Summer Days in Shakespeare Land

The Beginnings of Stratford-on-Avon.

Ninety-five miles from the City of London, in the southern part of Warwickshire, and on the left, or northern bank of the Avon, stands a famous town. Not a town famed in ancient history, nor remarkable in warlike story, nor great in affairs of commerce. It was never a strong place, with menacing castle or defensive town walls with gates closed at night. It stood upon a branch road, in a thinly-peopled forest-district, and in every age the wars and tumults and great social and political movements which constitute what is called "history" have passed it by.

Such is, and has been from the beginning, the town of Stratford-on-Avon, whose very name, although now charged with a special significance as the birthplace of Shakespeare, takes little hold upon the imagination when we omit the distinguishing "on Avon." For there are other Stratfords to be found upon the map of England, as necessarily there must be when we consider the origin of the name, which means merely the ford where the "street"-generally a paved Roman road-crossed a river. And as fords of this kind must have been very numerous along the ancient roads of this country before bridges were built, we can only be astonished that there are not more Stratfords than the five or six that are found in the gazetteers.

The Roman road that came this way was a vicinal route from the Watling Street where Birmingham now stands, through Henley-in-Arden and Alcester, the Roman station of Alauna. Passing over the ford of the Avon, it went to London by way of Ettington, Sunrising Hill, and Banbury. Other Roman roads, the Fosse Way and Ryknield Street, remodelled on the lines of ancient British track-ways, passed east and west of Stratford at an equal distance of six miles.

All the surrounding district north of the Avon was woodland, the great Forest of Arden; and to the south of the river stretched a more low-lying country as far as the foot of the Cotswold Hills, much less thickly wooded. In the reign of Queen Elizabeth, when the Forest of Arden was greatly diminished, these districts owned two distinctive names: the forest being called "the Wooland," and the southward pasture-lands "the Feldon."

The travellers who came this way in early Saxon times, and perhaps even later, came to close grips with the true inwardness of things. They looked death often in the face as they went the lonely road. The wild things in the forest menaced them, floods obscured the fords, lawless men no less fierce than the animals which roamed the tangled brakes lurked and slew. "Now am I in Arden," the wayfarer might have said, anticipating Touchstone, "the more fool I; when I was at home I was in a better place; but travellers must be content."

No town or village then existed upon the banks of Avon, and the first mention of Stratford occurs in A.D. 691, when a monastery situated here is named. It was an obscure house, but with extensive and valuable lands which Bishops of Worcester hungered for and finally obtained. The site of this monastery was scarcely that of the existing town of Stratford, but was where the present parish church stands, in what is known as "Old Stratford," which is on the extreme southerly limit of the town. It was thus situated at some little distance from the ford, which was of course exactly where the Clopton Bridge now crosses the river. At that ford there would probably even then have been a hermit, as there was later, charged with the due guidance of travellers, and in receipt of offerings, but of him we know nothing, and next to nothing of the monastery.

The Bishops of Worcester, having thus early obtained a grant of the monastery and its lands, became lords of the manor and so remained for centuries, wielding in their spiritual and manorial functions a very complete authority over the town which gradually arose here. To resist in any way the Church's anointed in matters spiritual or temporal would have been to kick most foolishly against the pricks, for in his one autocratic capacity he could blast your worldly prospects, and in the other he could (or it was confidently believed he could) damn you to all eternity. Thus it may well be supposed that those Right Reverend were more feared than loved.

It was an agricultural and cattle-raising community that first arose here. "Rother Street" still by its name alludes to the olden passage of the cattle, for "rother" is the good Anglo-Saxon word "hroether," for cattle. The word was known to Shakespeare, who wrote, "The pasture lards the rother's sides."

In 1216 the then Bishop of Worcester obtained a charter for a fair, the first of four obtained between that date and 1271. The fairs attracted business, and about 1290 the first market was founded. The town had begun to grow, slowly, it is true, but substantially. At this period also that Guild arose which was originally a religious and charitable fraternity, but eventually developed into surprising issues, founding a grammar-school and becoming a tradesmen's society, whence the incorporation of the town in 1553, and the establishment of a town council derived. Camden, writing about this time, was able to describe it as "proper little mercat towne."

In that era which witnessed the incorporation of the town of Stratford-on-Avon and the birth of Shakespeare the population was some 2000. It is now about 8300; a very moderate increase in three hundred and fifty years, and much below the average rate for towns, by which Stratford might now have had a population of about 16,000.

The incorporation of this little town in the reign of Edward the Sixth was a great event locally. It included the restitution to the people of the place of the buildings and the property of the Guild of Holy Cross which had been confiscated in 1547, when also the inhabitants had been relieved from the yoke of the Bishops of Worcester, whose manor had been taken away from them. It is true that the manorial rights had not been abolished and that the property and its various ancient privileges had only been transferred to other owners, but it was something to the good that the Church no longer possessed these things. These were not arbitrary changes, the whim of this monarch or that, Henry the Eighth and Edward the Sixth did only what others in their place would and must have done. They were certainly sovereigns with convictions of their own, but their attitude of mind was but the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, and they did not so much originate it as be swayed by it. Those statesmen who have been held meanly subservient to them were, after all, men of like convictions. They saw the old order to be outworn and existing institutions ripe for change. It was the age of the Renascence. Everywhere was the new spirit, which was remodelling thought as well as material things. It was the age, above all things, of the new learning. These feelings led the advisers of the young king, Edward the Sixth, to counsel the restitution to the town of the property of the Guild dissolved only six years earlier, with the important provision that the grammar-school was to be re-established and maintained out of its revenues. To this provision we distinctly owe the dramatist, William Shakespeare, who was born at the very time when the educational advantages thus secured to the children of the townsfolk had settled down into smoothly working order. Education cannot produce a Shakespeare, it cannot create genius, but it can give genius that chance in early elementary training without which even the most adaptive minds lose their direction.

The ancient buildings of the Guild, which after its long career as a kind of lay brotherhood for what modern people would style "social service," had attained an unlooked-for development as the town authority, thus provided Stratford with its Grammar School and its first town-hall. In those timbered rooms the scholars received their education, and for eighty years, until 1633, when the first hall built especially for the corporation was opened, the aldermen and councillors met there. Among them was John Shakespeare.