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Ardens were Catholics.
    The document gives a picture of traditional rural society only a few years before William was born, and is thoroughly Catholic with its appeal to the Angels and the Virgin Mary ‘and all the blessed company of saints’. Henry VIII’s reformation had so far touched this part of Warwickshire only lightly. In keeping with most of her friends and neighbours, Mary Arden would have been brought up in a highly ritualised, old-fashioned English country Catholicism. 4
    This is part of Michael Wood’s version of the elaborate argument that seeks to prove that Shakespeare was as Catholic as the pope. This ‘part of Warwickshire’ had in fact been transformed by ‘Henry VIII’s reformation’ the dissolution of the monasteries had destroyed a complex system of land tenure and ancient traditions of land use, leaving tithelands and many common pastures vulnerable to annexation by neighbouring landlords, and the poor unprotected. The Catholic college and guild ofStratford had been replaced by a corporation in 1553; the Corporation was a closed oligarchy of sturdy protestants, into which no professed papist could dream of intruding. In 1559 the Corporation refused to pay the Vicar of Holy Trinity because of his popish practices; he retired to Wiltshire and for two years the cure lay vacant. 5 More important, as far as doctrine went, than ‘Henry VIII’s reformation’ (which remained doctrinally incoherent) was the consolidation of the church under the clerics and the earnest reforming boy king, Edward VI. In 1556, however, everyone who was not prepared to play the heroic martyr was a Catholic. If the wording of Arden’s will had been unusual, we might have to give it special significance, but in fact it is the formula in use in the third year of the reign of Bloody Mary. Suffice it to point out amid all the modish brouhaha about Shakespeare’s Catholicism that John and Mary Shakespeare baptised all their children in Holy Trinity Church and all of them, bar one, were buried there. John may have been presented for failing to attend church, but the reason was understood at the time to be ‘fear of processes’, that is, fear of arrest for debt. 6
    Mary Arden, Robert Arden’s youngest child, was left the estate in Wilmcote, which was called Asbyes, and ‘the crop upon the ground sown and tilled as it is’, as well as the traditional ten marks in cash for her dowry. Arden also appointed Mary one of his two executors, which was less ‘a clear sign of her ability’ than a response to the fact that she was present, whereas her elder sisters were either married or in service. As an executrix she was in a better position to carry out the precise provisions of the will despite any disgruntlement on the part of her in-laws. As we shall see, the Lamberts and the Webbes soon managed to reclaim the Wilmcote properties for themselves. It may be that the will was contrived this way because negotiations were already in hand for Mary’s marriage with John Shakespeare; Shakespeare’s acquisitions of freehold property in Stratford may also have been made with an eye to a marriage. In the same year that Arden made his will, Shakespeare bought a freehold ‘garden and croft’ in Greenhill Street and a house and garden in Henley Street, which became the Woolshop, the eastern part of the ‘birthplace’.
    Arden was relatively well off; after his death in 1556 his goods, which were valued at £77s 11s 10d, included oxen, bullocks, kine, weaning calves, horses, sheep, swine, poultry and bees, as well as ‘thebacon in the roof’. Agnes Arden remained at Wilmcote, where she died in 1580. After Richard Shakespeare’s death, the Webbes lived in the house at Snitterfield having leased it from Agnes Arden in 1561. When Alexander died in 1573, Margaret was made his executrix; John Shakespeare and Agnes Arden’s son John Hill were