The Material Letter in Early Modern England

Early Modern Literature in History
General Editors: Cedric C. Brown, Professor of English and Dean of the Faculty of
Arts and Humanities, University of Reading; Andrew Hadfield, Professor of English,
University of Sussex, Brighton
International Advisory Board: Sharon Achinstein, University of Oxford; Jean
Howard, University of Columbia; John Kerrigan, University of Cambridge; Richard
McCoy, CUNY; Michelle O’Callaghan, University of Reading; Cathy Shrank,
University of Sheffield; Adam Smyth, University of London; Steve Zwicker,
Washington University, St Louis.
Within the period 1520–1740 this series discusses many kinds of writing, both within
and outside the established canon. The volumes may employ different theoretical
perspectives, but they share a historical awareness and an interest in seeing their texts
in lively negotiation with their own and successive cultures.
Titles include:
John M. Adrian
LOCAL NEGOTIATIONS OF ENGLISH NATIONHOOD, 1570–1680
Robyn Adams and Rosanna Cox
DIPLOMACY AND EARLY MODERN CULTURE
Jocelyn Catty
WRITING RAPE, WRITING WOMEN IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND
Unbridled Speech
Patrick Cheney
MARLOWE‘S REPUBLICAN AUTHORSHIP
Lucan, Liberty, and the Sublime
David Coleman
DRAMA AND THE SACRAMENTS IN SIXTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND
Indelible Characters
Katharine A. Craik
READING SENSATIONS IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND
Bruce Danner
EDMUND SPENCER’S WAR ON LORD BURGHLEY
James Daybell (editor)
EARLY MODERN WOMEN’S LETTER-WRITING, 1450–1700
James Daybell and Peter Hinds (editors)
MATERIAL READINGS OF EARLY MODERN CULTURE
Texts and Social Practices, 1580–1730
James Daybell
THE MATERIAL LETTER IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND
Manuscript Letters and the Culture and Practices of Letter-Writing, 1512–1635
Matthew Dimmock and Andrew Hadfield (editors)
THE RELIGIONS OF THE BOOK
Christian Perceptions, 1400–1660
Maria Franziska Fahey
METAPHOR AND SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA
Unchaste Signification
Mary Flory-Wilson and Garrett A. Sullivan Jr. (editors)
ENVIRONMENT AND EMBODIMENT IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND
Kenneth J.E. Garaham and Philip D. Collington (editors)
SHAKESPEARE AND RELIGIOUS CHANGE
Teresa Grant and Barbara Ravelhofer
ENGLISH HISTORICAL DRAMA, 1500–1600
Forms Outside the Canon
Johanna Harris and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (editors)
THE INTELLECTUAL CULTURE OF PURITAN WOMEN, 1558–1680
Constance Jordan and Karen Cunningham (editors)
THE LAW IN SHAKESPEARE
Claire Jowitt (editor)
PIRATES? THE POLITICS OF PLUNDER, 1550–1650
Gregory Kneidel
RETHINKING THE TURN TO RELIGION IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
Edel Lamb
PERFORMING CHILDHOOD IN THE EARLY MODERN THEATRE
The Children’s Playing Companies (1599–1613)
Katherine R. Larson
EARLY MODERN WOMEN IN CONVERSATION
Jean-Christopher Mayer
SHAKESPEARE’S HYBRID FAITH
History, Religion and the Stage
Scott L. Newstok
QUOTING DEATH IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND
The Poetics of Epitaphs Beyond the Tomb
P. Pender
EARLY MODERN WOMAN’S WRITING AND THE RHETORIC OF MODESTY
Jane Pattegree
FOREIGN AND NATIVE ON THE ENGLISH STAGE, 1588–1611
Metaphor and National Identity
Fred Schurink (editor)
TUDOR TRANSLATION
Adrian Streete (editor)
EARLY MODERN DRAMA AND THE BIBLE
Contexts and Readings, 1570–1625
Marion Wynne-Davies
WOMEN WRITERS AND FAMILIAL DISCOURSE IN THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE
Relative Values
The series Early Modern Literature in History is published in association with the
Early Modern Research Centre at the University of Reading and The Centre for
Early Modern Studies at the University of Sussex
Early Modern Literature in History Series Standing Order

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Customer Services Department. Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England
The Material Letter in Early
Modern England
Manuscript Letters and the Culture and
Practices of Letter-Writing, 1512–1635
James Daybell
Plymouth University, UK
© James Daybell 2012
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2012 978-0-230-22269-4
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First published 2012 by
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For Julia, Kate and Alice
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Contents
List of Illustrations viii

List of Abbreviations x
Acknowledgements xiii
1 Introduction 1
2 Materials and Tools of Letter-Writing 30
3 Epistolary Writing Technologies 53
4 Interpreting Materiality and Social Signs 85
5 Postal Conditions 109
6 Secret Letters 148
7 Copying, Letter-Books and the Scribal Circulation of Letters 175
8 The Afterlives of Letters 217
9 Conclusion 229
Notes 234
Select Bibliography 291
Index 335
vii
List of Illustrations
1.1a Watermark ‘G3’ contained in CP88/58. Reproduced by

permission of the Marquess of Salisbury. 3
1.1b Watermark ‘standard’ or flag contained in CP88/58.
Reproduced by permission of the Marquess of Salisbury. 4
1.2 Fol.1r of CP88/58. Reproduced by permission of the
Marquess of Salisbury. 5
1.3 Binding of Cecil Papers volume 88. Reproduced by
permission of the Marquess of Salisbury. 9
3.1 Katherine Oxinden to her mother: BL, Add. MS, 28004, fol.9r,
n.d. Reproduced by permission of The British Library, London. 61
3.2 Title-page of the 1633 edition of Nicholas Breton’s
A Poste With a Packet of Mad Letters [10920 ccc 12].
Reproduced by permission of The British Library, London. 68
3.3 ‘Of the parts, place, and Office of a Secretorie’ in Angel Day,
The English Secretorie (1592), book 2, p.108 [C 131 de 17 (2)].
3.4 The form of a recommendation to be signed by William
Cecil, Lord Burghley, n.d.: BL, Lansdowne MS, 107, fol.155.
3.5 Draft letter from Henry VIII to earls of Angus, Cassillis and
Glencairn, 19 October 1543: BL, Add. MS, 32652, fol.228r.
5.1 John Norden, A Table Shewing the Distances Betweene all
the Cities and Shire Townes of England [1625]. Reproduced
by permission of The British Library, London. 115
5.2 By the King, A Proclamation for the Setling of the Letter
Office of England and Scotland (1635). Reproduced by
permission of The British Library, London. 124
6.1 William Cotton’s cipher (or ‘characterie’): BL, Cotton
MS, Caligula BVIII, fol.287r (7 June 1574). Reproduced
by permission of The British Library, London. 160
6.2 Partial key to the cipher of a letter from Thomas Jennings
to the Countess of Northumberland, 20 June 1572: TNA,
SP15/21, fol.119. Reproduced by permission of The National
Archives, Kew. 163
viii
List of Illustrations ix
6.3 Invisible ink used in a letter from Thomas Rogers to

Walsingham, 25 August 1585: TNA, SP15/29, fol.59r.
Reproduced by permission of The National Archives, Kew. 169
7.1 ‘The Stiles of the princes letters to all kinds of noblemen
and gents’ from Robert Beale’s manuscript formulary: BL,
Add. MS, 48150, fol.287r. Reproduced by permission of
The British Library, London. 206
r
7.2 ‘M Tho[mas] Alured (a privat gent.) to ye Marq[uess] of
Buckingham ag[ains]t Prince Charles marrying w[i]th Dona
Maria Infanta of Spayne’: TNA, SP14/121, fols.7v–8r.
Reproduced by permission of The National Archives, Kew. 214
7.3 The Coppie of A Letter Written to the Dvke of Bvckingham
Concerning the Match With Spaine (1642): E 115 (12).
List of Abbreviations
Original spelling and punctuation have been retained throughout in quota-

tions from manuscripts. Insertions are indicated by upward arrows ^^, and
deletions by a strikethrough line. Modern translations of eccentric spellings
have been provided in square brackets. Dates are given in Old Style, but the
year is taken to begin on 1 January. Roman numerals are retained in quota-
tions, but otherwise supplied in Arabic form; monetary sums of pounds,
shillings and pence are given as £ s d. In the endnotes dates are presented in
a shorthand day/month/year format. Place of publication is London unless
otherwise stated.
APC John Roche Dasent et al. (eds) Acts of the Privy Council of
England, 46 vols (London: HMSO, 1890–1964)
Beal, Dictionary Peter Beal, A Dictionary of Manuscript Terminology,
1450–2000 (Oxford: OUP, 2008)
Beinecke The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale
University, New Haven
Berks. RO Berkshire Record Office, Reading, Berkshire
BIHR Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research
BL British Library
BL, Add. MS British Library, Additional MS
BL, Cott. MS British Library, Cottonian MS
BL, Eg. MS British Library, Egerton MS
BL, Harl. MS British Library, Harleian MS
BL, Lansd. MS British Library, Lansdowne MS
BLJ British Library Journal
Bodl. Bodleian Library, Oxford
CKS Centre for Kentish Studies, Maidstone
CP Cecil Papers, Hatfield House, Hertfordshire
CRO Cornwall Record Office, Truro
CSP Calendar of State Papers
CUL Cambridge University Library
CUP Cambridge University Press
DNB Dictionary of National Biography
x
List of Abbreviations xi
EcHistRev Economic History Review

