Church Street—The “Castle” inn—The Guild Chapel, Guild Hall, and Grammar
School—New Place.
CHURCH STREET is the most likeable of all the streets of Stratford.
There you do not, in point of fact, actually see the church, which is out
away beyond the end of it. The features of this quiet and yet not dull
thoroughfare are the few and scattered shops in among private houses, and
a quaint old inn of unusual design, the “Windmill.” It is illustrated
here, and so the effective frontage, with its row of singularly bold
dormer windows need not be more particularly described. The interior is
almost equally interesting, and has a deep ingle-nook with one of those
bacon-cupboards that are so numerously found in the town and district.
It is a house that attracts and holds the observant man’s attention, and
it has been so greatly admired by an American visitor that a complete set
of architectural drawings was made for him and an exact replica built in
Chicago a few years ago.
Opposite the “Windmill” inn is a fine Georgian mansion called “Mason
Croft,” obviously once occupied by a person of importance, many years
since. But the chief feature of Church Street is the long range of
half-timbered buildings with its striking row of massive chimney-stacks,
ending with the imposing stone tower of the Guild Chapel. It is entirely
right that these buildings should bulk so largely to the eye, for in them
is centred the greater part of Stratford’s history. They are the
timeworn and venerable buildings of that ancient Guild of Holy Cross
whose beginnings are in the dim past and have never been definitely
fixed. The earliest facts relating to the Guild take the story of it
back to 1269, when its first Chapel was begun, and when the
semi-religious character of the fraternity was its more important half.
[Picture: The “Windmill” Inn]
The Guild may be likened to a mutual benefit society of modern times,
with the addition of the religious element. It was founded in
superstition, but lived that down and became not only an institution of
the greatest service, but also the originator of the Grammar School, and
an informal town council and local authority, which, strangely enough, in
its later and almost wholly secularised character, withstood the
exactions of the Bishops of Worcester, the old-time lords of the manor
and their stewards, and finally, after being dissolved in 1547, was
re-constituted as the town council of the newly incorporated borough in
1553.
The original form of the Guild was that of a subscription society for men
and women. Its benefits, unlike those of the Foresters and the
Oddfellows of to-day, were chiefly spiritual. It employed priests to
look after the religious needs of its members during life and to pray for
the health of their souls after death. It secured these then greatly
desired benefits at a reduced rate, just as the modern benefit society
employs the club doctor. It also in many ways promoted kindliness and
good-fellowship, helped the poor, and often found husbands for
unappropriated spinsters by the simple process of endowing them. This
was all to the good. Somewhat later the Guild espoused the cause of
education, and certainly had a grammar school at the close of the
fourteenth century, payments to the schoolmaster being the subject of
allusion in the Guild’s archives in 1402. Once a year the entire
membership went in stately procession to church, and returning to the
Guild Hall indulged in one of those gargantuan feasts whose records are
the amazement of modern readers. Of the 103 pullets, and of the geese
and the beef recorded to have been consumed at one of these feasts in the
beginning of the fifteenth century we say nothing, but on the same
occasion they drank “34 gallons of good beer,” and “39 gallons of small
ale,” perhaps on the well-known old principle that “good eating deserveth
good drinking.” The 73 gallons of ale not being enough they sent out and
had some more in by the cistern, a method which seems determined and
heroic. The account thus includes “1 cestern of penyale,” for which they
paid the equivalent of eight shillings, and “2 cesterns of good beer
bought from Agnes Iremonger for 3_s._”; that is to say, about twenty-four
shillings’ worth. They seem to have had enough, “’Tis merry in hall when
beards wag all,” and there can be no doubt that the company who on this
occasion drank pottle-deep were merry enough.
The Guild also added morality plays to its entertainments; but all these
lively proceedings formed but one side to its activities. It fulfilled
many of the functions of local government, and strictly too, and its
aldermen and proctors were officials not likely to be disregarded. The
authority of the Guild was supported by its wealth, contributed by the
benefactions of the members, which rendered it in course of time, after
the lord of the manor, the largest landowner in and about the town.
It was not so great a change when the old Guild was reconstructed and
became the town council. By that time it had ceased its early care for
the future of its members’ souls, and had become in some of its
developments much more like a Chamber of Commerce. But it had not
forgotten to make merry and its love-feasts continued, and its morality
plays with them, although they had become a little more after the secular
model.
These traditions were continued into the town council, as they could
scarcely fail to be, for the members of that body had been also officials
of the Guild. John Shakespeare, high Bailiff in 1569, was responsible
for inviting a company of actors to perform in the Guild Hall, and others
did the like.
