The origins of the Poets Supposed Grandfather

Richard Shakespeare

A number of American researchers give the parents of Richard Shakespeare as John and Joan, without giving source material (the entries are on the IGI - and there are several entries on the 'Family Trees' section at www.rootsweb.com), and add that this John, born about 1492 (in Snitterfield?), was a son of a Thomas Shakespeare of Wroxall, and his wife, Alice.

No sources are given for any of this information - in the light of further research this information is almost certainly based on Yeatman's writings, which can now be shown to be incorrect, as he makes Richard Shakespeare of Snitterfield synonymous with Richard Shakespeare, one time 'Bailiff of Wroxall' - this is clearly not correct. In fact, the information on the IGI is also incorrect - while Richard 'the Bailiif's' father was named John, this was a different John to the one referred to above.

The Dictionary of National Biography entry for William Shakespeare has a note that Richard may be descended from an Adam Shakespeare of Baddesley Clinton, and that Richard migrated to Snitterfield from Wroxall in the early years of the16th century:

• 'Adam Shakespeare, a tenant by military service of land at Baddesley Clinton in 1539, was great-grandfather of one Richard Shakespeare, who held land at Wroxhall in Warwickshire in 1525. The latter is hesitatingly conjectured to have migrated soon after that date to Snitterfield, a village four miles to the north of Stratford-on-Avon. At Snitterfield a yeoman of the name was settled in 1535 (cf. HALLIWELL- PHILLIPPS, II. 207), and there is no doubt that he was the poet's grandfather. In 1550 he was renting a messuage and land at Snitterfield of Robert Arden; he was alive in 1560, and may be assumed to have died before the opening of the next year, when the Snitterfield parish registers, in which no mention is made of him, came into being. Richard of Snitterfield had at least two sons, Henry and John; the parentage of a Thomas Shakespeare, a considerable landowner at Snitterfield between 1563 and 1583, is undetermined, but he may have been a third son. The son Henry remained at Snitterfield all his life, and died a prosperous farmer in December 1596. John, the younger son of Richard, was the poet's father.'

(Dictionary of National Biography)

This entry was written from, and repeats earlier sources, which are incorrect in making Richard of Snitterfield the Poet's grandfather.

Revised June 2005