Category: Media Moments

How to approach reconstructing an Elizabethan/Jacobean room in 8 (not so easy) steps

Featured by middlingculture, posted in Media Moments, Project Post, Uncategorized

Last year, Middling Culture embarked on an ambitious project to digitally recreate an upper-middling status room from the 1620s.  The space selected for this reconstruction is a (now) empty room in a house extension from the early 1600s. The property, originally part of an urban house on the High Street in Reigate, Surrey, was dismantled and re-erected at the Weald and Downland Living Museum, but the interior is not accessible to visitors. It is a space with a lot of history but a shadow of its former self with no means of direct engagement. We’ve been working closely with different organisations, collections and individuals to help bring the room to life; to imagine how it was experienced by different people from the time.

Exterior view of the house extension from Reigate, now at the Weald and Downland Living Museum.

The process of digital reconstruction is fascinating but not straightforward. As a team, we’ve learnt a lot about how digital technology can be used as a tool of engagement and learning in Arts and Humanities research projects. But the process of digital reconstruction has also allowed us to think more carefully and critically about the homes and lives of the urban middling sort. As a result, virtual reconstruction offers an alternative way of approaching the project’s original research questions while also providing a means of sharing our findings.

So, how do you begin to reconstruct a room from the 1620s? We’ve condensed our approach so far into 8 (not so easy) steps:

Surviving fireplace with replica wall paintings in the parlour room in the house extension from Reigate.

1. Research

Where it all started.

Middling Culture is a research project focusing on the cultural and literate lives of the urban middling sort in early modern England and our findings over the course of the project underpin the production of our virtual room. Of course, we also conducted specific investigations into the space we wanted to recreate. We researched the type of room (a parlour), its position (first floor), the location of the house (Reigate in Surrey), its building history as well as evidence about the people who owned and rented it.  We looked at archaeological reports relating to the site and studied any surviving decorative and architectural elements remaining in the room (and the rest of the property) today. Once we had established who lived there in the 1620s we built on our previous and ongoing research into domestic material culture to make decisions about what sort of objects would have filled the space and how they facilitated the domestic, occupational, literate and creative lives of its residents. For this, we employed the project’s vast database of surviving probate inventories.

2. Databases

Do not underestimate the value of a database, or the people who can help you navigate them.

Databases are fundamental tools often developed by major projects studying early modern probate documents (wills and inventories). We had a large database to work with, filled with information from our different case study areas (Chester, Stratford-upon-Avon, Bristol to name a few). With the help of our database expert, Dr Mark Merry, we were able to run queries (complex searches) to establish the most statistically likely furniture and furnishings for our room. The database let us model representative groups of objects that were found in historical parlours, generating models which were sensitive to place, period and social status. We could address questions about the quantity of objects, clusters of object types commonly found together, the visual and material detail of objects with lots of qualitative description (e.g. colours, materials and wear), arrangement of objects within the room and so on, which would not have been possible without the querying tools available with the database. Our reconstruction might be creative and interpretive, but it is rooted in extensive documentary evidence.

This wonderfully carved chair is one of the items chosen to fill the reconstructed parlour room.
Oak armchair, c.1620, SBT 1993-31/4.
© Shakespeare Birthplace Trust

3. Filling the room

Find surviving examples of the objects you want to fill your room – this isn’t always easy if your occupiers were of middling status.

Once we had an initial list of contents gleaned from probate evidence, we set about finding extant examples of furniture and furnishings of the correct date and social status. Some of the items chosen to fill our room are objects or documents that we have studied at other stages in the project. These are our ‘hero’ objects: items we want to highlight because they are central in articulating particular elements of ‘middling culture’. These hero objects will feature in another of our digital outputs – our online exhibition (more details to follow soon). Sourcing a fuller range of objects to fill the rest of the space was not an easy task. Most domestic items from the early 1600s are elite in status. Of the ‘middling’ items that do survive, many have been altered or restored over the centuries and it can be challenging to trace the origins and location of production for each item. Many of the furnishings and fittings were carefully sourced from a variety of museum collections. The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust hold a substantial collection of domestic furniture from the 1500s and 1600s, and a large proportion of the objects recreated for our room are based on items from this collection. The National Trust, Folger Shakespeare Library, Portable Antiquities Scheme and Museum of London collections also care for a significant amount of ‘everyday’ household items and documents matching the information found in probate inventories. After many searches, mood boards and various versions of object lists, we found an extant example of each item we wanted to appear in our parlour room.

