A keeper had killed a deer, and Richard Staverton had taken his bow. Neville’s reply from Billingbear on 19 July 1609 turned the quarrel into a dispute about forest boundaries and legal authority. He called his land “no purley but a free Chase”: a purley, or purlieu, was land removed from a forest’s jurisdiction but still subject to restrictions, and the distinction mattered to his claim that Staverton had no authority there.1
In As You Like It 4.3, Oliver asks for directions to a house:
OLIVER
Good morrow, fair ones. Pray you, if you know,
Where in the purlieus of this forest stands
A sheepcote fenced about with olive trees?
The play uses the same technical vocabulary that Neville employed in defending his jurisdiction.2
Two substantial studies of Shakespeare’s countryside bring these practical distinctions into view. Anne Barton’s The Shakespearean Forest (2017) examines woodland society, hunting, forest law and the ways dramatists populate and stage their woods. Randall Martin’s Shakespeare and Ecology (2015) follows the countryside into the economic pressures upon it: enclosure, commercial timber cutting, glassmaking, cannon manufacture and the competing claims of agriculture and war. Their subjects meet in Neville’s experience. He managed parks and chase rights, dealt with tenants and timber, manufactured and sold ordnance, and supplied wood for ocean-going ships. The documents behind those activities appear in Chapters 3–9.3
Purlieu and free chase
Barton explicitly identifies Shakespeare’s purlieus as a “legal term.” Martin devotes part of his discussion of Arden to the unresolved rights attached to such ground. Land could cease to be forest without becoming land upon which every former restriction had disappeared. Owners, tenants and forest officers could therefore disagree about the authority under which it should be used.4
Neville questioned Staverton’s right to retain a known keeper’s bow and insisted that the place of the offence decided the jurisdiction. If the deer had been killed in Warfield on land held of him, he would call Beard to account in his own court. He traced that liberty through earlier grants and legal proceedings, and refused to condemn his own chase keeper, Trigge, on an allegation alone. Chapter 8 sets out the dispute, including Beard’s removal and reimposition.1
Among 239 plays dated 1590–1615 in the comparison examined, five use purlieu. As You Like It, dated about 1599, is the earliest and the only one to use it literally for forest land. The later examples—Parasitaster (1604), Ram Alley (1608), Philaster (1609) and Bartholomew Fair (1614)—turn it towards sexual or figurative territory. Neville’s letter supplies the word in the practical legal business he regularly conducted.5
The people already living in Arden
The exiles do not arrive in an empty forest. Barton describes the play’s gradual disclosure of:
a forest society that was there long before the arrival of the various exiles from farmland and court
There is a village and a chapel, a vicar willing to perform a dubious marriage, shepherds, wage labour and property for sale. William was born there. Corin works there. The visiting aristocrats encounter a population whose livelihood does not depend on their arrival.6
Martin makes the agricultural setting equally concrete. He distinguishes the woodland scenes from the pasture and cultivated ground that occupy much of the play. The sheepcote has boundaries; its inhabitants buy food, tend livestock and negotiate ownership. When Celia gives Oliver directions in As You Like It 4.3, she follows the ground:
CELIA, [as Aliena]
West of this place, down in the neighbor bottom;
The rank of osiers by the murmuring stream
Left on your right hand brings you to the place.