EETS Early English Text Society
EHR English Historical Review
ELH English Literary History
ELR English Literary Renaissance
EMS English Manuscript Studies
Folger Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC
GEC George E. Cokayne et al., The Complete Peerage of England,
Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom, Extant,
Extinct or Dormant, 13 vols in 14 (London: St Catherine’s
Press, 1910–59 [reprint, Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1982–98])
Hasler P.W. Hasler (ed.) The House of Commons 1558–1603, 3 vols,
(London: History of Parliament Trust, 1981)
HJ Historical Journal
HLQ Huntington Library Quarterly
HMC Historical Manuscripts Commission
HT History Today
HWJ History Workshop Journal
JBS The Journal of British Studies
Kendal RO Kendal Record Office, Cumbria
L&P Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry
VIII, ed. J.S. Brewer, J. Gairdner, R.H Rodie, et al. (21 vols. and
Addenda; London, 1862–1932)
Lisle Letters Muriel St. Clare Byrne, ed., The Lisle Letters, 6 vols. (Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 1981)
LMA London Metropolitan Archives
LPL Lambeth Palace Library, London
MLR Modern Language Review
NRA National Register of Archives
NRO Norfolk Record Office, Norwich
N&Q Notes and Queries
ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
OED Oxford English Dictionary
OUP Oxford University Press
P&P Past and Present
xii List of Abbreviations
PBSA Publications of the Bibliographical Society of America

PMLA Publications of the Modern Language Association
PRO SP 10 Public Record Office, State Papers, Domestic, Edward VI
PRO SP 11 Public Record Office, State Papers, Domestic, Mary I
PRO SP 12 Public Record Office, State Papers, Domestic, Elizabeth
PRO SP 15 Public Record Office, State Papers, Domestic, Addenda
PRO SP 46 Public Record Office, State Papers, Domestic, Supplementary
PRO Ward Public Record Office, Court of Wards Records
Rawl. MS Rawlinson Manuscript
RES Review of English Studies
RO Record Office
SCJ Sixteenth Century Journal
SQ Shakespeare Quarterly
Staffs. RO Staffordshire Country Record Office, Stafford
STC A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland and
Ireland, and of English Books printed Abroad, 1475–1640, eds
A.W. Pollard and G.R. Redgrave, 3 vols (second edn. London:
The Bibliographical Society, 1976–1991)
TNA The National Archives, Kew
TRHS Transactions of the Royal Historical Society
UP University Press
WCRO Warwickshire County Record Office, Warwick
Acknowledgements
This book is the culmination of more than fifteen years of research on

early modern letters. In many ways, it was the book that I should have
written first, before I embarked on working on Tudor women letter-writers
among other projects. I have, however, to thank Betty Hageman for her
invitation in the early ‘noughties’ to produce two ‘Recent Studies’ arti-
cles on Renaissance letters in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for
ELR, which appeared in 2005 and 2006. Twelve solid months spent in the
British Library Rare Books Room reading several thousand secondary works
on letters and letter-writing was not altogether a poisoned chalice. As an
exercise, it highlighted to me what remained to be done in the field, and
galvanised a sense that something a little more substantial should accrue
from a year’s toil and intellectual investment. Significant long-term periods
spent working at the Bodleian Library, The British Library, Lambeth Palace
Library, The National Archives, The Folger Shakespeare Library and latterly
at Devon Record Office, along with visits to dozens of regional and local
record offices, allowed me time to work through huge swathes of collections
of correspondence spanning the early-Tudor period to the mid-seventeenth
century. I hope that the resulting monograph has benefited in some ways
from this period of gestation.
Given the amount of time over which I have worked on letters I have
incurred a rather substantial amount of debts, both scholarly and otherwise.
I have discussed the current project with numerous people, who have gen-
erously provided advice and references, and shared knowledge, ideas and
papers. Among these individuals are Robyn Adams, Simon Adams, Nadine
Akkerman, Gemma Allen, Marjon Ames, Cate Ashley, Kenneth Austin,
Toby Barnard, Diana Barnes, Catherine Bowness, Jan Broadway, Cedric
Brown, James Brown, Alan Bryson, Vicki Burke, Christopher Burlinson, Stan
Chojnacki, Danielle Clarke, Elizabeth Clarke, Marie-Louise Coolahan, Jane
Couchman, the late Barry Coward, Ann Crabbe, Anne Curry, Michelle
DiMeo, Susan Doran, Rebecca Emmett, Melanie Evans, Dennis Flynn, Susan
Frye, Jonathan Gibson, Kerry Gilbert, Helen Graham-Matheson, Jerome
de Groot, Steven Gunn, Bruna Gushurst-Moore, Karen Hardman, Barbara
Harris, Johanna Harris, Felicity Heal, Elizabeth Heale, Steve Hindle, Clive
Holmes, Margaret Houlbrooke, Ralph Houlbrooke, Arnold Hunt, Lisa
Jardine, Jennie Jordan, Samuli Kaislaniemi, Marika Keblusek, Anne Laurence,
Diarmaid MacCulloch, Lynne Magnusson, Katy Mair, the late Jeremy Maule,
Arthur Marotti, Anne Mathers-Laurence, Margaret Maurer, Felicity Maxwell,
Steven May, Michelle McDonough, Natalie Mears, Rachel McGregor, Harry
xiii
xiv Acknowledgements
Newman, David Norbrook, Kara Northway, Michelle O’Callaghan, Helen

Ostovich, Malcolm Richardson, the late Sasha Roberts, Beth Robertson,
Karen Robertson, The Lord John Russell, Paul Salzman, Elizabeth Sauer, Gary
Schneider, Bill Sherman, Hilda Smith, Edith Snook, Goran Stanivukovic,
Rachel Stapleton, Daniel Starza Smith, Sara Jayne Steen, Joel Swann, Alison
Thorne, Suzanne Trill, Christopher Tyerman, Ted Vallance, Claire Walker,
Alison Wall, Susan Whyman, Alison Wiggins, Graham Williams, Elizabeth
Williamson, Sue Wiseman, Andy Wood, Henry Woudhuysen, Gillian Wright,
Laetitia Yeandle and Andrew Zurcher. I am also grateful for the comments
on papers delivered at conferences and seminars. In particular I would like
to acknowledge the audiences of the Oxford Early Modern Seminar, the
Cultures of Knowledge Seminar at Oxford, the Sixteenth Century Studies
Conference, North American Conference of British Studies, the Renaissance
Society of America Conference, and at CELL, and to the audiences of two
conferences that I organised at Plymouth University on ‘Material Readings
of Early Modern Culture’ in 2008, and on ‘Cultures of Correspondence’ in
2011.
The book has taken me to numerous archives, but above all I would like
to thank the staff and curators at The British Library, Duke Humphrey
Library, Lambeth Palace Library, The Folger Shakespeare Library, The
National Archives, as well as Christine and Colin Edwards, former archivists
at Cornwall Record Office, Ian Rayment at the Charles Seale-Hayne Library,
Plymouth University, and most of all thanks must go to Robin Harcourt
Williams and Vicki Perry at Hatfield House Library for their invaluable assist-
ance with the Cecil/Darcy letter with which the book opens. Finally, on the
archival front, I am profoundly grateful to John Draisey and his team at
Devon Record Office in Exeter for providing such a comfortable home-base
for this project, which was greatly assisted by their remarkably strong hold-
ings of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century correspondence, as well as by a
reading room furnished with the remnants of the library of the late Joyce
Youings. Among those who worked in the county archive I am particularly
grateful to Rebecca Gee (former conservator) for her enthusiasm for my
project, for supplying me with reading lists on modern archival and record
preservation practice, and for letting me ‘behind the scenes’ at Great Moor
House and literally providing me with a laboratory in which to learn about
and study early modern paper, chain lines, watermarks, seals and folding.
At Palgrave Macmillan I would like to thank Paula Kennedy, Catherine
Mitchell and Christine Ranft for all their kind help and assistance. For gen-
erous funding towards research expenses and for sabbatical leave without
which this book could not have been completed I would like to thank the
Research Centre for Humanities, Music and Performing Arts at Plymouth
University, which also contributed towards the cost of illustrations. At
Plymouth I am grateful to my early modern colleagues Peter Hinds, Dafydd
Moore, Jenny Graham, Liz Tingle and Claire Fitzpatrick, and especially to
Acknowledgements xv
Mark Brayshay and Ian Cooper for more than one three-hour-long conversa-
tion about early modern postal communications. For reading various drafts
of materials and commenting on chapters and papers I would especially like
to thank Fritz Levy and Mark Brayshay. Thanks also go to the series editors
Cedric Brown and Andrew Hadfield for their continued support throughout
the course of the entire project.
In true epistolary fashion, the division between scholarship and friendship
is one that is always blurred, but I feel immensely fortunate to count among
my friends Adam Smyth, with whom I am joint series editor of the Ashgate
series ‘Material Readings in Early Modern Culture’, and Andrew Gordon,
with whom I am about to embark on several letters-based projects. Both
have been enormously generous as friends and scholars, a generosity and
warmth of spirit that I hope I have in some ways reciprocated. Within this
personal ‘republic of letters’, stands Alan Stewart, a veritable modern-day
Erasmus. I thank him for a decade-long ‘conversation among friends’ about
matters epistolary, a conversation nowadays more often than not conducted
in letter form (or email at least) now that we are oceans apart. He also read
the manuscript of this book in its entirety, for which I am eternally grateful!
Outside of academe, Jason Dove, a co-founding member of ‘Dads’ Club’, has
been a kindred spirit over the last year of writing; and I thank him for help-
fully feigning interest in the vagaries of the early modern postal system on
those all too rare occasions at the Hour Glass. Finally, this book would never
have materialised without my girls: Julia, whose unwavering love, support
and friendship has sustained and inspired me; Kate Bear, who wonderfully
distracted me with cat hunts, hissing snakes, bees, tizzy and the occasional
gold star; and Alice, who arrived just in time for the proofing stage. It is to
the three of them that this book is dedicated with love and affection.
JRTD
St Leonards
1
Introduction
On the morning of 23 September 1601 Secretary of State Robert Cecil sent

a brief letter to the soldier Sir Francis Darcy, a letter that never in fact
arrived:
Sr Francys Darcy. I haue receaued this inclosed from the

