SLIEST . ZS
LLIAM SHAKESPEARE
, . ,
STRATFORD CHURCH, FROM THE RIVER.
A** %
*>ftn.J^^ \VO
or*
STRATFORD-ON-AV
FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES
TO THE DEATH OF SHAKESPEARE
BY
SIDNEY LEE
WITH FORTY -FIVE ILLUSTRATIONS BY
EDWARD HULL
NE W EDI TION
LONDON
SEELEY AND CO. LIMITED, ESSEX STREET
NEW YORK: MACMILLAN & CO.
1890
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTORY . . . . . . i
i. THE ORIGIN OF THE TOWN, AND ITS RELATIONS WITH
THE SEE OF WORCESTER .... 8
2. AGRICULTURAL LIFE . '. . . 15
3. MEDIAEVAL TRADE, MARKETS, AND FAIRS . . 24
4. JOHN, ROBERT, AND RALPH OF STRATFORD . . 3 2
5. THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY TRINITY . . -37
6. THE GUILD . . .... . 5 1
7. SIR HUGH CLOPTON'S BENEFACTIONS . . ; 76
8. THE REFORMATION AT STRATFORD . . .88
9. THE GROWTH OF SELF-GOVERNMENT . . 95
10. JOHN SHAKESPEARE IN MUNICIPAL OFFICE AND IN
TRADE ....... 104
11. THE STRATFORD INDUSTRIES AND POPULATION . in
12. JOHN SHAKESPEARE'S FIRST SETTLEMENT IN STRATFORD
THE STREETS . . . . . 117
13. THE CONSTRUCTION AND FURNITURE OF THE HOUSES
THE GARDENS. . . . . .128
14. THE SANITARY CONDITION OF THE TOWN . . 147
15. PLAGUES, FIRES, FLOODS, AND FAMINES . . 155
vi Contents
PAGE
1 6. DOMESTIC AND SCHOOL DISCIPLINE . . .168
17. THE OCCUPATIONS OF STRATFORD LADS . .184
18. THE PLAYERS AT STRATFORD . . . .192
19. RURAL SPORTS . . . . . .199
20. CHARLECOTE HOUSE POACHING IN THE PARK. . 211
21. INDOOR AMUSEMENTS . . - . . 232
22. CHRISTENINGS AND MARRIAGES .... 243
23. SHAKESPEARE AT STRATFORD IN LATER LIFE . . 254
24. THE GUNPOWDER PLOT COMBE'S DEATH THE AT
TEMPT TO ENCLOSE THE WELCOMBE FIELDS . . 272
25. SHAKESPEARE'S DEATH AND HIS DESCENDANTS . 283
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
STRATFORD CHURCH, FROM THE RIVER . . Frontispiece.
PAGE
MEADOW WALK BY THE AVON . . . . .16
ASTON-CANTLOW CHURCH ..... 25
THE CHURCH OF STRATFORD-ON-AVON . . -39
PORCH OF STRATFORD CHURCH . . . -43
STRATFORD CHURCH, FROM THE NORTH . . -47
REMAINS OF THE OLD FONT AT WHICH SHAKESPEARE WAS
CHRISTENED ...... 50
THE CHAPEL OF THE GUILD OF THE HOLY CROSS . . 53
THE CHAPEL OF THE GUILD. INTERIOR . . -59
THE GUILDHALL ...... 65
SOME REMAINS OF THE OLD BUILDING AT THE REAR OF
CLOPTON HOUSE ...... 79
STRATFORD BRIDGE ...... 85
STAIRCASE OF CLOPTON HOUSE . . . ,87
LUDDINGTON VILLAGE AND NEW CHURCH . . -93
SHAKESPEARE'S BIRTHPLACE BEFORE RESTORATION . .118
SNITTERFIELD CHURCH . . . . .121
THE RED HORSE HOTEL . . . . .129
THE ROOM IN WHICH SHAKESPEARE WAS BORN . 135
viii List of Illustrations
PAGE
THE UPPER STORY OF SHAKESPEARE'S BIRTHPLACE . 139
THE BIRTHPLACE OF SHAKESPEARE . . H5
OLD HOUSES IN ROTHER STREET . . 149
THE HOUSE OF DR. JOHN HALL . 157
OLD LYCH-GATE AT WELFORD . .163
AN OLD ALE-HOUSE, STRATFORD-ON-AVON . . .169
THE GRAMMAR SCHOOL .- .179
MARY ARDEN'S COTTAGE AT WILMECOTE . . 205
CHARLECOTE PARK . . . 217
THE GRAND HALL AT CHARLECOTE . . . 223
ARMS OF LUCY ..... .231
BIDFORD . . . . . . 233
HlLLBOROUGH ....... 239
STRATFORD, FROM THE SOUTH-EAST .... 244
ANNE HATHAWAY'S COTTAGE AT SHOTTERY. INTERIOR . 247
ANNE HATHAWAY'S COTTAGE AT SHOTTERY . . 251
OLD CHURCH OF LUDDINGTON .... 253
APPROACH TO SHOTTERY, FROM STRATFORD . . . 259
CLIFFORD CHURCH AND OLD HOUSES . . . 267
THE CLOPTON PEW ...... 273
MEMORIAL OF SIR HENRY RAINFORD IN CLIFFORD CHURCH 276
OLD GRAVESTONES IN THE CHURCHYARD OF STRATFORD-
ON-AVON . . . . . . . 285
SHAKESPEARE'S MONUMENT ..... 289
CHANCEL OF THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY TRINITY, STRATFORD 293
THE SHAKESPEARE MEMORIAL THEATRE, STRATFORD-ON-AVON 297
THE CHANCEL OF STRATFORD CHURCH . . . .301
DISTANT VIEW OF STRATFORD-ON-AVON . . . 303
STRATFORD-ON-AVON
INTRODUCTORY
" ONE thing more," wrote Sir William Dugdale
in 1657, at the close of the eighteen folio pages
of his Antiquities of Warwickshire devoted
to Stratford -upon -Avon, " one thing more in
reference to this ancient town is observable,
that it gave birth and sepulture to our late
famous poet, Will Shakespeare." There is
little need to add the comment that the "one
thing more," about Stratford, which the learned
antiquary thought to have adequately noticed in
these four-and-twenty words, has grown into the
only thing about it that most men now regard
as memorable. Nor would the modern pilgrim
that is, he who makes his pilgrimage with
fitting judgment readily admit that Dugdale
has indicated the highest points of interest
B
2 Stratford-on-Avon
about Shakespeare's connection with Stratford.
That the borough was his birthplace and burial-
place gives it, after all, a smaller attraction than
that he lived there for full two-thirds of his life.
And completely as the resources of civilisation
have remodelled the town in many of its
aspects, it still boasts sufficient survivals of the
age of Elizabeth to give the sojourner a far-off
glimpse of Shakespeare's daily environment.
The nineteenth -century manufacturer has not
set his mark upon it : the inhabitants know
little of life at high pressure. Their acknow
ledged affinity with the hero who makes their
life worth living in more than a single sense,
would seem to have held them aloof from all
the ruder currents of modern life. It is only
within the last half century that the town has
begun to extend its boundaries, and the exten
sion has not yet attained very gigantic measure
ments. The chief streets, with their offshoots,
although they have grown wider in many places
and in all cleanlier, still bear the names by
which Shakespeare knew them. The church
on the river bank has undergone little change,
and time has dealt very kindly with the exterior
of the ancient Chapel of the Guild, with the
Introductory 3
Guildhall, and with the Grammar School, all of
which were once overlooked by the windows of
Shakespeare's far-famed house, at the meeting
of Chapel Street with Chapel Lane. Although
that house has gone, the public garden chris
tened after it New Place occupies the exact site
of the "great garden " that surrounded it when
the poet was its owner. Cross-timbered houses,
with the carved front in one instance at least
merely mellowed by the lapse of years, often
break the monotony of unlovely stretches of
modern brickwork. The stone bridge across
the Avon is in all its essentials the same as
when the Elizabethans crossed it. The water-
mill, although shaped anew, continues to do the
noisy work in which it has persevered through
nine centuries.
And when once the town is deserted for
Shakespeare's playing fields in the neighbour
ing country, the changes grow less marked.
Stratford always stood upon a "plain ground,"
as Leland described it early in the sixteenth
century, surrounded by "the champain," that is,
the flat open country. The woodland has
grown scantier, but there is still no lack of it on
the low hills of the district, and here and there
4 Stratford-on-Avon
on the banks of the river. The Forest of
Arden, which was in its decadence in Eliza
bethan England, has now retreated into a mere
name, but it was always in historic times cut off
from Stratford by a wide enough tract of land
to prevent it from affecting materially the im
mediate scenery. The Avon itself winds as of
old from Naseby to the Severn, with Stratford
on its right bank, midway between its source
and mouth, and at a little distance from Strat
ford it still flows under bridges at Binton
and Bidford which are as authentic relics of
the sixteenth century as their fellow at Strat
ford. Numberless villages, like Shottery and
Snitterfield, pursue that drowsy rural life which
seems always able to resist time's ravages.
They have not grown : some of them have
been renovated by the modern builder; in a
very few cases they have fallen into decay and
all but disappeared. But none have quite
reached la fin du vieux temps ; and the
preservation of an occasional relic like the may
pole on the village green at Welford suggests
to the least thoughtful passer-by their near
relationship with the past. Saunter where we
will by the homesteads and meadows of South
Intro diictory 5
Warwickshire, we are still led from time to
time within view of scenes which may well have
inspired poetic passages like Perdita's invita
tion to the sheep -shearing feast, or the song of
Spring in Loves Labour s Lost.
But there is some danger, although the
practice is an attractive one, in making Shake
speare's name the central feature of all Stratford
history and topography. It has been done too
often already. The writers of guide-books or
monographs on the town and district have
always endeavoured to fix the attention of the
pilgrim or student exclusively on points of
Shakespearian interest, and have valued only
as much of their investigations as belongs to
Shakespearian lore.
The scraps of information that their
labours have yielded are of their kind beyond
price ; but they fail to enable the reader to
form a coherent conception of the town's
general development or social growth. With
all respect to the antiquaries of Stratford, it
may be said that they have overlooked facts
in the various stages of the history of the
borough which are of striking importance in
the municipal history of the country. Nor is
6 Stratford-on- A von
this the limit of their offence, if offence
can justly be used in such a context. Al
though it would be only by an awkward
distortion of the neglected facts that they
could be turned to account in Shakespeare's
biography, those of them that relate to the
Middle Ages undoubtedly offer us traditions
which influenced the life and thought of
the poet as a Stratford townsman of greater
receptivity than his neighbours ; while those
that concern the late years of the six
teenth century, or the early years of the
seventeenth, can be made to create for us a
picture of the society in which he actually
moved. Thus we may be brought to the
conclusion that something of Dugdale's method
of dealing with Stratford is not without its
advantages for the Shakespearian student.
It is possible that an account of the town that
shall treat it as a municipality not unworthy
of study for its own sake, and shall place
Shakespeare among its Elizabethan inhabit
ants as the son of the unlucky woolstapler
of Henley Street or as the prosperous owner
of New Place, will be more suggestive and in
better harmony with the perspective of history,
Introductory 7
than a mere panegyric on the parochial relics
as souvenirs of the poet's birthplace, home,
or sepulchre. The following pages are in
tended as an experiment in the former direc
tion.
I
THE ORIGIN OF THE TOWN, AND ITS RELATIONS
WITH THE SEE OF WORCESTER
THERE are many towns in England that can
claim greater antiquity than Stratford - on-
Avon. 1 The county of Warwickshire, called
by Drayton (himself a Warwickshire man) the
heart of England, was doubtless in prehistoric
ages part of the vast forest which covered all
the Midlands, and which survived in later times
in the chain of wood stretching, with occasional
clearings, from Byrne Wood in Buckingham
shire, through Abingdon and Wych Woods in
Oxfordshire, to the forests of Dean, Arden,
Cannock, and Sherwood, and the Derbyshire
1 The main authority for the history of mediaeval Stratford is
Dugdale's account of the town in his History of Wanvickshire, first
published in 1656, and reissued under the editorship of Dr. William
Thomas in 1718. Kemble's Codex Diplomaticus gives the text of
the charters noted below.
The Origin of the Town 9
Wolds. The discovery of a very few tumuli
in the district, containing some rude stone
implements, mark the presence of a very sparse
population in a neolithic age.
Avon is the Celtic word for river, which as
A/on is still good Welsh. Arden is formed from
the Celtic ard y high or great, and den, the wooded
valley a compound which also supplied Lux
emburg with its district of the Ardennes. Place-
names like these prove the sojourn of Celtic
tribes in the north and south of Warwickshire
before the Roman occupation. The Romans
bestowed the title Cornavii on the inhabitants
of the county. We know nothing of its origin,
and find few traces of Roman civilisation in the
district. But Rome's ubiquitous roadmakers
did not leave the neighbourhood untouched.
Ryknield Street, which ran from Tynemouth
in Northumberland, through York, Derby, and
Birmingham, to St. David's, skirted the
Forest of Arden on its west side ; passed
through Studley and Alcester, and left the
county five miles below Stratford by way
of Bidford. The name of Straetford is a
proof, too, that this was not the only " street"
which approached the site of Stratford. It
io Stratford-on-Avon
must have started into being like five other
villages in different parts of England similarly
named, as the approach of a Roman street to a
ford as the approach to a ford across the Avon
of the smaller Roman road that ran from Bir
mingham through Henley-in-Arden to London.
But whether it had become an inhabited place,
or had its name before the Romans left Britain,
is mere matter of conjecture.
Of the Teutonic settlers, a Saxon tribe,
known to history as the Hwiccas, occu
pied Warwickshire and its neighbourhood
in the sixth century ; but according to local
legends, the Celts did not make way for
them without a struggle, which was waged
very fiercely up the Welcombe Hills that
overlook Stratford. For some years the
Hwiccas lived in independence under their
own alderman ; but in the seventh century
they were absorbed within the great March-
land the middle kingdom of Mercia
and their aldermen declined into mere
agents of the Mercian kings. The see of
Worcester was formed about 679, and all
the district of the Hwiccas constituted the
bishop's diocese.
The Origin of the Town 1 1
The seventh century all but closes without
supplying us with any authentic details as to
the rise of Stratford. The earliest docu
mentary clue to its origin is to be gleaned
from a charter dated 691, according to which
Egwin, the third Bishop of Worcester,
obtained from Ethelred, King of Mercia,
" the monastery of Stratford," standing on
land above three thousand acres in extent,
in exchange for a religious house that the
bishop had erected at Fladbury, in Worcester
shire. The best critics have doubted the
authenticity of the document, but another
charter of unblemished reputation, dated nearly
a century later, supports its statements, and
leads to the inference that Stratford owes its
foundation to a monastic settlement. In
781 Offa, the great King of Mercia, con
firmed, after much discussion, the right of
Heathored, the Bishop of Worcester, to
" Stretforde," then an estate of thirty hides ;
and in 845 another ruler of Mercia absolutely
surrendered to another bishop the Stratford
monastery by the Avon, to be held by him
and his successors free of all secular obligations.
This is the latest glimpse we obtain of this
1 2 Stratford-on-Avon
foundation, and it, perhaps, afterwards fell
into decay. The Bishops of Worcester,
like many others of their profession, doubtless
found it more to their interests to foster a
new village, and to cultivate the land about
it, than to maintain monks who could not
readily be turned to profit. According to
tradition, this early monastery stood on the site
where the church stands now, and, as in many
other parts of England, the first houses at
Stratford were probably erected for its servants
and dependents. Their abodes were doubtless
near the river, in the street that has for many
centuries been known as " Old Town."
The Saxon Bishops of Worcester were
evidently proud of their Stratford property, and
they sought with success to extend its bound
aries in all directions. Records prove that
the land was rich in meadows, pastures, and
fisheries, and was well watered by shallow
brooks. It was at no distant date that the
bishop's original property, which included
only the immediate environment of the
monastery, obtained the name of Old
Stratford, to distinguish it from a newer
Stratford-on-Avon, which stretched far along
The Origin of the Town 1 3
the north bank of the Avon. Thanes, who were
the country gentlemen of Anglo-Saxon society,
willingly rented under agreements for two or
three lives large plots of ground of the bishop,
and a few neighbouring villages retain in
their nomenclature traces of this occupation.
Alveston, originally called Eanulfestun, was the
homestead of Eanulf, its tenant in 872, under
Bishop Wearfrith. Bishopston (Bishopes-
tune) was doubtless the site of a small
homestead erected for the bishop's own
residence. All the fertile land about Clifford
was let in 988 to a Thane Ethelward.
Thus, before the Norman Conquest, Strat
ford had become a valuable portion of the
property of the see of Worcester ; and in this
condition of dependence it remained till the
Middle Ages closed. It appears to have been
little disturbed by any of the political convul
sions that overwhelmed many parts of Anglo-
Saxon England in the ninth and tenth centuries.
The Danes may have threatened it from a
distance while passing from the conquest of
Mercia into Wessex, on their first great
expedition ; but little is known of their route.
There can be little doubt that the tale of War-
14 Stratford-on-Avon
wick's legendary hero, Guy; embodies some
authentic tradition of a 'Mercian warrior who
successfully resisted the Danish invaders in the
tenth century. Perhaps to him the Stratford
townsfolk may have owed their immunity
from the second invasion of his kinsmen in
the tenth century ; and he may have at times
come among them on returning from hunting
or hawking in the Forest of Arden, of which
his friend and tutor Harald or Heraud, accord
ing to the popular romance, was a native.
It is certain that the Norman Conquest passed
almost silently over South Warwickshire, and
Stratford showed little sign of its passage. Its
lord at the time was Bishop Wulfstan, who was
famed for his holy life, and was alone of all the
Anglo-Saxon prelates rewarded for his ready
acquiescence in the new dominion with continu
ance in his office. He proved his gratitude by
twice leading his militia, his county tenants, some
of whom doubtless came from Stratford, in battle
against the Norman king's enemies once
against the half-Breton Earl of Hereford, who
sought to escape from William's yoke during
his absence in Normandy in 1074, and once near
Worcester against rebels from the Welsh border.
ii
AGRICULTURAL LIFE
IN 1085 the first distinct account of Stratford
was put on record by the Domesday surveyors,
and it supplies us with many interesting details. 1
The district had then been for several centuries
one of the Bishop of Worcester's manors, and
all the manorial machinery was at work upon it.
The township growing up there was a village
community, consisting mainly of very small
farmers and a few day-labourers with their
families, and in all their relations of life the
inhabitants were under the jurisdiction of the
bishop's steward, or seneschal, in virtual serfdom.
He presided over the manor court, constituted as
the court baron, to which the townsmen came
1 See Domesday Survey (Record Commission). Mr. Seebohm's
invaluable book on The Village Community in England (1883) has
defined the conditions of mediaeval agriculture.
1 6 Stratford-on-Avon
to supervise the payments of rent and dues,
the settlement of new-comers, and the distribu
tion of land. He, too, kept order in the villages,
and, with the aid of the community assembled
in court leet, punished breaches of the peace.
MEADOW WALK BY THE AVON.
He saw that the land was properly cultivated,
that the ploughs were fully yoked, and that the
seed was fairly sown.
The actual extent of Stratford in William
I.'s time was fourteen and a half hides, or
nearly 2000 acres. It was of smaller extent
than it had been under the Mercian regime, for
Agricultural Life 17
the neighbouring villages had now themselves
become so many separate manors. The inhabit
ants consisted of a priest, who, doubtless,
conducted services in the chapel of the old
monastery, with twenty-one villeins and seven
bordarii. Each of these residents was the
head of a family, and their number, therefore
represents a population of about one hundred
and fifty. The villeins stood the higher in the
social scale.
On all sides of the village lay arable land,
divided by balks of earth into narrow strips,
each about half an acre in size. Each villein
held, besides his homestead, strips of this land,
sometimes amounting in the aggregate to sixty
acres, but the strips in one ownership seldom
adjoined each other, being scattered over all
the fields adjoining the village. The bordarii,
from the Saxon bord, a cottage, were cottagers
who owned a cottage with a garden, and some
five acres in strips distributed as in the case of
the villeins over the fields at hand. But every
householder, whether villein or cottager, evi
dently possessed a plough. The community
owned altogether thirty -one ploughs, of which
three belonged to the bishop, the lord of the
1 8 Stratford-on-Avon
manor, and were probably drawn by a team of
eight oxen. Both classes of residents were
liable to small money payments to the lord
of the manor, and occasionally to payments
of agricultural produce, besides being called
upon to labour for several days every year
on portions of the land cultivated in the
bishop's own behalf. There was very little
meadow land. The Domesday surveyors
only found one field of that character five
furlongs long and two broad. All the energies
of the inhabitants were clearly engaged in
growing wheat, barley, and oats. By the river
at the same time stood the water-mill belonging
to the bishop. There the villagers were obliged
to grind all their corn, and they had to pay a
fee for the privilege. In 1085 the mill produced
an income often shillings annually, but the bishop
was often willing to accept eels in discharge of
the mill-fee, and a thousand eels were usually
sent to Worcester year by year by the customers
of the village mill. It is noticeable that the total
profit derived from Stratford by Wulfstan was
^25 in the Domesday Survey, an amount five
times that derived from it in the days of
Edward the Confessor. The advance marks
Agricultural Life 19
the rapid progress of the settlement in the
interval.
In the century and a quarter (from 1085 to
1210) following, the village does not seem to
have made any giant's strides. Alveston,
the obscure little village that now lies in the
bend of the river nearest to Stratford in its
upward course, seemed likely then to rival
it in prosperity. Just before the Norman
Conquest, ''certain great men," says Dugdale,
had withheld Alveston from the Bishops of
Worcester after it had long been in their pos
session, but William the Conquerer restored
it to Bishop Wulfstan, who generously made
it over to the great Worcestershire Priory.
Throughout the Middle Ages that religious
foundation rivalled the see itself in the posses
sion of broad lands. Three mills were erected
beside the Avon at Alveston, and eels without
number were sent year by year by its inhabitants
to the refectory of the priory. The boundaries
of the Alveston Manor crept up in the thirteenth
century to their still existing limits on the
southern side of the bridge of Stratford (it was
a rude wooden bridge at this early date), and
the manorial officers planted a little colony by
20 Stratford-on-Avon
their end of the bridge, which was known
to them and to the Elizabethans as Bridgetown.
Its dwellers were all of them bordarii or
cottagers, and in the descriptive rental of the
Worcestershire Priory compiled about I25O, 1
the names and annual dues, which varied from
five shillings to sixteenpence, are given at length.
One was called Brun, another John de Pont (or,
as we should say, John Bridge), another William
Cut. The steward, or seneschal, who looked
after this, with much surrounding property,
was a native of Stratford, Nicholas by name,
who held a messuage there with a garden
besides arable land in three neighbouring fields.
For his house and land he had to pay sixpence
quarterly, to cut hay in the meadow belonging
to the lord of the manor for one day, and to
help in stacking it, besides spending three days
in reaping his lord's grain.
The various services and payments due
as rent from the husbandmen of Stratford
and its neighbourhood at the time services
which seemed to increase in intricacy with
the centuries are given at length in the book
1 Cf. the Custumary of the Worcestershire Priory, published by the
Camden Society.
Agricultural Life 21
of the possessions of the Worcestershire Priory,
and illustrate the life led by the majority of
the villagers in the infancy of the town. Of
the changes in the condition of the inhabitants
since the Domesday Survey, it need only be
noted that many of the large estates outside
the town had been let as knight's fees, that
is to say, on condition of their holders per
forming certain military services, and that
some of the villeins within the village had
become free tenants (libere tenentes), that is
to say, men free from the imputation of serf
dom, who were permitted to cultivate their land
as they would, and paid for their farms a fixed
money rental, with little or no labour services
to supplement it. But the majority of the
inhabitants were still villeins or cottagers, and
labour services were exacted from both these
classes with vexatious regularity. Villeins who
owned sixty acres had to supply two men for
reaping the lord's fields, and cottagers with
thirty acres supplied one. On a special day an
additional reaping service was to be performed
by villeins and cottagers with all their families
except their wives and shepherds. Each of the
free tenants had then also to find a reaper, and
22 Stratford-on-Avon
to direct the reaping himself. Happily on that
occasion the steward saw that all the labourers
were fed at the cost of the manor. The villein
was to provide two carts for the conveyance of
the corn to the barns, and every cottager who
owned a horse provided one cart, for the use of
which he was to receive a good morning meal
of bread and cheese. One day's hoeing was
expected of the villein and three days' ploughing,
and if an additional day were called for, food
was supplied free to the workers. Villeins and
cottagers were also expected to assist in cutting
the hay, in carting and stacking it. When the
hay had all been gathered in, each householder
was to be presented with a ram, a fourpenny
cheese, and a small sum of money instead of
the fodder to which they were of old allowed to
help themselves. No villein nor cottager was
permitted to bring up his child for the Church
without permission of the lord of the manor.
A fee had to be paid when a daughter of a
villein or cottager married. On his death his
best waggon was claimed by the steward in his
lord's behalf, and a fine of money was exacted
from his successor if, the record wisely adds,
he could pay one. Any townsman who made
Agricultural Life 23
beer for sale paid for the privilege. But
these charges exhausted the manorial demands.
Fishing was free, church dues were small, and
the mills and the barns for storing grain were
at times placed freely at the disposal of the
population.
Ill
MEDIAEVAL TRADE, MARKETS, AND FAIRS
BUT although agricultural pursuits chiefly oc
cupied the people of Stratford in the thirteenth
century, several of them also turned their
attention to trade, and in an account of the
settlement rendered to the Bishop of Worcester
about 1251, we can trace the rise of several
industries that acquired importance later.
There were already numerous weavers, tan
ners, and tailors. There were carpenters and
dyers, whitesmiths and blacksmiths, wheel
wrights and fleshmongers, shoemakers and
coopers. The mill employed a number of
labourers as millers and fullers. 1
The Bishops of Worcester were clearly
anxious to encourage such pursuits. Before
1 Cf. a survey of Stratford made for the Bishop of Worcester in
1251, privately printed by Sir Thomas Phillipps at the Middlehill Press.
Medieval Trade, Markets, and Fairs 25
the close of the twelfth century they obtained
for the town from Richard I. the special privi
lege of a weekly market upon the Thursday, a
privilege for which the citizens paid the bishops
an annual toll of sixteen shillings. At first the
ASTON-CANTLOW CHURCH.
Thursday market was with difficulty maintained,
and it almost died within a century of its birth.
But in 1314 it was reinaugurated, and became
a permanent feature of Stratford mediaeval life.
The pasture-land within and without the
manorial boundaries must have grown since
the date of the Domesday Survey, for cattle was
2 6 Stratford-on-A von
certainly a staple commodity of the earliest
Stratford market. From time immemorial
one of the chief thoroughfares in the town
has been known by its present name of Rother
Market, and it was doubtless there that the
first market was held. Rother represents the
Anglo-Saxon word " Hreother," i.e. cattle (from
the Teutonic " Hrinthos," whence the modern
German rind). The ancient word long survived
in Warwickshire, and was familiar to Shake
speare, who employed it in the line, <k The
pasture lards the rothers' sides." 1 It is a more
significant mark of commercial progress that
early in the thirteenth century the various dues
of such inhabitants as were anxious to engage
in trade were commuted by the lord of the
manor for a fixed annual sum of twelvepence,
payable quarterly. The holdings of these
traders consisted of little more than a house
and very small gardens, and were known as
burgages, while their holders were called bur
gesses. Such a tenure bore, in the west of
England, the name of "the custom of Bristol,"
a commercial port only second in importance
at the time to London ; and its introduction
1 Timon of Athens, IV. iii. 12.
Medieval Trade, Markets, and Fairs 27
into Stratford proves the growth of mercantile
pursuits.
Meanwhile the national records do not con
cern themselves with Stratford very much.
The Hundred Rolls of Edward I., which were
drawn up in many counties to form a survey as
complete as that of the Domesday Book, barely
deal with Warwickshire ; and all they tell us
concerning Stratford is that the king's justices
had regulated by standard the manufacture of
beer in the town, and that the steward of the
Bishop of Worcester had not enforced the
regulation. The entry adds that John, a clergy
man and bailiff of the Bishop of Worcester, had
taken ten shillings from a man of Aston -Cant-
low, doubtless a political offender, who was
in prison at Stratford, as a bribe to permit him
to escape. Both these illegal episodes are dated
after the battle of E vesham. They seem to imply
some local discontent. Perhaps the people of
Stratford, or the bishop's steward there, had not
favoured Henry Ill's cause in his contest with
the barons, or it may be that the law had fallen
into contempt amid the confusion into which
the Midlands were plunged by the strife which
closed in favour of the king at E vesham in 1265.
