Clopton House—Billesley—The Home of Shakespeare’s Mother, Wilmcote—Aston
Cantlow—Wootton Wawen—Shakespeare Hall, Rowington.
THERE is a mansion of much local fame rather more than a mile out of
Stratford, off the Henley road: the manor-house of Clopton, for long past
the seat of the Hodgson family, but formerly that of one of the ancient
families of Clopton, who are found not only in Warwickshire and
Gloucestershire, but in Suffolk as well. Widespread as they once were, I
believe that the very name is now extinct.
There is necessarily much mention of the Clopton name in these pages, for
Sir Hugh Clopton was the great fifteenth-century benefactor of Stratford.
He was a younger son of the owner of this manor. The house has been time
and again altered and partly rebuilt, but it still contains portraits of
the Cloptons on the great Jacobean staircase, and painted on the walls of
an attic, once used as a secret chapel by Roman Catholics, are to this
day the black-letter texts upon which Ambrose Rookwood, prominent in the
Gunpowder Plot of 1605, must have looked. He had rented Clopton House
for a time, in order to be conveniently near his friends, and to the
meeting-place on Dunsmore, which the conspirators had appointed the scene
of their rebellion when King and Parliament should have been blown
sky-high by Guy Fawkes’ thirty-two barrels of gunpowder. After the
failure of the plot and the arrest of the conspirators, the High Bailiff
of Stratford was instructed to seize Ambrose Rookwood’s effects at
Clopton House. An inventory of them is preserved in the Birthplace
Museum at Stratford, and affords some quaint reading. Chalices, crosses,
crucifixes, and a variety of obviously Papist articles, are in company
with “an oulde cloake bagge,” whose value was sixpence, and “a white
nagge,” twenty shillings. The High Bailiff evidently cleared the house,
taking all he could find, for mention is made of “one pair of old boots,
2_d._ these being the goods of Ambrose Fuller.” There is a further note
that Ambrose Fuller had his old boots restored to him; the High Bailiff
being presumably unable to find anything treasonable in them.
Shakespeare is said to have taken his idea of Ophelia from Margaret
Clopton, who in the misery of disappointed love is supposed to have
drowned herself in a well in the gardens in 1592. A Charlotte Clopton,
too, is supposed to have been buried alive in the Clopton vault in
Stratford church in 1564, when the plague visited the neighbourhood, and
thus to have given Shakespeare a scene in _Romeo and Juliet_. But it is
only fair to say that the stories are legendary and not sustained by any
known facts in the Clopton family history.
From Clopton we will retrace our steps to Stratford, and thence set out
anew, to visit some outlying villages of interest, better reached from
the road to Alcester.
The Alcester road is the least interesting road out of Stratford. It
leads past the Great Western Railway station, and thence up Red Hill,
reaching Alcester, the Roman _Alauna_, in seven and a half miles. There
is little joy or interest to be got out of Alcester, which is a pleasant
enough little town of 3500 inhabitants and a manufacture of needles, but
not thrilling. There is still some unenclosed land along this road, on
the left, a rather wild upland common—the “unshrubb’d down”; and it is a
tumbled up and down country on the right, where Billesley stands.
Billesley is a parish, with a parish church and an ancient manor-house,
but no village. I can imagine the tourist—the cyclist, of course, who is
a more enterprising person than most—saying, as he sees Billesley on the
map, “I will put up there,” and I can imagine him, further, getting there
under circumstances of night and rain and wind, and finding it to be the
most impossible of places to stay at. For there is no inn, and not the
slightest chance of hospitality. But it is well enough if you come to it
in daytime, for it has the charm of singularity: the strangeness of the
old manor-house behind its lofty enclosing garden-walls and the weirdly
rebuilt eighteenth-century church at the end of a farm-road which you
dispute with porkers and cluttering fowls. Billesley church is one of
the claimants for the honour of witnessing Shakespeare’s marriage, but on
what evidence the claim rests no one can tell, and, in any case, it was
entirely rebuilt afterwards. The tradition is probably only a hazy
association with the marriage of his grand-daughter, Elizabeth Hall,
whose wedding took place in the former building in 1639. Little belief,
either, can be given to the panelled room in Billesley Hall, said to have
been a library in Shakespeare’s youth, in which he was allowed to study.
Downhill and to the right, and you come to Wilmcote, the home of
Shakespeare’s mother, Mary Arden. It was in her time merely a hamlet of
Aston Cantlow, but is now a separate ecclesiastical parish, with an
uninteresting church. Wilmcote is not a particularly inviting place, and
not one of a number of boys playing cricket could tell me where was the
home of Shakespeare’s mother. However, in a place like Wilmcote it does
not take long to solve such a point, even if it were to come to a
house-to-house inquiry. The home of the Ardens, yeomen-farmers, seems to
modern ideas quite a humble house. It is one of a row of ancient
timber-framed and plastered cottage-like houses, with a large farmyard at
the back.
[Picture: The Arden House, Home of Shakespeare’s Mother, Wilmcote]
Rambling, low-ceilinged rooms with ingle-nooks in the fireplaces form the
interior. Some day, I suppose, when the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust has
ceased to expend much money in the collection of rare editions and in
paying fat pensions to its super-annuated servants, it will seek to
purchase the Arden home, and show to Shakespearean travellers the house
in which Robert Arden, a sixteenth-century yeoman of some standing and
some pretensions to gentility, yet sat at table with his farm-servants in
the old way, just as in the remoter parts of the West of England is still
done.
