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AC C OU N T I NG F OR ON E SE L F
 Accounting for
Oneself
Worth, Status, and the Social Order in Early
Modern England

A L E X A N DR A S H E PA R D

1
 1
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© Alexandra Shepard 2015
The moral rights of the author‌have been asserted
First Edition published in 2015
Impression: 1
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contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
To Jason
 Acknowledgements

This book has been longer in the making than I care to admit; it is a much happier
task to acknowledge the many debts I have incurred along the way. There would
be no book had not the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council awarded me
a research grant in 2005 to compile the data set on which the analysis is based.
A Fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH)
at the University of Edinburgh in 2006 provided a stimulating environment in
which to undertake some preliminary analysis and writing. The IASH fellow-
ship was made possible by leave funded by a Philip Leverhulme Prize awarded
by the Leverhulme Trust. I would still be wading through the data set without
the Research Fellowship also granted by the Leverhulme Trust in 2012, which
en­abled me to complete a draft of the book. I am deeply grateful to the ESRC and
to the Leverhulme Trust for the funds that made this book possible.
Judith Spicksley was Research Associate for eighteen months between 2005 and
2007 during the data-collection phase of the project, to which task she brought
admirable good humour, astonishing efficiency, a keen eye, and a sharp mind.
Working with Judith, who shared my obsessive compulsion to collect as many
statements of worth as possible, has been one of the pleasures and privileges of
undertaking this project.
Portions of this book, albeit significantly reworked here, have appeared in part
in Alexandra Shepard, ‘Poverty, Labour and the Language of Social Description
in Early Modern England’, P&P 201 (2008), 51–95; Alexandra Shepard and
Judith Spicksley, ‘Worth, Age and Social Status in Early Modern England’, EcHR
64 (2011), 493–530; and Alexandra Shepard, ‘The Worth of Married Women
in the English Church Courts, c.1550–1730’, in Cordelia Beattie and Matthew
Frank Stevens (eds), Married Women and the Law in Premodern Northwest Europe
(Woodbridge, 2013). The material extracted from these publications is reprinted
here with kind permission, respectively, from the Past and Present Society, the
Economic History Society, and The Boydell Press.
This project has travelled with me as I moved between three institutions,
and I am deeply grateful to colleagues and students at Sussex, Cambridge, and
Glasgow for providing supportive and stimulating environments in which to
work. At Sussex the seeds of this book were partly sown in conversations with
Saul Dubow, Alun Howkins, and Pat Thane, while Michele O’Malley helped me
develop a pilot project and Carol Dyhouse and Claire Langhamer kept my sanity
intact. In Cambridge I worked alongside (among many others) Mary Laven, Craig
Muldrew, and Ulinka Rublack in ways that enhanced this project, and I had
the good fortune to have David Reynolds and Quentin Skinner as colleagues in
Christ’s College, to whom I am very grateful for their support. In Glasgow the
Early Modern Work in Progress group as well as the Centre for Gender History
have provided energizing contexts in which to think aloud about this book, and
viii Acknowledgements

I am particularly grateful to Lynn Abrams, Eleanor Gordon, Thomas Munck, and

Don Spaeth for their intellectual companionship over the past few years.
Participants at seminars at the Universities of Cambridge, Chicago,
Connecticut, Durham, East Anglia, Edinburgh, Exeter, Newcastle, Sheffield,
Warwick, and Yale have enriched my thinking with their engagement with vari-
ous parts of this project. I have also benefited from presenting material at the
North American Conference on British Studies, at conferences organized by the
Economic History Society, the European Social Science History Congress, and
the Social History Society, and at a workshop on Gender and Work in Early
Modern Europe hosted by the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History, and
Antiquities, Stockholm and funded by the Gender and Work project at Uppsala
University. Conversations with and advice from friends and colleagues have pro-
vided ongoing direction throughout the project. I am particularly grateful to Maria
Ågren, Judith Bennett, Mike Braddick, David Cressy, Konstantin Dierks, Amy
Erickson, Henry French, Lionel Glassey, Laura Gowing, Julie Hardwick, David
Harris Sacks, Karen Harvey, Cynthia Herrup, Steve Hindle, Margaret Hunt,
Catriona MacLeod, Marjorie McIntosh, Marina Moskowitz, Craig Muldrew,
Simon Newman, Sheilagh Ogilvie, Mark Overton, Steven Reid, Hamish Scott,
Leigh Shaw-Taylor, Richard Smith, Nick Stargardt, Tim Stretton, Julia Smith,
John Styles, Naomi Tadmor, Garthine Walker, Alex Walsham, John Walter, Phil
Withington, Jane Whittle, Andy Wood, and Tony Wrigley.
I owe enormous thanks to Steve Hindle, Lyndal Roper, Keith Thomas, and
Keith Wrightson for support that ensured the completion of this project. At a
pivotal point, Lyndal Roper assured me in terms I was almost able to believe
that I would indeed recover the energies required to see this book through. Her
understanding as well as her critical engagement with this project have been a sus-
taining force throughout. I am similarly grateful to John Walter for his wisdom at
important moments. Karen Harvey’s friendship and critical acumen also warrant
special acknowledgement. Steve Hindle volunteered to read a complete draft, and
helped enormously in its conversion to something for readers rather than a reposi-
tory for my thoughts. I am deeply indebted to him for the time he devoted to this
task, and for his encouragement throughout. Judith Spicksley also worked her
way through the entire manuscript, which was well beyond the call of duty, and
Sarah Knott, Craig Muldrew, and Lyndal Roper read parts of it. It is a better book
for their generosity as readers, although of course all remaining quirks, lacunae,
and errors are entirely my responsibility.
I am grateful to my daughter, Zoe, who was born during this project, for com-
pletely transforming my understanding of time, past and present. More impor-
tantly, the myriad delights she brings inspire a welcome impulse to count my
blessings and to keep what is of value in perspective. I also owe an enormous debt
to Elaine Conaghan, Rosemary Forbes, and Lesley Main for affording me the
necessary peace of mind as I entrusted Zoe to their care in order to think about
things early modern. Sarah and Max Cooper, besides providing good company,
have also generously shared childcare—enduring countless hours of rainy-day
 Acknowledgements ix

