Eleanor Bull

Eleanor Bull (c. 1550 – 1596) was an English businesswoman, known for owning the establishment in which Christopher Marlowe, the Elizabethan playwright and poet, was killed in 1593.

Life Eleanor (or Elinor) Whitney was daughter of James Whitney and Sybil, née Parry, of Clifford, Herefordshire; she was, according to Charles Nicholl, "a woman of substance, well-born and well-connected" rather than the "shabby old ale-house keeper" of some depictions. Eleanor was a niece of Blanche Parry, a companion of Queen Elizabeth I. Blanche gave Eleanor a legacy of £100 in her will in 1589.

The Whitney family, from a junior branch of which Eleanor's father came, were "an ancient border-country family" with a castle at Whitney-on-Wye in Herefordshire. They can be traced back to the thirteenth century, and "provided generations of county knights, MPs and sheriffs"; a generation prior, James Whitney (son of James Whitney of Whitney and Pen-cwm and Blanche Milborne, who raised Elizabeth I and Edward VI; Blanche's sister, Alice, was mother of Sybil and Blanche Parry) had been Server of the Chamber to Henry VIII.

Eleanor married Richard Bull October 14, 1571 at St Mary-le-Bow, London. He held the post of sub-bailiff at Sayes Court and worked for the Clerk of the Green Cloth. He died in 1590. After her husband's death, she stayed at their house on Deptford Strand, Deptford, which was in Kent, but is now within London. The house became a form of hotel or "rooming house in which meals were served". Her normal clientele included supervisors or inspectors at the dockyards, exporters of quality goods, and merchants involved in imports from Russia and the Baltic ports."