CHAPTER XI.
THE STRATFORD LAWYER.
The arrival of strangers to take up their abode for any length of time in such a town as Stratford-upon-Avon, always furnished matter of curiosity and speculation amongst the inhabitants. The neighbours were known to each other so well, and there was comparatively so little travel, that a certain degree of suspicion attached to all new-comers in those dangerous days. When any of the townsmen had business, even a few miles off, it was usual for them to arrange matters go that two or three might travel in company. Neighbour Fustian, the hosier, having business in Warwick, agreed to travel the road in company with neighbour Lambe, the glover, whose trade made him a visitor to Coventry, whilst the latter stayed the convenience of mine host of the Falcon, who was, peradventure, bound for the latter town, and all three, mounted and armed, went and returned in company, rather than trust purse and person singly to the chances of the road.
Robbing on the highway, although by no means so common as in the preceding reign, was still frequent. The woods were thick in this part of Warwickshire, and the gentlemen of the shade found it easy to elude pursuit after a highway robbery. Nay, but a few short years before, and during the York and Lancaster feuds, which had deluged the land with blood; what with disbanded men-at-arms, thieves, and caitiffs of one sort or other, the roads were but cut-throat defiles, and the country round a continued battle-field.
So that during the troublous reign of Henry VI. it had been especially ordered, that between the towns of Coventry, Warwick, and Stratford-upon-Avon, the highways should be widened, by cutting down trees on either hand, in order that travellers and wayfarers might have more room to defend themselves against the numerous robbers and caitiffs infesting those parts.
On the morning following the transactions we have recorded in the foregoing chapter, there were several subjects of interest commented upon and discussed in the little back room which constituted the office of one Pouncet Grasp, the head-lawyer of the town. One was the sojourn of several strangers, whom no one knew anything about, at one of the hostels: another was a dark and alarming rumour of a suspicious sort of illness having broken out in the suburbs: and another was the circumstance of a man, having all the appearance of a person of condition, having been found, stabbed in several places, and lying, with the pockets of his doublet rifled, a stiffened and unhandsome corse, in the road leading to the ferry beyond the church.
Master Pouncet Grasp himself was seated upon a high stool near the window of his office, which looked into a green and bowery garden, having at its further extremity a most pleasant bowling-green; the river just to be distinguished in the distance beyond, amongst the marshy meadows.
Some two or three clerks were seated in different parts of the apartment, all busily engaged, pen in hand, scrawling strange hieroglyphics upon certain sheets of parchment before them, making a dreadful sound of incessant scribbling with their pens.
Master Grasp himself, the monarch of all he surveyed, and an especial tyrant over the unfortunate clerks he presided over, was the only personage in that small apartment who seemed to have freedom of thought and motion, and license to take his attention from the crackling parchments beneath his nose.