court this morninge, wch I haue thought good to send ^to^ you
wth speed to be deliuered by you accordinge as you are directed:
and soe for this tyme I committ you to God. from London
this 23 of September 1601
your verie lovinge
freind
Ro Cecyll1
The letter was sent from London, written by a secretary, but bearing Cecil’s
signature; it was folded into an oblong packet and addressed by a secretary ‘To
my verie lovinge freind Sr Francys Darcye knight at Dover’. It was then folded
further, sealed twice and directed to Dover by royal ‘standing post’, enclosed
with a packet of official correspondence received at court and a French book.
Having been carried along the Dover road – a journey that took less than a
day – the letter was received not by its intended recipient, but instead by Sir
Thomas Fane, Lieutenant of Dover Castle, who eventually re-directed it back
to Cecil.2 At some point in this narrative of epistolary and postal transactions
the letter was opened, presumably once it had been returned to sender. It
was then read, endorsed by a secretary, and archived among Cecil’s writings.
Read solely for its contents this five-line letter appears inconsequential: it
functioned as a rudimentary communiqué accompanying other materials.
However, despite its diminutive size the missive is nonetheless extremely
potent. Read materially with attention both to the physical characteristics of
the manuscript as well as to the social contexts of its composition, delivery,
reception and latterly its archiving, this single letter permits an unfolding of
1
2 The Material Letter in Early Modern England
the broader social and cultural practices of early-modern letter-writing, and

introduces many of the main themes with which this book is concerned.
The manuscript letter itself is a bifolium, formed from a full sheet of paper
folded in half to provide four separate writing sides of 210 millimetres wide
and 300 millimetres high (referenced as folio 1 recto, folio 1 verso, folio 2
recto and folio 2 verso). Here size is important. For this 57-word message Cecil
chose to utilise an entire sheet, rather than cropping the paper. This was typi-
cal of bureaucratic practice. The paper on which the letter was written also
features a watermark (a design impressed into the paper during the manu-
facturing process): on one side of the page are the characters ‘G3’ and on the
other is a flag or standard that resembles Briquet number 5990 (Figures 1.1a
and 1.1b), a mark that identifies this as refined Italian paper, the use of which
is associated with members of the court.3 A stock of paper was a prerequisite
for writing letters, along various other tools, including a penknife, quills, ink,
wax, seals, pounce for blotting, a writing surface and calendar for dating.
The main text of the letter was contained in fol.1r (Figure 1.2); fols1v and 2r
were left blank; while the address, postal instructions and endorsements were
inscribed on different parts of fol.2v. Moreover, the ostentatiously generous
use of paper, the deployment of ‘significant blank space’ in the layout of the
text and the placing of the signature (itself a fashionable italic rendition) are
fundamental to the material rhetorics of the manuscript page. Cecil’s com-
munication was penned right at the top of the page, maintaining a left-hand
margin, with no space between the opening mode of address and the start of
the main body of the letter. Likewise, his signature was tucked close to the
closing mode of address ‘your verie lovinge frend’ leaving ample blank space
below, all of which functioned as markers of social status. That the letter was
penned by a scribe is characteristic of official correspondence of the period.
Ordinarily crown servants or bureaucrats employed secretaries for such rou-
tine tasks, as was the case with the address and endorsement of the letter,
both of which were in secretarial hands. Autograph postscripts were often
used to personalise missives.4 Secretaries composed letters working from dic-
tation, oral instruction, written notes or epistolary templates; in this case, the
insertion of the word ‘to’ in the second line suggests haste, that it was read
over once written and the omission corrected before sending.5 The choice of
italic script rather than secretary (the norm for business correspondence) is
unusual, reflective perhaps of learning or even intimacy if intended to pass
as an autograph hand. A connection certainly existed between Cecil and
Darcy, which might have warranted a personally penned letter, a connection
strengthened by the latter’s loyalty during Essex’s rebellion and his presumed
nomination to Parliament for Lymmington in 1601 by Cecil.6
The standard rules and conventions of writing a letter were routinely taught
to early modern schoolboys; they were readily available in epistolographies
of the period and could be gleaned by the untutored through contact with
the form. Cecil’s letter was perfunctory in its brevity and clipped form. The
simple opening mode of address ‘Sr Francys Darcy’ without use of a softening
3
Figure 1.1a Watermark ‘G3’ contained in CP88/58. Reproduced by permission of the

Marquess of Salisbury.
4
Figure 1.1b Watermark ‘standard’ or flag contained in CP88/58. Reproduced by permission of the Marquess of Salisbury.
5
Figure 1.2 Fol.1r of CP88/58. Reproduced by permission of the Marquess of

Salisbury.
pre-fix, such as ‘good’ or ‘honourable’, reflects Cecil’s superior social stand-

ing. The absence of epistolary niceties in the form of inaugural greetings and
salutations, combined with the short yet conventional closural committal
to God betray an urgent formality. The letter was instructional and informa-
tional, written to accompany a packet of letters received at court that morn-
ing which Cecil enclosed to be delivered with speed. The contractions and
abbreviations of ‘with’ and ‘which’, and the dating of the letter at the bottom
of the page (‘London 23 of September 1601’) evidence a practiced writer.
Official or business correspondence of this sort was more likely to contain
place and date of composition than ‘family’ or ‘domestic’ letters.
On receiving a letter, readers were confronted first with its outside (fol.2v;
see front cover image), which comprised the address leaf and secretarial and
postal endorsements. The bifolium was folded twice to create a long oblong
packet. Since the main body of the letter (fol.1r) and the address or super-
scription (fol.2v) both bled through the paper slightly, use of a bifolium with
two blank writing sides (fols1v, 2r) ensured postal secrecy in a period prior
to the use of envelopes. The address and postal directions were then writ-
ten onto the unfolded side before sealing, since the address continues over
a fold. The superscription followed the standard form outlined in epistolary
manuals, providing the addressee’s name, rank and title, his relationship
to the writer and place of delivery. Beyond providing the name of the
town, Dover, there is no further narrowing of location by street or lodging,
which illustrates the geographical imprecision of early modern addressing
practices. Above the superscription is written ‘For her Matys affayres’, and
underneath appears Cecil’s signature, which authenticated the dispatch,
permitting the letter to travel by royal ‘standing post’, rather than by carrier
or servant, the methods of posting most commonplace for ‘private’ corre-
spondence. The words ‘post hast hast hast for life life life lyfe’ reinforce the
urgency of the letter. Immediately below this is a sketch of a gallows which
acted as a visual cue presumably aimed at a partially literate bearer or to
allow a highly literate person to work out which letter to open first. Likewise
the words ‘For her Mats affayres’ and ‘Sr Francys Darcye’ were all written in
a clear italic hand (distinguished from the secretary hand of the rest of the
superscription) with the letters mostly separated and Dover is underlined for
visual clarity and ease of reading. This highlights the porous nature of early
modern epistolary culture, which encompassed a broad range of literacies,
and witnessed the intersection of manuscript practices with oral and visual
elements. The oblong manuscript would have then been folded, with the
opposite ends tucked in to form a compact packet, and warm wax applied
between the folds, before the letter was closed with Cecil’s seal (which has
his crest and motto on it) pressed into the paper covering the wax. Sealing
in this manner ensured epistolary privacy and authenticated the document.
The seals and signs of opening also reveal that the letter is an original (in
other words, a ‘real’ sent letter) rather than a draft or copy kept for filing.
Introduction 7
Postal endorsements written across the sealed seam permit a reconstruction