28 Stratford-on-Avon
Further commercial privileges were con
ferred upon the town at frequent intervals in
the thirteenth century. Stratford was then
endowed with a series of annual fairs, the chief
stimulants of trade in the middle ages. As
early as 1216 a grant was obtained by the
Bishop of Worcester for the holding of a yearly
fair, "beginning on the eve of the Holy
Trinity " i.e. on the Saturday following Whit
suntide "and to continue for the two next
days ensuing." Other fairs were added as the
century progressed. In 1224 a fair was per
mitted on the eve of St. Augustine, the 26th of
May, "and on the day and morrow after." In
1242 and in 1271 a similar distinction was
conferred on both the eve of the Exaltation of
the Holy Cross i4th of September "the
day, and two days following," and "for the eve
of the Ascension of our Lord, commonly called
Holy Thursday, and upon the day and morrow
after." The grant of the earliest fair on Trinity
Sunday was renewed in 1272, and in mediaeval
times it always proved the busiest of the four
gatherings, although that of the Holy Cross in
September has continued longest. Early in the
following century permission was secured by
Medieval Trade, Markets, and Fairs 29
the townsfolk to hold another fair for the long
period of fifteen days, to begin yearly on the
eve of St. Peter and St. Paul, at the latter end
of June. Out of each of these celebrations the
Bishop of Worcester made an annual profit
of about nine shillings and fourpence.
The choice of Trinity Sunday for the earliest
of the Stratford fairs was doubtless due to the
facts that the parish church was dedicated to
the Holy Trinity, and that Trinity Sunday being
"the festival of the church's dedication," had at
Stratford, as in other parts of the country, long
been celebrated by a "wake," which brought
many neighbouring villagers to the town. The
spiritual side of mediaeval life had a tendency
to merge itself in the worldly side, and there is
nothing exceptional in a Sunday of specially
sacred character being turned to commercial
uses. In most mediaeval towns, moreover,
traders exposed their wares at fair-time in the
churchyard, and chaffering and bargaining were
conducted in the church itself. The Statute of
Winchester attempted in vain in 1285 to re
strain this extravagance, but it persisted till the
Reformation. In an early printed "Comment
on the Ten Commandments by way of dialogues
3 o Sir at ford-on- A von
between Dives and Pauper" (1493), tne "pro
fane custom " is forcibly condemned. Dives
asks Pauper, "What sayest thou of them that
hold markets and fairs in Holy Church and in
Sanctuary ?" Pauper replies, " Both the buyer
and the seller, and men of Holy Church that
maintain them, or suffer them when they might
let \i.e. hinder] it, be accursed. They make
God's house a den of thieves." To which Dives
answers, "And I dread me that full often by
such fairs God's house is made a tavern of
gluttons. For the Merchants and Chapmen
keep there with them their wives and lemans
both night and day." The riotous times spent
at Stratford a century later, when the fairs
were in process, makes this a very pertinent
description.
Thus the close of the thirteenth century
guaranteed the future prosperity of Stratford.
The rivalry with Alveston was then practi
cally over, and its development was assured.
The Bishops of Worcester had shown them
selves exceptionally vigilant over its interests,
and it was proving year by year more profitable
to them. In 1251 the arable land returned to
them more than ^"40; in 1299 more than
Mediaeval Trade, Markets, and Fairs 31
The mills had grown in number ; there were
three for grinding corn by the river, and one for
fulling elsewhere. They yielded at times as
much as ^13 :6 : 8, an enormous increase on
their ancient profits. Arable, meadow, and
pasture all became richer with cultivation. The
lords of the manor found it convenient to make
a park in the neighbourhood for hunting pur
poses, and therefore paid it frequent visits.
One bishop anticipating Justice Shallow, and not
always with more effect, threatened all who
41 broke his park and stole his deer " with
excommunication.
IV
JOHN, ROBERT, AND RALPH OF STRATFORD
IN the fourteenth century the inhabitants were
no longer solely dependent for their welfare on
the benevolence of the lords of the manor.
Villenage gradually disappeared in the reign
of Edward III, and all who were not
burgesses became free tenants or copyholders,
paying definite rents for house and land. And
from these classes sprang men capable of
stimulating the prosperity of their birthplace
by their own exertions. Three fourteenth-
century prelates, one of whom rose to be Arch
bishop of Canterbury, and the two others to
be Bishops respectively of London and Chi-
chester, were natives of Stratford, and in days
when the principle of personal nomenclature
was still unsettled, borrowed of the town their
surnames. John of Stratford, Robert of Strat-
John, Robert, and Ralph of Stratford 3 3
ford, and Ralph of Stratford were closely
related. The two former were brothers, and
Ralph was their nephew.
Robert, the father of the prelates Robert and
John, was a well-to-do inhabitant of Stratford,
who appears to have set his sons an example in
local works of benevolence. He it is to whom
has been attributed the foundation, in 1296, of
the chapel of the guild that is, of the religious
fraternity of which we shall speak hereafter and
of the hospital or almshouses attached to it.
But the benefactions of his sons and his
grandson were in many points more remark
able, and are better known to authentic history.
There is little need to pursue their careers
in detail here ; but they gave so practical an
effect "to a more than ordinary affection" for
the town, that Stratford must always honour
their memory. It must always be profitable,
too, to study their lives as illustrating the rich
opportunities of advancement in the political
and ecclesiastical worlds open in the middle
ages to ability, even when revealing itself in
the sons of village farmers. John and Robert
were both for a time Chancellors of England,
and there is no other instance in English
D
3 4 Stratford-on-A von
history of that high dignity falling to two
brothers in succession.
All three were educated at the Universities,
and successes there proved stepping-stones
to preferment in Church and State. Ralph
obtained a canonry at St. Paul's, which led to
the bishopric of the metropolis. The latter
office he held from 1340 to 1354, and during
his episcopate he rented a house in "Brug-
gestret," or Bridge Street, Stratford. 1
Robert's first benefice was the living of Strat
ford itself, bestowed on him by the Bishop of
Worcester in 1319, and in that office he was the
earliest of the three relatives to give tangible
form to his regard for his birthplace. Long
streets were in the course of formation at Strat
ford in the reign of Edward II. One ran from
the Holy Trinity Church towards the north
east. Henley Street, whence Henley-in-Arden
could be most readily reached, had tenements
on both sides of it ; and Greenhill Street,
afterwards Moor Town's End, had, like Old
Town, long been inhabited thoroughfares.
Robert resolved to roughly pave these roads.
By obtaining permission in 1332 to impose
1 Corporation Records , vol. i. p. I.
John, Robert, and Ralph of Stratford 3 5
a toll for four years " on sundry vendible
commodities," brought by the agriculturists
of the neighbourhood into the town, "he
defrayed the charge thereof," and the tax
was renewed for short periods, at his sugges
tion, in 1335 and 1337, after he had left the
city to exercise higher dignities. From the
Archdeaconry of Canterbury he was promoted
in 1337 to the see of Chichester. But, like
his brother John, he aimed at political advance
ment as well as ecclesiastical, and twice filled
the office of Chancellor of England. He
survived both his distinguished brother and
nephew, dying in 1362.
John of Stratford, the most eminent of
the three, made a name at Oxford by his
knowledge of civil law, was Bishop of Win
chester from 1323 to 1333, and became in
the latter year Archbishop of Canterbury. 1
He played a prominent part in the politics of
his time. As Bishop of Winchester, he drew
up the Bill of Deposition against Edward II,
and Marlowe gives us a glimpse of him in the
most pathetic scene in his play of Edward II.
He undertook more foreign embassies than any of
1 See Hook's Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury.
3 6 Sir at ford-on- A von
his contemporaries, and could boast of thirty-two
journeys made across the Channel in the public
service. It was John of Stratford who, after
Edward III left England on his first French
expedition in 1338, virtually governed the
country as Lord Chancellor. Twice already
had he filled that dignified office, But the
king was dissatisfied with the small amount
of money that his councillors now managed
to collect for his wars, and suddenly returned
in 1341 to dismiss all his ministers, charging
them with dishonesty in their offices. The
archbishop boldly denied Edward's accusa
tion, and bade him remember his father's
fate, and the rights of the people of England.
The king had at length to yield to John of
Stratford, who takes his place in English
history as a sturdy defender of the constitu
tion.
V
THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY TRINITY
THE most notable benefactions which Arch
bishop John of Stratford, before his death in
1348, conferred on Stratford were gathered
about the parish church. The church,
although at the time, as the evidence
of some of the stonework proves, a sub
stantial erection, was not fully completed.
It had even then many architectural pre
tensions. The tower still retains its Nor-
manesque panel arches, with their Early
English lights, which probably date from
the farther side of 1200. But John of
Stratford desired to make the structure more
stable and more elaborate. Although cruci
form in shape, it had but an embryo south
aisle, and the north aisle was very narrow.
Having widened the north aisle, the archbishop
38 Sir at ford-on- Avon
placed there a chapel to the Holy Virgin,
and the Bishops of Worcester promoted the
decoration of the chapel by granting indulgences
to those who contributed money towards
the expenses. The south aisle the archbishop
built anew, and in it he set up a chapel in honour
of St. Thomas a Becket, with whom he had some
qualities in common. The church tower he
renovated, and probably added the wooden
spire, with which Shakespeare and his con
temporaries were acquainted. But his work
was not wholly confined to mere structural
improvements.
In 1332, with the permission of the Bishop of
Worcester and Edward III, John of Stratford
formed a chantry of the chapel of the church,
dedicated to St. Thomas the Martyr. It is
difficult for some of us nowadays to appreciate
the spirit that prompted such a foundation.
The archbishop's object was to endow five
priests to chant for all time at the altar of this
chapel masses for the souls of the founder and
his friends. John of Stratford, who had acquired
much property about Stratford, appointed for
the maintenance of the priests of his chantry
one messuage in Stratford, with the Manor of
The Church of the Holy Trinity 4 1
Inge, the modern Ingon-by-Welcombe, and
among those whose souls his masses were
expected to free from purgatory were, be
sides himself, his brother Robert, his father
and mother, the Kings of England, and the
Bishops of Worcester. Of the five priests,
one was to be warden of the chapel and
another sub-warden. John of Stratford, in
spite of his political cares, watched over the
chantry with paternal affection. Year by year
he added land and houses in Stratford to its
possessions, and his friends followed his
example. One of these was Nicholas of
Dudley, parson of King's Swynford, in
Worcestershire, a connection of a family
with a notorious career before it, who made
over much property to the chantry about his
native village of Dudley. And the patronage
of the church of Stratford, John purchased of
the Bishop of Worcester, and gave to his
chantry priests, who thus fully controlled the
parish church.
Ralph of Stratford was not behind his
uncles in his generosity to his native town.
In 1351 he built for John's chantry priests
a "house of square stone for the habitation
42 Sir afford- on- A von
of these priests, adjoining to the churchyard."
The ten carpenters and ten masons, with the
labourers, who doubtless came from London
to erect the edifice, were placed, while at
Stratford, under the king's special protection.
The building came to be known as the College
of Stratford, and was familiar to the Eliza
bethans and their successors, as the map of
1769 amply proves. In 1415 Henry V
confirmed all the privileges of the chantry
and the college, and the church of Stratford
then bore the honoured epithet of collegiate,
since it was under the supervision of a college
or chapter of priests, in much the same manner
as Westminster Abbey and St. George's Chapel,
Windsor, are to this day.
Other inhabitants of Stratford followed the
example set by the three prelates of Stratford,
and made many sacrifices to adorn their church.
True penitents were urged by the Bishop of
Worcester in 1321 to contribute to the building
and the repair of the belfry, and in 1381 to
adorn and illuminate the altar of the Virgin
Mary. The warden of the college in the time
of Edward IV, Dr. Thomas Balsall, "added a
fair and beautiful choir, rebuilt from the ground
PORCH OF STRATFORD CHURCH.
The Church of the Holy Trinity 45
at his own cost," which still survives. He
clearly employed master masons of different
schools. One was faithful to the older models,
and especially to the Early Decorated style. Of
his work are the tomb of Balsall, who died in 1 49 1 ,
the north and south doors, and, doubtless, the font
at which Shakespeare was baptized. The other
artificer aimed at greater novelty. He studied
his bestiary, and perched paunchy toads on but
tresses, or transferred dragon-flies in grotesque
attitudes to stone cornices. His angels are very
whimsical, and if the carvings in the stalls be
his, he delighted in picturing the least refined
aspects of humanity. Ralph Collingwood, the
warden at the close of the fifteenth century,
gave the collegiate church its final touches.
He renewed the north porch and the nave.
" The low decorated clerestory was removed,
the walls pulled down to the crowns of the
arches, rude angels (by some 'prentice hand)
were inserted to carry the pilasters, and the
walls were panelled with large lantern windows,
with a flattish roof." 1
In pursuit of Dr. Balsall's " pious intent,"
Collingwood improved the church service
1 Knowles's Architectural Account of Holy Trinity Church.
46 Sir at ford-on- Avon
by appointing "four children choristers, to be
daily assistants in the celebration of divine
service," and placed them under the supervision
of the college ; " which choristers," according to
Collingwood's ordination, " should always come
by two and two together into the choir to
Matins and Vespers on such days as the same
were to be sung there, according to the
Ordinale Sarum ; and at their entrance into
the church, bowing their knees before the
crucifix, each of them say a Pater Noster
and an Ave. And for their better regulation
did he order and appoint that they should sit
quietly in the choir, saying the Matins and
Vespers of our Lady distinctly, and afterwards
be observant in the offices of the choir : that
they should not be sent upon any occasion
whatsoever into the town : that at dinner and
supper they should constantly be in the college
to wait at the table : and to read upon the
Bible or some other authentic book : that they
should not come into the buttery to draw beer
for themselves or anybody else : that after
dinner they should go to the singing school :
and that their schoolmaster should be one of
the priests or clerks appointed by the discretion
The Church of the Holy Trinity 49
of the warden, being a man able to instruct
them in singing to the organ : as also that they
should have one bedchamber in the church,
whereunto they were to repair in winter-time
at eight of the clock, and in summer at nine : in
which lodging to be two beds, wherein they were
to sleep by couples : and that before they did
put off their clothes they should all say the
prayer of De profundis with a loud voice, with
the prayers and orisons of the faithful, and
afterwards say thus, ' God have mercy on the
soul of Ralph Collingwood, our Founder, and
Master Thomas Balsall, a special benefactor
to the same.' ' For the maintenance of the
choristers, lands were assigned at Stratford,
Binton, and Drayton.
Shakespeare only knew Stratford after the
Reformation had stripped it of all these
ecclesiastical distinctions distinctions which
were so many tributes of affection paid to their
birthplace by his ancient fellow-townsmen but
the majority of them had been solidly embodied
in stone, with which time in his day had not dealt
unkindly. They were monuments enshrining
traditions not wholly lifeless, and may well have
helped a poet to realise the setting of scenes like
E
5 o Stratford-on-A von
King John's death under the windows of
Swinstead Abbey, or Gaunt' s last moments in
Ely House.
s of fe old fFdnh -t iv/ur/v k*fc*jWr Lu cfe
VI
THE GUILD
BUT mediaeval life at Stratford in the later
Middle Ages developed a new feature, which
gives it by far its greatest attraction to the
student of English municipal history. Self-
government was in the Middle Ages the aim of
every English town which deserved the name ;
but so far as our investigations have led us,
the townsmen of Stratford had made no
advance in that direction. Before the four
teenth century closed, however, an institution
had arisen and taken formal shape in their
midst, which was to deprive the Bishops of
Worcester of their ancient authority. The
Guild, that then went by the triple name of the
Holy Cross, the Blessed Virgin, and St. John the
Baptist, and which still gives its name to the
picturesque chapel in Church Street, embodied
52 Stratford-on-Avon
this emancipating influence. It very possibly
represents the union of three distinct guilds,
each bearing one of the names cited ; but we
have no historical evidence of their combina
tion, and for our present purpose it is sufficient
to regard it as a single institution. 1
The early English guilds must not be con
founded with the modern survival in the city
of London. The guilds owed their origin to
popular religious observances, and developed
into institutions of local self-help. They were
societies at once religious and friendly, ''col
lected for the love of God and our soul's need."
Members of both sexes and the women were
almost as numerous as the men were admitted
on payment of a small annual subscription.
This primarily secured for them the perform-
1 Ample materials for the history of the Stratford Guild are to be
found in "Stratford-on-Avon Corporation Records The Guild
Accounts," by Mr. Richard Savage, reprinted from the Stratford-on-
Avon Herald for 1885. This is a calendar of the extant accounts for
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which was prepared at the ex
pense of Mr. Charles Flower of Stratford. Mr. Savage has prepared
for publication another collection of guild documents preserved at
Shakespeare's birthplace, Stratford. See also Toulmin-Smith's " Docu
mentary History of English Guilds" published by the Early English
Text Society, Mr. J. C. Jeaffreson's "Report on the Stratford
University," published in the Eighth Report of the Historical MSS.
Commission, and Thomas Fisher's extracts from the Guild Records
which appeared in the Gentleman* s Magazine for 1835.
THE CHAPEL OF THE GUILD OF THE HOLY CROSS.
The Guild 55
ances of certain religious rites, which were more
valued than life itself. While the members lived,
but more especially after their death, lighted
tapers were duly distributed in their behalf, be
fore the altars of the Virgin and of their patron
saints in the parish church. A poor man in the
Middle Ages found it very difficult, without the
intervention of the guilds, to keep this road
to salvation always open. Relief of the poor
and of necessitous members also formed part of
the guild's objects, and gifts were frequently
awarded to members anxious to make pilgrim
age to Canterbury, and at times the spinster
members received dowries from the association.
The regulation which compelled the members
to attend the funeral of any of their fellows
united them among themselves in close bonds
of intimacy.
But the social spirit was mainly fostered
by a great annual meeting. On that oc
casion all members were expected to attend
in special uniform. With banners flying they
marched in procession to church, and subse
quently sat down together to a liberal feast.
The guilds were strictly lay associations.
Priests in many towns were excluded from
56 Stratford-on-Avon
them, and, where they were admitted, held no
more prominent places than the laymen. The
Guilds employed mass priests to celebrate their
religious services, but they were the paid
servants of the fraternity. Every member was
expected to leave at his death as much property
as he could spare to the guilds, and thus in
course of time they became wealthy corporations.
They all were governed by their own elected
officers wardens, aldermen, beadles, and clerks
and a common council formed of their repre
sentatives kept watch over their property and
rights.
Although these religious guilds did not
concern themselves with trade, in many instances
there grew up under their patronage smaller
and subsidiary guilds, each formed of members
engaged in one trade, and aiming at the pro
tection of their interests in their crafts. Under
the name of craft-guilds, these offshoots often,
as in London, survived the decay of the
religious association ; their pedigrees became
obscured and they were credited with greater
originality and antiquity than they could justly
claim. Guilds of the religious kind can be traced
far back in Anglo-Saxon times. King Ine and
The Guild 57
King Alfred mention them in their legal codes.
But the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries saw
their palmiest days. Chaucer includes some of
their members among his Canterbury pilgrims.
An Haberdasher and a Carpenter,
A Webbe, a Deyer, and a Tapiser,
Were all y-clothed in o livere
Of a solempne and grete fraternite.
Wei semed eche of hem a fayre burgeis,
To sitten in a gild halle, on the deis.
Everich, for the wisdom that he can,
Was shapelich for to ben an alderman.
At Stratford the guild claimed a very
ancient history. " The guild has lasted," wrote
its chief officers in 1389, "and its beginning
was, from time whereunto the memory of man
reacheth not." Its muniments now collected
in the birthplace at Stratford prove that it
had been in existence early in the thirteenth
century, and that bequests were then made to
it. William Sude, who lived in the reign of
Henry III, is the name of the author of the
earliest extant deed of gift, and he gave a mes
suage of the yearly value of sixpence. Many of
his contemporaries are known to have followed
this example, for the sake of their own souls or
5 8 Stratford-on-Avon
those of their fathers and mothers. The
Bishops of Worcester encouraged such gifts,
and apparently contrived that some of the guild's
revenues should be devoted to the relief of
poor priests ordained by them without any sure
title. Godfrey Giffard, on 7th October 1270,
issued letters of indulgence for forty days to
all sincere penitents who had duly confessed
their sins, and had conferred benefits on the
Guild of the Holy Cross of Stratford-on-Avon.
Before Edward I.'s reign closed the guild was
wealthy in houses and lands. In 1353, from
which year the extant account-books date, there
was scarcely a street in Stratford without a house
belonging to the association.
It was in Edward I.'s time that the elder
Robert of Stratford laid for the guild the
foundation of a special chapel, and of neigh
bouring almshouses. These buildings, with the
hall of meeting, called the Rode or Rood Hall
(rood being equivalent to cross), were doubtless
situated in Church Street, where the guildhall
and guild buildings subsequently stood, as they
stand at this day. The fourteenth century
witnessed a rapid growth of the guild's pros
perity. In 1332 Edward III gave the corpora-
The Giiild 61
tion a charter which confirmed its right to all its
possessions, and to the full control of its own
affairs. In 1389 Richard II sent commis
sioners to report upon the ordinances of the
guilds throughout England, and the return for
Stratford is still extant, though the historians
of the town have persistently overlooked it.
The details are so picturesque that I make no
apology for quoting them in full.
These are the ordinances (the document begins) of
the brethren and sisters of the Guild of the Holy Cross of
Stratford.
First : Each of the brethren who wishes to remain in
the guild, shall give fourpence a year, payable four times in
the year ; namely, a penny on the feast of St. Michael, a
penny on the feast of St. Hilary, a penny at Easter, and a
penny on the feast of St. John Baptist. Out of which
payments there shall be made and kept up one wax candle,
which shall be done in worshipful honour of our Lord Jesus
Christ and of the blessed Virgin and of the Holy Cross. And
the wax candle shall be kept alight every day throughout
the year, at every mass in the church, before the blessed
Cross ; so that God and the blessed Virgin, and the
venerated Cross, may keep and guard all the brethren and
sisters of the guild from every ill. And whoever of
the brethren or sisters neglects to come at the above-named
times [when the payments are due], shall pay one penny.
It is also ordained by the brethren and sisters of the
guild, that, when any of them dies, the wax candle before-
named together with eight smaller ones, shall be carried
62 Sir at ford-on- Avon
from the church to the house of him that is dead; and
there they shall be kept alight before the body of the dead
until it is carried to the church ; and the wax candles shall
be carried and kept alight until the body is buried, and after
wards shall be set before the Cross. Also, all the brethren
of the guild are bound to follow the body to church, and
to pray for his soul until the body is buried. And who
ever does not fulfil this, shall pay one halfpenny.
It is also ordained by the brethren and sisters, that if
any poor man in the town dies, or if any stranger has not
means of his own out of which to pay for a light to be kept
burning before his body, the brethren and sisters shall, for
their souls' health, whosoever he may be, find four wax
candles, and one sheet, and a hearsecloth to lay over the
coffin until the body is buried.
It is further ordained by the brethren and sisters, that
each of them shall give twopence a year, at a meeting which
shall be held once a year ; namely, at a feast which shall be
held in Easter week, in such manner that brotherly love
shall be cherished among them, and evil-speaking be driven
out ; that peace shall always dwell among them, and true
love be upheld. And every sister of the guild shall bring
with her to this feast a great tankard ; and all the tankards
shall be filled with ale ; and afterwards the ale shall be
given to the poor. So likewise shall the brethren do ; and
their tankards shall, in like manner, be filled with ale, and
this also shall be given to the poor. But, before that ale
shall be given to the poor, and before any brother or sister
shall touch the feast in the hall where it is accustomed to
be held, all the brethren and sisters there gathered together
shall put up their prayers, that God and the blessed Virgin
and the venerated Cross, in whose honour they have come
together, will keep them from all ills and sins. And if any
The Guild 63
sister does not bring her tankard, as is above said, she shall
pay a halfpenny. Also, if any brother or sister shall, after
the bell has sounded, quarrel, or stir up a quarrel, he shall
pay a halfpenny.
It is also ordained, that no one shall remain in this
guild unless he is a man of good behaviour.
It is moreover ordained, that when one of the brethren
dies, the officers shall summon a third part of the brethren,
who shall watch near the body, and pray for his soul,
through the night. Whoever, having been summoned,
neglects to do this, shall pay a halfpenny.
It is ordained by the Common Council of the whole
guild, that two of the brethren shall be Aldermen ; and six
other brethren shall be chosen, who shall manage all the
affairs of the guild with the Aldermen ; and whoever of
them is absent on any day agreed among themselves for a
meeting, shall pay fourpence.
If any brother or sister brings with him a guest,
without leave of the steward he shall pay a halfpenny.
Also, if any stranger, or servant, or youth, comes in, without
the knowledge of the officers, he shall pay a halfpenny.
Also, if any brother or sister is bold enough to take the
seat of another, he shall pay a halfpenny.
Also, if it happens that any brother or sister has been
robbed, or has fallen into poverty, then, so long as he bears
himself well and rightly towards the brethren and sisters of
the guild, they shall find him in food and clothing and
what else he needs.
These ordinances, providing for kindly gifts
of beer to the poor, for the preservation of good
fellowship among all the members and for their
64 Stratford-on-Avon
participation in each others' joys and griefs,
vividly put before us the simple piety and
charity of the Stratford townspeople. The
regulations for the government of the guild
by two wardens or aldermen and six others
prove the progress of the town in the direc
tion of self-government. It is not difficult to
perceive how an association, which grew to in
clude all the substantial householders of the dis
trict, necessarily acquired much civil jurisdiction;
how its members referred to its council their
disputes with one another ; how the aldermen
were gradually regarded as the administrators
of the municipal police ; or how the burgesses
preferred this new regime to servile dependence
on the steward of the lord of the manor. The
college priests were very jealous of the guild's
growing influence, and when the guild resisted
the payment of tithes brought a lawsuit against
it to compel their payment. But this seemed to
be the fraternity's only external obligation.
The ledgers or account-books of the guild,
still extant for the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, well repay close study. Their micro
scopic details enable the historian to trace the
progress of the society in all its aspects
The Guild 67
from year to year and almost from month to
month.
The receipts under the various headings of
" light- money," rents, and fines increase with
satisfactory regularity, and the expenses grow
correspondingly. Candles both of tallow and
wax, repairs of house property, the setting up of
hedges, form large items of expenditure, but in
each year's balance-sheet the details of the food
and drink provided for the annual feast occupy
more and more extravagant space. The small
pigs and large pigs ; the pullets, geese, veal, and
"carcases" of mutton; the eggs, butter, and
honey ; the almonds, raisins, currants, garlic, salt,
pepper, and other spices were gathered in from all
the neighbouring villages in appalling quantities.
Gallons of wine and bushels of malt for brewing
ale were likewise provided in generous measure.
Horsemen were often equipped at the guild's
expense to bring in the supplies. After the feast
was done there came the settlement for such
items as washing the napery, rushes for the floor
of the dining hall, coal and charcoal for the
kitchen, the cooks' and other servants' wages. At
times the feast was enlivened by professional
minstrelsy. Twenty pence was paid to minstrels
68 Stratford-on-Avon
from Warwick in 1424 and a single performer
was often engaged at a fee of fivepence.
The guild buildings, the chief room of which
was the guildhall, were enlarged and embellished
after 1400. A parlour was added in 1427 ; it
was paved with tiles, and the window was of
glass. A chimney was provided for the
counting-house at the same time and a school-
house was built. The building material all
came from neighbouring places tiles from
Warwick, stone from Drayton or Grafton,
plaster from Welcomb. Additions were also
made to the almshouses set up near at hand for
the guild's pensioners, and towards the close of
the fifteenth century the chapel was carefully re
paired. Meanwhile the number of the members
steadily increased. One curious feature of the
later conditions of membership was that the souls
of the dead could be made free of the fraternity
on payment from the living as easily as the
living themselves. Thus, early in the fifteenth
century six persons surnamed Whittington, the
dead children of John Whittington, of Stratford,
were all admitted to a share in the guild's spirit
ual benefit for the sum of ten shillings. Before
the Middle Ages closed, the fame of the guild
The Guild 69
had grown wide enough to attract to its ranks
noblemen like George, Duke of Clarence,
Edward IV's brother, and his wife, with
Edward, Lord Warwick, and Margaret, two of
their children ; and so distinguished a judge as
Sir Thomas Lyttleton was one of the members.
