GFTU BGCM Minutes 2017

a local pub expecting 30 workers to attend and that is what he catered for, but

in fact 2,000 turned up. He led a successful campaign and a strike for higher

wages and shorter working hours for farm labourers, so the National

Agricultural Labourers Union was formed. It had a number of notable

successes, but the landlords and the judiciary, very often the same person,

fought back and further down into the Cotswolds at Chipping Norton 16

labourers’ wives were imprisoned for their role as pickets, because by that

stage the landlords had started to use lock out as an intimidatory weapon

against union members in starving labourers back to work.

Of course, our greatest claim to fame, as other speakers have identified, is this

is where Shakespeare lived and died. His birth place has been bought for the

nation. In fact it was bought by money raised by Charles Dickens and if you do

have time you can go and visit his birthplace, the house is preserved, as now is

his school room. It is true, as Doug observed, that Shakespeare was well

aware of the distinction between labour and wealth and he often put stories of

resistance in the centrepiece of his plays. In Henry VI he put Jack Cade, the

rebel leader, right centre stage in the play. In an attempt to try and win the

prize that Doug has offered I have got a Jack Cade quote from Shakespeare.

He said: “Be brave, then; for your captain is brave, and vows reformation.

There shall be in England seven halfpenny loaves sold for a penny: the three-

hooped pot; shall have ten hoops and I will make it felony to drink small bear:

all the realm shall be in common; and in Cheapside shall my palfrey go to

grass: and when I am king, as king I will be, there shall be no money; all shall

eat and drink on my score”.

Shakespeare often celebrated the rioter and he celebrated resistance and it

proved enormously popular, so in the 1590s London’s population has been

estimated at 130,000 people and of that 130,000 people 10,000 went to watch

Henry VI at the Globe. He died 401 years ago here in Stratford on his birthday

actually. Astonishingly, he had been frequenting the night before Stratford’s

finest ale houses with his pals and he took ill, so it seems that the world’s

greatest playwright died of a particularly bad hangover. His appeal was for

every man, but his works seem to have been appropriated by posh people. It

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