Anne Hathaway’s Cottage is another fascinating place…

You can walk from the centre of Stratford on Avon out to Anne Hathaway’s cottage, in what was once the Hamlet of Shottery. It is a nice thing to do if you can, as it makes you realise how far William Shakespeare would have walked to court the woman who was much older than him. He had scarcely finished his schooling days in the guildhall, or perhaps they began their affair when he was still at the school. But he definitely made an effort to meet up with Anne, it was not a casual endeavour, and you can mull over of his potential feelings and intent as you walk. While most of the walk is now through housing estates the cottage itself still feels as though it’s in a village location.

The cottage, Anne’s family home, where she was born and raised until she left when she married William, is preserved in the state it first became a tourist destination in the 18th Century. This home for sheep farmers was originally called Hewlands Farm. Its first phase was built in the 1400s, a simple long hall like dwelling that was leased to farmers by the land owner (very much like the house I live in). Unlike the guildhall in the town, this humble dwelling did not survive with many of its original features. As someone’s home it would have been updated with new fashions, and was extended as ways of living changed over the centuries. However in the 1700s they were far from modern ways of living, which means many very old structures and furniture has survived in situ.

You’ll see on these boards how the cottage changed over time to look as it does now …

What I loved most about the cottage, though, was the stories the guides told, and the best story, was why this property is so well preserved.

When Stratford on Avon became a place of pilgrimage for the famous, wealthy and other literary tourists, as I explained in my blog about why we remember and celebrate William Shakespeare’s birthplace, Anne Hathaway’s descendants had fallen on hard times financially. With these travellers coming to see and touch anything that had anything to do with Shakespeare, they saw on opportunity to earn money from their deceased relative’s good fortune and opened the door of the cottage to tourists. Visitors were told tales about the love affair between Shakespeare and his then future wife Anne.

A letter from Samuel Ireland, the 18th Century author, to his friend John Jordan, explains how Susanna Taylor, nee Hathaway, had sold him the exact chair that Shakespeare had sat in to court Anne. Who knows if that ‘courting chair’ was really in the house at the time of Shakespeare. Perhaps even Susanna didn’t know if that was true or not… There were records in the house that recorded visits from many of the renowned Regency poets too. Lord Byron, Shelley, and great actors like George and David Garrick, spent hours at the cottage, visiting regularly because the setting gave them inspiration. Even though at the time it was still a simple small farm. The family were making so little the house was split into three properties so they could rent the two ends of it to others.

Then came a more wily woman. Mary Baker, Susanna’s great grand-daughter, was definitely what we would call an entrepreneur today.

Mary saw the numbers of people visiting the buildings connected to Shakespeare’s life in the town grow, and in comparison hardly anyone would walk out to Hewlands Farm in Shottery. So she had a genius money spinner of an idea, she renamed the farm Ann Hathaway’s Cottage to make sure people would know the connection. It worked, it brought an increase in visitors. She gave them tours of her home, and told tales of William’s and Anne’s love affair, even talking through where they would have made love before their wedding.

She charged for everything – for her time, to serve tea and a ‘Shakespearean pork-pie’ in the very sport where William would have made love to his Anne, and for people to drink from the well that he would have drunk from. She gave people a gift from the garden too, picking single flowers to give to visitors to keep as a memory or send to others, again supporting the sense of romantic living.

She kept a visitors book, and even Charles Dickens and Mark Twain are recorded as visiting.

Her best story/hustle that I discovered, though, were the pieces of wood she allowed her visitors to chisel off an old oak two seater settle where she claimed William Shakespeare sat beside Anne during they’re courtship. The current managers of the property, The Shakespeare Trust, know that the settle is no where near that old. It was complete nonsense and Mary Baker knew it.

It makes me wonder what other tales she made up to con these gullible visitors. Ha! Ha!

So, what is original to William Shakespeare’s days in the cottage? …

The floor! the flagstones on some of the floors, polished by so many feet, and the door frames Anne and he would have walked through.

As you can tell, this is another place I would definitely recommend you visit if you go to Stratford on Avon.

