The spoken word: Oral culture in Britain, 1500-1850

Front matter

ORAL CULTURE IN BRITAIN, 1500-1850

Wier FO SR

ADAM FOX & DANIEL WOOLF mini q

Contents

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS—Vii CONTRIBUTORS—ix

Introduction Adam Fox and Daniel Woolf I

Language, literacy and aspects of identity in early modern Wales Richard Suggett and Eryn White 52

Chapter 1 Adam Fox and Daniel Woolf

S WE ENTER the sixth millennium of recorded civilization, human beings

have developed a superabundance of ways of communicating with each other. Some, such as writing, are several millennia old. Most have a much more recent vintage. Printing, the mechanical means whereby written symbols are reproduced in multiple identical copies, is barely five centuries old, despite some medieval and traditional Chinese precursors. The telegraph, invented in the nineteenth century, first allowed humans to communicate with others at a considerable distance. Radio, at the start of the last century, extended that technical immediacy by allowing the human voice to be carried, wireless, across great distances. Television and film reinserted the represented physical presence of the speaking human, and their modern successors, the live videophone and videoconference, have facilitated meetings of individuals as far apart as Canada and Australia. More mundane instruments, unheard of twenty years ago, now fill our personal informational universes: cell phones that allow us to converse at a distance but no longer tied to a fixed instrument in our homes or offices; and pocket organizers that ‘beam’ information to each other. Above all, email has become a matter of routine for hundreds of thousands of users. (It is worth remarking that the present book — perhaps ironically given its subject — has been co-edited by two historians who at the time it went to press had not, in fact, ever met face to face, and that virtually all of their interaction, including exchanges of the text of this introduction, occurred through email and the occasional phone call.)

In the light of all this, it is easy to overlook the fundamental importance of speech, the oldest form of intelligent communication, and of its receptionend counterpart, hearing. Although modern social theorists decry the disintegration of society, or of the family, and have argued that we are becoming atomized individuals without enduring social bonds, there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. Conversation, the subject of analysis by social scientists,! is now much less formal than it was a hundred or even fifty years ago, and somewhat less subject to class boundaries. It is also considerably less structured by formal education and manuals for aristocratic and gentle behaviour than was the case for our more remote, early modern, ancestors.” We speak freely with our co-workers, our families, our friends, and to the dozens of people with whom we interact, however casually, over the course of our lives. Our topics range from the weather to politics, work priorities, gossip, our own personal lives, religion, entertainment and even once taboo subjects such as sex. The electronic and mechanical implements that we have devised to allow us to project our verbalized thoughts at others not physically in view have aided this activity, but not replaced it. One can imagine a fictional ‘Y2K’ situation in which all electronic forms of communication ceased to function. This would limit the choice of persons with whom we could speak to those in proximate view, but it would not affect our choice of topics or our ability to conceive of an idea and then express it.

It is not a coincidence that the twentieth century, which witnessed remarkable changes in the modes of communication, was also the century that developed theories and models for explaining how it works. These have taken a number of forms, across a number of disciplines, several of which have approached communication principally through the theoretical, philosophical, and empirical study of language. Analytical philosophy, beginning with Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein, first developed a modern logic for the representation and linguistic denotation of ‘ideas’, thereby setting off a ‘linguistic turn’ decades before that phrase became associated with deconstruction and postmodernism. Less than a century later, philosophy of language remains a vitally important if difficult branch of the discipline and has helped to spawn newer areas of study such as cognitive science.’ Linguistics proper, which has historical origins in the study of family relationships among words, through comparative philology, has borrowed from the philosophers of language and also from psychology and anthropology. This may be seen, for instance, in the work of the American linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, whose ‘linguistic determinism’ postulated that human thought was invariably constrained by the cultural categories available in a particular language.‘ In its structuralist form, descending from Saussure via Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss and literary structuralism, linguistics examines the relations not only of words, but also of grammatical structures. Noam Chomsky has famously posited an innate human ability to create a ‘generative grammar’ (cohering to a ‘universal grammar’) of which any given individual will be unaware but which enables his or her native-language fluency. A widely read recent adaptation of Chomsky’s views by Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist, has gone so far as to postulate a ‘language instinct.’ From a different perspective, semiotics, the study of sign systems or modes of signification, has for many years ranged beyond language proper and into the analysis of ritual and popular culture. It now routinely examines non-verbal ways of communicating such as dress, gesture, visual art, and performance.®

