Literacy Rates in Lowestoft (1560-1730)

Among the many interesting features to emerge from close study of the 507 wills and 100 probate inventories which have survived for the period indicated in the title are the rates of literacy able to be determined in the various occupational groups which formed the town’s socio-economic structure. Even today, there would probably be argument (or at least discussion) among specialists in the field as to what literacy means. The same holds true for historians. And even if the two basic criteria of a person’s being able to read and write are accepted as evidence of it, the question then arises as to what level of proficiency in each skill identifies the truly literate man or woman. At least one commentator (Roger Schofield, of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure) commented as long ago as 1968 on the imprecision shown by historians regarding the word and pointed out further that the level of literacy skills considered appropriate in any historical context has rarely been adequately specified. In the final analysis, it seems that the only convenient means of measuring people’s standard of literacy in previous centuries is their ability (or lack of it) to sign their own names. Such proficiency is deemed to satisfy almost all the requirements of a universal, standard and direct method of assessment.

Signatures on wills

Out of a total of 507 wills, which have been analysed for the years 1560-1730, 416 bear the signatures, initials or marks of the testators, thirty-six are nuncupative (spoken by word of mouth by the testator, usually close to his or her death) and unsigned, and a further fifty-five are standard copies which have no identifying marks of any kind by the testator (though twenty-six of them are witnessed). Of the 416 documents which are either signed or marked by the testator, 216 have signatures, eighteen have initials and 182 bear marks. Initials were only classified as such if both were used; a single initial has been treated as a mark. The 216 wills which were properly signed represent 42.6% of the total number of 507 and 52% of the 416 which were authenticated by the testator. Both proportions are considerably higher than those established for an area of rural High Suffolk and for two Cambridgeshire country parishes. The difference noted is probably the result of the differing nature of urban and rural communities in social and economic structure, whereby the need for literacy was more pronounced in towns than in the countryside. The Lowestoft inhabitants’ ability to sign their names may be compared with that of the citizens of Ipswich, Suffolk’s biggest town. In Lowestoft, 43% of testators possessed the skill during the first half of the seventeenth century (as opposed to 37%) and 54% showed it during the early years of the eighteenth (as opposed to 57%).

Another point deserving attention, which has drawn comment from historians using probate material for various purposes, is the quality of handwriting evident in the signatures of both testators and witnesses. No claim is made that good handwriting means a high (or even reasonable) standard of literacy, because well-educated people, even today, are capable of producing an inferior script. Nevertheless, in assessing a large number of signatures from a single body of documents, certain inferences may be drawn from the overall quality of calligraphy. For instance, facility in using a pen becomes apparent – and if a person handled a pen with ease, then he or she might well have been confident in putting words onto paper. Furthermore, a good handwriting style may also be taken as evidence of thorough training in the art of writing or of regular practice at it. And people who write regularly are usually those who have some degree of literary attainment. Thus, while legible, well-formed handwriting may not be conclusive in itself of a high standard of literacy, it can probably be accepted as a general indicator of proficiency

The great majority of signatures of testators in the Lowestoft wills show an impressive level of calligraphic skill. Over 90% of them are well-formed, and it is probably reasonable to assume that at least some of the inferior signatures were the result of physical weakness rather than general ineptitude. Having said that, for every inferior signature appended to a will where the preamble refers to the testator’s sickness or infirmity, there are four or five others with identical preambles but with good handwriting. Witnesses’ signatures are less equivocal because those people were presumably in good health (or, at least, not seriously ill) when they signed the document before them. Over 95% of witnesses’ signatures are well-formed, but there is much greater variability in the initials and marks, with an overall tendency for the standard of penmanship to be lower than that evident in the signatures. This is not surprising, bearing in mind that it was largely the illiterate members of society who used either initials or marks as their means of formal identification, and these would have been the very people not used to handling pens on a regular basis.

