introduction from middle-class writing in late medieval london

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INTRODUCTION: PIRATES AND PENS

If a historian wished to list reasons for the growth of writing skills in England at

the end of the Middle Ages, piracy would likely not be rated very highly. But con-

sider: when two galleys laden with mercantile goods sailed from Zeeland towards

London in early May of 1478, they were waylaid in the English Channel by priva-

teers allied with the Hanse. Although unwelcome, the attack would have come as

no surprise. Th e Libelle of Englyshe Polyce, a clunky but fascinating poem from a

few years earlier, complains testily about Bretons and other coastal riff -raff :

… of thys Bretyns, who so trewth leveth,

Are the gretteste rovers and the gretteste thevys

Th at have bene in the see many a yere;

And that oure merchautes have bowght alle to dere.1 (ll. 158–61)

Understanding his situation only too well, the highly practical captain of one

merchant vessel quickly lightened the ship by tossing much of his merchandise

overboard and, like Brave Sir Robin, ‘bravely ran away’. Th e second captain, skip-

pering a Florentine vessel bearing the fl ags and insignia of the duke of Burgundy,

allowed his ship to be captured fully laden and then be escorted back to Bur-

gundian territory. His colleague, anchoring at Southampton while leaving its

remaining cargo on board, quickly notifi ed the London home offi ce about his

adventure and about arriving in the harbour of a ‘foreign’ port. Th en he awaited

instructions from the home offi ce. Th e Merchant Adventurers of London

received news of this misfortune, and, in a spate of hurried meetings of its ‘court’

or board of directors, they received, wrote, or caused to be written, at minimum,

the following documents:

1. A letter from the shipping agent Gherardo Canigiani (called here ‘Gerard

Canysian’)2 carried by his servant Victor to Th omas Portenare at Bruges ask-

ing Th omas to represent them in the case with the duke.

2. A second letter to English merchants at Bruges carried by a servant of a

London merchant asking them to assist in discovering the condition of the

pirated goods and to send an inventory of what was taken.

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2 Middle-Class Writing in Late Medieval London

3. A letter from John Lok in Southampton announcing the arrival of the

escaped vessel.

4. A letter from the Wardens of the Merchant Adventurers to the Mercers of

Southampton explaining that the escaped vessel, which was contracted to

deliver the goods only in London, will not deliver the goods in Southamp-

ton without the permission of the London merchants’ court, and that the

court will meet at 6 am to discuss the matter. Th is letter also implies other

now-lost letters between the London merchants, Canigiani and the owner

of the goods in the Netherlands.

5. A letter from the merchants’ court to be delivered to the merchants of

Southampton authorizing on the basis of their early morning meeting the

delivery of the goods there.

6. Another letter to the ‘patron’ of the goods from Canigiani explaining why

the goods were delivered to Southampton.

7. An inventory of the ship’s cargo made at Southampton by two London

merchants sent there for this purpose, along with an estimate of the cost of

goods taken in the other ship.

8. A letter from Th omas Portener to Canigiani reporting that the captured

ship had appeared in Zeeland, in the duke of Burgundy’s territory, and

requesting that the king appeal to the duke.

9. A letter from the king and various supporting documents from the London

merchants about the captured ship delivered to the duke by the Guyon King

of Arms, the king’s herald.

10. A long letter to the English merchants in Bruges asking them to give any

further information to the herald and emphasizing that the two ships and/

or cargo were Burgundian-owned and hence should be under the protection

of the duke, and copies of the king’s letter ‘in englisshe that the Kyng hath

sent written in frenche to the duke’.

11. A summary of the king’s letter written for the Merchant Adventurers’

records.

As is evident from this wearying list, once we look past the archaic aura of piracy

on the high seas, we would fi nd the response to this incident resembles that of

a twenty-fi rst century multinational company whose shipping had been inter-

cepted by vessels of a generally friendly third-world regime which can’t control

its bad guys. Lots of go-betweens and factors were immediately contacted and –

more to the point here – a great deal of paperwork was generated and preserved

for offi cial purposes in the company’s records, where it remains to this day.3

Th is is a book about why and when the English middle classes took up writ-

ing. Or, more precisely, it is about the relationship of the English middle classes

to pragmatic, non-literary writing such as the documents just mentioned, mainly

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Introduction 3

in London, during the period roughly from 1275 to 1520;4 its overarching argu-

ment is that over this period middle-class citizens were increasingly immersed in a

culture of written documents,5 so that the actual point when merchants and craft s-

men began writing with their own pens (mainly aft er c. 1420) is less important

than is their pre-existing familiarity with the culture of writing. Chronologically

the book begins at the end of the thirteenth century when Arnold Fitz Th edmar

created the fi rst London custumal, or offi cial city-owned compendia of local rules,

franchises, charters and history,6 and with the Statutes of Acton Burnell (1283)

and of Merchant (1285), which in eff ect mandated that business debts could be

recorded in the city records.7 When I began this book I intended it to focus on

the fi ft eenth century, the century when scholars agree acceptance of vernacular

writing led to the outburst of document creation manifested in the documents in

Chambers and Daunt’s Book of London English and in the Paston and Cely letters.8

Aft er a time it occurred to me that it was unlikely, even absurd, that merchants,

guildsmen and even women would, within a generation, decide that learning to

write was a good thing, acquire the skills needed to write in one’s own hand, and

in general become what we mean today when we say someone is ‘literate’. Th e

evidence suggested that a period of about a century and a half of ingesting how to

value, understand, utilize and (fi nally) read those documents was fi rst necessary

before actual writing seemed like a logical step to them. Th at is, before attempting

to write themselves, ironmongers or goldsmiths took several generations watch-

ing ‘clerks’ write, enrol, preserve and search documents such as letters of credit,

bills of exchange, recognizances, guild ordinances and semi-private letters. At fi rst,

perhaps, they heard their deeds read aloud at the Court of Husting and their guild

ordinances read several times annually at their guild meetings. Th en perhaps their

sons picked up some reading skills in English and even French, learned to sign

their names, and participated fully in the creation of guild ordinances, petitions

to the city government, etc. As discussed in the next chapter, guild ordinances

sometimes required that apprentices be taught literacy skills, and in the Ironmon-

gers and Goldsmiths guilds, for example, apprentices were required to write their

presentments in their own hands.9

Whatever the process, by the early fourteenth century at least merchants

and artisans were fully aware that their livelihood was heavily dependent on the

effi cacy of written documents (especially about credit and debt), and that they

risked ruin if they were unable to recover a recognizance from the Guildhall Let-

ter Books. Some, like the ironmonger Gilbert Maghfi eld, didn’t wait for the ‘rise

of the vernacular’ to keep their own records,10 and others went further, like the

anonymous fi shmonger who commissioned a nicely craft ed book of London

customs and offi cial documents in Latin and French, complete with a chronicle

bringing English history down to about 1395.11 Th us, while people were not fully

literate in the modern sense of ‘reading and writing fl uently’, they were highly