It would seem that the more means we have developed to communicate with one another, the greater our urge ‘as reflective, not merely communicative, animals’ to understand how and why such communications take place. Perhaps the most ambitious and inclusive discipline is a comparatively new one, the sometimes amorphous but immensely popular field of ‘communication studies’.” The Canadian historian Harold Innis (1894-1952), for instance, saw communications technology as the key to understanding world history. Innis linked different communicative processes and media (which included transportation networks) to social evolution, and in particular to the development of political régimes. Perhaps his most interesting insight was to point to the inherent ‘bias’ in any communications system toward either time or space. Thus, stone tablets and hieroglyphs had an inherent temporal bias, since they could endure many generations, even millennia. They were, however, not easily transportable and therefore poorly disposed spatially, which made them good instruments of central record-keeping but not well-suited for governing geographically large territories. In contrast, papyrus and paper had (and have) a spatial bias. Lightweight, they are easily transportable over great distances, but their very lightness makes them temporally ephemeral.’

Innis’s views, like those of his younger and more famous contemporary Marshall McLuhan (to whom we will return), rely on an evolutionary model of technological progress that envisions communicative change as not simply forward-moving, but also constitutive of other types of change, social, political, economic, and even cognitive. In one form or another, this perspective has until relatively recently underpinned most accounts of media transformation in various historical periods. Thus for Innis communications advances ‘caused’ (in the sense of providing the necessary and sufficient conditions for) most significant political changes, though the direction of these developments was neither invariably clear nor unambiguously progressive. The advent of papyrus, for example, had a democratizing effect on knowledge in ancient Egypt by spreading information afar and beyond a priestly class. Much later, a further technological advance, the printing press, became (Innis here quotes G. M. Trevelyan) ‘a battering-ram to bring abbeys and castles crashing to the ground’. Innis’s work was filled with unresolved contradictions and puzzles such as this: at the same period that print was supposedly engineering the downfall of monastic and aristocratic medieval power, Innis suggested, Tudor censorship also restricted its use. This tension in turn facilitated a widespread contemporary interest in drama ‘and the flowering of the oral tradition in the plays of Shakespeare’.?

ORALITY AND LITERACY

Within the broader study of communications, the relationship of the spoken word to other media has always been complex and problematic. As argued in Michael Hobart and Zachary Schiffman’s recent survey, Information Ages, what we say has never been divorceable from the means by which we say it, or from the forms within which we give it expression, though the medium is not (pace McLuhan) equivalent to the message.’ Plato, in the fourth century BC, recognized the impact of the Greek alphabet and of writing. He warned of the corrosive effect that the commitment of thought to inscriptions would have on face-to-face communication, and particularly on memory, thitherto the basic means of recording something said and replicating it for others not present at the original conversation. Nearly two millennia later Renaissance thinkers such as Erasmus, though they made great use of print, expressed similar concerns. Rousseau, building on two centuries of European encounters with largely non-literate New World peoples, romanticized oral culture in his Essay on the Origin of Language, becoming perhaps the first to conceive of the oral-—literate transition as an intellectual and cultural problem. This so-called ‘privileging’ of orality as a more natural and primary human form of communication has been a recurrent theme in Western thought, as one of its most famous critics, Jacques Derrida, pointed out many years ago.” There is little doubt that the ability to write and read opens communicative worlds for individuals and that it makes reliance on memory for some, though not all, tasks redundant. With each new innovation in human communications, there have been those who have regretted the passing, perceived or real, of old ways, and those who have anticipated social consequences, for good or ill.

The consideration of writing and its relations with speech present one set of problems for all periods prior to the late fifteenth century. These are by now relatively well defined, and some remarkably subtle work has been done in recent years on medieval communication. Brian Stock’s important investigation of the creation of literary communities in the High Middle Ages is one example and Michael Clanchy’s erudite study of the transition in post- Conquest England ‘from memory to written record’ another. From the mid-fifteenth century, however, the issues take on a different level of complexity principally owing to the introduction of another variable in the form of a new medium: mass-producible typographic print. Early modern Europe faced a communications change that was arguably as revolutionary as the one that we have lived through in very recent years.

