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The Ardens Were an Important Warwickshire Family The Arden family did not actually live in Stratford Upon Avon, but they would have been well known there. They were an important family in the county of Warwickshire, and Edward Arden's daughter, Margaret, had married John Somerville who was a gentleman of considerable stature. "Somerville – who was only a few years older than William Shakespeare – lived with his family at Edstone, the manor bordering Bearley, Wilmcote and Snitterfield. Lots of Shakespeare’s family lived in this area, and it’s where his mother and father grew up. Mary Arden’s farm in Wilmcote is a few miles or so away – easily walkable in sixteenth century habits. We can be fairly sure that the Shakespeare family knew John Somerville, because he lent some money to their friends, the Quineys, that ended up bringing the Quineys all kinds of trouble." Painting dated 1609 of William Camden, the historian who recorded that the Arden family took their name from the Forest. | Completed by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger (1561–1636) | Source The Forest of Arden The sixteenth century historian, William Camden, wrote that the Arden family took their name from the forest – they were the major landholders there by the eleventh century, we know that from the records in Domesday book. The Forest of Arden was more of a green space than it was your fairytale like forest. Arden was a heavily wooded landscape but it also had many open heaths, moors and greens – you can see these features clearly on present day maps of Birmingham and north Warwickshire – there’s Small Heath, King’s Heath, Acock’s Green, Smith’s Wood, and so on, dozens of names that include the words heath, wood or green, and the landscape reached right from the north of the county to the edge of Stratford on Avon – (it’s a huge area in English landscape terms!) – which is why we have towns and villages just outside Stratford called Henley in Arden and Tanworth in Arden. Shakespeare knew this landscape really, really well and I think it’s the place he means in As You Like It. Map showing the territory of the Forest of Arden | Image by Acne Trumpet | Source | This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Connecting the Family Dots: Edward Arden Related to Mary Arden Shakespeare As Cathryn points out this week, several scholars have researched this genealogy, only to come up empty on full documentary evidence for the relationship between Shakespeare's mother and the broader Arden family of Warwickshire. A lot of quite ordinary people had distant connections to gentry – families were big and not all the offshoots would be able to maintain their social status. But actually, as Glyn and I wrote in the book, we don’t think that having proof matters as much as people think – it’s a bit of a distraction from why the Arden family were important in Stratford and Warwickshire when Shakespeare...
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