The Guild Chapel, founded in 1296 and largely rebuilt by the generosity
of Sir Hugh Clopton in the fifteenth century, is the chief of the Guild’s
old buildings. It is not now of much practical use, but of venerable
aspect and considerable beauty. The tower, porch and nave are Clopton’s
work, the beautiful porch still displaying his shield of arms and that of
the City of London, although greatly weathered and defaced. He did not
touch the chancel, which had already been restored; and the exterior
still shows by force of contrast the greatness of Clopton’s gift; his
nave entirely overshadowing in its comparative bulk the humble
proportions of the chancel. Frankness is at least as desirable a quality
in a book as in the affairs of life, and so it may at once be admitted
that the interior of the Guild Chapel is extremely disappointing. It is
coldly whitewashed, and the ancient frescoes discovered a hundred years
ago have faded away. They included a fine, if alarming to some minds,
representation of the doom, a fifteenth-century notion of the Judgment
Day. Alarming to some minds because of the very high percentage of the
damned disclosed at this awful balancing of accounts. Illustrations of
this, among the other frescoes, survive, and have a fearful interest. It
is pleasing to see the towering mansions of the Blest on the left hand,
with St. Peter waiting at the open door welcoming that, ah! so small
band; but on the right, where green, pink and blue pig-faced devils with
asses’ ears are tormenting their prey, whanging them with bludgeons and
raking them in with three-pronged prokers, casting them into Hell’s
Mouth, and finally roasting them in a furnace, the prospect is vile.
Shakespeare must have been perfectly familiar with these horrific things,
and Falstaff’s likening of a flea on Bardolph’s fiery nose to a “black
soul burning in hell fire,” looks very like a vivid recollection of them.
Some day, perhaps, when the Shakespearean cult at Stratford is more
advanced (it is only in its youth yet) these frescoes will be renewed,
from the careful records of them that have been kept.
[Picture: Guild Chapel, Guild Hall, Grammar School and Almshouses]
The lengthy line of the Guild Hall and the almshouses of the Guild is one
of the most effective things in the town. It dates from 1417. For many
years, until 1894, the stout timbering was hidden away beneath plaster,
and few suspected the simple beauty of the honest old oak framing hidden
beneath. The plaster was spread over it _to preserve the oak from the
weather_. Let us italicise that choice specimen of stupidity, not
because it is unique or even rare, for it is found all over the country,
and elsewhere in this very town of Stratford, and here and everywhere
else it is at last being found out; but because the italics are needed
somewhere, to drive home the peculiar dunderheadedness of it. I think
perhaps, after all, plaster was coated over old timbering, not so much
for the preservation of it as because generations had been born who could
not endure the uneven lines of the old work. The woodwork of those later
heirs of time was true to a hair’s breadth and planed down to an orderly
smoothness: not riven anyhow from the logs. A conflict of ideals had
arisen, and the new era was ashamed of the handiwork of the old.
There have been times when architects were also ashamed of their
chimneys, and disguised them and hid them away, as though a chimney were
an unnatural thing for a house and to be abated and apologised for. The
only time to apologise for a chimney is when it smokes inside the house
instead of out; and it is pleasant to see that whoever designed and built
the long and lofty range of chimneys that rises, almost like a series of
towers, from this roof ridge, had not the least idea of excusing them.
The hall of the Guild occupies almost half the length of the lower floor.
The remainder forms the almshouses formerly occupied by the poorer
brethren of the Guild and still housing the pensioners enjoying their
share of the Clopton benefactions. They wear on the right arm a silver
badge displaying the Clopton cross, a cross heraldically described as a
“cross pattée fitchée at foot.”
The interior of the Guild Hall displays firstly that long ground-floor
hall in which the Guild members met and feasted or transacted business,
and where their morality plays and the entertainments given by their
successors, the earlier town councils, were acted. Here such travelling
companies as those who called themselves “the Earl of Leicester’s
servants,” and other troupes of actors, occasionally performed.
Shakespeare as a boy must have seen them, and thus probably had his
attention first directed to the stage as a career.
From this long hall the room variously styled the “Armoury,” or the small
Council Chamber or “’Greeing Room,” is entered. This Agreeing Room,
perhaps for the inner councils of the Guild, was re-panelled about 1619,
when the door leading from the hall was built; and as a sign of
rejoicing, the royal arms were painted over the fireplace at the time of
the Restoration of Charles the Second, in 1660. Here also at one time
the arms of the town guard were kept.
The present School Library, overhead, occupies the room under the roof,
formerly the large Council Chamber of the Guild. The heraldic white and
red roses painted on the west wall, the red countercharged with a white
centre and the white with red, were placed there in 1485, marking the
satisfaction of the townsfolk at the marriage of Henry the Seventh with
Elizabeth of York, and the union of the rival Houses of York and
Lancaster.
