IThroughout his prolific writing career, John Taylor made a habit of signing himself 'Io. Ta.', or iota, professing a 'poore plentious want of skill' and complaining that his imperfect education had exiled him from the literary establishment which bestowed status and rewards on poets. Taylor supplemented his earnings from pamphleteering with his wages as a waterman, rowing passengers in a small wherry boat across the Thames from the city to the theatres on the south bank. Despite his extravagant self-appointed title, the King's Majesty's Water Poet, Taylor often wrote about economic hardship, acknowledging that he was perforce a 'mechanicke Waterman by trade' and remarking that poets were even less adequately rewarded than watermen.1 He is nevertheless remembered for his accomplishments as one of the first writers to market and distribute small books by subscription, selling pamphlets directly to readers without the intervention of publishers or distributors. This essay reconsiders Taylor's achievements within the early seventeenth-century literary system, concentrating in particular on his description of writing as a branch of domestic industry whose virtues resided in plainness rather than fineness. Most early modern theorists of poetry privileged ingenium or natural wit, arguing that literary excellence originated first and foremost in the smooth, spontaneous workings of the imagination. Drawing resourcefully from contemporary theories of authorship, including Ben Jonson's, Taylor proposed instead that literary value depended upon the intellectual and physical labour involved in writing. It is argued here that Taylor's innovative exploration of exercitatio, the disciplined practice or exercise of verse-writing, enabled him to contribute in important ways to contemporary debates about literary worth.Born into a humble family, Taylor attended grammar school in Gloucester. John Aubrey writes that he later settled in Southwark and 'bound himselfe to a water-man'.2 John Stow estimated that there were about 3,000 men working in wherry boats on the Thames at the turn of the seventeenth century, and Taylor himself reckoned that 20,000 people were directly or indirectly earning a living from the trade by 1620.3 Taylor served on several expeditions of the Elizabethan navy, sailing on the Earl of Essex's voyage to Cadiz in 1596 and to the Azores in 1597. His appointment in 1605 as bottleman to Sir William Waad, Lieutenant of the Tower, gave him the responsibility of collecting the Lieutenant's perquisite of two bottles of wine from every ship carrying a cargo of wine on the Thames. Taylor held this post for about twelve years, although under successive lieutenants (Sir Gervase Helwys and Sir George More) he was obliged to pay an annual fee for the privilege.4 In 1613, Taylor was appointed one of the King's Watermen, a group of around forty men employed by the court for ceremonial occasions. Later, he became a spokesman for the Watermen's Company where he vociferously criticised the 'hired hackney-hell carts' which were drawing trade away from the Thames.5Many appraisals of Taylor's verse have been coloured by the class slur which has characteristically accompanied his name. In 1898 Gordon Goodwin noted Taylor's 'boisterous insolence', describing him as a 'literary bargee' and commenting that 'as literature his books - many of them coarse and brutal - are contemptible'. More than a hundred years later Warren Wooden observed Taylor's 'vigour' and 'bluntness', concluding that 'perhaps the weakest claim of these books on our attention is their literary value'.6 While Taylor himself often acknowledged that his work was not literary enough, these later remarks are perhaps informed by Jonson's famously withering assessment of Taylor in Timber, or Discoveries:if it were put to the question of the Water-rimers workes, against Spencers; I doubt not, but they would find more Suffrages; because the most favour common vices, out of a Prerogative the vulgar have, to lose their judgements, and like that which is naught. …