‘Language and Social Relations in Early Modern England’ by Hillary Taylor review

The angriest I’ve ever been at an academic seminar was after a paper on how ordinary people in early modern England talked about politics. To the attendees of the seminar in question, more used to elevated discussions of political theories and the history of ideas, this descent into the streets seemed like a shocking affront. One questioner explained to the speakers that this was a seminar which usually considered the ideas of ‘articulate people’, pausing delicately before describing the subjects of that day’s paper as ‘less articulate people’. The implication was clear: who cares what these people thought, even if we grant that they could think at all?

But even the words of the meanest mattered in early modern English society. The language of everyday life was a crucial mechanism by which the social order was expressed and maintained. There was a reason that labourers talking back to their bosses or Quakers refusing to use polite terms of address caused anxiety. The authorities, already busy cleansing Irish, Welsh, Cornish, and these islands’ other languages out of every official environment, lived in fear that the ‘murmurs’ of the population might break out into open revolt, disrupting the ‘quiet’ which was the sign of a well-functioning realm.

For Hillary Taylor, the relationship between language and power was not just articulated in linguistic policies or learned debates: it was worked out in everyday conversations between those at different levels of a rigidly hierarchised society. Taylor unpicks the social and economic contexts that led a 17th-century Norfolk fisherman to call a constable ‘Goodman Turd’, or a group of rowdy drinkers to chase away their stammering parson when he tried to talk them out of the alehouse. It’s an approach which strives to see early modern society as contemporaries understood it: highly socially unequal, and demanding constant awareness of one’s social status and the ability to perform authority or deference as appropriate.

We are lucky to have records that give us a sense of ordinary people’s voices as they spoke words that were heretical, treasonous, blasphemous, seditious, or insulting. The problem is that illicit speech is much more likely to leave an archival trace than everyday, unremarkable talk. The argument runs that these transgressive voices show us the unspoken rules that governed language and behaviour for everyone else. The challenge set by Taylor is to find out ‘how the politics of language played out in concrete circumstances’ – how language shaped everyday life and ordinary experience.

Language ideologies expressed the inequalities of early modern English society. Labouring people were commonly caricatured as so inarticulate that they might as well be animals – the yeoman Samuel Butler wrote of the labourer that ‘his perpetual conversation with beasts has rendered him one of them’. The assumption that the poor would happily perjure themselves at the request of their betters was so commonplace as to be ‘part of the cultural groundwater’, even if Taylor has found court records in which ordinary people spoke eloquently about their refusal to lie in court or their regret at having done so.

The ability to speak clearly and comprehensibly was important at every level of society. Even the greatest in the land didn’t escape censure: one London woman called Charles I a ‘stuttering foole’. Where scholars have often leaned on a metaphorical understanding of inarticulacy, Taylor seeks out moments in the archives when people found themselves literally unable to speak effectively. Overawed by the pressures of speaking in court, some people found themselves incapable of speech. In a case like that of John Gaul, accused of highway robbery in 1757, his stammering in court seems to have been an exacerbation of a preexisting speech impediment; a few decades earlier, a man accused of theft at the Old Bailey had presented his defence in writing, ‘pretending a great impediment in his speech’, but undermined his claim by quarrelling with a witness in a ‘clear strong voice’. The court’s scepticism may have been a factor in their decision to send him to the gallows.

Early modern authors theorised conversation as an exchange which could benefit both parties. The superior speaker could take pleasure in their inferior’s deference, while the inferior could bask in their superior’s regard. As such, ideas about conversations between people of different status ‘allowed domination to be repackaged as a figurative gift’. This was the logic underpinning the advice offered to those in charge of labourers – plenty of modern managers have clearly imbibed the advice that an effective leader ‘saith not to his servants, Goe yee, but Let us goe’, using ‘we’ rather than ‘ye’ to rank themselves among those doing the work. Conversationally, England expected everyone to do their bit to maintain an ordered society. But elites viewed with horror the risk of being overfamiliar with their inferiors: as Caleb Trenchfield wrote in 1671, ‘familiarity begets contempt, and contempt breaks the neck of obedience’.

Taylor is dissatisfied with our understanding of how language shaped early modern English society. Just as elevating unrepresentative moments of linguistic rule-breaking risks skewing how we think about social relations, so too does assuming that any instance of silence, shyness, or subjection was cover for ordinary people’s resistance. Not everybody was a rebel, and Taylor challenges historians to consider that ordinary people might have internalised linguistic ideologies, coming to believe what was said about their own inarticulacy, and to accept it as a reason for their subordination. In this way, ‘the politics of language cumulatively worked to circumscribe poor and labouring individuals’ capacity to develop critiques of their position and the social hierarchy in the first place’. It is an ‘admittedly bleak’ account, which sees ordinary people as commonly condemned to silence in their time and largely inaudible in the archives that survive. Unromantic but urgent, Taylor demands that we rethink how we listen to voices in the archives, and what we hear from them.

• Language and Social Relations in Early Modern England
  Hillary Taylor
  Oxford University Press, 272pp, £84
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

John Gallagher is Associate Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Leeds.