Did William Shakespeare once perform in Boots’ car park, opposite the common in the Essex town of Saffron Walden? Well . . . possibly. While there is no documentary evidence that he took a curtain call in what was then the yard of the Rose and Crown, he did have some intriguing connections to this ancient market town – as can be traced through the books of rhetoric, poetry, dictionaries and dramas held in the historic local independent library.
And William is not the only one. Samuel Pepys, Oliver Cromwell, Queen Victoria and Sylvia Pankhurst are among many who can be observed in a new light through the prism of this library’s remarkable collections. What a joy it was then, when I was invited to write a history of the almost unknown library on my doorstep.
What is now the Gibson Library was founded in 1832 after two bookish gentlemen agreed that Saffron Walden was ‘deficient’ in having no town library. John Player, a local Nonconformist, was frustrated at being prohibited from holding public office because of his faith. His Quaker neighbour, Jabez Gibson, was similarly disbarred yet also animated by progressive zeal. Since the late 1820s, the two friends had spent many evenings loosening the white linen bows at their throats and rolling up their sleeves to pen a list of possible donors for their library project.
It wasn’t plain sailing, for both men were suspected of religious or political intent. To be fair, these were febrile times. A combination of harsh working conditions and agricultural mechanization had created considerable unrest across the Essex countryside, culminating in the Swing Riots and an arson attack on the local workhouse just as Player and Gibson sat discussing books and learning over their own well-stocked dinner tables.
Nevertheless, within
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Subscribe now or Sign inDid William Shakespeare once perform in Boots’ car park, opposite the common in the Essex town of Saffron Walden? Well . . . possibly. While there is no documentary evidence that he took a curtain call in what was then the yard of the Rose and Crown, he did have some intriguing connections to this ancient market town – as can be traced through the books of rhetoric, poetry, dictionaries and dramas held in the historic local independent library.
And William is not the only one. Samuel Pepys, Oliver Cromwell, Queen Victoria and Sylvia Pankhurst are among many who can be observed in a new light through the prism of this library’s remarkable collections. What a joy it was then, when I was invited to write a history of the almost unknown library on my doorstep. What is now the Gibson Library was founded in 1832 after two bookish gentlemen agreed that Saffron Walden was ‘deficient’ in having no town library. John Player, a local Nonconformist, was frustrated at being prohibited from holding public office because of his faith. His Quaker neighbour, Jabez Gibson, was similarly disbarred yet also animated by progressive zeal. Since the late 1820s, the two friends had spent many evenings loosening the white linen bows at their throats and rolling up their sleeves to pen a list of possible donors for their library project. It wasn’t plain sailing, for both men were suspected of religious or political intent. To be fair, these were febrile times. A combination of harsh working conditions and agricultural mechanization had created considerable unrest across the Essex countryside, culminating in the Swing Riots and an arson attack on the local workhouse just as Player and Gibson sat discussing books and learning over their own well-stocked dinner tables. Nevertheless, within a few years the overtly non-political and non-religious ‘Philosophical Book Society’, the forerunner of the Gibson Library, was launched in the airy front room of Jabez Gibson’s town house, for ‘the promotion and diffusion of useful scientific knowledge’. If the project was indeed political, it was only in the broadest sense – washed in on the rising tide of library developments linked to movements for individual betterment and broader social change in the early nineteenth century. The first few thousand books were donated by a very Victorian circle of benefactors and reflect both their thirst for knowledge and the diversity of their interests. An early catalogue shows how far we have travelled in the way we think about and categorize knowledge today. No mod- ern library would break down Science, as these librarians did, into ‘Mental, Moral, Political, Social, Law’, or place Sports as an afterthought following ‘Topography, Archaeology, Anthrop- ology, Mythology, Folk-lore’. The collections on themes such as electricity and empire, society and surgery, now speak more about the times in which they were written than they do the subjects they were written to address. If these books appear in some ways like old snap shots, then the many journals on issues ranging from botany to current affairs, some in complete sets collected over almost 200 years, run like flickering ciné film beside them. As well as their subject matter, many of the early books are also fascinating as objects in themselves, handwritten on parchment – with occasional smudges – or printed on tissue-thin paper, illuminated in gold or branded with date stamps, fastened by brass clips or tied with plain ribbon, and still smelling of leather, paper, ink and glue. Often marks of individual ownership can be found on, or slipped between, the pages: signatures, sketches, ink-blots, annotations by the famous and the forgotten, torn pages, pressed flowers, broken spines and stains from smoke or sunlight on a favourite page. The oldest book is a rather worn missal from 1350; a practical religious guide written in Latin and perhaps once carried in the pocket of a priest travelling around his parish to mark family celebrations and sorrows almost 700 years ago. Neat black and red calligraphy and a few staves of music fill its vellum pages. Looking like birds of paradise besides this little wren of a missal are three manuscript Books of Hours dating from 1440 to 1460, each containing vibrant scenes from the life of Christ painted in red and white lead, vermilion, lead-tin yellow, brown earths and red dyes, indigo and ultramarine, with sumptuous highlights throughout in gleaming gold. Among much more, there is also a medieval chain book; a book with what is purported to be Martin Luther’s handwriting in rather angry red ink; a first edition