Beargarden

The Beargarden or Bear Pit was the facility for bear-baiting, bull-baiting, and other "animal sports" in the London area during the 16th and 17th centuries, from the Elizabethan era to the English Restoration period.

The Beargarden was a round or polygonal open structure, comparable to the public theatres built in and around London starting in 1576. Contemporaneous illustrated maps of the city show a substantial three-storey building that resembles the theatres nearby. It was located in the Bankside, across from the City of London on the south bank of the River Thames in Southwark; but its exact location is unclear, and apparently changed over time. Documentary sources from the middle 16th century refer to the bear-baiting rink as being in Paris Garden, the liberty at the western end of the Bankside. The names of the facility and its location were merged in popular usage: John Stow, writing in 1583, calls it "The Beare-garden, commonly called the Paris garden." Late-16th-century sources, however — the Speculum Britanniae map of 1593, and the Civitas Londini map of 1600 — show the Beargarden farther to the east, in the liberty of the Clink, where it sits on the northwestern side of the Rose Theatre. The building could have been moved from its original location, much as The Theatre was moved and rebuilt into the Globe Theatre in 1598–99.

The date of the Beargarden's construction is unknown; it was in existence by the 1560s, when it is shown on the "woodcut" map of the city. Questions of the Beargarden's location and date are complicated by the fact that animal sports were conducted at more than one place in Southwark in this era; the Agas map shows both a bull-baiting and a bear-baiting ring, situated near each other (bulls to the west, bears to the east).John Taylor the Water Poet, testifying in the Court of Exchequer in 1620 or 1621, said that "the game of bear-baiting hath been kept in four several [i.e. separate] places, at Mason Stairs on the Bankside, near Maid Lane by the corner of Pike Garden, at the beargarden which was parcel of the possession of William Payne, and at the place where they now are kept."

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