Literary Passion · Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire
Anne Hathaway's Cottage (Shakespeare's courtship)
The thatched farmhouse where the eighteen-year-old Shakespeare courted Anne Hathaway, eight years his senior — and married her three months before their daughter's arrival made the timeline eloquent. The settle by the fire is still called the courting bench.
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Nearby on the map
The oldest chalk figure in Britain, a 360ft Bronze Age horse leaping across the scarp above the dry valley called the Manger. Local folklore made the hill a fertility landscape — couples still climb it on midsummer nights — though the documented rite is the seven-yearly 'scouring' festival of the 1700s.
Documented + folkloreQueer HeritageMagdalen College, Oxford (Wilde's aesthetic years)Oxford, Oxfordshire · EnglandWhere Wilde perfected the pose — blue china, sunflowers, a double first — that became the aesthetic movement. Oxford also formed the circles through which, years later, Bosie entered his life
Documented historyFolk Rite & FertilityAbbots Bromley Horn DanceAbbots Bromley, Staffordshire · EnglandSix men carrying thousand-year-old reindeer antlers dance a full day around the parish each September — England's most venerable surviving folk rite, trailed for centuries by fertility folklore, with a man in a frock and a boy with a bow and arrow among the characters. The antlers are older than the Norman Conquest.
Documented + folkloreSpotted an error, or hold a better source? Write to marquis@marquisdemayfair.com — corrections are made, never defended. Our methodology.