Shakespeare's Wife (42 page)

 

all the old biting and young sucking puritans of Stratford are joined with their two Just-asses apiece maliciously to displace and utterly undo their minister [Rogers], and to bring in his place as arrant a knave as themselves, of purpose to assist them in their hypocrisy…
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The new vicar's most passionate adherent was John Hall. Wilson was a brilliant preacher; he was also a radical puritan who refused to allow the use of rings in wedding ceremonies, refused to anoint baptisands or
the dying with the sign of the cross, wouldn't allow people to kneel in his church and not only refused to maintain the guild chapel, but let his children play ball in it.
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Ann may have found Wilson's uncompromising religion challenging, exciting and worthy, but it was also a liability for Stratford, which had long been recognised as a little Geneva. From some points of view the unity of the puritan brotherhood was a source of strength, but it also laid the town open to discrimination and persecution, not to mention the ever-present threat of riot.

If Ann ran out of options, and one of the twenty-four places became vacant, she could have applied for admission to the almshouse, where, besides lodging and firing, she would receive four pence a week. When Elizabeth Ashwell became a widow in 1583, though she had living children, the Stratford Corporation granted her a place in an almshouse, where she lived until her death in 1596.
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Margaret Grannams, widow of George Grannams, a weaver, entered the almshouses in 1602, fourteen years after her husband's death, and died there four months later.
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Joan Tant, widow of the Stratford burgess Valentine Tant who died after being attacked by Thomas Combe in November 1616, entered the almshouses in February 1619 and lived there until her death injune 1625. Eady White was selected to enter the almshouses a month before her husband's death in April 1617; she lived there for ten months.
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If Ann Shakespeare had applied for admission to the almshouses we would probably know about it from the surviving records. If she did not, she must have had, as most other widows did, other options; we should probably conclude that as a widow Ann was still a woman of independent means.

While Ann may have continued to make malt or to play some part in the mercery-haberdashery business, she may also have put her money to work. Widows who had some capital of their own usually lent the money out at 10 per cent interest per annum.

 

The most prominent economic function of the widow in English rural society between 1500 and 1900 was money lending. The constraints upon her disposal of income did not apply, as a rule, to the use of moveable or liquid assets inherited or accumulated by saving and investment. Every collection of wills and inventories, published or unpublished, contains examples of widows and spinsters in possession of sheaves of promissory notes orbonds of debt owing to them at death.
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Isabel Mecocke, who died a widow in Old Stratford in 1621, had lent £9 to Arthur Cawdry and £9 to John Sheffield, in bonds repayable on the Feast of the Archangel Michael.
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When Alice Williams died in 1622 she was owed £100 ‘upon specialties'.
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Mary Mills, who had lived as a widow for seven years before her death in 1624, was owed rather more than .£60 in debts ‘sperate' and £2 in debts ‘desperate' when she died.
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Widows sometimes pooled their widows' mites and lived together. Alice Fletcher, widow of the toll-gatherer William Fletcher who died in 1600, shared a room in the almshouses with a Widow Bayliss, to which she brought the glass from the window of her old house, appraised at her death in 1608 as worth sixteen pence.
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Ann's forty-eight-year-old sister-in-law was widowed a week before she was. Shakespeare left her, rather than his wife, a life-tenancy of the western part of the Henley Street house, but once sixteen-year-old William, eleven-year-old Thomas and eight-year-old Michael were accommodated, there would have been scant room for Ann. The nest of Widow Quiney, being all but empty, would have provided plenty of room for Ann. Bess had married her daughter Elizabeth to Thomas Greene's stepson William Chandler in 1603, and had seen her buried in May 1615. Thirty-year-old Adrian had been married to Elinor Bushell since 1613, but no baby had been born. Richard Quiney had been in London since 1606, when he left Stratford with John Sadler the younger and went into business with him. By 1616 he was well on his way to becoming a successful importer of groceries from the new world where he and Sadler had acquired plantations. Thomas had been rather hastily placed in the capable hands of Judith Shakespeare, and was on his way to becoming mine host of the Cage. Mary, not yet twenty-two, may have been still at home, while young George, having come down from Oxford, was working as an usher at Stratford grammar school preparatory to taking orders. Widow Quiney was probably still economically active, with a busy household consisting as usual of employees, among whom Widow Shakespeare might have been counted.

