The eastern boundary of the precinct was St. Andrew's Hill, which still exists. On the site of the present church of St. Andrew in the Wardrobe stood a church of the same dedication in Elizabethan London. Stow wrote of "the parish church of St. Andrew in the Wardrobe, a proper church, but few monuments hath it." Near the church (the site being indicated by the existing court called the Wardrobe) was a building of State, which Stow calls "the King's Great Wardrobe." The Elizabethan use of the Wardrobe is described by Stow thus: "In this house of late years is lodged Sir John Fortescue, knight, master of the wardrobe, chancellor and under-treasurer of the exchequer, and one of her majesty's most honorable privy Council." Near the top of St. Andrew's Hill and within the precinct of Blackfriars was a house which Shakespeare purchased in 1613. It is described in the extant Deed of Conveyance as "now or late being in the tenure or occupation of one William Ireland ... abutting upon a street leading down to Puddle Wharf on the east part, right against the Kinges Majesties Wardrobe." Curiously enough, the name of this occupier survives in the existing Ireland Yard. [Illustration] ENVOY The omissions in this imperfect sketch of Elizabethan London are many and obvious. The design has been to show the tangible setting of a jewel rather than the jewel itself; the outward conditions in which the life of a new age was manifested. The background of destruction has been inevitably emphasised; but in Elizabethan London historic memorials existed on every hand. Nothing has been said of Baynard's Castle, its Norman walls rising from the margin of the river to the south of Blackfriars, or of St Bartholomew the Great, or the Charterhouse, or St. Giles's, Cripplegate; although an account of them would have completed the outer ring of our perambulation of the London described by Stow. The whole region westward--Holborn, Fleet Street, the Strand, and Westminster--has been left for another occasion. Here and there, however, we have been able to glance at historic buildings which had survived from earlier ages to witness the changes in London after the Reformation. It was those changes that led to the making of the playhouse and brought the conditions which enfolded the possibility realised in Shakespeare. This has been the point of view in the foregoing pages. A study of characteristics rather than a detailed account has been offered for the consideration of the reader. FOOTNOTES: [1] Thomas Dekker, the pamphleteer and dramatist, describes the Exchange as it was in 1607, when "at every turn a man is put in mind of Babel, there is such a confusion of languages"; and as late as 1644 the picturesque dresses of the foreign merchants appear in an engraving by Hollar.