Out of this room opens the Latin Schoolroom of the Grammar School. The
first portion of it was once separate, and known as the Mathematical
Room. Here we are on the scene of Shakespeare’s schooldays, the
schoolroom where he learnt that “small Latin and less Greek,” with which
Ben Jonson credited him; a room still used in the education of Stratford
boys. He pictured the schoolboy of his own and every other time in the
lines—
“The whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like a snail
Unwillingly to school.”
How unwillingly we do not fully comprehend until we look more closely
into the schooling of those days. It was a twelve-hour day, begun
extremely early in the morning, and continued through the weary hours
with some exercise of the rod.
We know exactly who were the masters of the Grammar School in the years
1571 to 1580, when Shakespeare received his education here, in common
with the other children of the town. They were Walter Roche, who was a
Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and afterwards rector of
Clifford Chambers; succeeded in 1572 by Thomas Hunt, afterwards
curate-in-charge at Luddington; and in 1577 by Thomas Jenkins, of St.
John’s College, Oxford. These may have been pedants, but they were
scholars, and qualified to impart an excellent education. They were in
fact men distinctly above the average of the schoolmasters of that age,
and live for all time in the characters of Holofernes in _Love’s Labour’s
Lost_ and Sir Hugh Evans in the _Merry Wives of Windsor_; the title
“Sir,” being one, not of knighthood, but of courtesy, given to a
clergyman. Shakespeare’s allusions to schools, masters and scholars, and
his Latin conversations in the plays, modelled on the school methods then
in vogue, are much more numerous and illuminative than generally
supposed. We find, indeed, an especially intimate touch with
Shakespeare’s schooldays in the description of Malvolio in _Twelfth
Night_ as “like a pedant that keeps school i’ the church”; a remark whose
significance is not evident until we read that during Shakespeare’s own
schooldays the buildings were extensively repaired and that for a time
the master and pupils were housed in the Guild Chapel.
[Picture: The Schoolmaster’s House and Guild Chapel]
The Latin Schoolroom has an outside staircase built in recent years to
replace the original, abolished in 1841. The half-timbered house
standing in the courtyard was formerly the schoolmaster’s residence; it
is now, with the need for accommodating the natural increase of scholars,
used for additional class-rooms.
Shakespeare, retiring early from his interests in London and the
playhouses, and coming home to Stratford a wealthy man, hoping to live
many years in the enjoyment of his fortune, settled in the old mansion he
had bought, adjoining the scene of his own schooldays. He must have
looked with a kindly eye and with much satisfaction from the windows of
New Place, upon the schoolboys coming and going along the street, as he
himself had done. Not every one can be so fortunate. Perhaps the
reigning schoolmaster of the time even held up the shining example of Mr.
William Shakespeare, “who was a schoolboy here, like you, my boys,” to
his classes, and carefully omitting the factors of chance and
opportunity, promised them as great success if they did but mind their
books. Perhaps, on the other hand—for these were already puritan
times—their distinguished neighbour was an awful example: author of those
shocking exhibitions called stage-plays, at this time forbidden in the
town, under penalties, and an actor, “such as those rogues whom we but
the other day sent packing from our streets. Beware, my lads, lest you
become wealthy after the fashion of Mr. Shakespeare. ‘What profiteth it
a man, if he should gain the whole world and lose his own soul?’”
[Picture: The Headmaster’s Desk, Stratford-on-Avon Grammar School]
Shakespeare, although he had become a personage of great consideration,
with a fine residence, many times removed from his father’s humble house
in Henley Street, had not changed into a more salubrious neighbourhood.
The Stratford of his day and for long after was a dirty and insanitary
place, according to our notions, but the townsfolk did not seem to be
troubled by these conditions, and it never occurred to them that the
plagues and fevers that carried off many of their fellows to Heaven—or
whatever their destination—untimely were caused by the dirt and the vile
odours of the place. Stratford of course, was not singular in this, and
had its counterpart in most other towns and villages of that age. The
town council, however, drew the line at the burgesses keeping pigs in
part of the houses, or allowing them to wander in the streets; and
enacted a fine of fourpence for every strayed porker. But the townsfolk
regarded the authority’s dislike of pigs as a curious eccentricity, and
the swine had their styes and roamed the streets exactly as before. The
biggest of the six municipal muckhills that raised their majestic crests
in the streets all the year round was situated in Chapel Lane, opposite
Shakespeare’s door, but there is no record of his having objected to it.
It was this, however, and the deplorable condition of Chapel Lane in
general, then notoriously the dirtiest thoroughfare in the town, which
probably caused the poet’s death; for the opinion now generally held is
that he died of typhoid fever.