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involved in a culture of pervasive literate practices. An analogy would be the

era before and aft er the full development of the printing press. Th e tremendous

success in the 1980s of Elizabeth Eisenstein’s Th e Printing Press as an Agent of

Change, itself infl uenced by the earlier ideas of Eric Havelock and Walter Ong,

had scholars speculating wildly about the ‘print revolution’ and ‘print culture’

and their eff ect on intellectual and social history, even on the human mind.12

Cooler heads eventually pointed out that, while print unquestionably had large

eff ects on the circulation of ideas and general ability to read, the need for the

printing press was the result of an existing western European culture of reading

fl owering well before the printing press was commercialized.13 Still, stereotypes

of a bitter late medieval battle between orality and literacy persist in scholar-

ship. As recently as 2005 an otherwise excellent study on letter-writing began

with the author’s foundational assumptions: ‘fi rst, that during the early modern

period, England was making its transition from an oral culture to a culture of the

written word’, and second, that early modern Europe tended to valorize speech

and face-to-face interaction as a more reliable, trustworthy and authentic mode

of communication compared to written or printed modes.14 Th e evidence gath-

ered in this book challenges both these common assumptions. Both come out

of blinkered academic vision as wishful as William Morris’s view of medieval

London as ‘small and white and clean’. People began writing their own texts in

the 1500s because a strong culture of literate practices had been developing for

nearly two centuries. What follows here shows the creation of an English civic

‘documentary culture’ going back to at least the 1270s, nearly a century and a

half before the merchants began scribbling their own messages, or at least read-

ing and editing the ones they dictated.15 Since, as Sheila Lindenbaum observed,

the citizens’ ‘specifi c literate practices have yet to be chronicled’, explaining how

and why this happened is the purpose of this book.16

Th us the scrambling by the Merchant Adventurers to settle a diffi cult legal

and political problem peacefully by generating dozens of documents was merely

business as usual. London at that time had been a ‘city of writing’ for at least

200 years. Consider the writing done in the modern London metropolitan area

during Chaucer’s boyhood just by ‘foreigners’, people who were residents but

technically not citizens: a huge royal apparatus for producing documents and

preserving records, while centred at Westminster, found its many clerks were

housed just outside the city walls in Farringdon, home of the royal Chancery

and Privy Seal offi ces. Some of the lower-ranking clerks moonlighted as writing

clerks for Londoners, helping them draw up legal and fi nancial documents and

possibly even the vernacular chronicles.17 Th e vast Exchequer bureaucracy and

the smaller government offi ces all consumed and disgorged abundant amounts

of documents daily, Sunday included.18 External to the royal administration but

with its members domiciled in the same wards, the Inns of Court and (later) of

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Introduction 5

Chancery were home to numerous attorneys and law students and their clerks

whose business was writing. Th en there was the church, that almost limitless

multinational enterprise whose writing centre was the papal chancery in Rome

and locally was centred at Lambeth Palace, residence of the Archbishop of

Canterbury and his army of writing clerks.19 Churches, chantries, chapels and

other religious institutions were practically on every London street, all keeping

records and sometimes serving as schools. Non-English merchants, especially

the Italians, were kept informed by formal corporate postal systems, as were

diplomats and religious orders.20 Th e city and its suburbs were the residence of

many other clerks who wrote business documents, petitions, private letters and

the like. Among the freemen of the city, professional scribes had two guilds, one

of which created literary manuscripts (the textwriters) and one that did nothing

but write down other people’s business for them (writers of ‘the court letter’).

Th ese professional writers kept the guild records, some of which were more

extensive than those of smaller English cities: in 1609 the Merchant Taylors, for

example, had nine volumes of court minutes going back to 1299.21 One might

also mention in passing a ‘foreigner’ who did some writing in the city without

apparently ever becoming one of its freemen, one Geoff rey Chaucer, not to men-

tion his later colleague, William Shakespeare.22 And, moving back to the topic

at hand, aft er the 1270s the London city administration, invariably styled ‘the

mayor and aldermen’, employed an offi ce full of clerks and fostered a growth in

records-maintenance and documentation parallel to if more modest than that of

the royal administration.23

While it is true that, beyond the clerical and legal/administrative profes-

sions,24 the technology of writing was too off -putting and the need to inscribe

was found not particularly compelling, merchants and artisans quickly became

skilled at ‘using’ writing as early as the thirteenth century. (‘Using’ writing begins

with the overwhelming cultural cache and omnipresence of religious texts,

of course, and the halo given to the written word by religion cannot be over-

looked in the psychology of the textualizing of middle-class life.25) Let us take

a fi ctional example of the centrality of writing using that crucial middle-class

institution, apprenticeship: a young lad we’ll call Jankyn Revelour, brother of

Chaucer’s slacker apprentice Perkin in the incomplete Cook’s Tale, is taken on

as an apprentice tallow-chandler in 1322, fresh from small-town Norfolk. He

brings with him a written testimonial of good character showing, among other

things, that he is not a run-away provincial apprentice who has stolen a previ-

ous master’s possessions, or even the master’s wife.26 Upon reaching an accord to

begin his service, Jankyn and his master must immediately trudge to Guildhall

to have Jankyn’s apprenticeship entered into the offi cial city records, mandatory

since 1274–527 (where the records still exist, possibly in multiple copies), and it

is likely that it would also have been entered on some craft guild records as well

