Summer Days in Shakespeare Land

by Charles G. Harper

He endowed his chantry chapel with liberality; almost extravagance, and even purchased the advowson of the church from the Bishop. This extremely liberal endowment was perhaps necessary, for he had considered the eternal welfare of a good many people besides himself and his relations, and included even the sovereigns of England, present and to be, and all future Bishops of Worcester. The priests, therefore, had their hands full, and shouldered some heavy responsibilities; for—not to go into individual cases, or specify some of the shocking examples—it does not need much imagination to perceive that a tremendous deal of intercession would be necessary for so unlimited a company as this. Perhaps, in the circumstances, he could not possibly endow his chantry too richly.

I do not know how his priests fared for lodgings. He seems to have omitted that important detail. But his nephew Ralph supplied the omission, and, in 1351, three years after his uncle’s death, built a house for them adjoining the churchyard. It was styled then and for centuries afterwards “the College.” Thus the church of Stratford-on-Avon became more richly endowed than the usual parish church, and was known as “collegiate.”

Many worthy folk followed the precedent set by the founder, and added to the beauties of the church; chief among them Thomas Balsall, Warden of the College in the second half of the fifteenth century, who built the present choir or chancel between the years 1465–1490. The last beautifier and benefactor was Dean Balsall’s successor, Ralph Collingwood. His is the north porch of the church, and he undertook and completed an important alteration in the nave; unroofing it, removing the low Decorated clerestory, probably of circular windows, and taking down the walls to the crown of the nave-arcades; then building upon them the light and lofty clerestory we see at this day. He added choir-boys to the establishment, and further endowed the College, for their maintenance. These were the last works in the long history of the church. In 1547 the Reformation came and swept away John of Stratford’s chantry and confiscated the endowments. The priests were scattered, and four years later their College was given by the king to John Dudley, the newly-created Earl of Warwick and lord of the manor in succession to the Bishops of Worcester. The College reverted to the Crown, and in 1576 it was let by Queen Elizabeth to one Richard Coningsby, who in turn let it to John Combe. It was a fine and picturesque residence, familiar enough to Shakespeare, who was on intimate terms with Combe, and received from him a bequest of £5 on his death in 1614. It was demolished in 1799.

The church is approached through the churchyard by a fine avenue of lime-trees leading up to the north porch, where a verger, or some such creature, habited in a hermaphrodite kind of garment, which is neither exactly clerical nor lay, waits for the visitor’s sixpences; for you may not enter for nothing, unless perhaps at times of divine service, and even then are allowed but grudgingly by these clerical entrepreneurs, who suspect you have come not so much for worship as with the idea of depriving them of a sixpence. I think, however, you would find it difficult to glimpse the chancel and the Shakespeare monument before the intention would be suspected and the enterprising person successfully headed off.

We will first encircle the exterior, where the many gravestones of departed Stratford worthies lean at every imaginable angle, the oldest of them, almost, or perhaps absolutely, contemporary with Shakespeare, grown or growing undecipherable. Some day Stratford will be sorry for neglecting them and their possible interest in the comparative study of Shakespeare and his fellow-townsmen. But everything connected, either intimately or remotely, with him has always been neglected until the record has almost perished. It is the singular fate of Shakespearean associations.

The exterior of the fabric, it will soon be noticed, is greatly weathered; more particularly the Perpendicular chancel, which must at no distant date be restored. It is surprising, and an excellent tribute to the security of the foundations of this work, built on the banks of the river over four hundred years ago, that its walls have not fallen seriously out of plumb, like that of the north nave-arcade; especially when the rather daring slightness of the design is considered, consisting of vast mullioned and transomed windows with but little wall-space between. The gargoyles leering down from the dripstones are a weird series of bat-winged creatures of nightmare-land. On the south side, however, is a very good Bear and Ragged Staff gargoyle, and next it, going westward, a nondescript Falstaffian monster, his legs amputated by time and weather.

The churchyard wall goes sheer down into the water of the Avon. The elms look down upon the stream, the rooks hold noisy parliaments in their boughs, and the swans float stately by.

Entering by the roomy north porch, where the person with the bisexual garments will take your sixpence and sell you picture-postcards, it is noticed that the good Late Perpendicular stone panelling is obscured, and the effect destroyed, by the extreme licence given in the placing of monumental tablets on the walls; a practice, judging from the dates upon them, still in existence. It is quite clear from this that the building might well be in better hands.

A very fine brazen knocker with grotesque head holding the ring in its mouth is a feature of the doorway. Although affixed to late fifteenth-century wood-work, the knocker would seem really to be nearly two hundred years earlier. It appears on picture-cards without number as the “Sanctuary Knocker,” and metal reproductions of it are to be had in the town; but there is nothing to show that this church was ever one of those that owned the privilege of sanctuary. In the inexact modern way, every curious old knocker on church doors is “sanctuary”; but in reality the ancient privilege was too valuable to be granted with the indiscriminate freedom this would argue.