Shakespeare's Crab

Bought from my local Tesco supermarket: an Old Ordnance Survey Map of the Vale of Evesham & Stratford, dating from 1892.

What caught my eye about this little map was the presence of a landmark - the so-called Shakespeare's Crab.  It is marked on the map about a mile outside the village of Bidford, on the road towards Stratford, very close indeed to Hillborough.

The story goes that the young Shakespeare and his mates were disposed to walk to Bidford one day and challenge a group known as the "Topers" to a drinking competition.  When they arrived, however, they discovered that the "Topers" had gone to Evesham Fair.  But they were invited to drink with another group, this one known as the "Sippers".  Even this proved too much for the Stratford lads, who drank so heavily that, on the way home, they all fell asleep under a crab apple tree on the wayside.  The next morning, Shakespeare's friends were eager to pit themselves against the "Sippers" again.  They roused young Shakespeare who, rather than heading back into Bidford to resume the drinking match, composed an impromptu epigram on the surrounding villages:

Piping Pebworth, dancing Marston,
Haunted Hillboro', hungry Grafton,
Dodging Exhall, papist Wixford,
Beggarly Broom, and drunken Bidford.

Frankly, I've never believed that this little rhyme was made up by Shakespeare.  And when we find that the earliest known use of the word "Toper", meaning a heavy drinker, came from 1661, we have to query the factuality of the legend of Shakespeare and the Crab-tree.

What fascinates me about the legend is that, as with so many local traditions regarding the Bard, it might be a polished and prettified account of something more intriguing.

For a start, Shakespeare's Crab is just a field or two away from Hillborough Manor.  In previous posts, and of course in Who Killed William Shakespeare?, I have suggested that Will Shakespeare's first Anne - Anne (or Agnes) Whateley - was a resident of Hillborough Manor.  This is indeed what local lore remembers: Shakespeare's "White Lady", his jilted lover, eked out her existence as a sorrowful recluse in the secluded manor house which belonged to a man with whom Shakespeare would later do business.

What is more, I have argued that Shakespeare fell in love with Anne ("Agnes") Whateley when he was recovering from an accident, as he seems to have indicated in his poem, A Lover's Complaint.  Anne, I believe, was a sort of unofficial or "underground" nun, serving the local Catholics in much the same way that her brothers, John and Robert, served as secret priests in their hometown of Henley in Arden.  Essentially, Anne Whateley nursed the young Shakespeare back to health.

It is worth noting that the marriage licence issued by the Bishop's court at Worcester to allow William Shakespeare to marry Anne Whateley referred to Anne as being "de Temple Grafton".  Hillborough Manor is indeed in the parish of Temple Grafton, the manor of which belonged to the Sheldon brothers of Beoley (there is a very important Shakespearean connection there, involving a skull, and the surname Whateley is much associated with Beoley and its church).  The vicar of Temple Grafton at the time was John Frith, "an old priest and Unsound in religion".  Frith's main interest in life, it would seem, lay in curing injured or diseased hawks.

My theory goes, then, that sometime in 1582, when Will was eighteen, he suffered an accident and was taken to the Catholic safe house of Hillborough Manor, a short distance downriver from Stratford, to recuperate.  His nurse on this occasion was the "sacred nun", Anne Whateley of Temple Grafton, who fell for the winning ways of the young poet.  They arranged to marry, but Shakespeare found himself dragooned into marrying another local woman, Anne Hathaway of Shottery.

The "accident", I always suspected, was the result of violence.  For the first part of 1582, young Shakespeare was on the run, hiding out (probably at Earl's Common in Worcestershire) and avoiding the government crackdown on Catholics who were suspected of having trafficked with the Jesuit priests, Father Campion and Father Persons.  By the late summer, though, he was back in the Stratford area, where he got Anne Hathaway (and possibly Anne Whateley) pregnant.

If Anne Whateley was a Catholic, as were most of her family, then Anne Hathaway was almost certainly Protestant, her father and brother expressing rather puritanical inclinations in their wills.  In the light of this, it might be worth reconsidering those twin gangs, the "Topers" and the "Sippers", especially as the word "Toper" does not seem to have been in use at the time.