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(although these have since disappeared). He was thus, as the Weavers’ ordinances

say, an ‘apprentice rolled in the Guylde halle of London [and] in oure Courte by

the vertue of our Chartre’.28 Jankyn’s apprenticeship offi cially begins only at the

moment the document is enrolled. He and his master swear oaths on the city

and later guild books to uphold their mutual responsibilities. Th ough neither

master nor apprentice can read very much (especially the French in which the

apprenticeship document is written), they see the documents, perhaps sign them

and, aft er taking their oath, kiss the books of governance of the city and later

of the guild. Jankyn is reminded of religious ceremonies back home in Norfolk

and is deeply impressed. Th e master has been through this many times and it is

simply business as usual, carried out among city offi cials he knows of old, and

he’s eager to get back to his shop. However, he knows that if he fails to record

the apprenticeship, Janykn can later petition the city to get out of it.29 Jankyn

also knows that rebellion against his master (in the manner of his brother Per-

kin) can land him in the mayor’s court, where he may well be chastised, like the

female apprentice Elizabeth Peynton who had to admit publically that her com-

plaints against her master were false and ‘on her bended knees and with raised

hands humbly begged the pardon of the said John for the off enses wicked perpe-

trated against him’.30 Th e master has recorded a promise in writing that Jankyn

will be taught how to read, a common feature of guild regulations, and over the

next few years he might make some fi tful eff ort in this direction. Seven years of

apprenticeship pass. A proclamation in English posted near St Paul’s reminds the

master that the city intends to enforce its rules about apprenticeship paperwork.

Jankyn and his master return to Guildhall. Jankyn, a good boy, has fi nished his

apprenticeship and now is to be set ‘free’. At this moment the documents, oaths,

etc. are of even more importance, because ‘free’ means having the freedom of the

city, being a London citizen. Th is makes Jankyn part of only about 7.5 per cent

of the inhabitants of the city, and citizenship gives him a huge economic advan-

tage in his chosen trade of tallow-chandler.31 As his career progresses, he or his

servants will deliver many documents to Guildhall, most written out by a scrive-

ner or guild clerk. He will enrol his own apprentices; he will record his major

credits and debts; he and his wife will record deeds and property transactions at

the Court of Husting; he will record his debts and recognizances at Guildhall;

he will petition the mayor and aldermen against non-citizen tallow-chandlers

who are encroaching on his business; he will petition them again because in

Southampton he has been charged customs from which his London citizenship

exempts him; he will get a writ of safe conduct from the city to travel for business

reasons to Picardy; he will help his guild draft a petition – completed and trans-

lated into French by a scrivener – to the city to recognize his guild and another

petition to the king asking him to incorporate his guild into a city company;

he will correspond with shipping agents like Gherardo Canigiani about goods

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Introduction 7

needed for his business and seek redress for goods stolen by pirates, a common

enough occurrence; there is a good chance he would be one of the approximately

25 per cent of free citizens who become members of the city government during

his lifetime and will deal directly with petitions, etc.;32 he will have a member of

the Mistery of Writers of the Court Letter draw up and witness his will and enrol

it at the Court of Husting, hoping that his widow will not later have to go to the

same scrivener to write a petition to the city to settle his bequests. And yet, we

were told for generations that this man is an ‘illiterate’.33

Th is book has three main stories of narrative threads. Most obviously, I

trace the complex, thoroughly un-modern relationship of writing to the needs

of the proto-capitalist culture of middle-class London (mainly). Since Michael

Clanchy’s seminal From Memory to Written Record demonstrated in the late

1970s the sudden increase in records-maintenance demanded and retained by

the royal administration beginning at the end of the twelft h century, others have

looked at the protective reaction by London and other English cities to the royal

initiatives, chiefl y by expanding their own town clerk units.34 In the 1980s stud-

ies of fourteenth-century English urban history sometimes took a ‘linguistic

turn’ and interpreted or implied that much political history could be seen as the

site of a hundred-year ‘document war’ for control of civic and royal documents;

the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 and the bitter civic strife in London were seen as

being the most visible outbreaks, with the accession of the Lancastrians and the

subsequent castration of literary and religious texts caused by fear of the hereti-

cal associations of the vernacular bringing an end to the worst of the struggle.35

Th is version of events, told with greatest force by scholars in literary studies, has

placed the growth of written documents at the forefront of a scholarly industry,

a salutary change. However, I believe this emphasis has simultaneously tended

to occlude a more complex relationship between town-dwellers and their

documents that ran just beneath the surface drama of Wat Tyler and John of

Northampton. Sheila Lindenbaum notes accurately that Londoners ‘would be

familiar with religious tracts and sermons read aloud in the household, the civic

regulations recited at wardmotes, all manner of legal documents concerning

property-holding and trade, royal proclamations and wills’.36 So although certain

groups were undoubtedly outraged at the abuses made possible by certain docu-

ments, generally the populace recognized increasingly the utility of the written

word. As Rosamund McKitterick notes, ‘Th e functions of literacy need … to be

established in relation to a particular society’s needs. As those needs change, so

do the particular contexts in which literate modes are required.’37 Unfortunately,

with the important exception of religious and literary texts, we have only a very

general idea of what documents these people needed. Consequently, one of the

purposes of this book is to examine the major genres of civic writing and deter-

mine how each fi ts into the shift ing and overlapping genre systems the middle

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classes used to negotiate daily life, systems that overall were recognized as keys to

the economic well-being of most citizens.

A second part of the story here is the process of how, mainly in the fi ft eenth

century, writing skills, in the modern sense, were transferred from the older cleri-

cal and legal classes to private citizens.38 Th is transferral was aided immensely by

the selective acceptance of vernacular writing by the Lancastrian royal admin-

istration. It would thus be satisfying to tell this story as another inspiring part

of the ‘triumph of English’ so popular in some quarters.39 Unfortunately, the

triumphalist story is as messy as most medieval social processes when applied

to writing. Although the evidence for this transferral of writing skills is abun-

dant, it also defi es a clear story line once we get into specifi cs. Merchants and

artisans did not simply cast off their Latin and Anglo-Norman linguistic past

and proudly start keeping their own vernacular records and writing their own

vernacular letters aft er the 1420s. For one thing, private citizens, guilds and cities

used professional secretaries and scriveners to varying degrees until well past the

end of this history (most of the voluminous Paston correspondence was written

down by various scribes, for example). More tellingly, civic and guild organiza-

tions likewise clung at least in part to French records-maintenance. As we shall

see, the London city government maintained the preponderance of its records in

French, and even used mainly Latin for its Journals, purely internal documents,

up until the late fi ft eenth century.40 Guilds indeed started keeping their records

in English aft er 1418 or so, but as in the case of the London Grocers they oft en

kept their fi nancial accounts in French and their guild book sections captioned

in Latin for many years aft erwards.41 Th e London Brewers’ Guild clerk William

Porland (or Porlond) entered the oft -cited declaration that the guild would keep

records henceforth in English, but he entered it in Latin. Porland long continued

using the three major languages in his records, ‘apparently indiscriminately’.42 So

while the long-term story of increasing direct participation in writing and the

‘triumph of English’ still holds, the story also has many digressions, dead ends

and qualifi cations.

