Bardolph (Shakespeare character) I", the 1598 quarto, he is called "Rossill" (an archaic spelling of the name Russell) and is at one point specified as "sir Iohn Russel". This is generally taken to mean that he originally had that name in the first performances of the play, just as Falstaff too had originally been given another name: Sir John Oldcastle. Shakespeare may have changed the name when he was forced to change Oldcastle to Falstaff after complaints from the Oldcastle family. It is possible he decided to remove any suggestion that he was ridiculing the Russell family (which included William Russell, 1st Baron
John Oldcastle military career Oldcastle became a trusted supporter of Henry, Prince of Wales, later to become King Henry V, who regarded Sir John as "one of his most trustworthy soldiers". Oldcastle was a member of the expedition which the young Henry sent to France in 1411 in a successful campaign to assist the Burgundians in the Armagnac-Burgundian Civil War. Lollardy had many supporters in Herefordshire, and Oldcastle himself had adopted Lollard doctrines before 1410, when the churches on his wife's estates in Kent were laid under interdict for unlicensed preaching. In the convocation which met in March 1413, shortly before the