THE fact that the English used by the King James translators of the Bible is identically the same as that used by Shakespeare in the plays, and that one lexicon answers completely for both, is a familiar one. But, in a communication to The Church Review,* Appleton Morgan went further, and suggested that this fact might furnish a hint as to the source whence Shakespeare drew his vocabulary, which Mr. Morgan had already demonstrated + he did not hear his neighbors talk, and did not learn at the Stratford grammar school. Mr. Morgan's suggestion was that Shakespeare must have become drilled in the Liturgy of the Anglican Church, as attendance upon the services of the Church was not an opportunity, but a routine and a duty, in the days of Shakespeare's youth. And indeed the suggestion can, it seems to me, be carried further. Clearly we must account for Shakespeare's boyhood, his impressible and formative years, by conceiving some other surroundings than the exceedingly conventional home, the chandlery or glover or ale-tasting business of his father, the bookless, dialect-speaking neighborhood, the grammar school whose curriculum consisted principally of flogging, and the sixteenth-century schoolmaster, who was, as has been shown, principally classed as efficient or non-efficient according to his muscle. Indeed, this description of a sixteenth-century schoolmaster as a person employed to thrash boys is no figure of speech. There was no desire to conceal the fact. The seal of the Stratford free grammar school of Edward VI.'s (1553) endowment (and Edward VI. has received a great deal of notice from writers of Shakespearian biography for his great goodness in the matter, though, as a matter of fact, as we shall

* September, 1887.

VILLA-DE-LOWASIGILL.COM·LI

QVI PARCIT VI
RGE O DIT FILIV

1552

†The Shakespearian Myth, p. 248; Venus and Adonis, a study in the Warwickshire dialect, passim.

Id. p. 141; Shakespeare in Fact and in Criticism, p. 64; and that the schoolmasters of that date were anything but proper persons, we have other authority than Ascham. From Maxwell Lyte's History of Eton College we learn that Nicholas Udall, headmaster of Eton, 1534-43, not only gave fifty-four thrashings in the course of a single Latin lesson, but in 1543 confessed to habitual and nameless acts of immorality with the boys under his charge, which confession was no bar to his appointment to the headmastership of Westminster School in 1554.

see further on, the school was actually endowed by a deed to the
Guild from Thomas Jolyffee, the benefits of which are still accruing
to Stratford children, so that the royal charter of 1553 was merely an
inexpensive confirmation on the king's part) actually bears the device
of a schoolmaster flogging his boys into a school-house. And if any
further confirmation of the ways of the sixteenth-century pedagogue
is needed, let the reader consult "The Disobedient Child," a rhymed
interlude made in 1560 by "Thomas Ingleland, late student in Cam-
bridge," wherein a boy begs his father not to send him to school,
where children's
"tender bodies both night and day

Are whipped and scourged and beat like a stone;
That, from top to toe, the skin is away."

Let us rather imagine young Shakespeare, then, like young Chatterton, a century later, wandering in the aisles of that splendid church, already, at his birth, of unrecorded antiquity;* rich then in glorious architecture and painted windows, and drinking into the very fibre of his soul. Somewhere or other, before he journeyed to London, this boy must have been moved by lofty and stirring environments. Why should he not in that grand interior have absorbed

"the carved angels, ever eager-eyed, the sculptured dead, Knights, ladies praying in dumb oratʼries. The pallid moonshine, and in the midst, 'mong thousand heraldries, And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings, diamonded with

panes of quaint device,

Rose bloom, warm gules, and amethyst and crimson, gold and jet, . . the missal where swart Paynims pray . . in splendid dyes.”

Something, indeed, must have surrounded young Shakespeare-something more sensuous than the middens and peasants and bailiffs and beer-guzzlers of Stratford town. And besides the great Church there was the Guild Chapel, of which all the townspeople were attendants.

In about the latter years of the fourteenth century an institution called the Guild became popular in the English towns. These Guilds were not the trade institutions called by that name, which arose many years later, and of which Chaucer speaks:

An Haberdasher and a Carpenter,
A Webbe, a Deyer, and a Tapiser,
Were all y-clothed in ye livere

Of a solemne and grete fraternite.

We shall see later on how these trade Guilds grew out of the greater town Guilds.

