John Weever of a religious tone, "The Mirror of Martyrs" and "An Agnus Dei". "The Mirror of Martyrs or The Life and Death of ... Sir John Oldcastle" may have been part of a backlash. In his preface Weever calls it the "first trew Oldcastle", perhaps on account of the fact that Shakespeare's character Falstaff first appeared as "Sir John Oldcastle". Weever's work is influenced by John Bale's 1544 biography of Oldcastle, which presents him as a proto-Protestant martyr. In the fourth stanza of this long poem, in which Sir John is his own panegyrist, occurs a reminiscence of Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar"
John Fastolf family. The bulk of Sir John's fortune passed to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he is remembered as a benefactor, and where there is a Fastolf Society. Fastolf appears in Shakespeare's early play Henry VI, part 1 as a cowardly knight who abandons the heroic Lord Talbot. In the first two folios the name of the character is given as 'Falstaffe' not Fastolf. When Shakespeare came to write Henry IV, part 1, set in the early years of Fastolf's career, he created a disreputable boon companion for the young Prince Hal called Sir John Oldcastle. The descendants of the real Oldcastle