Anne Hathaway’s Cottage, inside and out

Anne Hathaway’s Cottage is the thatched farmhouse in Shottery, a mile west of Stratford-upon-Avon, where William Shakespeare’s wife Anne grew up. It is older than its fame suggests and bigger than its name: a farmhouse begun in 1463, enlarged twice, lived in by thirteen generations of Hathaways and visited by admirers since the 18th century. Here is how it was built, what survives inside, and a 3D model of it you can turn round.

Where

22 Cottage Lane, Shottery, Stratford-upon-Avon

Oldest part

About 1463

Rooms

12, by 1697

Lived in by

The Hathaways, 1543 to 1911

Owned by

Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, since 1892

Listed

Grade I; the garden is Grade II registered

Not really a cottage

In Anne’s time this was the farmhouse of Hewlands Farm, a sheep farm of about 90 acres that John Hathaway, probably her grandfather, took the lease of in 1543. The Hathaways were prosperous yeomen, and by the end of the 17th century the house had twelve rooms. The name “Anne Hathaway’s Cottage” is much later, from around 1800, when Shakespeare tourism had taken off and a thatched house in a flower garden fitted the picture people came for. The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, which owns it, calls the word a misnomer.

(If you searched for the Anne Hathaway house and were hoping for the actress: she was reportedly named after this Anne, Shakespeare’s wife, but has no connection to the house.)

Three builds along one roof

The house was built in three stages over about 230 years, and you can read all three along its thatched roofline.

1463: the hall-house

The oldest part, in the middle of the house, is a cruck-framed farmhouse whose timbers were felled in 1462 or 1463. It began as a single storey of two or three rooms: a kitchen, a parlour and an open hall, with a passage through. The kitchen still has its original floor of blue lias limestone slabs, probably from nearby Wilmcote. Before they were laid, the floor was earth.

The early 1600s: Bartholomew’s wing

In 1610 Anne’s brother Bartholomew bought the freehold for £200, and the family stopped being tenants. He added the taller, two-storey wing at the west end, box-framed rather than cruck-framed, and put an upper floor into the old hall. By 1615 the house had ten rooms and two chimneys.

1697: John Hathaway’s extension

Bartholomew’s grandson John added two more rooms of stone, brick and timber at the east end, by the lane, bringing the house to twelve. He left his initials: a chimney stack carries a datestone reading “IH 1697”, and the grille of a bacon cupboard inside is cut with “IH EH 1697”.

From the garden, then, the taller thatch on the left is Bartholomew’s wing, with a small canted bay window under a tiled roof. The long, lower stretch with dormers cut into the thatch is the 1463 house, and the far right is the 1697 end. The whole house stands on a limestone plinth, with stone steps up to its doors, because Shottery Brook across the lane floods.

Turn it round here

Interactive 3D model

Anne Hathaway’s Cottage

The model is built from photographs of the house and garden: the long thatched roof, the timber frame and its plaster panels, the brick chimneys and the beds in front.

Open the 3D model →Download it for Minecraft

Anne, William and the courtship

Anne Hathaway was born in about 1556, very probably in this house; the Trust says so and Historic England’s listing calls it her birthplace. Her father Richard died in 1581 and left her a dowry of £6 13s 4d.

In late November 1582 William Shakespeare, who was 18, applied to the Bishop of Worcester for a licence to marry her quickly. She was 26 and about three months pregnant. On 28 November two farmers, Fulk Sandells and John Richardson, signed a £40 bond naming “Anne Hathaway of Stratford”. Where and when the wedding itself happened was never recorded; Temple Grafton is the most common guess.

Tradition makes this the house where William courted Anne, and he would certainly have visited her here, but no document puts him in it. After the wedding the couple lived with his family on Henley Street, in the house now called Shakespeare’s Birthplace. Their daughter Susanna was baptised in May 1583, and the twins Hamnet and Judith in 1585. Anne died on 6 August 1623 and is buried beside her husband in Holy Trinity Church.

Inside: what survives

Much of the inside is what the Hathaways left. The kitchen has its stone floor, a wide fireplace and a brick bread oven big enough for about fifteen loaves. The parlour has its fireplace, the 1697 bacon cupboard and some 17th-century panelling. Upstairs, the cruck trusses over the old hall are exposed, with their wind braces, and a brick smoke hood still shows its wattle panels.

Two pieces of furniture carry most of the stories:

• The “courting settle”, the high-backed bench by the parlour fire, is where Victorian guides said William wooed Anne. It dates from the mid-1700s, far too late, and one guide, Mary Baker, sold slivers cut from it to visitors.
• The Hathaway bed, a carved oak tester bed upstairs, is genuinely old: the earliest parts of its frame date from between 1580 and 1630. In 1792 the family refused to sell it to the collector Samuel Ireland. It is often called Shakespeare’s “second-best bed”, the one he left Anne in his will, but the Trust says there is not enough evidence for that.

Thirteen generations, then the Trust

The Hathaways held the house for 368 years, from the lease of 1543 to 1911. Debts in the early 1700s cost them most of the land, and in 1838 William Taylor sold the house itself to Thomas Barnes, but the family stayed on as tenants and kept showing visitors round. Mary Baker, a descendant of Bartholomew, guided for decades; her visitor books hold the names of Charles Dickens, Mark Twain and the American presidents Ulysses S. Grant and James Garfield.

The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust bought the house on 24 May 1892 for £3,000, after turning down an asking price of £3,300, and kept Mary Baker on as its custodian. The house had no mains water until 1910. Her son William Baker, the last Hathaway to live there, left in 1911.

In 1969 a fire damaged the west end. It was restored and the roof rethatched, and around 1997 its flush ridge, the original style, was put back. The house is listed Grade I, the highest grade.

The garden

In Anne’s day the garden was a farmyard, with animals and a few herbs and vegetables. The cottage garden that made the house famous came later, and much of what you see now dates from the 1920s. After a new sewer for Shottery was dug across the garden in 1923–24, the Trust asked the horticulturist Ellen Willmott to replant it, and she drew up plans in 1924–25: pastel colours, plants Shakespeare names, such as roses, irises, daffodils and thistles, and colour all year round. The three herbaceous beds opposite the entrance are what remains of her scheme.

Beyond them are an orchard of apple trees running west from the house, a Shakespeare tree garden of trees named in the plays, planted in 1988, and a sculpture trail. The garden itself is Grade II on the Register of Parks and Gardens.

Visiting Anne Hathaway’s Cottage

The cottage is at 22 Cottage Lane, Shottery, CV37 9HH, about a mile west of Stratford town centre. The Trust allows 30 to 35 minutes to walk from Shakespeare’s Birthplace, and the traditional route is the footpath across Shottery Fields. There is a pay car park on Cottage Lane.

The house is open to visitors and run by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, together with Shakespeare’s Birthplace and New Place in the town. Inside there are steps and uneven floors, so the rooms are not accessible to wheelchairs or pushchairs; the gardens have wide sloping paths. Opening times and prices change, so check the Trust’s visitor page before you go.

The film Hamnet, released in 2025–26, has brought more visitors to Stratford. It was not filmed here: its Hathaway farmhouse scenes were shot at Cwmmau Farmhouse in Herefordshire.

Explore the cottage in 3D →More famous homes in 3D