WFH – Middling Culture

Lettice Greene of Stratford-upon-Avon and her World

14 Aug 202014 Aug 2020 by middlingculture, posted in history, Project Post, WFH

Lettice Greene, like the majority of women in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, led a life in which her social status was determined by her male relatives. The life of her husband, Thomas Greene, was very well documented, particularly during the period 1602-1617, when he was town clerk and then steward of Stratford-upon-Avon. Lettice emerges as an important figure in documents made by or pertaining to her husband and other Stratford residents. This blog post presents a portrait of a middling woman who emerges from fragments of text.

Middling women’s activities often have to be glimpsed through snatched words, and their biographies are frequently partial. Their lives, where documented, are often written by men, though they followed very different trajectories: their educational experienced was geared towards skills that facilitated their running of a household, they very rarely gained positions of office, and their luck in marriage often determined whether they lived comfortable or difficult adult lives.[1] Their experiences, however, were varied, and many young women gained apprenticeships and positions of service before marriage and continued to have evolving careers over the course of their lives, as the Women’s Work in Rural England project has shown.[2]

Lettice began her life as the youngest daughter of a landed gentleman of West Meon in Hampshire. Here she would have had a privileged life, and she inherited 100 marks out of the profits of her father’s land. She bought this into her marriage to Thomas Greene, which took place in or around 1603, by which time she would have been in her late 20s. Thomas, although he was entitled to the title “gentleman” due to his education at the legal training centre of Middle Temple, was reliant on wages gained from his work for survival, and their early life in Stratford was spent as lodgers at New Place. Therefore, at this point in her life Lettice could be considered what we are terming “profession-al middling” status (working in or adjacent to a profession or literate role for a living), dependant on the hope that her husband would rise in status and wealth throughout his life. Although this status would have been gained through marriage, and shows a downward mobility from her landed gentry beginnings, from the evidence presented below, it seems that she may also have held this status in her own right, through the work she performed in relation to her husband’s profession as town clerk.

Lettice as a Writer and Networker

Letter from William Chandler to Thomas Greene at the Middle Temple. 26th January 1614. Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, BRU15/5/151.

Lettice first caught my attention when I was exploring her husband Thomas’ cultural life through his writing. The letter in fig.1 is from William Chandler to Thomas, who was at the time of the letter, 26^th January 1614, away from Stratford at the Middle Temple, where he spent a lot of his time. William asks Thomas for a subpoena out of the Star Chamber for six labourers involved in the enclosure of the common fields at Welcome, to which the Stratford Borough Corporation was opposed. He writes that:

I would intreate you if you have not the note of Remembrance that you tooke concerninge Mr Combe and other busyness at London all ready, then I would intreete you to Right downe to my mother greene that shee may send you the note up to you by the next retorne of the carrier.
Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, BRU15/5/151.

This sentence tells us a lot about Lettice’s important role in her husband’s professional life. She was clearly literate enough to read her husband’s fiendishly tricky cursive handwriting (which was especially bad in any of his ‘notes’) and could navigate her husband’s working space to the point of locating a particular document. Without his wife’s household management, Thomas might have been left to make do without some important information. Lettice, then, played an important role in mediating between Thomas’ life at the Middle Temple and his Stratford business.

The second document that gives an insight into Lettice’s involvement with her husband’s professional world emerges from Thomas’ diary, which records his conversations and actions during a protracted enclosure dispute in 1614 and 1615. Lettice’s social network of Stratford women gave her information, via Margaret Reynolds, of attempts by the local Combe brothers to buy up land from nearby landladies; this insight was relayed to her in Thomas’ absence, and he then recorded it in his diary when he got back.[4] Lettice was, then, trusted as a source for town news to be written down and Thomas’ recording of the conversation he had with her after his return home demonstrates the social role she played as a gatherer of information.

