who found it too small, and rented an adjoining chamber from Cheyne.[1] The paved hall was then let, with other neighbouring rooms on more than one floor, to one Woodman, who kept an ordinary in the hall and did a good deal of damage to the property.[2] Meanwhile, the Revels had apparently been moved from this first-floor hall where they lay in 1550, for when this hall is recited as the south boundary of Cobham's purchase in 1554, it is described as a house in the tenure of Sir John Cheke or his assigns.[3] So long as the Tents and Revels continued to be housed in Crown property, the offices had of course nothing to pay for rent. But after 1550 Cawarden, as naturally, claimed an allowance for rent, and in 1555 he was permitted to charge six years' arrears from Michaelmas 1549 at the rate of £3 6s. 8d. a year each for the official residences of the comptroller, clerk, and yeoman, £6 13s. 4d. for his own, £6 13s. 4d. for the office of the tents, and £6 13s. 4d. for the 'store and woorke howses of the revelles'. In the accounts for 1555-9 similar charges recur annually, but the allowance for Cawarden's own house is raised to £10 and that for the houses of the other officers to £5 each; and the £6 13s. 4d. for the Revels office is specified as being 'for the rente of fyve greate roomes within the Blackefryers for the woorke and store howses of the Revelles'.[4] About 1560 the store-house was certainly not the hall over the buttery, but the great vaulted room in the south-west corner of the cloister, which had been the lavabo of the friars.[5] On the other hand, Sir John Cheke's tenure of his house had ceased and the vacated rooms had become available for workhouses. This is evident from the terms of a lease of the same rooms to Sir Henry Neville, executed on 10 June 1560, just after the Revels had been removed to St. John's.[6] Cawarden had died on the previous 29 August, and the lease was one of the first dealings of William More with the property. The principal rooms leased were precisely four in number. They had been 'lately called or knowen by the name of Mr. Chekes lodginge and sythence vsed by Sir Thomas Cawarden knight deceased for the office of the Quenes Maiesties Revelles'. They were bounded on the north by Lord Cobham's house, on the east by the houses of More and of Sir Henry Jerningham, who was Lady Kingston's
- ↑ M. S. C. ii. 44, 53; cf. p. 502.
- ↑ Ibid. 51, 121.
- ↑ Ibid. 16.
- ↑ Feuillerat, Edw. and Mary, 210, 230, 242, 301; Eliz. 103, 107.
- ↑ M. S. C. ii. 118, 'one other grete rome or vawte next the ground next the entre in the west ende of the garden openyng into the same garden wherin now the robes of the revelles do lye' (Lease of 12 Feb. 1560).
- ↑ M. S. C. ii. 19.
