Literacy

Literacy—being able to read and write—was a fundamental skill for the middling sorts. It was central to occupational identities, from shopkeepers to those in growing professions like lawyer or scrivener. It also increasingly lay at the heart of these individuals' creative worlds, from game-play to poetry, song, and playwriting. These were forms enjoyed but also principally produced, shaped, and distributed by middling individuals. Print or theatrical markets could build reputation and entrench social and cultural “capital” (such as influence on local authorities or even access to the royal court).

The material signs of literacy were therefore visible throughout middling households, for instance desk boxes or inkwells, which established the status of their owners. Unlike the situation for the gentry above them, these middling artefacts advertised occupational or official dependence upon writing, as a means to earn a living or undertake community roles like churchwarden. Indeed, inkwells sometimes travelled with the writer as personal accessories, a sign of the overlaps between literacy and movement for work or leisure. Many documents were written “on the go,” in inns or taverns or even on roadside layovers. Literacy could even be a literal lifeline: when the bricklayer and playwright Ben Jonson was charged with murder, he escaped hanging by reciting the “neck verse” (Psalm 51:1) as a sign of educational distinction. As such, the ability to read and write well did not just undergird social mobility; it was symbolic of the sometimes violent social hierarchies of the period. Literacy could be formally acquired through schooling or picked up through practical work around the household in an overlap with numeracy, such as in bookkeeping, receipting, or note-taking by men, women, and children.

Crucially, the concept is not limited to the written word. Different forms of literacy were important across the middling spectrum, from the ability to recognise classical or moral symbolism (like the Virtues) to being able to read music or acquiring or using early maps. Meanwhile, an individual’s signature served not just as a personal identifier but a marker of economic transactions and moral obligation; the full signature can sometimes be distinguished from the record of those unable to write, who signed with a cross or a mark.