4. Floorplans

Think about how your virtual objects might fit in your virtual space.

The room itself set certain restrictions on its contents, and this offers important evidence for the surprising ‘fullness’ of some early modern rooms. The dimensions and layout of the space determined our object positioning as only one of the four walls provided a suitable position for the bed, the others being occupied by windows, a fireplace and a staircase. We were then able to plan our other objects around this key item, informed by the qualitative evidence from the probate materials about which objects were kept with or next to one another. Urban parlours in the 1620s were multifunctional spaces and this had to be reflected in the layout of the room. We wanted to recreate the feel of the room as if you were stood in or navigating the space, so we followed the exact dimensions of the room as well as the correct measurements of each extant object positioned within. This meant a lot of reshuffling and moving of items, while also thinking about the flow and function of the space. Using floorplanning software, we went through various layouts. This really helped us to think about how the room was actually used, as well as how people entering the room might have interacted with the space – what they might have seen and in what order.

5. Creative commissioning

To create an immersive experience, work with creative people.

We commissioned four brilliant creative writers to help us bring the room and its residents to life. We gave them information about four people associated with the town and property in the 1620s, worked up into fictionalised characters, along with short ‘catalogue’ style descriptions of each of our ‘hero’ objects, taken from our digital exhibition. Each took on one of the four characters and wrote insightful and emotive narratives evoking their characters interactions with our hero objects.  These narratives were then performed by four talented actors and their voices will feature in the room as it is encountered by users. Some of the writers and actors commissioned for this creative aspect of the reconstruction were not familiar with the specific time period of the project, so their imaginings of the different interactions, responses and experiences people may have had with the room and its contents has been one of the most insightful aspects of this work. We can’t wait to share this creative and emotive element to our reconstruction.

6. The design brief

Essential when commissioning artists and designers.

Creating a design brief meant putting all our research, selections and examples in one place, but it also helped us to refocus the purpose and aims of the project. Our brief for the digital heritage artist, Grant Cox, who has modelled the room included background to the project, an overview of its purpose and audiences, and other logistical pieces of information. The floorplan, object selections and extant examples accompanied the brief with numerous visual aids and website links.  A brief is an essential starting point for any artistic commission: it is a useful reference point and ensures that the research remains central to the more creative elements of reconstruction.

Attention to detail – deciding on the right tone and colour for the oak armchair from SBT’s collections (see above). Grant Cox from ArtasMedia gave us various options for us to choose from based on our research.

7. Workshops

 Be available for discussion and meetings.

Emails, meetings and regular communications are perhaps the most important elements of any digital reconstruction project. We’ve been lucky enough to work with a digital heritage artist from ArtasMedia who is passionate about recreating objects, sites and scenes from the past. From a single stitch on a tapestry cushion to the light cast on a wooden armchair, we have spent hours discussing minute details of shape, surface texture, colour, quality and condition. This has been an exciting part of project and through these discussions we have seen the room take shape. Dedicating time to regularly meet those involved in creating the room not only aids decision-making but allows you to be a part of the technical and creative process of digitally co-producing the space.

8. Handing over the reins

Making space for others to bring their skills and knowledge to the project makes for a more creative, inclusive and enlightening experience.

We set out to virtually create an immersive, emotive experience of middling domestic life in the 1620s. This, however, required expertise beyond our remit. The project’s research, goals and objectives may have been the starting point, but we had to hand over a significant amount of responsibility and trust to those with the creative and digital skills to bring the room to (virtual) life. We’ve worked with creative writers, actors, digital artists and storytellers whose skill is to reproduce the past in creative ways. The process of reconstruction is incredibly collaborative, and this is one of the greatest rewards and benefits of such a project.

A snapshot from an early version of the digital parlour room, modelled by Grant Cox.

We hope we’ve shed a little light on our approach and experience so far. Virtual reconstruction projects take time, research and resource and, in truth, there are no easy steps or shortcuts. Nonetheless, the process itself produces valuable insights and significant outcomes for any historical research project. We’re currently working with a digital storyteller to explore how people will encounter and interact with the virtual space and its contents. For this, we are going back to our aims and objectives, but also thinking about the nature of our audiences and how their engagement can help us understand our historical evidence in new ways. We want the room to be educational, emotional and immersive, but we also want it to be entertaining and challenging. For example, how does it feel not to be able to interact with certain objects and what does this say about the different gender, age, education and life experience of different members of the middling? What if some of the objects evoke sadness and loss, while others bring back memories of thwarted love? Experiencing the reconstructed room might not always be comfortable, but it offers the opportunity to engage with the complexity of past lives and culture in ways that the typical historic house interior rarely manages. 