A toper is a heavy drinker.  A sipper is someone who drinks one sip at a time (and yet, somehow or other, Shakespeare and his friends lost their drinking match against the "Sippers").  Could it be that these innocent-sounding names - "Topers" and "Sippers" - have been substituted for something else?

Let us suppose that the legend really recalls a kind of gang warfare - something along the lines of the deadly rivalry between the Capulets, and their retainers, and the Montagus, along with their retainers, which is dramatised in the opening of Romeo and Juliet.  Those two families are, respectively, Protestant (the Protestants wore little black caps in church) and Catholic (the Montagu family, from which Shakespeare's patron, the Earl of Southampton, was descended, were notable Catholics).  The gang warfare between those two tribes reflects the situation in and around Stratford during much of Shakespeare's lifetime.  It should be remembered that Richard Quiney, Shakespeare's "loving good friend and countryman", the mayor of Stratford and father to Shakespeare's future son-in-law, was murdered in Stratford by thuggish members of the puritanical Greville family in 1602.

In addition to the Greville gang, there were Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote and his men.  The Lucys and the Grevilles deliberately made life very difficult indeed for anyone tarred with the "papist" brush, and it is not too difficult to imagine Shakespeare and his little gang having various run-ins with either mob - the Grevilles or the Lucys.  Any such sectarian violence would not have reflected too well on the Bard, and so his battles with the Lucys and the Grevilles were remembered, a little more bucolically, as hard drinking competitions with groups known as "Topers" and "Sippers".

That may or may not have been so.  But I find it intriguing that young Shakespeare was long said to have taken shelter, while very much the worse for wear, under a crab-tree a mere stone's throw from Hillborough, where I have argued that young Shakespeare was patched up after an "accident".  He was already torn between two different sorts of gang - the Catholics, which included his own family and the "sacred nun", Anne Whateley, and the Protestants, including the woman he was destined to marry.  In that regard, "Sippers" might refer to Catholics, who sipped communion wine, while "Topers" might be a code word for Protestants, who showed contempt for the Catholic mass.

Of course, if Shakespeare had taken a fall, or been knocked on the head, he might have seemed a little drunken when he was found sprawled beneath the crab-tree.  I know of at least one scar, running immediately above his left eyebrow, which was there for much of his life, and which caused his left eyebrow to droop somewhat.  He also referred to his lameness in his poems, and so we have to entertain the possibility that he was so badly beaten at one stage that he spent the rest of his life with a limp and a pronounced facial disfigurement.

Finally, I find it interesting to note that the word "crab" can mean to criticise or to grumble, or to do something which spoils something else - the term originally having been used of hawks fighting (from the Middle Low German krabben).  John Frith, the "old priest" of Temple Grafton, was renowned for setting the broken bones of hawks.  And the inn where Shakespeare and his mates are alleged to have suffered at the hands of the "Sippers" was known as the Falcon.

The hawks in question were surely troublemakers.  Like today's "hawks", they went looking for a fight.  Their enemies were rivals in religion and local politics.  And Shakespeare, it would seem, took a pasting.  He had to be nursed back to health nearby at Hillborough, where his "White Lady" fell in love with him.  But he bore the scars for the rest of his days.

Anne Whateley

We've known for a long, long time that William Shakespeare somehow received permission to marry two women.

On Tuesday, 27 November 1582, the consistory court of the Diocese of Worcester issued a special licence allowing 'Willelmum Shakpere' to wed 'Annam Whateley de Temple Grafton'.

Shakespeare was aged just 18 at the time.  He was, therefore, a minor, theoretically dependent on his father's permission to take a wife.  The special licence was needed because the Advent season was fast approaching, when the Church forbade weddings.

The very next day - Wednesday, 28 November 1582 - two Stratford farmers, friends of the late Richard Hathaway of Shottery, made the 40-mile round trip to Worcester and laid down a substantial bond of £40 to ensure that Will Shakespeare married 'Anne Hathwey of Stratford ... maiden'.  The bond was required to indemnify the Bishop of Worcester against any legal problems arising from this marriage.