Merchants of towns as far distant as Bristol
and Peterborough joined it, and few towns or
villages of Warwickshire were unrepresented on
its roll of members. All the neighbouring
clergy were prominent members.
The fee for admission at its flourishing
epochs varied from six shillings and eightpence
to four pounds, according to the wealth of the
candidates. Those artificers and traders unable
to pay the entrance fee in money were allowed
to defray it in work. Thus, in 1408 Simon
Gove, carpenter, was admitted on his under
taking to build a porch at the door of the guild,
and in 1409 John Iremonger was admitted on
covenanting to build a house on the guild
ground, at the end of Henley Street. Five
years later John Ovyrton, a cook, of Warwick,
and his wife, were received into the fraternity
on condition of cooking the annual dinner,
for which they were to receive the hood of the
70 Sir at ford-on- Avon
guild the chief part of its distinctive uniform
and their expenses. In 1427 several weavers
were made free of the guild on condition of
supplying .cloth for the members' hoods and a
banner with paintings on it. In other years,
building material tiles, plaster of Paris, stone
was taken instead of the fees. Gifts in kind
from the prosperous members were frequent.
Silver cups, silver spoons, ecclesiastical vest
ments, missals, statues of saints, and wax for
candles were often presented by novices. Con
tributions to the annual feasts of corn, malt,
salt, white or red wine, were always welcomed.
In 1416 the guild received from five members
u a great pot for frumetty, a broad dish of
mascolyn, one basin, one board - cloth, and
one towel"; and in 1426 eight couples of
rabbits, two ewes with lamb, and a boar. In
1421 the presents included a silver chalice
and a coat of armour, and in 1474 seven
pewter dishes and ten pewter saucers. A
schedule of " the diverse goodes and juellies
beynge in the Gildehalle " in 1434 is remark
able for the number and richness of its
contents. Nor was there any falling off
in the bequests of houses and lands. The
The Guild 7 1
guild acquired in 1481 the rectory and
chapelry of Little Wilmecote, where the
Ardens the ancestors of Shakespeare's mother
had property with all its tithes and profits.
In 1419 a tenement in Church Street, and
in 1478 a shop in the Middle Row, came into
its possession, and later nearly all High Street
and Chapel Lane then called Dead Lane or
Walker Street owned the guild as landlord.
The inner constitution did not undergo
much alteration until late in the fifteenth cen
tury. New ordinances were promulgated in
1444; and while they define with more pre
cision than the former ones the duties of
the guild's officers, and the mode of election
to them, they differ from their predecessors
mainly in the increased importance attached to
the priests or chaplains, now five in number,
employed by the guild, and perhaps prove that
its ancient independence of ecclesiasticism was
in jeopardy. The chaplains were to perform
five daily masses hour by hour, from six o'clock to
ten in the morning. They were to live together
in one house, under as strict a discipline con
cerning hours for sleep and meals as the
choristers in the college by the churchyard.
7 2 Sir at ford-on- A von
They had to walk in procession with the
guild in their copes and surplices, with crosses
and banners, on the four principal feasts of
the year, and to officiate with the priests of
the college at the funeral of every member
and of the pensioners in the almshouses.
They were to avoid the county wakes, and
not to say mass out of Stratford without the
guild's permission. The guild had now its
master, aldermen, and proctors elected yearly.
Every new member was to be admitted in
the presence of the master, the clerk, and at
least two aldermen. No member could be
chosen alderman unless he had first served the
office of proctor. The proctors were, on the
Monday following the nativity of St. John the
Baptist (24th June), to receive and account for
the silver money received for providing candles,
and all the rents of the guild. They were
to make an annual inventory of the property.
Their duties also included the repair of all
the tenements of the Corporation, and the
arrangements for the feasts and dinners, of
the dates of which they were duly to in
form the members. There were more dinners
than of old. Private entertainments were
The Guild 73
given to neighbouring landlords. In 1463
the Bishop of Worcester was the guest of
the guild, with Sir John Greville and other
persons of distinction. The master and alder
men met in council every quarter-day at least,
and absentees without excuse were fined forty
pence. The master saw to the purchase of
cloth for the members' hoods. The oath
taken on admission was to the effect that
the brother or sister would truly pay his
fine ; that he would seek in all things the profit
of the fraternity ; that he would refer all his
disputes with fellow-members to the master ;
and that he would sue none of his brethren
without leave of the master and aldermen, upon
pain of a fine of twenty shillings. The date of
the annual feast was altered to the 6th July,
the day of St. Peter and St. Paul. Several
regulations were issued later to prevent the
" great inconvenience and hurt that grow to
this guild by private affection and grant of
the master and part of his brethren," by which
land and houses were let at low rents to
favoured friends.
By far the most important of the new
objects of the guild in the fifteenth century
74 Stratford-on-Avon
was the organisation of the grammar school
for the children of the members. We have
seen that the schoolhouse was built in 1427.
Thomas Jollyffe is the name of the member
always associated with its foundation, but it
is now proved to have been in existence
before the date (1453) usually assigned to its
origin. Attendance was free, and the school
master was forbidden to take anything from
his pupils. The master of the guild paid
him an annual salary of ten pounds. It was
at the guild school, somewhat altered in
shape, that Shakespeare was afterwards edu
cated.
When the fifteenth century closed the days
of the guild's prosperity were numbered. It
had grown inconveniently wealthy, and its
wealth was administered by a narrow oligarchy.
Men and women of position in all parts of the
country had sought and obtained admission to
it, but the extension of the guild's boundaries
was not favourable to the simple fraternal senti
ment, and the duties of membership acquired a
chilling formality. Religious feeling was de
clining, and the steady growth of the priests'
influence in the guild's internal economy failed
The Guild 75
to attract new members. The fee charged for
admission fell gradually from twenty-five shill
ings to twenty-five pence, and yet candidates
decreased. To the commercial progress of the
country the decline may be in part attributed.
Subsidiary guilds or companies, formed of men
engaged in the same or cognate trades, had
risen up among the members of the old Strat
ford guild, and had separated the great fraternity
into small cliques. At first the parent guild
appears to have encouraged the formation of
these traders' unions. We know that one room
of the guild buildings, where "John Smyth,
alias Colyere, first made a clock, having the
hand towards the street and figures all gilded,"
was known as the Drapers' Chamber as early
as 1419, and was probably so called because the
Stratford drapers were permitted to assemble
there to regulate their business arrangements.
Other trades soon secured the same privilege,
and in the sixteenth century every commercial
pursuit had its company at Stratford. When
the old religious guild was dissolved, these trade-
societies or craft-guilds lived on and shared
some of its traditions and repute.
VII
SIR HUGH CLOPTON'S BENEFACTIONS
AT the close of the Middle Ages, the town of
Stratford - on - Avon looked back on some
seven or eight centuries of continuous progress.
Originally the offshoot of a monastery, it had
almost reached the dignity of an independent
township. Bishops had nurtured it in its
infancy and the discipline of religion had left its
mark on the town. The majestic church with
its college of priests testified to the pious bene
factions of many generations of townsmen.
Religion too had developed among all the
inhabitants men and women a fraternal
sentiment powerful enough to call into being
the guild, which, with its hall, chapel, school,
almshouses, was barely less notable from the
architectural point of view than the collegiate
church. If the Stratford community, less
Sir Hugh Cloptori s Benefactions 77
fortunate than their Coventry neighbours, had
failed to develop a special industry, all the
simple crafts were practised in the town, and
were well organised among themselves. Strat
ford undoubtedly felt some of the effects of the
transition from the mediaeval to the modern era.
The guild the centre of the town's mediaeval
life temporarily suffered collapse, but it was
quickly restored to a new and healthier career
as the governing body of the town, and its new
birth secured for Stratford municipal independ
ence. Of outward change Stratford between
the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries knew
little. Not only the chief public buildings,
but many of the dwelling-houses with which
Shakespeare was familiar, dated from the
mediaeval period, and survived far beyond
Shakespeare's day. Very early in the sixteenth
century some additional adornments were made
by private benefactors. But when these were
completed, Stratford was at all points the
Stratford that Shakespeare and his children
knew. 1
From the neighbouring village of Clopton
1 For the early part of the sixteenth century, Jeaffreson's Report,
Toulmin-Smith's Account of the Guilds, and Dugdale are the chief
authorities.
7 8 Stratford-on-A von
came to Stratford, about 1480, Sir Hugh
Clopton, the last of its early benefactors, and to
him the town owed the latest structural improve
ments. His biography offers many points of in
terest. He energetically devoted great abilities
to commerce and to commercial speculations,
and is noted as an early example of the self-
made merchant. His pedigree is traced back
to Robert of Clopton, a substantial yeoman,
who in 1228 obtained from Peter de Montfort,
apparently a relative of the great Simon, the
Manor of Glopton, about a mile to the north
east of Stratford. Of the ninth generation
in descent, Hugh was a younger son. His
elder brother, Thomas, who inherited the
family estates and the great Clopton Manor
House, was religiously inclined, and built, in
the first instance, an oratory in his manor-
house, and afterwards a "fair chapel," in which
he obtained Pope Sixtus IV's permission to
celebrate divine service.
Hugh turned his attention at an early age
to trade, and made his fortune as a mercer in
London. He was Lord Mayor in 1492, never
married, and devoted his leisure and his wealth
to philanthropy. Stratford was his country
Sir Hugh Cloptoris Benefactions 8 1
home. There he erected, about 1483, "a
pretty house of brick and timber, wherein he
lived in his latter days," and obtained lands in
other parts of the town, and in Wilmecote and
Bridgetown. His "pretty house," the chief
building in the town, was, within the first
quarter of the sixteenth century, known as New
Place, and became Shakespeare's property in
1597. It stood in Chapel Street, at the corner
of Chapel Lane, and at the opposite corner of
the lane was the chapel of the guild. Clopton
hoped to end his days there, and in his will
stated his desire to be buried " in the parish
church of Stratford within the chapel of our
lady, between the altar there and the chapel of
the Trinity." But the fates were against the
fulfilment of his hope, and, dying in London in
1496, he finally " bequeathed " his body to the
chapel of St. Katherine, in the parish church of
St. Margaret, Lothbury.
New Place was far from being Clopton's sole
contribution to Stratford. The chapel standing
over against his house, and belonging to the
guild, of which he was a prominent member,
needed restoration in the last days of the
fifteenth century, and he readily defrayed the
G
8 2 Sir at ford-on- A von
expenses of the work. He did not touch the
chancel, which was renovated about 1450,
but the nave he determined to rebuild.
Death overtook him before the structure was
finished, but by his will he provided for its com
pletion. "And whereas," he wrote, "of late I
have bargained with one Dowland and divers
other masons for the building and setting up
of the Chapel of the Holy Trinity, within the
town of Stratford-on-Avon aforesaid, and the
tower of a steeple to the same, I will that the
said masons sufficiently and ably do and finish
the same with good and true workmanship, and
they truly perform the same, making the said
works as well of length, and breadth, and
height, such as by the advice of mine executors,
and other divers of the substantialest and
honest men of the same parish, shall and can
be thought most convenient and necessary ;
and all the aforesaid works to be done by mine
executors, and paid upon my proper goods and
charges ; and in like wise the covering and
roofing of the same chapel with glazing, and all
other furnishments thereunto necessary to it, to
be paid by my said executors as the works
aforesaid goeth forth." The "furnishments"
Sir Hugh Claptons Benefactions 8 3
included elaborate paintings on the roof, illus
trating the history of the Holy Cross. Although
in mediaeval times that history was usually
traced back to the creation of the world,
Clopton's artists connected it with no more
ancient personages than King Solomon and the
Queen of Sheba, and thence brought it by
several stages to the time of St. Helena, the
mother of Constantine, who made a successful
pilgrimage to Palestine to discover its where
abouts in the fourth century. Other paintings
commemorated St. Thomas a Becket, St.
George and the Dragon, and the Last Judg
ment. In 1804 the paintings were discovered
beneath a covering of whitewash, and they
were copied and engraved, but they have since
been more than once recoated with whitewash,
and are probably wholly destroyed. 1
Another of Sir Hugh Clopton's benefactions
was of greater practical utility. The towns--
people had long felt the need of a good bridge
over the river, and " the great and sumptuous
bridge upon the Avon, at the east end of the
town," constructed of freestone, with fourteen
1 Cf. Thomas Fisher's Series of Ancient Allegorical . , . Paintings
. . . discovered . . . at Stratford-on-Avon^ London, 1807, fol.
84 Stratford-on-Avon
arches, and " a long causeway " of stone, " well
walled on each side at the west," was erected
by Sir Hugh. Leland, the antiquary, who
visited Stratford about 1530 on a tour through
England, noted in his account of his journey
the great value of this gift. " Afore the time
of Hugh Clopton," he wrote, " there was but a
poor bridge of timber, and no causeway to come
to it, whereby many poor folks either refused
to come to Stratford when the river was up, or
coming thither stood in jeopardy of life." The
bridge required frequent repair, as we shall see,
in Shakespeare's day, but enough of it is still
standing to convince us of the workmanlike
thoroughness with which its foundations were
laid.
By Sir Hugh Clopton's will Stratford largely
benefited in other ways. " He bequeathed also
C marks to be given to xx poor maidens of
good name and fame dwelling in Stratford, i.e.
to each of them five marks apiece at their
marriage ; and likewise C/. to the poor house
holders in Stratford ; as also L/z. to the new
building the cross aisle in the Parish Church
there" (Dugdale). The testator did not, at the
same time, forget the needs of the poor of
Sir Hugh Claptons Benefactions 87
London, or their hospitals ; and on behalf of
poor scholars at the Universities, he established
six exhibitions at Cambridge and Oxford, each
of the annual value of four pounds for five years.
STAIRCASE OF CLOPTON HOUSE.
VIII
THE REFORMATION AT STRATFORD
ALTHOUGH the town was thus structurally com
pleted, its internal government had not advanced
with the times. The steward of the Bishop of
Worcester, the lord of the manor, was still in
name the supreme authority. The Reformation
gave the needful impulse and exerted a deter
mining influence on the constitutional develop
ment of Stratford. Before the Reformation had
run its full course, it brought to fruition the
townspeople's desire for self-government.
The new movement respected none of the old
rights of ecclesiastics to property, and the claims
of the Bishops of Worcester to manorial rights in
Stratford were summarily set aside. About
1550 John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, one of
Edward VI's Lord Protectors, and afterwards
Duke of Northumberland, was installed in the
bishop's place as Lord of the Manor of Stratford,
The Reformation at Stratford 89
and the king added to this estate the Lordship,
Manor and Castle of Kenilworth, which was not
very far distant. When the Duke of Northum
berland's ambitious plot to set his daughter-in-
law Lady Jane Grey on the throne of England
came to nought, and he paid the penalty of failure
on the scaffold, Queen Mary humanely made
Stratford over for a short while to his widowed
duchess ; but she finally assigned it to the
Savoy Hospital beyond Temple Bar, which she
had revived for the poor of London. Such
changes in the ownership of the manor did not,
however, very nearly affect the townsmen ; for
the manorial property had been diminished by
gifts of the Bishops of Worcester to the guild, and
the powers of the manorial lord had been lessened
by the assumption of many of his ancient func
tions by the fraternity's wardens and aldermen.
More important to the townsmen were the
laws of Henry VIII's reign, dealing with
religious houses and corporations. The Acts
for their dissolution immediately affected more
than one institution at Stratford. The college
the home of the chantry priests was the
first to fall. In 1535 commissioners visited it,
and found the warden, the five priests, and the
go Sir at ford-on- Avon
four choristers living there sumptuously. Sub
sidiary chapels had been set up by the college
in the neighbouring villages of Bishopston and
Luddington, of which they owned the tithes.
Its lands were under the supervision of a
steward and a bailiff. The annual income was
^128 : 9 : i. In 1545 another report was
made, and it was noted that all its officers had,
besides a good yearly stipend, two shillings
weekly for their diet allowed out of the posses
sions of the institution. It was rich in silver
and gold, and Henry VIII appropriated,
before the close of his reign, no less than 260
ounces of its plate. The priests were appar
ently permitted to reside within the college till
1547, but in that year all college chantries and
free chapels were finally suppressed. For four
years the Stratford College seems to have been
uninhabited. In 1551 it was made over as a
royal gift to the Earl of Warwick, the new lord
of the manor. He transformed it into a private
residence; but his execution in 1553 brought
the building again into the hands of the
Crown. Elizabeth leased it in 1576 to a Richard
Coningsby, and he it was who sublet it to
wealthy John Combe, who lived there on good
The Reformation at Stratford 9 1
terms with Shakespeare, although he bore the
reputation of being a ''devilish usurer."
The guild underwent a far more striking
transformation. The politicians who sur
rounded Henry VIII and Edward VI found
the destruction of religious corporations not
more satisfactory to their consciences than to
their purses. In 1545 and in 1547 com
missioners came to Stratford to report upon
the possessions and constitution of the Guild
of the Holy Cross. The income was estimated
at 50 : i : 1 1 ^, of which 2 1 : 6 : 8 was paid as
salary to four chaplains. There was a clerk, who
received 43. a year ; and Oliver Baker, who saw
to the clock (outside the chapel), received 133. 4d.
" Upon the premises was a free school, and Wil
liam Dalam, the schoolmaster, had yearly for
teaching ^10." " There is also given yearly,"
the report runs, " to xxiiij poor men, brethren
of the said guild, Ixiij.*-. iiijV. ; vz. xs. to be
bestowed in coals, and the rest given in ready
money ; besides one house there called the
Almshouse ; and besides v or vj/z. given
them of the good provision of the master of
the same guild." In the report of 1547 the
importance of the guild chapel to the town is
9 2 Stratford-on-A von
strongly insisted upon. It was more centrally
situated than the parish church, since the town
had long left the banks of the river, and the
old and sick regularly attended service there.
The chapel stood in the midst of the town, " for
the great quietness and comfort of all the
parishioners there ; for that the parish church
standeth out of the same town, distant from the
most part of the said parish half a mile and
more ; and in time of sickness, as the plague
and such like diseases doth chance within the
said town, then all such infective persons, with
many other impotent and poor people, doth to
the said chapel resort for their daily service."
But in 1547 all these advantages ceased: the
guild was dissolved, and all the property came
into the royal treasury. It was, as we have seen,
in the same year that the lordship of the manor
was transferred from the Bishops of Worcester to
the Protector Northumberland, who was far too
occupied with affairs of state to renew the worn-
out machinery of manorial government. And
now too all the functions of local government
which the guild had tacitly exercised were para
lysed. For six years the town lacked any
responsible government.
IX
THE GROWTH OF SELF-GOVERNMENT
BUT the inconvenience of anarchy, barely
tempered by the occasional appearance of the
steward of the manor, was felt to be an un
bearable humiliation. About 1550 the leading
townsmen the old officers of the guild laid
their grievances before the king, and begged
him to rehabilitate the guild as a municipal
corporation. The application was successful,
and Edward VI's reply, dated ;th June 1553,
unreservedly placed the government of the
borough in the hands of its own inhabitants.
Whereas (the charter ran) the borough of Stratford-
upon-Avon, in the county of Warwick, is an ancient
borough, in which borough a certain guild was in former
time founded and endowed with divers lands, tenements,
and possessions, from whose rents, revenues, and profits a
certain Grammar School was maintained and supported for
the education and instruction of boys and youths, and a
96 Stratford-on-Avon
certain charitable house was there maintained and sup
ported for the sustenance of twenty-four poor persons, and
a certain great stone bridge called Stratford Bridge, placed
and built over the water and river of the Avon beside the
said borough, was from time to time maintained and re
paired. And the lands, tenements, and possessions of the
same guild have come into our hands and now remain in
our hands. And whereas the inhabitants of the borough
of Stratford aforesaid from time beyond the memory of man
have had and enjoyed divers franchises, liberties, and free
customs, jurisdictions, privileges, reversions, and quittances
by reason and pretext of charters, concessions, and con
firmations made in ancient time by our progenitors to the
masters and brethren of the aforesaid guild and otherwise,
which the same inhabitants of the same borough aforesaid
are now very little able to have and enjoy, because the
aforesaid guild is dissolved, and in consideration of other
causes now apparent to us whence it appears likely that
the borough aforesaid and the government thereof may go
to a worse state from time to time, if a remedy be not
quickly provided. On which grounds the inhabitants of
the borough of Stratford aforesaid have humbly prayed us
that we would accord them our favour and abundant grace,
for the amelioration of the said borough and the govern
ment thereof, and for the support of the great works which
they from time to time are compelled and ought to sustain
and support, and that we would deign to make, reduce, and
create them the same inhabitants into a body corporate and
politic.
And directions followed ordering this " reduc
tion " and " creation " to proceed without delay.
Thus the ancient guild did not lie long in
The Growth of Self -Government 97
cold obstruction; in 1554 it entered on a new
tenure of life. The names and functions of its
chief officers were slightly changed, but the
bailiff, chosen on the Wednesday next before
the Nativity of our Lady (8th September), was
merely the old warden newly spelt. The alder
men bore the same titles as of old. The
proctors, were replaced by the chamberlains.
The clerk's and beadle's offices remained un
changed. The common council continued to
meet monthly in the guildhall or one of the
adjoining chambers "at nine o'clock of the
forenoon," summoned by the bell of the guild
chapel ; but the assembly now included, besides
the bailiff and ten aldermen, the ten chief or
capital burgesses, and its edicts governed the
whole town. Regular performance of duty was
secured by fines of six-and-eightpence on all
absentees from meetings of the council, and of
ten pounds on any councillor declining to
assume the office of bailiff when elected to it.
Very heavy penalties (five pounds for a first
offence, ten for a second, and "to be expulsed "
for ever for a third) punished those who dis
cussed " forth of the council chamber" any of
its proceedings. "In all and every general
H
9 8 Stratford-on-A von
procession," every councillor, according to
"orders passed" in 1557, was to take part " in
his honest apparel as in his gown"- a survival
of the hood of the guild on pain of a twelve-
penny fine, and a like forfeiture awaited any one
who attended a " hall " without " his gown upon
his back." The characteristic fraternal senti
ment of the original institution was perpetuated
in the orders " that none of the aldermen nor
none of the capital burgesses, neither in the
council chamber nor elsewhere, do revile one
another, but brotherlike live together, and that
after they be entered into the council chamber,
that they nor none of them depart not forth but
in brotherly love, under the pains of every
offender to forfeit and pay for every default,
v]s. viijW." Similarly, when any councillor or
his wife died, all were to attend the funeral "in
their honest apparel, and bring the corpse to
the church, there to continue and abide devoutly
until the corpse be buried."
The estates of the guild, to which the greater
part of the college lands were added, became
the corporate property, and the chattels of the
guild the vestments, armour, and plate -
passed into the hands of the new body. The
The Growth of Self -Government 99
school, in which Edward VI showed a special
interest, became, with the chapel and alms-
houses, institutions of the borough. The vicar
of the parish church was a corporate officer,
with a salary of twenty pounds annually and
two pounds in tithes. Nearly all functions that
the steward of the lord of the manor had per
formed were absorbed in the new regime, and
for their due exercise a few r new legal and police
offices were created. The bailiff was a duly-
appointed magistrate. He attended the judges
at the assizes, and presided, with his sergeants
and constables, in a monthly court of record, for
the recovery of small debts, and at the great law-
days or leets, to which all the inhabitants were
summoned to reviseand enforce the policeregula-
tions. The leets were held twice a year on the
Wednesdays after the feast of St. Michael the
Archangel (29th September) and after Low
Sunday, i.e. the week after Easter. Shakespeare
was familiar with these observances. Kit Sly,
talking in his sleep, promises to present the ale-
wife of Wincot at the leet, " because she brought
stone jugs and no seal'd quarts " ; and I ago
speaks in metaphor of keeping '* leets and law-
days." The new corporation also assumed the
i oo Stratford-on-A von
duty of supervising the trade of the town. Under
the shadow of the religious fraternity, we have
watched the trading companies come into being,
and the town council now kept them strictly under
its own control. The bailiff confirmed indentures
of apprenticeship, and the chamberlains de
manded a fee on the admission of a new
member into a craft or mystery. Prices of
bread and beer were fixed by the corporation,
and ale-tasters were annually appointed to en
force orders as to the quality and price of
victuals. Searchers were also nominated to
inspect the tanneries, and to prevent the
common abuses in the preparation of leather
which were prohibited by statutes of the realm
in 1566 and I6O3- 1
It is essential for the student of the social
history of Stratford to grasp clearly the leading
differences between life in the sixteenth and in
the nineteenth centuries, and of the first im
portance is it to realise how little personal
liberty was understood in Elizabethan country
towns. Scarcely an entry in the books of the
1 For the general social condition of the reformed municipality, see
Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps's invaluable Life of Shakespeare, his New Place
(1864), and his privately printed publication containing the Chamber
lain's Accounts 1564-1618, and the Council Books (A and B).
The Growth of Self -Government 101
new council fails to emphasise the rigidly
paternal character of its rule. If a man lived
immorally he was summoned to the guildhall,
and rigorously examined as to the truth of the
rumours that had reached the bailiff's ear. If
his guilt was proved, and he refused to make
adequate reparation, he was invited to leave
the city. A female servant, hired at a salary
of twenty-six shillings and eightpence and a pair
of shoes, left her master suddenly in 161 1. The
aldermen ordered her arrest on her master's
complaint. Her defence was that "she was
once frightened in the night in the chamber
where her master's late wife died, but by what
or when she cannot tell " ; but this plea proved
of no avail, and she spent some months in the
gaol by the guildhall. Rude endeavours were
made to sweeten the tempers of scolding wives.
A substantial " clicking stool," with iron staples,
lock, and hinges, was kept in good repair. The
shrew was attached to it, and by means of ropes,
planks, and wheels, was plunged two or three
times into the Avon whenever the municipal
council believed her to stand in need of cor
rection. Three days and three nights were
invariably spent in the open stocks by any
i o 2 Sir at ford- on- A von
inhabitant who spoke disrespectfully to any town
officer, or who disobeyed any minor municipal
decree. No one might receive a stranger into
his house without the bailiff's permission. No
journeyman, apprentice, or servant might "be
forth of their or his master's house " after nine
o'clock at night. Bowling alleys and butts
were provided by the council, but were only to
be used at stated times. An alderman was
fined on one occasion for going to bowls after
a morning meeting of the council, and Henry
Sydnall was fined twenty pence for keeping
unlawful or unlicensed bowling in a back shed.
Alehouse-keepers, of whom there were thirty
in Stratford in Shakespeare's time, were kept
strictly under the council's control. They were
not allowed to brew their own ale, or to en
courage tippling, or to serve poor artificers
except at stated hours of the day, on pain of
fine and imprisonment. Dogs were not to go
about the streets unmuzzled. Every inhabitant
had to go to church at least once a month, and ab
sentees were liable to penalties of twenty pounds,
which in the late years of Elizabeth's reign com
missioners came from London to see that the local
authorities enforced. Early in the seventeenth
The Growth of Self -Government 103
century swearing was rigorously prohibited.
Laws as to dress were always regularly en
forced. In 1577 there were many fines exacted
for failure to wear the plain statute woollen
caps on Sundays, to which Rosaline makes
reference in Loves Labour's Lost, and the
regulation affected all inhabitants above six
years of age. In 1604 " tne greatest part" of
the population were presented at a great leet,
or law-day, "for wearing their apparel contrary
to the statute." Nor would it be difficult to
quote many other like proofs of the persistent
strictness with which the new town council of
Stratford, by the enforcement of its own orders
and of the statutes of the realm, regulated the
inhabitants' whole conduct of life.
X
JOHN SHAKESPEARE IN MUNICIPAL OFFICE
AND IN TRADE
IT was this sober form of government that
demanded William Shakespeare's allegiance
from youth to the close of his life, and in his
later days there can be no doubt of his loyal
conformity to all its precise edicts. It was of
this government that his father, John Shake
speare, was an energetic member, filling all the
chief offices, from ale -taster and constable
to that of bailiff and chief alderman, between
1557 and 1577; and from his boyhood every
detail of municipal organisation must have been
familiar to the poet.