We’ll be offering more thoughts and findings in the coming months as we reach the final stages of our reconstruction. We’re truly excited to share the finished product and learn from how its virtual visitors use it.

Alexandra Hewitt

The Cally Family: Chester’s Early Modern Music Scene

by middlingculture, posted in history, Media Moments

This document details a rather formal conclusion to a brotherly quarrel.

BL Harley MS 2054

Dated 1599, it’s preserved as part of a manuscript “anthology” of copied and original documents from Chester’s administrative past by early antiquarian, Randle Holme II.

The brothers in question, Robert and George Cally, were both musicians, and they seem not to have been able to agree how to share the profits of their profession. This formal accord, signed by both of them, concluded that they should split the shares equitably between them based on the number of sons each had (1 and 2 respectively, at this date, with provision for this to change in the future). Having agreed to terms, they pledged to “Contynue be and remayne of one consorte and to play vpon their instrum{en}t{es} together still in one Company and be loving and frendlie.” The subsequent shape of their careers shows that this happy settlement didn’t last so long… But the Callies do present a fascinating case study of a large family of musicians adept at navigating the social hierarchy, status, and commercial possibilities of musical performance in the early modern city.

Meet the Callies

The Cally/Kelly family were something of a Chester dynasty of musicians. They had been active as musicians or performers from at least the mid-sixteenth century, and the George and Robert of this particular document were at their busiest in the early years of the 1600s.

After their agreement to continue as “one Company,” they seem to have split and sought different areas of patronage in the following decade. George, for instance, became a servant to the Earl of Derby (William Stanley), while Robert worked for Sir John Savage—both local elite figures. In their introduction to the Cheshire edition of Records of Early English Drama, Elizabeth Baldwin, Lawrence Clopper, and David Mills point out how the nature of this patronage arrangement speaks to a complex hierarchy of service: in 1609, under these new employment situations, George accused Robert of “crouching” to Savage (ie being servile or sycophantic), the erstwhile Mayor of the City, and he suggested that working for the mayor was far less prestigious than working for the noble Earl of Derby (lxiii).

Nearly a decade after signing the accord with his brother, George became the first musician to be made “free” of the city (granting him privileges and rights in accordance with his profession), granted in 1608 without any customary fee. He was clearly proactive not only in arranging his financial legacy for his children but in securing requisite status and authority within the city to practice music as a serious trade or profession.

The Case of the Missing Musicians

This proactive approach went further in 1613, when the Chester “waits”—the musicians who work formally for the city—just vanished without a trace! George saw this as an opportunity to petition the City for the role for himself and his company. He asked the Assembly whether he “and his felowe Musitians may be admitted waytes […] in steede of the Waytes now absent fyndinge Instrumentes of his own Charg to perform the service” (REED p. 387 and and Calendar of Assembly Minutes, ed. Margaret J. Groombridge, 1956, p. 66). The Assembly delayed a decision “vntill it may be vnderstoode what are become of the ould waytes.” This tantalising Case of the Missing Musicians notwithstanding, the Assembly did eventually grant the petition, and the mayor even gives them extra instruments on top of those Cally promised to secure himself: a “double Curtayle [a bassoon-like instrument] wantinge a staple of brasse for a reede, and one tenor cornett beinge the Citties instrumentes” (REED 383).

George was also more widely engaged in commercial competition and jostling for status, petitioning in 1615 for protection against “strangers” who were teaching music and dance. His complaint asserts his rights as a freeman of the city and also draws on his newfound public “office” as City Wait; he also emphasises how his musical ability and dance teaching have not only helped keep him and his family of ten children “but hath allso obtained & procured a good respecte and estimacion from men of the best sort & generall fashion truelie sensible and respectiue of the like faculties [of music and dance]” REED 407-08). Cally’s wording confers significant status on the public musician, indicating the role’s respectability and music’s potential for social mobility (and so speaking very closely to Ipswich’s Marten the Minstrel, who likewise occupied important public office as a town musician).

