Shakespeare: A Life (4 page)

could often read, but not write, as writing was an advanced, fairly
specialized, skill, and Tudor people learned to write only after getting
the basic skill of reading; he probably would not have kept the
borough's accounts, as he did for over three years, if he had been
unable to read sums. His wife had given birth so far to infants who
died -- her first child, Joan, evidently died in infancy,
¹⁰
and a second child, Margaret, was baptized on 2 December 1562 and buried four months later.

During the period when John Shakespeare was keeping the accounts, the
Gild chapel was defaced. Near its orchard border of sundried clay,
workmen moved into the chapel to see its painted walls with legends --
the town's old Catholic poetry:

WHEN ERTH UPON ERTH HATH BYLDED HIS BOWERS THEN SHALL ERTH FOR ERTH SUFFER MANY HARD SHOWERS

Over the chancel arch was a Doom, or Last Judgement, with the Virgin in
blue and St John in bright brown. Heaven was a palace with St Peter
in a red alb and green cope, and burning souls fell through a
hell-mouth into a cauldron. A crucifixion rose on the south wall, and
on jambs for the tower arch were Thomas à Becket and the names of his
murderers.
¹¹
After the Doom had been whitewashed, for which the workmen were paid 2
s.,
but before the rood-loft was taken down and seats were installed for
the vicar and his clerk, the acting chamberlain's account noted on 10
January 1564:

Item payd for defasyng ymages in y
^e
chappell ij
^s

The altar may have been removed then -- but otherwise the chapel was
mainly untouched. The council replaced stained glass with 'quarrells',
or glass panels, yet kept forbidden 'George' armour for their Catholic
St George festival well scoured. No one knew if the old faith would
return; and there were more dire problems. A plague had ravaged London
-- where a fifth of the population died -- and Spaniards, it appeared,
had found a way to destroy Protestant England. They had closed down
the main market abroad for broadcloths and kerseys at Antwerp. Forty
English ships in the Thames had to be unloaded and cloth worth up to
£700,000 had to be stored at the risk of damp, moth, and total loss.

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Warwickshire would suffer with no cloth market. The Queen had used
her wiles on the Spanish envoy -- but early in 1564. the only Spanish
envoy in England was a corpse, and creditors prevented the release of
his body. With the cloth fleet blocked, merchants were desperate. The
plague had begun to move north, killing children and the poor. On 14
March, before it struck Stratford, the vicar recorded the loss of his
own sister Cicely, 'Sicilia Bretchgerdle soror Vicarij.'
¹²
With death and ruin on his doorstep, he even had to think of his
unlucky chamberlain, whose wife had borne yet another child. As the
father of two dead infants John Shakespeare, on this occasion,
presented a boy. William, or
Gulielmus,
the vicar wrote on 26 April 1564, when infants were dying within two days' ride of Stratford parish,

Gulielmus filius Johannes Shakspere.

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At first the infant, Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.

( Jaques,
As You Like It
)

When her first son was born, Mary Shakespeare's town lay in the path
of the worst plague since the Black Death. Yet the town's corporate
council had been warned about the contagion, and for years the
aldermen and chief burgesses had been trying to keep the streets
clean. As early as April 1552 John Shakespeare had paid a small fine for
keeping an unauthorized muck-heap (or
sterquinarium
) on Henley
Street. At the town's northern end, this was an old, built-up street,
traversed by horsemen riding through on the way up to Henley-inArden.
Wagons drawn by oxen bumped over a cross-gutter in front of Gilbert
Bradley's house, a few doors to the cast of his fellow glover John
Shakespeare. Once, in 1560, nearly every tenant had to pay for pavings
broken by the damaging wagons. 'All the tenauntes in Henley street from
y
^e
cros gutter befor bradleys doore', it was stated, were
to blame, as many of 'the pavementes are broken befor ther doores &
for not mendynge of them they stand amerced'.
¹
A street also had to be kept clear, and Robert Rogers and others paid for leaving carts at their doors.

