At the same time, in an age becoming increasingly preoccupied with manners and decorum, 'urbanity' was frequently contrasted with 'rusticity' in discussions of propriety in wit and humour. These attitudes clearly had a significant influence on the emulative tendencies of the middling sort and others. As long as the 'rustic' dialects of the countryside were considered comical and the 'smooth' speech of the city was thought to be superior, there would be a natural tendency to be embarrassed by the former and aspire to the latter. The 'mere gull citizen' was no better than the typical country clown in John Earle's estimation, only he was somewhat more 'polite' and 'the quality of the city hath afforded hime some better dresse of clothes and language', which made him 'sillily admir'd' by his rural neighbour. In Elizabethan Suffolk it was already clear what an advantage in business it could be to speak in the best London fashion. The tradesman 'of the good towne', whose imitative tendencies struck Robert Reyce, found that his 'smooth speech, and civil conversation increase the number of his customers'. He could also appeal to a better class of clientele, and on purveying the goods, acquired through his contact with London, 'to his best customers of the next neighbour villages, hee in short time climeth to much credit and wealth'.

Such exposure to London fashion was highly significant, and the influence of the capital on the standards and tastes of the rest of the nation was clearly enormous in this respect as in others. Young people, in particular, poured into the metropolitan melting pot where they were exposed to the latest modes and trends at an impressionable age. In the early seventeenth century, 85 per cent of London's apprentices were from outside the city.

One of them was the 14-year-old John Lilburne, product of a minor gentry family from County Durham, who was immediately conspicuous by his north-country speech, 'rough-hewen' manners, and ignorance of the best etiquette, all of which deficiencies he set out to amend. When such people later returned to the provinces, as often happened, they became transmitters of the new refinements from centre to locality. In the century after 1650, one in every six adults is estimated to have lived in the capital city at some point during his or her life. That this had a strong influence on the emulation of its speech in the provinces is suggested by the proverb common in Cheshire, that 'She has been at London to call a "strea" a "straw" and a "waw" a "wall"', which was said in 1670 to be one 'the common people use in scorn of those who having been at London are ashamed to speak their own country dialect'. At the same time, Cornish people were said to speak better English than their West Country neighbours by virtue of copying 'the gentry and merchants' who had brought the language from London and 'imitated the dialect of the court, which is the most nice and accurate . . .'.

So it was that linguistic development in the early modern period may be said to have accentuated and exacerbated some of the fundamental distinctions within English society. There had always been disparities of wealth and status which were underscored by variations in manners and tastes. The cultural differences between urban and rural environments, or between the ambience of larger cities and that of smaller towns, were scarcely new in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But linguistic change added new dimensions to these existing cleavages. Patterns of speech both reflected the important social changes of this period and in many ways contributed to them. At the same time, however, these developments had assimilating tendencies which were felt quite far down in society. Artisans' wives and tradesmen, servants and apprentices, all adapted to the circumstances in which they found themselves; they too had to come to terms with a social system in which speech both expressed and determined place.

Patterns of speech in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England confirm the picture of a society in which for the majority of people local affinities and identities still subsumed national ones, in which 'country' meant neighbourhood, and mental horizons were fundamentally parochial. Local dialects remained intact in their myriad diversity and mutual opacity as a demonstration of the limits of national incorporation and cultural standardization. Despite this, however, they were not immune from the significant changes in the spoken language at this time as people of all ranks were encouraged to participate in the process of lin-guistic reform by a social system in which speech was an important determinant of position. The standard was set by the upper ranks in and around London, and the extraordinary growth of the metropolis during these centuries had a huge influence on the wider nation, as an agent of cultural integration no less than a motor of economic growth.