Bilton and Billesley

[freeru...@gmail.com]

Wading my way through Mark Anderson's Shakespeare By Another Name, I was interested in the Warwickshire link with De Vere he tried to create using properties Bilton and Billesley. Around 1589 he may have mentioned spending time in Warwickshire

Bilton actually belonged to De Vere, but he had sold it by 1580.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilton_Hall
So its unlikely to have any significance.

Billesley was supposedly owned by De Vere's grandmother's family, which is a weak link. According to local legend "Shakespeare" is supposed to have written As You Like It at Billesley and married his wife there.
The timeframe would possibly overlap with De Vere's second marriage and As You Like It must date after Marlowe's death in 1593.

However Billesley appears to have passed out of the De Vere extended family in 1588
http://hankeringforhistory.com/billesley-manor-and-the-trussells/
"In 1588, the Billesley estate would be lost for the last time. In complete despair, Thomas Trussell committed highway robbery and was caught. He was convicted and sentenced to death. The crown took the estate and sold it off. While being solely responsible for losing Billesley Manor, Thomas Trussell was fortunate enough to skip execution and lived for another fifty-two years"

1588 was the beginning of De Vere's period of disgrace, apparently Billesley was bought by Sir Robert Lee, then an alderman and later Lord Mayor of London. Robert Lee was also a memrchant of the Levant Company, which, if the Edward Bonaventure really did belong to De Vere, might have had an association with the Earl of Oxford.

Possibly Robert Lee leased out Billesley to Edward De Vere from 1588 - otherwise it is difficult to see a connection of De Vere and Warwickshire.

Billesley is very close to Stratford on Avon where Shakspear might have been encountered. But personally I always prefer the idea of Pimping Billy holding two Whorses outside a London theatre.

[graham.a...@btinternet.com]

On Saturday, 7 November 2015 10:55:21 UTC, freeru...@gmail.com wrote:
> Wading my way through Mark Anderson's Shakespeare By Another Name, I was interested in the Warwickshire link with De Vere he tried to create using properties Bilton and Billesley. Around 1589 he may have mentioned spending time in Warwickshire
>
> Bilton actually belonged to De Vere, but he had sold it by 1580.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilton_Hall
> So its unlikely to have any significance.
>
> Billesley was supposedly owned by De Vere's grandmother's family, which is a weak link. According to local legend "Shakespeare" is supposed to have written As You Like It at Billesley and married his wife there.

> Billesley is very close to Stratford on Avon where Shakspear might have been encountered. But personally I always prefer the idea of Pimping Billy holding two Whorses outside a London theatre.

Which wife? I had three!!!
NOBODY CALLS ME BILLY
The whores in the playhouse could write better than De Verve.
Will Shakespeare as he is today!!!

[Arthur Neuendorffer]

freeru...@gmail.com wrote:

<<Wading my way through Mark Anderson's Shakespeare By Another Name, I was interested in the Warwickshire link with De Vere he tried to create using properties Bilton and Billesley. Around 1589 he may have mentioned spending time in Warwickshire

Bilton actually belonged to De Vere, but he had sold it by 1580.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilton_Hall

So its unlikely to have any significance.

Billesley was supposedly owned by De Vere's grandmother's family, which is a weak link. According to local legend "Shakespeare" is supposed to have written As You Like It at Billesley and married his wife there.

The timeframe would possibly overlap with De Vere's second marriage and As You Like It must date after Marlowe's death in 1593.

However Billesley appears to have passed out of the De Vere extended family in 1588

http://hankeringforhistory.com/billesley-manor-and-the-trussells/

"In 1588, the Billesley estate would be lost for the last time. In complete despair, Thomas Trussell committed highway robbery and was caught. He was convicted and sentenced to death. The crown took the estate and sold it off. While being solely responsible for losing Billesley Manor, Thomas Trussell was fortunate enough to skip execution and lived for another fifty-two years"

1588 was the beginning of De Vere's period of disgrace, apparently Billesley was bought by Sir Robert Lee, then an alderman and later Lord Mayor of London. Robert Lee was also a merchant of the Levant Company, which, if the Edward Bonaventure really did belong to De Vere, might have had an association with the Earl of Oxford.

Possibly Robert Lee leased out Billesley to Edward De Vere from 1588 - otherwise it is difficult to see a connection of De Vere and Warwickshire.>>

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http://www.generallyeclectic.ca/shakespearecase-general.html

<<In the late 1580s, de Vere sold his home Fisher's Folly. His immediate whereabouts are known, but there is speculation that he spend time at Billesley Hall, about three miles from Stratford-upon-Avon. De Vere's materal grandmother was a Trussel. Billesley Hall had been in the Trussel family for 400 years. Local rumour holds that As You Like It was written there. De Vere also had an estate with a country house called Bilton in the Avon River valley near Warwickshire.>>
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http://whowasshakespeare.org/Who_Was_Shakespeare/Oxford_Was_Shakespeare.html

