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were we obliged to rely on conjecture only, might be presumed to have been a very valuable grant, as the annual rent stipulated to be paid to the King was forty-two pounds, a considerable sum at that time; which yet had certainly a very small relation to the real yearly value of the manor. Concerning its extent and value, however, I am not under the necessity of having recourse to conjecture; for by an inquisition taken many years afterwards, in the thirty-third year of Queen Elizabeth (1591), it appears that this manor contained above four thousand six hundred acres 8.

As Thomas Arden, cousin-german to Robert, the

8 By an inquisition taken October 4, 33 Eliz. [1591], after the death of Sir William Holles, who died at Haughton, in the county of Nottingham, on the 26th of the preceding January, it was found, that he died possessed (inter alia) of the manor of Yoxall, with all its appurtenances, in the county of Stafford, comprising forty messuages, twenty cottages, one water-mill, two pigeon-houses, forty gardens, forty orchards, two thousand three hundred acres of meadow, one thousand acres of pasture, one hundred acres of wood, forty acres of furze and heath, two hundred acres of marsh, with a rent of ten pounds a year; and that the whole manor was worth annually forty pounds and ten-pence [the rent reserved to the crown in the grant under which Sir William Holles held]. Esc. 33 Eliz. p. 1, n. 122.

9 Beside the distinction which was shown by King Henry the Seventh to Sir John Arden, who, we have seen, was one of the squires for his body, and the lucrative grant to our poet's great grandfather, Robert Arden, the groom of the chamber; it should be noticed that Thomas Arden, the eldest son of Sir John, and cousin-german of Robert, obtained a grant of the manor of Brerewood Hall, and the rectory of Curdworth, in the county of Warwick (Esc. 5 Eliz. p. 1, n. 2); and though this grant was made by Henry the Eighth in the thirty-first year of his reign

groom of the bedchamber, and nearly of the same age, married in the year 1508, we may reasonably suppose that Robert also became a father about that time, perhaps in 1510, when he appears to have been twentyfive years old; and if his son Robert, the father of our poet's mother, who settled at Wilmecote, near Stratford, married Agnes Webbe in 1535, at the age of twenty-four, then his fourth daughter, Mary, was probably born in 1539, and was about eighteen years old in 1557, when she became the wife of John Shakspeare. In tracing these descents, I have been the more minute, because they are wholly omitted by Dugdale in his pedigree of the Arden family, in which he has mentioned the first Robert, brother to Sir John, without noticing any of his posterity: an omission for which he is not answerable; for to have enumerated all the minor branches of each family, and their pedigree, would have been needless labour. For the existence of all the persons above-mentioned, as our poet's maternal ancestors, I have unquestionable authority; for the progress of their respective descents, conjecture only; but conjecture strongly confirmed by the corresponding marriages and deaths of the collateral branches of this family, as may appear by inspecting the genealogical table inserted in the Appendix. From that table it may be seen, that our poet's maternal grandfather, whose will has been already noticed, was cousin-german to William Arden, heir apparent to Thomas, the owner of the great estate of

(1539), it also might have been in the contemplation of the heralds, or rather of those from whom they received their instructions, who might not have minutely attended to the date.

Park Hall and Curdworth; which William died in June, 1544; and that our poet's mother, Mary Shakspeare, was third cousin to Edward Arden, who became possessed of that estate in 1563, was Sheriff of the county of Warwick in 1568, and by the artifices of Robert Earl of Leicester was attainted and executed in 1584'. Leland, who composed his Itinerary between the years 1536 and 1542, mentions that Arden of the court was a younger brother to Arden the heir. The principal representative of the Arden family, in Leland's time, was Thomas Arden, already noticed, who succeeded to his father's estate in 1526, and died in 1561. His only brother, John, was not, as far as I have been able to learn, preferred at court. The person about the court was probably either Robert, the quondam groom of the chamber, who, when Leland wrote, was above fifty years of age, and having once set his foot on the ladder of promotion, in the time of Henry the Seventh, might have continued to ascend it in the reign of his successor; or his son Robert, our poet's maternal grandfather, who was then, I believe, about twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old. In the multitude of facts and places noticed by Leland, he might easily have mistaken the younger branch, for the younger brother of this family. Supposing, however, the historian to have been perfectly correct, and that John Arden, the brother of Thomas, was the person in his contemplation, that

An account of the extremely hard usage which this gentleman received from Leicester, may be found in Peck's Desid. Cur. 4to. p. 579.

a Itin. vi. 20.

circumstance would not at all militate against the present hypothesis.

As the concession of arms obtained from the College of Heralds, by John Shakspeare, in 1569 or 1570, entitled his son to the honourable distinction of armorial ensigns, a privilege which, however little estimated at present, was in that age considered as very valuable and important, it may appear strange, that our poet (for the application, without doubt, came from him, though his father's name was used) should at a subsequent period, near thirty years afterwards, again apply to them on the same subject. The solution, I think, is, that, finding himself now rising into consequence (which we shall hereafter see was the case), and having acquired some wealth, he wished to derive honour to himself and his posterity, in consequence of his descent from the ancient and opulent house of Arden. Hence that descent is carefully noticed in the draft of 1596; and, to enable him and his posterity to impale the arms of Arden with his own, seems to have been the principal object of that confirmation 3, or exemplification of arms, which was granted by Camden and Sir William Dethick, in 1599: circumstances which appear to me to add great strength to the interpretation of the ambiguous words in these grants, which has been already given.

3 These arms have not hitherto been discovered thus impaled; they might, notwithstanding, have been thus impaled in a ring or seal used by our poet, and now lost; or this might have been his object in 1596 and 1599, and that object have been afterwards. neglected.

SECTION III.

The town of Stratford upon Avon having, as Dugdale observes, had the good fortune to give birth and sepulture to our great dramatick poet, and his father having been a member of the corporation, and attained to the highest honours which it can confer, it may not be improper, before we proceed further, to take a transient view of its history and constitution.

Stratford, or Stretford as it was anciently called, deriving its name from the ford, or passage there, over the Avon, on the great street or road, leading from Henley in Arden to London, can boast a very high antiquity; being mentioned in a charter of Egwin Bishop of Worcester, to whom it belonged, above three hundred years before the Norman invasion. It continued to be possessed by the Bishops of Worcester, who had formerly a palace there, and under whom a court leet was held there twice a-year, till it was passed away by Nicholas Heath,

3 Dugdale's Antiq. of Warwicksh. p. 475, edit. 1656.

"Necnon de uno burgagio jacen. in strata vocat. Church strete in Stratford predict. in quo Jõhes Ashurste modo inhabitat uno capite inde abuttan. versus Episcopum Wigorn. ex parte occidentali, et alio capite inde abuttan. versus Jõhem Hubaude ex partie orientali: necnon de alio burgagio jacen. in Church strete, in quo Jõhes Boleyn modo inhabitat, uno capite inde abuttan. versus Dōm. Episcopum Wigorn. ex parte occidentali, et alio capite inde abuttan. versus viam regiam vocat. Church Strete." Esc. 13 Hen. VIII. p. unica, n. 140.

5 This appears from a loose paper which I found in the chamber of Stratford, containing the proceedings of a court leet in the time of Henry VIII.

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