Before 1557 his father was a leading or
"capital" burgess and a member of the town
council. He was an ale-taster in 1557, and had
to enforce the order " that all the brewers, that
John Shakespeare in Municipal Office i o 5
brew to sell either ale or beer, shall sell their ale
or beer for threepence the gallon under the hair-
sieve (i.e. new), and threepence -halfpenny the
gallon stale, and thirteen gallons to the dozen,
and that no victualler and no alehouse -keeper
shall sell any ale or beer contrary to this order ;
and that all bakers that bake bread to sell shall
sell four (i.e. quarter) loaves for a penny, two
(i.e. half) loaves for a penny, and one (i.e.
whole) loaf for a penny, and so to keep the
assize (the testing of weights and measures)
delivered every Thursday at night, upon pain
of imprisonment." On 3oth September 1558,
and again on 6th October 1559, John Shake
speare was chosen one of the four constables,
and had to direct the watch throughout the
year, and, Dogberry-like, once every month,
from Michaelmas to Candlemas or oftener,
"as the case requireth it, to call to him certain
of the council and some other honest men,
and keep and have a privy watch for the good
rule of the town." In 1559 and in 1561 he was
one of the four "affeerors" officers who
assessed in the court - leets fines for minor
offences, for which the statutes prescribed no
express penalties. From 1561 to 1564 he was
106 Sir at ford- on- Avon
a chamberlain, and duly presented year by year
the municipal accounts.
On 4th July 1565 John Shakespeare
reached the dignity of an alderman. He took
the place of William Bott, a wealthy capitalist
from Coventry, who relieved William Clopton,
an heir of Sir Hugh, of some of his pecuniary
difficulties by purchasing New Place of him
in 1563. Bott was of a quarrelsome temper.
He was evidently one of those self-sufficient
blusterers whom William Shakespeare delighted
to honour with his ridicule in characters like
Bottom and Dogberry. In 1565 Bott brought
an action against Richard Sponer, a poor
painter, inhabiting a cottage in Chapel Lane,
for stealing twelve pieces of squared timber
from his garden, and at the same time he had
a serious dispute with his fellow-councillors.
He spoke evil words of Master Bailiff and
others. He said that " there was never an
honest man of the council," whereupon he
"was sent for and did not come to his answer."
On the contrary, he gave ''such opprobrious
words that he was not," in his fellow-councillors'
opinion, " worthy henceforth to be of the
council," and was consequently "expulsed,
John Shakespeare in Municipal Office 107
to be none of the company." It was Bott's
disgrace that secured John Shakespeare his
alderman's gown. Three years later, at
Michaelmas 1568, John rose higher and
became bailiff, and on 5th September 1571
he was chief alderman, a post which he
retained till sd September of the following
year. After Michaelmas 1572 he ceased to
take an active part in municipal affairs. The
duties of the aldermen could not be well
performed by poor men. In 1563 and 1564,
when John Shakespeare was chamberlain,
he had been able to advance as much as
>Z : 2 : *]\ to the corporation, but as the cen
tury grew older his monetary resources failed
him. In 1564, when the plague raged at
Stratford, he had liberally contributed to the
funds raised by the aldermen in behalf of their
poor and afflicted neighbours. In 1576 he
paid twelvepence towards the beadle's salary ;
but in 1578 he was unable to supply his share
of the payments privately made by his fellow-
councillors "towards the furniture of three
pikemen, two billmen, and one archer," who
were apparently sent by the corporation to attend
a muster of the trained bands of the county.
i o 8 Stratford-on -A von
Nor was he at the same time able to give
the small sum of fourpence for the relief of
the poor. Failure to pay such pecuniary dues
as these combined, with long-continued absence
from the " halls," to cause the corporation, on
6th September 1586, to deprive John Shake
speare of his alderman's gown. He thus retired
from public life when his son William was
twenty-two years of age, and in no position
to give his father any assistance.
John Shakespeare's assumption of municipal
office would prove, in the absence of all other
evidence, that he was engaged in trade in the
town. The first bailiff whose name is recorded
was a skinner, and all his successors, with
rare exceptions, were business men. When
John Shakespeare was first proposed for that
office in 1567, the rival candidates were a
butcher and a brewer. John Shakespeare's
mercantile occupation has been a matter of
endless controversy. It is certain that on
i ;th June 1556 he sued, in the capacity of
a glover, before John Burbage, the bailiff,
one Thomas Siche, of Arscotte, Worcester
shire, for a debt of eight pounds ; and between
1565 and 1579, whenever he attached his
John Shakespeare in Municipal Office 109
mark to official documents (he could not write),
he rudely drew the glover's trade-mark an
instrument resembling the stretcher still used
by sellers of gloves. Twenty-three years later
he was always described as a yeoman. But
here is no real inconsistency. Stratford still
retained many agricultural characteristics.
Small farmers lived there in number, and,
except those inhabitants exclusively engaged
in some recognised urban manufacture, they
dealt in all the products yielded by the cultiva
tion of land and stock. Thus, in 1597 George
Perry, of Stratford, was described as using,
"besides his glover's trade, buying and selling
of wool and corn, and making of malt," and
Richard Castell, of Rother Market, was a glover,
"while his wife uttereth weekly two strikes of
malt." Joyce Hobday, a widow, was similarly
selling at one time wool, calves' leather, and
gloves. John Shakespeare's business was,
doubtless, of even wider extent. He cultivated
far more land than the majority of his
neighbours. About 1557 he married Mary
Arden, the youngest daughter of Robert
Arden, of Wilmecote, his father's old landlord,
and she had inherited from her father "all his
no Sir at ford- on- A von
land in Wilmecote called Ashbies, and the
crop upon the ground, sown and tilled as it
is," and was, with her sister Alice, her father's
residuary legatee, which gave her arable
and pasture land at the little village of Snitter-
field. About 1570 John purchased a small
farm called Ingon Meadow, containing fourteen
acres, for eight pounds. The produce of these
estates was, doubtless, sold by John Shake
speare at Stratford. As early as 1556 we
find him complaining that his neighbour, Henry
Field, unjustly detained barley belonging to
him. In 1564 he sold timber to the corpora
tion. Sheep, meat, skins, wool, and leather
were among the commodities in which he dealt.
That his business transactions were numerous
is proved by the frequency of his suits for
the recovery of debts in the local courts
between 1557 and 1595. His failure after
1580 was probably due to some unfortunate
speculation in corn, or to the recurrence of
dearths, of which dealers were forbidden by
statute law, strictly enforced by the town
council, to take any commercial advantage.
XI
THE STRATFORD INDUSTRIES AND POPULATION
DESPITE the absence of strict divisions of trade,
and the trading by one person in many distantly-
related commodities, John Shakespeare's and
his son's contemporaries maintained the trade
societies initiated by their mediaeval pre
decessors, and descriptions of the various
trading companies are still extant. These
societies often embraced the followers of more
trades than one, but each society was a very
close corporation. " The weaver's art," as in
the thirteenth century, held among them the
first place. There were, besides, mysteries
or crafts of skinners, tailors, shoemakers,
saddlers, glovers, whittawers (i.e. tanners of
white leathers), and collarmakers ; a company
of chandlers, soapmakers, ironmongers, and
bakers, survived beyond 1726. Pewterers
1 1 2 Sir at ford- on- Avon
butchers, brewers, drapers, grocers, carpenters,
and painters were also numerous in the town.
Orders were frequently passed bidding no
person set up any trade or occupation " before
he be made free of its company," and enjoin
ing on every one the necessity of " sorting
himself into one company or another," but
almost all the shopkeepers, like John Shake
speare, contrived to follow more than one
trade. Thus Adrian Quiney, a prominent
mercer, dealt, together with his wife, in such
various commodities as ginger, red lead,
Southwich cloth, lime, salad oil, and deal
boards. This Quiney owned a house in
Henley Street, and was bailiff in 1572 ; his
grandson Richard was an intimate friend of
the poet, and his great - grandson Thomas
married Judith Shakespeare, the poet's younger
daughter, just before her father's death in
1616. Shoemaking seems to have formed a
more exclusive industry. Among the chief
shoemakers of the town was a namesake of
John Shakespeare, possibly a cousin, living
in 1590 in Bridge Street. He filled municipal
office as constable and ale-taster in 1585, and
was master of the company of shoemakers in
The Stratford Industries and Population 1 1 3
1585. In 1587 he was in pecuniary difficulties,
and received a loan of five pounds from the
corporation out of Oken's Charity a fund be
queathed to the town by Thomas Oken, of War
wick, in 1570, for the relief of poor tradesmen.
Soon afterwards he appears to have left Stratford.
Certain regulations like those enforced
upon bakers and brewers by the ale-tasters,
or those enforced by the tannery searchers,
hampered, with advantage to the consumer,
the freedom of trade. There were customs of
stretching and straining cloths, and of chalk
ing and " otherwise deceitfully making them,"
which were frequently prohibited under rigorous
penalties. Leather was often imperfectly tanned
and made hollow by divers mixtures, such as
obnoxious fats, so that " boots within two or
three days' wearing will straightway become
brown as a hare -back ; and, which is more,
fleet and run about like a dishclout ; and
which is most of all, hold out no water or
very little." Horse -hide was often sold for
ox-hide. Corn dealers were ordered, under
heavy penalties, in 1596, not to " ingross,
forestall, or regrate," but "to furnish the
market rateably and weekly " with fixed
ii4 Stratford-on-Avon
quantities. These prohibitions often affected
traders disastrously, but their customers in
variably benefited.
Trade was maintained at a normal rate of
briskness by the weekly markets and the
half- yearly fairs, the chief of which fell in
September. The town council strictly regu
lated the procedure of the fairs, and appointed
to each trade a station in the streets. Thus,
raw hides at markets and fairs were to be laid
down at the cross in Rother Market. Sellers
of butter, cheese, all manner of white meat,
wick-yarn, and fruits were to set up their stalls
by the cross at the chapel. A site in the High
Street was assigned to country butchers, who
repaired to the town with their flesh, hides, and
tallow. Pewterers were ordered to "pitch"
their wares in Wood Street, and to pay for
the ground they occupied fourpence a yard.
Saltwains, whose owners did a thriving trade
in days when salted meats formed the staple
supply of food, were permitted to stand about
the cross in Rother Market. At various points
the victuallers were permitted to erect booths.
These regulations were needful to prevent
strife, and fines for breach of the rules often
The Stratford Industries and Population 1 1 5
reached as large a sum as five pounds. The
townsmen were anxious to secure for them
selves all the advantages of these gatherings,
and the council often employed men armed
with cudgels to keep Coventry traders out of
the town.
These details, which are drawn from the
council books of the Stratford Corporation
from 1557 to 1607, indicate much commercial
activity. For a country town, we may judge
Stratford to have been fairly populous. We
know that the commissioners appointed to
report on the guild in 1547 stated the
chapel to be the chief place of worship for
fifteen hundred " houseling people," i.e. persons
accustomed to take the holy sacrament. In
1562 there appeared to have been about thirty
householders in each of the twelve streets of
the town, which would roughly show a popula
tion of two thousand persons. Plagues, like
the disastrous one of 1564, were continually
reducing the population, but new arrivals from
the neighbouring villages appear to have main
tained it at a fairly steady average. Small
farmers were finding agriculture growing year
by year less profitable ; the great city merchants
n 6 Straff ord-on- Avon
had long been buying up arable-land to trans
form it into pasture-land, sheep and wool were
now more profitable commodities than wheat or
barley or oats, and the new landlords only culti
vated their estates with a view to securing the
largest profits. Far less labour was required
in tending sheep than in growing corn.
Agricultural labourers, therefore, found their
services at a discount, and flocked to the
towns. The yeomen too found it to their
advantage to move into towns, where their
produce could readily find purchasers. Strat
ford, we have seen, attracted a rich man like
William Bott from Coventry, about 1560.
Some years before it had attracted from the
neighbouring village of Snitterfield John
Shakespeare himself.
XII
JOHN SHAKESPEARE'S FIRST SETTLEMENT IN
STRATFORD THE STREETS
IT was, in all probability, in 1551, just before
the borough had reached the all -important
stage of incorporation, that John Shakespeare
first came to Stratford. In the Middle Ages
there were no Shakespeares at Stratford. But
in the surrounding districts families of the name
were numerous. Thus, among the members of
a guild which closely resembled the Stratford
guild at Knoll, near Hampton-in-Arden,
Shakespeares, Shaxpers, Shakespeyres, Shak-
speeres, called Richard, John, William, Agnes,
Isabella, are found repeatedly between 1464 and
J 555- Some of these lived at Rowington, and
can be traced there till the close of the last
century ; one Thomas Shakespeare, of Rowing-
ton, was a disciple of Jack Cade. A family of
1 1 8 Sir at ford- on- Avon
Shakespeares also lived at Warwick till the
close of the sixteenth century, and on i6th
June 1579 William, one of these/according to
the register in the church of St. Nicholas, War
wick, met his death by drowning in the river
SHAKESPEARE'S BIRTHPLACE BEFORE RESTORATION.
Avon. (How invaluable might this piece of evi
dence prove to the monomaniacs who believe
that Bacon wrote Will Shakespeare's plays !)
But the poet, although doubtless col
laterally related to many of these families,
was directly descended from none of them.
John Shakespeare probably belonged to a
The Streets 1 1 9
branch residing in the sixteenth century at
Snitterfield, a little village four miles to the
north of Stratford, and the Richard Shakespeare
who was a farmer, renting there of Robert
Arden of Wilmecote a small tenement, with a
little land attached to it, in 1550, was doubtless
John's father and the poet's grandfather.
Snitfield, or Snitterfield, had seen days
of commercial prosperity, but it was at this
time chiefly occupied by small farmers and their
labourers. It had a church at the time of the
Norman Conquest, and in 1 242 a market and a
fair had been granted it. As a manor it had
successively belonged to a monastery of
Bordsley and to many Earls of Warwick, and it
came, in the sixteenth century, into the hands
of John Hales, the founder of a free school at
Coventry a very wealthy man, whose lame
ness, the result of an accident, gained for him
the sobriquet of . " Hales with the club foot."
In 1552 John Shakespeare was living in Henley
Street, Stratford, but it was not until 1556 that
he purchased houses in the town. In that year
he entered into copyhold possession of two
tenements, one with a garden and croft (i.e. an
enclosed plot of land), in Greenhill Street, at a
1 2 o Stratford-on-A von
rental of sixpence, and another with a garden
only in Henley Street. But these dwellings he
apparently let again, and continued to reside in
the house he had first occupied in Henley Street.
This tenement he bought, with its gardens,
orchards, and the house adjoining, which had
been previously in his occupation for business
purposes, for forty pounds, in 1575. It was in
an upper story of the former of these houses
that his son William was born in 1564,
probably on 23d April. It is of interest to note
that the nearest neighbours of John Shake
speare were on one side John Wheler, and on
the other, before 1591, George Badger, a draper,
who was once constable of the town. It was,
doubtless, among their children that William
Shakespeare found his earliest playfellows.
It may be well to follow John Shakespeare
from his first entrance into the town, and take
a survey of it in his company. We shall thus
gain some knowledge of that aspect of it with
which his son William was familiar in his youth.
John Shakespeare would have originally entered
Stratford by the Warwick Road, near which
Snitterfield lies, and would have found himself
on arrival at the bottom of Bridge Street, by
The Streets 1 2 3
the causeway leading to the stone bridge.
Leland, the antiquarian traveller of 1530, said
of the general appearance presented by Stratford
to a stranger, "It hath two or three long streets,
besides back lanes. One of the principal streets
leadeth from east to west, and another from
north to south. . . . The town is reasonable
well builded of timber." Passing up Bridge
Street, which led on from east to west, the
new-comer came upon a small row of shops
and stalls in the centre of the road known as
Middle Row, of which the south side was
Bridge Street, and the north, Back Bridge
Street. It was in Bridge Street, it will be re
membered, that John Shakespeare, the shoe
maker, had his stall. The row was pulled down
less than a century ago to form the wide
thoroughfare of modern Bridge Street. In
Bridge Street stood the three chief inns of the
town the Swan, the Bear, and the Crown, of
which the latter is believed to have occupied the
site of the present Red Horse Hotel ; and for
many years a large house there, known as the
Cage, and probably at one time the prison, was
in the occupation of Henry Smith, a vintner.
When the top of Bridge Street was reached, it
124 Stratford-on-A von
divided into two roads Wood Street to the left
and Henley Street to the right and the latter
soon led into the country. Wood Street ran on
into Greenhill Street, afterwards Moor Town's
End, which, though still retaining a rural hedge,
was fringed with a few houses. Behind Henley
Street lay gravel-pits belonging to the guild,
which were largely used in the repair of the
bridge, and in rare paving operations in the
town ; but no inhabitant was allowed to help
himself there. At right angles to the west end
of Wood Street was Rother Market, where a
stone cross stood, and the borough's weekly
cattle market was held, and thence lanes led to
Evesham.
The chief or market cross of the town was at
the head, i.e. the west end of Bridge Street, at
the corner of High Street, which ran parallel to
Rother Market. It was a stone monument
covered by a low tiled shed, round which forms
were placed for the accommodation of listeners
to the sermons, which, as at St. Paul's Cross,
London, were occasionally delivered there. At
a later date a room was placed above it, and a
clock above that. The open space about it
formed the chief market-place of the town, and
l t i f.l U
1 - 1 111 II
a rf d 4 ti ^ B
g
B g
1 1
I*
R S a
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' s a a s a'
The Streets 125
its site is now occupied by a house known as
the Market-house. At the pump which stood
near it housewives were frequently to be seen
"washing of clothes," and hanging them up on
the cross to dry, or the butchers might be de
tected hanging meat there ; but these practices
were disapproved of by the corporation, and
finally forbidden in 1608. The stocks, pillory,
and whipping-post were set up hard by the cross.
From the high or market cross, the street
that ran in a south-westerly direction introduced
the visitor to the most substantial buildings of
the town, and from the householders there the
bailiff was usually chosen. In other parts of
Stratford most of the houses were detached ;
here there were a few vacant spaces, but the
houses mostly adjoined each other. The first
portion was the High Street, and mainly con
sisted of shops. The second portion was
Chapel Street, and among the large private
houses there stood New Place, which in 1597
became William Shakespeare's property. The
lower end of the street was known as Church
Street, and at the corner, facing New Place,
was the chapel of the guild, succeeded by the
school, guildhall, gaol, and almshouses. Above
126 Stratford-on-A von
the chapel-porch was a third cross, and near at
hand a second pump, which was removed by
the council's order in 1595, and its site filled
with gravel and rubbish. Turning to the
left at the end of the street, Old Town was
reached, where gardens and unoccupied land
surrounded several large houses. John Hall,
one of the poet's sons - in - law, had a resi
dence there early in the seventeenth century.
This road ultimately led to the churchyard and
to the parish church, by the banks of the river,
" a fair large piece of work," as Leland describes
it, "... at the south end of the town."
Over against the church was a stately residence
of the Combes, formerly the College of Strat
ford, and but a little way down the road that
ran between its grounds and the cemetery were
the river-mill and the mill-bridge, which was
not pulled down till late in the present century.
By the river, near the church, doubtless stood
the cucking-stool for the scolding wives, and a
field belonging to the town in the neighbour
hood was known as the bank-croft, or bancroft,
where drovers and farmers of the town were
allowed to take their cattle to pasture for an
hour a day. " All horses, geldings, mares,
The Streets 127
swine, geese, ducks, and other cattle " found
there contrary to this regulation were impounded
by the beadle in the pinfold, which was situated
near at hand.
The back lanes of which Leland wrote
stretched from Rother Market to the river,
and intersected High Street and its con
tinuations. The chief of them was Ely Street,
or Swine Street, joining High Street at
its junction with Chapel Street, and running
to the Avon as Sheep, or Ship, Street.
Parallel with these roads were Scholar's Lane,
or Tinker's Lane, crossing Chapel Street by
New Place, and thence to the river bearing the
name of Chapel Lane, or Dead Lane, or Walker
Street. In both Tinker's and Chapel Lanes
were gravel-pits, digging in which was strictly
fordidden within eight feet of the road. Many
cottages in the smaller thoroughfares did service
as alehouses.
XIII
THE CONSTRUCTION AND FURNITURE OF THE
HOUSES THE GARDENS
THE visitor to modern Stratford will learn from
this account of the streets of the town in the
sixteenth century how kindly time has dealt
with their names. Nor of the outward appear
ances of the houses in Shakespeare's day will
his own observation fail to give him a good
conception. The majority of them, two stories
high, were constructed of timber beams, set
crosswise far apart, with the panels or inter
stices of lath and plaster. The roofs were usually
of thatch, with dormer windows nestling there
when the front wall did not rise into steep
gables. Porches shaded the door ; often a
narrow, slanting, tiled or wooden roof ran
along the house front over the window on the
ground floor, and beneath this kind of shed,
K
The Gardens 1 3 1
called a pentice or penthouse, the smaller
traders set a stall for their goods. The better
houses in High Street and Chapel Street, like
New Place, were of timber and brick, instead
of plaster, and Shakespeare appears to have
rebuilt the greater part of his residence with
stone, of which the College was wholly con
structed. Tiled roofs were characteristic of
such buildings, but at times an owner of con
servative tendencies would insist on the superi
ority of thatch, like Walter Roche, who moved
into a house in Chapel Street in 1582, and
replaced the tiles with thatch. Occasionally
the woodwork in the front of the houses, as in
the surviving example in High Street, built
in 1596, was carefully carved with fleurs de
Us and interlacing designs, and the oriel
windows and overhanging beams were sup
ported by carved brackets. Chapel Lane, one
of- the streets well within the town, and others
in its outlying districts, like the rural parts
of Henley and Greenhill Streets, were
chiefly occupied by barns, where the grain
from the neighbouring country, largely culti
vated by the townsmen, was stored. These
were constructed like the smaller dwelling-
1 3 2 Stratford-on-A von
houses of timber, lath, and plaster, and
were invariably thatched.
The gardens of the houses were separated
from each other by mud walls, which were con
structed of clay, road-sand, or mud, and usually
thatched at the top. In constant need of repair,
they afforded little protection against robbers,
who often forced their way through them. The
land about the houses was very generally
planted with fruit-trees, and the orchard about
the guild buildings was noted for its plums and
apples. The garden of New Place was long
famed for its mulberries. Pleasure gardens
were an exclusive characteristic of the great
manor-houses in the surrounding country, but
it is certain that flowers and a few cooking and
medicinal plants were cultivated in the small
plots in the town, and it is quite possible that
more ambitious attempts at horticulture were
made in the exceptionally large gardens of
New Place and the College. Elm-trees were a
very common feature of the Stratford gardens.
In 1582 it was reported to the council that of
four backyards in Dead or Chapel Lane the
street where the barns predominated there
were eleven elms and one ash-tree growing in
The Gardens 133
one of them, twenty-six elms in another, one in
the third, and four in the fourth. Several
gardens in Henley Street could boast of at
least four elms, and elm -trees marking the
borough's boundaries on the Birmingham and
Evesham roads were surveyed with much
ceremony in Rogation Week year after year
by the town officers. Thus the town was well
shaded in summer, and he who would learn the
rudiments of forestry had little need to go far
afield. Shakespeare frequently indicates a sig
nificant familiarity with the pruning of trees
and the simpler operations of horticulture.
His gardener in Richard II has no dilettante
acquaintance with the method of cutting off
"the heads of too fast-growing sprays," or of
rooting away
The noisome weeds, that without profit suck
The soil's fertility from wholesome flowers.
At the proper season he wounds
The bark, the skin of our fruit-trees ;
Lest, being over-proud with sap and blood,
With too much riches it confound itself.
Others of Shakespeare's characters give very
adequate explanation of the gardener's hatred
of weeds, of " hateful dock, rough thistles,
1 3 4 Str at ford-on- A von
kexies, burs," of " tooth'd briars, sharp furzes,
pricking gorse and thorns"; they well knew the
evil work wrought by " envious worms and
caterpillars," and were not ignorant of the uses
of manure for those roots
That shall first spring and be most delicate.
lago's specious philosophy finds its most vigor
ous expression in his comparison of "our
bodies " to "our gardens, to the which our wills
are gardeners," where we may "plant nettles or
sow lettuce ; set hyssop and weed up thyme ;
supply it with one gender of herbs or distract it
with many." This practical knowledge was
doubtless acquired while the poet was working
with his father in the garden or orchard about
his home in Henley Street, and was developed
later in the "great garden" about his own
residence in Chapel Street.
The interior of the Elizabethan houses of
Stratford had little of what we understand by
comfort. In the smaller houses for a long
period chimneys were rare. A mere hole in
the wall allowed the smoke to escape. In
many cases the internal space was not par
titioned off. The ground floor formed a single
The Gardens 137
"hall," and "each one made his fire against
a reredos in the hall, where he dined and
dressed his meat." In the case of the larger
houses, the hall was likewise the chief apart
ment, and a single loft above, sometimes divided,
formed the only sleeping -room, but here there
was usually a parlour and another chamber cut
off from the hall and cellars and outhouses
devoted to the buttery. A change for the
better came over Stratford in the matter of
chimneys towards the close of the century.
They were added to many of the little tene
ments of Middle Row, and John Shakespeare's
house in Henley Street could certainly boast of
one of them. A chimney was constructed for the
kitchen at the guild chambers, and in 1582 an
order was passed by the town council that
"Walter Hill, dwelling in Rother Market, and
all the other inhabitants of the borough, shall,
before St. James's Day, 3Oth April, make suffi
cient chimneys," under pain of a fine of ten
shillings. To the absence of chimneys the .
continual recurrence of severe fires at Stratford
in the sixteenth century was mainly due.
Of the furniture of such a house as that in
which the poet was born in Henley Street,
1 3 8 Sir at ford-on- A von
we obtain an adequate account from an in
ventory made in 1592, on the death of Henry
Field, tanner, a near neighbour of John Shake
speare. John Shakespeare was his chief ex
ecutor. In the hall there was "one table upon
a joined frame, five small joint stools, a small
chair, a wainscot bench, and painted cloths,"
i.e. hangings of cloth or canvas painted in oil.
There was evidently a stove there, doubtless
the only one in the house, for andirons, fire
shovel, tongs, pothooks, and pothangers are
among the furnishings. In the parlour, the
sitting-room by day and bedroom apparently
by night, was a small table upon a frame, two
joint stools, two chairs, a press, a joined bed,
and a small plank. " Item, three painted cloths,
one feather bed, one flock bed, two bolsters,
one pillow, one bed covering of yellow and
green, four old blankets, and one old carpet."
A long chest in the room contained coarse
sheets, coarse table cloths, coarse wipers (i.e.
dusters), and table napkins. In a shorter
coffer were three pairs of flaxen sheets, one
pair of hempen sheets, one flaxen table cloth,
another of hemp, half a dozen table napkins
of flax and one of hemp, two diaper napkins,
The Gardens 141
and four pillow-cases of flax. In the buttery
were dishes, pewter platters, saucers, porridge
dishes, salt cellars, candlesticks, a quart pot, a
pint pot, and two flower pots. Of brass there
were three pots, a little pan, six skimmers, a
basin, one chaffing dish, a frying pan, and a
dripping pan. There were also in the buttery
four spits, great and small, and a pair of cup
boards. In the chamber next the parlour were
a truckle bed which could be rolled up by day,
an old coverlet, an old bolster, an old blanket,
a little round table, and two old chests. In a
little room adjoining were more beds, coffers,
and a press of boards with shelves. In the
kitchen house were six barrels of beer, five
looms, four pails, four forms, three stools, one
bolting hutch, two " skips" for taking up yeast,
one vat, a table board, two pairs of trestles, and
two strikes (i.e. bushel measures), besides an
axe, shovels, and spade. In an upper chamber
were more beds and bedding, a cheese-crate,
malt, malt shovels, a beam with scales, two
dozen trenchers, and one dozen pewter spoons.
In the yard were bundles of laths, loads of
wood, buckets, cord and windlass for the well,
and a watchman's bill.
1 4 2 Stratford-on-A von
Another house, the property of a wooldriver,
of which John Shakespeare also made an in
ventory, contained a similar array of tables,
chairs, beds, bedding, painted cloths, and brass
and pewter implements. There were also three
green cushions for a window seat, a curtain
for the window, and pots of earth and glass.
The presence of brewing utensils and looms
in both instances show that it was customary
to brew ale and weave wool at home. But
what gaps suggest themselves in these in
ventories to the modern reader ! Henry
Field's wealth of table napkins, which were
used freely after the meal was done, emphasise
the total absence of knives and forks. Jugs,
basins, and towels are conspicuously rare.
