Mary Arden

  General Notes:

Mary Arden was born in 1540 as a member of the noble Catholic family of the Ardens of Park Hall whose family forebears had been given land by William the Conqueror. The Ardens were one of Warwickshire's most prominent families, tracing its ancestry back beyond the Norman Conquest to the Doomsday Book. Mary was the favourite of eight daughters of the widowed Robert Arden. His second marriage in April 1548 to Agnes Hill, a widow of another prosperous farmer, added four stepchildren to his own family. The family home was called Glebe Farm a two-storey Wilmecote farmstead. Mary was sixteen when her father died and she was named as one of the Executers of her father's will in which he left her some money and some land in Wilmecote.

Mary married John Shakespeare in 1557. (John Shakespeare was born in 1531 and died in 1601.)