There are two kinds of initials used in the wills: those representing both Christian name and surname and those which opted for one or the other. It is noticeable that the quality of handwriting is better on the part of testators and witnesses who used both initial letters of their names than it is on the part of those who used one letter only. There are eighteen examples of testators who used both initials and sixteen examples of witnesses who did the same (two of the former presented them as monograms, as did one of the latter). A further twenty-six testators used their Christian name initial only and another four the initial letter of their surnames. The preponderance of Christian name initial over that of the surname is also to be seen in the witnesses’ marks: there are thirty-six examples of the former and thirteen of the latter. In both types of initials used for either signing or witnessing wills, the malformation of certain letters is noticeable: M and W were sometimes written upside-down; E, N and S were sometimes rendered back to front. In nearly every case where initials were written, capital letters were used.

The marks employed (in other words, those symbols which do not have anything to do with the initial letters of the testators’ or witnesses’ names) fall into three categories: personal marks of varying shape and type (a number of these may be interpreted as imitations of medieval merchants’ marks), trade tools or representations, and imitations of a cursive hand. The first group contains a wide variety of different crosses, circles, lines and strokes, with varying facility in the operation of the pen. Actual trade tools or symbols are very limited in number, but interesting nevertheless. There are seven examples of testators using such a mark and they are as follows: William Barnard (shipwright, 1580), an adze; Hugh Calver (husbandman, 1593), a three-tined fork; John Besecke (mariner, 1597), a beacon; John Landefield (mariner, 1617), a beacon; Robert Beeteson (husbandman, 1623), a scythe; John Stroud (mariner, 1636), a beacon; Thomas Neale (husbandman, 1649), a pick or mattock. In addition to these, there are two instances of witnesses employing the same technique: Thomas Burges (smith, 1575), outlined a three-tined fork, while Thomas Graye (mason, 1603) drew a spade. Of the various trade symbols used by Lowestoft people, the beacon is the most interesting because it is a copy or variant of the symbol used on contemporary maps and charts. This suggests that the mariners who employed it as their personal mark were familiar with it. And this, in turn, means that they may have been able to interpret a chart without being able to read in the conventional sense.

Finally, there are the attempts by a minority of people to imitate proper handwriting. There are twenty-two examples of this particular practice (fifteen testators and seven witnesses), and just over half of the exponents were women. This is not a sufficiently large majority (on an admittedly small number to begin with) to make any assumption that certain women were trying to compensate for their lack of educational opportunity by pretending that they were able to write, any more than it is to submit a similar claim on behalf of the men who did it. What the practitioners did, in all cases, was to pen an irregularly undulating line that looked like a cursive hand at first glance, but did not bear closer scrutiny as genuine writing.

As might be expected, the ability of a person to sign his or her name has a pronounced social and economic factor about it, with the greatest degree of literacy evident among the wealthier levels of Lowestoft’s population. Not only could such people afford to pay for the education that was available (either by meeting the costs involved or by not having to see their children become wage-earners at an early age), they also needed to acquire the basic skills of reading and writing in order to conduct business interests more efficiently. This latter point held for tradespeople and craftsmen as well, while seafarers would have seen the benefits of being able to read charts and cargo manifests and sign their names on customs documents. The increase in literacy among the sea-going fraternity in Lowestoft is particularly noticeable after 1700, by which time the town was becoming much more of a specialist maritime community. With growing numbers of menfolk involved in coastal and overseas trade, there would have been an increased need for masters and mates to be able to read and write in order to deal with the documentation which came their way.

Tables 1 to 4 present the literacy statistics deriving from the 416 surviving wills which are signed, and perhaps the most interesting feature revealed is the relatively high rate of female literacy from the second half of the seventeenth century onwards. This is not so pronounced among testators as among witnesses, and it can be clearly seen how women became the single most important group of people to authenticate wills during the first three decades of the eighteenth century. Such a development may have been due in some measure to the town’s burgeoning maritime life, which resulted in substantial numbers of men being absent from home for weeks at a time (especially on trading voyages) – though it does not explain where the women learned to write. As far as the ability of witnesses to sign their names is concerned, Tables 2, 3 and 4 include only those people for whom it was possible to prove residency in town by the family reconstitution exercise. The number of witnesses who seem to have lived out of town was very small. There are only about twenty examples between 1560 and 1730 (thirteen men and seven women) and it is possible that some of these people were resident in Lowestoft. Parish registration did not record everyone living in the place – nor did other local bureaucratic systems, such as poor law administration and the manor courts. A large proportion of witnesses in the “Occupation unknown” category, who were able to sign, belonged to families in the first four occupational and social groupings.

