an entrance to the conventual cemetery was commenced by Abbot Lichfield in 1533.
In 1539 the good abbot resigned the office which he had held for twenty-six years.
His successor was placed in authority for a few months, to carry on the farce which
was enacting through the kingdom, of a voluntary grant and surrender of all the
remaining possessions of the religious houses, which preceded the Act of 1539 " for
dissolution of abbeys." Lelaud, who visited the place within a year or two after the
suppression, " rambling to and fro in this nation, and in making researches into
the bowels of antiquity."* says, "In the town is no hospital, or other famous
foundation, but the late abbey." The destruction must indeed have been rapid. The
house and site of the monastery were granted to Philip Hobby, with a remarkable
exception ; namely, " all the bells and lead of the church and belfry." The roof of
this magnificent fabric thus went first ; and in a few years the walls became a stone-
quarry. Fuller, writing about a century afterwards, says of the abbey, " By a long
lease it was in the possession of one Mr. Audrewes, father and son ; whose grand-
child, living now at Berkhampstead in Hertfordshire, hath better thriven, by God's
blessing on his own industry, than his father and grandfather did with Evesham
Abbey ; the sale of the stones whereof he imputeth a cause of their ill success." t
All was swept away. The abbey-church, with its sixteen altars, and its hundred
and sixty-four gilded pillars,t its chapter-house, its cloisters, its library, refectory,
dormitory, buttery, and treasury ; its almory, granary, and storehouse ; all the various
buildings for the service of the church, and for the accommodation of eighty-nine
religious inmates and sixty-five servants, were, with a few exceptions, ruins in the
time of William Shakspere. Habingdon, who has left a manuscript " Survey of
Worcestershire," written about two centuries ago, says, " Let us but guess what this
monastery now dissolved was in former days by the gate-house yet remaining ; which,
though, deformed with age, is as large and stately as any at this time in the king-
dom." That gateway has since perished. Of the great mass of the conventual
buildings Habingdon states that nothing was left beyond " a huge deal of rubbish
overgrown with grass." One beautiful gateway, however, formerly the entrance to the
chapter-house, yet remains even to our day. It admits us to a large garden, now
let out in small allotments to industrious inhabitants of Evesham. The change
is very striking. The independent possession of a few roods of land may perhaps
bestow as much comfort upon the labourers of Evesham as their former dependence
upon the conventual buttery. But we cannot doubt that, for a long course of years,
the sudden and violent dissolution of that great abbey must have produced incal-
culable poverty and wretchedness. Its princely revenues were seized upon by the
heartless despot, to be applied to his unbridled luxury and his absurd wars. The
same process of destruction and appropriation was carried on throughout the country.
The Church, always a gentle landlord, was succeeded in its possessions by the grasping

* Wood, Athena Oxon." f Church History."

J Dugdale's " Monasticon," ed. 1819, vol. ii., p. 12.



106



WILLIAM SHAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY.



[BOOK ii.



creatures of the Crown ; the almsgiving of the religious houses was at an end ; and
then came the age of vagabondage and of poor-laws.







[Chapter-House Gateway.j

The sense which we justly entertain of the advantages of the Reformation has
accustomed us to shut our eyes to the tremendous evils which must have been
produced by the iniquitous spoliations of the days of Henry VIII. and Edward VI.
The religious houses, whatever might have been their abuses, were centres of civiliza-
tion. Leland says, " There was no town at Evesham before the foundation of the
abbey." Wherever there was a well-endowed religious house, there was a large and
a regular expenditure, employing the local industry in the way best calculated to
promote the happiness of the population. Under this expenditure, not only did
handicrafts flourish, but the arts were encouraged in no inconsiderable degree. The
commissioners employed to take surrender of the monasteries in Warwickshire
reported of the nunnery of Polsworth, "that in this town were then forty-four
tenements, and but one plough, the residue of the inhabitants being artificers, who
had their livelihood by this house." * In another place Dugdale says, " Nor is it a
little observable that, whilst the monasteries stood, there was no act for relief of
the poor, so amply did those houses give succour to them that were in want ;
whereas in the next age, namely 39th of Elizabeth, no less than eleven bills were
brought into the House of Commons for that purpose." t We have little doubt that
the judicious encouragement of industry in the immediate neighbourhood of each
monastery did a great deal more to render a state provision for the poor unnecessary
than the accustomed " succour to those who were in want." The benevolence of
the religious houses was systematic and uniform. It was not the ostentatious and
improvident almsgiving which would raise up an idle pauper population upon their
own lands. The poor, as 1 far as we can judge from the acts of law-makers, did not
become a curse to the country, and were not dealt with in the spirit of a detestable
severity, until the law-makers had dried up the sources of their profitable industry.
Leland, writing immediately after the dissolution of the Abbey of Evesham, says of
the town that it is " meetly large and well builded with timber ; the market-sted
is fair and large ; there be divers pretty streets in the town." While the abbey

