as learned as the town-clerk; they kept him straight. But there had been enough turmoil about learning in those days to make goodman Whetely, and goodman Cardre, and their fellows, somewhat shy of writing and Latin. They were not quite safe in reading. Some of the readers had openly looked upon Tyndale's Bible and Coverdale's Bible twelve years before, and then the Bible was to be hidden in dark corners. It was come out again, but who could tell what might again happen. It was safer not to read. It was much less troublesome not to write. The town-clerk was a good penman; they could flourish. We were reluctant to yield our assent to Malone's assertion that Shakspere's father had a mark to himself. The marks are not distinctly affixed to each name in this document. But subsequent discoveries establish the fact that he used two marks-one, something like an open pair of compasses-the other, the common cross. Even half a century later, to write was not held indispensable by persons of some pretension. In Decker's Wonder of a Kingdom,' the folowing dialogue takes place between Gentili and Buzardo : the "Gen. What qualities are you furnished with? : Buz. As a gentleman should have; I know all but play on none: I am no barber Buz. As a gentleman ought to be; one tongue serves one head; I am no pedlar, te travel countries. Gen. What skill ha' you in horsemanship? . Buz. As other gentlemen have; I ha' rid some beasts in my time. Gen. Can you write and read then? Buz. As most of your gentlemen do; my bond has been taken with my mark at it." We must not infer that one who gave his bond with his mark at it, was necessarily ignorant of all literature. It was very common for an individual to adopt, in the language of Jack Cade, "a mark to himself," possessing distinctness of character, and almost heraldically alluding to his name or occupation. Many of these are like ancient merchants' marks; and on some old deeds the mark of a landowner alienating property corresponds with the mark described in conveyance as cut in the turf, or upon boundary stones, of unenclosed fields. Lord Campbell says, "In my own experience I have known many instances of documents bearing a mark as the signature of persons who could write well."* One of the aldermen of Stratford in 1565, John Wheler, is described in the town records as a yeoman. He must have been dwelling in Stratford, for we have seen that he was ordered to take the office of high bailiff, an office demanding a near and constant residence. We can imagine a moderate landed proprietor cultivating his own soil, renting perhaps other land, seated as conveniently in a house in the town of Stratford as in a solitary grange several miles away from it. Such a proprietor, cultivator, yeoman, we consider Johu Shakspere to have been. In 1556, the year that Robert, the father of Mary 'Shakespeare's Legal Acquirements, p. 15. Arden, died, John Shakspere was admitted at the court-leet to two copyhold estates in Stratford. The jurors of the leet present that George Turnor had alienated to John Shakspere and his heirs one tenement, with a garden and croft, and other premises, in Grenehyll Street, held of the lord at an annual quit-rent; and John Shakspere, who is present in court and does fealty, is admitted to the same. The same jurors present that Edward West has alienated to John Shakspere one tenement and a garden adjacent in Henley Street, who is in the same way admitted, upon fealty done to the lord. Here then is John Shakspere, before his marriage, the purchaser of two copyholds in Stratford, both with gardens, and one with a croft, or small enclosed field.* In 1570 John Shakspere is holding, as tenant under William Clopton, a meadow of fourteen acres, with its appurtenance, called Ingon, at the annual rent of eight pounds. This rent, equivalent to at least forty pounds of our present money, would indicate that the appurtenance included a house, and a very good house. This meadow of Ingon forms part of a large property known by that name near Clopton-house. When John Shakspere married, the estate of Asbies, It is marvellous that Malone, with these documents before him, which are clearly the admissions of John Shakspere to two copyhold estates, should say:-" At the court-leet, held in October, 1556, the lease of a house in Greenhill Street was assigned to Mr. John Shakspeare, by George Turnor, who was one of the burgesses of Stratford, and kept a tavern or victuallinghouse there; and another, in Henley Street, was, on the same day, assigned to him, by Edward West, a person of some consideration, who during the reign of Edward VI. had been frequently one of the wardens of the bridge of Stratford." It is equally wonderful that, Malone having printed the documents, no one who writes about Shakspere has deduced from them that Shakspere's father was necessarily a person of some substance before his marriage, a purchaser of property. The roll says "et ide Johes pd. in cur. fecit dño fidelitatem pr eisdem," that is, "and the said John in the aforesaid court did fealty to the lord for the same." Every one knows that this is the mode of admission to a copyhold estate in fee simple, and yet Malone writes as if these forms were gone through to enable John Shakspere to occupy two houses in two distinct streets, under lease. We subjoin the documents : "Stratford super Avon. Vis fră Pleg. cum cur. et Session pais tenit. ibm. secundo die Octobris annis regnorum Philippi