of its rather complex (and ultimately unsuccessful) journey from London to
Dover. Over the course of the sixteenth century there developed a network of
royal ‘standing posts’, relays of men and horses on standby to deliver govern-
ment communications, which could lead to relatively fast and efficient deliv-
ery times, at least at an elite level.7 Customary ‘post-stage’ towns were dotted
at regular intervals (of between eight to twenty miles) along designated postal
roads, and local postmasters were paid by the crown to furnish post-horses
and guides at a reduced rate for anyone carrying a royal warrant or placard to
travel on the monarch’s ‘special service’. Given its proximity to London and
important coastal ports, the Dover route was one of the most popular postal
roads throughout the period, and the first to have had royal standing posts.8
The massive demand for horse hire for private and official use meant that
Kentish postmasters could charge a universal fee of half-a-crown for horse
hire, a rate above the normal mileage rate. At each stage along the route
postmasters were expected to write the time and date of arrival of post, either
on the outside of individual letters or on the wrappers or outer coverings of
packets or parcels of letters.9 The survival of declared accounts of the masters
of the post from 1566 onwards – providing names, dates of appointment
and daily wages of postmasters on particular routes – permit the identifica-
tion of those postmasters through whose hands the letter passed on its way
from London through Kent to Dover.10 The letter was first endorsed ‘London
this 23 of September at 8 in the morninge’ by a secretarial hand different
from the one that superscribed the letter, possibly by Rowland White, the
Post of the Court, who was responsible for the transfer of packets from the
court presumably by foot-post to the Post of London. Immediately opposite
White’s timings, the letter was endorsed by another hand, that of the post
of London, William Hynchley, ‘London at past eight in the morninge’. The
letter was then regularly endorsed by the postmaster at each stage along the
London to Dover route. It was sent down river by boat from the City’s post-
master, arriving in ‘Dartford at 11 in the fornone’ (where the postmaster was
James Newbye); it was not endorsed at the next stage, the relatively short one
of Gravesend which appears to have been missed out. The letter was then
sent by rider reaching Rochester ‘at 2 in the afternon’ (where the postmaster
was John Smythe); it was endorsed at Sittingbourne (‘Sytynboren’) at 7 in the
evening, spelled phonetically ‘ynde efenyn’, indicating the partial literacy of
the postmaster Matthew Oteley. The final endorsement was ‘Canturbury past
nine in the night this 23th of Sep:’ where Antonye Howe was postmaster.
Canterbury was the hub for three coastal post-rooms, Margate, Sandwich and
Dover. Correspondence from Sir Thomas Fane to Robert Cecil shows that the
letter reached Dover Castle sometime in the morning of 24 September. The
Dover post, John Windebanke, would have been responsible for sending a
man probably on foot to carry the letter from the town up to the castle. The
letter arrived at the castle presumably along with Fane’s own administrative
postbag carried up from the town. Realising the letter was not for him Fane
redirected it down to Dover and finding Darcy already departed arranged
first for it to be carried by post into the Kentish Downs to try to catch up
with its addressee on his travels. When that course of action failed the letter
was returned to Cecil with the original book and packet, as enclosures with
Fane’s own letter. The concept of a single identifiable letter-bearer (which is
based on carriage by personal servants) is unhelpful here; delivery is at once
impersonal, plural and ad hoc.
This return journey can be reconstructed from the postal endorsements on
the accompanying letter from Fane to Cecil, which was dated from Dover
Castle the same day, 24 September 1601. Fane’s own letter was signed on the
outside, marked ‘For her Majesties Affairs’, again with a sketch of a gallows,
and urging ‘haste hast hast post hast for life life life’. It left Dover at 2 in the
afternoon, arriving at Canterbury at past 6 pm, Sittingborne at 9 pm, Rochester
at midnight and Dartford at almost 4 am, from where it would then have jour-
neyed by river to the Post of London, and thence been carried by foot-post
back to the Post of the Court, who would have arranged for it to be delivered
to the Principal Secretary.11 At this stage the letter was opened, a process that
tore away part of the paper to which the seals were attached, but left the two
seals intact. It was then endorsed ‘To Sr. Francis Darcy wth a Fr[ench] Booke’
by one of Cecil’s secretaries. Further information can be gleaned from the
endorsement on Fane’s letter, which reads ‘24 Sept: 1601 / Sr Thomas Fane to
my Mr / Sr Francis Darcy gone / yr honor packet returned’. The letter was folded
with the endorsement face up for ease of retrieval, and filed along the lines of
Nicholas Faunt’s 1592 ‘discourse touching the office of the Principal secretary
of estate’, which recommended that papers be sorted in bundles for daily use,
then removed to a chest to avoid confusion before being placed in cabinets
and coffers.12 On Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury’s death in 1612 a warrant was
issued directing that his papers be delivered to Levinus Muncke and Thomas
Wilson to be held in the State Paper Office, a transfer (according to a Memorial
by Wilson) that apparently occurred in 1613, and included papers ‘long kept at
Whitehall, and those brought from Salisbury House’.13 These papers now form
part of the State Papers housed at the National Archives at Kew. Despite this
transfer of documents, a considerable body of papers was retained by Cecil’s
secretaries. One portion latterly found its way to the British Library (as the
Burghley Papers in the Lansdowne MSS), the other is now preserved at Hatfield
House, Hertfordshire. Cecil’s letter to Darcy (along with Fane’s letter to Cecil)
was among the latter group, and at some point during the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries it was removed from its original bundle and transferred
into a hard-bound leather volume (number 88 in sequence, as document 58)
now kept in the library at Hatfield, as part of the Cecil Papers, a group of some
30,000 documents which are collected among the manuscripts of the present
Marquess of Salisbury.14 The current binding dates from the 1940s; the words
Cecil Papers 88 appear in gold embossed letters on the spine (Figure 1.3). The
Introduction 9
Figure 1.3 Binding of Cecil Papers volume 88. Reproduced by permission of the
Marquess of Salisbury.
letter now bears the archival stamp ‘Hatfield House Library’. Fane’s letter like-
wise resides in this volume (as document 60), which was organised in chrono-
logical order of the letters’ composition, a letter from Sir Edward Stafford to
Cecil bearing the same date of 24 September 1601 now separating Cecil’s letter
and its reply. The letters were calendared in 1906 by R.A. Roberts in volume
11 of the Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Most Hon. the Marquis of Salisbury,
Preserved at Hatfield House, Hertfordshire, as part of the Historical Manuscripts
Commission’s great endeavour to survey the nation’s records for the purposes
of historical research, and they have recently been digitized and are now avail-
able electronically through ProQuest.15
Cecil’s letter to Darcy illustrates the peculiarities of early modern corre-
spondence in all its nuanced complexities from composition to archive. Its
convoluted postal history highlights perhaps to exaggerated effect the vagar-
ies of delivery conditions throughout the sixteenth and early-seventeenth
centuries, even at the highest governmental level. It also challenges the
model of epistolary exchange as a closed relationship between letter-writer
and reader. Instead letter-writing emerges as a complex (often collaborative
rather than solitary) activity. It was a social transaction that could involve
layers of secretarial input at different stages of the epistolary process. Letters
passed through multiple hands (which complicates our understanding of a

single letter-bearer); and functioned as a part of a series of texts, enclosures
and documents. The fact that this missive was never in fact received, calls
into question assumptions that letters were necessarily read. While Cecil’s
letter was sent and returned unopened, other manuscript letters survive as
copies or drafts, distinct from the ‘original’ letter as sent, if in fact such a doc-
ument ever existed. A rounded analysis thus necessitates that we read beyond
text, to pay attention to material forms and practices as well as textual resi-
due. This letter is of course an example of official correspondence and in this
respect it is distinct from other ‘private’ correspondences. It could travel by
royal standing post, it obeyed epistolary conventions of structure form and
manuscript layout, and conformed to scribal protocols. What it illustrates is a
formal mode of business correspondence, and as such stands as a benchmark
against which other forms of letter might be measured. Moreover, taken as
a lens through which to view early modern letter-writing, the Cecil letter
introduces many of the main themes with which this book is concerned:
the materials, tools and technologies of letter-writing; the writing practices
(singular and communal) surrounding composition; the social signs, codes
and cues encoded in the physical form of letters; the nature of postal condi-
tions and delivery; the reception and the circulation of correspondence; and
finally the preservation and archiving of letters.
The Material Letter represents the first full-length monograph study of

manuscript letters and the culture and social practices of letter-writing in
early modern England. Concentrating on the years circa 1512 to 1635, it
examines what is arguably a crucial period in the development of the English
vernacular letter before Charles I’s postal reforms in 1635, one that witnessed
a significant extension of letter-writing skills throughout society, an expan-
sion in the range of uses to which letters were put and significant develop-
ments in epistolary theory and practices. Importantly, the un-systematised,
idiosyncratic character of postal conditions which marked the sixteenth and
early-seventeenth century, prior to the opening up of the royal post to pri-
vate mail, formed a distinctive feature of letter-writing, conditioning the very
nature of the letter. Letter-writing was responsive to the irregular rhythms
of dispatch, and throughout the period correspondence remained a deeply
insecure medium, with obvious consequences for composition. Letter-writers
were careful what to commit to paper, and sought to preserve the integrity
of letters through sealing, requests to the reader to burn missives once read,
and the use of secret codes. Moreover, meaning was generated by material as
well as textual forms. A fundamental argument of the book, therefore, is that
early modern letters can only be fully understood by also paying attention
to the ‘materiality’ of texts. Materiality is here defined first in terms of the
Introduction 11
physical characteristics of manuscript letters and the meanings generated by

them: for example, the significance of handwriting, the size and quality of
paper used, the layout of the manuscript page and the significance attached
to seals. Such forms were imbued with social signs and codes that affected
meaning. Such features as writing a letter oneself, the use of black wax for
sealing, signing at the bottom of the page, the way in which a letter was
folded or the use of Italian paper, all carried significant meanings that were
readily understood during the early modern period. Indeed, the material
rhetorics of the manuscript page were central to the ways in which letters
communicated. Modern printed editions of letters which aim to present
accessible texts lose much of the meaning generated by material features and
have led to misunderstandings of the ways in which letters worked. Study of
the materiality of letters thus means that far from being practices marginal to
historical and literary inquiry, palaeography (the study of handwriting) and
codicology (the study of watermarks, bindings and collation), among other
specialist fields concerned with analysis of the physical forms of manuscripts
and documents, are crucial to understanding the complexities of early mod-
ern letters and epistolary culture. In addition to these physical features, the
term materiality also encompasses the ‘social materiality’ of letter texts, in
other words the social and cultural practices of manuscripts and the material
conditions and contexts in which they were produced, disseminated and
consumed. It is intended above all that the interdisciplinary approach of
this book, which emphasises the importance of material readings, will add
a methodological sophistication to the analysis of letters, enhancing and
complementing historical, literary and linguistic approaches.
Another central aim of the book is to provide a comprehensive study of
letter-writing as a process in all its nuanced complexity. Rather than viewing
the letter as an abstract form disconnected from material contexts or as a self-
reflective mirror, textually conveying the feelings and emotions of a writer,
the study is concerned with the ways in which attention to material features
enhance the ways in which letters were read, and with reconstructing and
interpreting the social practices and cultures of correspondence during the
early modern period. It is interested in the raw materials of letter-writing – the
tools, writing implements and other accoutrements connected to the episto-
lary arts – their nature, how they were acquired and the meanings attached to
them. Integral to this analysis are considerations of the material conditions of
letter-writing: the contexts, environments and milieux in which letters were
composed; the characteristics of authorship and epistolary production; the
nature of early modern postal conditions, and the ways in which these under-
lying structures impacted on the writing and the form of letters throughout
the period. The study is further concerned with the acquisition and spread of
letter-writing skills, the mechanisms by which the rules and protocols of letter-
writing were embedded within the fabric of early modern society. It therefore
focuses on a series of technologies that each contributed to the culture of
letter-writing: pedagogic, the ways in which letter-writing was taught; mod-