soft-play to enable occasional oases of time. As always, my family have done much
to keep me going. Kirsten Shepard in particular stepped in at crucial moments
to shore up our household. I am the grateful beneficiary of loving parents, a kind
and good-humoured mother-in-law, and admirable siblings. My life is further
enriched by the friendship, not to mention the formidable intelligence, of Sarah
Knott.
This book was completed in the interstices between the countless joys and
untold sorrows of reproductive labour, the pleasures and pains of which would
have been neither as exquisite nor as tolerable respectively without the compan-
ionship and support of Jason Reese. He additionally deserves credit for reminding
me more than once of the cumulative force of undertaking manageable incre-
ments in the face of the debilitating prospect of an enormous project. I am, as
ever, indebted to him for his love, integrity, and constancy. The dedication of this
book to him is but a small token of my ongoing affection and admiration.
 Contents

List of Figures and Tables xiii

List of Abbreviations xvii

1. Self and Society in Early Modern England 1

I . W E A LT H A N D P OV E R T Y
2. Calculating Credit 35
3. Quantifying Status 82
4. Demarcating Poverty 114

II. M A I N T ENA NCE

5. Maintaining Oneself 149
6. Depending on Others 191
7. Making a Living 232

I I I . T H E C H A N G I N G C U R R E N C Y OF C R E DI T
8. Refashioning Credibility 277
Conclusion: Reappraising the World of Goods 303

Bibliography 315
Index 343
 List of Figures and Tables

F IGU R E
1.1. The dioceses of England between the Reformation and the nineteenth century 15

TA B L E S
1.1. Distribution of witnesses between subsets, over time 16
1.2. Urban/rural distribution of witnesses, by parish of residence, over time 18
1.3. Proportion of female witnesses within subsets, over time 19
1.4. Distribution of male witnesses by social/occupational title, over time 20
1.5. Distribution of male witnesses by social/occupational title, by subset 21
1.6. Age structure of witnesses aged 25 and above, compared with data from
family reconstitution 23
2.1. Categories of witnesses’ responses to the question of their worth, by
subset and gender 40
2.2. Categories of witnesses’ responses to the question of their worth, by
gender and over time 51
2.3. Categories of witnesses’ responses to the question of their worth, by
gender and marital status 54
2.4. Categories of servants’ and of all witnesses’ responses to the question of
their worth, by age and gender 55
2.5. Categories of witnesses’ responses to the question of their worth, by
social/occupational status 64
2.6. Denials of liability to respond to the question of witnesses’ worth, by
social/occupational group, compared with each group’s overall repre-
sentation in the witness sample 67
2.7. Monetary evaluations of worth, by social/occupational status and
gender, 1550–1649 69
2.8. Mean and median worth of common social/occupational groups,
1550–1559 and 1600–1649 74
2.9. The proportion of total stated worth held by different social/
occupational groups, compared with the proportion of each social/
occupational group among witnesses quantifying their worth in goods 76
2.10. Mean and median worth, by age and social/occupational status,
1550–1599 and 1600–1649 78
3.1. Relationship between multiple monetary estimates of worth given by
witnesses examined more than once, according to the length of time
between statements 89
xiv List of Figures and Tables
3.2. Inventoried wealth compared with witnesses’ estimates of worth 93
3.3. The ‘charge’ of probate accounts compared with witnesses’ estimates
of worth 94
3.4. Common cash values cited by witnesses providing a monetary estimate
of their worth, over time 95
3.5. Proportions of different social/occupational groups who provided a
monetary estimate of their worth citing common values, over time 102
4.1. Chronological incidence of the proportions of witnesses responding
that they were worth little or nothing or poor, by subset and gender 127
4.2. Incidence of relative poverty, by gender and subset, on the basis of
witnesses’ self-representation 128
4.3. Incidence of relative poverty, by gender and women’s marital status, on
the basis of witnesses’ self-representation 129
4.4. Incidence of relative poverty, by age and gender, on the basis of
witnesses’ self-representation 132
4.5. Categories of objection raised in relation to witnesses of limited means
compared with all other witnesses who were subject to discussion 136
4.6. Proportions of witnesses under discussion who were condemned or
validated, according to their worth 143
5.1. Distribution of witnesses providing information about how they
maintained themselves, by subset and over time 151
5.2. Proportions of witnesses describing how they lived, by subset, gender,
and source of maintenance 153
5.3. Proportions of all male witnesses with a social/occupational title
described as ‘labourers’ compared with proportions of those witnesses
(male and female) detailing their maintenance who lived by their labour 159
5.4. General sources of maintenance, by status/occupation of witnesses 160
5.5. General sources of maintenance cited by married women, by status/
occupation of the witness’s husband 160
5.6. Proportions of witnesses detailing the source of their maintenance who
lived by their labour or by their own means, by social/occupational
status and subset 162
5.7. Occupations of witnesses living of their own means or by their labour 165
5.8. Proportions of all witnesses detailing the source of their maintenance,
by urban/rural residence 171
5.9. Tasks specified by witnesses living by their labour 174
5.10. Proportions of witnesses describing themselves as poor, by type of
maintenance response 178
5.11. Proportions of age groups declaring different sources of maintenance 179
6.1. Sources of dependence identified by witnesses maintained by others, by
gender and marital status 193
6.2. Sources of dependence identified by witnesses maintained by others, by
age and gender 193
 List of Figures and Tables xv
6.3. Proportions of witnesses detailing credit relations, by social/occupa-
tional title and women’s marital status 200
6.4. Sources of maintenance declared by witnesses below the age of 25 206
6.5. Categories of work specified by women witnesses appearing in London
and elsewhere, by marital status 219
6.6. Titles used to describe singlewomen in the preamble to their deposi-
tions, by subset 222
7.1. Proportions of male and female witnesses who were servants/appren-
tices, by age 237
7.2. Proportions of male witnesses providing more than one observation of
social/occupational status incidentally revealed to be in service 238
7.3. Social/occupational titles claimed by men before and after the age of 25 241
7.4. Multiple/alternative occupations pursued by witnesses deviating from
their occupational titles 250
7.5. Proportions of men claiming general sources of maintenance, over time
and by social/occupational group 263
7.6. Proportions of women claiming general sources of maintenance, by
marital status and over time 263
7.7. Mean and median worth of men from main social/occupational groups,
1625–1649 and 1657–1681 265
7.8. Number of occupational titles in relation to the number of male
witnesses, by residence and over time 269
7.9. Proportions of married women claiming to depend on others, in
London and elsewhere, over time 270
8.1. The changing incidence of categories of witnesses’ responses to the
question of their worth, 1625–1728 281
8.2. The changing incidence of different categories of response, by subset,
before and after the mid-seventeenth century 282
8.3. Proportions of witnesses residing in rural/urban parishes responding
evasively, over time (excluding married women) 283
8.4. Proportions of witnesses residing in urban/rural parishes for whom no
response was recorded, over time 284
8.5. Proportions of witnesses within social/occupational groups deploying
select categories of response, over time 285
 List of Abbreviations
BI Borthwick Institute, York
CCA Canterbury Cathedral Archives
CRO Cheshire Record Office, Chester
CUA Cambridge University Archives
CUL Cambridge University Library
EcHR Economic History Review
EDR Ely Diocesan Records
GL Guildhall Library, London
LMA London Metropolitan Archive
LRO Lancashire Record Office, Preston
OBO Proceedings of the Old Bailey Online
P&P Past & Present
TNA The National Archives, London
TRHS Transactions of the Royal Historical Society
W&SHC Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre, Chippenham
WSRO West Sussex Record Office, Chichester

