All of these many and varied vocabularies of region and community, of occupation and manufacture, point to the highly variegated nature of popular culture in this period. Each of these linguistic systems was the signifier of mentalities and world views which were often quite specific to particular places or groups of people. That communication could be difficult between localities and trades reflects the fact that early modern England was less a unified nation and more a constellation of communities which, while they may have shared some common cultural features, stubbornly clung to chauvinistic and exclusive ways of acting, perceiving, and speaking. There is no more graphic reflection of this than the lack of a national market economy at this time, due, among other reasons, to the fact that many agricultural 'countries' or specialist crafts had their own weights and measures and used different words to describe them. Much quantifying was done simply by rule-of-thumb. There were various dialect terms which recall the typically impressionistic definition of a stole' in Cheshire as a tree with a trunk which a man might reach the top of with his hand. In Essex John Ray noted that his neighbours spoke of a 'yaspen' or 'yeepsen', which meant as much of something 'as can be taken up in both hands joyn'd together'. With them, a 'seame' of corn signified a 'horse load', or eight bushels. In the north of England, meanwhile, an equivalent word was a 'fother', although in some places it meant two 'horse loads' and in others just one.

Bushels, strikes, and pecks all varied, not only from town to town and manor to manor but also according to the commodity in question. Wheat and corn, peas and potatoes, apples and pears, all had their own standards and all were contingent on place: a strike could be anything from half a bushel to four bushels. Equally, in the case of land, measures depended on the region, as well as both the type of soil and the nature of the crops grown in it. As Robert Thoroton explained in the 1670s, these gauges had 'been taken from the plow as long as memories of things are extant', and therefore were bound to vary 'according to the lightness or stiffness of the soyl, whereof one plow might dispatch more or less accordingly'. Thus a 'curucat', or 'plowland', 'defined to be as much land as one ox might till through the year . . . could not be equal in all places, but in some places was twelve, in some sixteen, in some eighteen or more acres'. So the meaning of oxgangs, virgates, and roods also varied in their turn, while there was not even a standard acre since the number of feet to a perch and perch to an acre were highly localized. Even 'the foot itself was also customary', recognized Thoroton, 'in some place twelve inches, in some eighteen or less'.

This lack of standardization is also evident in the many dialect words used to denote animals and plants. There were, for example, over 120 different names nationwide to describe the smallest of a litter of pigs. The hickwall (Gecinus viridis) went by over twenty titles around the country, while other common birds such as the sparrow, or fish such as the stickle-back, were also prolifically described. Meanwhile there were as many as fifty separate names for the marsh marigold (Caltha palustris). Tragopogon pratensis was variously called goat's beard, Joseph's flour, star of Jerusalem, noon tide, and go-to-bed-at-noon; Arum maculatum might be cuckoo pint, cuckoo pintle, or cuckoo point, wake-robin, priest's pintle or calve's-foot, aron, barba-aron, janus, ramp or starchwort; Capsella bursa-pastoris was known in the south of England as shepherd's purse, shepherd's pouch or poor man's parmacetie, but in the north as toy wort, pick-purse or case-weed.

Such names given to animals and plants often betray the popular beliefs held about them or the uses to which they were put, and the same applies to much of the prolific dialect vocabulary. In this now obsolete local terminology can be found evidence of everyday practices and habits, of social customs and modes of thought, which might otherwise have remained obscure or forgotten were it not for the words which denoted them. Thus Ray exposed some interesting household practices when he recorded the verb 'to leint' applied in parts of the north to ale and meaning 'to put urine into it to make it strong'. Other brewing techniques are revealed in his noting of the term 'slape-ale' used in Lincolnshire for 'plain ale as opposed to ale medicated with wormwood or scurvey-grass'. Long before Ray, John Gerard had pointed out that women in north Wales and Cheshire would put 'ale-hoofe' into their brews, but then, depending on the part of the country, this plant might also be called 'ground ivy', 'gill go by ground', 'turne-hoofe' or 'cats-foot'.

If these usages of women in the domestic sphere were unlikely to be recorded otherwise, so too were the practices of children. White Kennett made reference to several of the local words by which children's games or toys were known thus providing earlier evidence of their use than might be suspected. So the phrase 'to play at knur' alluded to 'a game among the boys in Yorksh[ire] with a little round cheas-ball (which they call a knur) struck from one to another with little landy sticks . . .'. Another game in the same county using stick, or bat, and ball was 'bad', played with a 'cat stick', 'bad-stick', or hippal-stick'. Interestingly Kennett thought that a variant form of this game, known as cricket, was still sufficiently localized, 'a game most usual in Kent', to consider it a dialect word. In Norfolk and Suffolk the word for ball was 'campers' and 'to camp' was to play at football. Elsewhere, 'aws-bones' referred to 'bones of the legs of cows or oxen with which boys play at aws or yawse'.

