tive place. "He had," wrote Rowe in 1709,
"by a misfortune common enough to young fellows, fallen into ill
company, and among them, some, that made a frequent practice of
deer-stealing, engaged him with them more than once in robbing a
park that belonged to Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote near
Stratford. For this he was prosecuted by that gentleman, _as he
thought, somewhat too severely_; and, _in order to revenge_ that
ill-usage, he made a ballad upon him, and though this, probably
the first essay of his poetry, be lost, _yet it is said to have
been so very bitter_ that it redoubled the prosecution against
him to that degree that he was obliged to leave his business and
family in Warwickshire and shelter himself in London." The
independent testimony of Archdeacon Davies, who was vicar of
Saperton, Gloucestershire, late in the seventeenth century, is to
the effect that Shakespeare "was much given to all unluckiness in
stealing venison and rabbits, particularly from Sir Thomas Lucy,
who had him oft whipt, and sometimes imprisoned, and at last made
him fly his native county to his great advancement." The law of
Shakespeare's day (5 Eliz., cap. 21) punished deer-stealers with
three months' imprisonment and the payment of thrice the amount
of the damage done.

The tradition has been challenged on the ground that the
Charlecote deer-park was of later date than the sixteenth
century. But Sir Thomas Lucy was an extensive game-preserver, and
owned at Charlecote a warren in which a few harts or does
doubtless found an occasional home. Samuel Ireland was informed
in 1794 that Shakespeare stole the deer, not from Charlecote, but
from Fulbroke Park, a few miles off, and Ireland supplied in his
_Views on the Warwickshire Avon_, 1795, an engraving of an old
farmhouse in the hamlet of Fulbroke, where he asserted that
Shakespeare was temporarily imprisoned after his arrest. An
adjoining hovel was locally known for some years as Shakespeare's
"deer-barn," but no portion of Fulbroke Park, which included the
site of these buildings (now removed), was Lucy's property in
Elizabeth's reign, and the amended legend, which was solemnly
confided to Sir Walter Scott in 1828 by the owner of Charlecote,
seems pure invention.

The ballad which Shakespeare is reported