28 July 2022

Cock and Bull stories about
Shakespeare and getting
lost in ‘the wrong Stratford’

The Cock Hotel, one half of the Cock and Bull stories … but was this ever the ‘wrong Stratford’? (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2022)

Patrick Comerford

The apocryphal story is told of the Victorian writer who took the coach to Stratford in search of Shakespeare.

The coach driver dropped him off at the Cock, a coaching inn on the High Street in Stony Stratford.

When the poor benighted writer realised the driver’s mistake – or his mistake – he exclaimed, ‘This isn’t Stratford!’

‘Yes it is,’ the coach driver retorted. ‘It’s just not Stratford-upon-Avon.’ And off he sped, heading off in a northerly direction.

It’s probably just another ‘Cock and Bull’ from the twinned coaching inns on the High Street in Stony Stratford.

But of course, Shakespeare knew of Stony Stratford, whether he ever enjoyed the confusion between the two Stratford: his birthplace in Warwickshire and the town on the old Watling Street in Buckinghamshire.

The former Rose and Crown Inn on High Street is associated with the stories and legends about the ‘Princes in the Tower’ (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2022)

Certainly, Shakespeare uses this town as the setting for one of the events in his telling of the story associated with the Princes in the Tower.

‘I hear they lay at Stony Stratford,’ it is said in Richard III, Act II, Scene IV, when the uncrowned Edward V is abducted in the Rose and Crown also on the High Street, at Nos 26-28, at the other end of the street from both the Cock and the Bull.

The Duke of Gloucester, later Richard III, finds the location of the young, uncrowned Edward V and his brother, the Duke of York. These two stood in the way of Richard’s claims to the throne. Edward was abducted in Stony Stratford in 1483, taken to the Tower of London and was never seen or heard of again.

The link between the Princes in the Tower and the Rose and Crown is dismissed by most historians today.

There is another, tentative but even more dismissible link between Shakespeare and Stony Stratford. The Horseshoe or Lyon and Horseshoe Inn is mentioned in Sir John Oldcastle, a play first published in 1600 and attributed to Shakespeare in 1619.

The play was once linked to the Bard because when Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part 1 was first staged in 1597-1598, the character Sir John Falstaff was called Sir John Oldcastle. There is even a suggestion that Falstaff was originally Oldcastle in The Merry Wives of Windsor too.

If Sir John Oldcastle is not Shakespeare’s play, there certainly was a pub in Stony Stratford known as the Horseshoe. Local historians Brian Dunleavy, Ken Daniels and Andy Powell, in their charming Inns of Stony Stratford, which I was referring to yesterday, identify the Horseshoe as a mediaeval pub that stood on High Street from at least the 16th century until it closed in 1797. They identfiy the site of the Horseshoe with the site later developed as Saint Paul’s School and Saint Paul’s Court.

Perhaps the one true link with Shakespeare on the High Street is the choice of name for the Talbot, a mediaeval pub that once stood at 81-83 High Street, across the street from both the Cock and Saint Paul’s Court. But that’s a story for another day … and it’s not another Cock and Bull story.

Saint Paul’s Court in Stony Stratford … was this the site of the Horseshoe or Lyon and Horseshoe Inn mentioned in ‘Sir John Oldcastle’, a play once attributed to Shakespeare? (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2022)

Further reading:

Bryan Dunleavy, Ken Daniels, Andy Powell, Inns of Stony Stratford (Southampton: Magic Flute, 2014/2018)

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