Finally, something may be inferred about popular religion, or at least popular attitudes towards the established Church, by the dialect names given to its major feasts and festivals. For example, Maundy Thursday was termed 'skirisfurisday' in Scotland, Northumberland, and Durham until the late seventeenth century, a survival of pagan ceremony and Old Norse; the Invention of the Holy Cross was known as 'crouchmas' in many areas until the nineteenth century, a hangover from medieval Catholicism and late Old English. The feast of Epiphany was called wassailing' day in Sussex, Somerset, and Devon, or 'howling' or 'holler-ing' in other regions, after the name given to the gathering and selling of apples. The day before Shrove Tuesday was known as 'collop Monday' in many northern places, after the word for the bacon customarily eaten on that day, and 'carling Sunday' took its name from the brown peas then consumed. Good Friday was 'cave Friday' in Cheshire and 'long Friday' in Lancashire, while 'cattern' was the name given to St Catherine's Day in Buckinghamshire, Shropshire, Sussex, Wiltshire, and Worcestershire, following the practice of children begging apples and beer from door to door, which gave rise to the noun 'catterning' or 'cattering'.

THE LANGUAGE OF DEGREE One of the most significant developments in the perception of language at this time was a more self-conscious identification of speech patterns with social status. No doubt the idea that accents and dialects might be a reflection of social rank was already an old-established one by the Tudor period, and may well have crystallized as early as the late fourteenth century with the emergence of a standard form of English. It was only in the mid-sixteenth century, however, that commentators on both the language and the social order began to articulate this notion explicitly and to insist, moreover, that people should speak in ways befitting their status and position. Perhaps the new technology of print, which facilitated the circulation of debate on the subject among contemporaries and has preserved evidence of it for posterity, creates the illusion of new urgency and new attitudes in this respect. But the reign of Elizabeth may have marked new departures in the social stratification of English. In the first place, this was a period of immense linguistic change. More loan words enriched English vocabulary in the years 1570Ð1630 than at any time before or since. At the same time, there were extensive debates over correctness and propriety in terms of orthography and pronunciation, grammatical rules and stylistic conventions, and these had considerable influence on both the written and spoken word. In the second place, this was an era of enormous social and economic upheaval. A doubling of the population in the century after 1540, a much brisker land market in the wake of monastic dissolution, and huge price inflation as a consequence of these and other factors, all precipitated tremendous instability in almost every area of economy and society. It was for this reason that the governors of Tudor and early Stuart England were so concerned with the problem of 'order', both in their rhetoric and their social policy. Their concern manifested itself in a number of ways, including in a much greater insistence on the regulations and conventions which had long upheld hierarchy and degree. Proper codes of dress, forms of address, and rules of behaviour were all urged upon people with renewed vigour at a time when daily experience demonstrated their increasing fragility in practice. Just as William Harrison's highly traditional description of the Elizabethan social order was ceasing to bear any relationship to recognizable reality at the very moment at which it was written, so sumptuary laws and behavioural regulations were being proclaimed loudest at precisely the point when they were no longer reflecting actual circumstances.

Manner of speech was another of the symbols of order and degree to come under scrutiny in this period of significant and rapid social development. in the sixteenth century orthoepists and educationalists began to stress that 'the King's English' was not merely more 'correct' in the grammatical and philological sense, but actually 'better', in a qualitative and emotive one. It was not only more 'lawful' but also more 'civil'. Writing in about 1570, George Puttenham made the point most clearly when he pointed out that the best usage was determined not so much by regional origins as by social status. The 'better brought vp sort . . . men ciuill and graciously behauoured and bred', spoke and wrote correctly wherever they lived just as the lower orders spoke badly irrespective of their habitat: 'a craftes man or carter, or other of the inferiour sort, though he be inhabitant or bred in the best towne or citie in this realme . . . doe abuse good speaches by strange accents or ill shapen soundes, and false ortographie'. Thus 'in euery shyre of England there be gentlemen and others that speake but specially write as good southerne as we of Middlesex or Surrey do, but not the common people of euery shire, to whom the gentlemen, and also their learned clarkes do for the most part condescend . . .'. This was a picture confirmed soon afterwards by Robert Reyce on the basis of the evidence in Suffolk. Among a certain rank of person, he observed, I find no dialect or idiom in the same different from others of the best speach and pronunciation . . . so having no naturall defect proper to this soile, doe wee disgrace that with any broad or rude accent which wee receive at the hands of gentility and learned schollers, whereof wee haue many trained up in the best and purest language. Howbeit I must confesse our honest country toyling villager to expresse his meaning to his like neighbour, will many times lett slip some strang different sounding tearmes, no wayes intelligible to any of civill education, vntill by the rude comment of some skillfull in that forme, which by dayly vse amongst them is familier, they bee after their manner explaned.