Osier willows were useful material for baskets and other farm equipment. Martin places them in Arden’s rural economy, rather than treating them solely as an attractive feature beside a stream.7
Both scholars draw attention to a change from Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde, the play’s principal prose source. Lodge’s Coridon is a tenant with a cottage and land; Shakespeare’s Corin is a hired worker who does not own the flock. Barton connects that change with the declining position of small tenants in late-sixteenth-century Arden. Martin likewise emphasizes the dependence of a man who must work for wages but cannot command his employer’s supplies. Corin’s inability to offer food to the hungry newcomers has an economic explanation.8
Martin’s fuller account follows enclosure and the practice of alternating land between tillage and pasture. He considers both the pressure these changes put on common grazing and their capacity to restore fertility or increase food production. His account is more complicated than a simple opposition between a good traditional countryside and a bad commercial one. Oliver’s treatment of his brother is vicious; that does not make every agricultural practice on Oliver’s farm incompetent. Corin’s master owns the resources that could relieve hunger but fails to provide hospitality.9
Neville’s work as steward at Sonning involved this same practical distinction between the paper description of land and its value in use. In September 1608 he reported finding faults in the survey supplied to him. He would seek better information before fixing values for the king. His separate household and estate memorandum also concerns sheep, wheat, barley, ponds, provisions and fuel. They show responsibility for the productive countryside alongside responsibility for deer.10
Windsor: a working forest on the stage
In The Merry Wives of Windsor, the landscape has names that the audience could recognize: Windsor, Datchet, Frogmore, Eton and the surrounding parks. Barton emphasizes the unusually precise location of this woodland comedy. Martin calls it Shakespeare’s “most locally detailed play.” Its routes connect houses and fields with river crossings, woodland and the royal residence.11
The figure at the centre of its forest legend had an occupation. Mistress Page introduces him in The Merry Wives of Windsor 4.4:
MISTRESS PAGE
There is an old tale goes that Herne the Hunter,
Sometime a keeper here in Windsor Forest,
Doth all the wintertime, at still midnight,
Walk round about an oak, with great ragged horns,
The supernatural story continues with damaged trees and cattle. Barton points out that beef and dairy cattle really did enjoy pasturage in the park and forest. Herne’s malice attacks the resources of a working landscape. His horns and midnight appearances belong to folklore; his former employment and the animals he troubles belong to forest life.12
Neville’s responsibilities included Sunninghill Park, Swinley Walk and Fines Bailiwick; Chapter 4 sets out their tenures. After his death in July 1615, John Chamberlain reported efforts to secure his forest places for his son.13
Barton’s treatment of Titus Andronicus supplies a useful comparison. The woods outside imperial Rome contain walks and a lodge. She calls the walks “administrative sub-sections,” a reminder that the word can describe the divisions of a managed forest. Saturninus places Bassianus and Lavinia in Titus Andronicus 2.3:
SATURNINUS
[…]
He and his lady both are at the lodge
Upon the north side of this pleasant chase.
The Roman hunting ground is described through familiar institutions: lodge, walk, chase and park. Neville’s Swinley Walk was an actual responsibility of this kind.14
The oak and the sawpit
The people impersonating fairies do not simply appear from an unspecified wood. Their hiding place is a timber-working site. Mistress Page proposes in The Merry Wives of Windsor 4.4:
MISTRESS PAGE
[…]
Let them from forth a sawpit rush at once
With some diffused song. Upon their sight,
We two in great amazedness will fly.
Barton notices the sawpit as part of the scene’s physical arrangement. Martin makes more of its proximity to Herne’s oak: a large living tree stands beside a place where trees are converted into material for use. The same woodland supports a local legend, a comic ambush and an industry.15
Martin traces the demands of glassmaking upon Windsor wood. He describes two French glassmakers seeking Windsor fuel in 1568. Their request for permission must be distinguished from the earlier general glassmaking licence; whether the Windsor request was granted requires separate confirmation. Larger windows and fashionable drinking vessels required furnaces; furnaces required continuing supplies of wood. His account follows the commercial uses of timber into the domestic world of the plays, where windows, glasses, chimneys and fires are signs of consumption as well as household comfort.16
He also describes attempts to renew the resource. Martin places plantations in Cranbourne Walk and Ice House Field in Windsor Great Park in 1580. A later petition independently reports thirteen acres fenced and sown with acorns in Cranbourne Walk during Elizabeth’s twenty-second regnal year; it does not name the official who ordered the work. Mature timber could take generations to replace, while the income from cutting it was immediate. Martin reads the play’s oak and sawpit against those conflicting demands. His interpretation does not turn the Windsor citizens into straightforward conservationists: they are quite willing to use the sawpit for their entertainment, and their comfortable houses consume fuel.17
Neville participated directly in the timber trade. In August 1609 Sir Thomas Smythe acknowledged the delivery of one hundred loads to the East India Company and asked whether Neville could provide another hundred to finish its ships. The first delivery had satisfied the Company. The request joined estate resources to shipbuilding and overseas trade; it did not identify the particular woods from which the timber had been cut.18
Mayfield: woodland becomes ordnance
Martin’s section “Deforestation militant” moves from timber consumption to the iron industry. He describes the royal foundry at Newbridge in Sussex, its French and English workers, the use of nearby Ashdown Forest timber, and the expansion of Wealden cannon production. His account makes the connection explicit:
An unintended consequence of this rapid progress was the iron industry’s inordinate consumption of local wood.