Place of publication is London unless otherwise stated.

 1
Self and Society in Early Modern England

For let a man (as most men do,) rate themselves at the highest Value they can;
yet their true Value is no more than it is esteemed by others.1

How did ordinary people ‘rate themselves’ in early modern England? What was
the relationship between wealth, occupation, and social identity, for women as
well as for men? And to what extent did social estimation depend on the appraisal
of others? This book approaches these questions by exploring the language of
self-description deployed by a very broad social range of men and women when
they appeared as witnesses in court. In doing so, it offers a view of early modern
English society as envisaged from the bottom up. This was not a static scene. With
the dramatic social polarization that occurred between the mid-sixteenth and later
seventeenth centuries, the calculus of esteem was gradually yet fundamentally
reformulated, involving a shifting relationship between people and their things.
A corrective to top-down, male-centric accounts of the social order penned
by elite observers, the perspective from below testifies to an intricate hierarchy
based on sophisticated forms of social reckoning that were articulated throughout
the social scale. This wide vantage also establishes the central importance of the
appraisal of wealth to the competitive processes whereby people judged their own
and others’ social position. We are used to thinking that landed wealth was the
yardstick of status, but for the majority it was moveable property—the goods and
chattels in people’s possession ranging from livestock to linens, tools to trading
goods, tables to tubs, clothes to cushions. Finally, the view from below bears wit-
ness to the profound impact of widening social inequality from the mid-sixteenth
century: not only was the social hierarchy distorted beyond recognition; the cri­
teria underpinning processes of social estimation were significantly realigned.
In a period of unprecedented and unsurpassed litigiousness, thousands upon
thousands of men and women from across the social scale were called on to produce
testimony in early modern courts. In many settings witness depositions were care-
fully crafted and preserved as part of the formal court record. After witnesses had
been examined on the allegations or counter-allegations in a cause, they often faced
interrogation about themselves. In particular, witnesses in certain courts were asked

1 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tusk (Cambridge, 1991), 63.

