By Eva Griffith, 25th April 2023
So I’ve disappointed everyone, I guess, saying that Sir Henry Seckford was not a privateer-pirate in the “Arrr!” sense. That research must be gone into more deeply… I have a friend who had a quick look (and thought I might be right), and I’ll be in touch with him again.
But – “hiding in plain sight”, yes.
“Solder”, it turns out, is a metal alloy – a filler metal employed as early as 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia. Its friendly term is “PIKE”, like the fish or the ne’er-do-well lad in Dad’s Army, that long-running tv comedy.
I should preface what I want to say by stating that we had the story of ‘Doubting Thomas’ recently at church – it’s a story that means something to me as an entertainment historian of an earlier time. It means something to anyone who believes that in order to say anything about anything in history, having a look at the original documents is a privilege and an aim. Just like Jesus’s friend Thomas wanting to place his fingers in the wounds – to really believe and get the full context of what happened – I like to see original documents. Not that, unlike Thomas, I ever had to put my fingers into Christ’s wounds to believe his message of radical Love. But with history, the printed form is never enough. Even if the original vellum or parchment doesn’t tell the whole story, or may even contain untruths, it’s best to lay your fingers on it. In other words, faith is not enough when you are looking at entertainment. There is too much ‘let’s pretend’ in the world today.
Before the ten-year-old book, I was the proud PhD student of one article, not freely available today, and that’s quite good because my own research out-dates it now. It was published in the journal Theatre Notebook at the turn of the millennium, when found a seventeenth-century survey showing the southern portion of the ‘Seckford Estate’ where Thomas Seckford (see previous article) lived. It was very near his brother, Henry. He left it to his own Suffolk charity to raise money to keep it going and this was where the Red Bull playhouse came to be.
In the article I cited a will – a 1575 will – of a gentleman brewer called John Draper. Draper was the father of Anne Draper, later Anne Bedingfeild, who held the lease of the part of the land where the Red Bull came to be. In Draper’s will he leaves property in St. John Street to Anne, identifying what it was only by saying he had it from one “Dunstan Braye”. A PhD student’s head spins, however ‘mature’ she might be, and she scours the known records of the Brewers’ company looking for Braye. John Draper was a rich man, having attained positions within his livery, a brewery in the Whitefriars liberty of the City, other property around and about, and with charitable intentions towards, for example, Highgate School. Surely this Dunstan Braye was an important man as well? But he wasn’t a brewer from what I could see, not in its available records.
The favourite old book of Revels things that I like to look at carries a problem, in that it is so full of old entertainment wonders that when I read it, all I can hear is the sawing and planing of wooden structures (there is a lot of that in my comedy screenplay), alongside the occasional “ouch” of an embroiderer as he/she stabs her finger with a needle. Let’s call her “she” for this essay, although males abound at this time. She’d have to be careful not to get blood on the very expensive materials she’d be handling for the costumes she would be making or sorting/mending for the entertainments at court.
A lot can be understood from ‘Accounts’. Taking one example at random, a haberdasher called Peter Bonyvale (Bonneville, maybe?) was paid £6 and 16 shillings in 1558/9 for 12,000 “Spangells” – I think we might say “spangles” – although exactly what they were I can’t imagine, except they sound SHINY. During my 1970s childhood, a Spangle was a boiled sweet that came in tubes and was bad for a young person’s teeth. For this earlier time it sounds like the sort of thing you might sew into a costume to make it sparkle – but I don’t know. For his £6 and 16 shillings, Bonyvale also provided six ounces “di” of copper silver, “di” dozens of feathers and something called “cullen sylver fringe”. Not sure what the “di” of any of these things were, but when dipping into this book you can get waylaid by so much glitter. And this I have been: waylaid by the twinkle, missing an entry that was always there before my eyes, just further along into the book. I only missed it because my imagination burgeoned under the weight of so much spangly-ness, as well as taffata, silk, “tyncell” (tinsel), something called “sarcenet” and much more besides.
Well, I was right. It is an AO3. I wish I could show you a picture, and perhaps I will be able to one day. Here’s what it says in the old book:
“The Plummer Dunstan Braye For Leade and sowlder with woorkmanshipp by him bestowed over the Cowntyng-howse at saint Iohns where it Rayned in xlvjs, jd”
In 1583, Braye’s work was described like this:
Plumbers Dunstone Braye for work done | upon the hall & office of the Revelles. | pipe lead to mend the masters conduite [with the price after this] | sheete lead to make a spowte | Soder lj ls At uijd the pound | for workemanship of plumbers & laborers/ xxxijs iiijd [that’s 32 shillings and 4 pence to you – and this is from the original document!]
The whole 1583 job came to £5, 14 shillings and 5 pence in very old-style money.
Well, he was only the Revels plumber, wasn’t he?
Which means (says a rather late Sherlock Holmes) the brewer, Draper, father of the Red Bull’s landlady, may well have been connected to the Clerkenwell entertainment area much earlier than previously thought. I mean before the 1570s when he wrote his will.
The plot thickens like bubbling “pike”. What will happen next? Will I ever leave the subject of water? We’ll have to see.