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

What’s more, I argue that each type of mark requires a different level of pen skill to complete, and that this list of categories, in this order, represents a rough hierarchy of writing skill. It’s also worth noting that only 2 per cent of the sign offs in my sample were ‘indistinct scrawls’, suggesting that the vast majority of the population had a least some competency and familiarity with using a writing implement. The rabble could write. Well, at least a little bit.

The initials of Frances Coward… F C

Does that mean they could also read? Traditionally historians have worked on the basis that reading skills were taught before writing skills in early modern England, so anyone who had had some training in writing would have learnt to be a competent reader first. I’m not so sure. Take Frances Coward, a widow of West Pennard in Somerset, who in 1680 was asked to confirm that she had put her mark to a will she had witnessed. Coward said that ‘the letters F C subscribed thereto as a witness … is this deponent’s own handwriting as she verily believeth but she cannot write or read but saith that she doth usually make that mark and she verily believeth it to be the same’. In other words, Coward had put her initials to the will – which required a reasonably high level of penmanship – but by her own admission she could not read or write. It seems to be the case that she was one of many people who had learned to write individual letters, but couldn’t actually read full words or sentences, a condition I’ve termed ‘letteracy’. [I was quite pleased with that…]

But why would a rural dweller in early modern England take the time to learn how to craft a few letters, and perhaps just their own initials? In my earlier blog post I suggested this was likely to be about status; about showing off skills to set yourself apart from your neighbours. No doubt that played a part, but in the article, I also argue that such skills could be incredibly useful in everyday life. My favourite example here is that of David Webber, a thatcher from Stogursey, Somerset, who used his ‘letteracy’ in an ingenious way. In the winter of 1688-9, he noticed that hay was being stolen from his stack. Determined to catch the culprit, Webber ‘did make twelve small tickets of paper and upon each ticket he did write the letters DW’. The tickets, ‘about the breadth of his thumb nail’, were then mixed in with his hay by his wife. When more hay went missing that night, Webber went in search. In his neighbour’s ground he found horses eating what he knew to be his own hay as ‘he found on the ground where the hay lay three tickets’, complete with his initials on them. Genius.

This kind of evidence provides us with some fantastic glimpses of the everyday uses of literacy, and in the process it reminds us of an important point. That being able to create and recognise individual letters was not necessarily only valuable to those who wanted to build on those skills to become fully fledged readers and writers. For many ordinary people these basic skills were useful in and of themselves in their everyday lives. Perhaps many of ‘the rabble’ couldn’t read, but it would be wrong to label their resourceful use of letters as illiteracy.