2 Accounting for Oneself

to provide an account of their ‘worth’, in terms of the net value of their moveable
property. This book is founded on a data set of several thousand witnesses’ responses
to the question that asked them what they were worth, in goods, having deducted
the value of any debts they owed. Often in conjunction with questions about how
deponents maintained themselves or got a living, such enquiries were part of broader
strategies for testing witness credibility that developed between the mid-sixteenth and
early eighteenth centuries. These questions, and witnesses’ responses to them, provide
access to criteria with which early modern people judged and experienced social dif-
ferentiation, not just in court but in the vibrant social world beyond.
Social identities and social interaction were ordered and given meaning through
the appraisal of what people had. Social estimation was firmly rooted in the assess-
ment of people’s material assets, premissed on expectations that an individual’s
‘worth’ was integral to reputation and assessed and circulated through ‘common
fame’. These accounting processes involved sophisticated forms of numeracy that
drew on a set of qualitative as well as quantitative principles that transcended local
boundaries, and that moderated the tenor of social relations. In this culture of
appraisal, people rated their net moveable wealth and thereby their relative social
position with reference to monetary benchmarks. The sums that they commonly
cited (such as 40s. and £10, £40, and £100) signified not only as units of account
but also as thresholds of credit and of political eligibility and liability.
However, as the redistribution of wealth transformed the social landscape between
the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries, people began to use new measures
to account for themselves. Expectations that relative wealth might be comprehended
and plotted on a single numerical scale receded. Material markers of worth became
more partial, and more likely to involve appraisal of the flow rather than the stock of
goods, thereby forming a less stable foundation for the brokerage of credit. Witnesses
increasingly detailed their working activities rather than the moveable estate in
their possession as the means by which they lived. These changes recast associations
between wealth and identity. Evolving processes of social differentiation did not rep-
resent, however, a simple shift towards a more acquisitive, consumer-driven society.
This was instead a transition towards a differently oriented form of materialism, and
towards novel but not necessarily more sophisticated modes of consumption. People
no longer expected that assets in people’s possession should or could be commonly
known, and they placed more importance on the status-bearing function of goods
rather than on their value as repositories of wealth and the means of exchange. The
character of social relations, as well as the culture of appraisal, was redrawn.

DE S C R I BI N G T H E S O C I A L OR DE R

Our understanding of contemporary concepts of English society has been

heavily influenced by the various schemes of the social order that circulated in
manuscript and print in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.2 A diligent

2 See especially David Cressy, ‘Describing the Social Order of Elizabethan and Stuart England’,
Literature and History, 3 (1976), 29–44; Keith Wrightson, English Society, 1580–1680 (1982), 18–23.
 Self and Society 3

student of early modern English history will almost certainly have encountered
Sir Thomas Smith’s division of ‘the Parts and Persons of the Common Wealth’
into ‘four sorts’ in his account of the English polity devised while on diplo-
matic service in France in the 1560s. Once attributed to William Harrison (but
in fact subsequently elaborated by Harrison having been circulated widely in
manuscript before publication in 1583), Smith’s scheme distinguished between
‘gentlemen, citizens or burgesses, yeomen artificers, and laborers’. Smith went
on to elaborate in great detail the ranks of the nobility and the qualifications
of gentlemen before devoting a briefer discussion to citizens and burgesses and
to yeomen whom he deemed deserving of a comparatively short chapter each
in recognition of their political enfranchisement. Finally, and (in)famously, he
consigned the remainder (who constituted the vast majority of the male popu-
lation) to the ‘fourth sort of men’ of whom ‘no account is made’. Although
he acknowledged variation within this group with reference to ‘day labour-
ers, poore husbandmen, yea marchantes or retailers which have no free lande,
copiholders, all artificers, as Taylers, Shoomakers, Carpenters, Brickemakers,
Bricklayers, Masons, &c’, this level of distinction was derisory compared with
the precision Smith deployed to separate the ranks of the gentry. And, although
he conceded that the fourth sort should ‘be not altogether neglected’ on the
basis of their petty office-holding duties, Smith’s summary statement on the
governance of the commonwealth restricted its ‘maintenance’ even further to
‘three sortes of persons’—the monarch, the gentry, and the ‘yeomanrie’—and
thereby eclipsed the ‘fourth sort’ entirely from view.3
Smith’s passing acknowledgement of the parochial authority exercised by a
sizeable proportion of the male population has provided the foundation for recent
arguments that holding office facilitated widespread popular participation within
a ‘monarchical republic’.4 However, it would be nigh on impossible to breathe
similar life into Smith’s account of the commonwealth as an inclusive vision of
society as a whole. Besides his palpable lack of interest in the social gradations dis-
tinguishing the myriad ranks of the ‘fourth sort of people’, Smith also explicitly
‘rejected’ women from his scheme as ‘those whom nature hath made to keepe
home and to nourish their familie and children’. Smith’s prescription that women
should not ‘medle with matters abroade, nor . . . beare office in a citie of common
wealth’ instead placed them on a par with ‘children and infantes’, except when
dynastic bloodlines trumped their gender.5

3 Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum, ed. Mary Dewar (Cambridge, 1982), 64–77.
4 Patrick Collinson, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, Bulletin of the John Rylands
Library, 69 (1987), 394–424; Patrick Collinson, De Republica Anglorum. Or, History with the Politics
Put Back (Cambridge, 1990); Mark Goldie, ‘The Unacknowledged Republic: Office-Holding in
Early Modern England’, in Tim Harris (ed.), The Politics of the Excluded, c.1500–1850 (Basingstoke,
2001). See also Keith Wrightson, ‘The Politics of the Parish in Early Modern England’, in Paul
Griffiths, Adam Fox, and Steve Hindle (eds), The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England
(Basingstoke, 1996), and Steve Hindle, ‘Hierarchy and Community in the Elizabethan Parish: The
Swallowfield Articles of 1596’, Historical Journal, 42 (1999), 835–51.
5 Smith, De Republica Anglorum, 64.
4 Accounting for Oneself