Shakespeare, of course, married Anne Hathaway, who was anything but a 'maiden' at that time (she gave birth to their first daughter six months later).  So who was 'Annam Whateley de Temple Grafton' - the first woman Shakespeare was given the bishop's permission to marry?

The official line, laid down by Professor Samuel Schoenbaum, is that she didn't exist.  There was a William Whateley, vicar of Crowle, at the consistory court that day, and the dozy clerk simply muddled up the names of 'Whateley' and 'Hathaway'.  So, nothing to see here, move along please ...

Only it isn't that simple.  For a start, the 'it was all a clerical error' argument always makes me suspicious whenever a historian advances it.  The sense I get is that, basically, we don't know the answer to this one, so we'll assume somebody got it wrong.  (There's a similar claim that the island of Ioua became 'Iona' in the 18th century because someone couldn't tell the difference between the letters 'u' and 'n' - that argument doesn't wash either.)

All the same, Sam Schoenbaum's insistence that 'Anne Whateley' was just a slip of the pen has dominated the matter for years.  We must all believe, apparently, that there never was an Anne Whateley.

Quite how the clerk also managed to mistake 'Stratford' for 'Temple Grafton', which is four miles away from Shakespeare's hometown, is never explained.

Well, as I explain in Who Killed William Shakespeare?, Anne Whateley did exist.

Pictured above is the first page of the Ultimo testimentii John Whateley de Hendeley in Ardena.  John Whateley was a draper of Henley in Arden, eight miles north of Stratford.  His will was probated in 1554 - ten years before Will Shakespeare was born.

Named in Whateley's will are his five sons and four daughters.  One was George Whateley, a woollen draper based in Stratford-upon-Avon.  George Whateley served on the Stratford Corporation with Will Shakespeare's father; he married his second wife in Stratford in May 1582, just a few months before John Shakespeare emerged for his self-imposed seclusion to vote against Whateley becoming the bailiff or mayor of Stratford.

George Whateley was a Catholic: he funded two of his brothers, John and Robert, to work as underground priests in Henley (the first of these had previously been vicar of Crowle; he resigned his post and left the Church of England, allowing William Whateley - his more conformist nephew - to take over).

John Whateley's will also names 'Agnes my daughter', who was still living with her mother when the will was drafted, and so was probably unmarried - and possibly very young - at the time.  There is a clue in the will as to who might have been the godmother of Agnes Whateley: one Agnes Fairefox of Barford, a few miles upriver from Stratford.

The names 'Anne' and 'Agnes' (pronounced 'Ann-es') were used interchangeably.  Anne Hathaway was named in her father's will as 'Agnes', and so it is a near certainty that the Agnes named in John Whateley's will would also have been known as Anne Whateley.

What this tells us is that there was an Anne Whateley in the Stratford area.  She was the sister of one of the colleagues of Shakespeare's father, who was also a near-neighbour to the Shakespeares.

Stratford tradition has long held that Anne Whateley resided in Hillborough Manor - 'haunted Hillborough' - which fell inside the parish of Temple Grafton.  Like so many a jilted bride, she lived on as a ghostly 'White Lady', a designation which might also indicate that she was an Augustinian nun.

Nuns were forbidden in Elizabethan England.  But then, so were priests - and two of Agnes's brothers worked secretly as priests in Henley in Arden.  It is possible that Anne or Agnes kept up the family tradition and served as a secret nun in the secluded manor of Hillborough.  The manor house belonged to the Huband family (Shakespeare would buy land off Ralph Huband in 1605), while the manor itself was in the hands of the ardently Catholic Sheldon family of Beoley.

