ing the new playhouse, the
Fortune, in Golding Lane, "was by negligence of a candle, clean burned
down to the ground." In this year also, 1614, the town of
Stratford-on-Avon was burned. One of the strangest events, however,
happened in the first year of Elizabeth (1558), when "dyed Sir Thomas
Cheney, Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, of whom it is reported for a
certain, that his pulse did beat more than three quarters of an hour
after he was dead, as strongly as if he had been still alive." In 1580 a
strange apparition happened in Somersetshire--three score personages all
clothed in black, a furlong in distance from those that beheld them; "and
after their appearing, and a little while tarrying, they vanished away,
but immediately another strange company, in like manner, color, and
number appeared in the same place, and they encountered one another and
so vanished away. And the third time appeared that number again, all in
bright armour, and encountered one another, and so vanished away. This
was examined before Sir George Norton, and sworn by four honest men that
saw it, to be true." Equally well substantiated, probably, was what
happened in Herefordshire in 1571: "A field of three acres, in Blackmore,
with the Trees and Fences, moved from its place and passed over another
field, traveling in the highway that goeth to Herne, and there stayed."
Herefordshire was a favorite place for this sort of exercise of nature.
In 1575 the little town of Kinnaston was visited by an earthquake: "On
the seventeenth of February at six o'clock of the evening, the earth
began to open and a Hill with a Rock under it (making at first a great
bellowing noise, which was heard a great way off) lifted itself up a
great height, and began to travel, bearing along with it the Trees that
grew upon it, the Sheep-folds, and Flocks of Sheep abiding there at the
same time. In the place from whence it was first moved, it left a gaping
distance forty foot broad, and fourscore Ells long; the whole Field was
about twenty Acres. Passing along, it overthrew a Chappell standing in
the way, removed an Ewe-Tree planted in the Churchyard, from the West
into the East; with the like force it thrust before it High-wayes,
Sheep-folds, Hedges, and Trees, made Tilled ground Pasture, and again
turned Pasture into Tillage. Having walked in this sort from Saturday in
the evening, till Monday noon, it then stood still." It seems not
improbable that Birnam wood should come