In order to arrive at accurate analysis of people’s ability to write their names, based on the evidence available in wills, it is necessary to make adjustments within Tables 2 and 3. In the case of the former, the final column takes account of those people who acted as witnesses in two of the individual sub-periods and who must not, therefore, be counted twice so as to inflate the overall total. The same principle applies in the latter table: the amalgamation of testators and witnesses has to take account of the men and women who signed their names or made their marks in both capacities. Furthermore, the calculations have to apply to both the individual sub-periods used and also to the overall time-scale. Hence, there is a final column for the adjusted totals, whereby people who were witnesses in one sub-period and testators in another are amalgamated to produce figures which are as reliable as possible with regard to the data used.

Because of the difficulties inherent in maintaining the columnar structure of the tables, within the width of the pages where they feature, all of them have been converted to spreadsheets in order to present the literacy data.

Table 1. Literacy statistics: wills (testators)

S. signature I. initials (both) M. mark (including single initial)

Table 2. Literacy statistics: wills (witnesses)

Table 3. Literacy statistics: wills (testators and witnesses)

Table 4. Literacy statistics: wills (% of testators and witnesses able to sign their names)

Husbandmen and labourers have been omitted from this table because their numbers (as testators or witnesses) are not large enough to create representative percentages of literacy for their respective categories.

Analysisof literacy rates in Norwich Diocese between 1580 and 1700, based on ecclesiastical court depositions, found that 56% of tradespeople and craftsmen were able to sign their names and only about 11% of women. [D. Cressey, ‘Literacy in Seventeenth Century England: More Evidence’, in Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 8 (1977), pp. 141-50]. Table 4, in providing a summary statement of the overall pattern of literacy on the part of those people who signed wills, either as testators or witnesses, is able to demonstrate that Lowestoft people in these categories had a notably higher ability. In fact, if tradespeople and craftsmen are grouped together for a period covering the late sixteenth century to the beginning of the eighteenth, the rate of male literacy is about 60%-65% and that of women about 25%. It is, however, possible that the better literacy rate for women may be exaggerated above the norm because of the particular documentation used. Women who made and who witnessed wills were likely to have been members of the more affluent social and occupational groups, whereas those appearing in ecclesiastical court depositions would have been drawn from a wider cross-section of society – including the less fortunate.

Percentages of literacy among the various social and occupational groups in Lowestoft may seem to suggest a decline in people’s ability to sign their names during the first half of the seventeenth century. It is tempting to view this as further evidence of the town’s decline at this time – but there may be another explanation. If Table 3 is scrutinised, it can be seen that the varying (and variable) survival-rate of the wills themselves may be responsible for inflating the degree of literacy measurable from the signatures of testators and witnesses between 1560 and 1599. For instance, nearly all of the nineteen craftsmen recorded were able to sign their names – a trend which does not observe the pattern evident in the other three sub-periods. And there was quite a high degree of female literacy resulting from a good survival-rate of wills relating to women from merchant and yeomen families. There were probably other anomalies and variables, too, and perhaps the safest response to the data in all four tables is to look at the long-term trend revealed: one of increasing rates of literacy among most of the social and occupational groups listed.

Signatures on probate inventories

The statistics deriving from a study of appraisers’ signatures and marks on ninety-five of the 100 surviving inventories (those which are undamaged and complete) are not the same as the results yielded by the wills – though there is still the same bias, in terms of numbers, towards the better-off social and occupational groupings. To have amalgamated the inventory material with that of the wills would have had a distorting effect on the picture of literacy given. There is a complete absence of either labourers or women in the documents and there is a great preponderance of signatures over initials and marks. Labourers, of course, did not feature strongly in the will material and their absence from inventories need not be surprising: given their economic and social status, their services were not likely to have been required in assessing the value of goods belonging to wealthier people. Husbandmen comprise the other group which has a very limited presence in will material, and the same is true of inventories. The reason for this is the low survival-rate of documents – and in the case of inventories, of course, the people best qualified to assess the value of agricultural equipment and stock were men involved in farming themselves. Thus, if few husbandmen’s inventories have survived, there will not be many men from that occupational group in evidence as assessors. The absence of women was probably due to their social position at the time and even inventories taken of women’s possessions do not include a single female assessor.