As these comments suggest, problems of communication existed not only between people from the various regions of England, but between those of different social classes living in close proximity. Thus by the Elizabethan period in Cornwall most of the common people spoke English, but to a gentleman such as Richard Carew they seemed to 'disgrace it, in part, with a broad and rude accent' and they used, moreover, 'certayne peculiar phrases, which require a speciall dictionarie for their interpretation'. In mid-seventeenth-century Derbyshire, Philip Kinder seems to have been at a complete loss to characterize the impenetrable dialect of his neighbours. ' They have no thunder in theire speech in coughing in the teeth like the lower Britans in France. They have noe querulous tone like the Irish, noe wharleing like them of Carleton in Leic[ster]shire: but sumething a broad language much like the Dorsett dialect in Greeke.' A few generations later it was confirmed in Derbyshire that these 'particularities are not the language of the better sort, but of the vulgar; for they, except by chance, speak as elegantly and correctly as in any part of England'.

Given the contemporary anxiety about status and the concern to maintain demarcations of rank and degree amid alarming fluidity in the social structure, conservative commentators upbraided the nobility and gentry who failed to speak in the pure and proper way befitting their place and position. Equally they spurned the vulgar sort who dared to ape the language of those above them in a manner which was at best insubordinate and at worst a dangerous progenitor of upward mobility. On the one and, it was 'a pitty when a noble man is better distinguished from a clowne by his golden laces, then by his good language' chided a Jacobean observer. On the other hand, remarked another, citizens were 'never so out of countenance, as in the imitation of gentlemen', be it in 'habite, manner of life, conversation, and even the phrase of speech'. It was common for critics of the English stage, from the Elizabethan period onwards, to blame the breakdown of order and morality on the way in which dramatists blurred social distinctions by making gentle folk speak like clowns and country bumpkins sound like lords. 'Nothing put into the mouths of persons' which does not agree with their 'age, sex, and condition', Jeremy Collier advised playwrights in the 1690s. 'An old man must not appear with the profuseness and levity of youth; a gentleman must not talk like a clown, nor a country girl like a town jilt.'

One of the notable social consequences of economic change during the sixteenth century was the increase in wealth, education, and political responsibility enjoyed by those in the lower middle ranks of both rural and urban society. Many of the freeholders and secure tenant farmers who were able to benefit from market conditions in the countryside and the skilled craftsmen and modest tradesmen of the larger towns who contributed to an expanding service sector, enjoyed significant improvements in their material circumstances. At the same time, the increases in educational provision and the expansion of central government in the localities which were such features of the century after 1540, reached down to include and co-opt these social groups to an ever greater degree. Significantly, the phrase 'middle sort of people' emerged in the mid-sixteenth century, and was being used quite regularly by the 1620s, to describe those groups whose modest economic competence or petty political authority gave them a degree of substance and status within local society. It is precisely these groups which, so modern research into speech patterns reveals, are most concerned to imitate the language of their 'betters', to ratify their social and economic gains with this and other cultural symbols of 'civility'.

A varied body of evidence exists from the late sixteenth century to suggest that the lower 'middling sorts' were already displaying this tendency towards linguistic emulation. In the 1590s Thomas Nashe thought that exposure to greater amounts of literature had 'made the vulgar sort, here in London . . . aspire to a richer puritie of speach, than is communicated with the comminalitie of any nation vnder heauen'. At the same time, Robert Reyce noticed in Suffolk that while 'the ruder sort' spoke an unintelligible dialect, 'the artificer of the good townes scorneth to follow them, when he naturally prideth in the counterfitt imitation of the best sort of language'. In the countryside, meanwhile, the yeomanry were also following the example of the best English. In 1600 Samuel Rowlands referred to the way in which 'barbarisme' was being banished by 'the goodman . . . at his plow' who had become so marked by his 'new printed speech, that cloth will now compare with veluet breech'. A tract of 1598 apparently identified a social trend when it offered advice to the yeoman's son aspiring to be the servant of a gentleman. As well as altering his appearance and manners, 'he must as well as he can, make satisfaction for the queenes currant English before by him clipped: he must now make it full wayght, good and currant lawfull English.'