The impact of movable type on early modern culture has been much debated. Two scholars writing principally in the 1950s and 1960s, Marshall McLuhan and his one-time graduate student Walter J.Ong, SJ argued in different ways that the press fundamentally changed the ways in which humans communicated, and each tended to decry the results. McLuhan made the press, along with later electronic media, especially television (he did not live into the age of the Internet), the twin foci of an elliptical critique of modern culture. His work, written in a deliberately idiosyncratic and often impenetrable ‘mosaic’ style that has irritated many of his readers, has nevertheless exercised a continued influence on modern communications research.

McLuhan’s own reputation has ebbed and flowed since the 1960s, and he is alternatively revered as a prophet of the Information Age, and even of postmodernism, or decried as superfluous manufacturer of ‘self-destructing clichés’. Ong, in contrast, has retained a higher credibility, principally owing to his impressive credentials as a historical scholar and the relative clarity of his thought. Ong began with a specific period, the late sixteenth century, and a particular genre. He examined the impact of printed logic textbooks, especially those of the French pedagogue Petrus Ramus, in support of a broader argument. That argument may be summarized thus: that during the later Renaissance knowledge first became cognitively ‘spatialized’ (Innis’s earlier view on the geographically spatial bias in paper is not intended here), and conceived of as something primarily to be found ‘contained’ in the physical location of a book, rather than communicated dialogically. Ong’s analysis of the flood of Ramist books on logic and rhetoric (the first major reform to Aristotelian systems in nearly two millennia) suggested that they considerably simplified the teaching of those subjects, virtually reducing rhetoric to a subcategory of logic. This was not necessarily to the gain of either discipline, or of their subsequent generations of students.!5 The reorientation to spatialized knowledge diminished the age-old primacy of the human voice, ‘the primordial medium of communication, the basis of all dialogue’.'° A corollary of Ong’s specific conclusion about Ramism, still cast in a McLuhanesque mould, was another, more wide-ranging, thesis: that Western culture had fundamentally shifted at the Renaissance from a primarily auditory perceptual and cognitive mode to a primarily visual one, ‘and that the vehicle for this shift was the invention of printing’. The interactions between the spoken and the not merely written but printed word are a major connecting theme of several of the chapters below.

Less speculative treatments than Ong’s or McLuhan’s abound.!* Indeed, it is fair to say that since the Second World War, considerations of the impact of print in particular have tended to dominate treatments of communications change in past times, especially in the first two centuries or so of printing’s history. (The parallel but not identical relationship between speech and writing has been given comparatively less attention, and is often subsumed.) Innis himself had already made print the terminus ad quem of his Empire and Communications in 1950, and general studies by S. H. Steinberg and by Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin followed within a decade.” For the past twenty years, however, much of the discussion has occurred in the spreading wake of Elizabeth Eisenstein’s major study, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change.” This has sometimes been criticized for overemphasizing both the impact of the press and the objectivity or fixity of the ‘print culture’ it is supposed to have created.?! Nevertheless, Eisenstein’s book has had the merit of reviving discussion of issues such as the past relations of speech, writing and print during a modern cultural moment of even more profound significance for early twenty-first-century humans. According to Eisenstein, the impact of print can be measured in a variety of ways, not least in its enabling of the Reformation. Luther’s revolt was more successful than that of previous, medieval, heretics because he was literally able to get The Word out, in the form of his German Bible and of hundreds of polemical and pastoral tracts. Protestant countries moved from a religion based on ritual and auditory communication with the divine through a priest, to one based on private study and devotion focused on a personal experience of the Gospel.” In the two centuries thereafter, print’s influence spread further, creating the international learned community that was able to share experimental and mathematical knowledge (in addition to more conventional textual scholarship). It thereby facilitated the second great intellectual phenomenon of the post-Renaissance era, the Scientific Revolution.