Bess Quiney had endured, besides the murder of her husband, the deaths of two sons in infancy, of her eldest daughter at the age of twenty-one, and of another son aged six, but there was more anguish to come. Her second daughter Ann was married to the haberdasher
William Smith in May 1614 when she was twenty-two. She bore a daughter Elizabeth in January 1615, and probably set her out to nurse for in May the next year she gave birth to premature twins who died before they could be baptised. In November Elinor Quiney, the wife of Bess's eldest surviving son Adrian, died childless. In May the next year Ann followed her twins to the grave. A month later Adrian made his will; four months later he died and was buried, on 11 October 1617. In his will he simply asks his ‘mother Quiney', whom despite her age he has named as an executor, and his widowed brother-in-law William Smith to dispose of his possessions as they think fit. William Chandler, now Bailiff of Stratford, helped to compile his simple inventory which included ‘one parcel of lace with all books and other odd implements'. Adrian too had been money-lending; he was owed a total of £133 3s, including £30 lent to Sir Edward Greville and ‘uncertain to be got'.
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The next year Widow Quiney had the consolation of seeing her successful son Richard marry a Stratford girl, Ellen Sadler, but then he took her away with him to London where eleven children were baptised at St Stephen's Walbrook, and three of them buried. Bess's greatest success was in getting her youngest son George to Oxford. In 1620 he was appointed Curate of Holy Trinity but by 1623 he was ousted by Simon Trappe, and Hall was treating him for consumption to which he succumbed a year later. In 1623 Bess's twenty-nine-year-old daughter Mary married Richard Watts, who had served as Minister of Holy Trinity from 1613 to 1617. In March 1623 Watts had been appointed Vicar of Harbury, and it was there that Mary was married to him.

We know a good deal about the way that widows lived in Stratford from their wills and inventories. When Agnes Elliott of Stratford died in 1564, she was living in her own three-roomed cottage, and possessed of £18 15s 4d worth of chattels, most of it malt worth £12 6s 8d. In the main room or hall, where she cooked, there was a collection of pewter platters, porringers, salt cellars and a quart pot, ten candlesticks, four hanging cauldrons, brass pots and pans and two painted cloths. The bed chamber above, where a man-or maidservant might have slept, contained only an old feather bed and mattress. Agnes seems to have slept and worked in the lower chamber, where her malt was stored, alongside malting equipment and four loads of
wood. She had moreover a cow in the keeping of Thomas Smart of Bridgetown, three frocks and a petticoat.
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In 1585 died Elizabeth Smart of Bishopton, possibly the widow of the same Thomas Smart, and her inventory shows that she too was living in a three-roomed cottage, with a ‘back house' and a barn. In all, her possessions were worth £17 10s 2d, of which £4 was in wheat and barley. She too owned her own pewter and brass, and five flitches of bacon, probably of her own curing, for in her barn there were two ‘store pigs', as well as a cow and a heifer, two geese and a gander, twelve hens and a cock. It seems that right up to her last days Elizabeth supported herself by selling her butter and eggs and bacon.
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Alice Bell was widowed in 1572 and survived until 1588; according to her will she was survived by three unmarried daughters and two sons-in-law whose wives may or may not have been living. Her inventory gives no clue to where she lived; her goods consisted of clothing, bedding, furniture and thirty-four pieces of pewter, valued at £10 17s. It seems likely that at least one of her unmarried daughters was living with her.
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Elizabeth Pace of Shottery is identified as a widow in her inventory of 1589, but as we do not have a will for her we have no way of knowing how she fits into the extended Pace family; she too lived in a three-roomed cottage consisting of hall, chamber and kitchen. She was comfortable, it would appear. Her apparel was appraised at twenty shillings, her linen at twenty-five shillings, but her real wealth was in horses, cattle and sheep, to the value of £11 6s 8d out of a total of £15 16s 8d.
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Elizabeth Nott's house was, again, three rooms, this time a hall, a chamber and a ‘sailer' or, more usually, ‘seller', an upper room with a window in the gable. The appearance of a seller in cottages like Elizabeth's is probably an indication that some kind of craft is being carried out, mostly in the off-season, when light was low. When she died in 1596 Elizabeth had been a widow for nearly twelve years; but she was well supplied with furniture, linen (to the value of £5), brass and pewter.
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Not all widows were so fortunate; Elizabeth Such of Shottery was left a widow in 1586; when she died in 1602 her few goods, as assessed by Fulke Sandells and Stephen Burman the younger were worth only £4 Os 16d. Her clothing amounted to no more than
twelve shillings; she had an old cupboard and two coffers, an old vat, an old table board, a brass pot, an old cauldron, two pewter platters and one candlestick, one bed covering, a blanket and an old counterpane, cattle and horse fodder worth thirty-two shillings, and her sown barley and peas.
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The appraisers noted no firewood, no animals and no stored foodstuffs of any kind, which suggests that Elizabeth may have died of malnutrition.