It is generally supposed that Wilmcote is the place referred to by
Shakespeare in the induction to the _Taming of the Shrew_ as “Wincot.”
The name is locally pronounced in that way, as it would be when we
consider the difficulty in ordinary rustic speech of twisting the tongue
round “Wilmcote.” But reasons are given on p. 169 for identifying it
with Wincot in Quinton. There is, however, another place which claims
the honour; the unlovely Wilnecote, a brick and tile-manufacturing
settlement on the Watling Street, over twenty-five miles distant. It
also is locally “Wincot,” and in Shakespeare’s time brewed a famous
tipple. Sir Aston Cokain, whose verses were published as near
Shakespeare’s own day as 1658, had no difficulty in identifying it.
Writing to his friend, Mr. Clement Fisher, who resided at Wilnecote, whom
he addresses “of Wincott,” he says
“Shakespeare your Wincot ale hath much renown’d
That fox’d a beggar so by chance was found
Sleeping that there needed not many a word
To make him to believe he was a lord.
But you affirm (and in it seem most eager)
’Twill make a Lord as drunk as any beggar,
Bid Norton brew such ale as Shakespeare fancies,
Did put Kit Sly into such lordly trances;
And let us meet there for a fit of gladness,
And drink ourselves merry in sober sadness.”
It is quite evident, among other things, that Sir Aston Cokain wrote
pretty bad verse, but the point to be emphasised is that there were
certainly in Shakespeare’s time three “Wincots,” any one of which might
have served his turn. But the vanished ale-house of Wincot in Quinton is
the place more particularly meant by him.
[Picture: Wootton Wawen Church]
“Stephen Sly” alluded to in the play, was a real person who seems to have
been what people call “a character.” He was probably a half-witted
creature, the butt of Stratford, and occasionally appears in the
unimpeachable records of the town as a servant of the Combes of Welcombe,
or as a labourer. There also appears in those same chronicles in later
years a Joan Sly, who was fined in 1630 for travelling on the Sabbath: an
offence not so great in itself, but very reprehensible in the eyes of the
Puritan magistrates of that time.
The parent village of Aston Cantlow is two miles from Wilmcote. The site
only of the ancient castle of the Cantilupes remains, behind the church,
in a tangled moat still sometimes flooded by the little river Alne. The
old Court House, a long half-timbered building now divided into three or
four cottages, is the chief feature of the village street.
Wootton Wawen, in something less than another three miles, owes the first
part of its singular name to its olden situation in the Forest of Arden,
and the second part to the Saxon lord of the place, a landowner named
Wagen, whose name appears as witness to the foundation charter of the
monastery at Coventry founded by Leofric, the husband of Godiva, in 1043.
It stands at a junction of roads, where the highway from Stratford
through Bearley comes swinging up round a corner from the channels of the
Alne, and runs, broad and imposing, on to Henley-in-Arden and Birmingham.
The church, occupying a knoll, is a strange but beautiful group, with
central tower in the Decorated style, a rather plain south chapel of the
same period, and a beautiful nave clerestory of the fifteenth century. A
very large Decorated chancel east window has its moulding set with
elaborate crockets.
The stranger, attracted by this noble church, tries the door. It is
locked, but before he can turn away it will be opened by a girl, who
says, “There is a fee of sixpence.” There always is!
You render tribute for sake of seeing the interior, uneasily suspecting
that it is another sixpence gone towards some scheme of alteration which
would not have your approval; but these things cannot be helped.
[Picture: Shakespeare Hall, Rowington]
The interior discloses some unexpected features, the lower part of the
tower being unmistakably Saxon work, with very narrow arches to nave and
chancel. Here are two curious enclosed carved oak pews that were perhaps
originally chantries, and a fine fifteenth-century oak pulpit. A desk
with eight chained books, and an ancient chest with ironwork in the shape
of fleurs-de-lis, together with effigies and brasses to the Harewell
family, complete an interesting series of antiquities. Here is buried
William Somerville, author of _The Chase_, who died in 1742.
The town of Henley-in-Arden, with its broad and picturesque street and
the “White Swan” inn, is much afflicted in these latter days by excessive
motor traffic from Birmingham. Beaudesert, a seat of the Marquis of
Anglesey, adjoins it, and Preston Bagot, on the east, lies in a
once-remote district. The sign of the “Crab Mill” inn, on the way,
alludes to a former manufacture of cider here. The old manor-house of
Preston Bagot, beside the road, is locally said to have been the first
house built in the Forest of Arden, but of that we cannot, obviously, be
at all sure. There is a house about four miles onward, at Rowington
Green, on the other side of Rowington, which looks, in parts, older. It
is the romantic-looking house known as “Shakespeare Hall,” for many years
a farmhouse, but now the residence of Mr. J. W. Ryland, F.S.A. It dates
back to the early part of the fifteenth century, and had until recently a
moat. Traditionally, it was the home of one Thomas Shakespeare, a
brother of William Shakespeare’s father; and Shakespeare is further said
to have composed _As You Like It_ in the room over the porch. We need
not believe that tradition, which has no evidence to warrant it, although
the house was once the home of one of the very numerous Shakespeare
families in Arden, the poet’s family were relations. The massive
horseman’s “upping-block” has been allowed to remain, beside the
front-door.