Down Chapel Lane then ran an open gutter: a wide and dirty ditch some
four or five feet across, choked with mud. All the filth of this part of
the town ran into it and discharged into the river.
There is no pictorial record of New Place, as it was when Shakespeare
resided in it. He was unfortunate in living long before the age of
picture-postcards, and never knew the joy of seeing illustrations of his
house, “New Place; residence of Mr. William Shakespeare” (with the
tell-tale legend “Printed in Germany.” in ruby type on the back), for
sale in all the shop windows. Poor devil!
New Place passed by Shakespeare’s will to his daughter Susanna and her
husband Dr. Hall. They removed from their house “Hall’s Croft,” Old
Stratford, shortly afterwards, Shakespeare’s widow probably living with
them until her death in 1623. Dr. Hall died in 1635. In 1643, Mrs. Hall
here entertained Queen Henrietta Maria for three weeks, at the beginning
of the royalist troubles, when the Queen came to the town with 5000 men.
In 1649 she died, two years after her son-in-law, Thomas Nash, whose
house is next door. Somewhere about this time all the Shakespeare books
and manuscripts would seem to have disappeared. The puritan Dr. Hall
disapproved of stage-plays, and his wife, Shakespeare’s daughter Susanna,
could neither write nor read; and thus the complete destruction of the
dramatist’s records is easily accounted for.
Nash’s widow, Shakespeare’s granddaughter, married again, a John Barnard
who was afterwards knighted. Lady Barnard died childless at her
husband’s place at Abington, Northamptonshire, and was buried there,
leaving New Place to her husband, who died four years later, in 1674. By
a strange chance, the house that had been sold out of the Clopton family
now came back to it by marriage, Sir Edward Walker who bought the
property in 1675, leaving Barbara, an only child, who married Sir John
Clopton. His son, Sir Hugh, came into possession of an entirely
new-fronted house, for his father, careless of its associations, in 1703
had made great alterations here. Illustrations of this frontage which
survived until 1759, show that it was not at all Shakespearean; being
instead most distinctly and flagrantly Queen Annean, in the semi-classic
taste of that day, with a pediment and other architectural details which
we are convinced Shakespeare’s New Place never included.
The ill-tempered Rev. Francis Gastrell who bought New Place in 1753
completed the obliteration of the illustrious owner’s residence. There
cannot, happily, be many people so black-tempered as this wealthy
absentee vicar of Frodsham, in Cheshire, who, resident for the greater
part of the year in Lichfield, yet found Stratford desirable at some time
in the twelve months. His acrid humours were early stirred. He had no
sooner moved in than he found numbers of people coming every day to see
Shakespeare’s mulberry-tree in the garden, so he promptly had it cut
down, to save himself annoyance. Then he objected to the house being
assessed for taxes all the year round, although he occupied it only a
month or two in the twelve; and when the authorities refused to accept
his view, he had the place entirely demolished. Thus perished New Place.
The site of it, after passing through several hands, was finally
purchased, together with the adjoining Thomas Nash’s house, by public
subscription in 1861; and both are now the property of the Shakespeare
Birthplace Trust.
The site of New Place is open to the view of all who pass along Church
Street and Chapel Lane, a dwarf wall with ornamental railing alone
dividing it and its gardens from the pavement. Sixpence, which is the
key that unlocks many doors in Shakespeare land, admits to the
foundations, all that remain of the house, and also to the “New Place
Museum,” in the house of Thomas Nash. Strange to say, the Trustees do
not charge for admission to the gardens. Is this an oversight, or a
kindly wish to leave the stranger an odd sixpence to get home with?
Nash’s house, odiously re-fronted about the beginning of the nineteenth
century, showed a stuccoed front with pillared portico to the street
until recently. This year (1912) the alterations have been completed by
which the frontage is restored by the evidence of old prints to its
appearance in Nash’s time. The interior remains as of old. Among the
relics in the Museum are chairs, tables, a writing-desk, and other
articles rather doubtfully said to have belonged to Shakespeare; a
trinket-box supposed to have been Anne Hathaway’s, and an old
shuffle-board from the “Falcon” inn opposite, on which Shakespeare is
said to have played a game with friends at nights, when he felt bored at
home. Unfortunately for tradition and the authenticity of this
“Shakespearean relic,” the “Falcon” was a private house in Shakespeare’s
lifetime, and for long after. It is known to have become an inn only at
some time between 1645 and 1668. The sign was chosen probably in
allusion to the Shakespeare crest. Reproductions of portraits of
Shakespeare’s friends complete the collections in Nash’s House.