It is noticeable, too, how the furnitures of
the sleeping-rooms and sitting-rooms encroached
upon one another, and how gradually the
modern distinction grew up. The cooking was
chiefly done in the hall, upon which the front
door opened ; and there the ' pothooks and
hangers were always kept. The tables, as a
rule, were made with flaps, to " turn up."
Capulet, when he wants room for the dancers
in his hall, shouts out to his servants to " turn
The Gardens 143
the tables up." The painted cloths, or arras,
were features prominent in all Elizabethan
houses, whether rich or poor. They were nailed
on the walls of the guildhall, and even in the
smaller cottages they were met with, bearing in
in all cases " wise sayings painted upon them,"
and frequently rough representations of Bible
stories, especially of Dives and Lazarus and of
" the pamper'd Prodigal." Shakespeare writes
of these hangings in " Lucrece "
Who fears a sentence, or an old man's saw,
Shall by a painted cloth be kept in awe.
Orlando taunts Jaques with having studied his
cynical questions from "right painted cloth."
Despite the scantiness of bedroom furniture,
there was some attempt at decoration. The
bed coverings, or counterpanes there was one
of yellow and green belonging to Henry Field
were often richly embroidered, like those in
Gremio's city house. The carpet owned by
Henry Field was doubtless to cover the table,
not to lie beneath it. Grumio, Petruchio's
servant, sees "the carpets laid" for supper on
the return home of his master and new mistress.
The floors were strewn with rushes, or occasion
ally with sweet -smelling herbs. A Dutch
144 Stratford-on-Avon
physician, visiting London in 1560, notes how
"the chambers and parlours strewn over with
sweet herbs refreshed me." Grumio bids the
rushes be strewn in Petruchio's house ; and
Romeo bids wantons, light of heart,
Tickle the senseless rushes with their heels.
Shakespeare, like his own Gremio, clearly took
careful notice of the
Pewter and brass, and all things that belong
To house, or housekeeping.
XIV
THE SANITARY CONDITION OF THE TOWN
SANITARY arrangements within the house were
obviously not much heeded. The clay floors,
whether or no strewn with rushes, attracted all
mariner of refuse, and were rarely swept. The
well in the garden and the town pump might have
formed an adequate water supply ; but the uses
of water were not generally known. The mud
walls between the gardens were not conducive
to cleanliness. Very few of the ordinary laws
of health were, in fact, observed by the house
holders ; and the corporation made very feeble
attempts to enforce such of them as, when
neglected, created very obvious nuisances.
Frequent penalties were imposed on those who
failed to scour and clean the gutters and ditches
before their residences. But the difficulty of
disposing of household refuse was very com-
1 4 8 Stratford-on-A von
monly met by "laying it in the streets .and
lanes,' 7 or in these ditches and gutters. John
Shakespeare appears to have been an habitual
offender in this respect. His name first appears
in any record of the municipality as owing a
fine of twelvepence for having made a dirt heap
with his neighbours Adrian Quiney and Henry
Reynolds in Henley Street. Six years later
he "stood amerced " in fourpence for failing to
keep his gutter clean. In 1563, and subse
quent years, the exposure of domestic rubbish
in the street rendered the offender liable to a
forfeit of three shillings and fourpence, and
"the tenant that renteth the ground" upon
which the " muckhill " stood, to one of ten shill
ings. Six places in the town were appointed
for the amassing of the filth in legalised " muck-
hills." One stood in Ship Street, another in
Scholar's Lane, a third in Henley Street, but
the chief was in Chapel Lane. They were, in
almost all cases, at the rural end of the smaller
streets ; but as they were to be removed only
"twice a year that is to say, before the feast
of Pentecost, and near about Michaelmas," they
were sufficiently near to human habitations
to make them a constant source of danger
The Sanitary Condition of the Toivn 1 5 i
to health and life. Butchers, it is true, were
forbidden to use them, and were ordered, under
a penalty of twenty shillings, to take their
garbage out of the town at nine o'clock each
evening.
Chapel Lane, which ran by the side of New
Place, was the filthiest part of the town. The
small cottagers there habitually neglected the
council's orders, and dispersed refuse in the
open road, until it often became impassable.
John Sadler, a miller, insisted on winnowing
his peas there, and leaving the chaff about.
But this was a very innocent offence. Most
of his neighbours kept pigs, who, in spite of
repeatedly published prohibitions, were allowed
to wander at their own sweet wills. If a pigs-
cote or pigsty was built, it was on the lane's
pathway, and fines could not break the house
holders of the practice. John Rogers, the
vicar of Stratford, living by the guild chapel,
in 1613 was remonstrated with by the council
for an offence of this kind, and his irrelevant
defence was to the effect that " about my house
there is no place of convenience without much
annoyance to the chapel," which was next door,
and "how far," he proceeded, "the breeding
152 Slratford-on-Avon
of such creatures is needful to poor house
keepers, I refer myself to those that can equal
my charge," i.e. have as many expenses as I.
The town council issued an order in 1611
" that no swine be permitted to be in the open
street of this town unless they have a keeper
with them, and then only while they are in driv
ing within this borough, upon pain for every
strayer of fourpence." But this produced little
effect. Every time Shakespeare left his house
in New Place (for the doorway was in Chapel
Lane), he crossed the most noisome thorough
fare in the town ; and Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps's
suggestion that his death in 1616, like that of
many of his townsmen, was due to the tainted
atmosphere of his environment, seems only too
probable. And Stratford saw no rapid im
provement in the matter. Garrick described
the town in 1769 as ''the most dirty, unseemly,
ill-pav'd, wretched-looking town in all Britain."
Paternal as was the tone of the town council's
edicts, it never supplemented the householder's
neglect of cleanliness by any really adequate
provisions. It delegated the duty of keeping
the streets clean to the townsfolk, and as they
failed to perform this function the streets re-
The Sanitary Condition of the Town i 5 3
mained dirty. It alone undertook the cleans
ing of the bridge, the market-place, and the
space before the chapel door and guildhall ;
but in these days of the glorification of
hygiene there is a ludicrous ring about all
the details of the arrangements made for this
object. For the sweeping of the market-place,
in Shakespeare's day, a widow named Baker
was employed at a yearly salary of six shillings
and eightpence, and she was provided, at the
municipal expense, with a shovel, a broomstick,
and twigs of trees. The duty of sweeping the
bridge was entrusted to a man named Raven,
who at times secured the additional services of
the widow Baker. The chapel was rarely de
filed by water ; but on the occasion of the
repair of its roof in 1604, Anthony Rees and
his wife with goodwife Wilson were directed to
sweep away the cobwebs and to wash the seats.
Fresh rushes were occasionally laid in the
council chamber and guildhall ; and the floor
of the latter was renewed at intervals with
clay.
There was little pavement about the town.
The market-place, in fact, alone was paved.
But the bridge and the causeway were kept
154 Stratford-on-Avon
in fair order by the liberal sprinkling of gravel
from the guild pits. In other parts of the town
" logs and blocks " lay about the roadways,
"to the nuisance of the king's liege people."
Arrangements were made for a short time in
winter for the lighting of the town. In 1557 it
was ordained that every alderman and "capital "
burgess, "between i5th December and twenty
days after Christmas, from five to eight o'clock
in the evening, have a lanthorn hanging in the
street before his door, and there a candle burn
ing to give light," under pain to forfeit twelve-
pence in default. In 1617 the dates ran from
ist November to 2d February.
XV
PLAGUES, FIRES, FLOODS, AND FAMINES
THE whole town had to pay heavy penalties
of disease for its indifference to sanitary pre
cautions. The plague, a scourge of Christen
dom, whose horrors are barely paralleled by
the fatal progresses now made from time to
time in Europe by the Asiatic cholera, paid
Stratford repeated visits. Few decades passed
without its appearance among the townspeople.
The infection rapidly passed from house to
house, with its burning fevers and icy shiver-
ings, its cureless pains and fatal languors. No
remedy was known to produce much effect on
the course of the disease. Bleedings and
draughts of the plague - water were of no
avail. Sorrel- water and verjuice, with oranges
and lemons, allayed for a time the patient's
thirst, and he was advised to take often, and
156 Stratford-on-Avon
in small quantities, light food like rabbit or
chicken.
Cleanliness was enjoined, with rare success, to
prevent the spread of the contagion. Windows
were to be kept open, and hung with green
boughs of oak and willow; the floors to be
strewn with sorrel, lettuce, roses, and oak-
leaves, or with vinegar and rose-water ; sandal-
wood and musk, aloes, amber, and cinnamon
were to burn about the houses six hours a day.
The lighting of fires of rosemary and bay was
the sole precaution habitually taken in small
cottages at these troublous times (see Froude's
History, vol. vii. pp. 74, 75).
The claims of death rarely remained
unsatisfied : high and low fell before the
pestilence ; and graves in the churchyards
stood always open to receive new dwellers,
as soon as they had yielded their last breath.
The most fearful epidemic that Stratford knew
came in the summer of 1564, when William
Shakespeare was two or three months old.
One-seventh of the inhabitants of Stratford was
swept away and consigned to the cemetery on
the banks of the Avon. John Shakespeare's
house was happily spared, and he did his duty
Plagues, Fires, Floods, and Famines 159
to his poor neighbours. The town council
feared to meet in their chamber, but frequently
assembled in the garden adjoining to discuss
measures for the relief of the poor. Many
twelvepences John Shakespeare and his fellow-
councillors bestowed on " those that be visited "
between August and October of the fatal year.
Of the terrors of the day one tradition pre
serves a vivid picture. Clopton manor-house
was attacked. Charlotte Clopton, a young girl
of the family, whose portrait shows fair blue
eyes and pale golden hair falling in wavy ring
lets on her neck, sickened of the disease, and,
to all appearance, died. The body was hurried
into the family tomb beneath Stratford church.
Before a week had passed another of the house
followed her, and was borne to the same vault.
And there the bearers saw by their torches,
on the steps leading from the church to the
sepulchral chamber, Charlotte Clopton, in her
grave-clothes, leaning against the wall. She
was dead then, but it was clear that the plague had
spared her : after she had been laid in the gloomy
vault there had been a terrible struggle for life.
Juliet's fears had a very real justification. Char
lotte Clopton had been stifled in the vault,
1 6 o Stratford-on-A von
To whose foul mouth no healthsome air breathes in,
And there died strangled ere [assistance] came.
Perhaps she had awoke
Early what with loathsome smells,
And shrieks like mandrakes torn out of the earth,
That living mortals, hearing them, run mad :
and had, as Juliet foretold, become distraught,
Environed with all these hideous fears.
Fire was another danger to life and property
with which the municipal council failed to deal
adequately. Towards the close of the century,
in 1598, two severe fires visited the town, and
so many houses were reported to be " decayed
with fire," that a special exemption from the
national subsidies was granted the inhabitants.
Barns seemed to have suffered repeatedly.
The council, by its order of 1582, bidding all
householders to erect chimneys for their houses,
attempted to stem the fiery tide. They
purchased five hooks as early as 1576 for pull
ing down threatened buildings, and one seems
to have always been hung at the entrance to
the guildhall. A wise precaution was contained
in an edict enjoining on every burgess the
necessity of having one leathern bucket, to be
Plagues, Fires, Floods, and Famines 161
used in case of fire, and on every alderman that
of having two. But, none the less, the town
continued to suffer, and parts of Henley Street
seem often to have been aflame.
A third danger to Stratford was less pre-
ventible. The Avon, as it still continues to do,
often flooded its banks, and it did no little
injury from time to time to the bridge. Stone
to fill a hole in the bridge was a frequent item
of expenditure in the town's accounts. In
1598 William Shakespeare, probably engaged
in restoring New Place, sold for that purpose
one load of stone to the corporation for ten-
pence. A very disastrous flood visited Strat
ford in 1588, and in the parish register of the
neighbouring village of Wei ford a picturesque
account may be found of its coming.
On the 1 8th day of July 1588 (runs the register), in the
morning, there happened about eight of the clock, in Avon,
such a sudden flood, as carried away all the hay about
Avon. Old Father Porter, buried about four years past,
being then a hundred and nine years of age, never knew it
so high by a yard and a half. Dwelling in the mill-house,
he, in former times, knew it under his bed, but this flood
was a yard and a half in the house, and came in so suddenly
that John Perry's wife was so amazed that she sate still till
she was almost drowned, and was wellnigh beside herself,
and so far amiss that she did not know her own child when
M
1 6 2 Stratford-on-A von
it was brought in to her. It brake down Grange Mill ; the
crack thereof was heard at Holditch. It brake up sundry
houses in Warwick town, and carried away their bread, beef,
cheese, butter, pots, pans, and provisions, and took away ten
carts out of one town, and three wains, with the furniture of
Mr. Thomas Lucy, and broke both ends of Stratford Bridge.
That [flood] drowned three furlongs of corn in Thetford
field. It was so high at the height that it unthatched the
mill, and stocked up a number of willows and sallows,
and did take away one [of] Sales's daughters of Grafton, out
of Hillborough meadow, removing of the hay-cock, that she
had no shift but to get upon the top of a hay-cock, and was
carried thereupon by the water a quarter of a mile wellnigh, till
she came to the very last bank of the stream, and there was
taken into a boat, and all was like to be drowned, but that
another boat coming rescued them soon. Three men going
over Stratford Bridge, when they came to the middle of the
bridge they could not go forward, and then returning
presently, could not get back, for the water was so risen ; it
rose a yard every hour from eight to four, that it came into
the parsonage of Welford Orchard, and filled the fish-pool,
and took away the sign -post at the Bear; it carried away
Edward Butler's cart, which was soon beneath Bidford,
and it came into the vicarage of Weston, and made Adam
Sandars thence remove, and took away half a hundred
pounds of hay.
So quaint a list of disasters well illustrates
Shakespeare's own account, in Midsummer
Nights Dream, of how the winds-
Falling in the land,
Have every pelting river made so proud,
Plagues, Fires, Floods, and Famines 165
That they have overborne their continents :
The ox hath therefore stretched his yoke in vain,
The ploughman lost his sweat ; and the green corn
Hath rotted, ere his youth attained a beard. . . .
It was doubtless at Stratford, too, that Shake
speare learnt how in such seasons " the moon,
the governess of floods, . . . washes all the
air,
That rheumatic diseases do abound.
Besides the dangers of plagues, fires, and
floods, Stratford ran sometimes the risk of
starvation. Grain at times was so scarce
that the corporation had to distribute corn
on its own account, and made an inventory
of all to be found in the town. One of the
most serious dearths occurred in 1598, and
" the note of corn and malt taken " at the
time is extant. John Shakespeare appears
to have owned none, but his son, at New
Place, had as much as ten quarters, a quantity
which few of his neighbours exceeded. The
laws enforced against grain-dealers, prohibiting
them from buying up corn to sell at famine
prices in times of dearth, broke undoubtedly
the violence of these visitations, but they did
not come without forcing many to suffer.
1 66 Stratford-on-Avon
These details will help us to form a good
working conception of the conditions of business
life led by Shakespeare's father, and by the
majority of the poet's contemporaries and
fellow - townsmen. We can picture John
Shakespeare of a morning wrapping his gown
about him, and cursing the pigs that impede his
progress, as he hurries past the market- cross
down High Street, when the clock strikes
nine, on his way to a meeting of the town
council in the guildhall or council chamber,
We can watch him on a market day purchas
ing pewter ware in Wood Street or salt in
Rother Market, and at the fair driving a brisk
trade on his own account in wool, corn, and
gloves. Now and then, by means of tallies,
he reckons up his gains and losses, and laments
the slackness of trade and the perversity of
debtors and creditors. He takes an intelligent
interest in his garden and orchard, and sees
the apples stored in autumn. He visits his
namesake in Bridge Street when he is in need
of boots, and is on intimate terms with Richard
Sponer, the painter, of Chapel Lane, who has
been persecuted by the town bully, William
Bott. Every night in winter he carefully
Plagues, Fires, Floods, and Famines 167
hangs a lamp out before his house, and before
nine o'clock he and his household are at rest.
Sometimes he is summoned later by cries of
fire, and has to work his two buckets in behalf
of a neighbour's barn or house. He cannot
write nor read, but he has a distant respect
for book-learning. Nothing indeed that he
does or has done, amid his serious and prosaic
avocations, seems likely to invest his children
with anything akin to the genius of poetry.
Nevertheless, while he is still striving with
declining success to make a living out of the
wool and gloves that he keeps stored in his
house in Henley Street, it is his eldest son
who becomes the brightest of all lights in
the firmament of English poetry.
XVI
DOMESTIC AND SCHOOL DISCIPLINE
A STRICT discipline, similar in principle to
that enforced by the town council upon the
burgesses, was maintained by the sober citizens
within their own dwellings over their servants
and children. From his earliest infancy we
can roughly trace the stern habits of life in
which attempts were made to train William
Shakespeare. The "Books of Nurture" fre
quently published in the sixteenth century
illustrate the manners which the middle-class
father strove to impress upon his sons. The
boy was to rise at six o'clock in the morning,
carefully to attend to the more necessary
portions of his toilet, and to brush his clothes.
At meals he had to lay the table and wait
on his parents, in whose presence he was not
to talk or laugh but in moderation. After his
Domestic and School Discipline 1 7 1
parents rose from the table, he might say his
grace and take his own meal. His modes of
eating and drinking were carefully regulated.
In the streets he had to take off his cap to
his elders. He was to go to bed early, and
say prayers morning and evening. The father
was not to be sparing in the use of the rod.
John Shakespeare and his wife Mary Arden,
who was related to a good county family,
and, perhaps, was herself well educated, were
evidently determined to give their eldest son
as good an education as Stratford afforded.
Doubtless the clerk of the town, like the clerk
of Chatham in 2 Henry VI, who is detected
by Cade's followers " setting of boys' copies,"
was capable of teaching the boys the horn
book such writing and reading as enabled
them to gain admission to the grammar
school. It was probably about 1571 that
William proceeded for the first time to the
schoolhouse.
The dissolution of the Stratford guild did
not involve, as we have seen, the dissolution
of the old school of the guild. On the margin
of the report made by the King's Com
missioners in 1548 a royal officer wrote,
1 7 2 Stratford-on-A von
" Continuetur schola quousque," and the school
entered soon afterwards on a new lease of life.
In June 1553 it was created by royal charter,
"The King's New School of Stratford-upon-
Avon " " a certain free grammar school, to
consist of one master and teacher, hereafter
for ever to endure." The schoolmaster was
to be appointed by the Earl of Warwick, to
whom the manor and borough had been
granted when the Bishop of Worcester's claim
was ignored, and he was to receive twenty
pounds a year, which was to be defrayed out of
"a gift of certain lands to the value yearly of
xlvi/z. iijs. \}d. ob. [^46 : 3 : 2^]," made by
the king to the burgesses. This " school
at Stratord," we learn from Strype, " was the
last this prince founded." The endowment
is not yet exhausted, although the corporation,
after the duke's execution, took to itself the
government of the school ; and the boys of
Stratford still enjoy the advantages of Edward
VI's foundation. The schoolhouse stood as
it stands to-day with slight alteration, under
the shadow of the guild chapel, forming part
of the buildings of the old guild in Church
Street. The schoolrooms were reached from
Domestic and School Discipline 1 7 3
an inner yard by an external staircase " roofed
with tile," which was demolished about fifty
years ago. Above them was a " soller "
a still higher story or garret which was
taken down in 1568. The fabric of the house,
which had seen service in the days of the
ancient guild, was old and in need of repair
in Shakespeare's boyhood; and in 1568 it
underwent several amendments. A few years
later the rooms became uninhabitable and
underwent further renovation. While they
were under repair the master had to take his
pupils into the chapel itself. This was pro
bably not an uncommon practice. Shake
speare likened Malvolio to "a pedant that
keeps school i' the church." But in 1595 the
holding of school in church or chapel was
forbidden for the future.
To this school the children of the Stratford
freemen were sent, with rare exceptions. It
was one of those " common schools" that
received, according to a contemporary account,
"all sorts of children to be taught, be their
parents never so poor and the boys never so
unapt." And from Henley Street, some three
hundred yards away, came each morning, from
i/4 Stratford-on-Avon
1571 onwards, William, the seven-year-old son
of John Shakespeare. His description penned
thirty years later of
The whining schoolboy, with his satchel,
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school,
is doubtless a reminiscence of this daily walk.
The education supplied at a free day-school in
Elizabethan England depended largely on the
attainments of the schoolmaster, and these varied
very much in quality with times and places.
According to many contemporary writers, bad
schoolmasters prevailed. " It is a general plague
and complaint of the whole land," writes Pea-
cham in the seventeenth century, " for, for one
discreet and able teacher, you shall find twenty
ignorant and careless ; who (among so many
fertile and delicate wits as England affordeth),
whereas they make one scholar, they mar
ten ;" and Roger Ascham had written some years
before in the same strain. In many towns the
office of schoolmaster was conferred on "an
ancient citizen of no great learning." Some
times a quack conjuring doctor, like Pinch, of
the Comedy of Errors, held the post. An
eccentric master of St. Alban's School in
Domestic and School Discipline 175
the middle of the sixteenth century paid so
much deference to the parents of his pupils,
that " by no entreaty would [he] teach any
scholar he had further than his father had
learned before them." He argued that they
would then prove saucy rogues and control their
fathers. From the comparatively small number
of burgesses at Stratford who could sign their
names in the middle of the sixteenth century, we
may infer that William Dalam, the last master
appointed by the ancient guild, was no very
zealous or capable performer of the duties of the
office. But the far smaller average of marks
men in subsequent years proves that Dalam's
successors were fairly discreet and able peda
gogues. The burgesses seem to have carefully
selected them, and to have taken them on trial
for two years at a time, and Walter Roche,
appointed in 1570, Thomas Hunt in 1577,
and Thomas Jenkins in 1580, apparently
satisfied all the burgesses' requirements.
The scholiasts have waxed warm in contro
versy over the educational equipment bestowed
on the poet at Stratford ; and while one has
denied him the veriest elementary knowledge of
the classics, another has credited him with the
1 76 Stratford-on-Avon
acquirements of a Bentley or a Porson. There
is every reason to believe that Masters Roche
and Hunt gave young Shakespeare and his
schoolfellows a firm grasp of Latin at least, and
led them from the accidence and Lilly's grammar
through conversation books and colloquies, like
the Sententice Pueriles, up to Horace, Seneca,
and Plautus, and " the rest of the finest Latin
poets," of whom conscientious masters were
advised by contemporary writers on education
to give their pupils a taste. It is just possible
that at the most efficient country schools the
more advanced scholars, before the patronage of
some neighbouring magnate or the bestowal of
a college scholarship enabled them to proceed
to the universities, learnt something of the
Greek grammar, with the Greek Testament, and
Isocrates or Demosthenes. But Shakespeare
was doubtless withdrawn from school, in con
sequence of his father's pecuniary misfortunes,
before he enjoyed these advantages.
In the pedantic Holofernes of Love 's Labour 's
Lost, Shakespeare has carefully portrayed the
best type of the rural schoolmaster, as in Pinch he
has portrayed the worst, and the freshness and
fulness of detail imparted to the former portrait
Domestic and School Discipline 1 77
may easily lead to the conclusion that its author
was drawing upon his own experience. Holo-
fernes does not long appear on the stage before
he pompously quotes from Lilly's grammar :
" Vir sapit qui pauca loquitur." Other of Holo-
fernes's phrases illustrate the practice in vogue
of inviting boys to supply English synonyms
to Latin words proposed by the master. His
words, " sanguiS) blood, . . . cozlum, the sky,
the welkin, the heaven, . . . terra, the soil, the
land, the earth," are veritable extracts from
phrase-books like the Sententue Piieriles, which
lads had to learn by heart. The formal dialogue
in which Holofernes and his friend the curate,
Sir Nathaniel, engage
HoL Novi hominem tanquam te : anne intelligis ?
Nath. Laus Deo, bene intelligo.
Nath. Videsne quis venit ?
HoL Video et gaudeo.
is framed on models, to be met with in many
popular Elizabethan school-books of familiar
dialogues. And Shakespeare elsewhere proves
his intimacy with the dialogue in such volumes
specially marked for use in a school, when he
makes Holofernes allude to their common
phrases
N
1 7 8 Sir at ford-on- Avon
He speaks false Latin. Diminuit Prisciani caput.
It is barbarous Latin. Olet barbariem
in the criticism of Sir Nathaniel's Latin as
" Priscian a little scratched," and in the remark,
" I smell false Latin," on the country clown's
burlesque misreading of "ad dunghill " for "ad
unguem." The pedagogue's citation of a line
and a half from "the good old Mantuan " (the
mediaeval poet Mantuanus, whose eclogues, often
preferred to Virgil's in the sixteenth century,
formed the chief study of the fourth form in
many grammar schools), his attempts to recall
his Horace, his praises of Ovid as the writer
whose works were to be studied by Latin verse-
makers, may all fairly be interpreted as
memories of the instruction given at Stratford.
It was usual for a boy to remain at the gram
mar school for seven years at least, from the age
of seven to that of fourteen, and unless the
master was singularly incapable, and the boys
singularly rebellious, it was seldom that a young
Elizabethan failed to acquire some useful know
ledge in his schooldays. He rarely left school
without being able to " write and read English
and congrue Latin." But schoolboy morality
was not very high, and by the practice of little
Domestic and School Discipline 1 8 1
frauds it was possible, we learn from con
temporary sources, for idle pupils to make
" shift to escape correction" without making
any progress at the schoolhouse. An ingenious
device of "prompting" one another was
practised by boys, born in the same year as
young Shakespeare, at Gloucester Grammar
School ; a few pupils would prepare the lesson
given them overnight, and "being at the
elbows" of their idle companions, would put
into their mouths answers to their master's
question as he walked up and down by them.
One of the boys named Willis has amusingly
recounted his own experience of this system.
After pursuing it for a long while with complete
success, "it fell out on a day that one of the
eldest scholars and one of the highest form fell
out with me upon occasion of some boys' play
abroad," and all help from the prompters was
denied him. His companions looked forward
to seeing him "fall under the rod," but he
gathered all his wits together, began to
study for himself, and " so the evil intended
to me by my fellow-scholar, turned to my great
good." Small frauds of this kind were encour
aged by the severity of the discipline adopted in
1 8 2 Stratford-on-A von
all the rural schools. The birch was in continual
request, and was administered with alarming
brutality. Roger Ascham has described how
recklessly floggings were awarded at Eton, and
in the smaller schools the masters were under less
intelligent supervision. A repulsive picture of
the terrors which the schoolhouse had for a
nervous child is drawn in a "pretie and merry
new interlude," entitled "The Disobedient Child,
compiled by Thomas Ingelend, late student in
Cambridge," about 1560. A boy who implores
his father not to force him to go to school,
tells of his companions' sufferings there how
Their tender bodies both night and day
Are whipped and scourged, and beat like a stone,
That from top to toe the skin is away ;
and a story is repeated of how a scholar was
tormented to death by "his bloody master."
Other accounts show that the playwright has
not gone far beyond the fact. Peacham de
scribes a schoolmaster with whom he was
acquainted, " who in winter would ordinarily, on
a cold morning, whip his boys even for no other
purpose than to get himself a heat." Neverthe
less, we believe that Masters Roche and Hunt
were of a milder disposition. Holofernes,
Domestic and School Discipline 183
although of a dry humour, seems well disposed
towards his pupils, and is invited in the play to
dine with the father of one of them. Sir Hugh
Evans asks his pupil, William Page, " some
questions in his accidence," when he meets him
and his mother on a school holiday, with a
geniality that makes it probable that his creator
knew many of his profession who wielded the
rod with discrimination.
XVII
THE OCCUPATIONS OF STRATFORD LADS
A FEW lads on leaving school passed on to the
universities, or inns of court, to proceed in the
study of the common law, divinity, or physic.
Rich parents were usually anxious to give
their children an opportunity of pursuing an
academic career. At both Oxford and Cam
bridge charitable endowments maintained at
the same time a large number of poor scholars.
Sir Hugh Clopton had, as we have seen, left
money for such a purpose. Of the poor
university scholars, the majority entered the
Church, and a great number of them gained
high preferment there. Their wealthier com
panions usually sought their fortunes at the
bar, or after living riotously in London,
often swelled the band of military adventurers
by sea and land.
