Mark Hailwood

I have often said that writing a blog post can be a good way to disseminate research findings or ideas that you don’t think would sustain a whole article. But sometimes a blog post can act as a seed that slowly germinates into something more substantial, and before you know it you realise that most of your articles started out as blog posts. At which point it feels like the right thing to do is to complete the cycle and blog about those articles, as some kind of superstitious homage – an offering of thanks – to the blog format, in the hope it will provide again.

So, this August saw the publication of my article on ‘Rethinking Literacy in Rural England, 1550-1700’ (open access!) which was the product of several years of musing on a post I wrote on this blog some nine years ago: ‘The Rabble that Cannot Read? Ordinary People’s Literacy in Seventeenth-Century England’. In that post, I wondered whether historians of the early modern period were missing a trick when using people’s signatures to ascertain their literacy skills, with a full signature taken as evidence of full literacy, and anything else – termed a ‘mark’ – as an indicator of illiteracy. It seemed to me that there was a lot of variety in the way people signed off on various legal documents – from full signatures to initials, images of tools, crosses, circles, and a whole host of other squiggles and shapes – that might in themselves reflect hierarchies of reading and writing skills.

Well, since then I have encountered a lot of signed documents as part of my research on the Women’s Work in Rural England project, so I duly collected as many examples of marks and signatures as I could, and in my recent article I subjected them to more sustained analysis. I don’t want to go into too much detail about the findings – I want you to read the article! – but the headline is that I think we can usefully sort sign offs into the following categories:

• Signatures
• Double Initials
• Single Initials
• Icons
• Circles
• Crosses
• Multi-stroke marks
• Single-stroke marks
• Indistinct scrawls

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