* " Dugdale's " Warwickshire," p. 800. f Ibid., p. 803.



CHAP. V.] RUINS, NOT OF TIME. 107



stood there was an annual disbursement there going forward which has been com-
puted to be equal to eighty thousand pounds of our present money.* The revenues,
principally derived from manors and tenements in eight different counties, are seized
upon by the Crown. The site of the abbey is sold or granted to a private person,
who will derive his immediate advantage by the rapid destruction of a pile of build-
ings which the piety and opulence of five or six centuries had been rearing.
More than a hundred and fifty inmates of this monastery are turned loose upon the
world, a few with miserable pensions, but the greater number reduced to absolute
indigence. Half the population at least of the town of Evesham must have derived
a subsistence from the expenditure of these inmates, and this fountain is now almost
wholly dried up. In the youth of William Shakspere it is impossible that Evesham
could have been other than a ruined and desolate place. It was the policy of the
unscrupulous reformers who, whatever service they may ultimately have worked
in the destruction of superstitious observances, were, as politicians, the most dis-
honest and rapacious it was their policy, when (to use their own heartless cant)
they had driven away the crows and destroyed their nests, to heap every opprobrium
upon the heads of the starving and houseless brethren, of whom it has been com-
puted that fifty thousand were wandering through the land. The young Shakspere
was in all probability brought into contact with some of the aged men who had been
driven from the peaceful homes of their youth, where they had been brought up in
scholastic exercises, and had looked forward to advance in honourable office, each in
his little world. Some one of the Gray Friars of Coventry, or the Benedictines of




-

[Old House: Evesham.]



Evesham, must he have encountered, hovering round the scenes of their ancient pros-
perity ; sheltered perhaps in the cottage of some old servant who could labour with
his hands, and upon whom the common misfortune therefore had fallen lightly.

* " History of Evesham," by George May. A remarkably intelligent local guide.



108 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY. [BOOK II.



The friars of the future great dramatist would, of necessity, be characters formed
either out of his early observation, or moulded according to the general impressions
of his early associates. In his mature life the race would be extinct. These his
dramatic representations are wonderfully consistent ; and it is manifest that he
looked upon the persecuted order with pity and with respect. It was for Chaucer
to satirize the monastic life in the days of its greatness and abundance. It was for
this rare painter of manners to show the grasping dissimulating friar, sitting down
upon the churl's bench, and endeavouring to frighten or wheedle the bed-ridden man
out of his money :

" Thomas, nought of your tressor I desire

As for myself, but that all our covent

To pray for you is aye so diligent."

The ridicule in those times of the Church's pride might be salutary ; but other days
had come. The most just and tolerant moralist that ever helped to disencumber
men of their hatreds and prejudices has consistently endeavoured to represent the
monastic character as that of virtue and benevolence. One of Shakspere's earliest
plays is " Borneo and Juliet ;" and many of the rhymed portions of that delicious
tragedy might have been the desultory compositions of a very young poet, to be
hereafter moulded into the dramatic form. Such is the graceful soliloquy which
first introduces Friar Lawrence. The kind old man, going forth from his cell in the
morning twilight to fill his osier basket with weeds and flowers, and moralizing on
the properties of plants which at once yield poison and medicine, has all the truth
of individual portraiture. But Friar Lawrence is also the representative of a class.
The Infirmarist of a monastic house, who had charge of the sick brethren, was often
in the early days of medical science their sole physician. The book-knowledge and
the experience of such a valuable member of a conventual body would still allow
him to exercise useful functions when thrust into the world ; and the young Shak-
spere may have known some kindly old man, full of axiomatic wisdom, and sufficiently
confident in his own management, like the well-meaning Friar Lawrence. In
" Much Ado about Nothing," it is the friar who, when Hero is unjustly accused by
him who should have been her husband, vindicates her reputation with as much
sagacity as charitable zeal :