els, the dissemination of letter-writing theories through published manuals;
and finally, technologies of authorship, both personal and singular, as well as
collaborative, involving secretaries and other amanuenses. Over the course of
the early modern period, letter-writing emerged as an increasingly ‘private’
and ‘individual’ medium associated with personal writing technologies, but
secretarial and scribal forms of epistolary activity continued to be widespread.
In addition to explorations of epistolary composition, the book is concerned
with the broad range of practices connected to the writing, sending, read-
ing and archiving of letters. It explores the practices associated with secret
writing; copying and scribal culture; the circulation of letters and epistolary
networks; and with letter-books and the formation of archives of correspond-
ence. Pivotal to the book’s main argument is that the early modern period
did not witness a single monolithic culture of correspondence, but rather a
range of interlocking and overlapping cultures and practices, which shifted
and developed over time, varying according to factors such as social status,
gender and circumstance. While there are rules and protocols informing the
manner in which letters were written, what is most distinctive about early
modern letter-writing was its often makeshift and improvised nature, worked
out in the face of local conditions.
Taken as a whole, the book aims to complicate further the ways in which we
read and interpret letters as intrinsically ‘personal’, ‘private’ and ‘intimate’,
and letter-writing as a straightforward closed two-way epistolary exchange
between sender and reader. This rather simplistic model of epistolarity proba-
bly owes more to Victorian correspondence practices and modern interpreta-
tions of the letter as an Erasmian ‘conversation between friends’ (constructed
as intimate and private) than anything else, and demands significant revision
for the sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries.16 Letters thus emerge from
this study as multifaceted and layered forms, often collaborative or medi-
ated, and intended for wider, sometimes even more ‘public’ dissemination.
Indeed, what one means by the very term ‘letter’ is not as straightforward as
it appears on first consideration. The early modern archives yield a range of
letter texts, many of which are distinct from commonsense notions of let-
ters as ‘real’, in the sense of original correspondence that was sent, received
and read. The various scribal forms of letter include drafts, copies, circular
letters, letter-books and even printed letters, each of which had their own
distinct characteristics and features that require careful scholarly attention.
In addition to the contents of the main body of the text (which in some cases
might follow a clear classical rhetorical structure), letters featured numerous
other material and textual components in addition to the physical features
already outlined, which were crucial to how they communicated meaning.
The main parts of the inside of a letter included opening and closing modes
of address; the salutation, subscription and signature; the dating formulae
and postscript. The outside of the letter contained the superscription, the
Introduction 13
address or direction (often referred to as the address leaf), and often bore
secretarial endorsements (summarising contents and dating receipt), postal
markings, which trace the journey of the letter along designated postal
routes, as well as seals and signs of sealing. These distinct parts of the letter
are fundamental to an understanding of the diplomatics of early modern
correspondence. Furthermore, letters must not be seen as isolated texts, but
were often in fact only a single part of wider social and textual transactions.
They generated additional meaning through corporeal extensions (such as
bearers); were frequently conveyed with enclosures, accompanying texts,
goods and commodities or functioning as introductions; and they often
represent merely one side of a reciprocal epistolary exchange. Moreover, the
process of letter-writing itself was immensely complex and varied, involving
various parties ancillary to the notional sender and recipient: secretaries,
amanuenses and scribes; bearers, carriers, servants, postboys and messengers;
archivists, keepers of records, antiquarians and collectors. Early modern cor-
respondence is thus viewed as a highly complex genre that requires layers of
careful unpacking, and sensitivity to social and cultural meaning inscribed
textually and materially in order for letters fully to be decoded. Moreover,
the book has wider applicability since the letter form arguably structures and
mirrors a range of early modern transactions. Thus, the ways in which we
read and interpret letters necessarily influences and informs how we under-
stand many other textual interactions and social relationships. At the very
least, the study forces an understanding of the multi-agent nature of what
seems to us ‘personal’ correspondence.
Approaches to letters and material readings
Studies in Renaissance letter-writing have witnessed a remarkable growth of

interest over the last decade or so, paralleled by the diversity in the range of
interdisciplinary approaches taken towards epistolarity (an ugly term admit-
tedly, but literally, the ‘letterness of letters’). Scholarship has tended to focus
on individual letter-writers, usually those of canonical status or historical
renown; on epistolary form and genres (such as the letter of petition, the
love letter or the letter of condolence); or has taken distinct methodologi-
cal approaches to letters, notably linguistic and gender-based analyses.17 In
combination the work of numerous scholars has redefined the ways in which
we conceptualise, situate and read letters of the period. Lynne Magnusson’s
Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters
(1999), adapts theories of linguistic analysis relating to politeness and Pierre
Bourdieu’s social theory of language, as means of examining the ways in
which social relations are encoded and manipulated in Shakespeare’s dra-
matic language, and how Shakespeare’s notion of conversation relates to
letter-writing practices of the early modern period. Alan Stewart’s important
book Shakespeare’s Letters (2008) analyses the representation of epistolary
practices in Shakespeare’s dramatic works and studies early modern letter-

writing practices as a way of re-reading the plays. Roger Chartier has studied
the influence of model letters in the ancien régime in France, while Gary
Schneider’s Culture of Epistolarity: Vernacular Letters and Letter Writing in Early
Modern England, 1500–1700 (2005) focuses on the socio-cultural function
and meaning of epistolary writing, arguing that letters circulated within the
‘culture of epistolarity’ in early modern England.18 Susan Fitzmaurice’s The
Familiar Letter in Early Modern English (2002) is a socio-historical linguistic
study examining the linguistic form, function, and practice of familiar letters,
both real and fictional, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Treated
as sites of homoerotic desire, letters have also received queer readings by
David M. Bergeron and Alan Bray amongst others.19 Other works have con-
centrated on the largely male Latinate world of the Republic of Letters. Lisa
Jardine’s Erasmus, Man of Letters: The Construction of Charisma in Print (1993)
demonstrates Erasmus’s self-conscious mastery of print media as a means of
fashioning himself as a truly pan-European scholar.20 Epistolary networks
that stretched across early modern Europe have been studied by scholars
of the mid- to late-seventeenth century interested in the Royal Society and
the scientific revolution, and the newsletter and intelligence networks have
received considerable attention.21 Others including myself have studied the
gendered aspects of letter-writing, focusing specifically on early modern
women’s letters, interestingly by far the most industrious area of research
on letter-writing.22 While these varied studies illustrate an intense interest in
matters epistolary among early modern scholars, they are on the whole (with
the exception of work on the Republic of Letters and perhaps my own and
Stewart’s more historical work) concerned with the ‘literariness’ of letters and
rely heavily on modern-day, and often modernized, printed collections of let-
ters. Several scholars, however, have stressed the importance of attending to
the material aspects of letters. Work by Jonathan Gibson, A.R. Braunmuller
and others has emphasised the significance of the physical layout of the
manuscript page, while Alan Stewart and Heather Wolfe’s Letter-Writing in
Renaissance England (2004) richly illustrates materials associated with the
epistolary process.23 There has to date, however, been no full-scale study of
early modern English manuscript letters, their material or physical features,
and the social and cultural practices associated with letter-writing.24 It is this
gap in the scholarly landscape that this monograph seeks to fill in order to
reconstruct and examine letter-writing through its entire process from tools
and composition to circulation and archive. Despite an increasing body of
scholarship on European epistolography, especially on seventeenth-century
France, the study excludes international correspondence, instead focusing
on England during the sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, a period
marked by a distinct set of concerns.25
Alongside this development in epistolary studies scholarly attention has
in recent years begun to focus on the material meanings of texts, broadly
Introduction 15
defined, as a new and crucial way of reading and understanding their full
significance.26 Indeed, D.F. McKenzie in a now famous and monstrously
over-quoted essay has argued that ‘bibliographers should be concerned to
show that forms effect meaning’; and following his lead Roger Chartier has
pronounced that ‘form produces meaning’.27 Definitions of what constitutes
a ‘text’ have been constantly expanding to include ‘visual, but non-verbal
texts as well as oral ones’.28 There has been a steadily growing recognition
that all interpreters of texts – not only bibliographers – need to take full
account of material forms. Attention to the physical characteristics of texts
has been especially pronounced in the related (but at times remarkably
insular) fields of manuscript studies and history of the book, and this book
builds on the pioneering scholarship on manuscript, print, oral and material
cultures.29 Such works have elucidated the materials, practices and proc-
esses of literacy, the technologies and tools of the written and printed word,
interpreting the uses of paper, writing implements, ink, desks and presses.
Approaching manuscripts and printed books as physical artefacts they have
examined the significance of watermarks, bindings, seals and handwriting;
analysed the spacial features and design of texts, the layout of the manu-
script and printed page, and the importance of script, typeface and blank or
white space, as well as the social signs, codes and cues inscribed within texts.
Printed books, it has been shown, have their own bibliographic rhetoric,
while manuscripts contain social signals that are textually embedded within
material forms, such as handwriting and layout. At a time when historical
and literary critical discourse treats the idea of the text as an abstraction, and
‘authorship’ is viewed as collaborative, scholars have reconstructed the social
context, space and location of writing and production – what G. Thomas
Tanselle has summarised as ‘the social process of publication’ – the distribu-
tion and dissemination of texts, the environments of reading and reception,
as well as marginalia and practices of reading.30 Texts have thus begun to be
re-examined and located in their most immediate contexts, in the spaces in
which they were read and experienced (the study or closet, universities, the
Inns of Court, Parliament, the coffee house, the court, the household and
family, and even the street).31 Likewise scholars are increasingly aware of
the ways in which texts functioned as gifts and of textual exchange more
broadly, and the role that the physical media of manuscripts and books
played in the construction and projection of identity in the early modern
period.32 In this respect writing, printing and reading have been examined as
contextual and embodied activities located in particular environments and
often bounded by conventions. Broadly defined, then, materiality relates not
only to the significance of physical forms, but also to the social materiality
(or ‘sociology’) of texts, that is the social and cultural practices of manuscript
and print and the contexts in which they were produced, disseminated and
consumed. Material matters are thus central to a full understanding of a writ-
er’s words as they appear in handwritten and printed form.
Whilst the majority of studies of material texts have tended to concen-

