The Great Seal of Queen Elizabeth I, from the Year of Shakespeare’s Birth

Attached to a royal charter issued by the Elizabethan court, under the name of one of the most powerful and respected legal figures of Tudor politics

 

Only months later, adventurers would bring the first taste of tobacco to Elizabethan England, either in the tow of Sir John Hawkins or Sir Francis Drake

Queen Elizabeth was crowned in 1559, denying all suitors and famously saying, ‘If I follow the inclination of my nature, it is this: beggar-woman and single, far rather than queen and married’. Sir James Dyer (1510-82) was perhaps the most well-known judge of Elizabethan England, a senior politician and legal figure, who had served in Tudor government since holding office as Speaker of the House of Commons under King Edward VI, until his appointment as Chief Justice of the Common Pleas from 1559, gaining renown as a judge of near-unrivaled fairness and knowledge of the law, and in 1564 was at the very height of his power. A portrait of him, from about 1575, survives in the National Portrait Gallery. The same man sat in judgement in 1575 over a fine levied when John Shakespeare bought the house in Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon, where his son, William Shakespeare (the playwright,) was born in the same year this grant was issued, and where he grew up.

Royal charter of Queen Elizabeth I, ratifying a recent decision of the royal court lead by Sir James Dyer, judge, relating to disputes in south Devon, concerning estates, tofts, gardens, orchards and bodies of water in Salcombe, ‘North’, Horestone, ‘Hanger’, Waddesdon also known as ‘Watteston’, Wiscombe and Marlborough, manuscript on parchment, Westminster, in 6th year of Elizabeth’s reign, 1564, the year Shakespeare was born. Single sheet document, on 22 long lines in a professional and angular English secretarial hand, space left for initial (only guide-initial present), a few small stains, folds and small holes, else good condition, with royal seal of England present on parchment seal tags (but with figure of queen enthroned in majesty and royal arms on reverse easily visible).