It is nearly a century since the “Falcon” ceased to be an inn. It then became a workhouse, and thus many a boozy old reprobate whose courses at the “Falcon” had brought him to poverty ended his days under the same roof. Cynic Fortune, turned moralist and temperance lecturer, surely was never in a more saturnine humour!
The old sign of the inn eventually found its way to Shakespeare’s birthplace. It pictured a golden falcon on a red ground, and bore additionally the arms of the Skipwith family, the chief landowners in Bidford. With the sign went an old chair in which Shakespeare is traditionally said to have sat. To-day the “Falcon” is let in tenements, and also houses the village reading-room and library. The building deserves a better fate, for, as will be noted from the accompanying illustration, it has that quality, as admirable in architecture as in men, character. It is of two distinct styles: the half-timbered gable noted along the street being doubtless the oldest portion, apparently of the mid-fifteenth century. This would seem to be the original inn. The main block seems to be about a century later, and would thus have been a recent building in Shakespeare’s youth. It was added apparently at a period of unbounded prosperity and is wholly of stone. The stone is of that very markedly striated blue lias much used in this district, and is set in a traditional fashion once greatly followed, that is to say, in alternate narrow and broad hands or courses.
Proceeding from Bidford along the Stratford road for Hillborough the haunted, the site of the ancient crab-apple tree is found, where the defeated Stratfordians slept off the effects of their carouse. The road is hedged now and the fields enclosed and cultivated, but in Shakespeare’s time the way was open. The spot is marked on Ordnance maps as “Shakespeare’s Crab,” and although the ancient tree finally disappeared in a venerable age on December 4th, 1824, when its remains, shattered in storms and hacked by relic-hunters, were carted off to Bidford Grange, a younger tree of the same genus has been planted on the identical site. We may note the spot, interested and unashamed, because although the rhymes upon the eight villages are almost certainly not Shakespeare’s—though probably quite as old as his period—that is no reason for doubting the poet’s taking part in the drinking contest. “Because thou art virtuous, shall there be no cakes and ale?” and because we do not follow the customs of our ancestors shall we think them in their generation—and Shakespeare with them—disreputable? I think not, although, with these things in mind, I live in daily expectation of an article in some popular journal, asking, “Was Shakespeare Respectable?” I think the poet was, apart from his literary genius, an average man, with the weaknesses of such; and all the more lovable for it.
Hillborough is reached by turning in a further mile to the right, off the high road, at a point where a meadow is situated locally known as “Palmer’s Piece.” Palmer, it appears, was a farmer who drowned his wife in the Avon, and was gibbeted on this spot for the crime.
A mile’s journey along narrow roads, down towards the river, brings the pilgrim to Hillborough. Now Hillborough is not a village: it is not even a hamlet, and is indeed nothing but the remaining wing of an old manor-house, now a farm, and in a very solitary situation. It will thunder and lighten, and rain heavily when you go to Hillborough—it always does when you seek interesting places in remote spots—but these conditions seem only the more appropriate to the haunted reputation of the scene; although what was the nature of the hauntings has eluded every possible inquiry. It is thus curiously and wholly in keeping that the old manor-house and its surroundings should look so eerie. Noble trees romantically overhang the house; remains of old buildings whose disappearance mournful ghosts might grieve over, lend a dilapidated air of the Has Been to the place; and an ancient circular stone pigeon-house, a relic of the former manor, stands beside a dismal pond. But the ghosts have ceased to walk.
A mile and a half across the Stratford road, is situated the fourth of these eight villages, “Hungry” Grafton. The real name of the place is Temple Grafton. “Hungry” is said to be an allusion to a supposed poverty of the soil, but farmers of this neighbourhood, although fully as dissatisfied as you expect a farmer to be, do not lend much help to the stranger seeking information. “I’ve varmed wuss land an’ I’ve varmed better,” was the eminently non-committal reply of one; while another was of the opinion that “it ’on’t break us, nor yet it ’on’t make us.”