The study of the impact of print has been renewed with vigour since Eisenstein’s book first appeared.» During this time, the subject has to a considerable degree converged with the related histories of the book, of libraries, of reading, and of popular mentalities.4 Select older treatments such as that by Febvre and Martin have become available in translation, along with the more recent work of Roger Chartier, the best-known of the current generation of French scholars. Chartier, like the late Robert Mandrou, has also been interested in the profound influence of printing on popular culture, as a written world associated with the literate elite collided with the oral and mnemonic world of the vast majority of the population who could neither read nor write.” British and North American scholars have also addressed these matters, and while the impact of print is conceded to have been immense, it has also been qualified in some important respects. In particular, the notion of a print culture that overwhelmed and eventually eradicated the oral ritualistic culture of the masses has been fairly convincingly undermined as far too simplistic. The spread of print was neither rapid, nor universal, outside of major commercial and political centres. Indeed, it did not completely ‘supplant’ writing as the vehicle of choice for elite literary communication, since ‘scribal publication’ retained a high social status among the affluent and the educated throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.” Even after the Copyright Act of 1710, Margaret Ezell has suggested, script remained ‘a competitive mode of transmitting and reading’. Both writing and print also retained some of the dialogic quality of speech in the sense that texts in both forms were routinely annotated and revised by readers.”8

How many people were reading, and in what ways, has in itself proved very difficult to assess with much precision. European literacy was indeed increasing (much more rapidly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries than in the sixteenth), but both the rate of that change and what exactly was changing remain obscure, a problem to which we shall return in greater detail below. For now it is sufficient to note that the once-accepted measure of literacy, ability to sign one’s name, is no longer regarded as a reliable index of reading ability, much less of full literacy; conversely, those who could not write at all were sometimes able to read.” The reformers who sought to spread Protestant piety and doctrine, though they stressed the virtues of education as an aid to spirituality, nonetheless recognized that the vast majority of the population that they needed to win over was illiterate in whole or part, and they quite reasonably compensated for this in various ways. Use of vivid pictorial images by reformers, ably demonstrated by the late Robert Scribner for Germany, and more recently by Tessa Watt, Margaret Spufford, Margaret Aston, Ian Green and others for the English Reformation, enabled the evangelical message to penetrate even the humblest households. Shared reading, in familial or devotional settings, provided the means to use the spoken word to bring the otherwise inaccessible printed page to the attention of those who could not read it on their own. Even among those who could read with facility there are important distinctions to be made. There were those, for instance, who could read one style of typeface more easily than another.3! A significant subset of the fully literate was ‘unlettered’ in the classical sense of being unable to read Latin (much less other languages.) This too is an important division in an era when literary writing was both highly allusive and often linguistically hybrid, English texts still including extensive passages and quotations in Latin and other languages.

It is not very helpful to cling firmly to the technological progressivism of the Innis—McLuhan school, for three reasons. The first is that the cognitive superiority or even modernity of one medium (writing) relative to others (such as speech) has not been satisfactorily established in any cross-cultural context, a point made most sharply by Ruth Finnegan.?? Secondly, the tripartite relationship between speech, writing and print over the long early modern period from 1500 to 1850 — in technological terms, the age of the hand-operated press — is different from the equivalent relationship since then. (This in turn has now been further complicated by very recent developments such as the Internet, cellular phones and satellite television.) Thirdly, and perhaps most important, this same relationship can be shown to have altered and evolved dynamically at various times, in different regions, and within quite distinct social contexts — even within the era covered by the present book.