of Dr Johnson’s Dictionary; and many shelves of works connected with Saffron Walden’s history. In Middlemarch (a fine Victorian copy of which is, of course, held in the Gibson Library), George Eliot describes a ‘pierglass’ – a mirror or other reflective surface well-polished by a housemaid until it has been ‘multitudinously scratched in all directions’. Yet hold a lighted candle to it, and ‘lo, the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun’. Eliot presses the scratches into service as a metaphor for events, the candle as our perspective. The light cast by the Gibson Library seems similarly to order Britain’s cultural history around the little town of Saffron Walden. One historically significant collection is of original tracts from the English Civil War, as Thomas Fairfax, commander-in-chief of Cromwell’s New Model Army, established his headquarters in one of Walden’s inns in 1647. It was here that each regiment of exhausted ‘souldiers’, inspired by the pioneering democratic ideas of the Levellers, elected representatives from their own ranks, called ‘Agitators’, to argue for their pay and raise other grievances in England’s first democratic debates – held in the town church. Ironically, despite pressing their case through democratic means, the soldiers were rebuffed by their own Parliament. Disappointed, they grew ‘much nettled’ and more radical. Walden locals soon saw them in the town, ‘with their swords drawne at the street corners’. The more famous Putney Debates in London that followed, pushing for universal male suffrage and other facets of democracy, would be the main act of a play that had already been written and rehearsed in the streets, pubs and church at Saffron Walden, and were ultimately recorded in its library. Less than twenty years later, another visitor arrived on horseback. Samuel Pepys stabled his horse at the White Hart Inn and walked over to the nearby Jacobean mansion of Audley End House. Pepys was impressed by his first sight of the place, but it was the cellars that really inspired him. There he ‘drank a most amiable drink, a health to the King’, he noted, and then ‘played on my flageolette, there being an excellent echo’. The first editor of Pepys’ Memoirs & Diary, well over a century later, was Lord Braybrooke of Audley End. But if Braybrooke had been pleased by Pepys’s early praise of his home, disappointment must have followed when Pepys recorded that, on a later visit, Audley End appeared not ‘as fine as it hath heretofore to me’. The appeal of the cellars was at least undiminished. ‘We went down and drank of much good liquor . . .’ wrote Pepys, ‘and here my wife and I did sing to my great content.’ Braybrooke took his revenge by editing the diary ruthlessly, making the copy in the Gibson Library an unusually slim first edition. So, does a (facsimile) of Shakespeare’s First Folio among many other holdings relating to the playwright in (original) works dating from 1610, mean that he was similarly connected to the town? Curiously, the First Folio opens with The Tempest, even though this is believed to be the last play that Shakespeare wrote. The drama commences with a storm-tossed ship which founders on the coast of a remote island. Today it is widely accepted that The Tempest was inspired by the wreck of the Sea Venture, the flagship of a small British fleet bound for the fledgling colony of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1609. Caught in a hurricane, the Sea Venture ran aground on the then uninhabited island of Bermuda, accidentally starting England’s colonization of the archipelago. Miraculously, all lives were saved, including that of William Strachey, an aspiring writer from Saffron Walden. Strachey, who had already had a sonnet published, kept a journal of his year-long travails. His handwritten manuscript, A Voyage to Virginia, caused a sensation when it was privately circulated in London in 1610, where it came to Shakespeare’s attention. As it happens, Shakespeare may have known another William from Saffron Walden. William Holgate, an aspiring writer himself, was the son of the wealthy landlord of the Rose and Crown in the town’s marketplace. He kept a handwritten Miscellany of some of his own writing, supplemented with those of established authors – but the only verse of Shakespeare’s he transcribed is Sonnet 106, ‘On his Mistress’ beauty’. This is a member of the ‘fair youth’ sequence, in which Shakespeare expressed his love for an unknown young man. Could William Holgate be a candidate for the mysterious WH? When James I visited Audley End in 1610, Shakespeare’s company was brought from London to perform for their monarch and be paid 6s 8d. They were then staging three plays: Coriolanus, A Winter’s Tale and The Tempest. As neither the play performed nor the names of the players who came to Walden were recorded, it is impossible to know whether Shakespeare was among them, but it is tempting to imagine him staging The Tempest in homage to the local man whose account had inspired it. It would also have been perhaps his last opportunity to spend some time with William Holgate. Researching this history of the Gibson Library and its collections not only made me see my town with fresh eyes, it also made me appreciate that a historic library is not merely a collection of books past their sell-by date but a living place full of artefacts, arguments and ideas. Animated by the people who use it, the Gibson Library, and others like it around the country, offer us conversations about ourselves. My history of this old institution and its collections, The Library Book, has just been launched in Saffron Walden’s town library, in the rooms below the Gibson Library itself. Since I had learned that the town has a (slender) claim to being the birthplace of English democracy, in 1647, I put the question of whether Shakespeare might have performed there to the locals in the room. Democratically, if not historically accurately, the answer was a resounding yes.Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 91 © Clare Mulley 2026
About the contributor
Clare Mulley’s writing focuses primarily on the experiences of women in the Second World War, and her books include The Spy Who Loved and Agent Zo. Having once been told that mulley in Celtic means ‘to fall over’, she is delighted to make her living falling down the rabbit holes of history, whichever century they lead to.
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