The London houses of the Percy family - and a link to Shakespeare!

NORTHUMBERLAND HOUSE

"The Percies, it is true, did not build the house, nor was it their first abode in London. Stow mentions two others occupied by this family, before they obtained possession of their Strand tenement, as of many other fair property, by marriage.

The first was in the parish of St. Anne's, close to Aldersgate, which in Strype's days had become degraded into a tavern. It was inhabited by Henry Percy (Hotspur) before it was forfeited to Henry IV., who bestowed it upon his wife, Queen Jane, as her "wardrobe."

Another Northumberland House was in the parish of St. Katherine Colman, on the south side of Fenchurch Street, the memory of which still survives in Northumberland Alley. This belonged to Henry, the third Earl of Northumberland, in the reign of Henry VI.; and after his time it became converted into a gambling-house, and its gardens into bowling-alleys.

A third Northumberland House, occupied by Henry, the ninth earl, was in the Blackfriars, in a house abutting on the property of William Shakespeare.

The Northumberland House which forms the subject of this chapter, was, at the time of its removal, at the close of 1874, the very last relic of all the noble mansions and palaces which, in the seventeenth century, adorned the river-front of the Strand. It may therefore be well to enter into a more elaborate description of it."

http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.asp?compid=45141





The Percy family





Henry Percy...did he write Shakespeare?








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