Of course, Smith’s account was intended to represent not early modern English
society but the polity more partially enmeshed within it. It is nonetheless typi-
cal of the social myopia of contemporary commentators on the social order, who
were mostly drawn from and publishing for the gentry. Sir Thomas Wilson, for
example, was (like Smith) concerned with documenting the political nation, in
this case in terms of the assets on which it might draw, and dwelt disproportion-
ately on the wealth concentrated in the hands of the nobility and gentry carefully
ranked in his description of the ‘ability’ of England in 1600.6 Other commentators
who were more directly interested in sketching the entire social order nonetheless
tended to inscribe a highly conservative vision, such as Edward Chamberlayne,
who as late as 1669 presented a neatly ranked hierarchy to which he attached
diminishing significance the further he descended below the gentry.7 Even if they
were not primarily focused on delineating the social order, such accounts none-
theless represented it as if through the wrong end of the telescope, with dwindling
detail the greater the social distance between the commentator and the groups he
observed.
The limitations of contemporary perceptions of the social order represented
by such ‘literary’ accounts have long been recognized, not least their ‘remark-
able inertia’.8 Keith Wrightson has contributed the most sustained analysis and
critique, arguing that they ‘tell us nothing of how members of the middling and
lower ranks of society may have viewed their social world’. While formal classifi-
catory schemes provide evidence of the complexity of criteria of social estimation,
involving the subtle and often inconsistent interaction of ‘birth, inherited or con-
ferred title, wealth and the nature of that wealth, occupation, mode of land ten-
ure, legal status, lifestyle and tenure of positions of authority’, they do not show
how these (or other criteria) operated to differentiate the lower ranking.9 Similarly,
awareness of the processes of group identification is confined to the gentry, which
prompted Peter Laslett to claim that they alone exercised class-consciousness in
what he dubbed a ‘one-class society’.10 By contrast, Wrightson has argued that
such accounts mask ‘the widespread existence of simpler, cruder, perceptions of
the principal social groups’. He finds evidence of these looser social clusters in the
‘language of sorts’, which first revolved around binary distinctions between the
‘better’ or ‘richer’ sorts and the ‘meaner’, ‘poorer’, or ‘baser’ sorts, before diversify-
ing to accommodate a ‘middling sort’ by the mid-seventeenth century.11

6 Thomas Wilson, The State of England Anno-dom. 1600, ed. F. J. Fisher, Camden Miscellany,
16, 3rd ser., 52 (1936).
7 Edward Chamberlayne, Angliae Notitia: Or, the Present State of England (1669).
8 Keith Wrightson, ‘Estates, Degrees and Sorts: Changing Perceptions of Society in Tudor and
Stuart England’, in Penelope J. Corfield (ed.), Language, History and Class (Oxford, 1991), 32.
9 Keith Wrightson, ‘The Social Order of Early Modern England: Three Approaches’, in Lloyd
Bonfield, Richard Smith, and Keith Wrightson (eds), The World We Have Gained: Histories of
Population and Social Structure (Oxford, 1986), 182, 180.
10 Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost: Further Explored (1965), ch. 2. Cf. R. S. Neale, Class in
English History, 1680–1850 (Oxford, 1981), ch. 3.
11 Wrightson, ‘Social Order’, 183; Wrightson, ‘Estates, Degrees and Sorts’; Keith Wrightson,
‘“Sorts of People” in Tudor and Stuart England’, in Jonathan Barry and Christopher Brooks (eds),
The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England, 1550–1800 (1994).
 Self and Society 5

In his discussion of ‘sorts’ and their implications for our understanding of

incipient class relations, Wrightson offers a dynamic corrective to the more rigid
and apparently unchanging formal schemes of degrees of people, and demon-
strates the extent to which elite observers constructed an increasingly untenable
vision of a unitary social hierarchy. Analysis of the language of sorts has contrib-
uted an important chapter to the history of the ‘longer-term reconstruction of
social identities’ represented by the transition from the functional social ordering
of ‘estates’ to the conceptualization of society in terms of ‘classes’ primarily deter-
mined by economic criteria. As such, it presents a serious challenge to traditional
characterizations of early modern society as a deferential hierarchy, or ‘an ancien
régime sociologique which was to be shattered only with industrialisation’, while
resisting an anachronistic or overly rigid concept of class relations.12 An entirely
deferential model of early modern social relations has become historiographically
unsustainable in the light of recent research on popular political agency as well
as on economic development. Although historians do not entirely agree about
the extent to which people were able to shape the terms (if not the fact) of their
subordination, they nonetheless have opened up broad vistas on forms of popular
resistance and strategies for the negotiation of power through petitions, threats,
and foot-dragging as well as more direct forms of protest.13 In addition, a ‘revolt
of the early modernists’ has hammered yet another nail in the coffin of classic
accounts of industrialization as a seismic shift triggered by technological genius
through emphasizing the extent of pre-industrial growth in north-west Europe,
with implications for changing social relations well in advance of rather than as
a consequence of industrial development.14 This is not to assert an earlier start
date for fully fledged and classically defined class relations, but it is to argue that
the quickening economy created a challenging environment for traditional social
categories. One reason for the significance of the language of sorts is that it attests
to the coexistence of multiple models of society and categories of social relations,
confirming the futility of approaching hierarchy and class as though they are
mutually exclusive categories, neatly characteristic of ‘successive stages of social
development’.15 As part of a broader historiographical trend that has prioritized

