Shakespeare

It was a well-watered town with various streams or streamlets running through the streets, with adjacent wells and ponds as well as standing water and cess-pools. Two doors down from Shakespeare’s house was a smithy that made use of the water from a stream called the Mere. He was never very far from the sound of water. The streets of Stratford were wide enough for wagons to pass each other, yet not so wide that they were not pestered by dunghills and gutters, ditches and mud walls. They were “paved” or cobbled on each side, but anything might flow down the middle channel. They were also encroached upon by uncultivated land, marked by makeshift and shapeless roads.

Pigs, geese and ducks were not supposed to wander freely through the town but the presence of the pigs, in particular, was signalled by the numerous sties and yards in every street. There were many goodly houses, to use the expression of the day, but there were also hovels and tenements for the poorer sort, thatched barns for the storage of corn and many decayed outbuildings. There were stone crosses to show humankind the way; there was a pillory, stocks and a whipping post for those who defied the authority of the town’s governors, one of whom was Shakespeare’s father; there was also a gaol, a structure known as “the cage,” and a ducking stool. This was no Tudor idyll. The engravings of Stratford – of the mills and the market crosses, the church and the chapel – naturally display a world of stillness and of silence, populated by merchants or labourers in picturesque costume. The earliest photographs also show a world preternaturally solemn and still, the wide streets almost bare of human habitation. They do not evoke the pressing and chaotic life that was Shakespeare’s reality.

Each trade had its own place and station. Pigs were sold in Swine Street, and horses in Church Way; sellers of hides took their place at the cross in Rother Market, while the salters and sugarers put up their stalls in Corn Street. The ironmongers and ropers were to be found in Bridge Street, while the “fleshers” or butchers were at the top of Middle Row. There were various markets for corn, cattle and cloth. When Shakespeare returned to Stratford in later life, there was a butter and cheese market at the White Cross just outside his front door.

By four o’clock in the morning, the town had awakened; by five, the streets were filled with people. The traders and labourers breakfasted at eight, and took their dinner or nuncheon at noon; they finished their work at seven in the evening, at the end of a fourteen-hour day. The Statute of Artificers, however, promulgated in 1563, allowed one hour of sleep after the noonday meal. There were no holidays but the various holy days.

Many of the Stratford trades had been followed for centuries. A survey of occupations, from 1570 to 1630, shows that the town had twenty-three butchers, twenty weavers, sixteen shoemakers, fifteen bakers and fifteen carpenters.³ These were “primary” occupations; townspeople, such as Shakespeare’s own father, engaged in a variety of different trades. John Shakespeare’s principal occupation was that of glover, one of twenty-three in the town, but he also earned his living as a trader in wool, a money-lender and a maker of malt. The brewing and selling of ale was a speciality in Stratford; no fewer than sixty-seven households were involved in the trade.⁴

Yet underlying these trades, and the whole of the town’s economy, was the larger rhythm of the agricultural year with the February sowing and harrowing, the March pruning, the June haymaking, the reaping of August, the threshing of September and the pig-killing of November. There were horses and sheep and pigs and cattle and bees. There was tillage land and fallow land, meadow and pasture. “Again, sir, shal we sow the hade land with wheate?” a servant asks Justice Shallow in the second part of King Henry IV. “With red wheat, Dauy” (Part Two, 2704-5). Shakespeare evidently understood the language of the land.

In 1549 the Bishop of Worcester was obliged to cede his manorial rights over Stratford to John Dudley, Earl of Warwick; the town was in that sense secularised. In 1553 it was granted a charter whereby the erstwhile officers of the Guild of the Holy Cross became aldermen; fourteen townsmen were given this role, and out of their number a bailiff or mayor was to be elected. They in turn chose fourteen other “burgesses,” and together they comprised the town council.