Shakspere getting a whipping! No doubt he often did. Masters in those days were not greater, but rather less, respecters of persons than they are now, and they believed very firmly in the adage which is going out of fashion, that to spare tie rod is to spoil the child. So we may think of little Will Shakspere coming out of the Grammar School and passing the old Guild Chapel and the Falcon Inn with two little red fists crammed into two little red and streaming eyes, and going home to mother Mary in Henley street to be comforted and coddled and popped down on the settle in the wide chimney corner, with some dainty, dear to the heart of small boys who got into trouble three hundred years ago just as they do now. Let us hope his cake was not like one he describes as “dough on both sides.”
But I fancy that lessons bore a very small part in Will Shakspere’s education. He certainly never knew much Latin; but he knew all about country things as only a country-bred boy can know about them. He and Gilbert must have run many a time to Ashbies, their mother’s farm at Wilmecote, and watched the oxen plowing in the heavy clay fields; and cried, perhaps, as children do now “as the butcher takes away the calf”; and played with the shepherd’s “ob-tailed cur”; and gossiped with Christopher Sly, who could tell them all manner of wonderful tales, for had he not been peddler, card-maker, bear-herd, “and now by present profession a tinker”?
They must have listened to their father and their uncle Henry up at the big farm close to Snitterfield church (where Henry Shakspere lived) as the two men discussed the price of a yoke of oxen at Stratford or Warwick fair, or debated whether they should “sow the head-land with wheat.—