“Verses of My Owne Making”: Literacy, Work, and Social Identity in Early Modern England

Abstract

Reading and writing became widespread in England over the course of the early modern period, with literacy expanding alongside rapid commercial development and growing economic inequality. This article shows how tradesmen and others of similar rank used reading and writing to create a powerful identity that cut across some of the sharpening divisions in wealth from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries. Growing numbers of economically precarious “middling” men and women took advantage of the spread of literacy to construct social roles for themselves based on godly work, vocational knowledge, and occupational fraternity. This analysis begins with the uniquely voluminous collection of notebooks filled by an Essex tradesman named Joseph Bufton (1651–1718). Drawing on his notebooks together with other examples of non-elite writing and cheap print, it reveals a broad literary culture that was emerging in provincial towns at this time. Through this, it connects the historiography of social structure and economic change to the growing research on non-elite literacy and life-writing. Taken together, these findings suggest that the existing narrative of early modern “social polarization” should be revisited. Rather than consistently reinforcing the deep economic divisions between workers and masters, literacy could often serve as a tool for crafting a shared identity that could encompass a whole trade.

Writing Mobile Lives, 1500–1700

“…However, the fact that something is 'fashioned' or 'performative' does not mean it is untrue or that a narrative has no basis in lived experience; this study does not aim to discover all the lies and deceptions of travellers (that would be really boring indeed), but rather attempts to trace the wider contours and meanings they gave to their mobility in the context of their lives. Currently, individual identity is increasingly seen in the context of the manifold relationships between early modern people and their changing settings and communities, shaped, produced, and represented in intersecting social and cultural formations, occupational roles, and relations (Hailwood and Waddell 2023;Paul 2018;Shepard 2015;Scott-Warren 2016;Waddell 2019). Scholars have occasionally chosen to emphasise the structures that restricted early modern people, sometimes viewing the contexts they operated in as accommodating them and giving their lives meaning and purpose, often both.…”

Work and Identity in Early Modern England

“…When the wool combers of Coggeshall called upon each other to 'play the men' by supporting a common fund for workers in the trade in the 1680s, they were asserting an unambiguously masculine notion of occupational community. 36 However, working identity was also widespread among women. Sometimes this operated in similar ways to men, such as the many women in late seventeenth-and early eighteenth-century London who asserted formal occupational titles and laid claim to the Freedom of the City through the Livery Companies.…”

“…The cloth trade, for example, offered a powerful source of identity to many men in Essex, Gloucestershire and Somerset. 40 Likewise, Andy Wood and Simon Sandall have shown that free miners in the Peak District and the Forest of Dean had an exceptionally well-honed sense of fraternal unity. 41 Equally strong was the spirit of collective endeavour that emerged from maritime work, whether linked to a particular fishing village or to 'a floating factory' traversing the oceans.…”