The Occupations ~of Stratford Lads 185
But the larger proportion of the boys of
a rural grammar school looked forward to
earning a livelihood by trade in their native
town. And it was not an infrequent objection
urged by practical men against the seven or
eight years spent by the lads at school, that the
time might have been better occupied in teach
ing them u a mystery or occupation." When a
boy's schooldays were over, it was usual for
his father to apprentice him to himself if an
eldest son, or to a neighbour if a younger one,
and seven years were consumed in the process
of learning a trade. The restrictions on trad
ing at the time rendered this step incumbent
on any parent who valued his son's future
prosperity. No man who had not undergone
a legally recognised apprenticeship was per
mitted by the municipal laws to open a shop
or practise any craft within the borough, or
to exercise any of the rights of a freeman.
" No person," ran an order issued by the bur
gesses of Stratford on i3th April 1603, " shall
set up, occupy, or exercise any trade, mystery,
or occupation before he be made free or con
firmed in his freedom of the same trade where -
unto he was apprentice." In all towns the
1 8 6 Sir at ford-on- A von
apprentices formed the least orderly portion of
the population, and the regulations enforced
against them at Stratford that they were to
be at home before nine o'clock at night, that
they were never to wear swords, and that
they were not to tipple at the alehouses
prove that the older burgesses had some
experience of their irregularities. Many of them
spent three days and three nights in the stocks
for breaches of the municipal bye-laws.
Whether or no Shakespeare on quitting
school became an ordinary apprentice ("he
was formerly in this town," wrote Aubrey,
"bound apprentice to a butcher," i.e. appren
tice to his father), there can be little doubt
that the apprentices whom he had known at
school were his intimate companions in early
manhood. The tradition recorded by Aubrey
distinctly states that " there was at that time
another butcher's son in this town, that was held
not at all inferior to him for a natural wit, his
acquaintance and coetanean, but died young."
In September 1585, when the Earl of
Leicester sent letters to his friends round
Kenilworth to enlist 500 men for the army
which he was leading to the Low Countries,
The Occupations of Stratford Lads 1 87
some adventurous ne'er-do-weels of Stratford
doubtless shouldered a pike beneath their
great neighbour's standard. Stratford names
like Combe and Arden certainly figure in
the muster-lists of Leicester's battalions.
Shakespeare's intimate knowledge of the
technicalities of warfare has led one writer to the
inference that Shakespeare himself marched
with his young townsmen under Leicester's
banner. A vain attempt has indeed been made
to identify him with " Will, my Lord of
Leicester's jesting player," who (we know on
the authority of Sir Philip Sidney) accompanied
Leicester to Holland.
Some of Shakespeare's schoolfellows found
more peaceful occupation in the great houses
of the country gentlemen in the neighbourhood
of Stratford. It was their custom to keep a
large retinue of serving-men " comely men, and
commonly sons of honest yeomen or farmers of
the country "who led a lazy life in the manor-
houses, wearing good garments or liveries, aid
ing in their master's sports, and attending him
at his meals. They were skilled, as a rule, in
wrestling, leaping, running, and dancing ; they
could shoot with the long-bow or cross-bow,
1 8 8 Stratford-on-Avon
handle guns well, and entertain their masters
with table-talk about hawks, hounds, fishing,
and agriculture. Their profession brought
them in some forty pounds a year, besides
a good livery with a badge upon it, and in
their master's absence they were wont to
entertain their own guests in his hall. The
menial servants the bakers, brewers, cham
berlains, wardrobers, falconers, hunters, horse-
keepers, lackeys, fools, cooks, scullions, hog-
herds, and the like were far below them in
social status. Shakespeare introduces serving-
men on the stage as the confidants of their
masters in the persons of Tranio and Balthasar ;
and Malvolio, Olivia's steward, was of their
class. The author of an interesting tract,
entitled "The English Courtier and Country
Gentleman" (1586), which deals largely with
"the superfluity of serving -men" kept in
country houses, designates them as so much
unprofitable furniture, and points out how
they were proud and ill-natured, and wasted
their master's substance.
Of the houses near Stratford into which young
townsmen were received, the nearest was doubt
less Clopton House. At Charlecote Sir Thomas
The Occupations of Stratford Lads 1 89
Lucy, at Milcote Sir Edward Greville, and at
Long Compton Lord Compton maintained large
establishments; while at no great distance
was the castle of Kenilworth, in the occupa
tion for the greater part of Elizabeth's reign
of the Earl of Leicester. At these great
buildings Shakespeare in all probability fre
quently visited schoolfellows who had secured
places in their owners' retinues.
But there were young Stratford men who
had higher aspirations than life in the town
itself or in the immediate neighbourhood could
satisfy. Life in London, then as now, was the
goal of much youthful ambition, and thither
occasionally youths from Stratford made their
way to seek fame or fortune, or both. John
Sadler was one of these in Shakespeare's time,
and an account of his early life is interesting.
On quitting Stratford he ''joined himself to the
carrier, and came to London, where he had
never been before, and sold his horse in
Smithfield ; and having no acquaintance in
London to recommend him or assist him, he
went from street to street, and house to house,
asking if they wanted an apprentice, and though
he met with many discouraging scorns and a
190 Stratford- on- A von
thousand denials, he went on till he lighted on
Mr. Brokesbank, a grocer in Bucklersbury, who,
though he long denied him for want of sureties
for his fidelity, and because the money he had
(but ten pounds) was so disproportionable to
what he used to receive with apprentices, yet,
upon his discreet account he gave of himself
and the motives which put him upon that
course, and promise to compensate with diligent
and faithful service whatever else was short of
his expectation, he ventured to receive him upon
trial, in which he so well approved himself that
he accepted him into his service, to which he
bound him for eight years."
Another native of Stratford who sought an
apprenticeship in London was Richard Field,
son of that Henry Field, tanner, of whose
property an inventory was made by his friend,
John Shakespeare, in 1592. Richard Field
was apprenticed to a printer in London in
1579, and in 1587 set up in business for
himself. It is of interest to note that in
1593 he printed his fellow-townsman's "Venus
and Adonis," and later his " Rape of Lucrece."
There is a current tradition that certain
actors who acquired Elizabethan fame were
The Occupations of Stratford Lads 1 9 1
natives of Stratford, and sought admission to
a company of players on its visit to the town
during a provincial tour. Thomas Greene and
the two Burbages, James and Richard, have
been claimed by the borough's historians as
Shakespeare's fellow - townsmen ; but in no
case has the evidence proved conclusive.
Nevertheless, it is certain that Stratford was
visited with sufficient frequency by the London
actors to induce some young men there, who
were weary of their long apprenticeships
to look in the direction of the drama for
relief from uncongenial occupations. Of these
young men William Shakespeare was prob
ably one. Of his mode of life between
1578 and 1585, it may be stated as fairly
certain that his father, during that period,
endeavoured to secure his services in rehabili
tating his decaying trade ; that William took
unkindly to the pursuit of woolstapling in all
its manifold branches ; that he believed himself
capable of making his way as actor and play
wright ; and that he set out for London to try
his fortune in these professions.
XVIII
THE PLAYERS AT STRATFORD
IF John Shakespeare ever regretted as many
a sober citizen of the day might have done
his son's choice of this primrose path, he had
only himself to blame. Like all his friends of
the town council, he was undoubtedly a lover
of plays. While he was bailiff in 1568-69, he
granted licenses to play in the town to the
Queen's players and the Earl of Worcester's
players, two of the chief companies. Nine
times between 1573 and 1581 did these or
other companies enter the town with drum
and trumpet, wearing their noble masters'
badge, and give their performances in the
guildhall. Very few of the town chamberlains
down to the close of the century failed to enter
in their annual accounts an item varying very
capriciously from nine pounds to twelvepence
The Players at Stratford 193
paid for dramatic entertainments at the fair
time in September. In 1597 payments were
made to four companies. Every manner of
show could, in fact, reckon on a good reception
in Stratford ; and in 1597 the bailiff sent three
shillings and fourpence to a man bringing to
the town his puppet show of the city of
Norwich, a famous show to which the
dramatists often made allusion.
Shakespeare as a child undoubtedly witnessed
such performances ; and the circumstantial ac
count given by a Gloucester contemporary
named Willis born in the same year as the
poet of his father's practice of taking him to
the play, may well apply to William Shake
speare. The plays Willis witnessed were
interludes brief moralities with the faintest
semblance of a plot about them. When the
players came to a town, he tells us, they first
waited on the mayor or bailiff to inform him
"what nobleman's servants they were, and so
get license for their public playing." If the
mayor liked the players, or wished to show
their master respect, he would invite them to
play for their first performance in the guild
hall before himself and the aldermen. " That
o
1 94 Stratford-on-Avon
is called the mayor's play, when every one
that will comes in without money, the mayor
giving the players as he thinks to show re
spect unto them." Afterwards they would
perform in the courtyard of an inn, as at the
Swan, Bear, or Crown, in Bridge Street,
Stratford, and charge for admission. Willis,
according to his own account, witnessed the
mayor's play, standing between his father's
legs, "while he sat upon one of the benches,
and where we saw and heard very well." The
interlude performed was the " Cradle of
Security," in which the chief characters were
the Wicked of the World, Pride, Covetousness,
Luxury, the End of the World, and the Last
Judgment. " The sight," Willis adds, "took
such impression on me that when I came to
man's estate, it was as fresh in my memory as if
I had seen it newly acted." It is quite possible,
moreover, that John Shakespeare occasionally
took his son over to Coventry to witness
the famous miracles or mysteries on Corpus
Christi Day the Thursday after Trinity
Sunday.
The Stratford townsfolk had from an
early period been wont to witness these
The Players at Stratford 195
performances. In The Hundred Merry
Tales, first issued in 1526, a popular jest-book
of the sixteenth century, whence Beatrice
taunts Benedick with having borrowed his
wit, there is the story of a Warwickshire
village priest, who concluded a sermon on
the twelve articles of the creed with the words,
"If you believe not me, then for a more surety
and sufficient authority, go your way to
Coventry, and there ye shall see them all
played in Corpus Christi play." There
Shakespeare, in all probability, learned how
a grotesquely-painted canvas face, through
whose open mouth a fire was visible, satis
factorily represented Hell in the popular view.
There he doubtless made the acquaintance of
the sooty-faced figures that stood for lost souls,
of Herod in his many-coloured dress and
flaming sword, and of the Devil and his tor
mentor the Vice. That the poet knew these
features of the mysteries and something of their
machinery, is clear from such references as
FalstafPs comparison of the flea on Bardolph's
nose to "a black soul burning in hell," or
Hamlet's advice to the players to avoid in
explicable dumb -shows and noise that out-
1 96 Sir at ford-on- Avon
herods Herod, or the Clown's description in
Twelfth Night of the " old Vice,"
Who, with dagger of lath,
In his rage and his wrath,
Cries, ah, ha ! to the devil.
It may be that among the Stratford people
themselves, as in other towns and villages,
pageants of rudimentary dramatic interest were
played by the " bachelry " at Christmas or
Whitsuntide. In Loves Labours Lost the
show of the " Nine Worthies," presented by the
schoolmaster and his companions, has all the
features of a rural Christmas comedy, and the
" Pyramus and Thisbe " of Midsummer Nights
Dream is constructed and presented by " hard-
handed men,"
Which never laboured in their minds till now,
And now have toiled their unbreathed memories
With this same play.
A similar entertainment is described by Julia
in the Two Gentlemen of Verona, another of
Shakespeare's earliest comedies, when she, dis
guised as a page, is enlisting Silvia's sympathy
in her own behalf. " At Pentecost," she says,
When all our pageants of delight were play'd,
Our youth got me to play the woman's part,
The Players at Stratford 197
And I was trimm'd in madam Julia's gown ;
Which served me as fit, by all men's judgments,
As if the garment had been made for me : . . .
For I did play a lamentable part :
Madam, 'twas Ariadne, passioning
For Theseus' perjury, and unjust flight.
Pageants and interludes were played at
intervals at the neighbouring great country
houses, where, as in the Taming of the Shrew
and Hamlet, strolling companies often offered
their services ; and there is reason to believe
that Shakespeare's father took him when
eleven years old to Kenilworth, to witness
the elaborate performances arranged to
honour the Queens' visit there to Lord
Leicester in 1575. Every step that Eliza
beth took on this occasion was celebrated
by some quaint semi-dramatic device. As she
first approached the castle on Saturday, the
9th of July, a Sibyl met her, prophesying
prosperity to her government. The porter
who opened the gate to her was disguised as
Hercules. When she passed a pond in the outer
court, female figures personating water nymphs
offered her welcome. Next day a display of
fireworks took place. Monday was occupied
in hunting, ingeniously diversified by a sylvan
1 9 8 Stratford-on-A von
masque. In whatever direction the Queen
rode in the neighbouring country during the
ensuing week, the villagers arranged similar
shows for her delight. Reminiscences of these
pageants have been detected by the com
mentators on Midsummer Nighfs Dream, in
Oberon's famous description, of the whereabouts
of the little western flower, Love-in-idleness.
XIX
RURAL SPORTS
THUS we may receive without much misgiving
the theory that Shakespeare was encouraged
while still a boy at Stratford to honour the
drama ; and that it was in accordance with
an early ambition that he sought employ
ment in 1585 at a London playhouse. But
the drama was not the only amusement in
which Shakespeare's plays prove him to have
taken part ; there are many indications that,
as a youth, he practised all manner of rural
sports, and did not always escape censure in
pursuit of them. Many of them he doubt
less engaged in far from Stratford, for he had
many relatives among the fanners of the dis
trict, and they all encouraged young men in
athletic exercises. His grandmother, Agnes
Arden, was still living at Wilmecote, and his
200 Stratford-on-A von
father's brother, Henry, was still farming at
Snitterfield.
Rustic games for all ages and dispositions
are mentioned in Shakespeare's plays. In
his early comedies he refers to the " whip
ping of tops," " hide and seek," "more sacks
to the mill," " pushpin," and "nine men's morris."
The last, a game played on turf, seems to
have resembled "fox and geese," now played
with marbles on a wooden board. " Nine-pins "
or "ten-pins," "quoits," "hockey," "football,"
"leap-frog," "country base" or "prisoner's
base," "fast and loose," and "flap-dragon,"
are also among the rural diversions of Eliza
bethan days to which Shakespeare makes
allusion. Bowls formed a more solemn urban
recreation, and the town council maintained a
bowling alley for the free use of the townsmen,
while they provided at the public expense at
least one top for the boys. At Whitsuntide,
or the beginning of May, there were village
dances about the may-pole in which young and
old took part, "busied with a Whitsun morris-
dance."
Even John Shakespeare, like the franklin
described by Sir Thomas Overbury, doubt-
Rural Sports 201
less "allowed of honest pastime, and thought
not the bones of the dead anything bruised,
or the worse for it, though the country lasses
danced in the churchyard after evensong."
Probably, also, " Rock-Monday, and the wake
in summer, Shrovings, the wakeful catches on
Christmas eve, the hoky or seed-cake, these he
yearly kept, yet held them no relics of Popery."
Rock- Monday followed Twelfth Day, and
celebrated the resumption of the distaff or rock
by the housewives after the twelve days' festivi
ties at Christmas time. Shrove Tuesday, when
apprentices made holiday, was chiefly conse
crated to pancakes, cockfights, and cockthrowing.
Hock-tide, the Monday and Tuesday after the
second Sunday following Easter, was devoted
to banquetings and to sports, like wrestling,
hurling, and shooting at the butts. At
Coventry the Corpus Christi play was often
repeated then, or one of rougher merriment
performed. Harvest homes were also honoured
with like celebration, and especially with
" barley-break," a game played by lads and
lasses in the cornfields, which seems to have
roughly resembled prisoner's base. Then it
was that
2 o 2 Stratford-on-A von
Corin sat all day
Playing on pipes of corn, and versing love
To amorous Phillida.
Bearbaitings occasionally diversified the amuse
ments of the country side, and in morris-dancing
the young people often indulged on "the
wanton green " of a summer's evening.
From an early date far-famed athletic
meetings took place on the Cotswold Hills, at
which Will Squeele, according to Justice
Shallow, was a "swinge-buckler." The Cots-
wold games were greatly improved by one
Captain Dover, of Barton-on-the- Heath, not
far from Stratford, early in James I.'s reign ;
and coursing with greyhounds was pursued
there. Shakespeare clearly knew these coursing
matches well. He makes Slender ask John
Page, " How does your fallow greyhound ?
I heard say, he was outrun at Cotsale."
Of more elaborate country sports with which
Shakespeare was clearly well acquainted, al
though he probably in early life witnessed
them from afar, hunting and hawking hold the
chief place. " An' a man have not skill in the
hawking and hunting languages, I'll not give a
rush for him," says Master Stephen in Jonson's
Rural Sports 203
Every Man in his Humour ; and there is no
lack of evidence that Shakespeare studied them
both. He clearly had an ear for the music of
the hounds, and often marked
The musical confusion
Of hounds and echo in conjunction.
Theseus knows what hounds should be :
My hounds (he says) are bred out of the Spartan kind,
So flew'd, so sanded : and their heads are hung
With ears that sweep away the morning dew ;
Crook-kneed, and dew-lapp'd like Thessalian bulls,
Slow in pursuit, but match'd in mouth like bells,
Each under each. A cry more tunable
Was never holla'd to, nor cheer'd with horn.
Near Stratford too, Shakespeare doubtless
learnt the famous song of the hunt, to which
he alludes in Romeo and Juliet :
The hunt is up, the hunt is up,
Sing merrily we, the hunt is up :
The birds they sing,
The deer they fling,
Hey ninny, ninny no.
" The noble art of venery " was often pursued
in enclosed parks by the owners of the great
houses, with trains of ladies, foresters, and other
retainers. Deer was their chief quarry, and
cross-bows seem to have then vied with hounds
204 Sir at ford-on- Avon
in bringing down the prey. It is this method of
hunting that Shakespeare elaborately describes
in Loves Labour s Lost, when the Princess and
her ladies hunt the deer in the King of
Navarre's park. But the stag chase and the
boar chase were pursued in the open country.
It is over " a poor sequester'd stag that from
the hunter's aim had ta'en a hurt," that Jaques
moralises in well-known lines. In his " Venus
and Adonis " Shakespeare especially recom
mends the hunting of the hare, the fox, and
the roe ; and in another famous passage of this
first poem he describes all the points of a
hunter. It is very possible that Shakespeare
in youth chased the timorous hare on foot. No
more vivid picture of the pursuit of " poor Wat "
is found in literature than in Shakespeare's
" Venus and Adonis." He shows us there the
poor wretch ''outrunning the wind," " cranking
and crossing with a thousand doubles," eluding
the cunning hounds among a flock of sheep or
herd of deer, or "where earth-delving conies
keep," then far off upon a hill "standing on
hinder legs with listening ear "
To hearken if his .foes pursue him still ;
Anon their loud alarums he doth hear ;
Rural Sports 207
And now his grief may be compared well
To one sore sick, that hears the passing bell.
Hawking u a princely delight," as one con
temporary writer calls it, or " a pleasure for
high and mounting spirits," according to another
authority was a more elaborate sport than
hunting, and was invariably confined to the rich,
although the country people delighted to watch
its practice of a winter's morning, or to listen
by night to the falconers' stories of their hawks'
prowess. Similes and metaphors without
number has Shakespeare drawn from this
recreation, and his continual use of its technical
terms, all of which are now obsolete, accounts
for the obscurity of many passages in his plays.
Hawks went by a variety of names, according
to their age and training, and Shakespeare
uses them all. There was the wild and in
corrigible haggard, to which Petruchio likens
his shrew, Katharine :
Another way I have to man my haggard,
To make her come, and know her keeper's call ;
That is, to watch her as we watch these kites,
That bate, and beat, and will not be obedient.
(To bate is to flutter the wings.) There was
the eyas-musket, i.e. the hawk in its infancy, and
208 Sir at ford-on- Avon
the tassel-gentle, the mate of the goss-hawk,
to both of which frequent allusion is made by
the dramatist. Shakespeare knew how the
hawks were unhooded and whistled off the fist,
to which jesses and lures attached them, or how,
when they were incapable of benefiting at the
trainer's hands, they were let down the wind.
Probably, too, Shakespeare was not unac
quainted with less dignified sport in which
birds were the prey. He talks of " bat
fowling," which is a Cotswold expression for
taking birds by night in hand -nets, and of
"setting springes for woodcocks." "The
creeping fowler," at a time when shooting
birds was not a legitimate pastime, often
succeeded, according to a passage in Mid
summer Night's Dream, in doing something
more than scatter by his gun's report wild
geese or russet-pated choughs.
The Avon, with its " wind'ring brooks, with
their sedg'd crowns and ever harmless nooks,"
must have also introduced the Elizabethan
dwellers to some river sport. The river was
not made navigable for even small boats till
1635, and rowing as a recreation grew up at a
much later date. But fishing has always had its
Rural Sports 209
English votaries. Few of the mediaeval monas
teries in this country lacked their anglers ; and
the literature of the sixteenth century was
graced by many tributes of no mean value to
" an exercise so much laudable." The incidental
references that Shakespeare makes to the
angler's art, the poetic fulness of his descriptions
of the banks and " fair course" of rivers, and
the distinctness with which he occasionally
speaks of various freshwater fish, makes it
almost certain that he himself, like others of his
townsmen, had trolled for pike or luces, and
tickled trout for in those days fly-fishing was
not in the Warwickshire or Gloucestershire
streams. If the Avon then, as now, only
harboured fish of the rank of dace and bream,
pike and perch, the Elizabethan angler had but
to make his way from Stratford to the streams
that run from the Cotswolds into the Severn or
the sources of the Thames, to enter a paradise
where trout seldom failed him. Within a
few miles of Stratford lived one of the most
enthusiastic anglers of Shakespeare's time a
Gloucestershire squire named John Dennis, who
gave voice to his passion in a long poem called
the " Secrets of Angling," first published in
2io Stratford-on-Avon
1613. In these verses the joys of the angler are
extolled above those of any other sportsman,
and the author details the pleasures that he had
experienced of seeing his " quill and cork down
sink, with eager bite of barbel, bleak, or dace."
If Shakespeare, who described how
The pleasant'st angling is to see the fish
Cut with her golden oars the silver stream,
And greedily devour the treacherous bait,
ever lived in his youth at Dursley, as many
writers have urged, he surely helped Dennis
to fish his waters, whether with or without his
permission.
XX
CHARLECOTE HOUSE POACHING IN THE PARK
IF tradition be admitted in evidence, the poet
did not on occasion disdain to play the poacher.
According to the ancient story, the whole course
of his life was altered by his detection in
the act of poaching at Charlecote Park.
" The frolic of Shakespeare in deer -stealing
was the cause of his Hegira," says Landor, and
although there is something to be urged
against this statement, it probably has some
foundation in fact.
Tourists seldom leave Shakespeare's native
place without traversing the four or five miles
to the north-east which lie between it and the
great park encircling Charlecote House. 1 The
winding River Avon skirts the enclosure to the
1 This chapter is chiefly from two papers which I contributed to
the Portfolio for May and July 1888.
212 Stratford-on-Avon
west. Large herds of deer are now always
crouching under the branches of the old oaks and
elms within its timber boundaries. The gray-red
mansion where the Lucys have lived for more
than three centuries stands at the water's edge ;
avenues of limes approach it at back and front ;
the flower-gardens which immediately surround
it are separated from the gently undulating park
by a sunken fence. The present century has
witnessed many additions to the building, but
the Elizabethan portion has not been disfigured
by restoration, and from one aspect still seems
to the visitor to stand detached from the recent
erections. Nowhere is a more finished specimen
of Tudor domestic architecture to be met with.
The building of the Elizabethan house at
Charlecote was begun in 1558 the year
of Elizabeth's accession and was probably
finished in 1559. Its owner was Thomas
Lucy. For more than five centuries his
ancestors had owned the Charlecote Manor,
which had figured in Domesday Book under
the name of Ceorlecote. At first the lords
of the manor took their surname from the place,
but early in the thirteenth century William de
Charlecote, who had fought with the Barons
Charlecote House 2 1 3
against King John, assumed, for reasons which
antiquaries have not determined, the name
of Lucy. A manor-house, with a chapel
attached, was in existence at Charlecote
throughout the Middle Ages, and its owners'
prosperity grew, chiefly through intermarriages,
with every generation. One Fulk de Lucy,
who died in 1303, was "a special lover of good
horses," and paid forty marks (i.e. 26 113:4)
for a black horse at a time when an ox cost
sixteen shillings. Many of his descendants
sat in Parliament as knights of the shire of
Warwick, and nearly all of them, for military
services rendered to the Crown at home or
abroad, received the honour of knighthood.
William Lucy became a Knight of the Bath
when Henry VII's Queen Elizabeth was
crowned at Westminster, and it was Sir
William's grandson who built Charlecote as we
know it.
The young man had been carefully brought
up. John Foxe, the compiler of the martyr-
ology, had come from Oxford to be his tutor,
and on 3d February 1547 (it is of interest to
note) Foxe, while holding that office, married
at the little Charlecote church Agnes Randall,
2 1 4 Stratford-on-Avon
a lady of many virtues, who was, like himself,
in the service of the Lucy's. 1 Foxe's pupil was
only twenty -six years old when he took the
work of rebuilding Charlecote in hand, but six
years earlier, in 1552, his father's death had
made him master of his family's great War
wickshire estate, which soon included, besides
Charlecote, the neighbouring properties of Sher-
borne and Hampton Lucy, the former a grant
of Edward VI, and the latter of Queen Mary
in 1556. Meanwhile his wife, Joyce Acton,
had brought him Sutton Park, at Tenbury,
Worcestershire. His worldly position was in
no wise inferior to that of a nobleman ; and
he was wealthy enough to freely indulge the
taste for elaborate architecture which charac
terised the aristocracy of his day.
Of the pre- Elizabethan manor-house at
Charlecote no trace remains. The Elizabethan
mansion, reared probably on the old site, owes
nothing to an earlier epoch. The ground-plan
roughly resembles the letter E, an eccentric
compliment which great builders of the day
were fond of paying to the reigning sovereign.
The original building, with its gently sloping
1 See Art. " Foxe, John," in Dictionary of National Biography.
Charlecote House 2 1 5
gables, is flanked at either end by boldly
projecting wings, with octagonal angle turrets.
The fabric is of red brick ; the window
dressings are of stone, but all has grown
greyish with age. Near the centre of the
facade stands an elaborate porch, which
supplies on the ground-plan the E's short
middle stroke. There is a striking contrast be
tween this richly worked excrescence and the
homely simplicity of the rest of the building.
It has been suggested that it was by a different
and more fashionable architect, who was ac
quainted with both the Italian and French
Renaissance styles, and that it was added
after the house was built. John of Padua,
alias John Thorpe, the designer of Holland
House and the greatest English architect of
the time, is credited on uncertain grounds
with this admirable specimen of Renaissance
architecture. It is in two floors, each supported
by pillars, and the whole surmounted by a
delicately carved balustrade. The front is
of freestone ; the lower pillars are of the
Ionic order, the upper of the Composite. Over
the doorway, on the ground story, the royal
arms, with the letters 'E.R.' are engraved,
2 1 6 Stratford-on-Avon
and in the spandrils are the initial letters
'T.L.,' i.e. Thomas Lucy.
But the porch is not the only remarkable fea
ture of the exterior of Charlecote. Before the
house lies a quadrangular garden court enclosed
by low terrace walls, protected from without by
the sunken fence. On the side of the enclosure
that is farthest from the house rises a massive
structure two storeys high, and completely
isolated. Through its ground - floor runs a
narrow archway, closed at the outward end
by iron gates. This structure is the detached
gatehouse, of which few examples remain
in England. In earlier Tudor times large
mansions were usually quadrangular in shape,
like the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge.
In that case the gatehouse invariably sur
mounted the one archway by which the
quadrangle could be entered. It was at
times battlemented and fortified to resist
attack, but more often architects lavished on
it their most elaborate schemes of decoration.
When the quadrangular form of building was
dying out its memory occasionally survived in
a forecourt fronted by an isolated building,
exactly modelled after the older fashioned
Charlecote House 2 1 9
gatehouse ; but now that three sides of the
quadrangle were absent, it stood, as here
at Charlecote, at some fifty yards' distance
from the mansion, looking like a stately
lodge.
In its architecture the gatehouse at Charle
cote exactly resembles the main building.
Octagonal turrets adorn its four angles. Its
roof is flat, and is surmounted by a balus
trade ; oriel windows project on the second
floor above both ends of the archway. In
Elizabethan days the porter lived on the
ground floor ; the upper formed a large
banqueting-room. As a defence against un
welcome intruders the gatehouse still had its
uses, but great householders had long ceased
to fear very formidable foes in Elizabeth's
time ; and it was probably erected by Sir
Thomas Lucy merely as an effective archi
tectural ornament.