The third document where Lettice’s presence is marked is on a deed of conveyance for Elizabeth and Adrian Quiney drawn up in 1611, which she signs as a witness in fluent italic hand. Here we get more of a sense of her social connections – she signs alongside her husband as well as Edmund Rawlins (another lawyer) and Judith Shakespeare, William Shakespeare’s daughter. She was, then, connected to some of the most powerful women in Stratford-upon-Avon: Elizabeth Quiney, the merchant and landowner, the Shakespeares (with whom she and Thomas also lodged at New Place in the first decade of the 17^th century), and Margaret Reynolds, another female landowner. Her handwriting, present in her signature, also hints at her high level of literacy: her ink distribution is even and her hand confident (despite having to add an ‘I’ into her first name – Let^i^ce). The image of Lettice which emerges from these three documents is one of active involvement within her community and embeddedness within a network of socially and economically prominent women.

Lettice’s fluent handwriting, ability to locate and send documents to her husband, and role as a gatherer of information begs the question, just how frequently did Lettice write? Where did it all go? How typical was she of a middling woman married to a professional man who often spent time away for work? I’d been willing to imagine from her handwriting that Lettice was a regular scribe; that maybe she sent letters to her husband in his absences; that maybe she noted down information given to her. Her importance as an administrator only comes to light in a few documents, with her inevitable considerable unpaid labour towards her husband’s professional life hidden – if we had her matriarchive then #thanksfortyping might well be applicable to Lettice’s writing!

Lettice – a Businesswoman?

Although very little information survives about Lettice’s and Thomas’ home ‘St Mary’s’, it was described at its sale in 1617 as having a ‘brewing furnace’ and a brewhouse, as well as some land. This hints at the kind of activity Lettice may have participated in to enhance the household’s income. If Lena Orlin’s research into Anne Hathaway, and her speculation that Anne brewed beer at New Place is considered, it is not unlikely that Lettice, whilst lodging there, picked up this skill and continued it in her own home.[5] Her social circle of women who were economically active and successful in their own right, like Elizabeth Quiney and Margaret Reynolds, would suggest that Lettice also participated in similar enterprises within the town. Middling wives and widows conducted a range of paid and voluntary work within their homes and locales, and so it would not be unusual for Lettice to have generated produce in her brewhouse and on St Mary’s land to sell on.

After the house’s sale, Thomas and Lettice moved to St John’s Parish, Bristol, where, they largely disappear from the record.[6] Sadly, it seems Lettice’s marriage was not as economically or socially advantageous as she perhaps anticipated when she married a Middle Temple lawyer, who had secured a good position of office. In Thomas’ will (the final document in which Lettice can be found) he makes Lettice sole executrix, and bequeaths all of his remaining goods to her his ‘most deare & loving wife, being sorry that I haue noe more (than I haue to doe good a woman)’.[7] This statement is an extraordinary admission of Thomas’ failure to sustain the lifestyle Lettice was born into, but also suggests her important role as part of a team in marriage. Although, then, it is difficult to gain a full picture of Lettice’s life, these small mentions of her activities in documents pertaining to others hint at her varied work activities and the essential role she played in her household’s economic production. Perhaps, then, we might think of Lettice as having more than a supporting role, but as sharing a career with her husband, through her labours in his absence and domestic production of consumables.

Hannah Lilley

[1] For an introduction to women’s education see: Caroline Bowen, ‘Women in Educational Spaces’ in The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing, ed. by Laura Lunger Knoppers (Cambridge: CUP, 2009).

[2] See https://earlymodernwomenswork.wordpress.com/ and Laura Gowing, ‘Girls on Forms: Apprenticing Young Women in Seventeenth-Century London’, The Journal of British Studies 55:3 (2016), 447-473.

[3] BRU15/5/151. William Chandler to Thomas Greene, Stratford the 26^th January 1614. The survival of this letter within the borough archives suggests that either it was never sent, or that Thomas bought it back from London with him.

[4] BRU 15/13/29r.

[5] SBT, BRU15/7/128. Lena Cowen Orlin, ‘Anne By Indirection’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 60.4 (2014) 421-454, p.447.

[6] BRU, 15/7/125 and BRU15/7/128.

[7] Will of Thomas Greene, National Archives PROB 11/186/420.

NB. Links in text are to Shakespeare Documented and to a Buzzfeed summary of #thanksfortyping.

