Shakespeare Birthplace Trust
Shakespeare Birthplace Trust
Much, much more than Shakespeare!
By Mairi Macdonald – Deputy Head of Archives
There are, at time of writing, fewer than eighty hand-written documents from Shakespeare's lifetime that contain a mention of his name. Of these, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Records Office holds a remarkable thirty-one. But that is only a small part of our story!
It may surprise you to know that, despite our name, we are, essentially a small and very friendly county record office. Our strong rooms currently hold more than 100 cubic metres of records; documents similar to those you might expect to find in your own local record office.
Established in the mid nineteenth century after the purchase of Shakespeare's Birthplace for the nation, the original collecting policy of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust encompassed books, objects and manuscripts relating to Shakespeare, but within a few years this remit was expanded to include his town and times and has subsequently evolved, from our point of view, to take in the history of much of South Warwickshire.
We now hold material ranging from a charter of King Stephen in the 1140s to this week's issue of the local newspaper, all freely available to researchers after a simple registration process.
In the 1860s the archives received the records of Stratford-upon-Avon Borough Council and its medieval predecessor, the Guild of the Holy Cross: providing an unparalleled resource for the history of the town and its properties from the thirteenth century onwards.
The first major private deposit came with the antiquarian collections of local solicitor Robert Bell Wheler, author, at the age of 21, of the first history of Stratford, published in 1806. The borough archives were added to consistently until Local Government reorganization in 1974.
In one major way we were fortunate to begin collecting before the establishment of county archives in the 1920s and 30s, and came into the public eye at a time when owners of archives, particularly those with large landed estates, became aware of the need both to clear space in their own premises (often outhouses) and preserve these manuscripts for posterity.
This was aided immeasurably by the indefatigable efforts of two early administrators of the Trust, Richard Savage and his successor F. C. Wellstood.
Rejoicing in the title "Secretary and Librarian', these two, who in addition to overseeing the collections, also ran the day-to-day administration of the organization, established personal contact with local peers and gentry, and persuaded them of the benefits of depositing their collections for safekeeping.
That this storage would cost the depositor nothing was, no doubt a major factor in their success! – and is still a major weapon in the armoury of most record offices.
In addition, Savage and Wellstood held out the promise of catalogues, which would enable owners to retrieve relevant material if necessary, while making their contents known to a wider academic readership.
This combination of practicality and flattery worked its charm and among the larger estate collections deposited before the Second World War were those of the Gregory-Hood family of Stivichall near Coventry; the Archer family of Tanworth, later Earls of Plymouth; Willoughby de Broke of Compton Verney, the deeds and manorial records of the Throckmortons of Coughton Court and, pre-eminent for both quantity and scope, the records of the Leigh family, Lords Leigh of Stoneleigh Abbey, whose landed estates covered not only Warwickshire, but also Bedfordshire, Cheshire, Gloucestershire and London, and whose records date from the thriteenth century.
In addition to deposit, the Trust also purchased the family papers of the Ferrers family of Baddesley Cinton. Since the advent of Acceptance in Lieu, we have been fortunate to have transferred to us permanently the Thorckmorton and Gregory-Hood collections.
Add to these two or three collections of parish register transcripts covering much of south Warwickshire and neighbouring counties (we hold the originals for Stratford, including THE baptism and burial), a regular accumulation of deeds and papers from local solicitors, businesses, Stratford families and private individuals and it immediately becomes apparent that we are significantly more than it says on the cover.
For many years we struggled to inform and educate both locals and academic researchers that we were "worth a detour', but it was not until the advent of the internet that we really began to feel that our "living had not been in vain'.
above: Portrait of Elizabeth I from Inspeximus of 1572
Since 2000 we have been cataloguing on computer and, thanks to various lottery funded projects, not least A2A, have about 90% of our holdings available through our online catalogue.
A regular fortnightly article "Living Archives' in the Stratford-upon-Avon Herald, draws attention to recent accessions and reminds people of our existence. We do our best to spread the word with open days, family history surgeries, formal introduction sessions and occasional tours of the strongrooms, but it is still lowering to have new readers say "I've lived here all my life/thirty years and didn't know you were here' or worse, "I didn't know I could come in'.
Our Library holdings too, are "out there': all accessions since September 2001 have been entered into a computer catalogue and the rest are being gradually reconned: All Warwickshire and Worcestershire books are there, as are biographical works.
Our Library collection is one of our major strengths: again, because of our "venerable antiquity' we have most of the Historical Manuscript Commission reports, Rolls Series volumes, British Record and Harleian Society publications, Calendars of State Papers for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – all on open access.
Recent initiatives to expand our "customer base' include the scanning and adding to the catalogue of more than a thousand (of our many thousands) of photographs of Stratford and surrounding area, dating from the 1850s, and, to be officially launched in March, aided by a grant from MLA West Midlands, five databases based on documents in the archives.
It will now be possible to search the Borough and Union Workhouse admisssions, the Borough Police Charge books before 1880, the Stratford Cemetery Registers from 1881 to 1964 and a unique 1765 Smallpox census, detailing households and the number in each who had had smallpox.
In the pipeline are the register of Stratford's first Dispensary,1823 -1833, the parish apprentice register, 1802-1825, Visitors Books for Shakespeare's Birthplace from the early nineteenth century, various autograph collections and registered wills from a local solicitor.
With a staff of three full-time archivists, a part-time Local Studies Librarian (who doubles as our genealogical researcher) and part-time Office Administrator (who keeps us all in order!) we could not achieve as much as we do without the invaluable and dedicated services of a band of fifteen volunteers who turn up regularly and undertake a range of tasks from data inputting to re-typing old lists for import into the online catalogue, indexing the local newspaper, preliminary sorting of new accessions and prophylactic packaging of vulnerable items.
We may be small, but we think we're perfectly formed!
Click here out. to find out more.
Below: Watercolour map of Stratford and Grant of land in Fletchampstead c.1285
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