<<Down the road from Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire, [de Vere] owned Bilton Hall, with the Avon River on one side, and the Forest of Arden on the other. Nearby still stands an ancestral estate, Billesley Manor, where local legend has it As You Like It was penned in its "Shakespeare Room.">>
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http://shakespeareoxfordfellowship.org/rebuttal-to-reedy-and-kathman/

A Rebuttal to Thomas Reedy and David Kathman's "How We Know that Shakespeare Wrote Shakespeare"

Posted by: SOF September 12, 2004
By Lynne Kositsky and Roger Stritmatter
...........................................
Tom Reedy and Dr. David Kathman:

<<Oxfordians sometimes attempt to claim that this evidence could apply to Oxford by asserting that Oxford owned an estate on the Avon river. While it's true that one of the many estates Oxford inherited from his father was at Bilton on the Avon river, he sold this estate in 1580 (43 years before Jonson's poem), and there is no evidence that he was ever physically present there.>>
...........................................
Kositsky and Stritmatter:

<<Oxford inherited Bilton Hall from his maternal grandmother, Elizabeth Trussel, who brought the property with her when she married the 15th Earl of Oxford. Reedy and Kathman cite no source for their claim that Oxford sold the estate in 1580. Actually, the records regarding of the disposition of Bilton are contradictory. The Victoria History of the County of Warwickshire, as cited by Charlton Ogburn states of the property that "in 1574, Edward, Earl of Oxford, leased it to John, Lord Darcy, and in 1580 he sold it to John Shuckburgh, who immediately leased it to Edward Cordell." Dugdale's Antiquities of Warwickshire, on the other hand, places the alienation "towards the latter end of Qu. Eliz. reign" -- which cannot possibly be a description of 1580. If correct, Dugdale places the alienation sometime in the 1590s and would make Bilton "one of the last properties that Oxford relinquished."

Based on Dugdale's account, and his own knowledge of Oxford's finances, Charles Wisner Barrell speculates that the date of sale was 1592. Regardless of whether the alienation took place in 1580 or later, the assumption that Oxford's connection with the property ended when Shuckburgh became the legal owner is not necessarily a secure one. Elizabethan property arrangements, particularly among the upper classes, were notably more fluid than they are today. Moreover, as Barrell comments in his article, to this very day the manor at Bilton appears to preserve a symbolic connection to the de Vere family: "The portico of the house bears the insignia of a single star. Later photographs of the entrance show this star design much more clearly. This is good evidence that the house was once the private residence of an Earl of Oxford, for the single silver "mullet" or star was an armorial device borne by all Vere members of the Tudor nobility." Is this the de Vere heraldic star? If so, it would indicate a close, enduring and well-known connection between the property and the de Vere family.

In any case, the date of sale is in a sense a red herring. That there was a property at one time owned by the Earl of Oxford on the Avon River makes it perfectly feasible for Jonson to have used this information, possibly in a covert fashion, in his [Swan of Avon] poem.

Also, only three and a half miles from Stratford-upon-Avon, another Trussell property, Billesley Hall, preserves an oral tradition that As You Like It was written in the "Shakespeare Room." Although it has been impossible to substantiate the theory that Billesley actually fell into Oxford's possession, it had been by the 1580s owned for more than four hundred years by the Trussell family, according to Charlton Ogburn. Is it a coincidence that Oxford has such distinct ties to Warwickshire environs associated with the Shakespeare legend? We think it unlikely to be a mere coincidence.
...........................................
Tom Reedy and Dr. David Kathman:

<<Also in the Folio, Leonard Digges wrote an elegy "To the Memorie of the deceased Authour Maister W. Shakespeare," in which he refers to "thy Stratford Moniment." Digges presumably knew what he was talking about; he was the stepson of William Shakespeare's friend Thomas Russell, and had close ties to Stratford for most of his life. The only surviving letter by him, written a few years before his death, contains gossip of the "mad relations of Stratford," including Thomas Combe, to whom William Shakespeare had left his ceremonial sword in his will.>>
...........................................
Kositsky and Stritmatter:

<<This fact is well known. It is unfortunate for Stratfordians, given the allegedly close association between Digges and Shakespeare of Stratford, that none of his surviving correspondence can be cited to verify the relationship.>>
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http://www.sourcetext.com/sourcebook/library/barrell/06avon.htm

"Shake-speare's" Unknown Home On the River Avon Discovered
by Charles Wisner Barrell
First published in The Shakespeare Fellowship News-Letter, December 1942.

<<"Fisher's Folly," the great house in the parish of St. Helen's. Bishopsgate, which was Oxford's property for some years, was sold by him to William Cornwallis in 1588. Some evidence suggests that Oxford spent part of his time at the old manor house in Stoke-Newington, one of London's northern suburbs, as early as 1585; and he is definitely known to have established a home there, following his marriage to his second wife, Elizabeth Trentham, in 1591. But all of these places were either in or immediately contiguous to the city, and it must be remembered that Oxford was the type of Englishman to whom a real country retreat for recreation and contemplation might be considered a necessity. The mere fact that he designated Wivenhoe--before the place lost interest for him--"my new country Muses," testifies to his love of the unspoiled countryside.