12 Wrightson, ‘“Sorts of People”’, 38, 29.

13 See especially Griffiths, Fox, and Hindle (eds), Experience of Authority; Michael J. Braddick and
John Walter (eds), Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination
in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 2001); Harris (ed.), Politics of the Excluded; Andy Wood, ‘Fear,
Hatred and the Hidden Injuries of Class in Early Modern England’, Journal of Social History, 39
(2006), 803–26; Andy Wood, ‘Subordination, Solidarity and the Limits of Popular Agency in a
Yorkshire Valley, c.1596–1615’, P&P, 193 (2006), 41–72.
14 Jan Luiten van Zanden, ‘The “Revolt of the Early Modernists” and the “First Modern
Economy”: An Assessment’, EcHR, 55 (2002), 619–41. See also Jan de Vries, ‘Economic Growth
before and after the Industrial Revolution: A Modest Proposal’, in Maarten Prak (ed.), Early
Modern Capitalism (2001); E. A. Wrigley, ‘The Quest for the Industrial Revolution’, Proceedings of
the British Academy, 121 (2003), 147–70; Jan Luiten van Zanden, The Long Road to the Industrial
Revolution: The European Economy in a Global Perspective, 1000–1800 (2009).
15 Wrightson, ‘Social Order’, 198. See also John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the
English Revolution: The Colchester Plunderers (Cambridge, 1999), 260–84; Andy Wood, ‘Deference,
Paternalism and Popular Memory in Early Modern England’, in Steve Hindle, Alexandra Shepard,
6 Accounting for Oneself

the discursive production of social identities, analysis of the language of sorts

therefore contributes to the rehabilitation of ‘class’ as a useful concept for early
modernists. Far from de-anchoring social identities from the material circum-
stances in which they were experienced, the best work in this vein treats the artic-
ulation of collective identities as part of a dialectic between language and reality
while also acknowledging their fluidity and often temporary coalescence.16
However, while analysis of the language of sorts has provided an important
model of methodological and conceptual sophistication to our understanding of
the processes of differentiation and identification in early modern England, chart-
ing its deployment by contemporaries does not provide a panacea to the inadequa-
cies of representations of the social order as a finely graded hierarchy bound by
ties of patronage. Just as the formal schemes outlined by gentry observers were
shaped by their investment in a chain of deferential social relations (as well as
their own privileges at its apex), the language of sorts was itself the idiom of those
‘composite local ruling group[s]‌’ who ‘identified themselves with authority, sound
religion [and] civility’.17 Expressive of a different set of interests, the language of
sorts provides critical insights into the latent and sometimes explicit social conflict
that remained masked by the representation of society in terms of a hierarchy
of degrees. But the language of sorts still does not represent the way in which
the majority of people may have perceived the society in which they lived nor
their own position within it. Indeed, even among those whose interests were most
clearly articulated by the language of sorts, there is limited evidence of the extent
to which people self-identified with these groups. Henry French’s detailed exami-
nation of the ‘middle sort of people’ found no indication that the men who might
be classed as such actually thought of themselves in these terms. Instead, they
asserted their status in locally bounded terms as the ‘chief inhabitants’ of their
parishes, and, in the case of the wealthiest, through adopting some of the material
trappings of gentility.18 And, even if ‘sorts’ implied greater gender neutrality than
the terms used to describe degrees of people (such as yeomen and husbandmen),
the language of sorts does not provide any resolution to the problem of women’s
conspicuous absence from the vocabulary of social description. While confirming
the ‘developing ambiguity’ of early modern English social relations in tandem
with significant economic and political change, the language of sorts was no more
representative than the formal classificatory schemes devised by the gentry of the
ways in which the majority of people made sense of the social order and their own
place within it.19

and John Walter (eds), Remaking English Society: Social Relations and Social Change in Early Modern
England (Woodbridge, 2013).
16 David Rollison, ‘Discourse and Class Struggle: The Politics of Industry in Early Modern
England’, Social History, 26 (2001), 166–89, p. 167.
17 Wrightson, ‘“Sorts of People”’, 39–40.
18 H. R. French, ‘Social Status, Localism and the “Middle Sort of People” in England, 1620–
1750’, P&P, 166 (2000), 66–99; H. R. French, The Middle Sort of People in Provincial England,
1600–1750 (Oxford, 2007).
19 Wrightson, ‘Social Order’, 201.
 Self and Society 7

How can we address this grand lacuna in the social history of early mod-
ern England? Craig Muldrew has proposed one method for overcoming
these limitations by exploring how middle-ranking people ‘looked at their
own social relations as they were actively negotiating them . . . rather than
how they attempted to make sense of society as an objective or metaphorical
whole’. Muldrew’s examination of the self-positioning of the middling sort
through their deployment of ‘an ethics of social judgement’ led him to con-
clude that to be middling sort was less about belonging to a ‘class’ and more
‘a process of continual achievement’. 20 This confirms Michael Mascuch’s
findings that middle-ranking identity was defensively couched in response
to the threat of downward mobility rather than anchored to particular forms
of social exclusivity or belonging. 21 However, such investigation has been
restricted to the terms of social description deployed by ‘those with the edu-
cation to write’, who were not only socially limited but also in most cases
male. 22 Insomuch as the ‘middle sort of people’ corresponded with the chief
inhabitants of their parishes and were represented by autobiographers, they
apparently omitted women from their ranks.23 Women are marginally more
visible in an approach that similarly ‘build[s]‌up from social relationships
rather than read[s] back from social structure’ pursued by Dave Postles in
his exploration of terms of address. The naming practices traced by Postles
suggest a tripartite division of parochial society between the ‘honorifically
addressed’, those included through recognition of their full names, and those
whose partial representation reflected their limited integration—in contrast
to the dichotomous distinction of ‘chief inhabitants’ from the rest repre-
sented by the language of sorts. 24 However, while more socially inclusive
than the musings of the gentry and middling sort, terms of address recorded
in parish records do not take us any nearer to the forms of self-identification
adopted by the majority. This is a particularly important omission, given the
findings that middling-sort identities were more negatively founded on their
distinction from morally reprehensible ‘others’ (that is, the poorer, meaner,
vulgar, baser sorts) than positively articulated through assertions of belong-
ing to a clearly bounded social group. But how did these ‘others’ respond to
being so positioned?
Building on these various departures both from the formal overviews of the
social hierarchy and from the informal language of sorts, this book proposes

