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Seventeenth Century Austrey

Books and Reading

There was a general improvement in popular literacy over the course of the seventeenth century, but the ability to read and write was closely tied to social status.  John Aubrey, looking back to the early Restoration period, had a ready explanation for this apparent increase in literacy:

Since printing came in fashion, till a little before the Civil-wars, the ordinary sort of people were not taught to read.  Nowadays, books are common and most of the poor people understand letters.

The common criterion for literacy is the ability to sign or write ones own name, proficiency in writing being assumed to indicate at least an elementary ability to recognise the written word.  Estimates of the literacy of sample populations are frequently derived from analyses of lists of signatories to protestation oaths and covenants, which usually provide a cross-section of inhabitants. Unfortunately the names of those who subscribed to the oath were transcribed, rather than entered directly into the Austrey register, so this technique cannot be used.  An alternative analysis of the signatures and marks of those acting as witnesses or overseers to wills encounters difficulties because witnesses did not always represent the broad cross-section of inhabitants.  Allowance has to be made for the fact that some ‘literate’ testators may have been too old or incapacitated to sign their own names.  Another problem is that witnesses were selected rather than chosen at random. This means that in the case of the wealthier inhabitants witnesses were more frequently chosen from two social extremes: the educated elite who acted as overseers and executors, and ordinary household servants who were closest to hand at the drawing up of the will.

Nevertheless, the surviving Austrey wills suggest that about a third of the inhabitants were literate, which conforms fairly closely to the Cambridge Group’s estimate of around 70 per cent illiteracy among signatories to the Protestation Oath in 1642. All of those identified as gentry or clergy in the wills and title deeds throughout the period of this survey were able to sign their names as witnesses.  In the earlier period, from 1600 to 1640, approximately half of the yeomen and a third of the husbandmen and labourers, could sign their names. Although only a handful of the witnesses were craftsmen they were generally more literate than husbandmen or labourers.

     Sources and Notes

Aubrey's Brief Lives, ed. and intro. by O.L. Dick (Bungay, 1976),  pg. 36. N.R. Evans, ‘Testators, Literacy, Education and Religious Belief’, LPS, 25 (1980), 42-50; D. Cressy, ‘Vow, Covenant and Protestation: sources for the history of population and literacy in the seventeenth century’, Local Historian, 14 No. 3 (1980), 134-41

D. Cressy, ‘Literacy in Seventeenth Century England: more evidence’, JIH, 8 No. 1 (1977), 144; A Leicestershire survey of literacy rates from the 1590s to the 1640s estimates an increase in the number of literate yeomen from 23% to 45%. husbandmen from 73% to 79% and labourers from 0% to 9%: K. Wrightson, English Society, 190.