The ‘Eight Villages’—‘Piping’ Pebworth and ‘Dancing’ Marston.

No one who has ever sojourned in Shakespeare land can remain in ignorance of what are the “Eight Villages.” The older rhymes upon them are printed upon picture-postcards, and on fancy chinaware, and reprinted in every local guide-book; and now I propose to repeat them, not only for their own sake and for the alleged Shakespearean authorship, but because the pilgrimage of those villages offers many points of interest. One need offer no excuse for this descriptive chapter, because although the rhymes themselves are trite, the places are by no means so well known; your average Shakespeare Country tourist being rarely so enterprising as he is commonly—and quite erroneously—supposed to be. Stratford-on-Avon, Evesham, Warwick, Kenilworth and Coventry, with their comfortable hotels, furnish forth the average pilgrim. But if you are to know Shakespeare land intimately, and if you would come into near touch with the poet and know him at closest quarters, you must linger in the villages that in every circumstance of picturesqueness are dotted about the valley of the Avon. There, as freshly as ever, when spring has not waned too far into summer, the

“Daisies pied and violets blue,
And ladysmocks all silver-white,
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue,
Do paint the meadows with delight.”

“Shakespeare is Bacon,” dogmatically asserts the ancient hyphenated baronet who in these latter days posts pamphlets broadcast (incidentally favouring me with one, uninvited) seeking to dethrone our sovereign bard. Well, let who will cherish the impious opinion; but all the countryside around Stratford disproves it; the trees, the fields, the wild flowers, the rustic talk, which Bacon could never have known, that are all faithfully mirrored in the plays.

But let us to the Eight Villages, whose fame rests upon a legend of olden drinking-bouts and of competitions between different towns and villages, to decide whose men could drink the most liquor. In Shakespeare’s time, it seems, Bidford held the championship of all this countryside, and had two valiant coteries of tipplers who drank not only for their own personal gratification, but went beyond that and inconvenienced themselves for the honour and glory of their native place. Further than this, local patriotism cannot go. So famous were the doings of the Topers and the Sippers of this spot that it became familiarly known as “Drunken” Bidford; an unfortunate adjective, for it was bestowed not by any means because those convivial clubmen could not carry their liquor like men, but was intended as a direct tribute of admiration to their capacity for it. In short, such was their prowess that they went forth, conquering and to conquer, in all the surrounding villages. On an historic occasion the daring fellows of Stratford went forth and challenged the Bidford men on their own ground, Shakespeare traditionally among them. The Topers were not at home; they had gone to drink Evesham dry; but the Sippers held the fort and duly maintained the honour of Bidford. At the “Falcon” inn the contest was waged, and the Stratford men were ignominiously worsted, drawing off from the stricken field while yet there remained some with full command of their legs, and ability to carry away those of their number who had wholly succumbed. In this sort they went the homeward way towards Stratford, which is more than six miles distant, but they had proceeded no further than three-quarters of a mile when they sank down by the roadside and slept there the night, under a large crab-apple tree. When morning dawned—when night’s candles were burned out and jocund day stood tiptoe on the meadows—they arose refreshed, the majority eager to return to Bidford and try another bout; but Shakespeare refused. He had had enough of it. He had drunk with—

“Piping Pebworth, Dancing Marston,
Haunted Hillborough, Hungry Grafton,
Dodging Exhall, Papist Wixford,
Beggarly Broom, and Drunken Bidford.”

