e recovery of the sum of five
pounds. Unlike his partners in the litigation, his name is not followed
in the record by a mention of his calling, and when the suit reached a
later stage his name was omitted altogether. These may be viewed as
indications that in the course of the proceedings he finally retired from
trade, which had been of late prolific in disasters for him. In January
1596-7 he conveyed a slip of land attached to his dwelling in Henley
Street to one George Badger.

His wife's debt.

There is a likelihood that the poet's wife fared, in the poet's absence,
no better than his father. The only contemporary mention made of her
between her marriage in 1582 and her husband's death in 1616 is as the
borrower at an unascertained date (evidently before 1595) of forty
shillings from Thomas Whittington, who had formerly been her father's
shepherd. The money was unpaid when Whittington died in 1601, and he
directed his executor to recover the sum from the poet and distribute it
among the poor of Stratford. {187}

It was probably in 1596 that Shakespeare returned, after nearly eleven
years' absence, to his native town, and worked a revolution in the
affairs of his family. The prosecutions of his father in the local court
ceased. Thenceforth the poet's relations with Stratford were
uninterrupted. He still resided in London for most of the year; but
until the close of his professional career he paid the town at least one
annual visit, and he was always formally described as 'of
Stratford-on-Avon, gentleman.' He was no doubt there on August 11, 1596,
when his only son, Hamnet, was buried in the parish church; the boy was
eleven and a half years old.

The coat-of-arms.

At the same date the poet's father, despite his pecuniary embarrassments,
took a step, by way of regaining his prestige, which must be assigned to
the poet's intervention. {188a} He made application to the College of
Heralds for a coat-of-arms. {188b} Then, as now, the heralds when
bestowing new coats-of-arms commonly credited the applicant's family with
an imaginary antiquity, and little reliance need be placed on the
biographical or genealogical statements alleged in grants of arms. The
poet's father or the poet himself when first applying to the College
stated that John Shakespeare, in 1568, while he was bailiff of Stratford,
and while he was by virtue of that office a justice of the peace, had
obtained from Robert Cook, th