Shakespeare: A Life Read Free Page B

the north is
the Arden region, where the Forest of Arden was more thinly wooded in
Shakespeare's day than in medieval times. Here were irregular fields,
meadows, moated farmsteads, and groups of cottages, but few villages.
South and west lay the Feldon, with new ornamental parks at Clopton and
Goldicote, Ettington and Charlecote. Round about were fields
cultivated in narrow strips, as well as tithe barns, villages, and
black and white half-timbered cottages.
    Stratford-upon-Avon, between Arden and Feldon, was a market town
where goods from the two regions could be exchanged. Protected because
it lay in the rain-shadow of Welsh hills to the west, it had a mild
climate, Farmers found the Avon valley fertile and took
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advantage of a bridge built by the town's benefactor Sir Hugh Clopton
in the reign of Henry VII to take goods to market. John Leland, the
antiquary, saw Stratford's bridge with its fourteen stone arches
around 1540, and noted the well-laid-out town. A parish church rose to
the south at Old Stratford, and from here one walked north into good
streets, partly paved, to see the Pedagogue's House accommodating a
grammar school, a range of almshouses, and the Gild hall and Gild
chapel. Besides back lanes the town 'hath 2. or 3. very lardge
stretes', Leland wrote. 'One of the principall stretes ledithe from est
to west, anothar from southe to northe.' Houses of two and three
storeys were of timber, and he was struck by the 'right goodly
chappcll' in Church Street. 1
    The land on which Stratford was built had belonged to bishops of
Worcester after Ethelhard, a Saxon king, granted it to the third bishop
( AD 693-714). From then until fifteen years before Shakespeare's
birth Stratford had been a manerium of Worcester bishops. 2 Once the town had been a small group of farms called Straetford,
meaning a Roman approach to a ford, and it stood on a Roman road. But
in 1196 there had been a change: a bishop purchased the right to hold a
weekly market at the Avon, and his plan avoided the existing village.
Land north of Straetford, some 109 acres, was laid out into six
streets, forming a grid which is still visible in the town's pattern
today. Three streets ran roughly parallel to the river, intersected by
three more, and the land within this grid was marked into 'burgage'
plots, each of which was 12 perches in length and 3½ perches in
breadth (198 feet by 57 feet 9 inches). The plots would be subdivided
in various ways in the years ahead, but they allowed for ample
buildings and convenient neighbourhoods. The Roman road was worked into
the grid to form an open area, and hence Bridge Street is wide today.
Craftsmen and merchants were attracted to settle in this well-planned
town, and the 'Manerium de novo Stratford' began to thrive. It
had tall inns and some 240 built-up plots (besides other tenements,
shops, and stalls) in the thirteenth century, and would have been no
larger in Shakespeare's day.
    The
medieval town of Stratford was known for one of its social features,
its lay religious Gild. Membership in the Gild of the Holy
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Cross was open to all men and women -- and the fame of this
organization spread beyond the county. Members elected their own
aldermen, and a woman's vote counted as equal to a man's; the Gild
provided jurors for the manorial courts, looked after the sick and the
poor, prayed for the dead (even admitting departed souls to the
membership), and founded a school. The Gild nearly absorbed the local
government and gave continuity to local life.
    Indeed, the Gild not only linked the generations, and gave common
religious and social purposes to the people of Stratford, but it had
too the effect of stimulating at least a few men of exceptional talent.
Robert de Stratford (taking his surname from the town) probably
founded the chapel of the Gild in 1296. John de Stratford, his son,
rose to be Bishop of Winchester and three times Chancellor of England,