Lastly, the book suggests that individuals learn to write by being drawn into a

system of interlocking written rhetorical genres, genres that they must be able to

use to conduct their daily lives. Here the genre story is in some senses one of lib-

eration, in oversimplifi ed terms showing the citizenry acquiring mastery over one

civic genre aft er another and moving from the world of bourgeois silence towards

the world of Stowe and Holinshed and Camden. It was a world where a vernacu-

lar chronicle manuscript creator could urge its owner to make his own corrections

and that ‘whosoever owns this book may write it out in the hinder end of this

book or in the forth end when he getteth a true copy’.43 In other senses it might be

interpreted as the story of top-down oppression, since an overriding rhetoric of

tradition and permanence demanded by the rulers of the city characterizes even

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Introduction 9

the most chaotic periods of civic unrest.44 Th e presence of guilds and elections in

no way meant that London was an early kind of bourgeois republic. Although it

was the site of incessant strife among economic and social groups at all levels and

in some ways resembled a kind of Italian city-state without the Borgias, Viscon-

tis and the glory and destruction those cities created, London social conditions

never created the level of bourgeois linguistic competence that led to the ricordi

and libri di famiglia of Italian merchants.45 But although this is not quite the suc-

cess story of writing-saturated bourgeois Florence or Bologna during about the

same period, it is likewise not just the story of a drab transitional period in the

history of English writing, dominated by dull late medieval businessmen with

‘no high purpose, no faith in man, no sincerity’, and motivated only by ‘narrow

bourgeois greed’.46 Rather it is an important chapter in the study of why and how

people learn to write, and what rhetoric and genre have to do with this process.

Terms, Defi nitions, Qualifi cations

Th is sections clarifi es the ways the problematic terms ‘literacy’ and ‘middle class’

are used here, and also discusses why literary and religious texts – oft en the focus

of similar studies of the period – play such a minimal role.

Few scholars approach the term ‘literacy’ without hesitation, especially those

who specialize in the area. Even sidestepping the many nasty debates in modern

western society about what constitutes ‘literacy’ for products of our educational

systems, the term is equally perplexing in Medieval Studies. Th e arguments noted

above by Jack Goody in the 1960s and Walter Ong and Elizabeth Eisenstein in the

1980s on the psychological and cultural eff ects of literacy and printing initiated

passionate debates on the relative eff ects of orality and literacy. Th ese debates are

only now beginning to run out of steam so that the more extravagant claims can

be laid aside.47 Until the mid-twentieth century or later the common assumption

was that nearly everyone in the later Middle Ages was an uncouth oaf, unable to

read or even sign his or her name.48 Clanchy’s From Memory to Written Record,

which appeared in its fi rst edition in 1979, did much to clarify if not simplify the

question of what constitutes medieval literacy.49 Clanchy taught us, for example,

the relative uselessness of the medieval term illiteratus, which refers only to the

inability to read Latin, and he suggested the many gradients of how medieval

people could comprehend and use the written word even without being able to

read adequately by modern standards or to write at all (or, conversely, how some

could write but not read). Clanchy likewise suggested brilliantly that the abil-

ity to hear and comprehend was a critical form of literacy in an age when most

written documents were intended to be read aloud. Subsequent scholarship has

shown the time- and place-specifi city of virtually all the key terms associated

with reading and writing. As a case particularly perplexing to modern concepts

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of literacy we might point to the London Skinner John Claydon, who died hor-

ribly as a heretic in 1410. Claydon had Wycliffi te vernacular writings well-bound

and maintained in his home in St Martin’s Lane, where he had the books read to

him by his servant John Fuller and where he discussed them with his friends. At

his trial he admitted agreement with texts that he proudly owned but had never

read and then he died for them.50

Although the term ‘literacy’ has become such a quagmire, continental

scholars have coined terms that more precisely describe which aspects of read-

ing and writing are under examination. Th erefore this book may be called an

examination of what contemporary German scholars call Verschrift ung or ‘the

development of the writing down of texts’.51 European research in the last quar-

ter of the twentieth century validated Clanchy’s implied warnings about the

danger of holding too many untested assumptions about what communicative

strategies medieval people found eff ective.52 Unlike speaking, writing is not an

innate human skill: it must be learned over an extended time. An entire aca-

demic fi eld (Composition Studies) has grown up in the United States studying

primarily how to teach eff ective writing to university students who have already

been drilled in writing skills for at least a dozen years. One fi nding in this fi eld

is that, not surprisingly, people learn to write when they fi nd they need writing

skills to advance in life. (Most US graduates discover they need writing skills

on the job, long aft er they’ve slept through their Composition courses, unfor-

tunately.) Perhaps infl uenced by the experience of African slaves in the New

World, anglophone scholars tend to project backwards the idea that medieval

people, especially women, yearned to free themselves from Dark Age ignorance

by learning to read and write fl uently. Unlike the African slaves, who lived in a

world where literacy was patently liberating in every way, most medieval people

found the act of personal writing wholly unnecessary for daily functioning.53

It is, however, equally clear that aft er about 1250 they found it necessary fi rst

that someone keep careful written records and second that they know how to use

other people’s writing eff ectively, as the fi ctitious case of Jankyn Revelour sug-

gested. As a result, written texts were almost as familiar to fourteenth-century

Londoners as cats, and I will tread as lightly as a cat around the term ‘literacy’

and other loaded terms relating to reading and writing skills.

