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290 man pass through the City with his company and drum on the way to the Theatre or some other place in the suburbs. Possibly the correspondence of April was only a cloak for the real intentions of the Corporation; or possibly they miscalculated the Council's reasons for not carrying it further. At any rate, still profiting by the continuance of the plague, they determined in the course of the autumn to risk another step in advance. The plan for working through the guilds was ill-conceived, and had probably failed; obviously masters could not effectively prevent their apprentices from slipping off to Finsbury or Southwark on holiday afternoons. At any rate nothing more is heard of it. To this date probably belongs an Act of Common Council, which after dealing with other matters of civic government, briefly enacted that public plays should 'wholly be prohibited as ungodly', and that suit should be made to the Council for a like prohibition 'in places near unto the city'.

It was not long before an opportunity for opening the projected campaign against the outside houses presented itself. On Sunday, 13 January 1583, eight persons were killed by the fall of a scaffold during a bear-baiting at Paris Garden in Surrey. John Field, Leicester's correspondent of 1581, was quick to point the Puritan moral in A Godly Exhortation dedicated to the Corporation. But already, on the day after the accident, the Lord Mayor, Sir Thomas Blank, had written to Lord Burghley to urge that this interposition of the hand of God called for redress of the abuse of the Sabbath day, and to beg for Burghley's good offices with the Surrey Justices, some of whom were willing to take action but alleged that they lacked commission. Burghley promised that the Council would consider the matter, and suggested that it was within the scope of the Corporation's authority to make a general order against the attendance of Londoners at Sunday entertainments. The previous year's experience, however, had probably impressed the Corporation with the difficulty of securing that such an order should not be a dead letter outside their own jurisdiction; and although the Council Register is deficient at this point, it is certain that the event at Paris Garden did in fact result in the extension by the Council itself of the prohibition against Sunday performances from the City to the counties. But this was not until after the Lord Mayor had again pressed the question in a letter to the Council of 3 July, in which he alleged the attractions of unlawful spectacles as a reason for the decay of archery, of which the Council had complained, and declared that Paris Garden was rebuilt and the Sunday bear-baitings in