acres of
adjoining land. This was situated on the east side of the convent church
and on the east side of the great cloister.

The property has passed through various hands since that day. It
belonged to the Earls of Rutland during part of the seventeenth century,
and a reminiscence of their ownership remains in the name of the small
street called Rutland Place, issuing from the north-east corner of
Charterhouse Square. It was in this house that Sir William Davenant, in
the year 1656, was permitted to exhibit stage plays at a time when all
theatres were closed by the government. The land is now in the hands of
various owners--Charterhouse, Merchant Taylors' School, and others.

[Illustration: OLD PORCH, CHARTERHOUSE.

_From a drawing by J. P. Neale (1813), engraved by Owen._]

In providing himself with a residence on the property which he had
purchased, the Duke of Norfolk adopted a plan very different from that
of his predecessor. Instead of building for himself a new residence, he
adopted a common practice and determined to adapt to his own uses part
of the buildings which the Carthusians had left behind them. The part he
chose for this purpose was the little cloister, which had been built
probably about fifty years before, and was very easily converted into a
sufficiently stately mansion in accordance with the fashion of the day.
Fortunately, he was able to do this with a minimum of destruction of
the old work. The little cloister was, in fact, a house built round a
quadrangle. In adapting it to his own use the Duke did not interfere
with the outer walls or floors, which are very substantially built, but
merely rearranged the rooms inside. This was the more easy because the
inside rooms were probably divided from one another by wooden
partitions. The result is most interesting to the antiquary, for he
finds at Charterhouse not only an excellent specimen of monastic
building in the early sixteenth century, but also a very pure example of
the London house of a great nobleman of the same date. The Duke left
intact a smaller quadrangle opening out of the little cloister, which
had been built also in the sixteenth century for the use of the lay
brothers. He also beautified the large room which had been used for a
Guesten Hall, and perhaps raised the roof. He certainly built two
handsome rooms to the north of the Guesten Hall, on the first floor,
over what had been the prior's cell and a small part of the cloister
walk