Second, the term ‘middle class’ causes almost as much nail-biting among

scholars as ‘literacy’. Traditional ‘Th ree Estates’ divisions have long been useless;

the formula ‘men who fi ght, men who pray, and men who work’ has no space

for ‘men who sell pies’, or for women either. Janet Coleman, in her well received

study English Literature and History, 1350–1400 cautiously puts quotation

marks around all uses of the term, suggesting both the term’s elusiveness and the

diffi culty of fi nding one more precise.54 Another eminent scholar, Christopher

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Introduction 11

Dyer, argues fl atly that no medieval middle class existed, and prefers ‘townspeo-

ple’, a term with its own problems.55

People between the ranks of labourers and the gentry were in practice split in

many varied ways depending on the economic foundations existing in individual

towns. S. H. Rigby, who gives the most lucid description of town classes based

in economics, says simply: ‘Th ere were three main economic classes within the

medieval English town: the merchants, the master craft smen, and the journey-

men and laborers.’56 Between the merchant and craft smen groups – the middle

class – there was constant confl ict, especially in London, and London history

is oft en written as a protracted war between the retailers and the wholesalers.57

(Chaucer is again an untrustworthy economic historian, for the guildsmen and

their wives he mocks come from the artisan rather than the merchant class into

which the poet was born: haberdashers, weavers, carpenters, dyers and tapicers.)

And to complicate matters, some artisan groups would side with the merchants

at times. Chaucer’s London, the London of much of this book, also had a num-

ber of free women in trade, usually hucksters, traders in food, drink and clothing

– half the femmes sole in fi ft eenth-century London.58 ‘Middle class’ could include

those trying to get into the middle class as apprentices; it could certainly include

who were legally non-citizens of the town although active in business; it could

include benefi ced and unbenefi ced chancery clerks and others who dealt in

money-lending and property transactions; it could include well connected for-

eign merchant factors such as Canigiani; it could include lower gentry like some

of the Paston men, who were engaged in business and wrote business letters and

documents like an ordinary wool merchant.

‘Middle class’ is a term frustratingly restricted by time and geography.59 Like

today, what was considered middle class in medieval times varied widely from

place to place. Chaucer’s Miller, for example, is economically in the middle class

of his small town, but Chaucer’s description of him with stereotypical peasant

features betrays the London poet’s low estimation of what passed for middle

class once outside London’s city walls, mainly hayseeds who know only

With whom ’tis counted Learning but to know

Th e price of Runts, how Sheepe and Cattell goe.60

In terms of writing, despite sharing common systems of written genres, the pro-

vincial middle classes left document collections that show signifi cantly diff erent

interests than those in London. Th e commonplace book of a reeve from Acle, for

example, contains the same mix of legal and business formula documents, verse,

and useful local facts as its counterparts in the ‘London collections’,61 but its

respect for feudal ceremonies, lack of interest in ‘courtesy’ texts or guild material,

and its distinctly down-market literary tastes led its modern editor to comment

that ‘there are no indications of what we would call a middle-class consciousness

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in the MS at all … It would thus appear that the rural middle class may have been

of a kind vastly diff erent from that in the city.’62

Nevertheless, for purposes of this book I use ‘middle class’ to mean, most of

the time, ‘merchants and artisans’. In terms of the history of writing during this

period the merchants, with their complicated credit arrangements and interna-

tional offi ces, played a much larger role, but all groups left evidence of writing

activities.

While ‘literacy’ and ‘middle class’ are contested terms that the reader will

fi nd me also struggling with throughout, one subject I do not agonize over is

literary history. Th e book does not deal signifi cantly with questions of literary

taste or with the belletristic value of the relatively few literary and religious texts

that fall under the general subject here. Th is neglect is not to slight the value of

literature in transmitting or refl ecting cultural values, middle class or otherwise.

Numerous contradictory arguments have been put forth by eminent schol-

ars such as Paul Strohm, Seth Lerer and Ralph Hanna, Jr, about middle-class

literary taste in the fourteenth and fi ft eenth centuries. (Th e view of earlier twen-

tieth- century criticism was bracingly easy to understand – fourteenth-century

literature was good, fi ft eenth-century defi nitely bad, Malory and some Scots

excepted.63) Scholars agree, on the other hand, that the fi ft eenth century saw a

marked increase in the number of middle-class English literary readers and, to

a lesser extent, English middle-class writers. Besides vernacular chronicle writ-

ers such as the author(s) of ‘Gregory’s Chronicle’ (discussed below), the middle

class produced literary writers such as Th omas Hoccleve, a Privy Seal clerk and

hence a professional of sorts, but also ‘citizen-writers’ such as John Page, author

of Th e Siege of Rouen, which ended up in a number of citizens’ commonplace

books, or the skinner Henry Lovelich, who doggedly translated well over 50,000

lines of French romance poetry in his unloved Merlin and Holy Grail.64 Concur-

rently, the manuscript book trade increased hugely all over England during the

fi ft eenth century, and the process produced businessmen/booklovers/compilers

such as the erratic John Shirley and enabled merchants like the early Tudor gro-

cer Richard Hill to create their personal compendia or anthologies, either by

copying texts or assembling them from pre-written booklets.65 Perhaps most of

all, the many Lollard texts discussed in the important work of Anne Hudson

and others are undoubtedly the work of people of the middling sort, although

the writers seem to have been preachers or university graduates rather than cord-

wainers scribbling in their off -hours.66 Still, literary and religious texts are not

emphasized here. I confess to being suspicious of the long-standing tradition of

confl ating literary with sociolinguistic history, or treating the history of rhetoric

and language as primarily an auxiliary of literary studies.67

Perhaps over-compensating for the assumption that imaginative literature is

the measure of all things, I work from the assumption that the key documents

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Introduction 13

in the development of middle-class writing are at the opposite end of the writ-

ing spectrum from literature or theology. (Th is approach is discussed at more

length in the next section, ‘Methodology’.) My crudely Marxist assumption is

that people, as a general practice, acquired writing skills mainly to further their

own economic interests. Th e document genres most critical to the development

of writing skills are not necessarily those that are of most interest to modern

scholars and certainly not to readers of imaginative literature. However, we must

not ‘mistake the routine for the trivial’.68 In 1662, William Prynne described the

kind of material most useful for this kind of history when he told in a lecture

how he had turned over ‘many hundred thousands of writts, petitions, and other

records cast aside as useless and buried altogether in a confused heap for many

yeares past in a darke corner of Caesar’s Chapell in the White Tower of London

under cobwebs, dust and rubbish’.69 Th is ‘confused heap’ is exactly where the

history of writing lies, generally speaking. Why else would fourteenth-century

Oxford students skip Logic lectures and sneak over to the nearby business writ-

ing school of Th omas Sampson to learn how to draw up conveyances?70 Th e

medieval merchant revered the chronicle and the guild charter, which he care-

fully preserved and even annotated, but, like us, he discarded his accounts and

business letters aft er a safe interval. Yet when the merchant and his peers fi rst

picked up their pens in the fi ft eenth century to try their hand at writing, it was

not the chronicle but the business letter and credit contract that they struggled

through as their initial assignment in Writing 101.