That the attempts of the aspiring 'middling sorts' to imitate 'the best sort of language' was a common phenomenon, is suggested by the fact that it was already becoming a source of amusement among the social elite in the sixteenth century. As early as the 1530s, when Thomas Wilson was a student at Cambridge, he had witnessed a townsman offering a gift to the new Provost of King's College, 'that lately came from the court'. The 'simple man beyng desirous to amende his mother tongue' among scholars said: ' "Cha good even my good lorde, and well might your lord-ship vare: Understandyng that your lordship was come, and knowyong that you are a worshipfull Pilate, and keeps a bominable house: I thought it my duetie to come incantivantee, and bryng you a pottell a wine, the whiche I beseeche your lordeship take in good worthe".' So it was that the servant in elevated company, the upwardly mobile tradesman or the socially ambitious aritsan's wife, who tried to affect the best English but slipped unwittingly into solecism and mispronunciation, would become comic stereotypes long before Fielding's Mrs Slipslop and Sheridan's Mrs Malaprop perfected the form in the eighteenth century. A number of Shakespeare's humble characters, such as Juliet's nurse, the cockney Mistress Quickly, the plodding constable Dogberry, and Bottom the weaver, are rendered ridiculous by their malapropisms and linguistic infelicities. Such caricatures remained a source of humour on the London stage throughout the seventeenth century and beyond.

Another butt of stage humour was the broad dialect of country folk. To urban dwellers, of course, rustics had always provided stock figures of fun. But the new heights to which comic acting rose in the first age of London's established theatres gave this age-old trope an added dimension by exploiting the increasingly conspicuous differences between the speech of court and country. It is surely significant that Elizabethan comedians typically wore the garb of a countryman. The greatest of them, Richard Tarlton, was renowned for it. 'You should ha' seene him ha' come in', says the stage-keeper at the beginning of Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, 'and ha' beene coozened i' the cloath-quarter, so finely!' The russet coat was one of old Dick's trade marks, and his habit of 'mistaking words, as the fashion is, in the stage-practice', was another. At this time, the common English name for a countryman was 'clown', derived from the Latin colonus. Tarlton may well have been responsible for the fact that the first recorded usage of the word in its modern sense, of stage buffoon, is around 1600.

In the seventeenth century, Tarlton was succeeded as the greatest comedian of his day by John Lacy. Lacy was a brilliant impressionist whose imitations of country bumpkins and foreigners made him a favourite of Charles II. Aubrey recorded that Ben Jonson 'tooke a catalogue . . . of the Yorkshire dialect' from Lacy, who hailed from near Doncaster, as 'his hint for clownery' in A Tale of a Tub. On four occasions in the 1660s Samuel Pepys saw him in one of his most celebrated roles, the 'country fellow' or 'clowne', Johnny Thump, in Shirley's Changes, or Love in a Maze. In 1667 he also attended Edward Howard's Change of Crowns in which 'Lacy did act the country gentleman come up to court'. In addition, Pepys made reference to his having appeared in Richard Brome's Jovial Crew, one of the best comedies to be based around thieves' cant. Lacy may actually have been too skilful for his own good: his accent as Sauny the Scot in his own version of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew was so strong that Pepys could not understand him. But his Irishman seems to have been more accessible to London audiences. John Evelyn saw him play the part of Teague in Sir Robert Howard's popular comedy, The Committee, in November 1662 and thought 'that mimic Lacy acted the Irish-footeman to admiration'. The following summer Pepys considered his interpretation of the character, 'beyond imagination'.

Thus characteristic features of the 'country clown' were well established in the minds of Londoners by the time Henry Peacham summed him up in 1638. His ordinary discourse is of last year's hay, which he hopes will give six pounds the load at Smithfield, and of the rate of swine in Rumford market. All his jests consist in rude actions with the hand or foot. His speech is Lincolnshire about Wrangle and Frieston; if he be westward, about Taunton and ten miles beyond. Restoration drama continued to be cluttered with provincial simpletons and rustic boors who came up to town and betrayed their clownish manners and course dialects. John Dryden could not understand why gentlemen found the conversation of 'Cobb and Tib' a jest in 'the theatre, when they would avoid it in the street', but the appetite for such material remained undiminished.

