A substantial ducking-stool, etc. The ducking-stool was kept up as a punishment for scolds in some parts of England until late in the 18th century. An antiquary, writing about 1780, tells of seeing it used at Magdalen bridge in Cambridge. He says: "The chair hung by a pulley fastened to a beam about the middle of the bridge; and the woman having been fastened in the chair, she was let under water three times successively, and then taken out.... The ducking-stool was constantly hanging in its place, and on the back panel of it was an engraving representing devils laying hold of scolds. Some time after, a new chair was erected in the place of the old one, having the same device carved on it, and well painted and ornamented."
Page 41.—Butts. Places for the practice of archery, the butts being properly the targets.
Page 45.—Pinfold. Shakespeare uses the word in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (i. 1. 114): "I mean the pound—a pinfold"; and in Lear (ii. 2. 9): "in Lipsbury pinfold." It was so called because stray beasts were pinned or shut up in it.
Page 46.—One wagon tract. That is, track. Tract in this sense is obsolete.
Page 49.—In which William Shakespeare was probably born. We have no positive information on this point; but we know that John Shakespeare resided in Henley Street in 1552, and that he became the owner of this house at some time before 1590. The tradition that this was the poet's birthplace is ancient and has never been disproved. Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, one of the most careful and conservative of critics, says: "There can be no doubt that from the earliest period at which we have, or are likely to have, a record of the fact, it was the tradition of Stratford that the birthplace is correctly so designated"; and he himself accepts the tradition as almost certainly founded upon fact.
The cut facing [page 50], like that facing [page 56], gives an idea of the interior appearance of these old houses. The room in which tradition says that Shakespeare was born is the front room on the second floor (what English people call the "first floor"), at the left-hand side of the house as seen in the cut on [page 49].
In the other cut (the interior of the cottage in which Anne Hathaway, whom Shakespeare married, is said to have lived at Shottery) the very large old-fashioned fire-place is to be noted. Persons could actually sit "in the chimney corner," like the woman in the picture. The grate is a modern addition.
Page 51.—New Place. Sir Hugh Clopton, for whom this mansion was erected, speaks of it in 1496 as his "great house," a title by which it was commonly known at Stratford for more than two centuries. Shakespeare bought it in 1597 for £60, a moderate price for so large a property; but in a document of the time of Edward VI. it is described as having been for some time "in great ruin and decay and unrepaired," and it was probably in a dilapidated condition when it was transferred to Shakespeare. It had been sold by the Clopton family in 1563, and in 1567 came into the possession of William Underhill, whose family continued to hold it until Shakespeare bought it. He left it by his will to his daughter Susanna, who had married Dr. John Hall, and who probably occupied it until her death in 1649, when she had been a widow for fourteen years. The estate descended to her daughter Elizabeth, who was first married to Thomas Nash, and afterwards to Sir Thomas Barnard. In 1675 it was sold again, and was ultimately re-purchased by the Clopton family. Sir John Clopton rebuilt the house early in the next century, and it was subsequently occupied by another Hugh Clopton. He died in 1751, and in 1756 the estate was sold to Rev. Francis Gastrell, who pulled the house down in 1759, on account of a quarrel with the town authorities concerning the taxes levied upon it. The year before (1758) he had cut down Shakespeare's mulberry-tree, in order, as tradition says, to save himself the trouble of showing it to visitors. The Stratford people were indignant at this act of vandalism. Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps says that an old inhabitant of the town told him that his father, when a boy, "assisted in breaking Gastrell's windows in revenge for the fall of the tree." It is possible, however, that some injustice has been done the reverend gentleman. Davies, in his Life of Garrick (1780), asserts that Gastrell disliked the tree "because it overshadowed his window, and rendered the house, as he thought, subject to damps and moisture." There is also some evidence that the trunk of the tree, which was now a hundred and fifty years old and grown to a great size, had begun to decay. That Gastrell was not indifferent to the poetical associations of the tree is evident from the fact that he kept relics of it, his widow having presented one to the Lichfield Museum in 1778. It is described in a catalogue (1786) of the museum as "an horizontal section of the stock of the mulberry-tree planted by Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon."
Page 52.—William Harrison. An English clergyman, of whose history we know little except that he was born in London, became rector of Radwinter, Essex, and canon of Windsor, wrote a Description of Britaine and England and other historical books, and probably died in 1592. His detailed account of the state of England and the manners and customs of the people in the 16th century is particularly valuable.