Finally, the book focuses on London mainly because it is the best-documented

city in the British Isles, and because other English cities appear on evidence from

their less-abundant records to have followed analogous – but not exact – patterns

of development. Forty years aft er publishing her classic Th e Merchant Class of

Medieval London, Sylvia Th rupp complained that her readers had misread her by

assuming that ‘the eff ects of any change in London life as being nationwide’,71 and

I fear this volume will have the same fate. I do not wish to imply that other cities

dutifully followed London’s lead or that London was always the innovator. To

take an important example, London’s custumals begin about 1274, Exeter’s brief

early custumal may have been complied a half century earlier,72 and later non-

London custumals suggest that they could be fourteenth- or fi ft eenth-century

compilations based on even earlier collections. It is true that other English cities

such as Bristol followed the textual examples of the richest city in the kingdom,73

but it is also true that many of the trends in documentation were either already in

place at home or were developed independently before 1300. So although hard

evidence outside London oft en consists only of a relatively late custumal and a

few scattered records, this does not mean that other cities were necessarily poor

record-keepers. Nevertheless, all cities were in the same web of documentary

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genre systems and there are no signifi cant regional variations. A charter, petition

or letter of credit was generically the same everywhere.

Methodology

In this book I apply an eclectic methodology based on genre theory and rhe-

torical analysis, assisted to a degree by sociolinguistics. All of these disciplines

I see as interrelated and overlapping, especially in historical language studies.

Th e book thus diff ers from earlier Verschrift ung studies such as Clanchy’s From

Memory to Written Record and various chapters in Th e Cambridge History of the

Book in Britain, both of which used traditional historical analysis and codicol-

ogy.74 Th e present study combines methods of discourse study in much the way

the linguist Susan Fitzmaurice adapted methods from pragmatics and literary

criticism in her study of eighteenth-century letters, with the same intent to ‘con-

tribute to conversations among disciplines regarding fruitful ways to approach

topics and subject matter of common interest’.75 Similarly, in Shakespeare and

Social Dialogue, Lynn Magnusson applies ideas from Bakhtin, Bourdieu and

other social theorists with the politeness theories of Brown’s and Levinson’s dis-

course analysis to a wide variety of Early Modern texts ranging from Othello to

Th e Merchant’s Aviso.76

Here, however, analysis is of late medieval English civic genres and genre

systems. Th ere is no grand methodological theory in the study, but rather two

general assumptions which I hope are borne out by the evidence I present. My

fi rst general assumption is that written discourse and communication operate

through interlocking genre systems that bind people in a common system of

exchange. To take what may seem like a frivolous example, the Louisiana driver’s

licence in my wallet as I sit writing these words is a document connecting me

to numerous and wide genre systems, in each of which the much-abused little

card has shift ing meanings and applications. Th ese genre systems can range from

the neighbourhood video rental store (where the clerk uses it to generate more

electronic documents as she enters data from the licence) to the criminal justice

system (through the police offi cer who stops me on my return from the video

store and reports that my car has a defunct headlight). Depending on where I’m

required to show the licence, it connects me to a vast number of intimidating

federal agencies, such as the FBI or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Fire-

arms. When I show it while being screened at an airport, its facts about me are

instantly transmitted through the world-wide computer networks of a number

of agencies concerned with crime and terrorism. And moving back towards the

time period under consideration here, my humble Louisiana driver’s licence even

links me to Roman law (as noted by Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named

Desire: ‘Now we got here in the state of Louisiana what’s known as the Napo-

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Introduction 15

leonic code’). Please save this modest example for future reference (again, let’s

not ‘mistake the routine for the trivial’), for none of these connections requires

me to write a single word other than my signature on the licensc: I know how

to use the written/printed document to enter correctly into other genre systems.

We are now back to one of the medieval facts fi rst emphasized by Clanchy and

critical in this study: it is sometimes as important to know how to interpret the

meaning of a document as it is to be able to read it fl uently.

Th erefore this book, using several methods, analyses late medieval English

genre systems to posit explanations of how and why the English middle classes

used ‘pragmatic’ writing from the 1270s to the early sixteenth century. Its gen-

eral structure is chronological, with the major break coming about 1400 and the

arrival of the Lancastrians and the growing authorization and empowerment of

vernacular documents. It is not an exhaustive study of all late medieval middle-

class genres. Marco Mostert, one of the current leading fi gures in the study of

medieval communication, comments: ‘Any attempt to reduce the fullness of

medieval communicative behaviour to a rigid scheme risks to be both banal and

soporifi c.’77 Th e public and private business of the late medieval city operated

through a fi nite number of genres that were well-known to them, so well-known

they needed no explanation or explication, except sometimes in court. Th ese

genres were interrelated in a number of ways, either as part of a coherent pro-

fessional discourse or as part of the wider pan-European system of trade and

exchange or law.78 Like my Louisiana driver’s licence, these documents and gen-

res oft en spilled over into separate legal jurisdictions, in medieval England these

being at minimum local, customary, common, civil, civic and merchant law.

My second general assumption is that medieval writers, even in the earli-

est stages of their writing experiences, knew what they were doing when they

selected a particular genre or style. Writing about eff orts to trace the history of

the so-called ‘letter of payment’, M. M. Postan observed that:

Th ings are never borrowed unless the borrower wants them: institutions are not

transmitted unless they have a defi nite purpose to serve in their new home. When a

new need produces a new tool or custom, that tool is either ‘invented’ or ‘borrowed’,

but the signifi cant explanation elucidates the need which called it into being, rather

than the manner in which it was adopted.79

Or, as the social theorist Anthony Giddens noted, ‘all competent members

of society are vastly skilled in the practical accomplishments of sociology and

are expert “sociolinguists”. Th e knowledge they possess is not incidental to the

persistent patterning of social life, but is integral to it.’80 Since the civic and eco-

nomic documents such as the ones discussed below are the very stuff of the study

of economic history, the role of social utility and practical need in the rise and

fall of written genres was widely studied by scholars like Postan before it was

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acknowledged by rhetoricians and sociolinguists. Th e following chapters show

that English merchant-class writing was a negotiation among genre, innovation

and necessity. Necessity drove innovation underneath the stagnating surface of

offi cial city rhetoric. Necessity pushed Henry V into tacitly blessing the use of

the vernacular, and necessity pushed the upper bourgeois/lower gentry group,

vexed by economic uncertainly following the Black Death, civil war and endless

lawsuits, to put pen to paper.