Tracking Down Tudor Graffiti

If I could pin down a point in time when I first became fascinated by historic graffiti it might be the first time I saw the wall carvings in The Beauchamp Tower, in The Tower of London. I remember scanning it for ages. Some well known prisoners and lesser known prisoners were locked up in The Beauchamp Tower for years at a time during the reigns of King Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth I. Of course, the amount of days they had time to pass means some of the graffiti is very detailed.

It was one of those moments that made me stop and think about the individual – the human – who had worked on the image with a knife in their hand carving out every detail for hours, standing or sitting in exactly the same space I was hundreds of years before me. Being a storyteller, my mind immediately leaps to trying to get into their minds. What were they thinking as they worked? How did they feel at the time?

Anyway, ever since then, I hunt for historic graffiti where ever I think it’s likely I’ll see it, and if you’ve followed my blog for a while you will have seen me post about it when I do find it. Cathedrals are great for graffiti, around the choir stalls and in any other areas where people would have stood for some time. On the backs of pillars in the nave and in all sorts of areas outside the central nave. My husband is now as fascinated as I am and we usually try and find the oldest mark as people mostly write the year and their name or initials. You will not find very much on the normal pews though, pews were quite a late addition to churches and cathedrals the nave was originally an open standing space.

Ruins are another great place for historical graffiti, castle ruins, or follies in gardens. This usually dates from the Georgian, Regency or Victorian periods or later. These are places were people would have visited with others and perhaps talked to one another as they carved. These carvings are mostly in soft stone work, like the sandstone used in Georgian buildings, because people did not have years to carve and were tempted by an easy target.

But anyway, this post is really about a particular piece of graffiti my husband spotted in a church porch in a village just down the road from us.

You may remember that a while ago I did a lot research to try and find out how old my house is. You can find those posts on the Index page under the heading ‘The History of a House on an English Village Green’ .One of the owners I discovered, who owned this land and quite a few local manors and their land from 1597, was a clothier called Edward Long. From what I can tell he bought all the manors to own the land to rear sheep. None of the family lived where our house is. Their main place of residence was in a village a short way down the road from us, in Steeple Ashton, it would have been known only as Ashton originally.

So, when we had nothing to do one day recently, I said to my husband, ‘Can we go and look at the church in Steeple Ashton?’ I know the Longs had a lot of money at the time, their names are still used in lots of places near us, in pubs and village names, and I wanted to see if the family graves were in the church. When we walked up to the church I was very surprised to see something very different from an average village church.

Steeple Ashton Church is unlike most churches that are predominantly medieval, it is Tudor. A Tudor church. There is a contemporary record of the church being built in the Tudor period, ‘When Leland visited Steeple Ashton c. 1540 he remarked that ‘it standithe muche by clothiars’ and named two, Robert Long and Walter Lucas, who had assisted in the building of the parish church.‘ At the time the church had a notably tall steeple but the steeple fell when it was hit by lightning not long after it was first built.

Another difference was that churches rarely contain graffiti. Perhaps because they’ve been continually used by local people who want to keep their church smart, they would have removed graffiti at the time, as we’d remove it today. Or perhaps because churches are smaller people can’t hide for long enough to carve. But anyway, here is where Steeple Ashton Church is different again, because I started noticing some graffiti in the church porch, and then… My husband spotted one of the oldest pieces of graffiti we have seen. 1579. Certainly the oldest piece we’ve come across by accident.

Graffiti in Steeple Ashton Church Porch

In 1579, when Antoni wrote his name on this wall, Queen Elizabeth I was on the throne, and still relatively young. Shakespeare was alive and writing his plays. Raleigh was sailing around the world discovering other lands and plants previously unknown in Britain.

Interestingly, in my heading images, is another piece of graffiti we spotted dated to the 1500s. This was in Canterbury Cathedral. It’s interesting that both 7s and 9s are carved with long tails which must have been the style of writing then.

Graffiti in Canterbury Cathedral

So we have found an earlier carving by eighteen years. Fascinating.

If I can find out anything about Antonio Passhant, I will tell you more one day. But I am just so excited that after all these years of searching historic graffiti, the oldest, well with a date anyway, is about fifteeen minutes away from where I live!