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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 detaining 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.'

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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; shewn 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 record of this very period, and the solution of the difficulty is palpable: In John Strype's "Memorials Ecclesiastical under Queen Mary I," under the date of 1558, we find this passage: "It is certain that one Edward Horne suffered at Newent, where this Deighton had been, and spake with one or two of the same parish that did see him there burnt, and did testify that they knew the two persons that made the fire to burn him; they were two glovers or FELLMONGERS."* A fellmonger and a glover appear from this passage to have been one and the same. The fellmonger is he who prepares skins for the use of the leather-dresser, by separating the wool from the hide-the natural coadjutor of the sheep-master and the woolman. Shakspere himself implies that the glover was a manufacturer of skins: Dame Quickly asks of Slender's man, "Does he not wear a great round beard like a glover's paring knife?" The peltry is shaved upon a circular board, with a great round knife, to this day. The fellmonger's trade, as it now exists, and the trade in untanned leather, the glover's trade, would be so slightly different, that the generic term, glover, might be applied to each. There are few examples of the word "fellmonger" in any early writers. "Glover" is so common that it has become one of the universal English names derived from occupation,-far more common than if it merely applied to him who made coverings for the hands. At Coventry, in the middle of the sixteenth century, (the period of which we are writing) the Glovers and Whittawers formed one craft. A whittawer is one who prepares tawed leather— untanned leather-leather chiefly dressed from sheep skins and lamb skins by a simple process of soaking, and scraping, and liming, and softening by alum and salt. Of such were the large and coarse gloves in use in a rural district, even amongst

* Vol. v., p. 277-edit. 1816.

labourers; and such process might be readily carried on by one engaged in agricultural operations, especially when we bear in mind that the white leather was the especial leather of "husbandly furniture," as described by old Tusser.

We may reasonably persist, therefore, even in accord with "flesh and fell" tradition, in drawing the portrait of Shakspere's father, at the time of his marriage, in the free air,-on his horse, with his team, at market, at fair-and yet a dealer in carcases, or wood, or wool, or skins, his own produce. He was a proprietor of land, and an agriculturist, living in a peculiar state of society, as we shall see hereafter, in which the division of employments was imperfectly established, and the small rural capitalists strove to turn their own products to the greatest advantage.

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In the eleventh century the Norman Conqueror commanded a Register to be completed of the lands of England, with the names of their possessors, and the number of their free tenants, their villains, and their slaves. In the sixteenth century Thomas Cromwell, as the vicegerent of Henry VIII. for ecclesiastical jurisdiction, issued Injunctions to the Clergy, ordaining, amongst other matters, that every officiating minister shall, for every Church, keep a Book, wherein he shall register every Marriage, Christening, or Burial. In the different character of these two Registers we read what five centuries of civilization had effected for England. Instead of being recorded in the gross as cotarii or servi, the meanest labourer, his wife, and his children, had become children of their country and their country's religion, as much as the highest lord and his family. Their names were to be inscribed in a book and carefully preserved. But the people doubted the intent of this wise and liberal injunction. A friend of Cromwell writes to him, "There is much secret and several communications between the King's subjects; and [some] of them, in sundry places within the shires of Cornwall and Devonshire, be in great fear and mistrust what the King's Highness and his Council should mean, to give in commandment to the parsons and vicars of every parish that they should make a book, and surely to be kept, wherein to be specified the names of as many as be wedded, and the names of them that be buried, and of all those that be christened." * They dreaded new charges;" and well they might dread. But Thomas Cromwell had not regal Quoted in Rickman's Preface to Population

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* Cromwell's Correspondence, in the Chapter-House. Returns, 1831.

exactions in his mind. The Registers were at first imperfectly kept; but the regulation of 1538 was strictly enforced in the first year of Elizabeth; and then the Register of the Parish of Stratford-upon-Avon commences, that is, in 1558.

Every such record of human life is a solemn document. Birth, Marriage, Death! -this is the whole history of the sojourn upon earth of nearly every name inscribed in these time-preserved pages. And after a few years what is the interest, even to their own descendants, of these brief annals? The last entry is too frequently the most interesting; for the question is, Did they leave property? Is some legal verification of their possession of property necessary?—

"No further seek their merits to disclose."

