Such a plan had many advantages. For one thing, it would prevent the pecuniary losses often caused by a severe winter. In the _Poetaster_ (1601), Jonson makes Histrio, representing the Globe Players, say: "O, it will get us a huge deal of money, and we have need on't, for this winter has made us all poorer than so many starved snakes; nobody comes at us."[365] This could not be said of the King's Men after they moved to the Blackfriars. Edward Kirkham, a man experienced in theatrical finances, offered to prove to the court in 1612 that the King's Men "got, and as yet doth, more in one winter in the said great hall by a thousand pounds than they were used to get on the Bankside."[366] [Footnote 365: Act III, scene iv. Cf. also Webster's Preface to _The White Devil_, acted at the Red Bull about 1610.] [Footnote 366: Fleay, _A Chronicle History of the London Stage_, p. 248.] Kirkham's testimony as to the popularity of the King's Men in their winter home is borne out by a petition to the city authorities made by "the constables and other officers and inhabitants of Blackfriars" in January, 1619. They declared that to the playhouse "there is daily such resort of people, and such multitudes of coaches (whereof many are hackney-coaches, bringing people of all sorts), that sometimes all our streets cannot contain them, but that they clog up Ludgate also, in such sort that both they endanger the one the other, break down stalls, throw down men's goods from their shops, and the inhabitants there cannot come to their houses, nor bring in their necessary provisions of beer, wood, coal, or hay, nor the tradesmen or shopkeepers utter their wares, nor the passenger go to the common water stairs without danger of their lives and limbs." "These inconveniences" were said to last "every day in the winter time from one or two of the clock till six at night."[367] [Footnote 367: The Malone Society's _Collections_, I, 91.] As a result of this petition the London Common Council ordered, January 21, 1619, that "the said playhouses be suppressed, and that the players shall from thenceforth forbear and desist from playing in that house."[368] But the players had at Court many influential friends, and these apparently came to their rescue. The order of the Common Council was not put into effect; and so far as we know the only result of this agitation was that King James on March 27 issued to his actors a new patent specifically giving them--described as his "well-beloved servants"--the right henceforth to play unmolested in Blackfriars. The new clause in the patent runs: "as well within their two their now usual houses called the Globe, within our County of Surrey, and their private house situate in the precinct of the Blackfriars, within our city of London."[369] At the accession of King Charles I, the patent was renewed, June 24, 1625, with the same clause regarding the use of Blackfriars.[370] [Footnote 368: Halliwell-Phillipps, _Outlines_, I, 311.]