20 Craig Muldrew, ‘Class and Credit: Social Identity, Wealth and the Life Course in Early
Modern England’, in Henry French and Jonathan Barry (eds), Identity and Agency in England,
1500–1800 (Basingstoke, 2004), 148–9.
21 Michael Mascuch, ‘Social Mobility and Middling Identity: The Ethos of British
Autobiographers, 1600–1750’, Social History, 20 (1995), 45–61.
22 Muldrew, ‘Class and Credit’, 149.
23 For an attempt to see beyond the male autobiographers of the middling sort, see Naomi
Tadmor, ‘Where was Mrs Turner? Governance and Gender in an Eighteenth-Century Village’, in
Hindle, Shepard, and Walter (eds), Remaking English Society.
24 Dave Postles, ‘The Politics of Address in Early-Modern England’, Journal of Historical
Sociology, 18 (2005), 99–121, pp. 100, 115.
8 Accounting for Oneself

a more comprehensive means of charting the terms of social description that

shaped social identities and social relations across the early modern period.
Women and men from a broad social spectrum were examined as witnesses,
and (particularly in the church courts) they routinely faced questions designed
to assess their social standing and creditworthiness. In what was arguably the
most litigious age in Western European history, courts deploying procedures in
which witness depositions were preserved bequeathed a remarkably rich archive
that has provided the foundation for much of our understanding of early mod-
ern popular culture and belief.25 Depositions generated by a very wide range of
jurisdictions have informed our understanding of (among other things) sexual-
ity and gender relations, the making and breaking of marriages, the language
of insult, the quality of lay–clerical relations, the conduct of deathbed rituals,
concepts of providence, and the production of social memory.26 Witnesses’ nar-
ration of events in dispute has provided extraordinary insight into the social
and cultural worlds inhabited by people who otherwise left no trace of their
views, not least because the majority of them were unable to write. Like any
source, of course, witness depositions were not an unmediated account of expe-
rience, and historians now routinely approach them as ‘fictive’ scripts serving
particular interests and heavily shaped by the legal processes governing their
construction—which nevertheless provide rich evidence of what was considered
plausible and defensible in a wide range of circumstances, thereby represent-
ing broader mentalities.27 Yet historians’ representation of the statements made
in court as essentially fictive nonetheless both underestimates the value of the
incidental details that attached to their stories, and more significantly leaves
depositions curiously detached from the witnesses who provided them. Just as
no social judgement remains unshaped by the circumstances of its production,
so records of litigation do not provide a straightforward window on early mod-
ern identities. They do, however, provide us with myriad observations of the

25 Pioneering works of especial significance were Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: Cathars
and Catholics in a French Village, 1294–1324 (1978); Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The
Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (1980).
26 See especially Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–1640
(Cambridge, 1987); Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern
London (Oxford, 1996); David Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-
Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford, 1997); Ralph Houlbrooke, Death, Religion and the
Family in England, 1480–1750 (Oxford, 1998); Malcolm Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities in Early
Modern England (Cambridge, 2000); Donald A. Spaeth, The Church in an Age of Danger: Parsons
and Parishioners, 1660–1740 (Cambridge, 2000); Diana O’Hara, Courtship and Constraint:
Rethinking the Making of Marriage in Tudor England (Manchester, 2000); Joanne Bailey, Unquiet
Lives: Marriage and Marriage Breakdown in England, 1660–1800 (Cambridge, 2003); Angela
McShane and Garthine Walker (eds), The Extraordinary and the Everyday in Early Modern
England: Essays in Celebration of the Work of Bernard Capp (Basingstoke, 2010); Andy Wood, The
Memory of the People: Custom and Popular Senses of the Past in Early Modern England (Cambridge,
2013).
27 Hugely influential in this process has been Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon
Tales and their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Oxford, 1987). For a critical response to
such an approach, see Frances E. Dolan, True Relations: Reading, Literature, and Evidence in
Seventeenth-Century England (Philadelphia, 2013).
 Self and Society 9

terms in which a very wide range of people chose to represent themselves when
giving evidence in court.
One of the remarkable things about the litigiousness of the early modern
period is the extent to which it made appearing in court a routine activity.
The rising volume of business in the church courts alone between the fif-
teenth and eighteenth centuries may have involved as many as one in seven
of the adult population as witnesses at its peak.28 In the case of courts gener-
ating a written record of depositions, this has left an enormous body of evi-
dence about the people who traipsed before various scribes to have their say.
In fact, as the volume of business increased from the mid- to late sixteenth
century, so the level of interest in the identities of witnesses grew, result-
ing in more details about who was in court as well as how they rehearsed
the events at issue. 29 While court records did not produce a comprehensive
overview of the early modern English population, as captured, for example,
in parish registers or listings of various kinds, they encompass a significant
range of information about a very large number of people that was broadly
representative of the majority of the population below the level of the gentry.
Despite the absence of the very marginal vagrant population and the very
young (children below the age of 18 were only rarely called to give evidence),
witnesses were emphatically not exclusively drawn from the ‘middle sort of
people’. They included a large proportion of men and women who occupied
the ranks between those who were likely to have left a will or probate inven-
tory, on the one hand, and those who were so poor that they were considered
deserving of formal poor relief, on the other. It is the statements of these
women and men, and what they had to say about themselves and each other,
that provide the focus of this book.