He follows that consumption into complaints about lost trees and habitat, and into the priority given to armaments over competing uses of fuel.19
Mayfield belonged to this industrial region. Its business required ore, charcoal, water power, skilled labour and transport. Timber and charcoal were different products with different uses: large timber served ships and buildings, while smaller wood could be converted into the charcoal needed by furnaces. Coppicing allowed repeated crops of wood from established stools. The cost and difficulty of transporting charcoal made access to suitable woodland a continuing concern.
G. Hammersley’s study of the charcoal iron industry challenges an explanation based simply on universal woodland exhaustion. D. W. Crossley’s work on the Sidney ironworks shows the practical calculations behind supply, carriage, labour and estate resources. The woods were managed as well as consumed. Those studies give the industrial details behind the larger environmental history.20
Neville’s own ordnance papers are unusually substantial. An inspection reported in August 1595 rejected two sakers, six falcons and two minions. His working account to Robert Sackville in February 1596 listed deliveries amounting to more than 152 tons against a bargain for 150; another consignment would bring the total to 175 tons. The documents concern inspection, carriage, delivery and the release of bonds. The rejected pieces and the outstanding securities show how many stages separated casting a gun from completing the business.21
His petition to Burghley in 1590 concerns the state’s regulation of the trade. Neville accepted production controls and the marking of guns but resisted being compelled to sell through designated merchants. He proposed reporting purchasers and giving security against unauthorized export. His objection was to a restriction he believed might serve private advantage under the name of public policy. Martin’s account of government, manufacturers and military demand supplies the wider setting for a dispute in which Neville was personally engaged.22
Cannons where history has none
The cannons in King John belong to a period long after its early-thirteenth-century action. Martin draws attention to their prominence and explicitly contrasts the play with The Troublesome Reign of King John, printed in 1591, which does not give the Angers confrontation this artillery. The earlier play has a separate figurative “Cannons crack”; Chapter 31 examines the distinction. Shakespeare puts the iron weapon before the walls of Angers. King John says in King John 2.1:
KING JOHN
[…]
The cannons have their bowels full of wrath,
And ready mounted are they to spit forth
Their iron indignation ’gainst your walls.
The anachronism is the point: these are not weapons that the historical King John could have deployed. The play brings the machinery of later warfare into his reign. Martin develops the contrast on pages 82–83, where he connects the cannon imagery with the violence threatened against a civilian town.23
The same displacement occurs more drastically in Macbeth, whose action is set in eleventh-century Scotland. The Captain describes Macbeth and Banquo in Macbeth 1.2:
CAPTAIN
[…]
If I say sooth, I must report they were
As cannons overcharged with double cracks,
So they doubly redoubled strokes upon the foe.