The pronounced dominance of signatures over marks, which can be clearly seen in Table 5, is probably the result of the best educated people in the various social and occupational groupings being in demand as assessors simply because of their ability to read and write. Again, as with the wills, an impressive level of facility is evident in the signatures and the documents themselves are generally well written too. Only those people whose residency in Lowestoft could be proved were considered for inclusion in the table (there were only about ten assessors all told who could not be traced in the family reconstitution data) and, once again, adjustments were made in the final column to take account of those people (three only) who acted as appraisers in two of the individual sub-periods. As was the case in the earlier tables, most of the people in the “Occupation unknown” category, who were able to sign their names, belonged to families in the first four occupational groupings.

Table 5. Literacy statistics: inventories

The writers of wills and inventories

It has been possible to identify the scribes responsible for drawing up 86% of the Lowestoft wills between 1560 and 1730. There seem to have been 188 people involved as writers of the 507 surviving documents, 121 of whom are known by name (with the occupations of ninety-seven of these also being known). The work of ascertaining the identity of the writers was assisted by the abbreviation scr. (scriptor) being appended to some of the names, but more especially it derived from an exercise in comparing and matching handwriting styles. The use of copy-books at the time, as a means of training people to write, was not ignored (in theory at least, pupils who were taught from the same book might all have finished up writing very similarly), but there is enough individuality detectable even within definite graphological styles to be able to distinguish one writer from another. 

The men who emerge as writers contain no major surprises, with schoolmasters and clergymen featuring prominently among the “informal scriveners”, as they have been sometimes been termed. Nevertheless, a considerable variety of people is revealed as participating in the process and there also are sixteen instances of a testator drawing up his own will. These are as follows, in date order: Peter Beddyngfelde (tailor), December 1586; John Gouldesmith (draper), April 1594, Abraham Turnpeneye (shoemaker), April 1617; John Wild (merchant), January 1641; Arthur Ashby (naval officer), July 1666; James Reeve (doctor), February 1679; James Wilde (merchant), August 1682; Robert Knight (gentleman), September 1689; Richard Rootsy [al. Ratsey] (mariner), March 1696; John Buxton (mariner), January 1711; Joseph Pake (doctor), September 1712; Thomas Mighells (merchant), August 1723; James Wilde Snr. (merchant). November 1723; Abraham Freeman (surgeon), September 1724; Thomas Sayer (mariner), November 1726; William Botson (schoolmaster), May 1728. 

It is noticeable in Lowestoft that, as time went on and literacy became more widespread, more and more townsmen became involved in the writing of wills. The increase, although not dramatic, is nevertheless detectable. The rise in the number of professional scriveners involved in writing wills, especially after 1700, does not reflect a growth in the presence of lawyers practising in Lowestoft. An increasing number of local seafarers (often those serving in the Royal Navy) based themselves in Wapping and Stepney and their wills were invariably drawn up by scriveners or notaries public who lived there. Nowhere, in any of the Lowestoft probate material, are women to be found as writers of wills.

When it comes to writers of inventories, it is possible to identify twenty-five of the seventy scribes as resident in the town. Between them, they drew up fifty-five of the one hundred surviving documents (there are five damaged ones, but in three cases it is possible to recognise the handwriting).  Their identities contain no surprises and sixteen of them were people who, at one time or another, wrote wills for local testators. There is, as to be expected, close correlation between the occupational groupings in both sets of data and the rise in rates of literacy, especially during the first three decades of the eighteenth century, is once more reflected in a greater number of people drawing up inventories – a feature also observable among those men for whom occupation and place of residence cannot be established.

In broad terms, the writing of both wills and inventories was mainly concentrated in the upper levels of Lowestoft society, with the small number of gentleman resident in the town at any one time detectable as having an input. Merchants featured strongly, as did clergy, schoolmasters and scriveners of one kind or another. Less numerous (but also noticeable) were men involved in retail trades of one kind or another, as well as the more  prosperous craftsmen (be they blacksmiths or cordwainers), and some of the leading mariners are also to be found. Yeoman farmers had an input and the granting of port status in Lowestoft in 1679 saw customs officials begin to make their presence known during the 18th century. And, at the lower end of the social scale, even the occasional husbandman and labourer is seen to have been capable of writing a will for someone.  