Wagons and pack-horses were less likely to use the parallel way known
as the Gild Pits, or royal highway, since it was rutty. Crossing
Clopton's bridge, a traveller would be led by a walled causeway into
Bridge Street, and on past two inns showing the Bear and the Swan.
This was a major market area, divided in the centre by a row of houses

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called Middle Row into Fore Bridge and Back Bridge streets. Riding up
opposite the Crown inn and past the Angel inn, one turned into Henley
Street, where orchards and gardens lay behind the façades. Here doors
abutted pavings, and on the north side, leading east to west, stood a
row of half-timbered tenements, some of which served as shops. A
tradesman let down a wooden board or shelf before a ground-floor
window to display his wares, and a glover would show an array of
purses, belts, gloves of various quality, and other soft-leather
goods.

In the street's north row,
John Shakespeare's two houses were separate but adjoining. In later
times the eastern one became known as the Woolshop, and the western as
the Birthplace. He held these libere of the lord of Stratford manor
on a burgage tenure (nearly the equivalent of a freehold) and paid a
small annual chief-rent, or ground-rent, of 6
d.
for the Woolshop and 13
d.
for the Birthplace; with these rents, we find both houses linked to
his name in 1590 in a list of manorial tenants of the late Ambrose, Earl
of Warwick:

Vicus Vocatus
Henley Strete
[The Street Called
Henley Street]

Johannes Shakespere tenet libere unum tenementurn cum pertinentiis per redditurn per annum Vj
^d
secta curie vj
^d

[ John Shakespere freely holds one tenement wi th appurtenances for a rent per year of 6
d.
by suit of court 6
d.
]

Idem Johannes tenet libere unum tenementum cum pertinentiis per redditum per annum Xiij
^d
secta curie
xiij
^d

[The same John freely holds one tenement with appurtenances for a rent per year of 13
d.
by suit of court 13
d.
]
²

He had bought the Woolshop from Edward West, in October 1556, when its small chief-rent of 6
d.
is mentioned. We do not know when he began to inhabit the western
house, or Birthplace, but the tradition that he lived in it early
enough for his son William to be born there is respectable. After his
son's time, workmen broke through a wall to

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join the two tenements, so that on Henley Street today there is a
much-restored house of three gables as a shrine for Stratford's
visitors.

John had a barn in the Gild
Pits well behind the frontages, and he needed ample work-space. As a
whittawer, he would have had to boil and scrape some of his animal
skins -- a job often given to a boy apprentice since it involved
steam, human sweat, and stinking refuse. In 1556 he had bought an
estate with garden and croft in Greenhill Street (
'unum tenementum cum gardino et crofto'
),
and our improving knowledge of the town in his time suggests that he
may either have transferred some of his work there, or leased that
property to his helpers. Greenhill Street was then an area with open
lots and storage buildings, and it was easily accessible to the
Woolshop by way of Meer Lane.

In
any case, he had more space. Soon after that purchase, or on a day
between 25 November 1556 and mid-December of the year following, he
married Mary Arden, whose father had leased a Snitterfield farm to
John's father. Mary came from Wilmcote, a hamlet on a ridge of grassy
land in Aston Cantlow parish where meadows rose to 400 feet at the
Alne Hills and stone was quarried to repair Stratford's bridge, With its
'auncient name' Arden, as Leland found, the area north of the river
was 'much enclosyd', lacking in corn if not in meadow-grass. Billesley,
near Wilmcote, once had seventeen peasants and eight slaves; the
Trussell family held its manor in declining circumstances which
included the sentencing to death of one Trussell for highway robbery.
³
Poor families lost their homes as arable ground was fenced into sheep
pasture, and fifteen families had been evicted over at Ardens
Grafton. Enclosures of parkland tempted others; so many deerpoachers
hunted at Shelfield Park that two commissions had had to look into the
stealing.

Land seems to have changed
hands rather quickly in this region. Thomas Finderne or Fynderne, a
man of wealth, made two interesting purchases: he acquired --just
when, we do not know -- a holding that was called the manor of Great
Wilmcote, as well as the farm that we know today as '
Mary Arden's House
'.
He sold both, five years after Mary's father died, to George Gibbes
and to Adam Palmer; the latter had been a legal overseer of Robert
Arden's will in 1556. These slim

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facts do not prove the Ardens' farm was ' Mary Arden's House', but
the property that we see today on Featherbed Lane is of about the
right size. The farmstead's sturdy, narrow main dwelling has low
gables, close-timbered oak beams, a fair-sized kitchen. Outside is a
dovecote, which supplied eggs and meat for winter. Either at this farm
or at one close by, Mary Arden was born in about 1540, the youngest
of eight daughters.

