Shakespeare: A Life Read Online Free PDF

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