It seems clear that the story of his poaching expeditions in Charlecote or Fulbroke Parks is not a mere legend unsupported by facts. Sir Thomas Lucy, the owner of Charlecote Park, was of course a game preserver, and Shakespeare must have thought that poaching was a reasonable pastime enough. He dared "do all that may become a man," and the penalty of exciting the wrath of a great landowner and game preserver was no less then than now. Sir Thomas was angry; the poet is said to have written a vulgar, bitter lampoon, still preserved, and affixed a copy to the gates of Charlecote. The response was a persecution that made Stratford too hot to hold a greater man than all the big sportsmen from Nimrod's day to ours, and William Shakespeare left wife and children and vanished from the old town's ken. Some think he lived in neighbouring towns or villages awhile, and found work as a schoolmaster. There was an idea that he went for a time as a soldier to the Low Countries under the Earl of Leicester, whose splendid pageants in honour of a visit from Queen Elizabeth may have inspired some of the fantasy of "A Midsummer Night's Dream." =ANNE HATHAWAY'S COTTAGE--INTERIOR= Doubtless there was a Shakespeare or two in Lord Leicester's regiment; the name was a common one enough; but it was no part of the poet's experience "to trail a pike in Flanders." Directly or indirectly, he was on the high road to London, and Sir Thomas Lucy was to find his claim to immortality in the pursuit of a young poacher and in the poacher's creation of Mr. Justice Shallow of Gloucestershire, whose foolishness, suggested in "Henry IV." (Part II., Act iii. sc. 2), is still further emphasised in the "Merry Wives of Windsor," where he figures as one who has come to make a Star Chamber matter out of Sir John Falstaff's poaching. His complaint will be remembered. "Knight, you have beaten my men, killed my deer, and broken open my lodge ... the council shall know this."