Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500-1700
by Adam Fox
Even in the modern age of near-universal literacy, few would question the continuing importance of office gossip or the power of rumour, displayed again when false reports of renewed 'action' by petrol delivery-drivers swept through the country within a matter of hours.
Adam Fox explores the still greater significance of the oral dimension of Tudor and Stuart culture, through popular speech, proverbial wisdom, 'old wives' tales', local custom, ballads, history, and the dissemination of news.
John Aubrey, the 17th century antiquarian, thought the spread of literacy and print had heavily eroded the older culture of oral tradition, but this was an exaggerated and over-simplified assessment. Fox's book focuses on the interaction of oral and literate culture, and demonstrates that, in many respects, print served to modify and even reinvigorate oral traditions rather than undermine them. Thus, a substantial proportion of 'traditional' proverbs, which we tend to imagine encapsulated folk wisdom, had found their way into common speech through published texts by Erasmus and others, which popularized snippets of ancient wisdom originating in classical Greece or Rome.
The fame of Robin Hood similarly received a huge boost from the ballads and chapbooks that carried his adventures to a far wider audience than had ever heard of him in the medieval period. Fox argues, persuasively, that almost no 'purely' oral tradition survived, and that we have instead a culture in which orality, the written world and then print fed off one another. Texts were read aloud to a circle of listeners, printed ballads offered simple lyrics to be memorized and sung (like modern pop songs) rather than read, while jestbooks recycled old jokes for readers who would then use them to amuse friends in the alehouse or round the fireside.
Our figures for 'literacy' in this period record only ability to sign one's name, and as Margaret Spufford established 20 years ago, reading ability among ordinary men and women was far more extensive. Fox emphasizes that even the world of the poor was permeated by print, and stresses too the influence of the written word before print's arrival.
Scribal writing remained important throughout the period. Villagers who invented mocking rhymes about a neighbour often took the trouble to find a scribe to write them down, while the familiar news-pamphlets of the 17th century were massively out-numbered by hand-written newsletters. Even in 1700 most people heard their news by word of mouth or hand-written missives rather than print. This is not to underrate the significance of the rise of print and literacy. Print and the dominance of London and the court helped to produce the triumph of the 'king's English', and the relegation of other forms to the status of regional dialects, increasingly dismissed as vulgar or comic.
At local level, flexible manorial customs transmitted by popular memory were becoming fixed as they were set down on paper. The relegation of much traditional lore to the status of 'old wives' tales' itself testifies to the diminished standing of such fare, which the educated came to see as suitable only for small children, and perhaps not even them. And no one could doubt the importance of cheap print in the English Revolution.
Paradoxically, the role of oral culture becomes visible to the historian only when it was written down by an early collector, or a seditious libel or scurrilous village rhyme landed its author in court. Assumptions about popular speech based on the relatively tame language of printed ballads were turned upside down when scholars began to explore the records of defamation cases and Star Chamber suits and discovered the earthy obscenities uttered by men and women. Some aspects of orality remain largely hidden.
Fox does not address here the 'problem' of the sermon, another key form of communication in the past. Though thousands of printed sermons survive, we have no way to gauge how far these polished artefacts differed from the routine fare delivered in rural pulpits week by week. Gender raises other, and probably insuperable problems. Numerous proverbs described the foibles of women, but almost none of men. Did men dominate every day speech, as well as the world of print? Or did they fail to penetrate the world of female proverbial lore, or dismiss it as not worth recording? We will probably never know. But Adam Fox has given us a massively documented, beautifully written work of impeccable scholarship, and one (like Aubrey's work three centuries ago) enriched throughout by a deep sense of affection for this world we have largely lost.
