Arden family

• 1. Introduction

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  The Arden family gave its name to the Forest of Arden, a wooded stretch of England south of the old Roman road Watling Street. The forest ranged across Warwickshire, Staffordshire, Worcester, Cheshire and Shropshire. William Shakespeare set the action of As You Like It in that same forest. Behind that literary borrowing lies a rarer claim. The Ardens trace an unbroken male line back before the Norman invasion of 1066, to an Anglo-Saxon landholder who kept his status after the conquest. Very few families in Britain can make the same claim. How did this family hold its ground while so many English noble houses fell? Why have other families since claimed the very same unbroken descent? And what tied one branch of the Ardens so closely to England's most famous playwright?

• 2. A Rare Bloodline

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  Alwin, also recorded under his Old English name Æthelwine, served as Sheriff of Warwickshire when the Normans invaded in 1066. His son, Thorkell of Arden, inherited that position; his name also appears in records as Thorkill or Turchil. Thorkell's own son and principal heir, Siward, married a woman named Cecilia, and many Arden families descend from that marriage. Later generations stayed prominent in Warwickshire affairs, holding the office of sheriff on many occasions.

  Only a handful of families in Britain can prove a patrilineal line reaching back to a single pre-Norman Anglo-Saxon ancestor. The Berkeley family is the other most often cited alongside the Ardens.

  Other families have pressed similar claims. The Swinton, Wentworth, and Grindlay families each claim the same kind of unbroken male line, though historians dispute every one of those claims.

• 3. Branches And Endings

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  In the thirteenth century, the senior Arden line ran through Siward's grandson Thomas, whose family settled at Ratby in Warwickshire. A third Thomas de Arden of Ratby was taken prisoner at the Battle of Evesham.

  By the end of that century, the Ratby branch had died out. Its lands were sold to Thomas Arden of Hanwell and his wife Roesia.

  A separate Arden family held onto substantial lands from their base at Radbourne. Those Warwickshire holdings soon anchored a very different seat of Arden power near Solihull.

• 4. The Park Hall Estate

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  By the fourteenth century, under Sir John de Arderne, the most senior Arden line held Park Hall, Castle Bromwich, near Solihull, as its primary estate.

  Family records also credit Sir Henry de Arden, from this same century, with establishing that prominence. This branch had first been based at the old Arden manor of Cudworth in Warwickshire, and descended from Thomas and Roesia.

  Robert Arden was executed in 1452, for supporting the uprising of Richard, Duke of York. That same estate would pass down to a descendant who rose to become sheriff himself, before his loyalties brought the family under royal suspicion.

• 5. Shakespeare's Cousins

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  Edward Arden of Park Hall, Castle Bromwich, became Sheriff of Warwickshire in 1575, following his father William Arden, who died in 1545. Edward was the second cousin of Mary Arden, the mother of William Shakespeare.

  In 1583, suspicion fell on him as head of a family that had stayed loyal to the Catholic Church. He was sentenced for allegedly plotting against Elizabeth I.

  His son, Robert Arden of Park Hall, was born in 1553 and married Elizabeth Corbett, born in 1551. Elizabeth was the great niece and heiress of Sir Rowland Hill, and the daughter of Reginald Corbett. Hill is a possible inspiration for the character Old Sir Rowland in As You Like It.

  Edward's great-grandson Robert died unmarried and without issue in 1643, ending the Park Hall male line. The senior Warwickshire line was gone, but other Arden branches, far from Park Hall, were only just taking root.

• 6. The Cheshire Ardens

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  In the 1500s, one branch of the family settled at Underbank Hall in Stockport, at an estate known as Arden Hall, Harden, or Hawarden.

  A collection called the Arderne Deeds, held in Manchester University Library, records the muniments of the Arderne family of Alvanley in Cheshire. The same collection covers the related Done family of Utkinton, Cheshire, and both families' estates. Further papers on the Cheshire Ardens are held in the UK National Archive.

  Historians debated the links between the Cheshire and Warwickshire Ardens in print during the nineteenth century. That same question had already occupied scholars centuries earlier, for reasons tied to one of England's most powerful families.

• 7. The Ancestry Question

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  The powerful Dudley family had a direct stake in the answer. Modern scholars Parry and Enis have noted how much weight sixteenth century investigations into Arden ancestry carried for the Dudleys.

  The Dudleys needed to claim descent from Turchil, or admit that their own prestigious ancestors had lied about descending from him. That question was tangled up with the legend of Guy of Warwick, who was supposed to be an ancestor of Turchil. Turchil, not Guy, was the real ancestor of the Ardens at the time of William the Conqueror.

  Parry and Enis describe Turchil as "the only Saxon magnate to increase his territories after the Norman conquest." They also call him "the largest landholder in Warwickshire at the time of the Domesday survey."

  That single Domesday-era ranking is the closest thing to proof behind every later Arden pedigree claim, disputed or not.