xiii. The Boar’s Head

There appear to have been at least six city inns under this sign. The most famous was that on the south side of Great Eastcheap, in St. Michael’s, which seems to have been regarded in the middle of the sixteenth century as the traditional locality of the tavern scenes in Henry IV. This inn was in the occupation of Joan Broke, widow, in 1537, and in that of Thomas Wright, vintner, about 1588. Another Boar’s Head stood ‘without’ Aldgate, in the extra-mural Portsoken ward, which lay between that gate and the bars with which the liberties of the City terminated at Hog Lane. Here, according to Stowe, there were ‘certaine faire Innes for receipt of trauellers repayring to the Citie’. At the Aldgate inn had been produced in 1557 a ‘lewd’ play called The Sackful of Newes, which provoked the interference of Mary’s Privy Council. But it seems to me exceedingly improbable that either this or the Eastcheap inn was converted into the play-house, of which we have brief and tantalizing records in the seventeenth century. Both were within the City jurisdiction, where the licensing of play-houses seems to have definitely terminated in 1596. It is true that a Privy Council letter of 31 March 1602, which directs that the combined company of Oxford’s and Worcester’s men shall be allowed to play at the Boar’s Head, is addressed to the Lord Mayor. But so are other letters of the same type, the object of which is to limit plays to a small number of houses outside the liberties, and to restrain them elsewhere over the whole area of the City and the suburbs. And when, a year or two later, Worcester’s men became Queen Anne’s, and a draft patent was drawn up to confirm their right to play in the Curtain and the Boar’s Head, both houses are described, not as in the City, but as ‘within our County of Middlesex’. Presumably Anne’s men left the Boar’s Head when the Red Bull became available for their use in 1606, and Mr. Adams has explained a mention, which had long puzzled me, of the Duke of York’s men as ‘the Prince’s Players of Whitechapel’ in 1608 by the suggestion that they succeeded to the vacant theatre. If this is so, I think it affords further evidence for the theory that the Boar’s Head, although it may have taken its name from the Aldgate inn, was not itself that inn, and probably not a converted inn at all, but lay just outside and not just inside the City bars. For, although part of the street between Aldgate and Whitechapel is sometimes called, as in Ogilby’s map of 1677 and Rocque’s of 1746, ‘Whitechapel Street’, yet Whitechapel proper lay outside the liberties, farther to the east along the Mile End Road. The only other contemporary record of the Boar’s Head is a letter to Edward Alleyn from his wife Joan on 21 October 1603, in which she says, ‘All the companyes be come hoame & well for ought we knowe, but that Browne of the Boares head is dead & dyed very pore, he went not into the countrye at all’. This Browne cannot be identified, and it is perhaps idle to conjecture that he may have been related to Robert Browne, and that it may have been at the Boar’s Head that the latter played with Derby’s men in 1599–1601. The Boar’s Head seems to have been generally forgotten by the Restoration, but is recalled by the Marquis of Newcastle c. 1660.