et Marie, Dei gratia, &c. tertio et quarto (October 2, 1556). "It. pre. quod Georgius Turnor alienavit Johē Shakespere et hered. suis unum tent. cum gardin, et croft. cum pertinent in Grenehyll stret, tent. de Dro libe p' cart. pr redd. inde dño pr annu vid et sect. cur. et ide Johes pd. in cur. fecit dño fidelitatem pr eisdem. "It. quod Edwardus West alienavit pd. eo Johe Shakespere unu tent. cum gardin. adjacen. in Henley street p redd. inde dño p' ann. vid et sect. cur. et idé Johes pd. in cur. fecit fidelitatem." We give a translation of this entry upon the court-roll: "Stratford upon Avon. View of Frank pledge with the court and session of the peace held of the same on the second day of October in the year of the reign of Philip and Mary, by the grace of God, &c., the third and fourth. "Item, they present that George Turnor has alienated to John Shakspere and his heirs one tenement with a garden and croft, with their appurtenances, in Greenhill street, held of the lord, and delivered according to the roll, for the rent from thence to the lord of sixpence per annum, and suit of court, and the said John in the aforesaid court did fealty to the lord for the same. "Item, that Edward West has alienated to him, the aforesaid John Shakspere, one tenement, with a garden adjacent, in Henley Street, for the rent from thence to the lord of sixpence per annum, and suit of court, and the said John in the aforesaid court did fealty." + See the extracts from the 'Rot. Claus.,' 23 Eliz, given in Malone's 'Life,' p. 95. Ingen is not, as Malone states, situated at a small distance from the estate which William Shakspere purchased in 1602. Clopton lies between the two properties. within a short ride of Stratford, came also into his possession, and so did some landed property at Snitterfield. With these facts before us, scanty as they are, can we reasonably doubt that John Shakspere was living upon his own land, renting the land of others, actively engaged in the business of cultivation, in an age when tillage was becoming rapidly profitable,-so much so that men of wealth very often thought it better to take the profits direct than to share them with the tenant? In A Briefe Conceipte touching the Commonweale of this Realme of Englande,' published in 1581,-a Dialogue once attributed to William Shakspere, the Knight says, speaking of his class, " Many of us are enforced either to keep pieces of our own lands when they fall in our own possession, or to purchase some farm of other men's lands, and to store it with sheep or some other cattle, to help make up the decay in our revenues, and to maintain our old estate withal, and yet all is little enough." The belief that the father of Shakspere was a small landed proprietor and cultivator, employing his labour and capital in various modes which grew out of the occupation of land, offers a better, because a more natural, explanation of the circumstances connected with the early life of the great poet than those stories which would make him of obscure birth and servile employments. Take old Aubrey's story, the shrewd learned gossip and antiquary, who survived Shakspere some eighty years :-" Mr. William Shakespear was born at Stratford-upon-Avon, in the county of Warwick. His father was a butcher, and I have been told heretofore by some of the neighbours that when he was a boy he exercised his father's trade; but when he killed a calf he would do it in high style, and make a speech. There was at that time another butcher's son in this town that was held not at all inferior to him for a natural wit, his acquaintance and coetanean, but died young." Oh, Stratford! town prolific in heroic and poetical butchers; was it not enough that there was one prodigy born in your bosom, who, "when he killed a calf, he would do it in a high style, and make a speech," but that there must even have been another butcher's son fed with thy intellectual milk, "that was held not at all inferior to him for a natural wit?" Wert thou minded to rival Ipswich by a double rivalry? Was not one Shakspere-butcher enough to extinguish the light of one Wolsey, but thou must have another, "his acquaintance and coetanean?'' Aubrey, men must believe thee in all after-time; for did not Farmer aver that, when he that killed the calf wrote "There's a divinity that shapes our ends, the poet-butcher was thinking of skewers? And did not Malone hold that he who, when a boy, exercised his father's trade, has described the process of calf-killing with an accuracy which nothing but profound experience could give? And as the dam runs lowing up and down, The story, however, has a variation. There was at Stratford, in the year 1693, a clerk of the parish church, eighty years old, that is, he was three years old when William Shakspere died, and he, pointing to the monument of the poet, with the pithy remark that he was the "best of his family," proclaimed to a member of one of the Inns of Court that "this Shakespeare was formerly in this town bound apprentice to a butcher, but that he ran from his master to London." His father was a butcher, says Aubrey; he was apprentice to a butcher, says the parish clerk. Aubrey was picking up his gossip for his friend Anthony-a-Wood in 1680, and it is not very difficult to imagine that the identical parish clerk was his authority. That honest chronicler, old as he was, had forty years of tradition to deal with in this matter of the butcher's son and the