Note 1486 — BOOK IV THE PLAY-HOUSES (continued 3)

The 1586 documents in Stowe (1720), i. 3. 178, state that the prior held of the lord of St. John’s, ‘who did make the bridge at the Thames’. Feuillerat, Eliz. 454, however, quotes a Declared Account of 1550 for ‘the ereccion and buyldynge ... of two bridges thone at the Blackfreers and thother at the Temple’. Under Elizabeth the liberty maintained the bridge as well as that at Bridewell (Lansd. MS. 155, f. 80v). The tenure from St. John’s is also alleged (1587) in Dasent, xv. 137. It is rather curious that in an endorsement of the survey of St. John’s in 1586–7 (Feuillerat, Eliz. 47) that house, although in Clerkenwell, is described, perhaps by a slip, as in the Blackfriars.