Upon the 13 day of January last, being the Saboth day, _Anno_ 1583, the people, men, women, and children, both young and old, an infinite number, flocking to those infamous places where these wicked exercises are usually practised (for they have their courts, gardens, and yards for the same purpose), when they were all come together and mounted aloft upon their scaffolds and galleries, and in the midst of all their jolity and pastime, all the whole building (not one stick standing) fell down with a most wonderful and fearful confusion. So that either two or three hundred men, women, and children (by estimation), whereof seven were killed dead, some were wounded, some lamed, and otherwise bruised and crushed almost to death. Some had their brains dashed out, some their heads all to-squashed, some their legs broken, some their arms, some their backs, some their shoulders, some one hurt, some another.[184] [Footnote 184: Philip Stubbes, _The Anatomie of Abuses_ (ed. Furnivall), p. 179.] The building, which the Reverend John Field described as "old and rotten,"[185] was a complete ruin; "not a stick was left so high as the bear was fastened to." The Puritan preachers loudly denounced the unholy spectacles, pointing to the catastrophe as a clear warning from the Almighty; and the city authorities earnestly besought the Privy Council to put an end to such performances. Yet the owners of the building set to work at once, and soon had erected a new house, stronger and larger and more pretentious than before. The Lord Mayor, in some indignation, wrote to the Privy Council on July 3, 1583, that "the scaffolds are new builded, and the multitudes on the Saboth day called together in most excessive number."[186] [Footnote 185: _A Godly Exhortation by Occasion of the Late Judgement of God, Shewed at Paris-Garden_ (London, 1583). Another account of the disaster may be found in Vaughan's _Golden Grove_ (1600).] [Footnote 186: The Malone Society's _Collections_, I, 65.] The New Bear Garden, octagonal in form, was probably modeled after the playhouses in Shoreditch, and made in all respects superior to the old amphitheatre which it supplanted.[187] We find that it was reckoned among the sights of the city, and was exhibited to distinguished foreign visitors. For example, when Sir Walter Raleigh undertook to entertain the French Ambassador, he carried him to view the monuments in Westminster Abbey and to see the new Bear Garden. [Footnote 187: What became of the other amphitheatre labeled "The Bull Baiting" I do not know. Stow, in his _Survey_, 1598, says: "Now to return to the west bank, there be two bear gardens, the old and new places, wherein be kept bears, bulls, and other beasts to be baited."] [Illustration: THE BEAR GARDEN From Visscher's _Map of London_, published in 1616, but representing the city as it was several years earlier.]