William Shakespeare by S.L. Bensusan — Read

Stratford in Shakespeare's time administered its own affairs in very complete fashion through the medium of a Guild, which was turned into a Municipal Corporation by Edward VI. It boasted bailiff, aldermen, burgesses and chamberlains, and the council met every month in the Guild Hall. Those who accepted office were liable to be heavily mulcted for non-attendance, for attending in mufti, for declining promotion to a more responsible office, or for telling the secrets of the council chamber to those who had no place in it. The Chapel of the Guild, the Guild Hall, and the Grammar School, in which boys were taught and disciplined in fashion that would shock our humanitarian instincts to-day, still exist. The bailiff or warden of Stratford was at one time John Shakespeare himself, and at another a subordinate colleague, who would have sat in judgment upon him in the days when the old man's liabilities were beginning to get the better of his assets, and he himself was no longer a man of importance. The rule of the City Guild or Corporation was paternal in an Elizabethan sense. Just as the schoolmaster did not spare the rod lest he should spoil the child, so the magnates of the corporation regarded their fellow-citizens as men and women to be admonished or encouraged, punished or praised, according to their behaviour. Food prices were fixed by the corporation; the adulteration of the people's supplies was made exceedingly difficult and dangerous.

Men who lived ill were fined or expelled from Stratford's boundaries; scolding wives were sentenced to have their tempers sweetened by immersion from the ducking-stool in the clear, cold waters of Avon. Publicans were forced to conform to the local laws carefully framed to abolish public drunkenness. The stocks were waiting for the feet of drunkards, brawlers, and offenders against municipal regulations, and the whipping-post was always in evidence where the Market House now stands. Apprentices might not be out after nine o'clock at night. Attendance at church was obligatory, and he who blasphemed or used foul language found ample reason to regret his indiscretion. In short, the conduct of Stratford was of a kind more in keeping with the Puritan tradition than anything we can find in England to-day, but it was associated with real brotherly love, and a feeling of common citizenship, that held the town together. Those who have studied the early records of the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish community in England in the years following the successful intercession of Manasseh ben Israel with Oliver Cromwell, will hardly fail to note the striking similarity between the rules that governed Elizabethan corporations and those that governed those Jews who returned to England and lived their prosperous but dignified lives in the east end of London when the eighteenth century was as young as our own.