It is interesting to note that Shakespeare, in his curious poem A Lover's Complaint, indicated that one of his early achievements had been to seduce a 'sacred nun', a 'sister sanctified of holiest note'.  It is also noteworthy that John Aubrey wrote, later in the 17th century, that Shakespeare left '2 or 300 pounds per annum to a sister' in his native county.  No such amount is mentioned in Shakespeare's will - and nothing like 2-300 pounds was left to his only surviving sibling, Joan Hart - so maybe there was another kind of 'sister' (an Augustinian 'White Lady', perhaps) to whom Shakespeare left a generous bequest.

The Sheldon link between Temple Grafton and Beoley is of major importance - for it was to Beoley that Shakespeare's skull was taken (see Who Killed William Shakespeare? http://www.thehistorypress.co.uk/index.php/who-killed-william-shakespeare.html/), and it is also at Beoley that we come across some very intriguing Whateley connections!

So - Anne Whateley did exist.  She was not just a slip of the pen.

Now scholars will have to come up with a new explanation for why the young William Shakespeare was granted permission, on consecutive days, to marry two different women - and why pressure was put on him to marry Anne Hathway, when he was already contracted to marry his 'sacred nun'.

Chapter and Verse

A few years ago, while I was researching another of my projects, my wife (Kim) and I went to a County Records Office somewhere in England.

There was a document I wanted to find.  Basically, it proved the existence of a certain Anne Whately.

We've known for a long time that the first marriage licence issued to William Shakespeare allowed him to marry one Anne Whately of Temple Grafton.  The next day, two Stratford farmers coughed up a fair amount of money to make sure that young will married one Anne Hathaway of Stratford (optimistically described as a 'maiden').

The document was there, and yes, it proved that Anne Whately did exist, and that the Shakespeare family would have known of her.  Job done.

At the counter, Kim couldn't resist asking if anyone else had wanted to see this document.  Scholars, perhaps, or students?  The staff looked blank.  So Kim told them that they'd got a very important document there - it proved the existence of the woman William Shakespeare had wanted to marry, as opposed to the woman he ended up marrying.

Quick as a flash, a guy with a beard came hurtling over and said something along the lines of:

"Well, of course, the official line on Anne Whately was delivered by Professor Samuel Schoenbaum, who said that she was a clerical error.  The clerk at the Worcester Consistory Court got her name wrong."

Under other circumstances, I might have been inclined to argue.  However, what I really wanted was to get out of there fast and keep the secret to ourselves, at least until I get round to writing that book.

But, at the same time, I was flabbergasted.  We - that is, my wife -  had just announced that we had found documentary proof that Anne Whately existed.  And straightaway a guy had told us that she didn't exist.  Had he asked to check the document? No.  He just told us what Professor Samuel Schoenbaum (who also hadn't seen the document) once said about her.

I mention this because I'm anticipating a great deal of this sort of thing when my ARTHUR book comes out very shortly.  I think of it as the 'Chapter-and-Verse' tendency.

You announce a discovery.  You have documentary proof.  But they don't want to see it.  Because somebody once said ...

It's like dealing with theology students.  You tell them that the Earth revolves around the Sun, and they'll quote you no end of learned sources who insist that it doesn't.  They won't look at the evidence.  They just go looking for something that somebody else once said.  "Well, of course, Samuel Schoenbaum said she didn't exist - ergo, she can't have existed."  But here's the evidence that she did.  "Well, Professor Schoenbaum said ... "

There's going to be a lot of that sort of thing.  Someone once pretended to look into something with a view to disproving it - the equivalent of a policeman standing by a road accident saying "Move along, please, move along, there's nothing to see here."  And their judgement is endlessly quoted at anyone who asks awkward questions in the hope that certain issues (such as Arthur having been Scottish) will go away.  It's the default position of the self-appointed experts.  Rather than considering new evidence, they all line up to discredit it (without looking at it) because somebody once said something else.

It's like that old joke: History never repeats itself, but historians only repeat each other.

So I've snuck a wee quote from Andre Gide into the start of my ARTHUR book:

"Alas! there exists an order of minds so sceptical that they deny the possibility of any fact as soon as it diverges from the commonplace.  It is not for them that I write."

At least take a look at the evidence before quoting whatever Professor Dumbledore said, chapter and verse!