Stratford upon Avon, Warwickshire

Home of the Shakespeare family
on Henley StreetStratford is William Shakespeare's hometown. The Shakespeares' house on Henley Street is maintained by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

In the sixteenth-century Stratford was a thriving rural town, home to around 1,500 people, around three days' and three nights' travel from London.

Far from offering a simpler life, in Elizabethan times a rural existence could be perched on a knife-edge. Local economies were fragile and easy victim to mishap. In towns frequented by merchants travelling from the biohazard hotspots in the south, disease, in particular plague, was a constant visitor.

Holy Trinity Church, where William
Shakespeare was baptized and buried,
and one of England's most visited
parish churchesThe region's fragile economy could easily be disrupted; livestock could be eradicated by pests, or crops destroyed by summer deluges. In the mid 1590s two calamitous fires are known to have caused a severe food crisis in Stratford with paupers forced to rely on local handouts until a petition led to Elizabeth agreeing to "relieve this town afflicted and almost wasted by fire" from state coffers.