318 LEAVES THEY HAVE TOUaiED. 



and Sir William Waldegrave, Knights, of tlie one party, and Antholiji' 

 Cooke of Romford in the County of Essex, Esquire, of the other 

 party, witnesseth that to the intent that part of the manors, lands 

 and hereditaments of the said Anthony Cooke may be limited and 

 l,ppointed out in certainty, to be by him the said Anthony Cooke 

 disposed of at his will and pleasure for the payment of his debts, 

 and preferment of his children in marriage or otherwise, according to 

 the tenor and effect and true meaning of an Act of Parliament made 

 in the present five-and-thirtieth year of her Majesty's reign, intituled 

 an Act for giving power and liberty to repeal certain xises of a, Deed 

 trijjartite therein mentioned of land in certain manors, lands and rents 

 of Anthony Cooke of Romford in the County of Essex, Esquire ; now, 

 as well the said Anthony as the said Lord Burleigh, Sir Robert Cecil, 

 Sir Thomas Mildmay, and Sir William Waldegrave, according to the 

 authority and power given unto them by the aforesaid Act of 

 Parliament and by virtue of the same, do hereby limit and -apponit 

 out in certainty the manor, lands and rents hereafter mentioned, being 

 part of the lands and hereditaments mtentioned in the said Act of 

 Parliament, that is to say, the manor of Great Dassett with aj)purte- 

 nances in the County of Warwick, and all and singular other the 

 lands, rents and hereditaments of the said Anthony Cooke, set, lying 

 and being in the County of Warwick, to be by him the said Anthony 

 at his will and pleasure disposed of for the payment of his debts and 

 for the preferment of his children as aforesaid, according to the true 

 intent and meaning of the said Act. In witness whereof,' to each 

 part of this deed indenture ti'ipartite, all the said parties have 'putt' 

 their seals upon- the day and year first above written." The year 

 1593, which is the date of this deed, takes us back into the Shak- 

 spearean period. Great Dassett itself, of which the document speaks, | 

 is almost Shakspearean ground. It is situate not many miles to the 

 south-east of Stratford. The year 1593 was the 30th of ShakspeareV 

 life. It was in this year that he published what he calls "the first 

 heir of his invention," the poem of Yenus and Adonis, and dedicated 

 it to the Earl of Southampton. The hand that subscribed the W 

 BuRGHLEY which we see on the time-stained parchment whose con- 

 tents I have just deciphered, had often grasped the hand of this Earl 

 of Southampton, if it never grasped that of Shakspeare himselt 

 Southampton, left fatherless in his infancy, had been the ward ot 

 :Burleigh; and it was the expectation and intention of the pradeni^ 