Such is the legend. There are those who believe it, and there are again those who do not. The quatrain does not seem to fit in with the story, and indeed bears evidence of being one of those injurious rhymes respecting neighbouring and rival villages fairly common throughout England, often reflecting severely, not only upon the characteristics of those places, but also upon the moral character of their inhabitants. Indeed, the present rhymes are mildness itself compared with some, with which these pure pages shall not be sullied. But although we may not place much faith in the Shakespearean ascription, those go, surely, too far who refuse to believe Shakespeare capable of taking part in one of these old-time drinking-bouts. Shakespeare, we are nowadays told, could not have descended to such conduct; but in holding such a view we judge the poet and the times in which he lived by the standards of our own age; a very gross fallacy indeed. It is not, nowadays, “respectable” for any one, no matter the height or the obscurity of his status, to drink more than enough; but he who in those times shirked his drink was accounted a very sorry fellow. What says Sir Toby Belch, in Twelfth Night? “He is a coward and a coystril that will not drink till his brains turn o’ the toe like a parish top.” To this day, in the banqueting-room of Haddon Hall, we may see what the jovial souls who were contemporary with Shakespeare did to the man who could not or would not finish his tankard. There is an ingenious handcuff in the panelling of that apartment in which the wrist of such an one was secured, and down his sleeve the drink he had declined was poured. Nay, only a hundred and fifty years ago, the hospitable hosts and the best of good fellows were those to whom it was a point of honour to see that their guests were made, in the modern police phrase, “drunk and incapable,” so that they had to be carried up to bed. Mr. Pitt did not commonly get much “forrarder” on three bottles of port, and generally made his best speeches in the House when, having generously exceeded that allowance, he was quite drunk. Mr. Fox was a worthy fellow to him. Nobody thought the worse of them—in fact, rather the better—for it. To be drunk was the mark of a gentleman; to be excessively drunk—the very apogee of inebriety—was to be “as drunk as a lord”; no man could do more.

The villages whose bygone outstanding features are thus rhythmically celebrated are scattered to the west and south-west of Stratford-on-Avon, between six and eight miles distant; the two first-named in that widespreading level which stretches almost uninterruptedly between that town and Evesham. Pebworth, whose name would seem to enshrine the personal name of some Saxon landowner—“Pebba’s weorth”—is quite exceptionally placed on a steep and sudden hill that rises rather dramatically from the level champaign.

Piping Pebworth

There is more than a thought too much of new building and of corrugated tin roofing about the Pebworth of to-day, and when I came up along the village street a steam-roller was engaged in compacting the macadam of the roadway. I thought sadly that it was not at all Shakespearean; yet, you know, had the roads been of your true Shakespearean early seventeenth-century sort, one would not have penetrated to these scenes with a bicycle at all. No one pipes nowadays at Pebworth; there is not even a performer on the penny whistle to sound a note, in evidence of good faith. It is a pretty enough village, but not remarkably so, and offers the illustrator the smallest of chances, for the church which crowns the hill-top is so encircled with trees that only the upper part of its tower is visible. The church, in common with nearly all the village churches within the Shakespeare radius, is locked, doubtless with a view to extracting a sixpence from the amiable tourist. Old tombstones to a Shackel, Shekel or Shackle family—the name is spelled in many ways—abound here.

Long Marston lies in the midst of this pleasant, level country, six miles south-west of Stratford-on-Avon, and on a yet somewhat secluded road; its old-time retirement that recommended it to the advisers of the fugitive Charles the Second, when seeking a way for him to escape from the country after the defeat of his hopes at the Battle of Worcester, September 3rd, 1651, being little changed. Marston is the only village I have ever known which owns three adjectives to its name. “Long” Marston is the better known of them; “Dancing” Marston is another, and “Dry” Marston—or “Marston Sicca,” as the pedantic old topographers of some two centuries ago styled it forms the third. Whatever fitness may once have attached to the sobriquet of “Dancing” has long since disappeared, nor are the traditions of its olden morris-dancers one whit more marked than those of any other village. In the days when Marston danced, the neighbouring villages footed it with equally light heart and light heels, so far as we can tell. “Dry” Marston, too, forms something of a puzzle to the observer, who notes not only that it is low-lying and that the little Dorsington Brook meanders close at hand on the map, in company with other rills, but also observes that a stone-paved causeway extends for a considerable distance along the road at the northern end of the village; evidently provided against flooded and muddy ways. Finally, if “Marston” does not derive from “marshtown,” then there is nothing at all in derivatives. We are thus reduced to the better-known name, “Long” Marston.

