Exhall, Stratford-on-Avon

Exhall is a village and civil parish about 1+1/4mi south-south-east of Alcester in the Stratford-on-Avon district of Warwickshire, England. Its parish includes the hamlet of Little Britain and part of Ardens Grafton, the greater part of which is in the neighbouring civil parish of Temple Grafton. The 2011 Census recorded Exhall parish's population as 203.Exhall is on Hay Brook, a tributary of the River Arrow. The civil parish neighbours those of Alcester and Wixford, with which it shares both an ecclesiastical parish and a cricket club.HistoryExhall is known as one of the "Shakespeare villages". William Shakespeare is said to have joined a party of Stratford folk which set itself to outdrink a drinking club at Bidford-on-Avon, and as a result of his labours in that regard to have fallen asleep under the crab tree of which a descendant is still called Shakespeare's tree. When morning dawned his friends wished to renew the encounter but he wisely said "No I have drunk with Piping Pebworth, Dancing Marston, Haunted Hillboro’, Hungry Grafton, Dodging Exhall, Papist Wixford, Beggarly Broom and Drunken Bidford' and so, presumably, I will drink no more." The story is said to date from the 17th century but of its truth or of any connection of the story or the verse to Shakespeare there is no evidence. The nickname "Dodging Exhall" may have arisen from the fact that the village was not, at any rate in the 18th century, directly approachable either from Alcester or Stratford.