" I have mark'd

A thousand blushing apparitions start
Into her face ; a thousand innocent shames
In angel whiteness bear away those blushes ;
And in her eye there hath appear'd a fire,
To burn the errors that these princes hold
Against her maiden truth : Call me a fool ;
Trust not my reading, nor my observations,
Which with experimental seal doth warrant
The tenor of my book ; trust not my age,
My reverence, calling, nor divinity,
If this sweet lady lie not guiltless here
Under some biting error."

In "Measure for Measure" the whole plot is carried on by the Duke assuming the
reverend manners, and professing the active benevolence, of a friar ; and his agents
and confidants are Friar Thomas and Friar Peter. In an age when the prejudices of
the multitude were nattered and stimulated by abuse and ridicule of the ancient
ecclesiastical character, Shakspere always exhibits it so as to command respect and
affection. The poisoning of King John by a monk, " a resolved villain," is
despatched by him with little more than an allusion. The Germans believe that
Shakspere wrote the old King John in two Parts. The vulgar exaggeration of the



CHAP. V.] RUINS, NOT OF TIME. 109



basest calumnies against the monastic character satisfies us that the play was
written by one who formed a much lower estimate than Shakspere did of the dignity
of the poet's office, as an instructor of the people.

A deep reverence for antiquity is one of the clearest indications of the intimate
union of the poetical and the philosophical temperament. An able writer of our
own day has indeed said, " In some, the love of antiquity produces a sort of fanciful
illusion : and the very sight of those buildings, so magnificent in their prosperous
hour, so beautiful even in their present ruin, begets a sympathy for those who
founded and inhabited them." * But, rightly considered, the fanciful illusion
becomes a reasonable principle. Those who founded and inhabited these monastic
buildings were for ages the chief directors of the national mind. Their possessions
were, in truth, the possessions of all classes of the people. The highest offices in
those establishments were in some cases bestowed upon the noble and the wealthy,
but they were open to the very humblest. The studious and the devout here found
a shelter and a solace. The learning of the monastic bodies has been underrated ;
the ages in which they flourished have been called dark ages ; but they were almost
the sole depositories of the knowledge of the land. They were the historians, the
grammarians, the poets. They accumulated magnificent libraries. They were the
barriers that checked the universal empire of brute force. They cherished an
ambition higher and more permanent than could belong to the mere martial spirit.
They stood between the strong and the weak. They held the oppressor in
subjection to that power which results from the cultivation, however misdirected,
of the spiritual part of our nature. Whilst the proud baron continued to live in
the same dismal castle that his predatory fathers had built or won, the churchmen
went on from age to age adding to their splendid edifices, and demanding a succes-
sion of ingenious artists to carry out their lofty ideas. The devotional exercises of
their life touched the deepest feelings of the human heart. Their solemn services,
handed down from a remote antiquity, gave to music its most ennobling cultivation ;
and the most beautiful of arts thus became the vehicle of the loftiest enthusiasm.
Individuals amongst them, bringing odium upon the class, might be sordid, luxurious,
idle, in some instances profligate. It is the nature of great prosperity and apparent
security to produce these results. But it was not the mandate of a pampered tyrant,
nor the edicts of a corrupt parliament, that could destroy the reverence which had
been produced by an intercourse of eight hundred years with the great body of the
people. The form of venerable institutions may be changed, but their spirit is
indestructible. The holy places and mansions of the Church were swept away ; but
the memory of them could not be destroyed. Their ruins, recent as they were, were
still antiquities, full of instruction. The lightning had blasted the old oak, and its
green leaves were no longer put forth ; but the gnarled trunk was a thing not to be
despised. The convulsion which had torn the land was of a nature to make deep
thinkers. After the wonder and the disappointment of great revolutions have sub-
sided, there must always be an outgushing of earnest thought. The form which
that thought may assume may be the result of accident ; it may be poetical or
metaphysical, historical or scientific. By a combination of circumstances, perhaps
by the circumstance of one man being born who had the most marvellous insight
into human nature, and whose mind could penetrate all the disguises of the social
state, the drama became the great exponent of the thought of the age of Elizabeth.
It was altogether a new form for English poetry to put on. The drama, as we have
seen, had been the humblest vehicle for popular excitement. When the Church
ceased to use it as an instrument of instruction, it fell into the hands of illiterate
mimics. The courtly writers were too busy with their affectations and their flatteries
* Hallam's " Constitutional History of England."