“Dancing Marston”Doubtless the stranger expects to find a considerable village, with a long-drawn street of cottages; but Marston is not in the least like that. Instead, you find ancient half-timbered and thatched cottages, scattered singly, or in groups of two or three, fronting upon the level road, each situated in its large garden, where it seems as much a product of the soil as the apples and pears, or the more homely cabbages, beans, and potatoes, and appears almost to have grown there, equally with them. A branch line of the Great Western Railway, it is true, runs by, with a station, but at Long Marston station the world goes easily and leisurely; sparrows chirp in the waiting-room and rabbits sport along the line; while such work as goes on in the goods-yard is punctuated by yawns and illuminative anecdotes. All this by way of praising these old-world surroundings.

Among the cottages is an older whitewashed group, set back from the road. In pre-Reformation times this was the Priest’s House. Across the way stands the pretty little fourteenth-century church, with little of interest within, but possessing a fine timbered north porch of the same period, the timbering at this present time of writing being again exposed to view after having been covered up with plaster for more than a century.

It was on the evening of September 10th, the seventh day after the disastrous Battle of Worcester, that King Charles and his two companions, Mr. Lassels and Jane Lane, came to Long Marston and found shelter at the house of Mr. John Tomes. The King was in the character of “Will Jackson,” servant of Mistress Jane Lane; in that capacity riding horseback in front of her, while she rode pillion behind him. We may readily picture the King, in his servant’s disguise, kept in his proper place in the kitchen, while Lassels and Jane Lane were entertained by the master of the house in the best parlour. Blount, in his Boscobel, published in 1660, the year of the Restoration, illuminates this historic incident with an anecdote that gives the brief sojourn at Long Marston as piquant and homely a savour as that of King Alfred’s burning the cakes in the cottage where he was in hiding, away down in the Somersetshire Isle of Athelney, nearly eight hundred years before the troubles of the Stuarts were heard of. Supper was being prepared for Mr. Tomes’ guests, and the cook asked “Will Jackson” to wind up the roasting-jack. “Will Jackson,” says Blount, “was obedient, and attempted it, but hit not the right way, which made the maid in some passion ask, ‘What countryman are you, that you know not how to wind up a jack?’ To which Charles, who was ever blessed with that happy quality the French call esprit, for which we have no exactly corresponding word, replied, ‘I am a poor tenant’s son of Colonel Lane, in Staffordshire; we seldom have roast meat, and when we have, we don’t make use of a jack.’”

Every one in Long Marston can point out “King’s Lodge,” as this historic house is now known. Somewhat altered, externally and internally, but still in possession of descendants of the John Tomes who sheltered the King after Worcester Fight, it still retains the famous roasting-jack, now carefully preserved in a glass-case, in the room that was in those times a kitchen, and later became a cider cellar, and is now the dining-room.

The Tomes family—who pronounce their name “Tombs,” and have many kinsfolk who also spell it in that fashion—have a curious and dismal pictorial pun upon their ancient patronymic, by way of coat of arms. It represents three white altar-tombs on a green ground; to speak in the language of heraldry: Vert, three tombstones argent.

Dining Room, Formerly the Kitchen, King’s LodgeJohn Tomes suffered for his loyalty. Some of his lands were sequestrated and he was obliged to leave the country; nor did the Royal favour subsequently shown his family advantage them very greatly; the liberty granted them of hunting, hawking and fishing from Long Marston to Crab’s Cross, in the neighbourhood of Redditch, being, it may well be supposed, of little value.

Although, as already noted, changes have been made at “King’s Lodge,” one may yet, in the quaint dining-room which was then the kitchen, sit in the Ingle-nook of the great fireplace, in which it may be supposed “Will Jackson,” having doubtless kissed the cook—if indeed, she were a kissable cook—and thus made amends for his unhandiness with the roasting-jack, was afterwards allowed a seat.