trate on ‘literary’ works (although not exclusively) such an approach clearly
extends to other kinds of texts, including importantly here early modern
letters. Most modern printed editions of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
letters fail to convey the full range of meanings generated by this complex
and socially charged genre, although a small number of scholarly editions
have sought to represent visually non-textual forms, thus providing read-
ers with material texts closer in approximation to the original manuscript.33
Focusing on the ‘materiality’ of letter-writing it is possible to reconstruct using
various categories of source the epistolary process in its entirety. Physical
characteristics (such as, ink, paper, seals, folding, watermarks, handwriting,
endorsements and layout) tell us much about the nature, status and process of
letter-writing as it is traced from the preparation of epistolary materials, tools
and technologies, through the composition process (which was often collabo-
rative or mediated) and delivery of correspondence, through presentation,
reading and reception, and finally to the preservation and retention of corre-
spondence in various archival forms. The colour of a seal (black, for example,
signified mourning), the placement of a signature on the page, the size, type
and quality of paper used for writing, how a letter was folded, and whether it
was written by a secretary or in a correspondent’s own hand (and indeed the
type of script employed) all carried social signs that would have been readily
understood at the time by those familiar with early-modern epistolary culture
and practices. Attention to ‘social materiality’ contextualises epistolary prac-
tices, establishing the conditions of writing and reading, the range of literacies
(written, visual and oral) associated with letter-writing, the role of secretaries,
amanuenses, servants and bearers, the environments and spaces in which
letters were composed, received and read. Material readings in their broadest
sense then thus complement and enhance approaches to early modern letters
that have privileged analyses of content, form and historical context.
New historicists and their British cultural materialist counterparts have also
widely and influentially embraced ‘materiality’ in the turn towards ‘things’
or ‘material culture’ in Renaissance studies. While theoretical and critical
approaches have changed and developed over recent years, one dominant
strand of scholarship has been to treat objects (as with ‘non-literary’ writings)
as capable of reflecting wider cultural significances.34 Things are read simul-
taneously for their material, semiotic and rhetorical meanings. Using a form
of Geertzian ‘thick description’ scholars have read and analysed objects and
social practices, delineating their intrinsic natures, peculiarities and meanings;
studying the codes and social signs inscribed within things therefore becomes
the metaphorical key to unlocking the essence of the whole. Thus, drawing on
Malinowski’s analysis of the Kula ring, Patricia Fumerton views the practice of
‘placing-out’ of children among the aristocracy as reflective of wider patterns of
social exchange (‘the poetics of exchange’) and the ritualised gift-giving culture
of Elizabethan England; torturous cookery instructions – for example, ‘To rost
Introduction 17
a Goose alive’ – offered a more layered and plural anecdotal way of unpacking
the commonality in the cultural practices of the Renaissance everyday.35 Central
too is the historicist emphasis on the ‘historical gap’ between ‘then’ and ‘now’:
the object or material thing is laboriously described – its characteristics, uses,
natures, values, functions and variations delineated – its meaning culturally and
historically contingent (an assumption borrowed from historical anthropolo-
gists and applied by historians of material culture) negotiated in the contextual
moment of observation or interaction, inflected by who views it, and when
and how they interact with it.36 In their detailed study Renaissance Clothing and
the Materials of Memory Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, for example,
argue that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries clothes were not merely
‘detachable and discardable goods’ as they are today, but instead functioned as
‘material mnemonics’, ‘fashionings, the materializations of memory, objects
that worked upon and transformed the body of the wearer’.37 Similarly, Julian
Yates has observed the multiple meanings or significances of the orange in
late-Elizabethan England: as a commodity it was a luxury citrus fruit to be sold,
consumed, sent as a gift, utilised as a bribe; it was used for its detergent proper-
ties in laundry; and within recusant circles its peel was fashioned into rosaries,
its juice furnished invisible ink for use in covert correspondence.38 In the same
way, the physical characteristics of the early modern material letter were imbued
with social codes and signs that generated meaning for contemporaries, attain-
ing a cultural significance distant from modern-day letters and letter-writing
practices, but readily understood within the context of the period.
The ‘material turn’ has also opened up new avenues of investigation for
historians chiefly interested in the production and consumption of mate-
rial goods, the social and cultural meanings of material culture and analysis
of what has somewhat crudely been termed the ‘everyday’. Implicit in such
studies is that consumption was indicative of behaviour and attitudes; that
material goods themselves possessed physical attributes and practical uses, as
well as symbolic meaning associated with self-representation, which needs
to be teased out and considered alongside records of mere ownership.39 The
ways in which objects were consumed and used, their location within the
household and the relationship to rooms, room-use and spatial meaning
are important features for a study of the material culture of early modern
letter-writing.40 It is important to note that this book does not undertake
a full-scale analysis of patterns of consumption of writing materials. While
there is need for such research, it is well beyond the remit of the present
study. Nonetheless, focusing on the materials, tools and technologies of
letter-writing a series of general questions arise relating to their consumption,
ownership, use and social meaning. How widespread was the ownership of
writing materials? Where, how often and at what cost were items purchased
for letter-writing? Which things was it necessary to buy and what could be
made oneself? A survey of gentry and noble household accounts, of women
as well as men, and of mercantile and municipal expenses over the period
reveals the frequent consumption of consumables like paper, ink, wax and
quills, as well as the purchase of more durable goods, including desks, stand-
ishes, penners and seals. Likewise, inventories (household and probate) while
they have their distinct limitations, nonetheless shed light on the spread of
particular objects associated with letter-writing, such as writing desks (lock-
able, portable and otherwise) and other writing surfaces, seals and other writ-
ing implements.41 The location of these items within distinct rooms or spaces
within the household inflects a particular characteristic to letter-writing.
While small households tended to feature writing desks within reception
rooms, the appearance of desks in lockable rooms, such as closets and studies,
within large households locates letter-writing within a more secluded, solitary
environment. Furthermore, the presence of muniments rooms, and lockable
desks, chests and coffers, suggests an impulse towards secrecy, personal papers
and the preservation of correspondence and archives. Patterns of consump-
tion (as with literacy rates) were modulated by factors of class, gender and
region. A more qualitative approach to the writing tools and technologies
purchased records conspicuous consumption: the purchase of high quality
or decorated writing paper was related to social status. Likewise, ornate seals,
highly decorative desks, standishes or penknives increasingly became objects
of social ostentation, prized for their value, design and exclusivity.
Methodological tools that pay attention to materiality can be deployed to
consider letters within a wider context. Individual letters should be viewed as
part of an epistolary exchange (where recovery is in fact possible) or within
the light of a larger correspondence or letter collection. Textual residue is
often all that survives of a manuscript transaction that also comprised corpo-
real and oral features connected to the figure of the bearer. Renaissance letters
were often written with the intention of being read out aloud and perform-
ance was integral to their presentation. The protocols and practicalities of dis-
patch and reception are central to reconstructing the conditions of the social
materiality of letters. Individual missives could be passed around, read plurally
with many auditors, or read many times. Letters were also often disseminated
with enclosures, which could include other correspondence, written texts and
material goods. At the heart of the book’s analysis of letters then are the kinds
of bibliographical techniques that are the hallmarks of manuscript studies:
codicology or the physical description of manuscripts (watermarks, collation
and binding); palaeography (the study of handwriting), transcription prac-
tices, attribution and provenance; sigillography (the study of seals); and dip-
lomatics (the study of documents). By studying the physical and contextual
complexities of letters in this way alongside more traditional approaches to
the genre one can elucidate much about the nature and nuances of letters and
letter-writing, shedding fresh light on a range of intriguing questions relating
to the nature of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century correspondence. Where,
how, by whom and in what manner were letters written, sent and read? How
far was letter-writing a solitary personal activity associated with seclusion? In
Introduction 19
what ways do collaborative and communal epistolary practices erode notions

of letters as private and complicate our understanding of early modern sub-
jectivities? Was letter-writing an everyday activity, reactive to the exigencies of
the post and the demands of office and household and estate management? To
what extent did corresponding develop over the period as a leisured pursuit?
How far did letter-writing skills extend down the social hierarchy to groups
such as women and more ordinary correspondents below the ranks of tradi-
tional elites? A fundamental argument of the book is that letters can only be
understood fully by paying attention to their physical characteristics – paper,
ink, handwriting, physical layout, signatures, seals and fastenings, addresses
and endorsements – and the cultural and social practices of early modern let-
ter-writing. The aim here is not to privilege material readings, but to argue that
analysis of the physical characteristics must reside alongside and complement
literary, stylistic, linguistic and more recent gender-based approaches to let-
ters. As such, The Material Letter aims to contribute towards a new and wider
research agenda that is beginning to attend to the material forms of a range
of early modern manuscript and printed texts.
Methodologies and sources
The book concentrates on the years from the early-sixteenth century through
to the early-seventeenth century, which was a crucial period in the develop-
ment of the genre of the vernacular English letter. The study thus follows a
postal rather than regnal narrative or chronology, though cultural and social
practices it must be stressed are rarely constrained by precise dates. In the
broadest terms the study takes as its starting point the year of 1512 around
which time Sir Brian Tuke assumed duties as Henry VIII’s Master of Posts,
which saw the inauguration and development of a Tudor postal system for
the carrying of royal mail. The year 1635 marks the terminal point of the
study since in July of this year Charles I issued a proclamation ‘to settle a
running post’ between London and cities in England, Scotland, Wales and
Ireland and instituted changes in the royal postal system, permitting the
carrying of ‘personal’ mail. This transformation it could be argued altered
the very nature of the early modern letter as the advent of a national system
open to all meant that letter-writing was more secure, regularised and reli-
able.42 Previously the royal post had only really carried official state corre-
spondence. Prior to the evolution of the Post Office the means of conveying
personal letters – I refrain from using the term postal system – was ad hoc,
uneven and marked by regional disparities and variations.43 Letters were lost,
confiscated and purloined; they fell into the wrong hands and were read by
those other than for whom they were intended. The insecurity of the episto-
lary medium, however, promoted a degree of self-censorship among writers
distrustful of letters going astray and falling into the wrong hands. Writers
frequently asked recipients to ‘burn this letter’; messages were conveyed
orally by bearers; and much important business was transacted face to face.
Furthermore, the period under consideration witnessed the extension of edu-
cation and literacy (among women as well as men) and by the 1580s letter-
writing skills were more widely spread below the ranks of restricted social
elites and to various groups traditionally not associated with high levels of
literacy; although it is not until the eighteenth century that letter-writing
emerged as a much more democratic form.44 There developed an emerging
concept of privacy by the end of the sixteenth century; correspondence was
increasingly regarded as singular, the property of the recipient. The opening
of another person’s missive (even by a spouse) became socially taboo, thought
worthy of apology.45 As levels of literacy rose towards the end of the sixteenth
century, letters became increasingly private spaces associated with personal
writing technologies and detached from the secretarial gaze. Business secrets
were conveyed in writing personally; husbands and wives traded intimacies
in correspondence; young girls were encouraged to practice their epistolary
skills in order to allow them greater control over their own affairs in later life;
clandestine or highly sensitive information was transmitted using ciphers,
informal codes and secret devices. Increased personalisation of letter-writing
led also to letters being utilised for an expanding range of purposes by the
end of the period. Furthermore, the period as a whole witnessed the complex
development in letter-writing theory and instruction over the course of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from the influence of the medieval ars
dictaminis, through early-sixteenth-century Humanist letter-writing manuals
to the spread of vernacular English manuals and the proliferation of printed
works which offered instructions on how to write letters, or proffered exem-
plary materials for emulation and entertainment. The seventeenth century
in particular witnessed a series of generic developments: the rise of the ‘secre-
tary’, a form aimed at the ‘unschooled’; the emergence of ‘newly discovered’
letters, collections for amusement purporting to contain ‘private’ correspond-
ence; and publication of manuals specifically aimed at women.
The word ‘letter’ is in many ways a catchall term that belies the rich variety
of epistolary forms, both ‘real’ and ‘fictional’. Above all though, the kind of
letter in which this book is interested is the vernacular English prose letter,
which, although influenced by continental and Latinate models, developed
its own particular forms and conventions. Such letters can be divided for-
mally by function and sub-genre (the love letter, letter of condolence, peti-
tionary and ‘familiar’ letters) and are distinct from other types of epistolary
writing, such as the verse epistle, dedicatory epistle and epistolary novel.46 In
practice though, ‘domestic’ or ‘familiar’ epistles encompassed a wide range of
subjects and purposes, and are wellnigh impossible to categorise, which lends
them a generic fluidity.47 Indeed, William Fulwood, in the first published
English letter-writing manual, Enemie of Idlenesse (1568) argued that such
correspondence was ‘more in use than any other for so much as their nature
they are very necessary, to let our frendes understande of our estate, and of
Introduction 21
our businesse be it of helth, prosperitie, sicknesse, aduersitie, or any other