In studying these pragmatic documents and developing something reason-

ably coherent out of this cluster of approaches, I am especially indebted fi rst

to the project on medieval literacy centred at the University of Utrecht which

has resulted in the Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy series, and secondly by

the work of the Sociolinguistics and Language History Project at the Univer-

sity of Helsinki. Th e Utrecht group has broadened the scope of Verschrift ung

studies immensely by publishing research on writing in places such as medieval

Scandinavia, Poland and Hungary, thereby enabling specialists in a national Ver-

schrift ung to compare processes in diff erent parts of Europe. Th e bibliographies

throughout the series and Marco Mostert’s general bibliography in the initial

volume (under revision) should be eye-opening to the anglophone and west-

ern European scholar, particularly about how much study on vernacular writing

practices has already been accomplished in parts of eastern Europe and Scan-

dinavia. Th e Research Unit for Variation and Change in English at Helsinki

(usually called ‘the Helsinki Group’) has produced a sizeable database corpus

of English texts and latterly has focused specifi cally on letters in its Corpus of

Early English Correspondence. Although the methods used by these groups vary

highly between themselves (and indeed internally at times), both operate under

the assumption that the history of the written word in late medieval and early

modern Europe may best be studied by looking at the ordinary documents used

by ordinary people.

Outline of the Book

Chapter 1, London Middle-Class Writing: Th e Institutional Bases. Th e overall

argument of this chapter is that Londoners came to writing largely through their

professional need to create written records: the genres they used were defi ned

especially by their relationship with the city government, which was itself devel-

oping a genre system in the fourteenth century especially. Th e chapter begins

with brief descriptions of the late medieval European business economy, the

rather marginal role England played in that economy, and the trades and popula-

tion of London in particular. Th e essential documentary needs of the merchants

and artisans are listed, leading to a discussion of the city government and its

‘records revolution’ of the fourteenth century. Around 1300 the city, and espe-

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Introduction 17

cially its chamberlain Andrew Horn, took the initiative and codifi ed its writing

(and other) practices in a series of custumals and Letter Books, the Bibles and

Commentaries of civic government. Th e city oligarchy was comprised of mem-

bers of the leading guilds, and the book shows London guilds soon adapting the

major civic genres for their own uses, especially the charter and the guild book.

Finally, the chapter examines groups which did the actual writing for the city,

guilds and individuals: the scriveners, attorneys and royal clerks. Th e chapter

concludes with a survey of civic writing practices in other thirteenth-century

English cities, fi nding similar patterns and genres but also suggesting that mod-

els other than London may have been the source for some practices. In general

the chapter presents a picture of English cities and citizenry establishing well

recognized genre systems during the 1270–1400 period, systems with which

they were able to absorb the intricacies of documentary culture and quickly use

to their own advantage. By 1350, writing had become an essential tool for urban

tradesmen.

Chapter 2, ‘An Inextricable Labyrinth’: Th e Major Genres of Civic Life. Th is

chapter moves from the institutions that sustained the major genres to the gen-

res themselves and, more importantly, how the merchant class learned to use

and adapt them from the end of the thirteenth to the beginning of the sixteenth

century. Th e records of the prominent Grocer, mayor and alderman Robert

Chichele (d. 1438) are used as an example. Chichele was typical of his class, and

in his lifetime he used virtually all the genres, ranging from apprenticeship docu-

ments through the great city custumals to his will. Aft er introducing Chichele

and his family, the chapter moves through a series of representative genres. Th e

basic genre is shown to be the dictaminal letter, a letter following some of the

rules of the medieval art of letter-writing, or ars dictaminis. Th e dictaminal let-

ter is fundamental to this study because the majority of public documents were

cast in the rhetorical form of a letter from one agent (the king, the mayor, a busi-

nessman) to another, even forms such as deeds or private acknowledgments of

business debt. Th e chapter is thus divided into documents cast in dictaminal or

non-dictaminal formats. Dictaminal formats, the majority, include such widely

used genres as the charter, the petition, bonds and other obligations, and royal

letters and missives. (I do not try to list all possible genres.) ‘Collective’ genres,

bound manuscript collections of varied kinds of documents but with some spe-

cifi c overall purpose, include the secular cartulary, the civic custumal, the guild

book, the London Letter Books and other offi cial city collections. Non-dictami-

nal genres include guild ordinances, oaths, wills as well as newer business formats

originating in Italy. Th e chapter concludes by examining a fi ft eenth-century writ-

ing handbook intended for use by a London scribe, now BL Royal 17 B. XLVII,

a manuscript illustrating the types of writing that the creator of the manuscript

saw as actually useful to a working London scribe. Th e chapter emphasizes the

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participatory nature of the creation of these documents, the way the middle

classes familiarized themselves with writing practices during the fourteenth and

fi ft eenth centuries through dictating, editing and discussing their contents even

if the actual writing was still being done by professional scribes. Equally impor-

tant, it shows how the use of the documents helped create a scholarly/legalistic

mindset among the ruling oligarchy especially, with its emphasis on preserving,

researching, indexing, citing and cross-referencing important precedents.

Chapter 3, English Middle-Class Writing in the Earlier Fift eenth Century:

Th e Vernacular Letters. Th is chapter shows the middle classes beginning to take

charge of their own writing, even as they continued to rely on professional scribes

for most of their document production. Most middle-class people entered the

world of writing directly through creating letters, either using these scribes or,

eventually, writing them with their own hands. Th is chapter thus traces the his-

tory of the middle-class epistle, which began in earnest in the fi ft eenth century.