The ownership of books

The presence of books in houses, as an aspect of household contents noted in drawing up probate inventories and also referred to in wills, can also serve as an indicator of literacy within the community. A total of fifty-four people (forty-five men and nine women, all of the latter being widows) between 1581 and 1730 are seen to have owned books of one kind or another – the former year providing the earliest evidence in the surviving probate material. Forty-one inventories and fourteen wills make reference to books, with only one pair of those documents relating to the same person: Margaret Coldham, a merchant’s widow (1584). Table 7 presents the data regarding the ownership of books and relates it to the ability of the owners (or the lack of it) to sign their names. The people represented are predictable in the main, because they emanate from levels of society with the money to purchase books and with the ability to read them. The nine women are shown bracketed in their respective categories. It needs to be said, of course, that a person’s inability to sign his or her name does not necessarily mean that he or she was unable to read. Of the two literary skills, reading is usually learned first and is probably the more widely practised. It is possible, even today, for someone to read in a rudimentary fashion, yet not be able to form letters correctly in the written mode.

Table 6. Book ownership and the ability to make a signature

The books most frequently referred to by name, in both wills and inventories, are Bibles. There are sixteen individual references altogether, but their presence in a house did not necessarily mean that the occupant was able to read. Bibles were prized not only for their value as Holy Writ, but for their financial worth (the Lowestoft ones ranged in value from 2s. to 6s. 8d.) and for their presumed magical properties. In any attempt to divine the future by “book and key”, a Bible was a necessary part of the equipment – and, in some cases, rank superstition may have been the reason for having a Bible rather than the ability or the desire to read it. Lowestoft’s Bible-owning citizens consisted of three merchants and a merchant’s widow, a retired naval officer, a victualler, a butcher’s widow, a hatter’s widow, four seafarers (one of whom was a Nonconformist), a farmer, two cordwainers and a blacksmith. The dates of ownership, in sequence with this list, are as follows: 1581, 1588, 1590, 1585, 1669, 1710, 1648, 1645, 1613, 1696, 1711, 1712, 1711, 1590, 1602 and 1596.

Apart from the Bible, few other books are mentioned by name. John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (published in 1563) occurs once and there are occasional references to prayer books and psalters, collections of homilies, theological treatises, statute books and navigational works. John Collins, a young lawyer who died untimely in November 1671, had “eight folios, twelve quartos and ninety small books” in his lodging’s chamber, worth £11 5s 0d. Given his legal training, some of the books would have been law works and others possibly classical texts. It would be interesting, however, to know whether any of the ninety small books listed in his inventory were literature of the time or of an earlier period. One of the frustrations of working through probate inventories is to see collections of books merely itemised as such, but the assessors’ concern was to estimate monetary value, not make reference to every individual title.

Four of the people in Table 7 (including a married couple) not only had books in their houses, but were carrying on a shop trade in them as well. Allen Coldham (merchant) died in January 1583 and his wife, Margaret, carried on running the business after his decease. They had origins in Great Yarmouth, but came to Lowestoft at some point during the second half of the sixteenth century – with Allen Coldham himself having held office in Yarmouth, as one of the town’s four bailiffs, in 1559.  His wife’s inventory of January 1585 shows that she and her husband had been involved in a large-scale trade in cloth and drapery, a considerable one in groceries, and a specialist dealing in books. 

The volumes listed are six grammar books, six service books (Church of England liturgy, almost certainly), eight psalters, two small works of Cato, one book of governance and virtue, twenty-two English primers, five copies of Ovid’s works, eleven catechistic books of Calvinist doctrine and eighteen alphabet books. Obviously, there must have been a demand for such diverse literature and, in the case, of the two classical authors, some of it may have been generated by the town’s Free Grammar School. Furthermore, given the relatively high number of English primers and alphabet books, it is almost certain that this institution was educating its pupils in their mother-tongue as well as in Latin. Stocks of pens, ink and paper are also listed among the items in the Coldhams’ shop, which reinforces the idea of education and literacy being serviced by their enterprise.