Comparatively little within the house to
day recalls the sixteenth century. But in
the library stand chairs, couch, and cabinet
of coromandel wood, inlaid with ivory, which,
tradition says, were presented by Queen
Elizabeth to Leicester in 1575, and were
220 Sir at ford-on- A von
brought here from Kenilworth in the seven
teenth century. 1
The modern bust of the poet in the hall
recalls the relationship which tradition has
set up between Sir Thomas Lucy, its
builder, and the dramatist in his youth. By
1586 or 1587, when the two men are alleged
to have become acquainted, Thomas Lucy
had grown in dignity. Six years after he
had completed the rebuilding of his manor-
house, he was knighted (in 1565), and he sub
sequently sat in two parliaments (1571 and
1584) as knight of the shire of Warwick. In
1586 he was high sheriff of the neighbouring
county of Worcestershire, in right of the pro
perty derived from his wife. The town of
Stratford-on-Avon knew him well. As a local
justice and commissioner of the musters for the
county of Warwick, he frequently rode thither,
and the Corporation liberally entertained him
at the Bear or the Swan, the chief inns of
the city. But these performances never made
a man famous. Had not tradition credited Sir
Thomas Lucy with preserving deer in Charle-
1 An interesting account of Charlecote appears in Mr. W. Niven's
privately printed Old Warwickshire House (1878).
Charlecote House 2 2 1
cote Park, and accused the poet Shakespeare
of poaching on his preserves, there would have
been no reason why his name should have
escaped obscurity. It is stated that he
entertained Queen Elizabeth on her way to
the great entertainment provided for her at
Kenilworth by Leicester in 1575. But it is
impossible that the Queen could have slept
there, for her authentic route is known, and does
not include Charlecote as a resting-place at
night. Some urge modestly that she break
fasted there, but this report lacks confirmation.
In the seventeenth century it was currently
reported in Stratford that Shakespeare as a
youth fell into bad company, and " made a
frequent practice of deer-stealing . . . more
than once . . . robbing a park that belonged
to Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote, near Strat
ford." On one occasion, according to the
version recorded by Rowe, the earliest editor
of the plays, he was arrested by Sir Thomas's
keeper and severely punished, whereupon " he
made a ballad upon " the owner of Charlecote,
which was "probably the first essay of his
poetry." Further persecution was threatened,
and Shakespeare escaped to London to try
222 Stratford-on-A von
his fortune on the stage. The independent
testimony of Archdeacon Davies, who was
vicar of Saperton, Gloucestershire, late in the
seventeenth century, is to the effect that
Shakespeare " was much given to all un-
luckiness in stealing venison and rabbits,
particularly from Sir Thomas Lucy, who had
him oft whipped, and sometimes imprisoned,
and at last made him fly his native county
to his great advancement." The soundest
scholar among Shakespeare's biographers-
Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps accepts the outline
of this story as incontrovertible fact. The
additional details that Queen Elizabeth inter
vened to protect Shakespeare from Sir
Thomas's fury, and that the youth stole the
buck to celebrate his wedding-day, are obvious
fabrications. Nor can the rumour perpetu
ated in a well-known picture that Shake
speare when arrested by the keepers was
brought before Sir Thomas in the hall of
Charlecote be substantiated.
It has been urged by disbelievers in the
whole tradition that in the sixteenth century
no deer-park existed at Charlecote. There
was, however, a recognised warren at Charle-
Charlecote House 225
cote, and in the view of the law the theft of
rabbits from a statutable warren was as serious
an offence as deer-stealing, and might easily
have been confused with it. According to
Coke, a warren might be inhabited by hares
and roes as well as by rabbits, and Shakespeare
might thus have sought his prey in Lucy's
warren without seriously impugning the truth
of the tradition. But although Charlecote
in Shakespeare's youth cannot be proved to
have been a statutable park i.e. an enclosure
"closed with wall, pale, or hedge," and "used
for the keeping, breeding, and cherishing of
deer"- Sir Thomas is known to have been
an extensive game - preserver, and to have
employed gamekeepers on many of his estates.
In March 1585 he introduced a Bill into Parlia
ment for the better preservation of "game
and grain." He did not, it is true, make many
recorded gifts of venison ; but a German
traveller in Elizabeth's reign noted that
fallow-deer of various colours were as com
monly met with in England in woods as
in enclosed parks, and there seems no doubt
that deer lived in Hampton Woods in the im
mediate neighbourhood of Charlecote. When,
Q
226 Sir at ford-on- Avon
in the seventeenth century, Sir Thomas's suc
cessor acquired Fulbroke Park, which also lies
on the boundaries of Charlecote, he is stated
on good authority to have immediately stocked
it with deer. And as early as 1602 the Lord
Keeper, Egerton, received a buck from the
Lucy estates, although its preserve is not dis
tinctly named. It is, therefore, difficult to deny
that a few herds of deer might have roamed,
as at present, about Charlecote House. The
law of Shakespeare's day (5 Eliz. cap. 21)
punished deer - stealers with three months'
imprisonment and the payment of thrice
the amount of the damage done ; but
the popular opinion was on the side of
the poacher. ''Venison is nothing so sweet
as when it is stolen," was a contemporary
proverb.
In 1828 Sir Walter Scott was informed by
the owner of Charlecote that Shakespeare stole
the deer not from Charlecote, but from Ful
broke Park. This version of the exploit was
first promulgated about a century ago, and was
very well received. The antiquary, Ireland,
introduced into his Views on the Warwick
shire Avon (1795) an engraving of an old
Charlecote Ho^lse 227
farmhouse in the hamlet of Fulbroke, where,
he asserted, Shakespeare was temporarily im
prisoned after his arrest. An adjoining hovel
was also described for some years as Shake
speare's " deer-barn "; but the site of these
buildings (now removed) was not Sir Thomas
Lucy's property in Elizabeth's reign, and the
amended legend is a pure invention.
The ballad which Shakespeare is reported to
have fastened on the park-gates of Charlecote
does not survive. An old man, who lived in
a village near Stratford and died in 1 703 at the
age of ninety, is stated to have repeated from
memory the following lines, and they are often
identified with the libel which irritated Sir
Thomas Lucy :
A Parliament member, a justice of peace,
At home a poor scarecrowe, at London an asse ;
If lowsie is Lucy, as some volke miscalle it,
Then Lucy is lowsie, whatever befall it.
He thinks himself greate,
Yet an asse in his state,
We allowe by his ears but with asses to mate,
If Lucy is lowsie, as some volke miscalle it,
Then Lucy is lowsie whatever befall it.
Attempts have been made to prove the
genuineness of this worthless effusion. That
228 Sir atford-on- Avon
it is some two hundred years old may be
admitted ; the author is undoubtedly correct
in describing Lucy as "a Parliament member
and justice of peace," which may be urged
as proof that he was not unacquainted with
Lucy's biography, but that the lines are three
centuries old, and the work of Shakespeare,
may be safely denied.
Shakespeare undoubtedly took a subtle re
venge. He immortalised Charlecote and its
owner in the character of Justice Shallow.
According to Davies, of Saperton, "his re
venge was so great that he [i.e. Lucy] is his
[i.e. Shakespeare's] Justice Clodpate, and [he]
calls him a great man, and that, in allusion
to his name, bore three louses rampant for
his arms." Justice Shallow came to birth in
the second part of Shakespeare's Henry IV.
(written about 1597). He is, as all the world
knows, a garrulous old gentleman, who is proud
to call himself "one of the King's justices
of the peace," and ostentatiously parades re
miniscences of his wild days. His house is
in Gloucestershire, and in the court before
it Falstaff reviews, with the aid of the owner
acting as commissioner of the muster, his
Charlecote House 229
far-famed ragged regiment. His hospitality
and his officiousness as justice and muster-
man tally with all that is known of Lucy,
but the identity of the two does not dis
tinctly appear until Shallow's entrance in
the opening scene of the Merry Wives of
Windsor (probably written early in 1598).
There he has come from Gloucestershire to
Windsor to " make a Star-chamber matter"
of a poaching affray on his estates. Falstaff
is the offender. In a rambling and querulous
conversation with his cousin Slender, Shallow
refers with pride to his ancient lineage, and
Slender corroborates him with an allusion to
"the dozen white luces" on his "old coat"
of arms. This is undoubtedly a blundering
jest on the arms of the Charlecote Lucys,
described by heralds as " three luces hauriant
argent." A luce is in modern English a pike
a fact that accounts for Falstaff's comparison
elsewhere of Shallow to an "old pike." The
three luces, or pikes, are engraved on all the
monuments to the Lucys in Charlecote Church,
and on one monument a quartering of their
arms appears with three fish in each of four
divisions. Thus Slender may not be talking
230 Stratford-on-A von
altogether at random when he speaks of the
dozen luces. Shakespeare distinctly emphasises
the reference to the Lucy arms. " It is an old
coat," says Shallow, in reply to Slender. " The
dozen white louses do become an old coat well,"
is Sir Hugh Evans's punning comment, and the
dialogue lingers about the topic. Later in
the scene, as soon as Falstaff enters, Shallow
abruptly introduces the business which has
brought him from Gloucestershire. " Knight,
you have beaten my men, killed my deer,
and broke open my lodge ! " is his charge ;
" But not kissed your keeper's daughter," is
Falstaff's humorous rejoinder.
Shall. Tut, a pin ! this shall be answered. .'. .
Pal. I will answer it straight. I have done all this ;
that is now answered.
Shall. The Council shall know this.
Pal. 'Twere better for you if it were known in coun
sel [i.e. if you took good counsel about it] ; you'll be
laughed at.
And there the matter ends. Shallow and
Lucy are in identical situations throughout.
By many smaller details their identity could
be illustrated. Lucy was an enthusiast for
archery, according to an extant letter sent
Char lee ote House
231
by him to Leicester ; so was Justice Shallow.
The reiterated mention of Shallow's judicial
functions suggests the repeated exercise of
Sir Thomas Lucy's legal authority, which is
vouched for by the Stratford -on -Avon Cor
poration archives. Justice Shallow is, beyond
reasonable doubt, Shakespeare's satiric sketch
of the builder of Charlecote. 1
1 An admirably full and scholarly account or the Shakespearian
traditions that have gathered about Charlecote is to be found in the
seventh edition of Mr. J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps's Outlines of the Life oj
Shakespeare, vol. i. pp. 67-76, 157-161 ; and vol. ii. pp. 379-390.
^:* ix
ARMS OF LUCY.
XXI
INDOOR AMUSEMENTS
OF indoor amusements, few were probably in
much vogue at Stratford. But cards seem to
have been occasionally played.
In foul weather (says Vincent, a country gentleman,
in the Dialogue with an English Courtier, 1586) we send
for some honest neighbours, if haply we be with our wives
alone at home (as seldom we are) and with them we play
at Dice, and Cards, sorting ourselves according to the
number of players, and their skill, some to Ticktack, some
Lurch, some to Irish game, or Doublets : others sit close to
the Cards, at Post, and Pair, at Ruff or Colchester Trump,
at Mack or Maw : yea, there are some ever so fresh
gamesters, as will bear you company at Novem Quinque,
at Faring, Tray trip, or one-and-thirty, for I warrant you,
we have right good fellows in the country ; sometimes also
(for shift of sports, you know, is delectable) we fall to Slide
Thrift, to Penny prick, and in winter nights we use certain
Christmas games very proper, and of much agility; we
want not also pleasant mad-headed knaves, that be properly
learned, and will read in diverse pleasant books and good
Indoor Amusements 235
Authors ; as Sir Guy of Warwick, the Four Sons of Aymon,
the Ship of Fools, the Budget of Demands, the Hundred
Merry Tales, the Book of Riddles, and many other
excellent writers both witty and pleasant. These pretty
and pithy matters do sometimes recreate our minds, chiefly
after long sitting and loss of money.
But many preferred to recreate themselves in
an alehouse, and play there an elementary form
of bagatelle called " shovel-board." The Strat
ford people still tell how Shakespeare often
crossed from New Place to the Falcon Tavern,
on the opposite side of Chapel Street, and played
this game with his neighbours, at the very board
now preserved in the house at New Place ; but,
unluckily for the tradition, we know very well
that the tavern sprang up at a later date, and
in Shakespeare's day was a private dwelling-
house in the occupation, early in the seven
teenth century, of Mrs. Katharine Temple, and
later of Joseph Boles, a friend of John Hall,
the poet's son-in-law.
There is another very persistent tradition
at Stratford, to show that Shakespeare fre
quently took his ease in an inn. According
to this story, Shakespeare engaged, as a
youth, in a famous drinking-match at another
tavern called the Falcon, at Bidford, some
236 Sir at j "ord-on- Avon
five or six miles from his native town. The
tale dates, in its most authentic form, from
no earlier year than 1762. A gentleman
visiting Stratford was then taken to Bidford,
and shown "in the hedge a crab-tree called
Shakespeare's Canopy, because under it our
poet slept one night ; for he, as well as Ben
J orison, loved a glass for the pleasure of society."
Shakespeare (the story proceeds) " having heard
much of the men of the village as deep drinkers
and merry fellows, one day went over to Bidford
to take a cup with them. He inquired of a
shepherd for the Bidford drinkers, who replied
that they were absent, but the sippers were at
home, and, ' I suppose,' continued the sheep-
keeper, ' they will be sufficient for you ; ' and so,
indeed, they were ; he was forced to take up
his lodgings under that tree for some hours."
This story has since been elaborated by
Stratford writers, who make Shakespeare
" extremely fond of drinking hearty draughts of
English ale, and glorying in being thought a
person of superior eminence in that profession,"
and assert that, being worsted in a drinking
contest with the junior drinking club of the
Sippers at Bidford, he, with his companions,
Indoor A musements 237
slept under a crab-tree for a whole night.
Shakespeare and his companions were next
day invited to renew the contest, but the
poet wisely declined, saying, " I have drank
with
Piping Pebworth, Dancing Marston,
Haunted Hillborough, Hungry Grafton,
Dadgeing Exhall, Papist Wixford,
Beggarly Broom, and Drunken Bidford "
"meaning, by this doggrel, with the bibulous
competitors who had arrived from the first-
named seven villages, all of which are within a
few miles of Bidford," and thus not far from Strat
ford. The rhyme is very halting, and few of
the villages are specially noted for the qualities
indicated by the epithets. Bidford, although
it now strives manfully to deserve the epithet
bestowed on it in these lines, was reputed in
1605 an d 1606, to have its alehouses in good
orderand its rogues punished. In 1613, however,
one John Darlingie was " presented " there for
"keeping ill rule in his house on the Sabbath
in service time by selling of ale," and later in
the century the alehouse-keepers were guilty of
many irregularities. The room pointed out at
Bidford as forming part of the Falcon Tavern
238 Sir at ford-on- A von
where Shakespeare's match took place, and the
antique chair at the Stratford birthplace stated
to have belonged to the room, are relics of
highly doubtful authenticity. Other versions of
the tale make the drunken band sleep under the
crab-tree " from Saturday night till the following
Monday morning, when they were roused by
workmen going to their labour." The crab-tree
was still standing in the present century, but
was removed in a decayed condition in 1824.
A similar legend represents Shakespeare. as
a frequenter of another village inn at Wincot, or
Wilmecote, his mother's birthplace. This house
(we are told) "was resorted to by Shakespeare,
for the sake of diverting himself with a fool who
belonged to a neighbouring mill." " Marian
Hackett, the fat ale-wife of Wincot," has been
identified with the " genial hostess" of this
inn, and Stephen Sly, one of her customers in
the Taming of the Shrew, was undoubtedly
the name of a resident at Stratford who is some
times described in the records as a labourer and
sometimes as servant to William Combe.
Perhaps at this tavern, too, old John Naps,
Peter Turf, and Henry Pimpernell held revelry.
The references in the Taming of the Shrew
Indoor Amusements 241
to Wincot were well understood locally. Sir
Aston Cokain, addressing a poem in 1658 to Mr.
Clement Fisher, of Wincot, reminded him how
Shakespeare your Wincot ale hath much renownd,
That foxd a beggar so (by chance was found
Sleeping) that there needed not many a word
To make him to believe he was a lord.
The far-famed beggar, Kit Sly, was doubtless a
Stratford character ; he was probably related
to the Stephen Sly to whom reference has just
been made, and to Joan Sly, who in 1630 was
fined by the Stratford magistrates for breaking
the Sabbath by travelling.
A quart of ale was a dish for a king all over
England in Elizabethan days, and there is
nothing more probable, although the proof must
remain for ever incomplete, than that Shake
speare indulged in alehouse festivities. The
sober magistrates of Stratford did the same.
They always celebrated the visits of neighbour
ing gentry at quarter sessions by deep potations.
Whenever Sir Thomas Lucy visited Stratford,
a pottle of wine and a quartern of sugar, or a
quart of burnt sack and sugar, were placed at
his disposal either at the Swan or the Bear, or
at one of the aldermen's private houses. Sir
R
242 Stratford-on-A von
Edward Greville, the moat of whose manor-house
at Milcote is still visible in the fields there, came
very often to the town at the close of the six
teenth century to be entertained at a municipal
banquet, and to quaff his quart of sack and
gallon of claret. His more famous relative, the
poet, Sir Fulk Greville, also came over from
Beauchamp's Court by Warwick to take wine,
sugar, and cakes with the magistrates. He or Sir
Edward or Sir Thomas Lucy would send them
a buck or doe to form the substance of their
meal together, and would sometimes accept a
sugar-loaf or a keg of sturgeon instead of wine.
When the itinerant justices visited the town, or
the muster of the trained bands of the district
was held there, the town council was not sparing
in its gifts of sack and claret or Rhenish wine.
At one of these entertainments sixteenpence
was spent in wine and a penny in bread a
collocation of items which reminds one of the
monstrous " halfpennyworth of bread to this
intolerable deal of sack." None the less, these
aldermen and burgesses of Stratford were
ready next morning to set a poor artificer in
the stocks for three days and three nights on
the charge of wasting time in an alehouse.
XXII
CHRISTENINGS AND MARRIAGES
OTHER kinds of merrymaking celebrated the
happy crises of domestic life. The christening
of a child was a time of festival and gift-giving.
Apostle-spoons were always bestowed on the
infant among the middle classes, as silver and
gold cups were bestowed among the upper.
After baptism at the church font the child was
wrapped in a chrisome, or white chrism-cloth ;
and Dame Quickly refers to the practice when
she compares Falstaff on his deathbed to "any
christom child." Shakespeare must have often
seen such ceremonies. His sister Joan, who
afterwards married William Hart, of Stratford,
was baptized when he was five years old ; his
sister Anna, who died at the age of eight, when
he was seven ; his brothers Richard and
Edmund, when he was ten and sixteen respect-
244 Stratford-on-Avon
ively. His eldest daughter, Susanna, was
baptized in the parish church, 26th May 1583,
and his twin children, Hamnet and Judith,
2d February 1585. Nor does this exhaust the
list of christenings which he attended. The
nephew of Sir Roger Lestrange vouched for the
STRATFORD, FROM THE SOUTH-EAST.
story that Shakespeare was godfather to a son
of Ben Jonson's, and gave him a dozen good
latin (i.e. brass) spoons, for his father, as he
said jestingly, to translate.
But weddings formed the chief events in the
domestic annals of Elizabethan merriment.
There were first the espousals to be celebrated
the public announcement of betrothal. The
Christenings and Marriages 245
clergyman directed this important ceremony
in the house of the bride's parents, and it
was often regarded in the country as equi
valent to a marriage. Shakespeare describes
its details in Twelfth Night as
A contract of eternal bond of love,
Confirm'd by mutual joinder of your hands,
Attested by the holy close of lips,
Strengthen'd by interchangement of your rings :
and sealed finally by the testimony of the priest.
The lady usually received from her lover a bent
sixpence, or gloves, with handkerchiefs and
fruit. The marriage ceremony followed at
varying intervals. At the simplest weddings
the bride was led to church in her best gown,
with her hair hanging down her back, by boys
" with bride laces and rosemary tied about their
silken sleeves." A bride cup filled with wine
and decorated with rosemary and silk ribbons
was borne before her. Musicians and girls
followed her, one of whom carried the bridal
cake. The bridal cup appears from the account
of Petruchio's wedding in the Taming of the
Shrew to have been drunk in the church.
A full account of a Warwickshire " bride-ale,"
as the wedding was called, is given in the
246 Sir at ford-on- A von
description of the Queen's visit to Kenilworth,
when she graced one with her presence.
Doubtless, Mary Arden was married to John
Shakespeare at Wilmecote in 1557 with such
ceremony as this. First came sixteen lusty lads
and bold bachelors of the parish on horseback,
two by two, with blue buckram bride laces and
branches of green broom (because rosemary was
scanty) on their left arms, and sticks of elder-
tree in their right. Among them was the
bridegroom in a tawny worsted jacket, " a fair
straw hat with a capital crown, steeplewise
upon his head," and a pair of harvest gloves in
his hand. After this band came morris dancers
and three fair girls. A country bumpkin
followed them with the bride cup ; behind
him walked the bride between two ancient
parishioners, honest men, and she was accom
panied by twenty-four damsels as bridesmaids.
Shakespeare's own marriage with Anne
Hathaway, of Shottery, a mile from Stratford,
was probably less ceremonious. Both his and
her parents disapproved of it, and there was
certainly an awkward disparity of age between
them, he being but eighteen and she twenty-six.
According to tradition, the marriage took place
Christenings and Marriages 249
at Luddington, in a church which has now
disappeared, and of which the schoolmaster,
Thomas Hunt, was curate. The license, or
" bond against impediments," preserved in the
Worcester registry, is dated 28th November
1582. Two respectable husbandmen of Shottery,
Falk Sandells and John Richardson, attest it.
But espousals had doubtless been quietly
solemnised earlier, and Anne Hathaway had
then been betrothed to Shakespeare as his
wife. Their first child was born in May 1583.
There is an account extant of the cele
bration of a precontract, under similarly un
prepossessing circumstances, at Alcester in
1588, where the contract took the place of a
more regular marriage. The lady was present
without any friends, and explained their absence
by the statement that she thought she could not
obtain her mother's goodwill, but nevertheless,
quoth she, " I am the same woman that I was
before." Her lover merely asked her " whether
she was content to betake herself unto him, and
she answered, offering her hand, which he also
took upon the offer that she was content by her
troth, and 'thereto,' said she, 'I give thee my
faith and before these witnessess, that I am thy
250 Stratford-on-Avon
wife,' and then he likewise answered in these
words, viz. ' And I give thee my faith and troth,
and become thy husband.' ' This was doubtless
the form that Shakespeare's betrothal took, and,
although not very irregular for those days,
certainly caused many of his youthful em
barrassments.
Richard Hathaway 's cottage at Shottery,
reached from Stratford by open paths across
wide meadows, is still standing, and an ancient
chair by the chimney corner and bacon
cupboard in the parlour is called " Shakespeare's
courting chair." The house is encircled by an
old-fashioned flower and kitchen garden, and
forms a picturesque relic of Elizabethan country
life. Attempts have been made, with doubtful
success, to detect resemblances to it in Celia's
description of the cottage which she and
Rosalind occupy in the Forest of Arden.
The Hathaways had been small farmers at
Shottery before the middle of the sixteenth
century, and there were branches of the family
settled at Stratford. In 1580, another Anne
Hathaway had married Alderman Wilson there,
and a Thomas Hathaway, son of Margaret
Hathaway, died at Stratford in 1601. There
Christenings and Marriages 253
is evidence to prove that Richard Hathaway,
Anne's father, who died in 1582, in the same
year as Anne married, was, early in Elizabeth's
reign, on friendly terms with John Shakespeare,
and it is probable that the poet met Anne at his
father's house for the first time. That he had
an affection for her quiet native village is shown
by the fact that in 1598 he contemplated the
purchase there, of "some odd yard -land."
Probably the Richard Hath way, or Hathaway,
who takes his place in the lower ranks of the
dramatists of London early in the next century,
was a near relative of the great dramatist's wife.
OLD CHURCH OF LUDDINGTON.
XXIII
SHAKESPEARE AT STRATFORD IN LATER LIFE
IT is no part of my present plan to trace
the progressive career of Shakespeare as a
dramatist. His life at Stratford as the wool-
stapler's son who " went to London very
meanly, and came in time to be exceeding
wealthy," is alone to be noted here. Nor will
it be necessary to follow him in his journeyings
to and fro the metropolis. His first journey
was doubtless made in the covered waggon of
the carrier who made weekly journeys, or on
foot, but later he doubtless travelled on horse
back. It was a common practice to hire horses
for travelling at twelvepence the first day, and
eightpence a day afterwards, until they were
returned to the owner ; but Shakespeare could
have afforded long before his death to ride a
horse of his own.
Shakespeare at Stratford 255
There were two routes between Stratford
and London one by Oxford and High
Wycombe, through Shipston-on-Stour, Chip
ping Norton, Woodstock, the Chilterns,
Beaconsfield, Hillingdon Hill, Hanwell,
Acton, and Kensington ; the other by
Banbury and Aylesbury. 1 Tradition points to
the former route as Shakespeare's favourite
road, and signalises the Crown Inn, near
Carfax, at Oxford, as one of his resting-places,
where he found " witty company " and a fair
hostess with whom scandal will have it he
made too free. Aubrey asserts that at Grendon,
near Oxford, " he happened to take the
humour of the constable in Midsummer Night's
Dream " by which he meant, we may suppose,
Much Ado about Nothing but there were
watchmen of the Dogberry type all over
England, and probably at Stratford itself.
Lord Burghley, writing to Walsingham in 1586,
described how on a long journey he saw the
watch at every town's end standing with long
staves under alehouse pentices, and how at
Enfield they declared they were watching for
1 For an interesting account of the journey by road from Stratford
to London see Professor J. W. Hales's Notes and Essays on Shake
speare (1884), pp. 1-24.
256 Sir at ford-on- A von
three young men, whom they would surely
know because " one of the parties hath a hooked
nose " a statement upon which Burghley
makes the prudent comment that " if they be
no better instructed but to find three persons
by one of them having a hooked nose, they
may miss thereof." The inns all along the
Elizabethan country roads were famed for their
comfort. "The world affords," writes one
traveller, Fynes M orison, " not such inns as
England hath either for good and cheap enter
tainment after the guests' own pleasure, or for
humble attendance on passengers ; yea, even in
very poor villages." The host and hostess and
the servants zealously attended to the needs
of horse and man. What was left over from a
guest's supper was carefully preserved for his
breakfast, his chamber was kept well cleaned
and warmed, and a few pence was all that was
expected by the chamberlain and ostler when
the traveller left to pursue his journey. Up to
the very last years of his life, Shakespeare paid
frequent visits to London, and very often must
he have hasted to his bed "with travel tired"
at an hospitable roadside inn.
When Shakespeare left Stratford-on-Avon in
Shakespeare at Stratford 257
1585, his wife and three children remained
behind, but at no period is it probable that he
was long separated from them. His fellow-
townsmen at all times knew of his worldly
prosperity, and were conscious of a desire on
his part to stand well with them. Abraham
Sturley, who was once bailiff, writing apparently
to a brother early in 1598, says : "This is one
special remembrance from our father's motion.
It seemeth by him that our countryman, Mr.
Shakspere, is willing to disburse some money
upon some odd yardland or other at Shottery,
or near about us : he thinketh it a very fit pattern
to move him to deal in the matter of our tithes.
By the instructions you can give him thereof,
and by the friends he can make therefore, we
think it a fair mark for him to shoot at, and
would do us much good." To Richard Quiney,
the father of Thomas Quiney, afterwards
Shakespeare's son-in-law, who was staying in
1598 at the Bell, in Carter Lane, London, and
endeavouring to relieve the town of the
payment of a subsidy, Abraham Sturley also
wrote, on 4th November 1598, that since the
town was wholly unable, in consequence of the
terrible dearth of corn (" beyond all other
s
258 Sir at ford-on- Avon
countries that I can hear of dear and over
dear"), to pay the national taxes, he hoped
"that our countryman Mr. Wm. Shak. would
procure us money, which I will like of, as I
shall hear when, and where, and how."
Richard Quiney was himself harassed by debt,
and had just before (25th October) addressed a
like request to Shakespeare in his own behalf.
