at the Sessions of Oier and determiner, where he was committed vntill he browght furth his gest. The next daye after he browght hym forthe, and so we Indicted hym for his misdemeanour. This Browne is a commen Cossiner, a thieff, & a horse stealer, and colloreth all his doynges here abowt this towne with a sute that he haithe in the lawe agaynst a brother of his in Staffordshire. He resteth now in Newgate. . . .
Vpon Weddensdaye, Thursdaye, Frydaye and Satterdaye we dyd nothing els but sitt in commission and examine these misdemeanors; we had good helpe of my lord Anderson and mr. Sackforthe.
Vpon Sonndaye my Lo. sent ij Aldermen to the Court for the suppressing and pulling downe of the Theatre and Curten. All the LL. agreed therevnto, saving my Lord Chamberlen and mr. Viz-chamberlen, but we obteyned a lettre to suppresse theym all. Vpon the same night I sent for the quenes players and my Lo. of Arundel his players, and they all willinglie obeyed the LL. lettres. The chiefestes of her highnes players advised me to send for the owner of the Theater, who was a stubburne fellow, and to bynd hym. I dyd so; he sent me word that he was my Lo. of Hunsdons man, and that he wold not come at me, but he wold in the mornyng ride to my lord; then I sent the vndershereff for hym and he browght hym to me; and at his commyng he stowtted me owt very hastie; and in the end I shewed hym my Lo. his mrs. hand and then he was more quiet; but to die for it he wold not be bound. And then I mynding to send hym to prison, he made sute that he might be bound to appere at the Oier & determiner, the which is to morrowe; where he said that he was suer the Court wold not bynd hym being a Counselers man. And so I have graunted his request, where he shalbe sure to be bound or els ys lyke to do worse.
lxxv.
[c. 1584, Nov. (1) Petition of the Queen's Players to the Privy Council, and (2) Answer of the Corporation of London enclosing the Act of Common Council of 6 Dec. 1574 (No. xxxii), printed M. S. C. i. 168, from Lansd. MS. 20, f. 23; also in part by Strype in his edition of Stowe's Survey (1720), i. 292; Collier, i. 208; Hazlitt, E. D. S. 27. The documents are bound up out of order in the Lansdowne volume, the Act of 1574 being Art. 10 and (1) being inserted as Art. 12 between the two parts of (2) which are the reply to it. Each article is officially endorsed in pencil with the date 1575, and the same date is assigned by the printed Catalogue of the Lansdowne Manuscripts (1819) to Arts. 10, 12, and 13. This has misled Collier and nearly all subsequent historians of the stage into a belief that players were expelled from the City more or less permanently in 1575, and that this expulsion led to the building of the Theatre and the Curtain in 1576. The difficulty due to the description of the petitioners as the Queen's men is met by Collier with a suggestion that 'perhaps the Earl of Leicester's servants might so call themselves after the grant of the patent in May 1574', and by Fleay, 46, with an assertion that 'the whole body of then existing men actors who were going to perform at Court at Christmas (Warwick's, Leicester's, Howard's)' were meant. I called attention to the true bearing of the documents in a review of T. F. Ordish, Early London Theatres in the Academy for 24 Aug. 1895, but the mis-
