Wrapping the London Masters of Defense Rabbit Hole

 Okay, let's wrap up this random dive. (For now, anyway.)

While I started in on this by mulling over list sizes and hitting the boundary and deciding to poke at prize fights on the scaffold, the size of the scaffold, and so on, I definitely went a bit into the whole prize fight thing, inn-yards and playhouses, and more general bits about how the London Masters of Defense worked. My prior three entries covered a lot of that, but I want to take this last entry and go through some general interesting things about the London Masters of Defense, how they worked, and some side notes which I found really interesting.

So the beginning of the London Masters of Defense can be traced to Letters Patent from 1540 signed by Henry VIII, the text of which I dropped in an old post here. There are a couple really interesting things to note about this. First is that there's nothing about teaching or organizing or structure or anything else here. It's literally just "hey these twenty people (masters and provosts of the science of defense, according to the text) can go out and look for people who are supposedly teaching this stuff but are doing so really poorly and making actual masters look bad and are overcharging to boot and can drag them to a judge who will make them stop." That's really it. Secondly, and related to that first point is that although the patent implicitly gives the named individuals if not a monopoly on teaching fencing, at least massive control over it, but it doesn't actually incorporate them. They're not actually a guild in the way that, for instance, all the Livery Companies in London were. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to nail down any actual texts for a guild's Charter of Incorporation. I found one for the city of Wells, and while that's not quite the same, it does demonstrate the concept of the "rights and privileges" which the governing positions would be granted - which the Masters lack. (Though I did find a list of all the charters granted, which is kind of neat.) In "The English Master of Arms," Aylward says about it that, "If we compare it with, for instance, a Patent incorporating the Salters, issued by Elizabeth nineteen years later, we find that the Salters are given powers to elect Wardens, to make ordinances, and to enjoy all former liberties, none of which are given by the Patent of 1540 to Ric. Beste and his associates." That said, there was never any claim specifically made about them being a formal company, corporation, or guild - they only ever referred to themselves as the Masters of Defense.

What this all means is that there was one major impact of not being a formally chartered company - the Masters of Defense were not considered exempt from the various laws regarding vagrancy. Specifically, the Vagabond Act of 1572 (which I did a lot of digging for but the internet doesn't seem to have the full text of the act) mentions fencers specifically. In short, being a Master of Defense did not itself seem to be considered employment for purposes of fulfilling this act. Many such people had either an actual other job or a position just on paper to avoid the harsh penalties for vagrancy. Others may have sought connection a noble household, been a legitimate tradesman, or they could have found two judges to issue them a certificate of exemption from the act. While on a practical level if a Master had an established home and was settled and owned a school they would be more or less immune to being hassled over this law, it was still something to be concerned about.

Further complicating matters, Aylward points out that Patents of the kind that was issued by Henry VIII generally expired upon the death of the monarch, and there is no proof of renewal by Elizabeth. In fact, in 1545 the Alderman of London required them to produce a copy of such a Patent as part of a court case to settle an issue about setting up schools in the city of London, and no such copy was produced. On top of that, the Sloane Manuscript 2530 - the papers of the Masters of Defense that Herbert Berry transcribed in "The Noble Science" has example Master and Provost letters which include statements that Elizabeth did renew the privileges granted by Henry and also went so far as to grant them license to "play openly within the City of London." Yes, the Sloane Manuscript is the only place we have this written down - no other records we have back this up. Now, I'm not particularly conversant in what might have burned in the Great Fire. Maybe records relating to the London Masters of Defense were among them, I don't know. It's possible, but I'm inclined to doubt it. We have so many papers of Elizabeth's official patents and charters that I don't think that we'd somehow be missing something here.

And that wraps it up! I want to follow up further at some point with a more detailed look at what prize-fights entailed, and I'll likely do that in a few weeks. That's a separate rabbit hole in my mind though, because that's something that I really want to recreate at an event sometime. I still have dreams of a raised stage up at Bicolline for Les Beltaines some year - because doing that in that setting in front of the tavern would be a blast. It's for sure Not My Event but the setting would be wonderful.