Martin places this image within a recurring movement between human bodies and the destructive action of guns. His treatment also includes the cannon casting and shipbuilding at the beginning of Hamlet. These images occur across the plays, including histories set before gunpowder artillery. Neville’s connection with them is unusually concrete: he lived at Mayfield, dealt in cast-iron ordnance and argued about the conditions under which it could be sold.24
The forests themselves return to military use at the end of Macbeth. Malcolm orders his soldiers to cut branches from Birnam Wood and carry them as camouflage. Barton’s survey includes this brief but decisive woodland appearance among Shakespeare’s forest settings. The branches conceal the army’s numbers and bring about the apparent movement of the wood.25
Hunting, havoc and the flight from company
Chapter 26 follows the hunting language of Hamlet through Rhodri Lewis’s study and Neville’s letters about deer and keepers.
Barton’s account of hunting extends beyond deer as food or recreation. Drawing on Roger Manning’s research, she describes havocking: incursions into parks in which deer were killed indiscriminately, beyond what the attackers could carry away. Such raids could express rivalry, hostility or a challenge to authority. The distinction between lawful hunting and destructive excess sharpens a line in Coriolanus 3.1:
MENENIUS
Do not cry havoc where you should but hunt
With modest warrant.
Barton also follows this vocabulary into the slaughter at the end of Hamlet. Hunting language can describe bodies, violence and the breach of restraints, as well as the pursuit of game. Neville’s dispute over Beard similarly turns on the difference between an offence, the evidence for it and the authority to punish it.26
Forests could also offer escape from obligations. In January 1600 Neville complained that the expense of feeding visiting English gentlemen at his Paris embassy had become intolerable. He could not shut his gates or refuse his table. After declaring his contempt for honour without profit, he told Thomas Windebank:
when I com home I will becom an hermit in Ashridge or somwhere in the forrest, and do pennance for the faults I committe heere.
In Timon of Athens 4.1, the host who has exhausted his resources feeding other people abandons the city:
TIMON
Timon will to the woods, where he shall find
Th’ unkindest beast more kinder than mankind.
Chapter 33 sets out the full sequence of Neville’s complaint and its correspondence with Timon. Barton adds a precise observation about the source tradition: the familiar accounts in Plutarch, Lucian and Painter do not give Timon this same withdrawal into the woods. She proposes Greene’s James IV, with its disillusioned Bohan, as an additional dramatic source.27
Neville wrote his wish for a forest retreat from the embassy in Paris, where the arriving guests could number twelve or sixteen at a time. The man who defended his chase rights at home was imagining the woods as an escape from the obligations of his public position.
Notes and sources
Neville to Richard Staverton, 19 July 1609, Royal Berkshire Archives, Warfield tenant-dispute papers, D/EN/L2/1/1 file context; John O’Donnell’s transcription. The form purley is retained; the opening short quotation is on the first body face. “Chase” modernizes O’Donnell’s “Chace.” The threatened proceedings and proposed accommodation do not establish a later settlement. The contemporary address supplies Staverton at New Lodge; the final dateline supplies Billingbear, 19 July 1609. The catalogue identifies the Warfield dispute bundle; the individual item number remains uncertain.↩︎
John Cowell, The Interpreter (Cambridge: John Legate, 1607), entries Chase, Forest and Purlue, EarlyPrint/TCP A19476; John Manwood, A brefe collection of the lawes of the forest ([London, 1592?]), discussion of unlawful purlieu hunters, pp.186–187, EarlyPrint/TCP A06855. Text cited from the TCP editions. Cowell allows specially granted courts in a subject’s chase, so the distinction must not be reduced to an absolute claim that chases had no courts. Manwood’s qualifications explain why purlieu was not unrestricted hunting ground. Neither treatise decides the facts or title in Neville’s particular dispute. Shakespeare, As You Like It 4.3, Folger Shakespeare Library.↩︎