Just Dance 1612

Such musical rivalry is detectable throughout Chester’s rich history of music, play, and performance, sometimes overlapping with its wider leisure industry (especially in drinking!). In 1595, for instance, we hear of Richard Preston from Warrington, a musician who was visiting with his company when he gets into an altercation with an over-eager musical enthusiast (available on the Intoxicants website):

about 10 of the clock in the night upon Tuesday last this examinate and his company were playing upon their night’s music up St Werburgh’s Lane out of the Eastgate Street towards their host Foxall his house and saith that in that Lane Mr William Hicock clerk who came out of John Stile’s tavern overtook them and spake to this examinate and requested this examinate to leave him this examinate’s treble violin to play upon […]

Chester Record Office ZQSE 5/46

After a few drinks, the evening of violin-exchange turns into the theft of the musician’s sword by the drunken Hicock and a violent scuffle. In 1612, a Quarter Sessions case shows Robert involved in similarly impromptu performance, with an apprentice going to a “Sillibub” at Margery Waterson’s house, before meeting Robert Cally at 4 in the morning, whom he asked “to teache him daunce & stayed dancing one hower” (REED 391).

A pamphlet written by T. F. in 1579 offers a lively picture of what such dance teaching might have looked like. Written partly in satire and partly in censure of such revelry, the pamphlet’s speaker tells us how he visited a dancing school in London to partake in some of the pleasures “that were straunge and noueltie [sic] vnto vs of the Cuntrie”:

when wée weare come into the Schoole: the Musitions were playing and one dauncing of a Galiard, and euen at our entring hée was beginning a trick as I remember of sixteens or seuenteens, I doo not very wel remember but wunderfully hee leaped, flung and took on

Newes from the North C3r

T. F. indicates something of what visitors to Chester might meet in the Callies—a distinctly different urban leisure scene from quieter surrounding towns and villages. Such a difference is certainly borne out by the many different court documents of Chester from the mid-sixteenth-century onwards that recount individuals visiting or holidaying in the city, simply in order to sightsee, to drink in inns and taverns, or to meet up with friends. As such, individuals like the Callies helped create an atmosphere of play that was central to Chester’s economy and to the movement of people in and through its streets—in other words, to its local identity and sense of place.

Middling Musicians

The Callies therefore occupied a major role in the festive life of the city, while, even in a court case dealing with bad behaviour, delineating its propriety or respectability, in a similar way to George’s advertising of positive reviews from “men of the best sort.” As he intimates in his petition in 1615, by monopolising the trade of music and dance in the city, individuals like Cally could control its status and ensure that it was taught and performed to standard.

And so the document above signed between Robert and George in 1598/9 testifies to a rivalry developed early in their musical career. It also makes clear that at this earlier stage than the examples above, the two played together in a troupe, ahead of subsequent work for two different elite employers (Savage and Stanley respectively) and eventually for the city (at least for George and possibly for Robert or other Cally family musicians who may have formed part of George’s promised “company”). Despite their various quarrels, their brotherly connection and the longer family history of professional music-playing clearly helps map for them a way to make a living as musicians and dancing instructors. In this, they parallel the extraordinary rise to prominence of Edward Alleyn, a key and perhaps exceptional middling success story, who began as a player in a troupe with his elder brother; Shakespeare’s brother, Edmund, who followed the playwright to be an actor in London, also springs to mind!

The signatures of George and Robert Cally on this document offer a wonderful chance to get a little closer to the rich and tempestuous creative lives of these two remarkable personalities of early modern Chester.

Callan Davies

Media Moment 1: Bristol’s Audits

by middlingculture, posted in Media Moments

This blog introduces a new series of posts related to Middling Culture research: Media Moments.  These posts will provide short “glimpses” into topics that relate to ordinary, everyday lives in early modern England under the scope of this project, from keywords to documentation to objects and images.  This post begins the series by considering early modern Bristol’s civic accounts, which are presented in the surviving yearly audits made by the Chamberlain (now held at Bristol Archives).

“Audit is about much more than just the numbers,” according to one of the world’s Big Four professional services firms; “it’s about attesting to accomplishments and challenges […].”  For professional financial auditors, “numbers tell a story.”

