 'de Parys' in the fourteenth century, and the domus of the Robert in question, who lived some time after the first mention of 'Parish' Garden, was pretty clearly on the City and not the Surrey side of the river.[4] It is, however, the case that before the Civil War the Butchers' Company had been
- [Footnote: the Coventry Corporation rewarded the 'Bearward of palace Garden'
in 1576-7.]xx' [Rules for a sanctuary, with a dominus, senescallus, ballivus, constabularius, and societas, follow]; Liber Fundatorum of St. John (ibid. vi. 832), 'Molendina de Wideflete cum gardino vocato Parish-gardin . . . tenentur de Abbate de Barmondesey' (1434). Kingsford, 157, traces the manor through Bermondsey priory, the Templars, and St. John's Hospital to the Crown in 1536.]
- ↑ Cf. p. 411.
- ↑ Malone, Variorum, xix. 483; Rendle, Bankside, iii; Antiquarian, vii. 277; Ordish, 128.
- ↑ Annales Monasterii de Bermundseia, s. a. 1113 (Luard, Annales Monastici, iii. 432), 'Hoc anno Robertus Marmion dedit hidam de Wideflete cum molendino et aliis pertinentibus suis monachis de Bermundeseye'; Register of Hospital of St. John, s. a. 1420 (Monasticon Anglicanum, vi. 819), 'Haec sunt statuta et ordinationes concernentia locum privilegiatum vocatum Parishgardyn, alias dictum Wideflete, sive Wiles, cum pertinentiis, facta per Johannem nuper Ducem Bedfordiae, firmarium ibidem, anno Domini mccc[c
- ↑ Blount, Glossographia (ed. 4, 1674), 469, quotes Close Roll, 16 Rich. II, dorso ii. Kingsford, 156, translates the writ, which is abstracted (Sharpe, Letter Book H, 392), 'Writ to the Mayor and Sheriffs to proclaim ordinances made in the last Parliament at Winchester to the effect that the laystall or latrine (fimarium sive sterquilinium) on the bank of the Thames near the house of Robert de Parys be removed, and a house be built on its site for the use of butchers, where they may cut up their offal and take it in boats to mid-stream and cast it into the water at ebb-tide. . . . Witness the King at Westminster 21 Feb. 16 Rich. II'. The ordinance is recorded in Rot. Parl. iii. 306.