These town Guilds were originated in popular religious observances and soon developed into organizations for self-help. At once religious

*See SHAKESPEARIANA for October, 1890, p. 225.

and friendly, they were recruited from both sexes "for the love of God and our soul's need," not forgetting, however, the initiation fee. and annual dues. This fee and these dues were received in cash, when possible, or in kind, when candidates had not the cash. Thus in the Stratford Guild the entrance fee varied from sixpence to four pounds; from the building of a porch to the Guild house by one Simon Gore, in 1408, to the building of a whole house on Hurley Street by John Ironmonger in 1504. John Ovyrton and his wife were admitted. on agreeing to cook the annual dinner at the Guild's expense. Building material, plaster of Paris, wine, and indeed all sorts of merchandise were also taken for feed. The privileges secured were: protection from rapacious landlords, attendance in sickness, masses for the souls of the dead, lighted tapers in their behalf at all the shrines of the Virgin in the neighborhood, and those other securities for salvation which the middle-aged men and women valued more than life (which seem to be the nearest approach to the modern idea of life insurance), but which the poor could not always individually secure. Besides, these Guilds provided for the relief of the poor, to whom they distributed food and beer, the dowries of spinsters, and selected members to make pilgrimages to Canterbury at the Guild's expense. By strict rules the Guild attended en masse the funeral of each of its members, and once a year marched in great array with flying banners to church, where special services. were held, and afterwards a great feast. Priests were only occasionally admitted, and then upon the same terms as others. The idea was that the Guild was a lay organization which employed but did not include priests. It was governed by officers-two wardens or aldermen, proctors, beadles and clerks-elected by its members. Besides which it chose a council to guard its property, which was accumulated by the operation of the rule that each member should leave by will to it a larger or smaller portion of his or her estates. In time these Guilds grew very rich, and it was from them no doubt that the craft Guild, of which Chaucer speaks, originated. In time the members referred their disputes to this council, instead of going to law. And the Wardens, or Aldermen, soon grew so much more important than the town authorities that they were invited to control municipal, and especially police affairs, until the whole town was governed, and well governed, by the officers of the Guild of the Holy Cross. The college priests and the Lord of the Manor and his steward grew jealous, but could not make much headway against an organization to which the entire population belonged. The Church brought suit against the Guild for tithes now and then. But this seemed to be the only allegiance, except to its own members, which the Guild recognized. Mr. Sidney Lee says that an examination of the Guild's accounts is the best possible history of the manners of the day, and adds, dryly, that as the fraternity increased in wealth the disbursements for the feast grew larger and larger with each anniversary. The uniform of the Guild was a hood, furnished by it to each

member on admission (as we learn from an entry of the Stratford Guild, which records the admission of several weavers in 1427-on stipulating to present the cloth from which the hoods were to be made), and a painted banner.

The Guild of the Holy Cross at Stratford appears to have been one of the oldest of which we have any record. In 1389 one of its officers said: "And its beginning was from time whereunto the memory of man reacheth not." Its muniments, still extant, prove that it received gifts early in the thirteenth century. One William Sude, who lived in the reign of Henry III., made it a deed of gift of a messuage of the value of sixpence per annum. The Bishops of Worcester encouraged it. Geoffrey of Gifford, October 7, 1270, issued letters of indulgence for forty days "to all Christians who were sincerely penitent and who had given gifts to the Guild of the Holy Cross at Stratford. In the reign of Edward III. the Guild had become very rich, so that in 1353 it boasted that there was hardly a street in Stratford town upon which it did not own real estate. Besides this, so did its members work for its prosperity, that gifts were constantly made of produce, wine, corn, salt, sheep, boars, lambs, etc., by members, to increase its prosperity. Robert of Stratford the elder, back in the reign of Edward I., laid the foundations of a special chapel for this Stratford Guild, also for almshouses and a great hall of assembly, to be called Rood Hall (that is, " Cross" Hall; "rood" being another name. for "Cross"). In 1332 Edward III., by a new charter, confirmed all the Guild's franchises, rights and privileges. In 1389 Richard II. appointed a commission to examine and report concerning all the Guilds in the kingdom, which reported, so far as Stratford was concerned, as follows:

These are the ordinances of the Guild of the Holy Cross of Stratford:

1. Each of the brethren who wishes to remain in the Guild shall give fourpence a year, payable four times in the year, namely, a penny at the feast of St. Michael's, a penny at the feast of St. Hilary, a penny at Easter, and a penny at the feast of St. John the Baptist, out of which payments there shall be made and kept up one wax candle, which shall be done in worshipful honor of our Lord Jesus Christ and of the blessed Virgin and of the Holy Cross. And the wax candle shall be kept alight every day throughout the year at every mass in the church before the blessed Cross, so that God and the blessed Virgin and the venerated Cross may keep and guard all the brethren and sisters of the Guild from every ill. And whoever of the brethren or sisters neglects to come at the above-named time shall pay one penny. It is also ordained by the brethren and sisters of our Guild that, when any them dies, the wax candle before named, together with eight smaller ones, shall be carried from the church to the house of him that is dead, and there shall be kept alight before the body of the dead until it is carried to the church, and the wax candles shall afterwards be set before the Cross. Also, all the brethren of the Guild are bound to follow the body to the church, and to pray for his soul until the body is buried. And whoever does not fulfil this shall pay one halfpenny.

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