WFH 2: Tradesmen and Tools for Working from Home, Chapter 1

21 Apr 2020 by hmlilley, posted in history, Project Post, WFH

Chisel, 17th Century. Item ID: LON-4261F3

For this second instalment of ‘Working from Home’ in early modern England, I’m going to take a look at some of the tools and materials urban individuals used as part of their trade in two posts. The first looks at the wider uses of tools and the second studies joiners.

The chisel in the image above might seem fairly ordinary, but for the 17^th century tradesman it would have held a specific function and purpose for the performance of their craft. In early modern towns, individuals were set up and equipped to work from home, or in the home of their employers, and would often share tools, moulds and materials with their peers. Home set-ups are also a recurring concern from our own period of social distancing where many people have difficulty accessing the necessary equipment for performing their job – e.g. an adequate internet connection, working laptop or a comfortable seat.

From 1560 onwards there was a shift in how these tradespeople’s’ working spaces developed, with open hall houses giving way to an increase in rooms with specific purposes. Jane Whittle has noted that in Kent from 1600 to 1629 there was an increase in the number of specialist service room[s] within houses (like brew houses, mills and warehouses).[1] Two of this project’s team leaders, Catherine Richardson and Tara Hamling, have shown how people in urban settings invested in locks and doors to separate ‘working space from other spaces’.[2] Artisans would craft these areas to mark their trade identities to passers-by through the tools, materials and wares on display—and they often displayed shop boards at their openings, so they were not dissimilar from our own understanding of high street retail. But these shops were spaces of production, too, and could double as the site in which a trade was performed.

Tools and Identification of Trades

**A Drawing of Tools seen in Chester Shops by Randle Holme in one of his manuscripts for *The Academy of Armoury* (1649), Harley MS 2026. Left = butchers, Middle = bakers, coopers = Right.**

Randle Holmes III’s, The Academy of Armoury, or a Storehouse of Armoury and Blazonry, published in 1688, helps explain the importance of shop tools to urban identities. In it, he describes the trades he encounters through his home town of Chester, the tools artisans use and the ‘terms of the art’ as well as providing illustrations. The above image Holmes’ workings in a manuscript compiled in 1649, and on this folio he depicts tools used in three professions (butchers, bakers and coopers) in careful detail.

Tools are considered part of symbolic identities. Individual tradesmen are tied to their craft through the material culture that surrounds it in the form of the assemblages of tools used for their work. Tools were kept with and deployed by a person. As such, they could be viewed like clothing, which conveyed signals about a person’s status, residence, societal roles, gender, wealth and occupation. [3] A tradesman formed a close association with the equipment they shaped, repeatedly employed, and held.

**Randle Holmes, *Academy of* Armoury, pp.364-65.**

This facsimile, taken from the printed edition of Academy of Armoury, illustrates tools used in woodworking crafts like carpentry, joinery, and carving. The accompanying text is distinctly heraldic in its language with, for example, the mallet in the fourth image on the top row is elaborated with:

IV. He beareth Sanguine, a joyners mallet, Argent. By the name of Mallet. There is much difference between the masons, and the Joyners or Carpenters Mallets, the first being round and heavy, the others square both in the face and sides.
Randle Holme, The Academy of Armoury, or Storehouse of Armoury and Blazonry (1688), p.365

Holmes both describes what a woodworking mallet looks like and specifies how it should be used in a coat of arms. ‘Argent’ is the heraldic term for silver, and ‘Sanguine’ is blood red, so he also prescribes the correct colours for the mallet’s proper rendering. Holmes also uses the phrase ‘he beareth’ and ‘to bear’ has the meaning to be ‘the wearer of a garment, ornament, badge, etc.’ (3a, oed). A tool often borne in a joiner’s hand is here used as a suggestion for his coat of arms, linking his identity to the equipment he uses for his trade. Within the Academy of Armoury, Holmes paints the visual world of trade identity through tools.

Tools at Home

Inventories—lists of goods made at (relatively wealthy people’s) death—sometimes record the tools belonging to an individual, and occasionally in great detail. They are therefore a means through which we might ground the tools deployed in Holmes’ volume in specific locales.

