Clopton House—Billesley—The Home of Shakespeare’s Mother, Wilmcote—Aston Cantlow—Wootton Wawen—Shakespeare Hall, Rowington.

There is a mansion of much local fame rather more than a mile out of Stratford, off the Henley road: the manor-house of Clopton, for long past the seat of the Hodgson family, but formerly that of one of the ancient families of Clopton, who are found not only in Warwickshire and Gloucestershire, but in Suffolk as well. Widespread as they once were, I believe that the very name is now extinct.

There is necessarily much mention of the Clopton name in these pages, for Sir Hugh Clopton was the great fifteenth-century benefactor of Stratford. He was a younger son of the owner of this manor. The house has been time and again altered and partly rebuilt, but it still contains portraits of the Cloptons on the great Jacobean staircase, and painted on the walls of an attic, once used as a secret chapel by Roman Catholics, are to this day the black-letter texts upon which Ambrose Rookwood, prominent in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, must have looked. He had rented Clopton House for a time, in order to be conveniently near his friends, and to the meeting-place on Dunsmore, which the conspirators had appointed the scene of their rebellion when King and Parliament should have been blown sky-high by Guy Fawkes’ thirty-two barrels of gunpowder. After the failure of the plot and the arrest of the conspirators, the High Bailiff of Stratford was instructed to seize Ambrose Rookwood’s effects at Clopton House. An inventory of them is preserved in the Birthplace Museum at Stratford, and affords some quaint reading. Chalices, crosses, crucifixes, and a variety of obviously Papist articles, are in company with “an oulde cloake bagge,” whose value was sixpence, and “a white nagge,” twenty shillings. The High Bailiff evidently cleared the house, taking all he could find, for mention is made of “one pair of old boots, 2d. these being the goods of Ambrose Fuller.” There is a further note that Ambrose Fuller had his old boots restored to him; the High Bailiff being presumably unable to find anything treasonable in them.

Shakespeare is said to have taken his idea of Ophelia from Margaret Clopton, who in the misery of disappointed love is supposed to have drowned herself in a well in the gardens in 1592. A Charlotte Clopton, too, is supposed to have been buried alive in the Clopton vault in Stratford church in 1564, when the plague visited the neighbourhood, and thus to have given Shakespeare a scene in Romeo and Juliet. But it is only fair to say that the stories are legendary and not sustained by any known facts in the Clopton family history.

From Clopton we will retrace our steps to Stratford, and thence set out anew, to visit some outlying villages of interest, better reached from the road to Alcester.

The Alcester road is the least interesting road out of Stratford. It leads past the Great Western Railway station, and thence up Red Hill, reaching Alcester, the Roman Alauna, in seven and a half miles. There is little joy or interest to be got out of Alcester, which is a pleasant enough little town of 3500 inhabitants and a manufacture of needles, but not thrilling. There is still some unenclosed land along this road, on the left, a rather wild upland common—the “unshrubb’d down”; and it is a tumbled up and down country on the right, where Billesley stands. Billesley is a parish, with a parish church and an ancient manor-house, but no village. I can imagine the tourist—the cyclist, of course, who is a more enterprising person than most—saying, as he sees Billesley on the map, “I will put up there,” and I can imagine him, further, getting there under circumstances of night and rain and wind, and finding it to be the most impossible of places to stay at. For there is no inn, and not the slightest chance of hospitality. But it is well enough if you come to it in daytime, for it has the charm of singularity: the strangeness of the old manor-house behind its lofty enclosing garden-walls and the weirdly rebuilt eighteenth-century church at the end of a farm-road which you dispute with porkers and cluttering fowls. Billesley church is one of the claimants for the honour of witnessing Shakespeare’s marriage, but on what evidence the claim rests no one can tell, and, in any case, it was entirely rebuilt afterwards. The tradition is probably only a hazy association with the marriage of his grand-daughter, Elizabeth Hall, whose wedding took place in the former building in 1639. Little belief, either, can be given to the panelled room in Billesley Hall, said to have been a library in Shakespeare’s youth, in which he was allowed to study.

Downhill and to the right, and you come to Wilmcote, the home of Shakespeare’s mother, Mary Arden. It was in her time merely a hamlet of Aston Cantlow, but is now a separate ecclesiastical parish, with an uninteresting church. Wilmcote is not a particularly inviting place, and not one of a number of boys playing cricket could tell me where was the home of Shakespeare’s mother. However, in a place like Wilmcote it does not take long to solve such a point, even if it were to come to a house-to-house inquiry. The home of the Ardens, yeomen-farmers, seems to modern ideas quite a humble house. It is one of a row of ancient timber-framed and plastered cottage-like houses, with a large farmyard at the back.

