The English poet Michael Drayton once hailed it as an "all-heal" and through the ages it was considered a panacea.
A complete edition of Drayton's works with variant readings was projected by Richard Hooper in 1876, but was never carried to a conclusion; a volume of selections, edited by A. H. Bullen, appeared in 1883.
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In this volume he printed for the first time the famous Ballad of Agincourt.
Later Sir Henry Goodere, was a patron of the arts and leader of the Polesworth Group of poets which included his protegee Michael Drayton.
In 1603, at the coronation of King James I of England, Aston was honoured with the Order of the Bath at which Michael Drayton the poet acted as his esquire (Aston had become his patron and between 1602 to 1607 Drayton decicated five of his works to Sir Walter).
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William Lambarde, John Stow, John Hooker, Michael Drayton, Tristram Risdon, John Aubrey and many others used it in this way, arising from a gentlemanly topophilia and a sense of service to one's county or city, until it was eventually often applied to the genre of county history.
The poets involved cannot all be identified, since there are a number of poems marked as 'anonymous': they do include Edmund Bolton, William Byrd, Henry Chettle, Michael Drayton, Robert Greene, Christopher Marlowe, Anthony Munday, George Peele, Walter Raleigh, Henry Constable, William Shakespeare, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, John Wootton, William Smith.
A monument in his memory was erected in 1710 by Simon Harcourt, 1st Viscount Harcourt in Westminster Abbey, between the monuments to Chaucer and Drayton, with the motto Honos erit huic quoque pomo from the title page of Cyder.
The poet Michael Drayton was in the service of the Goodere family around 1580, and his works contain allusions to Polesworth and the River Anker (Brink, 1990).