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Boar's Head Playhouse
Contributed by Survey of London on Aug. 3, 2020

A late-Elizabethan playhouse, the Boar’s Head, stood just east of the south end of Petticoat Lane. On that account the early history of the immediate area has been exhaustively investigated.¹ First incursions behind Petticoat Lane to the east here were probably associated with houses on Whitechapel High Street. Thereafter, the most notable and substantial development was of an extensive yard behind the Boar’s Head Inn which lay on the site of the future 141–144 Whitechapel High Street, near the corner. This had probably taken place by the 1530s, when John Transfeild, a gunner in the service of Henry VIII, appears to have acquired a connection to the property. While in Ireland in 1557, Transfeild gave permission for the staging of a ‘Lewde Play called a Sackfull of Newes’ in the inn yard of the Boar’s Head, This brought the unwanted attention of the Lord Mayor, who briefly imprisoned the players. Transfeild died in 1561 and his widow Jane (née Grove), married Edmund Poley, who had the copyhold of the Woodlands estate of which, or part of which, Transfeild appears to have been a leaseholder. In 1594 Jane Poley, again widowed, granted a lease of the Boar’s Head inn that ordained the building of a public playhouse. By this time there were already several houses on the west side of the inn yard, in one of which she took up residence; she died in 1601.²

The lease of the inn was to Oliver Woodliffe, a haberdasher and financial speculator, for twenty-one years from March 1595. It required Woodliffe to spend £100 within seven years building a tiring house (dressing rooms) and stage. The decision to proceed, despite threatening noises from the Lord Mayor, may have been encouraged by the demise of the Burbages’ Theatre in Shoreditch in 1597. Before work started, the Whitechapel High Street frontage covered what would become Nos 141 to 144, a range of two-storey buildings including, from the west (Nos 142–144) a hall, parlour and kitchen below three chambers. Beyond was the inn’s entrance with a room over, and then the end of a building (No. 141) that stretched northwards to face the yard’s east side. This had a drinking room, three parlours, a cellar and three stables below seven chambers with access from a gallery. Remains of what is believed to be this building were discovered during archaeological investigation in 2018. A lateral barn enclosed the yard’s north side, the west side had an ‘ostry’ (probably the inn’s public stable) adjoining other stables reserved to Poley and Woodliffe. There was also a garden that had likely once pertained to one of the High Street houses.³

Woodliffe sublet the inn and part of the yard to one Richard Samwell who built narrow galleries north and south, while Woodliffe built one on the west side and a simple rectangular stage, 40ft by 25ft, in the middle of the yard. The existing eastern gallery leading from the back of the inn formed the fourth side. This arrangement separated the inn and the theatrical enterprise, and meant that neither man was entirely liable for the legally questionable structure. No sooner had it been built than Woodliffe took up with a theatrical entrepreneur, Robert Browne, leader of the Earl of Derby’s men, and a more substantial playhouse was built in 1599, the year the Globe opened at Bankside. Constructed by a carpenter, John Mago, at a cost of around £520, this had seven-foot-deep galleries and a tiring house on the west side adjoining a new stage with a tiled roof. The galleries provided only about a third of the accommodation. Overall, the Boar’s Head was similar in size to the Fortune, the contemporary playhouse on the edge of the City to the north- west.⁴

The Earl of Derby’s men played at the Boar’s Head in the winter season when it was permitted, but most of the drama was taking place in the courts, where Woodliffe, Browne and Samwell were embroiled with an investor, Francis Langley, who had hoped to exploit the ambiguous title to the inn and theatre. Difficulties were compounded by a Privy Council order in 1600 forbidding acting in inns, and matters further complicated when Browne went on tour, subletting to the Earl of Worcester’s Men. Langley died, then in 1603 Woodliffe and Browne, who had returned with his players, suing and countersuing one another, were both carried off by the plague.⁵ The Boar’s Head continued as a playhouse. Browne’s widow, Susan (née Shawe), who held the lease, married Thomas Greene (d. 1612), a member of the Queen’s Men, and in 1607, even after the Queen’s Men had departed for the Red Bull in Clerkenwell, ‘comon Stage Plaies … are daylie showed and exercised and doe occasion the great Assembleis of all sortes of people’.⁶ Once again a widow, Susan Greene, who may have retained at least part ownership, married James Baskervile in 1613. Further information is elusive up to 1616 when the lease reverted to Jane Poley’s son, Sir John Poley. Following a loosening of manorial constraints on copyholders, Poley was able to agree in 1618 to enfranchise most of the Boar’s Head property.⁷

The tiring house and stage were probably pulled down in 1621 when Poley sold the land on which they stood as sites for small houses. The purchaser was William Browne, who already held the house on the site of 145 Whitechapel High Street, immediately west of the Boar’s Head Inn. The eastern galleried range survived into the eighteenth century. The Boar’s Head name, like those of many other former inns, endured long after inn use ceased.⁸

Clay pipe kiln
Contributed by david2 on Nov. 29, 2019

During archaeological excavations of the "Boar's Head Playhouse" (an Elizabethan theatre, most of which is preserved and protected) I was a "relief supervisor" on this site, popping in on occasions that the archaeologist in charge (Heather Knight) had to attend to other duties.  So it was that I ended up supervising people digging up this 18th-century clay pipe kiln. It dates to the period after the theatre had closed and when the area was becoming a warren of small enterprises. In over thirty years digging, I haven't seen so complete a clay pipe kiln. They're mostly small backyard affairs and pipe makers would buy in china clay, and then sell on pipes, as small family businesses. This 3D model, with notes, gives a good impression of the sort of multiphase sites we have in London, with later 19th-c brickwork left in place too.  Anyway, here's a link to the model   https://skfb.ly/6OBMD