Arden is an area, mainly located in Warwickshire, England, traditionally regarded as stretching from the River Avon to the River Tame.[1] Derived from the British Celtic word ardu, meaning "high land", the area was formerly heavily forested and known as the Forest of Arden. Located in the geographical centre of England, the Forest of Arden was bounded by the Roman roads Icknield Street, Watling Street, Fosse Way, and Salt Road.[2] It encompassed an area corresponding to the north-western half of the traditional county of Warwickshire, stretching from Stratford-on-Avon in the south to Tamworth in the north, and included what are now the large cities of Birmingham and Coventry, in addition to areas that are still largely rural with numerous pockets of woodland (even today, Birmingham has more trees than any other British city.[3]) The most important and largest settlement in the forest was Henley-in-Arden, the site of an Iron Age hillfort.
Thorkell of Arden, a descendant of the ruling family of Mercia, was one of the few major English landowners who retained extensive properties after the Norman conquest, and his descendants, the Arden family, remained prominent in the area for centuries. Mary Arden, mother of William Shakespeare, was a member.[4]
The Forest of Arden is stated by Shakespeare to be the setting for As You Like It; however, since the play is also set in France, it should not necessarily be thought of as taking place in a real forest in Arden. (According to the Oxford Shakespeare, Shakespeare's "Forest of Arden" could be an anglicisation of the French Ardennes forest, however it seems more likely he took the name and setting from the forest near to where he was born)
From around 1162, until the suppression of the order in 1312, the Knights Templar owned a preceptory at Temple Balsall in the middle of the Forest of Arden. The property then passed to the Knights Hospitaller, who held it until the Reformation in the 16th century.
Robert Catesby, leader of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, was a native of Lapworth, a village in Arden. It is believed that many local families had resisted the Reformation and retained Catholic sympathies, including the family of Shakespeare, whose paternal ancestors were from Temple Balsall.
Towns in the area include:
Redirecting to Arden, Warwickshire
FOREST OF ARDEN, a district in the north of Warwickshire, England, the "woodland" as opposed to the "felden," or "fielden," i.e. open country, in the south, the river Avon separating the two. Originally it was part of a forest tract of far wider extent than that within the confines of the county, and now, though lacking the true character of a forest, it is still unusually well wooded. The undulating surface ranges for the most part from 250 to 500 ft. in elevation. Wide lands in this district were held in the time of Edward the Confessor by Alwin, whose son Thurkill of Warwick, or "of Arden," founded the family of the Warwickshire Ardens who in Queen Elizabeth's time still held several of the manors ascribed to Thurkill in Domesday. Shakespeare, whose mother Mary Arden claimed to be of this family, knew the district well, living as he did at Stratford; and its natural characteristics, then still unchanged, inspired his pictures of forest life in As You Like It. The name of the Forest of Arden, besides remaining a convenient designation of a well-marked physical area, is preserved in such placenames as Henley-in-Arden and Hampton-in-Arden.
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