domesticall and familiar thyngs’.48 The permeability of generic boundaries
blurs strict divisions between ‘familiar’, ‘domestic’ or ‘familial’ correspond-
ence, and ‘business’, ‘state’ or ‘political’ letters. In practice, early modern cor-
respondence was rarely limited to single issues, but covered diverse topics, a
characteristic feature that precludes individual epistles from any simplistic or
reductive mode of classification. English prose letters also represent a more
everyday mode of writing and in this sense are more useful to the socio-
cultural historian in that they capture a broader range of letter-writing activi-
ties and the experiences of letter-writers from a wider social spectrum.
This study does not aim to be comprehensive in its collection and analysis
of letters in the way that my book on Tudor women letter-writers was. While
entirely feasible (within reason) to read every letter produced by a sixteenth-
century woman letter-writer, such a goal would be virtually impossible for the
present study where numbers of surviving letters must total several hundred
thousand items. The book focuses on approximately thirty large collections
of family papers selected for their representativeness socially, geographically
and chronologically. The early- and mid-Tudor periods are well served by the
Lisle letters, the Johnson and Hengrave MSS. Later collections, many of which
cover the entire period, include the mercantile Herrick family, and gentry
Newdigate and Throckmorton family papers from Warwickshire; the Carnsew,
Ralegh and Seymour manuscripts covering the Westcountry; the Smyth fam-
ily correspondence from Bristol; for East Anglia, the Gawdy family papers and
the papers of various cadet branches of the Bacon family; the De L’Isle and
Dudley and Dering manuscripts, and the Oxinden correspondence for Kent;
the Loseley collection for Surrey; the Tresham Papers for Northamptonshire;
the Bagots in Staffordshire; the Hothfield MSS for Cumberland in the North
West of England; the Cavendish-Talbot MSS held at the Folger Shakespeare
Library and the Shrewsbury and Talbot MSS at Lambeth Palace Library, which
cover several generations of the earls of Shrewsbury. Taken together these
collections exhibit the letter-writing activities of men and women of diverse
social groups, from the aristocracy and gentry to merchants and the ‘middling
sort’. Several other collections provide access to letter-writers of lower social
status, notable here are the collection of begging letters sent to Sir Thomas
Sutton the founder of Charterhouse Hospital, and an assortment of letters
relating to Right of Wreck in Newquay from individuals accused of theft of
the cargo of the ship George of Breme which got into difficulty during a storm
on 3 February 1571.49 Depositions material and scriveners’ diaries further evi-
dence an engagement with epistolary culture by people not normally associ-
ated with literacy.50 For the chapters looking at secret codes, the manuscript
circulation and archiving of letters it was also necessary to cast the archival
net beyond family collections to study the kinds of royal, government and
diplomatic correspondence gathered among the State Papers and other offi-
cial collections of letters, such as the Cecil Papers, and to concentrate on
particular categories of letter or manuscript: ciphered and coded correspond-

ence, letter-books and manuscript miscellanies. Thus rather than concentrate
on a particular form of correspondence – say, the court letter, letter of petition,
gentry letters or even women’s letters – the book instead seeks to investigate
the diversity of early modern epistolary cultures and practices.
While letters themselves tell us much about letter-writing habits and con-
ventions numerous other sources are also illuminating in the reconstruction of
early modern epistolary cultures and practices. Renaissance letter-writing man-
uals or epistolographies are useful in delineating epistolary rules relating to lay-
out, rhetorical convention and form in order to suggest how these conventions
changed over time and the extent to which they were followed in practice.
The tools and materials that needed to be assembled for the task of writing are
documented by writing manuals and copybooks, household accounts, receipt
books, herbals, household manuals and Renaissance books of secrets. Material
artefacts (writing desks, trousseaus, cabinets, trunks, pens, ink horns, pounce-
pots, penners, seals and letter-boxes in which letters were kept) similarly assist
in the reconstruction of early modern epistolary practices; household inven-
tories permit the virtual furnishing of domestic interiors, making possible the
location of writing spaces within the household (both in private spaces such
as studies and closets as well as in communal rooms like halls). Much can also
be inferred from the contents of letters and diaries, which frequently mention
in passing the writing, sending and receipt of letters. Similarly paintings and
fictional works represent letter-writing activities. Mid-seventeenth-century
Dutch genre paintings depict the social currency of letters in scenes of every-
day life, being composed and read in closets and taverns, alone in private and
in the company of bearers, secretaries or servants; Vermeer’s women are often
shown reading or writing letters.51 For an early period, Jan Gossaert’s ‘Portrait
of a Merchant’ (circa 1530) and Hans Holbein the Younger’s ‘Portrait of the
Merchant George Gisze’ (1532) both depict mercantile figures surrounded
by the paraphernalia of epistolarity: writing implements, ink, paper, folded
letters, sealing wax, sandbox and systems for filing correspondence. Alan
Stewart’s study of letters in Shakespeare’s plays explores the ways in which the
cultural institution or commodity of the early modern letter (as drawn from
social life as well as stage traditions) was enacted on the stage, and argues for
Shakespeare’s ‘grammar of letters’, in other words ‘a vocabulary and a set of
images that originate in the material practices of letter-writing culture of early
modern England’.52 Finally, the nature of the early modern post can be gleaned
from incidental references in correspondence, postmasters’ accounts and anno-
tations on the face of letters as well as documentary materials relating to the
history of the post office; while payments to bearers are recorded in household
and receivers’ accounts and details of postal roads found in road books and
almanacs. The book, therefore, draws on an enormous range of documentary
evidence and sources in addition to the letters themselves to shed significant
light on the manuscript practices of the early modern letter.
Introduction 23
Early modern letters and letter-writing
Any analysis of an early modern letter necessarily starts with an examination

of its scribal status, a factor integral to understanding properly the essence
of individual texts. The first task is to identify whether or not the letter is
an ‘autograph’, in other words penned by the signatory himself or herself,
rather than a scribal text produced by a secretary or amanuensis. Thus, an
autograph letter is one written and signed with the author’s own hand.53 The
term ‘holograph’ is often used interchangeably with autograph, although it
strictly refers to letters where the signature and main body of the text is in the
same hand. This particular usage is common in nineteenth-century calendars
and catalogues, which can be misleading.54 During the sixteenth and early-
seventeenth centuries it was perfectly acceptable for scribes to sign as well as
indite letters, often replicating the sender’s signature.55 Holograph in some
instances, therefore, may in fact merely equate to correspondence entirely in
the hand of a scribe. Secondly, factors relating to the material conditions of
writing varied greatly according to circumstance and convention. Textual and
palaeographical analysis of the mechanics of composition – who wrote letters,
how and under what conditions – further relate much about the nature of the
letter, exposing various archetypal epistolary practices that in combination
work to erode, but not completely erase notions of early modern letter-writing
as private, personal and singular. Early modern correspondence was produced
in various ways, with differing degrees of spontaneity and mediation. Letters
could be written immediately on receipt, an impulsive response enforced by
the imminent departure of a bearer, and at the other extreme be products of
laboured forethought. While many wrote themselves, a significant proportion
of letters were penned by amanuenses (distancing signatories from personal
writing technologies) or exhibit signs of collaboration. Senders might write
themselves, dictate to secretaries or produce notes from which an amanuensis
could construct a missive. Letters were confected from epistolary exemplars or
modelled on templates. They might be drafted, passed around for perusal and
critique by family and friends, reworked by legal counsel or government offi-
cials, then redrafted or amended in light of comments before a fair copy was
made for despatch.56 Alterations and refinements are in themselves of intrin-
sic interest, uncovering the degree to which letter-writing was a layered and
cumulative activity. For both men and women use of a scrivener or secretary
was enforced by illiteracy; for others it was a matter of choice influenced by
circumstance and convention. Ill-health and infirmity might lead individuals
to sit with a scribe; the messy mundanity of writing itself did not sit easily
with early sixteenth-century ideas of nobility, though this changed over the
course of the century. Throughout the period, formal business correspondence
was conventionally penned by secretaries, while by the start of James I’s reign
it was increasingly expected that men and women would indite intimate and
family letters with their own hands.57 The scribal and textual peculiarities of
letters refigures them as potentially communal and collective, rather than