110 WILLIAM SHAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY. [BOOK II.



to recognise its power, and its especial applicability to the new state of society.
Those who were of the people ; who watched the manifestations of the popular
feeling and understanding ; whose minds had been stirred up by the political storms,
the violence of which had indeed passed away, but under whose influence the whole
social state still heaved like a disturbed sea ; those were to build up our great
national drama. But, at the period of which we are speaking, they were for the
most part boys, or very young men. It is perhaps fortunate for us that the most
eminent of these was introduced to the knowledge of life under no particular advan-
tages ; was not dedicated to any one of the learned professions ; was cloistered not
in an university ; was an adherent of no party ; was obliged to look forward to the
necessity of earning his own maintenance, and yet not humiliated by poverty and
meanness. "William Shakspere looked upon the very remarkable state of society
with which he was surrounded, with a free spirit. But he saw at one and the same
tune the present and the past. He knew that the entire social state is a thing of
progress ; that the characters of men are as much dependent upon remote influences
as upon the matters with which they come in daily contact ; that the individual
essentially belongs to the general, and the temporary to the universal. His drama
can never be antiquated, because he primarily deals with whatever is permanent and
indestructible in the aspects of external nature, and in the constitution of the
human mind. But, at the same time, it is no less a faithful transcript of the pre-
vailing modes of thought even of his own day. Individual peculiarities, in his time
called humours, he left to others.

This principle of looking at life with an utter disregard of all party and sectarian
feelings, of massing all his observations upon individual character, could have
proceeded only from a profound knowledge of the past, and a more than common
apprehension of the future. As we have endeavoured to show, the localities amidst
which he lived were highly favourable to his cultivation of a poetical reverence for
antiquity. But his unerring observation of the present prevented the past becoming
to him an illusion. He had always an earnest patriotism ; he had a strong sense of
the blessings which had been conferred upon his own day through the security won
out of peril and suffering by the middle classes. The destruction of the old institu-
tions, after the first evil effects had been mitigated by the energy of the people, had
diffused capital, and had caused it to be employed with more activity. But he, who
scarcely ever stops to notice the political aspects of his own day, cannot forbear an
indignant comment upon the sufferings of the very poorest, which, if not caused by,
were at least coincident with, the great spoliation of the property of the Church.
Poor Tom, "who is whipped from tithing to tithing, and stocked, punished, and
imprisoned,"* was no fanciful portrait ; he is the creature of the pauper legislation
of half a century. Exhortations in the churches, " for the furtherance of the relief
of such as were in unfeigned misery," were prescribed by the statute of the 1st of
Edward VI. ; but the same statute directs that the unhappy wanderer, after certain
forms of proving that he has not offered himself for work, shall be marked V with
a hot iron upon his breast, and adjudged to be " a slave " for two years to him who
brings him before justices of the peace ; and the statute goes on to direct the slave-
owner " to cause the said slave to work by beating, chaining, or otherwise." Three
years afterwards the statute is repealed, seeing that it could not be carried into
effect by reason of the multitude of vagabonds and the extremity of their wants.
The whipping and the stocking were applied by successive enactments of Elizabeth.
The gallows, too, was always at hand to make an end of the wanderers, when, hunted
from tithing to tithing, they inevitably became thieves. Nothing but a compulsory
provision for the maintenance of the poor could then have saved England from a
* " King Lear," Act in., Scene iv.