In that sense, auditors’ scrutiny of today’s businesses shares an affinity with historians’ interrogation of the past—its successes and its failures; the lessons to be learned and the stories that are sometimes obscured, eclipsed, or simply hidden from sight.  One central source for anyone approaching such “big theme” issues is to look at the finances behind both individuals and communities—and to consider the different stories they might tell.  Such work is unsurprisingly at the centre of a range of historiographic traditions, not least economic history.  The growth of early modern material culture studies over the past thirty years or so has also led to focus on sources such as personal account books, wills, and inventories.  Each of these sources is built from descriptions, quantities, and prices and they offer insight not only into the development of local and national economies but into issues as various as individual wealth, domestic interiors, personal networks, and the circulation of the paper on which such details are written—the life of the material text itself.  In Hugh Oldcastle’s words, from 1588, such sources are “used and compiled of many things.”[i]

It is with these several strands in mind that I approached the financial statements of early modern Bristol from the 1550s to 1620. 

Bristol Archives, F/AU/1/13, p. 254-55 (opening of audit from 1592). Reproduced with permission from Bristol Archives.

Each year, the city’s Mayor commissioned an audit of its accounts by its Chamberlain.  They begin with the yearly rents of property owned by the Corporation, which include a range of houses, tenements, and shops across the centre of the city.  They go on to detail the fees and dues paid by the Council for various obligations and debts and then list the individuals made “free” of the city (i.e. those given the licence to practice their trade there) either by apprenticeship of usually 7 years, or otherwise by marriage to a freeman’s widow or daughter, by having a prominent father, or by “redemption”—permission granted at a fee by the Council.  All of those made free here are men, but a number of those training apprentices are women.  Perhaps the richest vein in these yearly audits is the general payments: these include expenditure per week and range from substantial building work at the quayside or marsh or reparations on Council-owned buildings to money for horse hire and travel, gifts for visiting noblemen, or cleaning and gilding done on the swords and guns belonging to the Council and its members or officeholders.

These documents can help create and shape historical narrative and they offer some insight into “ordinary” business and the men and women involved—often otherwise obscured.  It is here where many of those in the middle sections of society—and those “below” (i.e. unnamed labourers, “a poore woman [paid] for keeping clean the house of office and the watering place at the Guildhall door” (F/AU/1/15, p. 216 [1604])—lie recorded in acts that range from the mundane (cleaning the sewers) to the sensational (piratical escape and capture).  In part, these sources provide a useful chance to understand more about what might define “ordinary” or “middling” identity: not only do a number of figures here receive regular, substantial income from their work (therefore providing economic indicators of status), they also occupy positions of distinction within the community—as officeholders, as people shaping the material life of the city, as key suppliers of materials (including stationery, furniture, or arms) for civic administration and display; or as senior employers in the building, painting, stationery, or leisure industries.  The remainder of this blog offers some glimpses into how entries in these audits can bring questions of middling culture, and the writing of history more broadly, to the surface.

Accounting for the Past: Bristol’s Audits, 1550-1620

A number of “ordinary” individuals are preserved in the record only thanks to their civic contract work as recorded here.  Some of these were clearly substantial business people in Bristol society, regularly contracted for major infrastructure works by the Council across decades—but a number of these cannot (as yet) be found in other record sources (including marriage, birth or death records), outside these audits.  

Others in the labouring class also play significant roles in Council business.  In 1578, the Council paid “William Savage a labourer for going on foot to the Court to Greenwich to deliver a letter sent from Mr Mayor to the body of the Council touching a letter which was received from my Lord Deputy Sir Henry Sydney touching the intent of Stewckley” (F/AU/1/11, p. 225)—a reference to the notorious English mercenary, Thomas Stukeley, killed later that year during The Battle of Alcazar in Morocco (who proved valuable fodder for stage plays across the following decades).  Savage’s postal duties show an interesting breadth of opportunities available to the “labourer” and indicate a civic “honour” or office that may have conferred status or distinction upon a non-elite worker.  Other such offices were occupied by the likes of prolific mason Thomas Barwell, a regular payee for a range of “subcontracted” work for the city, who was also one of Bristol’s “surveyors”: those responsible for assessing building work and the safety and integrity of existing or proposed structures.

In 1600, the Council paid one Widow Phippes “for painting the City’s Arms upon the new Conduit at the quay and for gold and other Colours” (F/AU/1/15, p. 84).  The entry testifies to the significant role that women played not only in the local economy but in inscribing civic identity into the city—here via her craft as a painter.  Presumably, Phippes must have been highly adept at her profession to gain this commission, and her family were also painters: in 1608, Morgan Phippes was made free thanks to his apprenticeship with one John Phippes in this trade; according to the Early Modern British Painters Database, (another) John Phippes (d. 1583, and perhaps Widow Phippes’s late husband) was also commissioned for work on Bristol’s gates.  This tiny glimpse into the Phippes’ suggests a small family dynasty of creatives, working in a period in England when “painting” was largely considered practical manual labour, but during which its status as a noble artistic pursuit was slowly gaining traction.