hutcher's apprentice; and the result of such glimpses into the thick night of the past is sensibly enough stated by Aubrey himself:-" What uncertainty do we find in printed histories! They either treading too near on the heels of truth, that they dare not speak plain; or else for want of intelligence (things being antiquated) become too obscure and dark!" Obscure and dark indeed is this story of the butcher's son. If it were luminous, circumstantially true, palpable to all sense, as Aubrey writes it down, we should only have one more knot to cut, not to untie, in the matters which belong to William Shakspere. The son of the butcher of Ipswich was the boy bachelor of Oxford at fifteen years of age; he had an early escape from the calf-killing; there was no miracle in his case. if we receive Aubrey's story we must take it also with its contradictions, and that perhaps will get rid of the miraculous. When he was a boy he exercised his father's trade." Good:-"This William, being inclined naturally to poetry and acting, came to London, I guess about eighteen." Good:-" He understood Latin pretty well, for he had been in his younger years a schoolmaster in the country." Killer of calves, schoolmaster, poet, actor,-all these occupations crowded into eighteen years! Honest Aubrey, truly thine is a rope of sand wherein there are no knots to cut or to untie ! " Akin to the butcher's trade is that of the dealer in wool. It is upon the authority of Betterton, the actor, who, in the beginning of the last century, made a journey into Warwickshire to collect anecdotes relating to Shakspere, that Rowe tells us that John Shakspere was a dealer in wool:-" His family, as appears by the register and the public writings relating to that town, were of good figure and fashion there, and are mentioned as gentlemen. His father, who was a considerable dealer in wool, had so large a family, ten children in all, that, though he was his eldest son, he could give him no better education than his own employment." We are now peeping "through the blanket of the dark.' But daylight is not as yet. Malone was a believer in Rowe's account; and he was confirmed in his belief by possessing a piece of stained glass, bearing the arms of the merchants of the staple, which had been removed from a window of John Shakspere's house in Henley Street. But, unfortunately for the credibility of Rowe, as then held, Malone made a discovery, as it is usual to term such glimpses of the past: "I began to despair of ever being able to obtain any certain intelligence concerning his trade; when, at length, I met with the following entry, in a very ancient manuscript, containing an account of the proceedings in the bailiff's court, which furnished me with the long-sought-for information, and ascertains that the trade of our great poet's father was that of a glover;” “Thomas Siche de Arscotte in com. Wigorn. querit' versus Johm Shakyspere de Stretford, in com. Warwic. Glover, in plac. quod reddat ei oct. libras, &c." This Malone held to be decisive. We give this record above as Malone printed it, not very correctly; and having seen the original, we maintained that the word was not Glover. Mr. Collier and Mr. Halliwell affirm that the word Glo, with the second syllable contracted, is glover; and we accept their interpretation. But we still hold to our original belief that he was, in 1556, a landed proprietor and an occupier of land; one who, although sued as a glover on the 17th June of that year, was a suitor in the same court on the 19th November, in a plea against a neighbour for unjustly de taining eighteen quarters of barley. We still refuse to believe that John Shakspere, when he is described as a yeoman in after years, "had relinquished his retail trade," as Mr. Halliwell judges; or that his mark, according to the same authority, was emblematical of the glove-sticks used for stretching the cheveril for fair fingers. We have no confidence that he had stores in Henley Street of the treasures of Autolycus, "Gloves as sweet as damask roses." We think, that butcher, dealer in wool, glover, may all be reconciled with our position, that he was a landed proprietor, occupying land. Our proofs are not purely hypothetical. Harrison, who mingles laments at the increasing luxury of the farmer, with somewhat contradictory denouncements of the oppression of the tenant by the landlord, holds that the landlord is monopolizing the tenant's profits. His complaints are the natural commentary upon the social condition of England, described in 'A Briefe Conceipte touching the Commonweale :'-" Most sorrowful of all to understand, that men of great port and countenance are so far from suffering their farmers to have any gain at all, that they themselves become GRAZIERS, BUTCHERS, TANNERS, SHEEPMASTERS, WOODMEN, and denique quid non, thereby to enrich themselves, and bring all the wealth of the country into their own hands, leaving the commonalty weak, or as an idol with broken or feeble arms, which may in time of peace have a plausible show, but, when necessity shall enforce, have an heavy and bitter sequel." Has not Harrison solved the mystery of the butcher; explained the tradition of the wool-merchant; shown how John Shakspere, the woodman, naturally sold a piece of timber to the corporation, which we find recorded; and, what is most difficult of credence, indicated how the glover is reconcilable with all these employments? We open an authentic |