CHAP. V.] RUIXS, NOT OF TIME. Ill



fearful Jacquerie. It cannot reasonably be doubted that the vast destruction of
capital, by the dissolution of the monasteries, threw for many years a quantity
of superfluous labour upon the yet unsettled capital of the ordinary industry of the
country. The prodigious changes in the value of money, favourable as they ulti-
mately were to the development of industry, raised the prices of commodities
without raising wages, an inevitable consequence of that natural law which makes
wages wholly depend upon the number of the labourers. That Shakspere had
witnessed much social misery is evident from his constant disposition to descry " a
soul of goodness in things evil," and from his indignant hatred of the heartlessness
of petty authority :

" Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand."*

And yet, with many social evils about him, the age of Shakspere's youth was one in
which the people were making a great intellectual progress. The poor were ill
provided for. The Church was in an unsettled state, attacked by the natural rest-
lessness of those who looked upon the Reformation with regret and hatred ; and by
the rigid enemies of its traditionary ceremonies and ancient observances, who had
sprung up in its bosom. The promises which had been made that education should
be fostered by the State had utterly failed ; for even the preservation of the univer-
sities, and the protection and establishment of a few grammar-schools, had been
unwillingly conceded by the avarice of those daring statesmen who had swallowed
up the riches of the ancient establishment. The genial spirit of the English
yeomanry had received a check from the intolerance of the powerful sect who
frowned upon ah 1 sports and recreations who despised the arts who held poets
and pipers to be " caterpillars of a commonwealth." But yet the wonderful stirring
up of the intellect of the nation had made it an age favourable for the cultivation
of the highest literature ; and most favourable to those who looked upon society,
as the young Shakspere must have looked, in the spirit of cordial enjoyment and
practical wisdom.

* " Lear," Act iv., Scene vr.




IBengeworth Church, seen through the Arch of the Bell-Tower.]



112



WILLIAM SHAKSPERE : A BIOGRAPHY.



[BOOK ii.



V




LWelford: The Wake.]
CHAPTER VI.

THE WAKE.



DECAY, followed by reproduction, is the order of nature ; and so, if the vital power
of society be not extinct, the men of one generation attempt to repair what the
folly or the wickedness of their predecessors has destroyed. Sumptuous abbeys
were pulled down in the reign of Henry VIII. ; but humble parish-churches rose
up in the reign of Elizabeth. Within four miles of Stratford, on the opposite bank
of the Avon, is the pretty village of Welford ; and here is a church which bears the
date of 1568 carved upon its wall. Although the church was new, the people would
cling, and perhaps more pertinaciously than ever, to the old usages connected with
their church. They certainly would not forego their Wake, " an ancient custom
among the Christians of this island to keep a feast every year upon a certain week
or day in remembrance of the finishing of the building of their parish-church, and
of the first solemn dedicating of it to the service of God."* For fifty years after
the period of which we are writing, the wakes prevailed, more or less, throughout
England. The Puritans had striven to put them down ; but the opposite party in
the Church as zealously encouraged them. Charles I. spoke the voice of this party
in one of his celebrated declarations for sports, which gave such deep, and in some

* Brand's " Popular Antiquities," by Ellis, 1841, vol. ii. page 1.



CHAP. VI.] THE WAKE. 113



respects just, offence. In 1633 the King's declaration in favour of wakes was as
follows : " In some counties of this kingdom, his Majesty finds that, under pretence
of taking away abuses, there hath been a general forbidding, not only of ordinary
meetings, but of the feasts of the dedication of the churches, commonly called Wakes.
Now, his Majesty's express will and pleasure is, that these feasts, with others, shall
be observed \ and that his justices of the peace, in their several divisions, shall look
to it, both that all disorders there may be prevented or punished, and that all
neighbourhood and freedom, with manlike and lawful exercises, be used." * Neigh-
bourhood and freedom, and manlike exercises, were the old English characteristics
of the wakes. At the period when William Shakspere was just entering upon life,