and supp in'.[1] Professor Wallace has a number of additional law-suits, still unpublished.[2] But the extracts from these given by him in 1908 add only a few details to those formerly known. They seem to amount to this. The hall was 66 ft. from north to south and 46 ft. from east to west. It was paved, and had a stage, galleries, and seats of which a schedule was attached to the lease. The stage was at one end of the hall. The school-house was at the north end of the hall.[3] At this end also must have been the entrance, as one of the petitions of 1619 locates it near the way used from part of the precinct in going to church.[4] It was doubtless by the gatehouse entry to the cloister, just beyond where the coaches turned. Unfortunately one is left quite in doubt upon the critical question as to which of the rooms known to us from earlier records were used for the theatre. It might have been the upper frater with the partitions removed; it might have been constructed out of the paved hall and blind parlour beneath, which appear to be represented by the 'midle romes' and two of the rooms in the occupation of Peter Johnson enumerated in the conveyance to Burbadge. A priori one would have thought the upper frater the most likely. It may very well have been paved, like the hall beneath it, and a chamber which had held parliaments and a legatine trial could amply suffice to hold a theatre. On this supposition the rooms 'above' the hall which were conveyed by the lease of 1600, and one of which Evans converted into a dining-room can only have been the room over the staircase and the garret over that. These, indeed, may have extended over the north end of the frater proper, although in the main that building appears, down to the time when Burbadge bought it, to have had nothing over it but leads.[5] There is a serious difficulty in the way of the alternative theory, which would identify the theatre with the 'midle romes' on the ground floor. This is that these would most likely only be low rooms, vaulted to carry the heavy floor of the parliament chamber above. On the
- ↑ Fleay, 211, 213. I suppose it was on this that Evans spent £11 0s. 2d. in Dec. 1603 (Wallace, ii. 89).
- ↑ In The Times of 12 Sept. 1906 Professor Wallace gives the number of new suits as four; in The Children of the Chapel at Blackfriars (1908), 36, as twelve. Presumably the Court of Requests suit of Keysar v. Burbadge et al., printed in Nebraska University Studies, x. 336, is one of these.
- ↑ Wallace, ii. 39, 40, 41, 43, 49.
- ↑ Cf. p. 511.
- ↑ M. S. C. ii. 31, 'all the Leds couerynge the premysses' (1576), 61, 'the stone staires leadinge vpp vnto the Leades or route over the saide seaven greate vpper romes oute of the saide seaven greate vpper romes' (1596).