For example, Thomas Bonner, an Ipswich blacksmith inventoried in 1583 had a variety of tools in his shop.

The shoop stuff
Item one stythe [blacksmith’s anvil] and blocke ______4 0 0
Item a paier of bellowes and appurtenances _______ 0 12 0
Item a beake horne [the pike of a blacksmith’s anvil] and carnayle toole and the blockes 0 2 6
Item one vyce ___________ 0 5 0
Item nyne hammers __________ 0 6 0
Item thre payer of tonges ________0 1 6
Item the smalle tooles _________0 1 8
Item tenn Punchins [small pointed tool which could pierce materials] ___0 1 6
Item a nayle stocke __________0 0 8
Item fyve fyles two buttres a paier of pynsons and other tooles_____0 1 4
Item a carte strake wrought _____ 1 7 6
Item fyftie six pound Iron ________0 4 8
Item LVIIIli leaden waights________0 4 10
Item two beames and skooles_______ 0 5 0
Item one smythes troughe___________0 0 6
Item a gryndston and cranke and the troughe _____ 0 5 0
From: The Ipswich Probate Inventories 1583-1631, ed. by Michael Reed (Boydell Press, 1981). Hereafter, IPI.)

Some of these tools are specialised to the blacksmith’s craft with a ‘stythe’ being a blacksmith’s anvil:

**Modern blacksmith at work using 17^th century style tools at Little Woodham Museum. By David Brightmore – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0**

Other tools, like hammers, files, weights and grindstones, are used across trades.

Archaeological examples of hammers show similar features to what we might expect today, with its flat head and prongs.

Bonner also has tenn ‘punchins’ which are small, sharp tools used to pierce metal. In his possession of ten of these punchins, Bonner would be able to produce piercings of various aesthetic effects, creating decorative touches to his work in ways which might make his work easily attributable to him.

Alongside his tools, Bonner has fire attending equipment, essential for the heat needed in the manipulation of metal, but also for light and warmth within the shop. Passers-by would be able to observe Bonner at work from the street, could judge his work, and make requests for wares to be made for them. The shop, in this sense, was a permeable boundary between the home and the outside world, where production and purchase happened in the same space.

The value of tools can be seen in the way they became heritable items. For example, Gilbert Mayerte, Millwright of Ipwich’s will details that:

‘I give and bequeathe unto the sayd Richard my sonne all my Tymber plancke bourd toles and all other tinges necessary belonging and Apperteyning to my science’
Suffolk Record Office, Ipswich Branch, IC/AA1/7/67.

As such, craft identity as it is expressed through tools, permeates workspaces in multi-layered ways: tools used to create items for consumption in the present may have been inherited from a family member or employer which gave them significance as memory prompts of past craftsmen in their continued use through generations. Patterns of craft could then be established in locales where these tools and techniques were passed between people through inheritance. We can see this with the distinct style of armchair that emerged from Salisbury joiners’ workshops in the seventeenth century, as seen in a past blog post.

Apart from the shop, there were many other rooms used for manufacture or for the storage of tools and materials. On a small scale, these rooms might be listed as chambers. For example, houses in Ipswich and Bristol occasionally have ‘shop chambers’, which were linked spatially and in purpose with the shop.

These chambers frequently contained tools, materials and shop wares. Stephen Grenewich, dyer of Ipswich, had a room next to his shop that held weights and scales and a skraier (a frame for layering cloth upon) for clothworking (IPI, p.55). On a larger scale, someone might have workhouses or warehouses. For example, Henry Piper of Ipswich, poldavisweaver (poldavis is a particular type of cloth common in Brittany, which was bought over to England in 1547, and Ipswich became the centre of its production in England), inventoried in 1615, has two workhouses with nine looms and various cloths ‘in makinge’ and this demonstrates a larger scale of production taking place domestically, with multiple employees—an “SME” or small “factory.”[4]

In non-inventoried houses low down the social scale, in precariously middling or poor households, tools would also have appeared. There are plenty of examples in churchwardens accounts of wool cards, timber and other tools and materials handed out in charity to enable those less fortunate to generate income.