Elizabeth's neighbour Alice Burman had been a widow for eighteen years when she died in 1608; Bartholomew Hathaway was one of the men who appraised her belongings, which were worth the considerable sum of £34 7s 4d, largely comprising ‘her crop of corn' (£20), her cows and a heifer and her ten sheep. Her clothes were worth the unusually high sum of thirty shillings, her linen and bedding £3.

Widows might be left leasehold property to occupy in their own right, either with or without any of their children. Joan Biddle who died in 1614, seventeen years after her husband Robert Biddle the shoemaker, inherited his lease of a commodious house in Sheep Street consisting of a hall, parlour, two chambers, a kitchen, stable, buttery, shop and yard, for which the Corporation charged eight shillings a year. In 1611 the Widow Biddle paid a fine of £9 to renew the lease in her own name for twenty-one years, leaving it at her death three years later to her son William, who was to share it with his brother Robert, or else to pay him £4, which suggests that both sons had been living there with her.
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Biddle's goods were appraised at £20 8s 10d; his widow's at almost the same amount, £19 5s 2d.
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In her will she left her great cauldron, her apparel, a sow and a pig to her ‘daughter', Elizabeth, who may have been a daughter-in-law.
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Almost all the items listed in her husband's inventory can be found in Joan's inventory, except the glass in the hall window and her husband's tools. In 1617 Mary Mills inherited her husband's lease of a house on Rother Street and later renewed it.
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Her husband died worth £204 7s 4d; at the time of her death seven years later Mary's goods were assessed at £268 9s 4d. Mills was a yeoman who probably doubled as a maltster; the most valuable item in his inventory was £100 in malt; Mary's inventory too shows £72 in malt and barley. She had also lent out £60 and the lease of her house was worth £50. In the house was all the equipment needed to make malt, more of it than can be traced in her husband's rather
perfunctory inventory. Widow Mills must have been living in the house alone except for servants; her son Thomas was dead, and her daughter married to the son of a gentleman.

Ann probably knew about all of these women; she certainly knew what befell Margaret Smith, the widow of John Smith, son of William Smith, the mercer and haberdasher and mother of Ralph Smith the hatter. Margaret was Hamnet Sadler's sister; she married in 1572 and bore three sons and three daughters between 1574 and 1583; in 1592 she produced another son, John. One son, Henry, died at the age of one. After her husband's death in late 1601 Mary was supposed to share their house in Sheep Street with her eldest son Ralph, while a house in Church Street which was sub-let was to go to John. When her son Hamnet Smith died in 1609, aged twenty-six, and left £10 to the Corporation, Mary was unable to raise the cash until 1613, when she paid it in two instalments.
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In 1615 the Corporation decided, in consideration of her poverty and the fact that her husband had served as Bailiff of Stratford, to reduce the rent she was paying for a barn and a garden attached to the house in Church Street, where she was then living with her son Ralph, to a mere twelve pence a year, but even so she couldn't pay it. (What became of John is not known.) In 1617 she and Ralph accepted £13 16s 8d in return for relinquishing all their rights in the Church Street property. The crushing blow fell in 1621 when Ralph died. When Mary made her will in 1625, she mentioned no child.
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In her inventory, out of a total estate of £16 19s 6d, her clothing was appraised at the relatively high sum of £5, the lease of the house she was then living in at £4, and she was owed £8 17s in ‘desperate' debts, for which there was no hope of payment.