28 Colin R. Chapman, Ecclesiastical Courts, their Officials and their Records (Dursley, 1992),
7. For the rising volume of business heard by the church courts, see Ronald A. Marchant, The
Church under the Law: Justice, Administration and Discipline in the Diocese of York, 1560–1640
(Cambridge, 1969); Ingram, Church Courts; R. H. Helmholz, The Oxford History of the Laws of
England, i: The Canon Law and Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction from 597 to the 1640s (Oxford, 2004),
283–6. For similar trends in other jurisdictions, see C. W. Brooks, Pettyfoggers and Vipers of the
Commonwealth: The ‘Lower Branch’ of the Legal Profession in Early Modern England (Cambridge,
1986); C. W. Brooks, ‘Interpersonal Conflict and Social Tension: Civil Litigation in England,
1640–1830’, in A. L. Beier, David Cannadine, and James M. Rosenheim (eds), The First
Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone (Cambridge, 1989); C. W.
Brooks, Lawyers, Litigation and English Society since 1450 (1998); Craig Muldrew, ‘The Culture
of Reconciliation: Community and the Settlement of Economic Disputes in Early Modern
England’, Historical Journal, 39 (1996), 915–42. See also J. A. Sharpe, ‘“Such Disagreement
Betwyx Neighbours”: Litigation and Human Relations in Early Modern England’, in John Bossy
(ed.), Disputes and Settlements: Law and Human Relations in the West (Cambridge, 1983); Tim
Stretton, ‘Written Obligations, Litigation and Neighbourliness, 1580–1680’, in Hindle, Shepard,
and Walter (eds), Remaking English Society.
29 Such details have informed studies of literacy and migration. See David Cressy, Literacy and
the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge, 1980); Peter Clark,
‘The Migrant in Kentish Towns, 1580–1640’, in Peter Clark and Paul Slack (eds), Crisis and Order
in English Towns, 1500–1700 (1972); Peter Clark and David Souden (eds), Migration and Society in
Early Modern England (1987).
10 Accounting for Oneself

W I T N E S S I N G I DE N T I T Y

What sort of information can we extract from witnesses’ statements about themselves,
and how was it shaped by the legal fora in which it was produced? The credibility
of witnesses was of central importance to those charged with weighing up evidence
in many early modern courts, and therefore to those waging law. Romano-canon
law had a long tradition of complex rules of exclusion and evaluation, which were
simplified in handbooks for legal practitioners in the ecclesiastical courts, and which
also migrated to codes for jurors in criminal trials and ultimately informed general
perceptions of authority in early modern England.30 As Thomas Hobbes observed
in Leviathan, the virtue of a witness was as critical to judgements about reliability
as what the witness had to say—an argument that has underpinned Steven Shapin’s
reassessment of the circumstances surrounding the production of ‘scientific’ know­
ledge in seventeenth-century England, which, he argues, was validated as much
through codes of gentility as through empirical observation.31 In the early modern
courts, a witness’s ‘virtue’ derived from a more subtle set of status distinctions than
those separating gentry and commons, however. Michael Dalton’s manual for jus-
tices of the peace included ‘two old verses’ based on civilian principles, summarizing
the criteria for assessing the probity of witnesses under examination:
Conditio, sexus, aetas, discretio, fama,
Et fortuna, fides, in testibus ista requires.32
However, the direct bearing of such considerations on the ways in which witnesses
presented themselves and were evaluated by others in criminal trials is largely
obscured owing to the convention of oral delivery of evidence to juries rather than
its formal preservation in writing. By contrast, courts adopting civil-law procedure
(the majority of which were church courts), whereby written depositions were pro-
duced as part of the formal court record, allow far greater insight into the proce-
dures as well as principles by which witness credibility was judged. In his description
of church court practice, Henry Conset’s advice on the methods for evaluating
depositions similarly rested on the distinction between the ‘sayings’ and ‘persons’
of witnesses, and accorded considerable significance to their ‘persons’.33 In order to

30 Barbara Shapiro, A Culture of Fact: England, 1550–1720 (Ithaca, NY, 2000), 14–15.
An example of the complexity of Romano-canon law traditions relating to witnesses is
Ioannis Campegii, De testibus, which included 440 rules governing the disqualification of
witnesses: Tractatus Universi Iuris (Venice, 1584), iv, fos 88–125. See also Bernard Schnapper,
‘Testes inhabiles: Les temoins reprochables dans l’ancien droit penal’, Tijdschrift voor
Rechsgeschiedenis, 33 (1965), 575–616; William Hamilton Bryson, ‘Witnesses: A Canonist’s
View’, American Journal of Legal History, 13 (1969), 57–67; Barbara Shapiro, Probability and
Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, 1983), 183–8.
31 Hobbes, Leviathan, 48; Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in
Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago, 1995).
32 ‘Situation, sex, age, discretion, reputation, worth and faith: you will need these things in
witnesses’ (Michael Dalton, The Country Justice Containing the Practice of the Justices of the Peace out
of their Sessions (1635), 297). Dalton added that ‘in case of felony, any man (though of no worth)
may be allowed for a witnesse or proofe’.
33 Henry Conset, The Practice of the Spiritual or Ecclesiastical Courts (1685), 114–15. This tract
drew heavily on the standard work in Latin by Francis Clerke that had long been in circulation in
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