Anne Barton, The Shakespearean Forest (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), publisher and DOI; Randall Martin, Shakespeare and Ecology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), publisher and DOI. Both authors write within the conventional attribution to William Shakespeare. The application of their observations to Neville is the argument of this chapter.↩︎
Barton, pp.11–12; Martin, pp.50, 70–71. Their accounts of purlieu are read alongside Cowell and Manwood, cited in note 2, rather than treated as interchangeable technical definitions.↩︎
Neville to Richard Staverton, 19 July 1609, Royal Berkshire Archives, Warfield tenant-dispute papers, D/EN/L2/1/1 file context; John O’Donnell’s transcription. The form purley is retained. Shakespeare, As You Like It 4.3. The comparison selects 239 plays dated 1590–1615 from Pervez Rizvi’s Collocations and N-grams, using his published play catalogue and assigned dates. Within this selection, the normalized forms purlieu and purlieus occur once in each of five plays: As You Like It, Parasitaster, TCP A07077, Ram Alley, TCP A04881, Philaster, TCP A06343, and Bartholomew Fair in Jonson’s works, TCP A04633. Public transcriptions confirm the variant forms purlues, purlews and purlewes. The assigned dates are 1599, 1604, 1608, 1609 and 1614 respectively. The four comparator passages concern Cupid’s territory, a woman’s sphere of attraction, sexual poaching, and the haunts of prostitutes; none locates a place in an actual forest. This sense classification is confined to the selected texts and dates. Neville’s letter is later than the play’s usual 1599 date; it documents his use, not an earlier source for the play.↩︎
Barton, p.11. The block quotation is her description of Arden’s pre-existing population.↩︎
Martin, pp.58–59, 76; Shakespeare, As You Like It 4.3, Folger Shakespeare Library. His further reconstruction of Rosalind’s farming practices on pp.76–77 is interpretive, not an inventory explicitly supplied by the play.↩︎
Barton, p.132; Martin, pp.68–70. Both cite V. H. Skipp’s work on economic and social change in Arden. Their comparisons with Lodge are attributed to them here; they do not establish that every detail of forest management originated in Shakespeare rather than in Lodge. Barton, pp.129–31, specifically discusses Lodge’s lodges, rangers and walks.↩︎
Martin, pp.64–77, especially pp.66–71 and 73–75. His interpretation distinguishes agricultural improvement from the moral conduct of the improver. The history of the 1597 legislation and its precise legal scope is not independently reconstructed here.↩︎
Royal Berkshire Archives, D/EN/O12/47, Neville to Sir Julius Caesar, 24 September 1608, repository record. Neville reports using the Sonning survey to value copyholds, finding it faulty in some points, and seeking a better value for the king; Chapter 8, “Land and overseas ventures,” summarizes this work. The same letter concerns the unopened Bray survey and two leases. For the separate household and estate memorandum, see Chapter 7, “Managing Billingbear from the Tower,” and Royal Berkshire Archives, D/EN/F45/1 (catalogued with D/EN/F45/2).↩︎
Barton, pp.125–28; Martin, p.33. The short quotation is Martin’s. Both discuss possible connections with the author’s experience; neither documents a Neville source for the play.↩︎
Barton, pp.126–27. Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor 4.4, Folger Shakespeare Library. The excerpt stops within Mistress Page’s account. Barton distinguishes the play’s legend from later identifications of a particular tree.↩︎