And that wraps up this random little dive into inn-yards and raised stages and fencing on them and some fun background into the Masters of Defense and all that! Like I said, next time I'll probably write up a look at prize-fights and I'll also get back into Book Two of Fabris. (Remember that I was doing writeups of that? I do!)

Yet More Playhouses!

I'm just continuing down this here rabbit hole and I'm okay with this! I might come up for air but I'll probably just end up looping back to poke more at the London Masters of Defense and then prep for a class about them. So that's cool!

So, prize-fights and the venues.

Prior to 1570, there was a fair variety of places where prize-fights occurred. The most common was the open-air market of Leadenhall, but there were other outdoor settings as well. After 1570 however, prize-fights almost entirely shifted to inn-yard theaters and public playhouses. The two most commonly used inns were the Bull and the Bell Savage, with the Curtain and the Theater as the two most popular playhouses.

I mentioned in my last post that I pulled out some stage sizes for two playhouses in London - the Fortune and the Globe. Ironically, according to O.L. Brownstein in his article A Record of London Inn-Playhouses from c. 1565-1590, "there are contemporary references to fencing shows in all the public theaters except the Globe and the Fortune." Both of those were buildings that were built specifically as playhouses though, and never adapted from anything else. What about the other venue that we've seen discussed in reference to prize-fights: the inn-yard theatre?

An inn-yard theatre is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. A raised stage would be temporarily built in the courtyard of an inn, and plays would be performed there. The audience would be charged for an entry, and a multi-story inn could also effectively have raised viewing galleries due to the rooms and balconies along the sides of the courtyard.

While the Sloane Ms. 2530 has a number of inns listed as prize-fight venues, in his study and transcription of the manuscript, "The Noble Science," Herbert Berry notes that the Ms. 2530 was neither the official register of the company nor a complete accounting of the company's activities. We know from other documents of the time, such as letters to the Aldermen of the City of London asking for permission to hold a prize-fight with all the attendant pomp, that other sites were used that were not noted in Ms. 2530. Although I have not yet found proof that any prizes were fought at the Boar's Head, it seems to me to be a good enough example of an inn-yard which was converted over time to a true play-house. That said, I did note that in "The Boar's Head Playhouse" (Folger Books, 1986) Berry speculates that the stage built in 1598 - 3'6" high, and it specifically had a railing to prevent the audience from trying to climb up - could have been placed in the middle of the yard with the hope of enticing prize-fights to happen there.

So let's talk about what the stage and the inn-yard looked like at various points in its development! (All of this data is from "The Boar's Head Playhouse," by the way.) In its original form, the full size of the open yard was 55'7" x 54'6", and the first free-standing stage in the middle of this was 25'x39'7". 

To this point, I recently grabbed a tape measure, some cones, and a Lupold, and we laid out a rectangle the size of that initial stage. Then we took up a pair of spears - being the most sizeable weapons we'd expect to use in any of rapier, C&T, or A&S projects - and proceeded to play around in the list we'd set up. I am here to tell you that it was luxurious. Even when we were testing it on all angles while moving around one another, we never really felt as though we were in imminent danger of stepping outside the boundaries of the stage being used. (Or what would have happened in period, falling off of the stage.) I imagine that if the fighters were fighting across the shortest dimension with larger weapons that they'd be very aware of the edge, but as long as your fight didn't consist solely of backpedaling, you'd probably be fine.

From there, when the stage was moved to be permanently up against one of the buildings bordering the inn-yard which had been converted to a tiring-house, they kept the same basic dimensions for it. Notably, despite expanding the galleries available for the audience, there is no evidence of the stage height increasing; presumably the owners wanted to be able to fill the floor of the yard to the brim and have it visible from anywhere. The only other meaningful change to the stage would have been that it was accessible directly from the tiring-house, without steps or ramps or clambering up a three and a half foot step.

There we are! A reasonable example of a free-standing temporarily erected stage in an inn-yard, which could well have been used in prize-fights!

I think there'll be one more post wrapping up the London Masters of Defense rabbit hole, and then I'll try to roll it all together into a single short class for the kicks of it.