elected High Bailiff, or Mayor, of Stratford, although he, in common with many of his fellow-burgesses, could not write his own name. He had land, too, at Snitterfield, where is father had lived; and his wife, Mary Arden, was the owner of Ashbies, the farm at Wilmcote, hard by.
But, though the parents were illiterate, they knew the value of a good education. The Free Grammar School had been refounded a few years before by Edward VI. And although there is no actual record of his school days, we may take it as certain that little Will Shakspere was sent to the Free School when about seven years old, as we know his brother Gilbert was, a little later. The old Grammar School still stands; and boys still learn their lessons in the self-same room with the high pitched roof and oaken beams, where little Will Shakspere studied his “A,B,C book,” and got his earliest notions of Latin. But during part of Shakspere’s school days the schoolroom was under repair; and boys and master—Walter Roche by name—migrated for a while to the Guild Chapel next door, And this was surely in the poet’s mind when, in later years, he talked of a “pedant who keeps a school i’ the church.”