Andrew Thrush, ‘Neville, Sir Henry I (1564–1615)’, History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1604–1629 (2010), Offices Held. The biography lists keeper of the house at Windsor Castle 1593–?1601; Sunninghill Park 1593–1601 and by 1607 to death; Swinley Walk and Fines Bailiwick by 1607; Sonning by 1598–1601 and by 1603 to at least 1608; Newbury ?1593 to at least 1604. These are separate tenures, not a single uninterrupted forest office. Thrush lists the Berkshire deputy lieutenancy as 1596–at least 1608; that range does not resolve any interruption. For the commission of 26 October 1596, see Chapter 4. Mary Anne Everett Green, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of Elizabeth, 1598–1601 (London, 1869), p. 157, Queen to Henry Nevill, dated “[Jan.]” under 1599; reference “Warrant Book, I., p. 36.” January is supplied editorially, no day is given, and the underlying warrant has not been inspected. The order establishes instructions, not compliance or an uninterrupted tenure. John Chamberlain to Sir Dudley Carleton, 13 July 1615, in Norman Egbert McClure, ed., The Letters of John Chamberlain, I (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1939), pp.607–608, public volume record. McClure identifies the secretary as Sir Ralph Winwood and the son as Neville’s eldest, Sir Henry. Chamberlain’s keeping of Windsor is not silently expanded into a precise patent title. This is a contemporary report of procurement, not inspection of the underlying grants. For the subsequent contest and grants to others, see Andrew Thrush, “Neville, Sir Henry III (1588–1629)”, History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1604–1629 (2010), biography and notes 18–20. Thrush dates the Sonning grant to 20 July 1615 and the Mote grant to August.↩︎
Barton, p.124. Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus 2.3, Folger Shakespeare Library. The omitted opening line is marked. The play’s lodge is not called a keeper’s lodge in Saturninus’s quoted sentence; that description belongs to Barton’s discussion.↩︎
Barton, p.127; Martin, pp.39, 47–53. Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor 4.4, Folger Shakespeare Library. Martin’s interpretation of the juxtaposition is identified as his reading; a sawpit’s presence does not establish the purpose for which every piece of timber was cut.↩︎
Martin, pp.37–41, especially p.39. His historical sources include William Menzies’s Windsor history and Eleanor S. Godfrey’s history of English glassmaking. Martin describes a 1568 licence; the evidence cited here independently establishes the request for permission, rather than the grant. H. Sydney Grazebrook, “Window Glass: The Henzey or Hennezel Family,” Notes and Queries, fifth series 3 (6 March 1875), pp. 189–190, distinguishes a general glassmaking licence in 1567 from a September 1568 request to Cecil to cut wood and make charcoal in Windsor Great Park. Article.↩︎
Martin, pp.46–47 and 50–53. The plantation history follows Martin’s account, drawing on Menzies. This chapter does not repeat Martin’s dates for the later prohibition of wood fuel in glassmaking, which require separate checking against the proclamations. Albion, Forests and Sea Power (1926), pp. 123–124, and Cox, “Forestry,” Victoria History of Berkshire, II (1907), p. 349, attribute the Cranbourne order to Burghley. Bruce, ed., Calendar of State Papers Domestic, Charles I, 1627–1628 (1858), p. 245, vol. LXX, no. 44, abstracts Richard Daye’s petition reporting thirteen acres fenced and sown in Elizabeth’s twenty-second regnal year, but does not name the ordering official. The exact attribution and Ice House Field claim need separate documentary confirmation. Petition abstract.↩︎
Thomas Smythe to Henry Neville, 10 August 1609, Royal Berkshire Archives, within D/EN/F6/1; parent catalogue. The individual item number requires archival confirmation: an address photograph bears F6/1/16, while the parent catalogue does not allocate the suffixes.↩︎
Martin, pp.85–86. The block quotation is from p.85. Martin’s chapter 3, notes 18–22 (p.188), cites H. R. Schubert, History of the British Iron and Steel Industry from c.450 B.C. to A.D.1775 (1957), pp.171–72, 247–55; Carlo M. Cipolla, Guns and Sails in the Early Phase of European Expansion 1400–1700 (1965), pp.36–46, 62–63; and Richard Winship Stewart, The English Ordnance Office 1585–1625 (1996), pp.65–88, among other works. These are Martin’s supporting references; his statement that the Sussex inquiry was the first environmental inquiry in England is not adopted here as an independently verified priority claim.↩︎
