Dawn breaks

To the editor:
    It is Saturday morning. 7 to be exact. Dawn is just beginning to break to the east. It is one of those quiet dawns that steps lively into the day. Stratford is similar to Presque Isle with the ability to leave the city and go into the country in moments. I am sitting on the train on my way to Birmingham. Think of going from Presque Isle to Bangor or Boston with no hassle other than getting a ticket and a seat. As the first train of the day, this one is pretty empty.     Stratford-upon-Avon has been a community for well over 1,000 years. Simple logic here, it is one of the few places along the Avon River that you could cross with relative ease. While it has been in the center of many controversies in the history of England it has managed to stay relatively the same. Thanks to a far-seeing bishop, the streets were laid out in a rudimentary grid based on the Roman road laid down in Hadrian’s time. To the north of the city was forest. The Arden Forest was huge. In the time of Shakespeare it still had a few bears and other creatures. To the south lay the wheat, barley and oat fields that fed much of the country over the eons.
    As you walk through the streets a few of the buildings remain after four hundred years. Their timber frames somewhat warped and bent through time but still in good shape. Here people developed an early form of the mobile home. You had your framing timbers that we see in pictures of the streets of the city. These form a cage like apparatus in the shape of a house or barn. The spaces were filled with a small weaving of thin sticks called wattle, mud, manure, and straw called daub. Thus the term “wattle and daub.” As your situation changed you could knock out the daub, poke out the pegs holding the beams together and move your house to a new location. We would add the necessary wheels much later.
    Street names are rather simple. Sheep, Wood and Rother streets are named for the products that were sold there. Rother is an old Anglo-Saxon term for Cattle. And just west of Shakespeare’s birthplace is the cattle market area of the city. This is where you will find the oldest thatched roof building in the city limits of his hometown. Thatching is made from straw. Done right it should last for about 30 years. However, while organically very sound it does have its problems. It does tend to burn easily. That is why one rule for the citizens of the city was that each house had to have a bucket of sand ready beside the door. If you had a larger amount of income then you also had to have a hook that would reach the upper parts of the roof so that in the event of fire you could pull the thatching off and perhaps save the rest of your house or your neighbors place.
    America has had a close relationship with Stratford-upon-Avon since it began. The Northern colonies were made up of Puritans and others. Many of those were from this region of England. One of the earliest was upset with the tenor of the religious atmosphere here. It was not in his opinion religious enough. He showed up on our shores with a few boxes of books, some simple clothes and thanks to the change in climate did not live long in the New World before he was called up for discussions with the Angels. Leaving behind his books in Cambridge, Mass. caused a bit of a stir because it was from these volumes that Harvard University was formed. John Harvard’s parents lived here in the city and you can tour their home.
    A very nice gift to the world today.