" Loving countryman," the application ran
and the manuscript, which is still extant, is
the only surviving paper besides his will known
to have been pressed by Shakespeare's own
hands "Loving countryman, I am bold of
you as of a friend, craving your help with
xxx/z. . . . You shall friend me much in help
ing me out of all the debts I owe in London,
I thank God, and much quiet my mind, which
would not be indebted. . . ."
Shakespeare apparently maintained very
good relations with his father, and the coat-of-
arms granted to John Shakespeare in 1596 was
undoubtedly the result of his son's exertions.
John's own fortunes had long continued to
decline. In 1587 an importunate creditor,
Nicholas Lane, had made an attempt to
distrain on his goods, but found none on which
Shakespeare at Stratford 261
he could lay hands. John had already in 1579
mortgaged his estate of Ashbies at Wilmecote
for forty pounds to Edmund Lambert, a family
friend, and sold in 1579 some of his property at
Snitterfield to Robert Webbe, yeoman, for four
pounds. A vexatious lawsuit arose out of the
mortgage of Ashbies. John Shakespeare,
although hard pressed by other debts,
offered in 1580, according to the agree
ment, to pay off the mortgage, but Lambert
refused to relinquish the property. On his
death in 1597 his son continued in possession,
and John Shakespeare endeavoured to deprive
him, with what success is not known. In 1592
John Shakespeare was in worse plight : he was
returned as a " recusant." Commissioners had
come to Stratford to enforce the penalty of
twenty pounds to which those who did not
attend church once a month were liable. The
appearance of Shakespeare's name in the list of
defaulters has suggested that he was a Roman
Catholic. But it was not merely a man's religious
opinions that kept him from church. The
statute acknowledged the lawfulness of plead
ing in excuse not only "age, sickness, and im-
potency of body," but fear of creditors. It was
262 Stratford-on-A von
doubtless under the last disability that John
Shakespeare suffered. But throughout this
troubled time he still lived in the old house in
Henley Street ; and although he is said to have
let out an adjoining tenement, he never parted
with the copyhold of the property. In 1601 he
died intestate, and William doubtless followed
him to the grave. The poet, as the eldest son,
inherited the houses in Henley Street, but his
mother continued to live there till her death in
September 1608.
Five years before his father's death, another
and a far sadder funeral had brought Shake
speare to Stratford. On nth August 1596
there was buried in the parish church his only
son, Hamnet, aged eleven. That loss must
have tempered the satisfaction with which the
creator of Arthur and Mamillius witnessed the
triumphant success that attended the pro
duction at the same date of his Romeo and
Juliet. It was in the next year (1597) that
he made his first purchase of landed property
at Stratford, and bought the great house of
New Place, with two barns and two gardens.
For it he paid sixty pounds to William Under-
hill, gentleman, who had succeeded Alderman
Shakespeare at Stratford 263
Bott in 1567 in its ownership. In May 1602
the poet purchased one hundred and seven
acres of land to the north-east of the town, from
the Combes, his wealthy neighbours ; and on
28th September following he bought a cottage
of one Walter Getley, adjoining his garden in
Chapel Lane. In July 1605 he added largely
to these properties by buying for ^440, " the
unexpired term of a moiety of the interest in a
lease granted in 1554 for ninety-two years of
the tithes of Stratford, Bishopston, and Wei-
combe, subject to certain annual payments."
This was the last of the poet's Stratford
purchases of real estate, all of which were
completed before he was forty-two years old.
There is further evidence that he occasion
ally traded in agricultural produce, as his father
had done before him. In 1598 few of his neigh
bours owned more grain than he. Between
March and May 1604 ne s ld one pound nine
teen shillings and tenpence worth of malt to
one Philip Rogers, and lent him two shillings
afterwards : six shillings of the debt were repaid,
but Shakespeare had to bring an action in the
local court to recover the balance. The records
of 1608 and 1609 show Shakespeare engaged
264 , Sir atford-on- Avon
in recovering another debt of six pounds from
John Addenbroke. Shakespeare gained a
verdict, but Addenbroke decamped, and made
the success a barren one. But at that period
Shakespeare was one of the richest men in the
town.
During these years Shakespeare was
frequently passing to and from London, and
while at Stratford he does not always seem
to have resided at New Place. He rebuilt
it, apparently of stone, in 1598, soon after
purchasing it, and planted an orchard in the
garden, of which the mulberry tree planted
about 1609 was l n g a famous survival.
Early in the seventeenth century the town-
clerk, Thomas Greene, who claimed to be
Shakespeare's cousin, lived in the house, but
he removed about 1609. It has been sug
gested that between 1598 and 1607 Shake
speare and his family lived with his mother
in the houses in Henley Street, which his
father's death in 1601 had placed in his hands.
In 1607 his eldest daughter, Susannah, mar
ried John Hall, a rising physician of puritan
tendencies, recently settled in Stratford, who
purchased a large house in Old Town. And it
Shakespeare at Stratford 265
was there, according to some conjectures, that
Shakespeare took up a temporary residence
between 1607 an ^ 1609. After the latter date,
New Place was his permanent home, and he
rarely left Stratford in subsequent years. He
had many friends there. Old John Combe, of
whose suspected usury he laughingly dis
approved, was living at the college. He saw
much of the Quineys, his father's and his own
acquaintances from youth. The second house
from New Place, a very substantial building
which is still standing, was inhabited by Julius
Shaw, who dealt regularly in wool, corn, and
malt, and occasionally in wood and tiles. Shaw
was a member of the town council in 1603, a
chamberlain in 1609, an alderman in 1613, and
bailiff in 1616. Shakespeare knew him well,
and called him in just before his death to
witness his will. Relatives were also numerous
in the neighbourhood. The house in Henley
Street Shakespeare appears to have let (after
his final removal to New Place) to his sister
Joan and her husband, William Hart, who is
described as a hatter. (There they brought
up their three sons, the poet's nephews :
William, born in 1600, Thomas, born in 1605,
266 Stratford-on-A von
and Michael, born in 1608; and the occupiers
of the house in the early years of the present
century claimed descent from the Harts.)
Shakespeare's brothers, Gilbert, three years
his junior, and Richard, ten years his junior,
lived at Stratford, and the former assisted
him to complete some of his purchases of
land.
Visitors to Stratford doubtless knew the
wealthy inhabitant of New Place. Old Sir
Thomas Lucy had died at Charlecote, 7th July
1600, and his son and heir died three years
later. But a third Sir Thomas Lucy, grandson
of Shakespeare's early enemy, was diligent in
the discharge of local judicial functions. In
early life he had travelled on the continent with
Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and was apparently
a man of culture. He was often to be seen
riding about Stratford. We know that in 1632
he conferred with Shakespeare's son-in-law,
John Hall, on local business, and afterwards
refreshed himself at the Swan Inn. There
is every reason to assume that he and the poet
were known to each other. As much may be
said of another great neighbour Sir Fulk
Greville of Alcester and of Beauchamp's Court,
Shakespeare at Stratford 269
Warwick, a poet, a statesman, and the friend in
earlier days of Sir Philip Sidney. A more
congenial acquaintance was Michael Drayton,
a native of Warwick and an ardent lover of the
county of his birth.
Shakespeare never coveted municipal office ;
he was content to be merely Mr. Shakespeare,
gentleman, of Stratford, and neither alderman
nor bailiff. There is little reason to suspect
that the cause of his neglect of this road to
local fame is to be ascribed to any contempt on
his part for its humble worth. It was due
rather to the puritan atmosphere which was
fast settling upon Stratford when he was in
a position to avail himself of municipal
honours. His father had evinced puritan
leanings, with which his son was clearly
never in sympathy. As early as 1564, when
John Shakespeare was chamberlain, he paid
two shillings "for defacing image in chapel."
But it was some years before the puritan
spirit laid a firm enough hold on the town
council to induce them, as they did on two
occasions in the early part of the seventeenth
century, to consider " the inconvenience of
plays." Shakespeare must have felt some
270 Stratford-on-A von
amusement when the news was brought him
from the council chamber, opposite New Place,
that after very serious consideration the council
resolved, on 7th February 1612, that plays
were unlawful, and "the sufferance of them
against the orders heretofore made, and against
the example of other well - governed cities
and boroughs " ; and the council was there
fore "content," the resolution ran, "and they
conclude that the penalty of xs. imposed [on
players] be x/z. henceforth." Ten years later
the king's players were bribed by the council
to leave the city without playing. The
drinking of sack and claret by the burgesses
did not cease, however, but it, too, was now
directed to advance soberer causes than of
old. The council began to invite puritan
preachers to preach in the town and to take
their pottle of wine and quart of sack, at
the municipal expense, after the sermon. One
of these incongruous entertainments was,
singularly enough, celebrated in 1614 at
Shakespeare's own house. " One quart of
sack and one quart of claret wine given
to the preacher at New Place " is an item
in the chamberlain's accounts for 1614. It
Shakespeare'at Stratford 271
was probably John Hall, the poet's son-in-law,
who organised that gathering ; or it may be
that the preacher was personally attractive, and
that the owner of New Place was anxious to
make his acquaintance. Shakespeare, it should
also be remembered, must have been a regular
attendant at the parish church, and may at
times have enjoyed a sermon. The pew which
the residents at New Place occupied, called
from its early owners the Clopton Pew, was
near the pulpit, on the south side of the nave.
XXIV
THE GUNPOWDER PLOT COMBE's DEATH THE
ATTEMPT TO ENCLOSE THE WELCOMES FIELDS
SOME stirring episodes disturbed Stratford
in the dramatist's last days. In 1598 there
were riots, owing to the famine; in 1602
"rogues were taken at Clifford," amid much
unexplained excitement, finally quelled by
draughts of sack and Rhenish wine given
to the townsmen at the municipal expense. In
1605 an d 1606 much consternation was caused
in the neighbourhood by the Gunpowder
Plot. Some of the leading conspirators lived
near Stratford. At Clopton House, then the
property of Baron Carew, William Clopton's
son-in-law, lived Ambrose Rook wood, a chief
abettor of the plot, and he received there many
of his associates. Catesby lived near Lapworth.
When the plot was discovered, the bailiff of
Combe s Death 275
Stratford was ordered to make an inventory
of Rook wood's goods. He and many burgesses
proceeded to Clopton House on 26th February
1606, and found much Papist paraphernalia,
which they duly seized. 1
Eight years later, on loth July 1614, old
John Combe of the College died, and was buried
in the parish church with much ceremony.
Some while before his death, he had told Shake
speare, according to a well-known story of little
authenticity, that he believed the poet intended
to write his epitaph, and begged him to tell
him what he would say of him. Shakespeare
replied with four lines, the sharpness of
whose satire on Combe's 10 per cent loans
is said to have brought the friendship of the
two to an end-
Ten in the hundred lies here engraved,
'Tis a hundred to ten his soul is not saved.
If any man ask, Who lies in this tomb ?
Oh ! oh ! quoth the devil, 'tis my John-a-Combe.
As a matter of fact, Combe's tomb bore an
inscription recording his many charitable be
quests to the poor of Stratford, and by his
will he left five pounds to " Mr. William
1 Cf. Professor Hales's Notes, etc., on Shakespeare, pp. 25-56.
2 7 6
Stratford-on-A von
Shackspere." Other bequests prove Combe
to have lived on intimate terms with all the
MEMORIAL OF SIR HENRY RAINFORD IN CLIFFORD CHURCH.
neighbouring gentry, including Sir Henry
Rainford, whose elaborate monument stands
still in Clifford Church.
Attempt to Enclose the Welcombe Fields 277
Combe was a favourable specimen of the
new class of country landowners which the
development of commerce had made numerous
throughout sixteenth century England. His
chief object in life was to secure a fortune, but
he sought at the same time to stand well with
his neighbours, especially with those in high
social station. Speculation in land offered a
ready means of attaining his two aims of wealth
and social dignity. Land (as we have already
noted a ) was in those days an investment which
could ensure a profit, but for this purpose it
was necessary to apply it chiefly to grazing
uses, and to secure wide areas. The agri
cultural labourer suffered under such masters.
Little labour was required, and the agri
cultural population dwindled. A greed for
great estates invariably characterised the
new class of landowners. Small owners were
absorbed by large ones, and lands held in
common by municipal corporations were con
stantly threatened with enclosure. If old John
Combe did not himself exemplify the worst
vices of the new system, he could not avoid
inflicting some hardship on his poorer neigh-
1 See pp. 115-116.
2 7 8
Stratford-on-A von
hours ; and his son and successor, William
Combe, had far less consideration than his father
for either the tillers of the soil or the townsmen of
Stratford as owners of the common fields near
his estates. Shakespeare certainly bore in
mind the grievances of the South Warwickshire
peasants when he made Corin, the shepherd of
the Forest of Arden, in his As You Like It,
complain
But I am shepherd to another man,
And do not shear the fleeces that I graze.
My master is of churlish disposition,
And little recks to find the way to heaven
By doing deeds of hospitality.
The evil influence of " the greedy gentlemen
which are sheepmongers and graziers," and
are worse than " the caterpillars and locusts of
Egypt," is a commonplace in the charges
brought by those who under Elizabeth de
nounced the vices of the age. " They have
depopulated and overthrown whole towns, and
made thereof sheep pastures nothing profitable
to the commonwealth," is the opening phrase
of " a petition of the Diggers of Warwickshire "
addressed " to all other diggers" in the reign
of James I.
Attempt to Enclose the Welcornbe Fields 279
The enclosure of the common fields attached
to villages and towns was repeatedly attempted
by the new landowners in the face of many
prohibitory enactments, and often with com
plete success. This pillage of valued rights
was always hotly resented, and often violently
resisted. In May and June 1607 the peasantry
of the midland counties, smarting under many
such invasions of their privileges and properties,
were involved in something like a rebellion.
" People," the proclamation issued to repress
the disturbances ran, "did assemble themselves
in riotous and tumultuous manner, sometimes
in the night and sometimes in the day, under
pretence of laying open enclosed grounds of
late years taken in to their domage, as they
say." In Warwickshire and elsewhere, says
Stow, "a great number of common persons
. . . violently cut and broke down hedges . . .
and laid open all such enclosures of commons
and other grounds as they found enclosed." !
At Hill's Norton, in Warwickshire, the in
surgents assembled to the number of 3000,
armed with spades, shovels, bills, and pikes.
The leader, John Reynolds, was called Captain
1 Stow's Chronicles (1632), p. 890.
2 8 o Stratford-on-A von
Pouch, because he pretended that a pouch
which he was in the habit of wearing contained
enough to feed any number of rebels. On sub
sequent examination there was only found in
the pouch " a piece of green cheese." Reynolds
or Pouch asserted that he had authority from
the king to overthrow enclosures. But when
the agitators declined to disperse on the issue
of a proclamation promising an investigation
into their grievances, military force was em
ployed, and all the ringleaders were arrested
and hanged. James I. expressed himself
strongly against the enclosures, and admitted
the injury thus wrought on the poor labourers.
After such disturbances in the peaceful
neighbourhood of Stratford, it is surprising to
find that William, John Combe's heir, had no
sooner succeeded to his father's lands than he
attempted to enclose the common fields about
his estate at Welcombe, which undoubtedly
belonged to the Stratford townsmen. In the
autumn the corporation of Stratford first be
came aware of Combe's intention, and they
resolved to offer it the sternest resistance.
Shakespeare had some personal interest in
the matter. He owned some neighbouring
Attempt to Enclose the Welcombe Fields 281
lands as well as part of the tithes of the
threatened fields. But he had small sympathy
with popular rights, and when Combe's agent,
Replingham, in October 1614 formally drew
up a deed engaging that he should suffer no
injury by the enclosure, he threw his influence
into Combe's scale.
In November 1614 he was in London, and
Thomas Greene, town clerk of Stratford- on -
Avon, who calls Shakespeare his cousin, al
though it is improbable that they were relatives,
visited him there to discuss the position of
affairs.
On 23d December 1614 the corporation
assembled in formal meeting and drew up a
letter to Shakespeare imploring him to aid them
in the struggle. Greene himself sent to the
dramatist "a note of inconveniences [that] would
happen by the enclosure." But although an am
biguous entry 1 of a later date (September 1615),
1 The words are "Sept. Mr. Shakspeare tellyng J. Greene that I
was not able to beare the encloseing of Welcombe. " J. Greene is to
be distinguished from Thomas Greene the diarist. The entry therefore
implies that Shakespeare told J. Greene that the writer of the diary,
Thomas Greene, was not able to bear the enclosure. Dr. C. M.
Ingleby published in 1885 a careful facsimile of the extant pages of
Green's diary (now preserved at Stratford) with a transcript by Mr. E.
J. L. Scott of the British Museum. Mr. Scott showed that Greene's
writing of this entry can only be read as we give it. Those who wish
282
Stratford-on -A von
in the few extant pages of Greene's ungram-
matical diary has been tortured into an expres
sion of disgust on Shakespeare's part at Combe's
conduct, it is quite clear that Shakespeare
adhered to his agreement with Combe's agent,
and tacitly supported him. Happily Combe
failed. The corporation carried their case into
the law courts, and the decision was in their
favour. It is interesting to note that one of
the disputed parcels of land, called then as now
" the Dingles," is still unenclosed and offers the
wayfarer an admirable point of view from which
to survey Stratford and the neighbouring
country.
to make Shakespeare a champion of popular rights unjustifiably inter- '
pret the " I " in "I was not able, etc." as "he," in which case
Shakespeare would have told Greene that he (i.e. himself) disliked the
enclosure. But all the correspondence addressed to Shakespeare on
the subject by the council makes it clear that he and they took opposite
views throughout.
XXV
SHAKESPEARE'S DEATH AND HIS DESCENDANTS
BUT before this dispute had reached its final
settlement, Shakespeare's days came to a
sudden close. He had welcomed the birth of
his first grandchild, Elizabeth Hall, in 1608,
the year of his mother's death. On loth
February 1616 there took place the marriage
of his second daughter, Judith, who was then
thirty -one years old, to the son of Richard
Quiney, of High Street, Thomas Quiney, who
was four years her junior. The ceremony was
performed without a license, and some doubts
as to its legality were subsequently raised. On
1 7th April the funeral of his brother-in-law,
William Hart, the hatter, brought almost all the
members of the family to the parish church.
But it is doubtful if Shakespeare was present.
A few days before, according to an ancient
284
Sir at ford-on- A von
tradition, the poet was entertaining at New
Place his two friends, Michael Dray ton and Ben
Jonson, and in the midst of the festivities was
himself taken suddenly ill. Certain it is that on
Tuesday, 23d April, six days after Hart's burial,
Shakespeare died, at the age of fifty- two. On
Thursday, 25th April, he was buried near the
northern wall of the chancel, by the door of the
charnel-house, where the bones dug up from
the churchyard were deposited. The poet,
fearful that his bones should suffer this in
dignity, is said to have written for inscription
on his tomb-
Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbeare
To dig the dust enclosed heare ;
Bleste be the man that spares these stones,
And curst be he that moves my bones.
According to the letter of one William Hall, a
visitor to Stratford in 1694, recently brought
to light, these verses were penned to suit " the
capacity of clerks and sextons, for the most
part a very ignorant set of people"; had this
curse not threatened them, Hall proceeds, they
would not have hesitated in course of time to
remove Shakespeare's dust to " the bone-
house," where waggon -loads of bones were
Shakespeare's Death and his Descendants 287
allowed to accumulate. The design, says the
same authority, did not miss of its effect, for
the grave was made seventeen feet deep, and
was never opened, even to receive his wife,
although she had expressed her desire to be
buried with her husband.
Thus Stratford was deprived of the inhabit
ant to whose " wit " its renown is due. The
burgesses of 1616 gave no sign that they were
conscious that death was taking from them one
who left anything besides a substantial worldly
fortune to invite their respect. The great bell
of the church was tolled, the bailiff and alder
men joined the funeral procession, rosemary
was freely strewn above the grave, and a
liberal banquet was provided for the mourners.
Every honour was paid by the poet's fellow-
townsmen, but none of those who were his daily
companions at Stratford guessed that he had
already gained an immortal fame for work done
outside their parish boundaries.
Shakespeare's will, the first draft of which
was drawn up in the January before his death,
and the final draft by his bedside, was proved
by Hall, in London, on the 22d of June. To
his younger daughter, Judith, besides a portion
288 Stratford-on-Avon
of his landed property, he left ^150, of which
^"100 was her marriage portion, and another
^150 to be paid to her if alive three years after
the date of the will. To his sister, Joan Hart,
who had just become a widow, he left, besides
a contingent reversionary interest in Judith's
legacy, his wearing apparel, 20 in money, a
life interest in the Henley Street property, and
5 to each of her three sons. To his grand
daughter, Elizabeth Hall, he bequeathed his
plate, with the exception of his broad silver and
gilt bowl, which was reserved for Judith Ouiney.
To the poor of Stratford he gave 10 ; to Mr.
Thomas Combe (apparently a brother of John,
of the enclosure controversy) his sword ; and
to a number of Stratford friends, and to his
" fellows," his partners in his theatrical specula
tions, John Hemyngs, Richard Burbage, and
Henry Cundell, xxvjV. viijV. each, with which
to buy memorial rings. To Susannah Hall, his
elder daughter, he left, with remainder to her
issue, New Place, almost all his land, barns, and
gardens, and a house at Blackfriars, London.
To his wife he gave only his second best bed
with its furniture ; all the rest of his household
stuff passed to John Hall and his wife Susannah.
SHAKESPEARE'S MONUMENT.
U
Shakespeare s Death and his Descendants 291
The executors were Thomas Russell " esquier,"
and Francis Collins, a solicitor of Warwick.
That the second best bed should have been
bestowed on his wife was, according to contem
porary notions, a mark of esteem, but that it
should form the only bequest forms a strong
argument in favour of the theory that the
dramatist was not happy in his domestic life.
His daughter Susannah was, according to his
will, to take his wife's position as mistress of
New Place.
Soon after his death, certainly before 1623,
an elaborate monument was erected to Shake
speare's memory in the chancel of the parish
church. The services of a London sculptor
and tomb-maker, Gerard Johnson, son of a
native of Amsterdam, with a shop near St.
Saviour's Church, Southwark, not far from the
Globe Theatre, were called into requisition,
and the inscription was apparently written
by a London friend of the dramatist. The
bust above the inscribed tablet is probably
from a cast taken after death, and, though
scarcely pleasing, is the most authentic
memorial of the poet's features. The words
run
2 9 2 Sir at ford-on- A von
Juditio Pylium, genio Socratem, arte Maronem,
Terra tegit^ populus maeret, Olympus habet.
Stay, passenger, why goest thou by so fast ?
Read, if -thou canst, whom envious death hath plast
Within this monument ; Shakspeare, with whome
Quick nature dide ; whose name doth deck ys tombe
Far more then cost ; sith all yt he hath writt
Leaves living art but page to serve his witt.
Obiit ano. dot. 1616. Aetatis 53. Die 23 Ap.
Of Shakespeare's family, his wife died on
6th August 1623, and was buried near her
husband two days later. The Halls moved to
New Place soon after the poet's death. John
Hall increased his medical practice largely
there, and his patients included the neighbour
ing gentry within a circuit of thirty miles. His
puritanism grew more confirmed and precise in
later life, and he frequently quarrelled with his
neighbours. He was buried in the chancel of
the parish church on the 25th November 1635.
His only child had been since 1626 the wife of
Thomas Nash, and to his son-in-law Hall be
queathed by will "his study of books." This
study, it has been reasonably conjectured, must
have formed the library of his father-in-law.
The books do not appear to have been quickly
Shakespeare s Death and his Descendants 295
removed from New Place, as his widow, who
was still residing there, showed them in 1642
to James Cooke, a doctor professionally engaged
at Stratford in the Civil War. He informed
her that some manuscripts of her husband were
among them, and offered to buy them of her,
but this offer she declined, and disputed his
opinion as to the authorship of the papers. Is
it possible that some of her father's manuscripts
were among them, or that she believed them to
be ? In any case, the information would have
availed her little, for reading was not one of
her accomplishments. Unhappily, nothing is
known of the later history of the papers. Mis
tress Hall died on nth July 1649, and was
buried near her husband. Her tomb bears the
epitaph-
Witty above her sexe, but that's not all,
Wise to salvation was good Mistris Hall ;
Something of Shakespere was in that, but this
Wholy of Him with whom she's now in blisse.
Then, Passenger, ha'st ne're a teare
To weepe with her that wept with all ;
That wept, yet set herselfe to chere
Them up with comforts cordiall ?
Her love shall live, her mercy spread,
When thou ha'st ne're a teare to shed.
296 Stratford-on-Avon
Judith, Shakespeare's younger daughter,
lived on till Qth 1 February 1662. Her husband,
soon after their marriage, removed to the house
called the Cage, in Bridge Street, and was in
business there as a vintner. He was a member
of the town council from 1617 till 1630, when
he fell into evil habits, and was fined for swear
ing and encouraging tipplers. From that date
his fortunes declined. He finally sought
employment in London, and died there about
1652. Judith's married life was thus not a very
happy one. Of her three sons, the eldest,
named Shakespeare, died in infancy, and the
other two on reaching manhood, and she lived
lonely at Stratford till death. The last surviv
ing descendant of Shakespeare was his grand
daughter Elizabeth Hall, whose first husband,
Thomas Nash, a resident at Stratford, a student
of Lincoln's Inn, died in 1647. She married
afterwards Sir John Barnard, a Northampton
shire gentleman, and died, without issue by
either marriage, in 1670. With her second
husband she lived for some years at New
Place, which she inherited from her mother,
but she subsequently resided at Sir John's
house at Abington, in Northamptonshire, and
Shakespeare s Death and his Descendants 299
in the church there she was buried. New
Place she bequeathed to Sir John Barnard,
and soon after his death, in 1674, it was
repurchased by the Clopton family.
It is unnecessary to pursue the history of
Stratford beyond these points. Of the final
fortunes of New Place, it only remains to tell
of its rebuilding by a Hugh Clopton in 1 703,
before any authentic pictorial representation of
its appearance in Shakespeare's day had been
made, and of its ultimate demolition in 1759 by
Francis Gastrell, Vicar of Stratford, to avoid
the pertinacity of sightseers and the payment ot
local taxes. Of other structural changes that
Stratford underwent in the last century, the
chief were the destruction of the College and
the erection of the Townhall. To the new
Townhall the municipal offices were transferred,
and the ancient Guildhall was thus left un-
tenanted. The general historian treats of the
part played by the town in the civil warfare of
the seventeenth century, of the story of Queen
Henrietta Maria's flying visit to New Place in
1643, an d of the quartering of soldiers at the
time in Shakespeare's dwelling-place. The legal
300
Stratford-on-A von
antiquary has described the grants of new
charters to the town by Charles II, and the
reform of the corporation in 1835. Of the
jubilees celebrated in the town since the days
of Garrick to honour the memory of the poet,
many records exist, and their barren history
has been often told. The purchase by the
nation of the birthplace in Henley Street,
and of New Place with its gardens, and the
erection of the memorial buildings on the river-
bank, are fresh in the memory of literary
students, and are no unworthy, although in
themselves necessarily inadequate, testimonies
of a nation's gratitude to Stratford for having
nurtured its king of poets.
The origin of the town and its development
in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries
alone afford a profitable study to the lover of
Shakespeare. But even while studying them,
it is useless to estimate exactly how much the
dramatist owed to Stratford. We could point
out in the various lists of the town's inhabitants
the immortal names of Fluellen and Bardolf, of
John Page and Thomas Ford, of Perkes and of
Peto, and many more confirmations than appear
in the foregoing pages of Aubrey's statement
THE CHANCEL OF STRATFORD CHURCH.
Shakespeare's Death and his Descendants 303
that "he did gather the humours of men daily
wherever he came." We might depict Shake
speare seeking inspiration for the sylvan scenes
of As You Like It beneath the trees of the
Warwickshire Forest of Arden. We might
press the theory that makes Lord Carew the
lord of Taming of the Shrew and Clopton
House the scene of Kit Sly's illusion. But it
is wiser to take a larger view, and to be content
to marvel how, in the aspect of the town and
country, fair as the latter was and is, or how in
304 Stratford-on-Avon
the petty details of Stratford daily life, his
mighty genius found adequate nourishment.
It is vain to endeavour to solve this mystery, or
to strive to indicate either in "the world of
living men," or in " wood, and stream, and
field, and hill, and ocean,"
All he had loved and moulded into thought.
THE END
Printed by R. & R. CLARK, Edinburgh.
PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE
CARDS OR SLIPS FROM THIS POCKET
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO LIBRARY
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