D. W. Crossley, “The Management of a Sixteenth-Century Ironworks,” Economic History Review, new series, 19, no. 2 (1966), pp. 273–288, especially pp. 273–274, 278–280 and 285–288, JSTOR. The study concerns the Sidney works at Robertsbridge and Panningridge, chiefly 1541–1573. It supplies industrial context rather than evidence of Neville’s personal activities. For coppice, regrowth and the cost of transporting charcoal, see G. Hammersley, “The Charcoal Iron Industry and Its Fuel, 1540–1750,” Economic History Review 26, no. 4 (1973), pp. 593–613, especially pp. 603–610, JSTOR. Hammersley challenges a general exhaustion explanation while recognizing local pressure on accessible supplies; his estimates depend on approximate capacities, variable measures and woodland yields.↩︎
Abraham Jones’s inspection report to Neville, docketed 28 August 1595, Royal Berkshire Archives, D/EN/O/23/4, supplies the rejected-gun passage; parent catalogue. Compare Jones to Neville, 23 November 1595, D/EN/O/23/2, which distinguishes two shipments. The near-match between November’s 22 tons 19 hundredweight and the February sheet’s 22 tons 19 hundredweight 1 quarter does not establish that they are the same consignment. The catalogue describes the group as correspondence concerning Neville’s sale and shipment of ordnance, 1593–1597. A separate account has not been securely connected with this letter and supplies no additional tonnage in the calculation here. Working copy to Robert Sackville, docketed 8 February 1595 Old Style (1596 with the year beginning in January), Royal Berkshire Archives, D/EN/O/23/3; same parent catalogue. The opening deliveries are 44 tons 2 hundredweight 3 quarters, 28 tons 13 hundredweight, and 79 tons 5 hundredweight. At 20 hundredweight per ton and four quarters per hundredweight these total 152 tons 0 hundredweight 3 quarters; the additional 22 tons 19 hundredweight 1 quarter brings the total to 175 tons. The sheet contains revisions and separate marginal drafts, so it should not be quoted as one clean sent letter. The final delivery location and the first bond-release threshold remain uncertain. No claim is made that all these guns came from a single furnace.↩︎
Henry Neville to Lord Burghley, [1590], British Library, Lansdowne MS 65/22; manuscript images published by Ken Feinstein. See also Owen Lowe Duncan, Jr., The Political Career of Sir Henry Neville: An Elizabethan Gentleman at the Court of James I (Ohio State University PhD dissertation, 1974), pp.69–71, especially p.71, OhioLINK. Duncan cites Lansdowne 65, no.22, f.70; his preceding note70 prints no.27 with the same folio. His longer transcription has textual differences, including a repeated “rather,” not reproduced here. The year is assigned; no day or month is claimed.↩︎
Martin, pp.21 and 82–83. Shakespeare, King John 2.1, Folger Shakespeare Library. The short extract is from King John’s speech. Martin’s stronger comparative claim about the number of cannon references across the canon is not repeated without an independent count.↩︎
Martin, pp.78–85. Shakespeare, Macbeth 1.2, Folger Shakespeare Library. For the Hamlet passage and its early textual witnesses, see Chapter 26. The industrial comparison does not assign the manufacture of brass cannon to Neville’s cast-iron business.↩︎
Barton, p.122. Shakespeare, Macbeth 5.4, Folger Shakespeare Library. The use of branches is stated by Malcolm; no independent botanical or tactical source claim is made.↩︎
Barton, pp.16–19, drawing on Roger B. Manning, Hunters and Poachers: A Cultural and Social History of Unlawful Hunting in England 1485–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), especially pp.47–48. Shakespeare, Coriolanus 3.1, Folger Shakespeare Library. Barton’s account extends the military associations of havoc with evidence of deer-park destruction. It does not make all uses of the word exclusively technical hunting terms.↩︎
Henry Neville to Thomas Windebank, Paris, 10 January 1599/1600, The National Archives, SP 12/274, f.15; TNA piece record. The quotation follows the manuscript-based John O’Donnell transcription used in Chapter 33, retaining its spelling. Shakespeare, Timon of Athens 4.1, Folger Shakespeare Library. Barton, pp.63–65, proposes Greene’s James IV as a dramatic source and distinguishes the forest retreat from the settings in Plutarch, Lucian and Painter. This is her source argument, not a claim that all possible antecedents have been excluded.↩︎