The long, broad mantel-shelf bears the usual collection of candlesticks and “chimney ornaments.” Under a window is an old table, with the visitors’-book, and on the opposite side of the room stands an equally old dresser, with a display of blue and white plates and dishes: a grandfather’s clock between it and the door. Gaping visitors are usually shown, by partial demonstration, with flint-and-steel, how our long-suffering and patient ancestors struck a light, but the process is not demonstrated in its entirety. To strike a spark off a flint with a piece of steel is an easy matter, but if the whole process of directing the sparks upon the tinder in the tinder-box and then blowing the tinder into a flame were gone through, visitors would be very much more astonished at the inconveniences endured by our forbears before the invention of matches. To get a light in this way was the most chancy thing in the world. The tinder might possibly catch with the first spark, or again it might take a quarter of an hour. I think Job must have taken his first lessons in patience with flint-and-steel and tinder on a cold winter’s morning. We see, from these fire-raising difficulties, a reason why our ancestors very rarely allowed the fires on their hearthstones to go out. Fuel was cheap in the country, and commonly to be had for the mere gathering of it, while if you let your fire burn out, it could only be lighted again at considerable pains. These seem altogether tales of an olden time, and they do actually strike the visitors to Shottery as very remote indeed; but there are yet many persons living to whom flint-and-steel and the tinder-box were as matter-of-course and necessary articles as the match-box is now.
The room to the right of the entrance-passage is the kitchen. Here again is an ingle-nook, and heavy beams support the floor above. A very tall man could not walk upright in this room, for these timbers are only about 5 ft. 11 inches from the floor. The ancient hearth remains here, and the oven runs deep into the masonry: a considerable space—almost large enough to be called a room—running round to the back of it. The little window seen rather high up in the wall of the house as you enter by the garden-gate lights this space.
Returning across the passage and through the living-room, the dairy, a little stone-flagged room is seen at the back. The door here, like most of the others, has the old English wooden latch known as the “Drunkard’s latch” because its cumbrous woodwork affords so good a hold for fumbling fingers.
Upstairs, on the left, is “Anne Hathaway’s bedroom,” where the chief object is a beautiful, but decrepit as to its lower legs, four-post sixteenth-century bedstead. The legs have assumed a permanently knock-kneed position, which humorous visitors affect to believe was caused by the bed having been used, something after the fashion of the Great Bed of Ware, not only for one person, but in common. It is indeed a very large bedstead. Apart from its size, it is certainly the finest article of furniture in the house, the headboard being beautifully carved with grotesque figures in the Renascence style then in vogue. The sheets are of old hand-spun flax, and a glass-covered case displayed on the bed contains a pillow-case of fine linen and beautiful needlework, traditionally the work of Anne. The mattresses of this bedstead and of the plainer one in the next bedroom are of plaited rushes. Here rough bed-curtains, dyed a dull yellow by a vegetable dye, are obviously of great age. A small slip room of no interest is shown, opening out of this second bedroom, and with that the exploration of the house is concluded.
CHAPTER XII
Charlecote.
To Charlecote, four miles east of Stratford, is an expedition rarely ever omitted by the Shakespearean tourist, for it is associated with one of the most romantic traditions of the poet’s life; that of the famous poaching incident, which may well have been the disposing cause of his leaving his native town and seeking fortune in London. The balance of opinion is strongly in favour of accepting the story, which comes down to us by way of Archdeacon Davis, Vicar of the Gloucestershire village of Sapperton, who died in 1708. He says the youth “was much given to all unluckiness in stealing venison and rabbits, particularly from Sir Thomas Lucy, who had him oft whipped and sometimes imprisoned, and at last made him fly his native county, to his great advancement.”
This does not at first sight present a flattering picture of William Shakespeare, but we have to consider that the deer- and game-raiders of that era were not on the blackguardly level of the modern poacher. They were commonly sportive and high-spirited youths, who went about the business of it in company. At the same time, he ought at this juncture to have given up this hazardous sport. The probable date of his leaving for London, fleeing before the anger of Sir Thomas Lucy, is either the summer of 1585 or 1587. He was in the former year twenty-one years of age, had already been two years and a half a married man, and was the father of three children. In imagination we can hear John Shakespeare’s friends prophesying that his son Will would “come to no good.” The same ungenerous thing has no doubt been prophesied of every high-couraged lad from time immemorial.
In revenge for Sir Thomas Lucy’s reprisals Shakespeare is said to have written some satirical verses and fastened them on the park gates of Charlecote. Some of the lines have, in tradition, survived—