d wished, even then, to make himself
and his family more worthy for her sake. The tradition of this draft, or
the sight of it, may have stimulated the heart of the good son to honour
his parents by having them enrolled among the _Armigeri_ of the county.
John had appeared among the "gentlemen" of Warwickshire in a government
list of 1580.[53]

The Warwickshire Visitations occur in 1619, after the death of the poet,
without male heirs, and are no help to us here. In the first 1596 draft
the claims are based on John's public office, on a grant to his
antecessors by Henry VII. for special services on marriage with the
daughter and heir of a gentleman of worship (_i.e._, entitled to
armorial bearings). Then a fuller draft was drawn out, also in 1596,
correcting "antecessors" into "grandfather." Halliwell-Phillipps only
mentions one at that date, but Mr. Stephen Tucker,[54] Somerset Herald,
gives facsimiles of both. Halliwell-Phillipps calls these ridiculous
assertions, and asserts that both parties were descended from obscure
country yeomen. The heralds state they were "solicited," and "on
credible report" informed of the facts. We must not forget that all the
friends intimately associated either with the Ardens or the Shakespeares
(with the exception of the Harts) were armigeri.

Nobody now knows anything of that earlier pattern, nor of the patents of
the gifts "to the antecessors." But seeing, as I have seen, that sacks
full of old parchment deeds and bonds, reaching back to the fifteenth
century, get cleared out of lawyers' offices, and sold for small sums to
make drumheads or book-bindings, and seeing that this process has been
going on for 400 years, it does not seem to me surprising that some
deeds do get lost. Generally, it is those we most wish to have that
disappear. Lawyers do not, as a rule, concern themselves with historical
fragments, but with the soundness of the present titles of their clients
and their own modern duties. (I do think that historical and antiquarian
societies should bestir themselves to have old deeds included among the
"ancient monuments of the country" and entitled to some degree of
protection.)

We must also consider how illiterate the inhabitants of the country were
in the reign of Henry VII., how the nation was bestrid by officials of
the Empson and Dudley type, and we have reason to believe that various
accidents, intentional or otherwise, caused many an old grant to
disappear at that