These practices extend to women’s work. Widows often inherited shops and responsibility for its trade and production, alongside household labour. For example, Ann Barnarde, widow of Ipswich whose inventory was taken in 1606 possesses tools for embroidery – a ‘reell and a little yarne’ – things she may have used to generate some income (IPI, p.65). A request for a women’s service in needlework appears in an Ipswich deposition too, where Margaret Morgon remembers that one Dorothy, a servant to Mr Barker,

bought unto the house of this deponent [Margaret] one shirte wrought w[i]th blacke worke of sylke & requested her this deponent to breake the same & to make the said dorothie a neckercher thereof w[hi]ch she […] so did.
Petty Court Depositions, Suffolk Archives, Ipswich, C/2/3/8/1, 140

Margaret recognises this shirt as stolen, but does the work anyway, with this case later going to court. The fact that the material garment recycled for the neckercher was stolen, is the only reason this example of Margaret’s work (and indeed Dorothy’s time as a servant before her marriage) is recorded. Work like this, completed with small tools like needles relies on archaeological examples like this needle to understand craft practices:

Post Medieval Needle, Portable Antiquities Scheme

There are many gaps in our understanding of practice generated by tools and materials which were ephemeral, used then thrown away, or too insignificant to be frequently recorded. But records, archaeological finds and images demonstrate how essential tools were to a trades-person’s identity within an urban setting. Next time I’ll be looking more closely at a particular kind of making setting and the tools used within it: the joiner’s workshop.

By Hannah Lilley

[1] Jane Whittle, ‘The House as a Place of Work in Early Modern Rural England’, Home Cultures, 8:2 (2011), 133-150, pp.134-136.

[2] Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson, A Day at Home in Early Modern England: Material Culture and Domestic Life, 1500-1700 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017), p.144.

[3] For more on clothing, tools in civic ceremonies, and identity this see, Catherine Richardson, ‘Dugdale and the Material Culture of Warwickshire,’ in C. Dyer and C. Richardson eds., William Dugdale, Historian, 1605-86: His Life, His Writings and His County (Boydell and Brewer, 2009).

[4]Eric Kerridge, Textile Manufactures in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), p.123.

WFH 1: Working From (the early modern) Home

4 Apr 20206 Apr 2020 by middlingculture, posted in WFH

1: Doing business at home with teenagers

As we, like the rest of the world, settle into the climate of pandemic lockdown, we thought we’d put together a short series on past experiences of “Working from Home”—something to which most non-key workers (us among them) are presently adjusting. Early Modern England hardly provides an exact parallel (and it wouldn’t be so interesting if it did!) but it promises a fascinating chance to consider the historical and cultural contingencies of home working environments.

Combing through archival materials from early modern England offers an excellent window onto what we might now call people’s home-working lives, as households combined domestic arrangements and consumption with business, education or training, childcare, and production. Here, keeping children occupied and having a work meeting about debts sat alongside the overlapping layers of household labour, from cooking to shopping to manufacture to an array of roles occupied by servants, often living in the household itself. A number of artisanal households also included their “shops,” with both production and selling run from home.

Prof. Robert Kelly’s video interview with BBC news, with his children entering stage left…

Each of these posts will feature an incident, glimpse, or insight into working-from-home practices among ordinary men and women of the Tudor and Stuart periods.

This opening post looks to Ipswich in the 1570s, where some court testimony gives us a brief insight into the working arrangements of a merchant household in the town.

Mary de Clarke was the daughter of a “merchant stranger”—a tradesperson born outside the town and, in this instance, hailing from Europe. Her father Cornelius had passed away and it seems that her mother, Katheryn (who had also recently passed away), had remarried: confusingly, to another Cornelius, this time of the surname de Hoghe. Katheryn was clearly actively involved in the household finances and was keeping charge of debts owed to her new husband.

