So okay (for I begin in the traditional manner of my people) a couple days ago, I posted a bit about a small dive I took into how backing up was seen as bad, and how at one point Saviolo said that he thought Englishmen backed up too much in their fight and that this made Silver sad enough to post more than a hundred flyers around where Saviolo's school was to challenge him to a fight.
What came up in that was the idea that fighting on a raised scaffold, or stage, was a thing. Silver wanted to fight on one explicitly so that if someone backed up too much they'd fall off, but fighting on a raised stage without railings was pretty common in England. It was a standard thing for the prize fights fought for advancement among the Masters of Defense!
For context, there were four ranks in the guild. There was scholar, free scholar, provost, and master. (There were four Ancient Masters, but those were the folks in charge of the whole thing. You didn't just get promoted to that.) You joined as a scholar and had to stay there for seven years. Then you could play your prize for free scholar. Seven years after that, you could play your prize for provost. Another seven years and you could play your prize for Master. (That's how it was on paper. In reality there were a number of spectacular exceptions to those rules, sometimes to the point where people who had to adhere to the rules seemed to be the exception.)
So. Prize fights were big deals. For the rank of provost and master, the candidate had to invite all those of the rank he was fighting his prize for as lived within 60 miles (for provost) or 40 miles (for master) of London. If the provost or master had to travel for more than 20 miles, the candidate had to pay for half the travel costs as well. (There were penalties owed for any eligible provost or master not notified, as well as penalties for provosts and masters who did not attend a prize fight, barring certain exemptions.) The candidate also had to pay a fee upon promotion, in exchange for what was supposed to be a fancy set of letters patent with signatures and seals and all. (I haven't been able to track down any surviving examples of the letters themselves, but the Sloane Ms. 2530 does contain the text for example letters, which is pretty great.
Anyway! So there was going to be a monetary cost to the candidate, but they were usually able to end up making a good profit after their expenses because prize fights were a big deal. There are still written records of how there would be a giant procession from the edge of town to wherever the fights would be taking place. Drums, noise, the whole nine yards. If you made money by selling food along the route - or better, near where the fights were - you might be pretty happy about this. Other businesses not so much, and they weren't shy about making that known. There's a lot of background drama about whether or not permits for the procession or the fight would be granted, if they held them anyway, the whole lot of it. But the upshot was that prize fights were almost an impromptu local holiday, and they would draw a huge crowd which would typically show appreciation for fights by tossing money onto the scaffolding, which the candidates claimed as their own. Everyone profits, everyone wins! The London Masters really were a functioning (though at times very dysfunctional) trade guild.
Right, so that's all the context for why fighting up on a stage for these sorts of things happened. I wanted to get an idea about how large a space the prize fights would have to take place in, which is its own thing. A number of them took place on stages built in inn-yards; the Bell Savage comes up regularly in this context. I haven't nailed down the size for what might be built as a temporary structure in an inn-yard, but I did find some articles by Herbert Berry (the same person who wrote the study and transcription of the Sloane Ms. 2530!) which might shed some light on this! There's one on the Bell Savage, another on the Red Lion. I'm hoping that there's a reference to a stage size, or at least a reasonable set of guesses based on building foundations and the like, since it was mentioned that the Bell Savage had theirs set up against the side of the inn. As an aside, while the plans are from the 1800s, the London Picture Archive has this and this if you want a general layout idea of the Bell Savage, which is really cool. I'm hoping to get a chance to skim through "Inns and Taverns of old London" which at least promises to be interesting!
Playhouses though, are another matter! They were also used for prize fights, and even without needing to cannonball into JSTOR there's some decent starter information out there. The wiki page for English renaissance theater has a sketch from 1596 as well as a shot from the modern reproduction of the Globe which show a bit of the layout. Also, playshakespeare.org has an article about the Globe which says, "A rectangular stage platform, also known as an 'apron stage', thrust out into the middle of the open-air yard. The stage measured approximately 43 feet (13.1m) in width, 27 feet (8.2m) in depth and was raised about 5 feet (1.52m) off the ground." Britannica.com has articles on the other three well-known playhouses of a similar style, the Rose, the Fortune, and the Swan. The Rose was smaller, and the article doesn't note a stage size. The Fortune's stage was about 43 feet by 27.5 feet according to the contract with the builder. The article on the Swan has no information about the size of the playhouse or stage.
Even if it's raised and has no rails, 43 by 27 sounds like a list which is positively luxurious in size compared to what many of us are used to!
I'm going to get back to doing that Fabris Book Two Part One retrospective, and I also want to do more with the Marozzo vs Fiore knife defenses as a treat, but I may try and collect a list of the playhouses where we have records of prizes being fought, and see if I can nail down specific stage sizes for those. That should be a fun spreadsheet to look forward to!
