A Life of William Shakespeare | Page 6

between 1550 and
1584 Minor collections of 444 French sonnets published between 1553
and 1605 INDEX 447
I--PARENTAGE AND BIRTH
Distribution of the name.
Shakespeare came of a family whose surname was borne through the

middle ages by residents in very many parts of England--at Penrith in
Cumberland, at Kirkland and Doncaster in Yorkshire, as well as in
nearly all the midland counties. The surname had originally a martial
significance, implying capacity in the wielding of the spear. {1a} Its
first recorded holder is John Shakespeare, who in 1279 was living at
'Freyndon,' perhaps Frittenden, Kent. {1b} The great mediaeval guild
of St. Anne at Knowle, whose members included the leading
inhabitants of Warwickshire, was joined by many Shakespeares in the
fifteenth century. {1c} In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the
surname is found far more frequently in Warwickshire than elsewhere.
The archives of no less than twenty-four towns and villages there
contain notices of Shakespeare families in the sixteenth century, and as
many as thirty-four Warwickshire towns or villages were inhabited by
Shakespeare families in the seventeenth century. Among them all
William was a common Christian name. At Rowington, twelve miles to
the north of Stratford, and in the same hundred of Barlichway, one of
the most prolific Shakespeare families of Warwickshire resided in the
sixteenth century, and no less than three Richard Shakespeares of
Rowington, whose extant wills were proved respectively in 1560, 1591,
and 1614, were fathers of sons called William. At least one other
William Shakespeare was during the period a resident in Rowington.
As a consequence, the poet has been more than once credited with
achievements which rightly belong to one or other of his numerous
contemporaries who were identically named.

The poet's ancestry.
The poet's ancestry cannot be defined with absolute certainty. The
poet's father, when applying for a grant of arms in 1596, claimed that
his grandfather (the poet's great-grandfather) received for services
rendered in war a grant of land in Warwickshire from Henry VII. {2}
No precise confirmation of this pretension has been discovered, and it
may be, after the manner of heraldic genealogy, fictitious. But there is a
probability that the poet came of good yeoman stock, and that his
ancestors to the fourth or fifth generation were fairly substantial
landowners. {3a} Adam Shakespeare, a tenant by military service of

land at Baddesley Clinton in 1389, seems to have been
great-grandfather of one Richard Shakespeare who held land at
Wroxhall in Warwickshire during the first thirty-four years (at least) of
the sixteenth century. Another Richard Shakespeare who is conjectured
to have been nearly akin to the Wroxhall family was settled as a farmer
at Snitterfield, a village four miles to the north of Stratford-on-Avon, in
1528. {3b} It is probable that he was the poet's grandfather. In 1550 he
was renting a messuage and land at Snitterfield of Robert Arden; he
died at the close of 1560, and on February 10 of the next year letters of
administration of his goods, chattels, and debts were issued to his son
John by the Probate Court at Worcester. His goods were valued at 35
pounds 17s. {3c} Besides the son John, Richard of Snitterfield certainly
had a son Henry; while a Thomas Shakespeare, a considerable
landholder at Snitterfield between 1563 and 1583, whose parentage is
undetermined, may have been a third son. The son Henry remained all
his life at Snitterfield, where he engaged in farming with gradually
diminishing success; he died in embarrassed circumstances in
December 1596. John, the son who administered Richard's estate, was
in all likelihood the poet's father.

The poet's father.
About 1551 John Shakespeare left Snitterfield, which was his
birthplace, to seek a career in the neighbouring borough of
Stratford-on-Avon. There he soon set up as a trader in all manner of
agricultural produce. Corn, wool, malt, meat, skins, and leather were
among the commodities in which he dealt. Documents of a somewhat
later date often describe him as a glover. Aubrey, Shakespeare's first
biographer, reported the tradition that he was a butcher. But though
both designations doubtless indicated important branches of his
business, neither can be regarded as disclosing its full extent. The land
which his family farmed at Snitterfield supplied him with his varied
stock-in-trade. As long as his father lived he seems to have been a
frequent visitor to Snitterfield, and, like his father and brothers, he was
until the date of his father's death occasionally designated a farmer or
'husbandman' of that place. But it was with Stratford-on-Avon that his

life was mainly identified.

His settlement at Stratford.
In April 1552 he was living there in Henley Street, a thoroughfare
leading to the market town of Henley-in-Arden, and he is first
mentioned in the borough records as paying in that month a fine of