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after their father’s death, which suggests that they too had been left adequate portions. Thomas married Margaret Smith (probably the sister of Henry) in 1575; in 1579 Ann married William Wilson who was to become a Stratford alderman in 1592, and a few months later Frances married David Jones, the man who produced the Whitsun pastoral that was played in Stratford in 1583; the accounts of the Corporation for that year list ‘thirteen shillings and fourpence paid to David Jones and his company for his pastime at Whitsuntide’. 10 By these marriages Ann was connected to a significant proportion of the settled population of Stratford and the surrounding district.
    The fact that Richard Hathaway made his wife rather than his eldest son his executor and residuary legatee reinforces the notion that she was a second wife and rather younger than he. Joan would remain in Shottery where she is recorded as holding a half-yardland in 1590, and running a household of six in 1595. It was not until well after herdeath in 1599 that Bartholomew took possession of Hewlands Farm. Historians who imagine that Ann and Bartholomew were running Hewlands Farm together after Richard Hathaway’s death are simply wrong. 11
    The overseers of the will, who received twelve pence each for their pains, were Hathaway’s neighbours, forty-three-year-old Stephen Burman and thirty-year-old Fulke Sandells. The Warwickshire Corn Enquiry of 1595 lists four Burman households in Shottery of which Stephen Burman’s with a hundred acres under barley and sixty acres under peas and a household of fifteen people was the largest. 12 Fulke Sandells seems to have been primarily a sheep-farmer, with only twenty acres of barley and eleven acres of peas in 1595. The will was witnessed by the curate William Gilbert, Richard Burman, John Richardson and John ‘Hemynge’. Gilbert served as under-schoolmaster at the grammar school at various times from 1561–2, and was appointed curate on £10 a year in 1576, a position that he held until his death in 1612. He was also paid £1 a year to maintain the town clocks. John Richardson was a substantial member of the Shottery community; when he died in 1594 his goods, including wheat, barley, peas, oats and hay in the barns, five cows, three heifers and a bullock, four horses and mares, and 130 sheep were appraised at £87 3s 8d. Of most interest to us is John Hemynge or Hemmings. A John Hemmings, hayward of Shottery, baptised seven children in Holy Trinity between December 1563 and September 1582, including another John. What nobody knows is in what way if at all these John Hemmingses are related to the John Hemmings who together with Henry Condell edited the Folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays. Fripp believes that John Hemmings to be the son and heir of George Hemmings of Droitwich, but the evidence is rather less than conclusive.
    No servants, except the shepherd Thomas Whittington, are mentioned in Hathaway’s will. As Catherine was neither married nor buried in Stratford, it seems likely that she had gone into service. If Ann was still living in Shottery, she may have been making herself too useful for her own good. Joan Hathaway, with the running of the farm to consider, may have been only too happy to leave the cooking and washing, brewing and baking to Agnes—Ann. Indeed, we mightthink of Ann as in much the same situation as Cinderella, except that she is older rather than younger than the other children.
    The match between William Shakespeare and Ann Hathaway was an alliance of two substantial families in a close-knit community where everybody knew everybody else’s business. Husband and wife would remain in contact with both their extended families, who continued to live in houses that were within walking distance of each other, worshipping at the same church, christening and burying their children in the company of their own kith and kin.
    The connection of the Hathaway