ABSTRACT
On the face of it, this was a straight sale of about 56 acres of land by the Shakespeares to Edmund Lambert for £40 (£5,600). The references to complainant and defendant were standard sixteenth century legal terminology; as Lewis has put it, “one of the legal methods of conveying and alienating land in the sixteenth century . . . was a fictitious suit in which one party sued the other for wrongfully witholding a given property. The defendant admitted the fictitious fact, and then the complainant paid the defendant for giving the premises back to him.”2 No mention was made in this foot of fine to any mortgage arrangement, and there was no reference to the land in question being held by other parties under lease; in fact the land was both mortgaged and let under lease.
