To be, or not to be a fly tipper — that is the question. Or so it was for a long time.
The earliest record of famous playwright William Shakespeare’s father in Stratford-upon-Avon comes in the form of a 1552 fine for making a “muckhill” on a street.
It has long been one of the best known facts about John Shakespeare, that the muckhill was dumped intentionally by the glover and tanner of leather, in what might be compared to fly-tipping in the modern day.
Now, however, that assumption has been overturned as a myth.
Experts studying archive documents say far from being punished, he was simply paying a waste disposal toll for waste related to his trade.
David Fallow, a former financier, has spent years studying the Shakespeare family’s wealth. It was during one of these readings that he found that the fine had been interpreted differently.
He told the Guardian: “The meanings of a lot of these words have changed over the last 500 years. A fine was simply a charge, a rent or rates.
“There was absolutely no moral imputation to John Shakespeare’s fine at all. Stratford muckhills in his lifetime were a rentable resource, for which the town could collect taxes.”
The 1552 document that records John Shakespeare and two of his associates as having paid 12d (a shilling) for a midden heap or “mukhyll” has been taken completely out of context, according to Mr Fallow.
Academics at the forefront of their industries like Sigmund Freud, he said, were “absolutely wrong” in their assessments of how “barbarous” John Shakespeare was.
While Mr Fallow maintains that the heap was muck, it included urine, which decayed into ammonia, to be used for softening and tanning leather hides, among other processes, which was clearly related to his profession.
Three years of research led him to discover that such muckhills helped provide Stratford with significant revenue.
He also found different approaches to waste than were previously known. For example, citizens would pay a fee for the convenience of keeping a muckhill on their property.
And while the England Shakespeare lived in has grown to be depicted as filthy and disease-ridden, Mr Fallow said he found evidence to turn that image on its head.
He said: “It’s attacking the whole idea that Elizabethan towns and villages were just rivers of excrement going down them.
“It’s not just heaving buckets of you-know-what out of the window. This changes the way we look at Shakespearean England, based on how the society uses waste and how it’s moved around and what they do with it.”
Evidence shows Stratford’s approach to the environment, which consisted of two streams and the Avon that made up a network of interconnected waste-management technologies. These practices were relied on in the mid-16th century.
Requirements were also included for clearing gutters and repairing pavements, and residents of the town were responsible for cleaning the area in front of their property.
Muckhills were meant to be piled up outside shops and houses. Those who left them there were expected to spread their contents over their fields or dispose of them in another way.
Mr Fallow has carried out other breakthrough work on the Shakespeare family. In 2015, his study of the family’s financial transactions and other records that survived the ages found that the portrayal of John Shakespeare as a failed trader was also wrong. He also found that he was a national-level wool dealer.
Mr Fallow, a former financier, was then commissioned to contribute to a major publication for Cambridge University Press marking the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death.
He said academics initially received his research with scepticism. “Nobody would believe it because it’s challenging some of the deep tropes that have been built up over the years about the Shakespeares, William and his father.”
His research — titled John Shakespeare’s Muckhill: Ecologies, Economies, and Biographies of Communal Waste in Stratford-upon-Avon, circa 1550–1600 — will be published this month by the academic journal Shakespeare Quarterly, an Oxford University Press publication for the Shakespeare Folger Library in Washington.
It is co-written with Elizabeth Tavares, an assistant professor of English at the University of Alabama.
