The Works of William ShakespeareCambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011 - 196 pages Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: now shown as the Birth-Place, and the other situated in Greenhill Street, a road afterwards called More Towns End. In the year 1557, however, his fortunes underwent an important change through an alliance with Mary, the youngest and fondly-loved daughter of Robert Arden, a wealthy farmer of Wilmecote, near Stratford-on-Avon, who had died a few months previously. A wealthy farmer, indeed, for those days, and one who would have been specially so distinguished in the contemporary provincial estimate. He possessed two farm-houses with a hundred acres or more of land at Snittcrfield, as well as another one with about fifty acres at Wilmecote, the former being occupied by tenants and the latter by himself. In addition to these he owned a copyhold estate in the last-named parish, the extent of which has not been ascertained. But with all these advantages he was a farmer, and nothing more, ?a worthy fellow whose main anxiety, as fully appears from the records, centered in the welfare of his family, and who had no desire to emulate, however remotely, the position of a country gentleman. The appointments of his dwelling were probably, however, superior on the whole to those which were to be found in other residences of the same class, including no fewer than eleven painted-cloths, a species of artistic decoration that was in those days a favorite substitute for the more expensive tapestry. Pictures of the kind that are now familiar to us were then very rarely indeed to be seen, excepting in palaces or in the larger mansions of the nobility. These painted-cloths were generally formed of canvas upon which were depicted the Seven Ages of Man, the Story of the Prodigal, and such like; grotesque accompaniments, in one or more of the rooms, to the bacon in the roof. The inventory of Rober.. |