In the 1660s and 1670s Londoners were delighted by the jigs which Thomas Jordan composed for civic pageants, such as 'A dialgoue betwixt Tom and Dick, the former a country-man, the other a citizen'; 'The Cheater's Cheated', which had as the butt of its joke the speech of Wat, the Somerset clown; 'A countryman, a citizen, and sedition' which featured Tom Hoyden of Taunton Dean; and the 'Musical Interlude' starring 'Crab, a west-countryman'. By the later seventeenth century, the dialect speech of country lovers in wooing ballads was being accompanied by the ridiculous love letters written between them in chapbook tales. Typically, the Somerset man, Dick Downright, was made to pen one such epistle in True Lover's New Academy which Pepys bought and added to his collection of 'Penny Merriments'. In Bog Witticisms another choice example was written by a country scrivener on behalf of a servant to his sweetheart, a Welsh kitchen maid. These rustic characters were ridiculed not simply because they were provincial but because they were ill-educated, uncouth, and lowly. Significantly in George Stuart's dialogues of 1686 between two provincials of different rank, 'a Northumberland gentleman and his tenant, a Scotchman', only the latter spoke in broad dialect.

Crude as these comic stereotypes of popular drama and cheap print were, they may well have been symptomatic of very marked differences in the texture of urban and rural life. Many of the important cultural developments of the period such as the growth of educational institutions, the ownership of books, and the consequent increases in literacy levels were much more evident in towns and cities than in the countryside. This served to accentuate, or add another dimension to, the distinctions which had always existed between the social and intellectual environment of London and that of the provincial capitals, as between them and the smaller market centres, and then, in turn, between these and their surrounding hinterlands. The hierarchy of urbanization, which was mirrored by the hierarchy of educational provision and literacy levels, seems also to have been reflected in the hierarchy of 'purity' and 'civility' in speech. There was a big difference, thought Puttenham, between the English 'spoken in the the kings court, or in the good townes and cities' and that 'in the marches and frontiers, or in port townes', and the latter was different again from that to be heard 'in any vplandish village or corner of a realme, where is no resort but of poore rusticall or vnciuill people'.

The gulf between urban and rural English was a constant refrain of commentators on the language. 'Olde and obsolete wordes are most vsed of country folke', commented one Elizabethan. 'And what I say here of dialects is pertinent only to country people,' remarked Alexander Gil in 1619. Other opinions from around the nation confirmed this distinction. Thus, Sir Thomas Smith made it clear in the 1540s that the peculiarities of pronunciation in his native Essex were confined only to the 'rustici'. In Suffolk, Reyce was later struck by the difference between the speech of the 'artificer of the good townes' and that of the 'honest country toyling villager'. 'And most of all if you listen to country people', it was said of Jacobean Somerset, 'it is easily possible to doubt whether they are speaking English, or some foreign language'. At the end of the seventeenth century, Hugh Todd boasted that 'in the citty and greater towns' of the diocese of Carlile, 'they speak English with more propriety and a better accent than is done in most counties in England', although he was notably silent about the country districts. This same distinction clearly applied on the 'Celtic fringes' no less. 'They have many words in the country that citizens understand not', commented Sir William Brereton as he passed through Lowland Scotland in 1635. A satirical attack on the Welsh in 1682 recognized similarly that 'their native gibberish is usually prattled through the whole of Taphydom except in their market towns, whose inhabitants being a little raised up do begin to despise it'.

Significantly, it was in the last quarter of the sixteenth century that the word 'rustical' came to be used not only to denote a rural dweller but also to imply someone with the manners and speech to be found in the countryside. The cultural and behavioural connotations of the word are clear when the city gentleman says to the country gentleman in a dialogue of 1579, that if youngsters are 'brought vp in the countrey till they bee sixteene or eyghteene yeares olde, before which time they are so deepely rooted in rusticitie', they will be beyond all civility. For, 'through rusticall company in childehoode, [they] doo get them selues as it were an habite in loughty lokes, clownish speech, an other ungentlemanly iestures, as it is a good while (yea many times neuer) that these rusticities bee leaste'. By the seventeenth century the standard dictionary definition of 'rusticity', and even of 'rural', was 'clownish, vplandish, or churlish and vnmannerly', or 'rudeness: clownish behauiour'. It was then coming to be employed in the language of differentiation within local society, as when the respectable inhabitants of Manningtree petitioned the Essex county quarter sessions in 1627 because the behaviour of local alehouse-keepers had grown 'so rusticall that for the better sort it is almost no living with them'. By the later seventeenth century, the adjective 'rustic' had more to do with uncouth, and 'slovenly speech', than it had to do with things rural.

In parallel with this, the term 'urbanity' was also coming to be used in the sense of the best manners and speech, those to be found in the city. In 1586 Angel Daye defined it as meaning 'ciuile, courteous, gentle, modest or well ruled, as men commonly are in cities and places of good gouernment', but thought that, as yet, 'the word is not comon amongst vs'. Within a generation, however, it had found its way into the new English dictionaries where its linguistic connotations were clear: 'courtesie in speech or behauiour', 'gentle in speech and gesture, pleasant in behaviour and talk, comely, seemly'.