Mary comes to court to testify about a sum of money owed to her father-in-law via her late mother of the not insubstantial sum of £70 (you can plug this figure into the wonderful currency converter available through The National Archives to get a sense of its scale at the time and today):

Marye de Clarke the daughter of Cornelius de Clarke, merchant, deceased, of the age of 15 years or thereabouts, sworn and examined before Robert Cutler one of the bailiffs of the Town of Ipswich in the 15 day of February In the 16 year of the Reign of this sovereign lady Elizabeth, by the grace of god of England, France, and Ireland, queen defender of the faith &c, upon her oath sayth that:

about Shrovetide last past, one Michael Seyes, merchant stranger, borrowed of Katheryn (the wife of Cornelius de Hoghe), deceased mother of the said Mary, threescore and ten pounds at her father-in-law’s house in Ipswich, which sum of money was her said father-in-law’s money, whereof she the said Katheryn had the keeping & upon the receipt thereof of the said Katheryn, the said Michael promised her to pay it again at A shorter time after.

And this examinant [Mary] knoweth to be true, for that she saw the money told out to him upon her chamber, where he did use to lie, and the same was all white money, and saith she: Katheryn after wrote the sum of money for her remembrance in a book of remembrances she kept, as it appeareth by the hand of the said Katheryn, which the said Mary hath seen.

And further saith she heard her said mother demand the same money again of the said Michael, because he had not kept his day of payment, & then he answered he had it not to pay. Whereupon her mother sorrowed much, and Complained much, to this examinant thereof. And [she] further saith that her mother afterward rode to London thinking to have received the said money of the said Michael Seys there, but when she came home again she told this examinant she would have her husband, being father-in-law of the said Mary, to know thereof, she willed this said examinant to tell him thereof if she died.
Suffolk Archives, Petty Court Depositions, 1573 (C/2/3/8/1, p. 37)

This short deposition indicates the rich and widespread culture of administration and account-keeping in the sixteenth century among certain groups, professions, and households—with Katheryn meticulously keeping a book of remembrances (in part, a loose early modern balance sheet).

Adam Smyth’s work has taught us how such acts constitute a form of “autobiography” or self-writing, in which individuals note facts and figures but often also jot down discursive details and asides that constitute a means of remarking on, marking up, or diarising their day-to-day relationships. Unfortunately, Katheryn’s book does not appear to survive, but we might look to other contemporary examples (even those from much more elite members) to indicate the range of approaches to such “remembering.” Here, for instance, is Sir William More’s account book (with details about expenses relating to his property in the Blackfriars in London):

And Elizabeth of Hardwick’s account book kept by her steward, Edward Whalley:

V.b.308, Folger Shakespeare Library LUNA. 1589-92.

For the purposes of this account in court, Katheryn’s book of remembrances centres on money matters, and the details here point to the imbrication of financial work with domestic space: 15-year-old Mary is witness to this transaction and her “chamber” is used by the visiting merchant as a place to sleep overnight.

Children and young women like Mary (of apprentice-able age) were therefore not only privy to these business interactions (which occurred at the heart of the home and overlapped with or seemingly reshaped domestic routine), but also understood the significance of them. In many ways, for Mary, simply being part of the household and talking with her mother about money acted as an informal apprenticeship in bookkeeping. Indeed, instead of following BBC Bitesize or video-cast lessons and talks from home, some Tudor teenagers were both key eyewitnesses to dealings and business confidantes: Mary tells the court, for instance, that her mother “complained” to her of the debt. Working and living in this international household therefore inculcated in Mary a degree of business literacy or at the very least a broad comprehension of how to keep track of monies owed.

A “book of diverse and necessary remembrances” kept by the Dering family in the late sixteenth to early seventeenth century, showing beautiful tacket binding. Folger Shakespeare Library, LUNA, V.b.296.

Kathryn working from home with her teenage daughter not only helped manage the spreadsheets, so to speak, it also put Mary in a good position (some time later at the date of this court hearing) to explore these issues of credit and credibility in court.

Lastly, this little entry reminds us that even within our own homes we are deeply connected with the world beyond the four walls—and beyond national borders. This family moved frequently between Ipswich and Europe and interacted with a huge range of immigrant traders and travellers, and here they sit at the heart of a cosmopolitan (if occasionally tense) Ipswich community. In part because of—not in spite of—working from home, early modern individuals, like us today, remained plugged into the world’s broader networks of trust and exchange.

Callan Davies