We should not, therefore, spend much more effort in re-‘proving’ (or even reproving) the notion of a grand cultural shift - whether conceived of as progress or decline scarcely matters — from ‘spoken/auditory’ to ‘written/ visual’. Rather, we need to attend more closely to the ways in which writing or printing, either separately or in combination, can be said to have modified, marginalized or reinforced different aspects of oral culture. This process was not one-way, since the spoken word itself continued to inform and shape what was put into script or print. Ong himself acknowledged this in postulating a kind of ‘secondary orality’ detectable in literate societies, and he identified a good example of this in the form of an ‘oral residue’ in Tudor prose. Above all, though there were unquestionably arenas of conflict between spoken and written, such as the law and custom, these are not usefully generalized into a polarized relationship which sees orality and literacy as Manichaean opposites. As Finnegan has aptly remarked, ‘orality’ and ‘literacy’ are not two separate and independent things. Nor (to put it more concretely) are oral and written modes two mutually exclusive and opposed processes for representing and communicating information.34 Harvey J. Graff has similarly warned that ‘the oral and the literate, like the written and the printed, need not be opposed as simple choices’.35 We are much better off conceiving of overlapping spheres of the oral and the literate, within which many of a culture’s communicative activities occur in different ways depending upon a variety of factors such as time, location, purpose, and the identity and status of the communicators. This is a less orderly and simple model, but it permits us to recognize differences between the forms of communication without losing sight of their similarities, their connections, or their historical mutability.” Within the period covered by this book, the spoken and the written or printed interacted in a complex and often circular fashion. This is not to argue that oral culture was utterly immune to the effects of writing and print, which would be foolish, or that some aspects of it were not seriously altered, marginalized or even eliminated. It is simply to acknowledge that instances of this were particular, rather than general, and that other aspects of orality adapted to a more literate environment and even thrived on writing and print, which were in turn affected in style and content by speech. In other words, the ever-increasing presence of the written or the printed word in early modern Britain cannot be assumed to have occurred invariably at the expense of or in opposition to the spoken word.

RE-CAPTURING ORAL CULTURE

The modern study of oral culture has developed quite independently of the study of print culture, but the collision of the spoken and the graphic (whether alphabetical or iconographic) in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has marked out some lines of mutual influence and of tension. As noted above, there has been a tendency since Plato to valorize the oral as more immediate and personal than the written, at the same time that the more ‘modern’ character of written communication is conceded. (The result has sometimes been a kind of ‘world-we-have-lost’ nostalgia for an imagined pure orality, supposedly shared by past times and by more recent primitive societies.) Social anthropologists, Claude Lévi-Strauss in particular, have demonstrated how aspects of culture, especially myth, are transmitted in predominantly oral ‘traditional’ societies.” Among the best-known studies, that of Milman Parry and Albert Lord of the poetic recitations of Slavic guslars cast new light on a much older problem, the oral composition of the Homeric poems, to which they exhibited some similarities. The implications of this for ancient literacy were more fully worked out by Eric Havelock in his classic Preface to Plato, which examined the transition from orality to literacy in ancient Athens. There are differences in the various treatments, but a common presumption is that literacy so fundamentally restructures human thought as to fossilize even an orally based subculture, turning the traditional songs of Lord’s guslars, for example, away from a performative and creative process into a more straightforwardly text-emulating and recitative one.“ Historians have approached the problem of orality from a slightly different angle.

We are naturally inclined to favour the document, even while recognizing that it, too, is incomplete, partial and selective.“ Given this long-standing preference, we have to face the inescapable fact that societies without writing (or non-literate segments of the population within partially literate societies) do not by definition generate written records that can provide local evidence of that culture’s past life, including its communicative aspects. How then to verify historical information derived from the traditions preserved by such a society? Africanists such as Jan Vansina and David Henige have addressed such issues directly, working out the structure and typology of oral traditions and offering methods by which external evidence (colonial records, or the written records of neighbouring and more highly literate indigenous societies) can be used to verify such fundamental historical details as chronology and genealogy. At the same time, they have also been careful to admit some of the problems with using oral traditions as a source equivalent to a written document (which leaves aside the issue of the degree to which documents themselves are inherently more trustworthy). These problems include ‘telescoping’, or the reduction/conflation of generations to fit a preconceived time scheme; the jettisoning of unwanted or undesirable forebears, and of those for whom no present trace of influence continues to exist in the present; and, of most significance for the present book, the idea of ‘feedback’. This last phenomenon occurs when an oral culture comes into contact with a written one, and apparently pure mnemonic recitations are tainted with the written records generated by an alien, often colonizing, society. Vansina’s and Henige’s studies, among others, have also demolished nineteenth-century romantic notions of the superiority and inherent reliability of the oral tradition (the conceptual background for which is captured in Nicholas Hudson’s essay in Chapter 8 of this volume) while nevertheless preserving the essence of the position that it is a usable and critically testable type of source. Others have been less cautious. The fate of the African- American popular novelist and journalist Alex Haley stands as a permanent warning against uncritical acceptance of tradition as if it were a literal and verbatim genealogical and historical record — a written record minus the writing. Haley’s Roots, a mid-1970s’ bestseller and television series, appears to have rested on an enthusiastic search for his ancestral origins, sufficiently well advertised in advance that he was able to hear what he wished to hear from a well-prepared Gambian story-teller.*3