The bittiness of historical accounting documents means that, by their nature, they offer partial records of acts and exchanges and not discrete or rounded wholes.  As I have explored elsewhere with regard to theatre history, this scrappiness can be embraced as an inherent part of early modern bureaucracy and honoured in our analysis of the past.  Entries such as 

Item paid for a book of large paper of 4 quires for the Tolsey covered with calfskin vellum, bought it of John Pacie and delivered to Mr Pacie — 4 shillings (F/AU/1/11, [1579])

or

Item paid for taking down the stained cloths at the Tolsey — 4 pence (F/AU/1/18, p. 172 [1617])

represent the fullness of a particular type of record. The challenge, especially for a project such as ours, is how to preserve that spirit of story-less “scrap” while building around it a broader picture of social networks, material objects (in particular extant ones), and other markers of social and cultural status.  Part of the aim of this project is to gain a more holistic sense of the lives of “middling” individuals by looking at the fullness of their lived experience, in order to do as much justice as possible to those lives for whom we do have various “scrappy” surviving records but who are not always popularly at the centre of the stories we tell about the Tudor or Stuart period.

Ancient House painted cloth, from Ipswich (c. pre-1578); photo Tara Hamling. This photo shows one of the few surviving painted cloths from the period.

Among the more surprising features of these accounts are the instances where the Chamberlain bursts into fine storytelling form.  Take this series of “pirate” entries from 1577:

Item paid for the charges of a man sent to London at the appointment of Mr Mayor and of the Aldermen to obtain a special Commission for to arraign the Pirates, wherein a gentleman of the new Inn of Chancery took pains therein, wherein also William winter gave his good will, but my Lord Admiral would not agree to it, the charges of the said journey cost: 16 shillings…

[…] Item paid to Henry Robertes for a charge of Pursuing the pirates by the Flyboat whereby the said Pirates were forced to the shore, near Steart in the County of Somerset, whereby 4 of them were apprehended, whereof three were executed and one was saved by his book, and were arraigned by the Commission of Oyer and determiner for that the fact is felony by statute law, the which charges were examined by Mr Mayor and the Aldermen and amount to 12£

[…] Item paid to John Baton carpenter for 2 days’ work to frame timber for a pair of Gallows to be set up in Canning marsh, for the executing of 3 Pirates, which were condemned, who were of that company that stole a bark of Dongarvan out of the 6 rock and Pill of 30 Ton and went away with her, which being pursued by my Lord of Leicester’s flyboat, furnished with 60 persons well-armed, was forced to come a land near Steart, where the pirates fled, at 12 pence per day… (F/AU/1/11, pp. 164-65)

Not only do these entries preserve details about the pirates’ theft of a boat and their sensational capture by the Lord of Leicester’s man, who gave chase and ran them aground in Somerset, but they also record the mundane, the banal.  In the stories of these anonymous pirates, the quotidian and the sensational come together, and the picture of John Baton engaged in 2 days’ work constructing a gallows that will kill 3 men provides a sobering reminder that all of these payments—some more significantly (and irreversibly) than others—have material consequences for the men and women involved. 

Bristol Archives, F/AU/1/11, p. 165.

Coda

The payments in these audits witness Bristolians carrying out major acts of cultural construction.  They build inexpensive gallows to execute pirates but they also rebuild and repair leisure infrastructure or “new build” the legal and administrative hubs of the city in the Tolzey and the Guildhall.  They paint the City arms on its new water fountains. Each of these acts—and a surprising number of their actors—would have been entirely lost to posterity but for the survival of these meticulous audits.  As such, they testify to both the possibilities and limits of historical narrative; they present self-contained scraps of banal, brilliant, or tantalising detail, snapshots of action and activity across early modern Bristol.

On the broadest level, then, “auditing” the historical city by taking into account the fullest scope of records such as these is a fruitful and important way of recovering what we might mean by the loaded term “ordinariness” in the archives, identifying and exploring the lives of people whose names would be otherwise forgotten yet whose labours are inscribed into the fabric of the city.

Callan Davies

Notes

[i]Oldcastle, John. A briefe instruction and maner how to keepe bookes of accompts after the order of debitor and creditor…. London, 1588. Web. Early English Books Online. 5 Sep. 2019. B4v.