This step gave John Shakspere a reputation among his neighbors of having married an heiress, and he was not slow to take advantage of it. His official career commenced at once by his election in 1557, as one of the ale-tasters, to see to the quality of bread and ale; and again in 1568 he was made high bailiff of Stratford. John Shakspere was the only member of the Shakspere family who was honored with civic preferment and confidence, serving the corporation for the ninth time in several functions. However, the time of his declination was at hand, for in the autumn of 1578 the wife’s property at Ashbies was mortgaged for forty pounds. The money subsequently tendered in repayment of the loan was refused until other sums due to the same creditor were repaid. John Shakspere was deprived of his aldermanship September 6, 1580, because he did not come to the hall when notified. On March 29, he produced a writ of habeas corpus, which shows he had been in prison for debt. Notwithstanding his inability to read and write, he had more or less capacity for official business, but so managed his private affairs as to wreck his own and his wife’s fortune. At the time of the habeas corpus matter William Shakspere was thirteen years old. “In all probability,” says his biographer, “the lad was removed from school, his father requiring his assistance.” There was a grammar school in Stratford which was reconstructed on a medieval foundation by Edward VI, though the first English grammar was not published until 1586. This was after Shakespere had finished his education. “No Stratford record nor Stratford tradition says that Shakspere attended the Stratford grammar school.” But, had the waning fortune of his father made it possible, he might have been a student there from his seventh year—the probable age of admission—until his improvident marriage when little more than eighteen and a half years old. However, a provincial grammar school is a convenient place for the lad about whose activities we know nothing, and whose education is made to impinge on conjecture and fanciful might-have-been.