Th e impetus for the increase use of letters was the acceptance of the vernacular as

an authorized medium of written communication, an authorization believed by

the citizens to have come directly from Henry V about 1417–18. Th e standard

or default form for vernacular letters (including business forms) was the royal

missive, a short and highly formulaic form with a clear rhetorical logic deriv-

ing from the ars dictaminis and the tradition of offi cial correspondence. Various

theories of the structure of the vernacular letter are examined and a more sim-

plifi ed approach suggested, one which may be applied to virtually all surviving

letters and not just to the well known Paston or Stonor correspondence. Bulletin

or newsletter styles are also examined. Th e case studies illustrating the rhetori-

cal sections of the vernacular letter are from the Cely papers (the only surviving

middle-class collection), a sample volume from the Ancient Correspondence of

Th e National Archives (SC 1/44), the second volume of the Davis edition of

the Paston Letters (letters written to the family, oft en by agents) and various

little-used sources such as the Christ Church Letters. Th e chapter also looks at

the role of the messenger who delivered the message and proposes an ‘epistolary

quadrangle’ that defi ned the rhetoric of many letters of the period. Finally, the

chapter suggests that the feudal rhetoric of the dictaminal letter was unsuited to

middle-class social and political relations, and how by 1500 the dictaminal forms

had either become vestigial or, in the case of business forms, eliminated almost

entirely. Once again the overall themes are a) people acquire literate practices

when it becomes economically or socially advantageous to do so, and b) Eng-

lish people were living in a writing culture already in 1400 with familiar written

genres in place – taking pen to parchment was a natural and relatively easy step

once business could be transacted in the written vernacular. Th e chapter notes

in passing the ‘writing families’ of London, certain families such as Elizabeth

Stonor’s which have left evidence of unusual writing activity. Th ese families are

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Introduction 19

shown to have connections to the royal administration and the legal profession,

thus showing how the writing skills of the older clerical professions were in some

cases introduced into middle-class families by marriage.

Chapter 4, Women’s Letters and Men’s Books. Th is chapter examines the

relative success of two groups within the merchant class at producing their own

documents in their own voice. Th e fi rst part of the chapter looks at letter-writing

by merchant-class women in the fi ft eenth century. Previous chapters highlighted

women as apprentices and businesspersons who were part of the civic and guild

genre systems, although to a signifi cantly lesser degree than men. Th e appearance

of more private letters by women aft er 1399 is almost certainly tied to the increas-

ing social prestige of English-language writing. In many ways the acceptance of

the vernacular was more liberating to women than to men, for the vernacular

gave women the ability to dictate, read and edit their own writing. Some of the

very earliest surviving vernacular letters are from women, from around 1400.

Th e chapter looks at the question of female ‘voice’ as revealed in the letters, and

shows that while there is little distinctly feminine in the letters, the dictaminal

rhetoric at least allowed or forced women to use a voice of power in their letters.

In the fi nal analysis, however, merchant-class women, in London and elsewhere,

were not large-scale letter-writers. Unlike in Italy, businesswomen and the wives

of merchants left few letters compared to the women of the gentry, and there is

no bourgeois Margaret Paston. Th e closest in rhetorical interest to the Paston

women’s letters are those by Elizabeth Stonor, whose second marriage was into

the gentry but whose background was solidly London mercantile. Her letters are

examined and illustrate how an intelligent, lively and rhetorically skilled writer

could bend the rather stiff rhetorical gestures of the fi ft eenth-century epistle. Th e

second example of a new bourgeois voice, a more successful one, I call the ‘citizen’s

custumal’, a bound volume of city customs, business aids and personal material

created by individual citizens as a private adaptation of the city and guild offi cial

books. Th e chapter analyses these ‘commonplace books’ created by London mer-

chants from the middle of the fi ft eenth century to about 1530. Th ese represent the

most advanced step with the written word by the English merchant class, roughly

equivalent to the libri di famiglia of Renaissance Italy. In these self-created texts

the merchants assembled (but did not actually create) entire books designed to

codify and sum up the bourgeois image. Th e citizen’s custumal is perfected in the

printed Customs of London (1503). Comparison with analogous Italian merchant

books (by Morelli, Dati and others), however, highlights the conservatism and

narrowness of London urban rhetoric. Although the citizen’s custumal and Cus-

toms of London show the middle classes adapting older genres to fi nd their own

‘voice’, it remains a reticent and narrowly focused voice.

Conclusions and Speculations. Th is short coda to a long book argues that

the literate practices found throughout the merchant class by the middle of the

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fi ft eenth century were one of the infl uences leading to the acceptance of the New

Learning in English. Th ese practices include not only skills in reading and writ-

ing, but the mental habits of examining texts in a critical way, of researching

original sources, of seeking written precedents and of editing. Although overall

the merchant groups disliked change and were obsessively protectionist in out-

look, their textual practices and ‘document culture’ may be traced in the work of

children of middle-class households like Th omas More and John Colet.

Summary

In the end, this book is an expanded series of hypotheses leading back to the origi-

nal case, namely why the London Merchant Adventurers of 1478 used the pen to

fi ght piracy rather than engage in direct Errol Flynn-like action, or simply urge

Edward IV to do so. It also helps explain why some of the most delicate English

songs and carols were preserved only in the pages of a business ledger book owned

by the London grocer Richard Hill, alongside his model business letters, a chroni-

cle, London topographical information and a recipe for gunpowder. Considered

as a history of writing, this study takes the tale told in Clanchy’s From Memory

to Written Record forward approximately another two centuries and explains in

some detail how and why the citizens of London learned to ‘trust’ writing (in his

well known formulation). Th e trajectory is roughly from the creation of the fi rst

civic custumal about 1270 to the publication of Customs of London (or Arnold’s

Chronicle) in 1503, with its aft ermath into the 1530s. It covers only one rather

porous social group (the merchant class and lower gentry) in a relatively small

geographic area, and the extent to which the conclusions and patterns noted

here can be generalized remains to be seen. Th e development of writing practices

elsewhere was quite diff erent, as shown periodically throughout the book, and

fourteenth-century Italy especially was institutionally more conducive to creating

a culture of urban discourse and civic political thought than was England. Th e

picture that emerges for English writing about 1500 is messy: a merchant such as

Hill would work in some environments where writing practices looked a lot like

they did in 1400, with heavy reliance on Latin and French written by professional

scribes; in other parts of Hill’s writing life he would do his own writing, most of

it vernacular, while his guild and his city would be increasingly collecting and

codifying their institutional practices. And of course Hill would be compiling

his own personal commonplace book or citizen’s custumal, something a grocer of

1400 would be highly unlikely to do. What emerges below, however, is English

urban culture being brought to the edge of a more sophisticated urban discourse

and self-awareness, the age of Eliot, Stowe and many a lesser fi gure working out an

urban image with their pens. Civic needs elicit genres and civic needs transform

them; genres both elicit and constrain urban writing.

introduction from middle-class writing in late medieval london

Documents