Bilton Manor was in those days another spot that might appear to have been especially created to win the affection of a poet. Even up to the present century, we are told, the land was decked with many a noble forest tree and lovely prospect of the rolling hills and lush valley swales along the Avon. Toward the north and west, lingering outposts of the ancient Forest of Arden were still visible in the 16th century when Edward de Vere owned Bilton.

Dugdale, the Warwickshire historian, states that Edward Earl of Oxford retained Bilton until "towards the latter end of Qu. Eliz. reign," when he sold it to "John Shugborough, Esq; then one of the six clerks in Chancery; which John dyed seized thereof in 42 Eliz. (1601)."

This sale of the manor to John Shugborough or Shuckborough must have taken place in 1592, when the last of Oxford's ancestral lands passed out of his possession. Castle Hedingham was taken over by Lord Burghley, in trust for the Earl's three daughters, at the same time.>>
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http://www.archive.org/stream/lifestoryofedwar00alle/lifestoryofedwar00alle_djvu.txt

THE LIFE STORY of EDWARD DE VERE as "WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE"

By PERCY ALLEN

<<Edward de Vere was connected with Warwickshire through the Trussells is indisputable ; for when, in 1510, the 15 th Earl of Oxford married Sir Edward Trussell's daughter, Elizabeth, several manors in that part of the country passed with her to her husband, including those of Bilton in Warwickshire, some eighteen miles north-east from Stratford, and Elmesthorpe in Leicestershire, not far from the Warwickshire border. Edward de Vere subsequently sold both these properties, of the first of which Dugald writes in his Warwickshire:

" By Edward Earl of Oxford was it (i.e. Manor of Bilton) sold unto John Shugborough Esq., then one of the six Clerks in Chancery ; which John died seized thereof in '42 Eliz. (1600)."

All this is most significant, but it by no means exhausts the connexion of the Trussells with Warwickshire ; for Mr. John Trotman, editing, in 1914, The Triumph Over Death by Robert Southwell, who also has come into our story, calls attention to the startling resemblances in The First Rape of Fair Helen, to Shakespeare's earlier works, and notes also that John Trussell sprang from an ancient and honourable family resident for centuries at Billesley, near Stratford-on-Avon. Now the sister and heir of this John Trussell was none other than Edward de Vere's grandmother, Elizabeth Trussell ; so that here we find Edward de Vere, through his Trussell grandmother, definitely connected with and coming into possession of manors and lands in and near Warwickshire, including it would seem, Billesley near Stratford-on-Avon.

The links are being drawn close ; but if only we can connect the Trussells, in some way, with William Shaksper of Stratford, they will thereby be drawn closer yet ; and that is precisely what we can do, for the Trussells were certainly connected with the Ardens, the very family into which William Shaksper married.

The following interesting letter, written by Mr. S. C. Wilson,
appeared in The Morning Post of 6 June, 1931.

" Sir, -- An early connexion between the Trussell and the Arden families is brought out by the late Dr. John Smart, of Glasgow, in his book Shakes-speare, Truth and Tradition, p. 64. He is establishing the relationship of Shakespeare's Arden grandfather with the main Arden family of Warwickshire and writes : ' A direct connexion between the husbandman of Wilmecote and the main branch of the family is established by a common friendship of an interesting and significant kind. When Walter Arden made a settlement upon his wife he formed a body of trustees to whom certain property was conveyed by a legal instrument for the purpose. The most prominent among them was Sir Robert Throckmorton, a gentleman of dignified rank in Warwickshire. . . . The same Sir Robert Throckmorton gave his services in a similar capacity to Thomas Arden of Wilmecote. When the latter purchased his estate in Snitterfield, he executed a deed by which several of his friends were associated with him in the transaction ; and the first name in the list is that of Sir Robert Throckmorton. The next is that of Thomas Trussell of Billingsley, a man of good birth and rank, who was Sheriff of Warwick and Leicester in 1508. It is plain that Thomas Arden of Wilmecote, Shakespeare's ancestor, was accustomed to move in the best society which Warwickshire could afford. . . . He had at Wilmecote a farm called Asbies . . . and houses and gardens in Snitterfield .... The property descended at his death to his son, Robert Arden, Shakespeare's grandfather. ... In due course it it would have descended to Shakespeare himself."

All this is very interesting, and is made the more so by these words written by Mrs. C. C. St opes in Shakespeare's Environment, page 13, when discussing the Arden property at Snitterfield, bought by Thomas Arden for his son, Robert, Shaksper's grandfather, in 1501.

" If we might read into the ordinary reading of such arrangements, it might be supposed that the
unknown wife of Thomas Arden was a Throckmorton, and the unknown first wife of Robert Arden a Trussell."

The whole question of this connexion of the de Veres, through the Trussells, with Warwickshire, and through the Ardens with Shaksper of Stratford, needs full investigation ; but the already ascertained facts fit in so amazingly well with the theme of this book, that I am almost disposed to describe William, of Arden Forest, as one of Edward de Vere's poor relations, whose forbears had seen better times.>>
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Art Neuendorffer