The Arden House, Home of Shakespeare’s Mother, Wilmcote

Rambling, low-ceilinged rooms with ingle-nooks in the fireplaces form the interior. Some day, I suppose, when the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust has ceased to expend much money in the collection of rare editions and in paying fat pensions to its super-annuated servants, it will seek to purchase the Arden home, and show to Shakespearean travellers the house in which Robert Arden, a sixteenth-century yeoman of some standing and some pretensions to gentility, yet sat at table with his farm-servants in the old way, just as in the remoter parts of the West of England is still done.It is generally supposed that Wilmcote is the place referred to by Shakespeare in the induction to the Taming of the Shrew as “Wincot.” The name is locally pronounced in that way, as it would be when we consider the difficulty in ordinary rustic speech of twisting the tongue round “Wilmcote.” But reasons are given on p. 169 for identifying it with Wincot in Quinton. There is, however, another place which claims the honour; the unlovely Wilnecote, a brick and tile-manufacturing settlement on the Watling Street, over twenty-five miles distant. It also is locally “Wincot,” and in Shakespeare’s time brewed a famous tipple. Sir Aston Cokain, whose verses were published as near Shakespeare’s own day as 1658, had no difficulty in identifying it. Writing to his friend, Mr. Clement Fisher, who resided at Wilnecote, whom he addresses “of Wincott,” he says

“Shakespeare your Wincot ale hath much renown’d
That fox’d a beggar so by chance was found
Sleeping that there needed not many a word
To make him to believe he was a lord.
But you affirm (and in it seem most eager)
’Twill make a Lord as drunk as any beggar,
Bid Norton brew such ale as Shakespeare fancies,
Did put Kit Sly into such lordly trances;
And let us meet there for a fit of gladness,
And drink ourselves merry in sober sadness.”

It is quite evident, among other things, that Sir Aston Cokain wrote pretty bad verse, but the point to be emphasised is that there were certainly in Shakespeare’s time three “Wincots,” any one of which might have served his turn. But the vanished ale-house of Wincot in Quinton is the place more particularly meant by him.

Wootton Wawen Church“Stephen Sly” alluded to in the play, was a real person who seems to have been what people call “a character.” He was probably a half-witted creature, the butt of Stratford, and occasionally appears in the unimpeachable records of the town as a servant of the Combes of Welcombe, or as a labourer. There also appears in those same chronicles in later years a Joan Sly, who was fined in 1630 for travelling on the Sabbath: an offence not so great in itself, but very reprehensible in the eyes of the Puritan magistrates of that time.

The parent village of Aston Cantlow is two miles from Wilmcote. The site only of the ancient castle of the Cantilupes remains, behind the church, in a tangled moat still sometimes flooded by the little river Alne. The old Court House, a long half-timbered building now divided into three or four cottages, is the chief feature of the village street.

Wootton Wawen, in something less than another three miles, owes the first part of its singular name to its olden situation in the Forest of Arden, and the second part to the Saxon lord of the place, a landowner named Wagen, whose name appears as witness to the foundation charter of the monastery at Coventry founded by Leofric, the husband of Godiva, in 1043. It stands at a junction of roads, where the highway from Stratford through Bearley comes swinging up round a corner from the channels of the Alne, and runs, broad and imposing, on to Henley-in-Arden and Birmingham. The church, occupying a knoll, is a strange but beautiful group, with central tower in the Decorated style, a rather plain south chapel of the same period, and a beautiful nave clerestory of the fifteenth century. A very large Decorated chancel east window has its moulding set with elaborate crockets.

The stranger, attracted by this noble church, tries the door. It is locked, but before he can turn away it will be opened by a girl, who says, “There is a fee of sixpence.” There always is!You render tribute for sake of seeing the interior, uneasily suspecting that it is another sixpence gone towards some scheme of alteration which would not have your approval; but these things cannot be helped.

Shakespeare Hall, Rowington

The interior discloses some unexpected features, the lower part of the tower being unmistakably Saxon work, with very narrow arches to nave and chancel. Here are two curious enclosed carved oak pews that were perhaps originally chantries, and a fine fifteenth-century oak pulpit. A desk with eight chained books, and an ancient chest with ironwork in the shape of fleurs-de-lis, together with effigies and brasses to the Harewell family, complete an interesting series of antiquities. Here is buried William Somerville, author of The Chase, who died in 1742.The town of Henley-in-Arden, with its broad and picturesque street and the “White Swan” inn, is much afflicted in these latter days by excessive motor traffic from Birmingham. Beaudesert, a seat of the Marquis of Anglesey, adjoins it, and Preston Bagot, on the east, lies in a once-remote district. The sign of the “Crab Mill” inn, on the way, alludes to a former manufacture of cider here. The old manor-house of Preston Bagot, beside the road, is locally said to have been the first house built in the Forest of Arden, but of that we cannot, obviously, be at all sure. There is a house about four miles onward, at Rowington Green, on the other side of Rowington, which looks, in parts, older. It is the romantic-looking house known as “Shakespeare Hall,” for many years a farmhouse, but now the residence of Mr. J. W. Ryland, F.S.A. It dates back to the early part of the fifteenth century, and had until recently a moat. Traditionally, it was the home of one Thomas Shakespeare, a brother of William Shakespeare’s father; and Shakespeare is further said to have composed As You Like It in the room over the porch. We need not believe that tradition, which has no evidence to warrant it, although the house was once the home of one of the very numerous Shakespeare families in Arden, the poet’s family were relations. The massive horseman’s “upping-block” has been allowed to remain, beside the front-door.