Writing History from Below: Chronicling and Record-Keeping in Early Modern England

On 8 August 1716, an Essex tradesman named Joseph Bufton sat down to take stock of his little archive. For about forty years, he had been filling the margins and blank pages of old almanacs with notes. He now had a substantial collection and his terse list hints at their contents.

'I reckon I have here 22 almanacks', he wrote in a tidy, confident hand. Most were 'filled up chiefly with things taken out of other books' and 'with notes of sermons'. Several others were old financial accounts and family letterbooks. Another 'I keep on my board and write in dayly', though its precise contents remain a mystery. The final two were primarily historical in focus, recording miscellaneous events from 1659 onwards. One was 'filled chiefly with buriall and marriage', chronicling the lives and deaths of his neighbours as well as local affairs in his Essex town of Coggeshall. The last volume recorded the rules, proceedings and officers of his trade and, in a later section, a 'yearly account of remarkable things' from the Glorious Revolution to the Hanoverian Accession.¹

This extraordinary collection has only partly survived the ensuing centuries. Only eleven volumes are known to remain, though thankfully the final two are among these. Eight are held in his native county at the Essex Record Office and another three can be found in the Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds.² Still, the fact that any escaped the rubbish heap is surely a sign of providential favour - most jottings of this sort were long ago destroyed by unfortunate fires, damp basements or over-enthusiastic spring cleaning.

The survival of a substantial written legacy is especially rare for people of Bufton's modest social standing. He was an inconsequential provincial tradesman with little schooling and even less wealth, far below diarists such as Samuel Pepys or John Evelyn in the social hierarchy. Yet he was not entirely alone. Craftsmen, shopkeepers and farmers across England -and a smaller number of women of similar rank - filled innumerable notebooks with their scribblings and then worked to preserve them for posterity. By examining a broad selection of such material from other individuals alongside Bufton's unusually diverse collection, we can begin to unravel how and why people with minimal formal education sought to compile records of their own lives and of the world around them. Such manuscripts show that gentlemen and clergymen were not the only ones who worked to create and maintain historical documents. There were, in fact, innumerable individuals who wrote histories 'from below' in this period.³

Fig 1.

Some early entries in Joseph Button's Coggeshall chronicle in 1678, written on the blank pages of the almanac Riders British Merlin (1677).

As will be seen, Bufton and the many others like him did not limit themselves to purely utilitarian information, nor did they concentrate exclusively on recording the state of their soul, though both types of texts were popular. Instead, they wrote in a wide range of ways, switching frequently and sometimes jarringly between different genres. Modes of writing that modern observers would consider distinct - such as national chronicles, burial registers, family genealogies and financial accounts - often crowd together on the page. This demonstrates both the remarkably confident and versatile historical literacy found among ordinary laypeople and the inadequacy of conventional categorizations which tend to label such volumes simply as 'diaries' or 'autobiographies'.

Bufton wrote very little about himself, and less still about his inner thoughts and feelings. He devoted most of his literary energies to studiously archiving information about the things he read, heard or witnessed himself. Scholars have often presented such material as 'self-writings' or 'ego-literature'.⁴ When they have focused on the writing of people like Bufton - 'godly' individuals of 'middling' social status - these tend to become examples of the rise of an 'individualist self, built on 'self-examination' and 'interiority'.⁵ Yet, as Sheila Ottway, Andrew Cambers and Adam Smyth have so ably demonstrated, using the writings of aristocratic and clerical elites, much early...