When Mary was
young, her mother died. In 1548 her father married Agnes Hill, who
brought two boys and two girls of her own to live near adze-roughened
surfaces. Life on a Tudor farm could be bleak; the oddity of Robert
Arden's household was that he lacked sons, and lost the help of his
own daughters. Two years after Agnes Hill arrived, Margaret Arden was
already married to Alexander Webbe of nearby Bearley, and Joan Arden
to Edmund Lambert of Barton Henmarsh (or Barton on the Heath) fifteen
miles south of Stratford. Other Arden daughters were wed later -- Anne
(or Agnes) first to John Hewyns of Bearley, and then to Thomas
Stringer of Stockton in Shropshire; Katherine to Thomas Edkins of
Wilmcote; and Elizabeth to a Skarlett. At all events, by 1556 Robert
Arden found some merits in his youngest, unmarried girl and named Mary
one of his will's two executors despite her youth; he also favoured
her, leaving her not only the sum of 10 marks (£6. 13
s.
4
d.
) but his most valuable property, Asbyes, at Wilmcote.
⁴

The skills of Shakespeares mother have been unknown, but it is not
unlikely that she could read and write, and we have a sign of her hand.
When selling her share in a land-holding to her nephew Robert Webbe,
in 1579, she made her 'marke' on a deed and on a bond.
⁵
The deed (unlike the bond) is a large enough piece of parchment to
have lain flat and offered her ample space to sign. Did she intend to
write her initials on the deed? If she did, why does she appear to
have written them in reverse, as S M and not M S, in between the
scrivener's words 'the marke' and 'of Marye Shacksper'? Instead of
drawing a stolid cross on the Webbe deed, Mary Shakespeare drew a
small, neat, rather complex design suggesting the letters S M in a
Tudor secretary style of script which her son William appears to have
used; the 'S', in this design, is exampled in the handwriting of
literate persons; the 'M'

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(if such was intended) lacks a final stroke or minim. She may have
intended only a pretty design, and alphabetic letters in a 'marke'
would not be proof of her ability to write. But what has become quite
clear, partly because time has worn away some of her clotted ink, is
that she drew her mark in one continuous movement. She appears to have
been familiar with a quill pen.

If
she was indeed able to write phrases and sums and to read them, she
would have been of considerable use to her father. However that may
be, Robert Arden's belief in her dependability is evident. She can
hardly have been much older than 17 or 18 when he made his will. Young
women, at that time, were seldom named in wills as executors, and
Robert Arden's will is that of an alert, shrewd Catholic, who does not
wholly trust his own wife. Whether or not he came from a cadet branch
of the Catholic Park Hall Ardens, in Castle Bromwich in the parish of
Aston near Birmingham, he seems to have shared the Arden piety. His
father Thomas in 1501 had been able to use as a trustee the first of
the intently pious Throckmortons, of Coughton Court, who died on a
pilgrimage to Jerusalem and whose son, Sir George, spoke out against
Henry VIII's divorce. Robert Arden joined Stratford's pious
foundation. He chose as his will's first witness (as he had no need to
do) a curate so stubbornly Catholic as to be dismissed later from a
Snitterfield vicarage for adhering to the old faith. Wedded to John
Shakespeare, Mary may have found his religious views problematic or
unlike her father's, but John seems to have been brought up as a
Catholic, and their son William was raised in the shadow of the old
faith.

By the late autumn in 1557 she
was living at Stratford. Young enough to have a chance of bearing a
healthy child, Mary Shakespeare failed at first. Her son William's
life itself was at risk in plague-time, and his birth-date was
important to her and would have been lovingly recalled until Mary
died. The wishful notion that he was born on 23 April was first
mooted, so far as we know, by William Oldys in a marginal note written
in all probability between 1743 and 1750, and properly belongs to
legends about Shakespeare 'The actual day of William's birth is
unknown', wrote E. K. Chambers in a statement that still holds good;
'a belief that it was April 23, on which day he died in 1616, seems to
rest

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