accustomed to send their offal by a beadle to 'two barrow houses, conveniently placed on the river side, for the provision and feeding of the King's Game of Bears', and were directed to resume the practice after the Restoration; and possibly this is what misled Blount.[1] Obviously, however, what the butchers did in the seventeenth century is no proof of what they did in the fourteenth. And, in fact, the ordinance of 1393 is explicit in its direction that the offal is ultimately to be, not devoured by bears, but cast into mid-stream.
There is in fact nothing, so far as I know, to locate the royal Game on the Bankside at all until the middle of the sixteenth century, when it was already hard by the stews in the Liberty of the Clink, and still less, except the persistence of the name, to locate it definitely in the Liberty of Paris Garden.[2] The notice which brings Paris Garden nearest is in Foxe's Book of Martyrs, which contains an account of an adventure of one Ralph Morice, secretary to Cranmer, who was foolish enough to take a book of his master's, containing criticisms of the Six Articles, in a wherry from Westminster Bridge to Paul's Wharf. It chanced that Henry VIII 'was then in his barge with a great number of barges and boats about him, then baiting of bears in the water, over against the Bank'. The waterman stopped to see the fun, and the bear broke loose, and climbed into the wherry, which upset. The dangerous book fell into the Thames and was picked up by the bearward, who was the Lady Elizabeth's bearward and 'an arrant Papist'. It was only through the good offices of Cromwell that Morice escaped serious trouble. This was about July 1539.[3] Certainly it was the custom from an early date to moor the King's barge off Paris Garden.[4]at after-non was a bere-beytyn on the Banke syde, and ther the grett blynd bere broke losse, and in ronnyng away he chakt a servyng man by the calff of the lege, and bytt a gret pesse away, and after by the hokyll-bone, that within iij days after he ded'.]
- ↑ Index to Remembrancia, 478.
- ↑ Brewer, xxi. 2. 88, 'a licence for Thomas Fluddie, yeoman of your Majesty's bears, to bait and make pastime with your Graces bears at the accustomed place at London, called the Stewes, notwithstanding the proclamation' (Sept. 1546); Machyn, 78, 'The sam day [9 Dec. 1554
- ↑ Foxe, Acts and Monuments (ed. 1846), v. 388. Collier, iii. 94, cites 'a book of the expenses of the Northumberland family' to the effect that the earl went to Paris Garden to behold the bear-baiting in 1525-6. Ordish, 129, criticizes this on the ground that the statement is not in the Northumberland Household Book printed by Percy. It was in fact a different book, from which Collier, i. 86, gives entries, of which one is of boat-*hire from and to 'Parys gardyn'. But there is nothing about bear-baiting.
- ↑ Account of Treasurer of Chamber, s. a. 1515 (Brewer, ii. 1466), 'Hen. Anesley, conveying the King's barge from Greenwich to Parys Garden, 16^d'.