Nearly one hundred and forty years later, the inventory of Thomas Utting (grocer) reveals that he, too, was conducting a retail trade in books, in addition to the various foodstuffs and items of hardware in his shop. The document dates from June 1723 and shows that part of his stock-in-trade consisted of twenty-four New Testaments, forty-eight horn books and seventy-eight primers. The horn-book was a sheet of paper containing the alphabet and perhaps the ten digits and the Lord’s Prayer, which was protected by a layer of translucent cow-horn and mounted on a wooden frame with a handle – thus enabling it to withstand rough use by children. The primers could have been either English or Latin ones, or both – being instructional manuals to teach the grammatical fundamentals of each language. Whatever the case, it was a quantity of books sufficient to suggest regular trade in such reading matter – one which was probably stimulated by demand from local schools. About six years later, in March 1729, “a parcel of horning book primers” was listed among all the other items being offered for sale in the shop of Richard Ward (labourer and woolcomber): scissors, lengths of ribbon, buttons, pins, pen knives etc. There is also a reference to thirteen “bound books” noted among the contents of his wash-house, but whether they were for sale or not is unclear. There is no such uncertainty regarding the horn books; they were intended to teach children to read.

A number of long-stay families in Lowestoft had quite a high proportion of members who, over the years, were able to sign their names and were probably also proficient at reading. They included the Arnolds (mariners, merchants and brewers), Barkers (shipwrights, coopers and merchants), Canhams (lesser gentry and mariners), Coes (yeomen, merchants and mariners), Durrants (brewers and mariners), Frarys (blacksmiths), Haywards (mariners and merchants), Mighells (merchants and mariners), Pacys (fishermen, mariners and merchants), Spicers (mariners and merchants), Uttings (brewers and merchants), Wards (merchants and mariners) and Wildes (merchants).

Conclusion

The degree of literacy evident in the sub-sections above suggests that, in the middle and upper levels of society at least, there was a marked competence on the part of Lowestoft people to sign their names – a feature which also included women – especially after 1700. Reasons have been given for the advantages of being literate in a maritime and trading community, and it is perhaps significant that the East Anglian coast has been noted as an area with quite a high rate of literacy among its inhabitants (something alluded to in a conversation with this writer, during the mid-1980s by the demographer Roger Schofield, of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure). In which case, it is not surprising to find that Lowestoft conforms to an overall pattern. 

Alternatively, it may also be the case that market towns had a marked degree of literacy among the populace, because investigation has shown that 61% of the adult males (over the age of sixteen years) in seven Suffolk communities were able to sign their names to the Association Oath of 1696 (Cressy, ‘Literacy', p. 99 – a work referred to earlier). The towns in question were Beccles, Ixworth, Nayland, Newmarket, Southwold, Stowmarket and Woolpit. Had the documentation for Lowestoft survived, it is likely that the town would have shown a rate of literacy equal to this, if not in excess of it. This particular oath was a declaration of loyalty to the Crown, made by all holders of public office, after a failed Jacobite assassination attempt on the life of William III. Therefore, in its very nature, it has severe under-registration of women and also suffers from uneven and defective geographical survival of the signatories.

Over the county of Suffolk, the same investigation showed that the ability to make a proper signature was 47%; in the Hundred of Mutford and Lothingland, the area for which Lowestoft was the local centre, it was 38%. There were 215 usable parishes in the county as a whole, giving a total of 10,056 signatories. In Lothingland & Mutford half-hundreds (as they really were, rather than a single united one), only eleven parishes were able to be analysed, producing 371 signatories between them (Cressy, ‘Literacy’,p. 103). Both rates are considerably lower than that in evidence in market towns. The rural nature of much of Suffolk no doubt served to bring down the county average below that of the towns. What, if any, were the advantages enjoyed by urban or proto-urban communities in promoting literacy, over and above the stimulus of trading activities? One factor is almost certainly to be found in the presence of schools. And this particular feature is the subject of another Lowestoft-related article to be found in these pages.

CREDIT: David Butcher