Shakespeare's Wife Read Free Page B

confounded in the calligraphy of 1623, but as all Ann’s family was baptised at Holy Trinity, where the registers began to bekept in obedience to the royal edict of 1558, we must conclude that she was born before the register began to be kept, and not afterwards. So 1556 it is.
    Our best evidence that Agnes Hathaway alias Gardner of Shottery is the woman who married Will Shakespeare in 1582 is the will made in 1601 by her father’s shepherd Thomas Whittington. Whittington is identified in Richard Hathaway’s will: ‘I owe unto Thomas Whittington my shepherd four pounds six shillings eight pence.’ Twenty years on, when he made his will in 1601, Whittington identified Ann as Shakespeare’s wife:
    Item I give and bequeath unto the poor people of Stratford forty shillings that is in the hand of Ann Shakespeare wife unto Mr William Shakespeare and is due debt unto me being paid to mine executor by the said William Shakespeare or his assigns according to the true meaning of this my will. 5
    The Hathaway family house is supposed to be the one that is now known as Ann Hathaway’s Cottage, though indeed it was never hers. This twelve-roomed farmhouse, known to the Hathaway family, if not to the bardolatrous public, as Hewlands Farm, is built on stone foundations, of timber-framed wattle-and-daub. The oldest part of the dwelling, thought to date from the late fourteenth century, consists of a hall of two twelve-foot bays reaching to the timbered roof, constructed around two oaken crucks that are pinned together to form the peak of the roof. Before the Great Rebuilding of the 1560s, all the members of the household would have slept in the hall, around an open fireplace from which the smoke escaped through an opening in the thatch. 6
    Ann’s paternal grandfather, John Hathaway alias Gardner, acquired the copyhold of Hewlands Farm in 1543 and it was probably he who modernised the house by installing stone fireplaces in each of the two bays of the hall, one eight feet across and the other eleven. The stone hearths were also the supports for stout oak bressemers supporting an upper floor which was divided into separate connecting rooms. On the ground floor, next to the hall, there was a kitchen with a huge domed bread-oven. A dairy or buttery has also survived.An east wingwas added to the main building later, probably by Ann’s brother, Bartholomew Hathaway.
    Shottery, to the west of Stratford, was then a cluster of farms worked by tenants of the manor; in 1595, we find the more substantial of them growing wheat, barley and peas on arable holdings of as much as 200 acres, but in 1581 the average holding would have been rather smaller and the farming more mixed. Hewlands Farm, which then stood right on the edge of the Forest of Arden, was typical in that it consisted of pasturage for sheep as well as cultivated yardland. Yardland or virgate was the name given to bundles of strips of land suitable for cultivation; the area of a yardland could be anything from twenty to forty-six acres. In 1595 Joan Hathaway’s half-yardland amounted to no more than fifteen acres, so we should probably assume that Richard Hathaway farmed thirty acres or so. He may have held other lands which he had devised to his son and heir before his death, but, even if he didn’t, his holding can be described as substantial, though he was a rung below a yeoman or freeholder.
    The family had been well established in the district for generations. A John Hathaway appears as an archer on the muster rolls (lists of citizens eligible for military service) in 1536. He also served at different times as beadle, constable and affeeror (assessor of sums owed) to the parish. He was one of the fifteen citizens from whom were selected the Twelve Men of Old Stratford (one of several manors that comprised the borough of Stratford) who presided twice a year at the Great Leet, when tenancies were arranged and transferred, debts paid and rents