But there are entries in this Register-book of Stratford that are interesting to us—to all Englishmen to universal mankind. We have all received a precious legacy from one whose progress from the cradle to the grave is here recorded-a bequest large enough for us all, and for all who will come after us. Pause we on the one entry of that book which most concerns the human race :

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Enkelmus filius Johannes Shakleer

William, the son of John Shakspere, baptized on the 26th April, 1564.* And when born? The want of such information is a defect in all parish-registers. Baptism so immediately followed birth in those times, when infancy was surrounded with greater dangers than in our own days of improved medical science, that we may believe that William Shakspere first saw the light only a day or two previous to this legal record of his existence. There is no direct evidence that he was born on the 23rd of April according to the common belief. But there was probably a tradition to that effect, for some years ago the Rev. Joseph Greene, a master of the grammar-school at Stratford, in an extract which he made from the Register of Shakspere's baptism, wrote in the margin, “Born on the 23rd." We turn back to the first year of the registry, 1558, and we find the baptism of Joan, daughter to John Shakspere, on the 15th of September. Again, in 1562, on the 2nd of December, Margaret, daughter to John Shakspere, is baptized. In the entry of burials in 1563 we find, under date of April 30, that Margaret closed a short life in five months. The elder daughter Joan also died young. We look forward, and in 1566 find the birth of a son, after William, registered :-Gilbert, son of John Shakspere, was baptized on the 13th of October of that year. In 1569 there is the registry of the baptism of Joan, daughter of John Shakspere, on the 15th of April. Thus, the registry of a second Joan leaves no reasonable doubt that the first died, and that a favourite name was preserved in the family. In 1571 Anne is baptized; she died in 1579. In 1573-4 another son was baptized,—Richard, son of Master (Magister) John Shakspere, on the 11th of

*The date of the year, and the word April, occur three lines above the entry-the baptism being the fourth registered in that month. The register of Stratford is a tall narrow book, of considerable thickness, the leaves formed of very fine vellum. But this book is only a transcript, attested by the vicar and four churchwardens, on every page of the registers from 1558 to 1600. The above is therefore not a fac-simile of the original entry.

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March. The last entry, which determines the extent of John Shakspere's family, that of Edmund, son of Master John Shakspere, baptized on the 3rd of May, 1580. Here, then, we find that two sisters of William were removed by death, probably before his birth. In two years and a half another son, Gilbert, came to be his playmate; and when he was five years old that most precious gift to a loving boy was granted, a sister, who grew up with him, and survived him. Another sister was born when he had reached seven years; and as he was growing into youthful strength, a boy of fifteen, his last sister died;-and then his youngest brother was born. William, Gilbert, Joan, Richard, Edmund, constituted the whole of the family who survived the period of infancy. Rowe, we have already seen, mentions the large family of John Shakspere, "ten children in all." Malone has established very satisfactorily the origin of this error into which Rowe has fallen. In later years there was another John Shakspere in Stratford. In the books of the corporation the name of John Shakspere, shoemaker, can be traced in 1580; in the register in 1584 we find him married to Margery Roberts, who died in 1587; he is, without doubt, married a second time, for in 1589, 1590, and 1591, Ursula, Humphrey, and Philip, are born. It is unquestionable that these are not the children of the father of William Shakspere, for they are entered in the register as the daughter, or sons, of John Shakspere, without the style which our John Shakspere always bore after 1569 -"Magister." There can be no doubt that the mother of all the children of Master John Shakspere was Mary Arden; for in proceedings in Chancery in 1597, which we shall notice hereafter, it is set forth that John Shakspere and his wife Mary, in the 20th Elizabeth, 1577, mortgaged her inheritance of Asbies. Nor can there be a doubt that the children born before 1569, when he is styled John Shakspere, without the honourable addition of Master, were also her children. The history of the family up to the period of William Shakspere's manhood is as clear as can reasonably be expected.

William Shakspere has been carried to the baptismal font in that fine old church of Stratford. The "thick-pleached alley" that leads through the churchyard to

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