A few more 'Hows and Whys' about ancestries
I didn't need to discover it.
He told us so himself in almost as many words in his application for a coat of
arms in 1596 and various subsequent documents at the College of Arms. His final
refinement was that his great-grandfather had been awarded 'lands and
tenements' in Warwickshire because of service for Henry VII. The most obvious
reason for this was participating in the winning army at Bosworth, composed almost
exclusively of Lancashire and Cheshire men. For the full transcriptions and
facsimiles of the coat of arms documents, see Gough
Nichols and Howard.
I honestly have no idea. Many
in the past have interpreted his claim of 'service to Henry VII' because of
fighting at Bosworth. It
seems, amazingly to me, that none of those who have made this suggestion knew
that 90+% of Englishmen on Henry's side were from Lancashire and Cheshire, in
the two Stanley armies. Read Michael Bennett's Bosworth for all the numbers and
details. Contemporary estimates in the Stanley armies were twenty thousand,
since scaled down to about five thousand, but the Earls of Derby regularly
mustered armies much larger than five thousand in the following century. (One
muster list in 1536, to counter the Pilgrimage of Grace, had well over seven
thousand just from Lancashire. Coward
(pp. 98, 108) gives the muster list (P.R.O. SP, Hen. VII, fols 157-160) and
references to sources for later Lancashire musters.) Henry's own army consisted
of about two thousand French (provided by the King of France), about a thousand
Scots (in the service of the King of France) and about two thousand Welsh
(picked up on the way largely because of his Welsh Tudor ancestry and the
Stanley interest in North Wales), plus a few hundred English fellow-exiles.
Work out for yourself the ratio between 5-20,000 from Lancashire and Cheshire
and 500(?) English exiles on Henry's side and you already have the chances that
any Englishman at Bosworth
and immigrant to the Midlands in the generation after Bosworth was a Stanley tenant. Whichever figures you
choose, you will arrive at 90+%.
His coat of arms grants make
it clear that it was his great-grandfather who had inherited the estate, but
that others had subsequently inherited it and were still living there and in
other local areas in 1599. The obvious explanation from the law of
primogeniture is that he or his father was a younger brother, who had to make
his own way in the world.
I don't know, but as his
eldest son was William (from Stratford Registers and from early reports), in
all likelihood his own father was William. It certainly wasn't Richard of
Snitterfield, the only candidate on offer so far.
Several reasons, but the main
one is that his son John was never labelled 'Mr' or 'Gent.', whereas 'our' John
always was. There really were very strict rules in operation at the time, which
were apparently not known by 19th century researchers who found Richard the
best candidate. He was obviously another recent immigrant in the generation
after Bosworth, however,
so might well have been a relative.
By reading Earwaker on the Ardernes of Cheshire, where
I immediately spotted Thomas Arderne, Esq., founder of the branch in
Leicestershire. He turned out to be Mary's great-grandfather, by total
elimination of all other candidates and his and Mary's coat of arms. The story was
rather tangled in the Midlands because of various 19th century muddles, but
Mary's coat of arms made it very clear that her grandfather was a fourth son of
the Cheshire family. Robert Glover
(1544-88), herald and King of Arms, had recorded Visitation Pedigrees of
Cheshire families in 1566 and 1580 (Rylands)
and recorded many coats of arms of Midlands Arde(r)n(e) families in the 1580s,
which allowed him, and later me, to sort out the whole story and disentangle
most Ardernes from Ardens. I realise I am making this claim without offering
the ultimate proof, just indicating where I found it, but the proof really is
there. The main problem was all the 19th century muddles, which led to later
muddles, which led to the 'conventional' story, which require several chapters
(in a future book) to sort out. Or maybe we can just forget about the
intervening muddles and go back to the primary sources from people who actually
knew the real story and reported it in the 16th century, and start again from
scratch? Glover presents most of the answers; French presents most of the muddles.
I don't think we will ever
know, but there are several examples in the Midlands of people using both names
in the 16th century, and also Shakestaff (Stopes,
Eccles). Shakespeare was the local
Midlands name and I suspect it was under pressure of the local version that
they just got fed up of trying to insist on Shakeshafte. (They have my
sympathy, as we Moorwoods have to fight long and hard to be recorded as this
rather than better known versions of Moorehead, etc. I had Moorcroft recently from an old school-friend - shame on
you, Dr Chadwick!) Or maybe they thought it sounded nicer? Keen in 1954 reported that a solicitor in the
Midlands had seen a document where Shakeshafte had been crossed out and
Shakespeare inserted, but unfortunately no one since seems to have managed to
locate this. However, we know that the Shakeshaftes of Snitterfield ended up as
Shakespeares. We also have the evidence of the peculiar hyphen in William's
surname, printed so often as Shake-speare, and Robert Greene's
'Shake-scene' in 1592. (Greene's story is told in all recent Shakespeare
biographies; start with Schoenbaum.)
The hyphen really is so strange that this in itself demands an explanation, but
no one so far has produced a convincing one for me or anyone else. I conclude
that it had something to do with the Shakespeare/ shafte puzzle.
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