The Hathaways would appear to have executed numerous repairs to the farmhouse which Bartholomew had acquired, and to this day we may see a stone tablet let into one of the chimneys, bearing the initials “I H” (for John Hathaway) and the date 1697; while the same initials and date, together with those of “E H” which doubtless stand for Elizabeth Hathaway, his wife, occur on the bacon-cupboard in the ingle-nook of the living-room. The last of the Hathaways was another John, who died in 1746, but the house remained in the hands of descendants until 1838. At last it came into possession of one Alderman Thompson, of Stratford-on-Avon, who in 1892 sold it to the Trustees of Shakespeare’s Birthplace, for £3000. The furniture was bought for a further £500. The Alderman is said to have made a very good thing out of it, but he would probably have done still better if he had waited a few years longer. The average number of visitors, who pay sixpence each to view the cottage, is 40,000 a year. The simplest calculation shows that to mean an income of £1000, and the upkeep cannot be very expensive. But the heavy thatch will soon again have to be renewed. The plentiful lack of understanding among many of the visitors is such that they frequently appear to think the thatch as old as Shakespeare’s day. It must, of course, have been many times re-covered, and at the present time it is again in a dilapidated condition, sodden through with the weather of many years, and precariously held together by wire netting stretched over it. A very garden of weeds grows there: shepherds’ purse, groundsel, candy-tuft and dandelion; and poppies wave their red banners on the roof-ridge.
There are twelve rooms in the house, and of these seven are shown. The showing is a very business-like proceeding nowadays. At the garden gate you read the strict rules of the Trust, and then, having paid your sixpence, receive a printed and numbered ticket. A party of four hundred and fifty persons from Sheffield was expected on the last occasion the present writer visited the place, and exactly how much mental sustenance or what clear impression that half-battalion of excursionists could have received, it would be difficult to say. “We have to put ’em through quick,” said one in charge. Obviously it must needs be so, else how would all see the house before day was done?
Entering by a low-browed doorway, a stone-paved passage opens into rooms right and left. On the left, down two steps, is the living-room, also, like all these ground-floor rooms, stone-floored. Overhead are old oaken beams and joists, and the rough walls are partly panelled. There are pictures without number of this old-world interior, the most characteristic of them that showing Mrs. Baker, who for many years received visitors, sitting by the fireside, in company with her old family Bible, in which the births, marriages and deaths of many Hathaways are recorded. She proved her descent from them by way of a niece of Anne Hathaway; whom, it is rather curious to reflect, no one ever thinks of styling by her married name, “Mrs. Shakespeare.” I cannot help thinking she would have resented it, if addressed by her maiden name.
But Mrs. Baker, who lived in the cottage for seventy years and appeared to be almost as permanent a feature of it as the very walls and roof-tree, died in September 1899, at the age of eighty-seven. Still, however, the photographic view of the old lady sitting there is easily first favourite among all the interior views of the cottage; and many are those visitors who, coming here and not seeing the familiar figure, miss it as keenly as they would any intimate article of furniture.
An old and time-worn wooden settle stands beside the ingle-nook. One may still sit in the corner seats, but a modern grate occupies the hearth on which the logs were burnt in the Hathaways’ time. Little square recesses in the wall show where the tinder-box was kept, and where those who sat here in olden times set down their jug and glass. The brightly-burnished copper warming-pan that hangs here, together with the bellows, is not, I think, credited with a Hathaway lineage. These once necessary, but now obsolete, household articles are simply placed here for the purpose of giving a more convincing air to this old home; but one suspects that some day, when the critical attitude relaxes, they will acquire a kind of brevet rank, and perhaps eventually even fully qualify as genuine heirlooms.
The spacious bacon-cupboard, where the flour was also stored, in the thickness of the wall on the left-hand side of the ingle-nook, is a very fine specimen. The neighbourhood of Stratford is particularly rich in these old bacon-cupboards, which indeed seem to be almost a peculiar feature of the district. There is one at Shakespeare’s Birthplace, in the town, and another at the “Windmill” inn, in Church Street, and numerous other examples exist in private houses; but this is the best specimen I have yet seen, and the better kept; the open lattice-work oaken door, bearing the initials “I. H., E. H, I. B., 1697,” being well polished. A further storage place for bacon is the cratch (otherwise the “rack”) in the roof-joists. You see it in the accompanying illustration.