Rethinking Literacy in Rural England, 1550–1700

Abstract

Abstract Historians have long been accustomed to viewing ordinary men and women in the early modern English countryside as illiterate. They are thought to have had neither the opportunity nor the desire to acquire reading and writing skills that were superfluous to their everyday lives. This article challenges such a view. It draws on a sample of signed legal testimonies from the rural south-west of England, and pays particular attention to the different types of mark that deponents made. These marks have conventionally been treated as indicators of illiteracy. In fact, they reveal the existence of a hierarchy of writing skills, and widespread pen competency across social class and gender. This leads to a reassessment of how and why literacy skills might have been obtained by ordinary people. What emerges is that basic forms of literacy — the ability to make meaningful shapes with a pen, and the capacity to decipher individual letters — were both easy to pick up and of considerable utility when navigating the challenges of everyday rural life. The term ‘illiterate’ fails to do justice to this resourceful rural culture. The methodology deployed here could potentially be used to challenge assumptions of illiteracy in other times and places.