Much additional scholarly work has appeared in the past thirty years on various forms of African oral literature and on its griots, or traditional performers.“ Finnegan in particular has drawn a distinction between traditional (trans-generational) oral literature and that which is non-traditional. She makes the point that there are many examples of cultures with precisely memorized oral literature, composed by one group (for instance medieval Irish poets or French troubadours) and recited by another. In contrast, oral traditional literature rarely passes down verbatim over several generations, as if it were simply a memorized historical record repeated viva voce from the aged to the young. Nor, she suggests, does it arise from a ‘people’ as a generalized voice of the volk. Rather, it generally consists of a central story or message sequentially improvised upon by a series of individual performers, often in response to time-specific social situations, and highly dependent on the performer’s choice of language, use of intonation and gesture — some of these, indeed, features that cannot be adequately captured in a transcribed version.“

The sorts of problems that the Africanists have identified can guide, mutatis mutandis, our treatment of other cultures. Early modern European countries were communicatively hybrid, with widely varying levels of literacy, and geographically uneven penetration by the written or printed word. We as their modern historians are highly dependent on written sources in our efforts to gain access to oral culture. Further problems arise. These written sources have nearly always been bequeathed us by privileged observers who were themselves geographically external to the oral culture on which they were reporting — antiquaries and travel writers for instance. Even more frequently, they stood ‘above’ that culture, socially and intellectually, however interested and sympathetic they may have been (and in many cases they were not). Yet these written testimonies are often our only means to recapture traditions, riddles, rituals and proverbs which may or may not have been purely oral in their own time, but which have now disappeared or been altered beyond recognition. The authors of another recent work on orality, who range all the way from Homer to African-American rap artists, invite their reader to step ‘through the medium of print’ into the ‘oral world’ (the singular is significant) of ‘Homer, the rapper, the orators of Madagascar and Samoa, the story-tellers of Africa and the Caribbean and many, many more’.46 The notion that all these cultures constitute a single ‘oral world’ is itself troublesome. So is the suggestion that we can gain direct entry to such a world through literary and archival sources. In fact, the oral worlds of the past, like other locations in that ‘foreign country’ and perhaps even more so, cannot be entered, at least not directly. We cannot, to paraphrase Ranke, restore their reality wie es eigentlich gewesen. We can, however, study the traces of that reality, the reflected remnants of those worlds, through other means, and even empathetically imagine how those worlds functioned, so long as we also recognize the indirect nature of our evidence.

ORAL CULTURE, ORAL COMMUNICATION AND ORAL TRADITION

The present volume investigates the nature of oral culture in Britain between the early sixteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. The authors recognize that the singular ‘culture’ is indeed a construct, and that it is probably more accurate to talk of distinct oral cultures, not least because some very different regions and linguistic environments are involved. Nevertheless, we hope to point to some common features that justify the theoretical use of the singular, with the caution that it is virtually never monolithic in practice.

Of what does an oral culture consist? Jack Goody has recently defined it as ‘a culture without writing’. Within an early modern British setting this definition is too exclusionary given the increasing number of ways in which speech and writing could come into contact, ways which increased as we move ahead within the period. But Goody immediately points out that writing does not supplant oral communication; instead it provides it with another channel, ‘substituting for the oral only in certain contexts but at the same time developing new ones’.*” It is perhaps best not to define oral culture as an identifiable social unit (that is, as an oral society). Used in that sense, Britain more realistically consisted of a number of subcultures since at no time in the early modern period was an entire region of Britain, of any significant size, utterly untouched by writing, except perhaps in the most remote and outlying regions of the Scottish Highlands and Western Isles. We prefer to define oral culture as a collection of communicative habits and practices, premissed on primarily face-to-face viva voce communication, and occurring within a variety of contexts. These habits and practices were more or less capable of adapting to encounters with the written or printed word.