merely individual and exclusive, providing a more complex understanding of
issues of authorship and early modern subjectivities.
The customs of delivery and reading shed further light on the generic
sophistication of early modern letters. In the period before Charles I’s postal
reforms, letters were delivered in a makeshift manner, conveyed by a range
of bearers: they were sent by carriers and merchants, entrusted to servants,
friends and family, and even pressed upon chance travellers heading in the
right direction. Letter-bearers represented corporeal extensions of the letter;
meaning was therefore generated orally and materially as well as textually.
The exigencies of dispatch, the sudden arrival and departure of a bearer, could
encourage an urgent immediacy among letter-writers, different from the stud-
ied rhetorical manoeuvrings evident in formal business missives. The reading
of letters – as with composition and dispatch – was often collaborative, far
from the solitary act of perusal that traditional conceptualisations of the epis-
tolary process portray. While private reading practices were not uncommon,
the ways in which many letters were read was manifestly diverse. Letters were
often sent unsealed to be read by family and passed around for comment
to wider social contacts. The passage of petitionary missives directed to the
monarch was carefully arranged: well-placed courtiers personally presented
important letters, often reading them aloud and then reporting back the
royal response. Letters of this nature thus attain a peculiarly oral quality.
Furthermore, these seemingly ‘private’ (in the sense of individual and solitary)
letters were in fact public performances of submission and deference, staged
bids for royal favour.58 Newsletters were copied and recycled, circulated and
transmitted to a diverse audience as news travelled up the social hierarchy,
or horizontally between ‘friends’. News percolated typically from the centre
(essentially London) to the periphery, often in a highly selective and person-
alised form, but also inevitably flowed from the provinces as localised infor-
mation and intelligence was garnered by letter. It is thus possible to delineate
the complex ways in which manuscript newsletters circulated, charting, for
example, the progress of continental news as it reached London in packets
of letters by ship, which were opened and consumed at St Paul’s (a veritable
staple for news), digested and copied by semi-professional and professional
newsletter-writers, before entering local reading networks. Beyond this, it is
clear that certain letters enjoyed wider circulation in manuscript (and print)
beyond the named addressee of a letter, the supposed intended recipient.59
What therefore survives in early modern archives is a complex range of
manuscripts of widely differing formats, some of which were sent while other
texts never in fact reached the addressee, but were preserved for purposes of
record. While Claudio Guillén has distinguished at least seven kinds of let-
ters in terms of genre, it is possible to delineate further sub categories of letter
by paying attention to their scribal status: the original sent letter, the rough
draft, the personal copy, the letter-book, the ‘circular’ letter, the ‘scribally
Introduction 25
published’ letter.60 Where letters bear no signs of sending – addresses, fold-

ing, seals or marks of sealing, endorsements of posting or receipt – they are
likely to be ‘drafts’ or ‘copies’, although there is some fluidity between the
two. Rough texts with crossings out and corrections were sometimes kept,
labelled as copies. At other times neat copies of outgoing correspondence
were specially made for filing. Duplicate copies of original letters assume
varying forms. They were reproduced as separates (or single leaf manuscripts,
usually in the form of full sheet cut in half or folded into a bifolium with four
writing sides) required for record-keeping. Letters were also copied as entries
into Renaissance letter-books, a form of recording incoming and outgoing
correspondence that has its root in classical and medieval epistolary culture.
Although often connected to office, letter-books were also compiled for a
range of personal and spiritual purposes. ‘Circular’ letters, such as those from
the Privy Council were serially copied for sending, and once received and
read, were then often forwarded with a transcript copy being retained for later
use.61 Finally, manuscript copies of certain letters – such as Philip Sidney’s
A Letter to Queen Elizabeth, Essex’s Letter of Advice to the Earl of Rutland, Lady
Rich’s Letter to Queen Elizabeth, and The Coppye of a Letter Wrytten to the Lower
House of Parliament – were produced by copyists and scribally circulated both
contemporaneously and in later years.62 The scribal circulation of manuscript
copies of letters was complex and varied, extending from the controlled
and unregulated dissemination of separates, through widespread copying to
professional scribal production and print publication. Texts thus enjoyed a
peculiar afterlife. Once copies entered manuscript networks, they circulated
as single manuscripts; as discrete bibliographic collections of related cor-
respondence and packaged with other materials. They formed part of larger
accumulations of general letters, and were included in miscellaneous volumes
of assorted genres. They were textually unstable, acquiring divergent applica-
tions and reapplications for different audiences, periods and contexts, often
separate from those intended by the signatory. Recognition of the varying
hierarchies and status of different letter texts illustrates the complexities of
early modern letters, and informs the ways in which individual correspond-
ence should be read, situated and understood. Indeed, letters can survive in
different versions, distinct from the ‘original’ (here taken to mean the text or
document intended for dispatch) copied and kept or circulated for manifold
purposes. The material sophistication of epistolary manuscripts complicates
the ways in which we read and interpret letters as intrinsically ‘personal’, ‘pri-
vate’ and ‘intimate’, and letter-writing as a straightforward one-dimensional
epistolary relationship between sender and reader. It also further underlines
the problems associated with reliance on modern printed editions of corre-
spondence which fail to register manuscript conventions of the period.
Letter-writing during the early modern period was characterised by its
unfixedness – what Alan Stewart has described as the ‘radical unmoored-
ness’, ‘the wonderfully miscellaneous, even chaotic’ nature of epistolary
practices – and the instability of the letter form.63 What emerges from the
study then is a range of epistolary literacies, an intricate series of overlapping
and interlocking practices rather than a monolithic culture of correspond-
ence. Rules and structures, hierarchies and conventions were clearly in
place – Renaissance epistolographies, postal routes and networks – and can
be delineated, but often on the ground letter-writing was in many respects a
remarkably ad hoc affair, worked out in relation to localised conditions and
inflected by factors such as social status, gender and generation. The proto-
cols of letter-writing were learned in ways that were socially differentiating,
both in terms of access to epistolary training and the ways in which the letter
form enforced social distinctions. A Latinate grammar school-educated male
elite was schooled in Ciceronian and Erasmian techniques of Humanistic
letter-writing; and by the late seventeenth century among the upper ech-
elons of society writing masters were retained within households in order
to instil the rules of letter-writing into children.64 Vernacular letter-writing
manuals translated these conventions in watered down form for a wider mar-
ket; and for many, lessons in epistolary etiquette were gained from contact
with the form. Nonetheless, despite the prevalence of letter-writing theory,
not least in the amount of scholarly ink spilled in discussions of it, in actual
practice very little seems to have transferred from manuals to the early mod-
ern manuscript page. The obvious exceptions are the influence of rhetorical
conventions over modes of address and salutations, and certain categories of
letter – letters of petition and condolence – and particular formal occasions
of writing, such as to the monarch, where conventions were more solidi-
fied. One can also identify different forms of letter, inflected by function
and occasion, and by the rank, social status and gender of writer: the court
letter, official government correspondence, administrative and mercantile
letters, the letter of petition or condolence, the love letter, the woman’s letter.
Necessarily the same individual wrote in different ways in different situations:
a man might write as a father, a son, a husband, a kinsman, as a patron or
master, and might wish to emote condolences or affection, offer rebuke and
reprimand, negotiate legal terms and business contracts, or curry favour and
make requests. Each distinct situation required a different form of epistolary
writing. Beyond distinct sub-genres, the early modern letter was, therefore, a
rather protean form. Rules relating to the layout of letters and the organisa-
tion of the manuscript page were likewise adopted in a very uneven manner,
with clear social and generational distinctions. Indeed, the Newquay Right
of Wreck letters, the Gawdy papers and the begging letters addressed to Sir
Thomas Sutton all exhibit a range of more idiosyncratic epistolary practices –
in terms of rhetorical structure, paper size and quality and layout – than are
found in other collections. Secret letters too betray an alarming disjuncture
between theory and practice, between the complex cipher systems outlined
in Renaissance cryptographies and the rather weak forms of encryption
actually employed in routine correspondence.
Introduction 27
The material conditions of letter-writing varied greatly, generating plu-

ralistic epistolary practices. Access to secretaries was largely the preserve of
social elites, state officials and bureaucrats, while lower down the social scale
scriveners provided letter-writing services for modest financial remuneration.
Postal conditions were uneven and differentiated, with the royal post reserved
for state dispatches; others had to make their own postal arrangements. The
contexts and spaces in which letters were composed influenced the nature of
letter-writing. Being based in one place whether it be in a merchant’s business,
an ambassador’s residence, a government department or secretariat, a college
room, or in an aristocratic household permitted a degree of regularity in letter-
writing. Materials were easily to hand, mechanisms for delivery could be set
up, and correspondence more easily stored. Itinerancy and travel brought
their own peculiarities, although portable writing desks facilitated the writ-
ing of letters on the move. When the monarch was on royal progress, special
temporary postal routes were set up in advance to keep open communications
with officials in London. Living conditions on the battlefield or on board ship
though made it much more difficult to receive and send letters. Prison letters,
for example, reveal much about the improvised nature of clandestine cor-
respondence: writing implements, ink and paper were either smuggled in or
fashioned out of whatever materials came to hand (paper used to wrap gifts of
foodstuffs or the page of a printed breviary became makeshift writing paper);
invisible ink was used to disguise communications and prisoners resorted to
ingenious methods of conveying their correspondences. Access to paper, pen
and ink was a common request for prisoners, in that it enabled communica-
tion with the outside world and facilitated the writing of penitent letters for
royal clemency. More broadly, what is striking is the degree of variation in
letter-writing practices, with formal, regularised customs co-existing alongside
the irregular and impromptu. The habit of keeping letter-books varied widely,
ranging from the official deskbound folio for regularly entering outgoing and
incoming correspondence to the student notebook, improvised out of several
single sheets of paper stitched together, where letters were recorded in an ad
hoc fashion among exercises and erotica.
To write a letter personally during this period demanded an assortment of
advanced literacy skills. Letter-writers needed to demonstrate facility with the
materials, tools and technologies of writing. They had to be able to cut, main-
tain and use quills; prepare and trim paper to size; make ink and apply sealing
wax. The art of letter-writing also required skills of penmanship and orthog-
raphy, knowledge of epistolary rules and rhetorical theory. Correspondents
needed to know how to address, date and sign a letter. It was also important
to understand the social meanings attached to the material aspects of letters,
the size of paper used, the type of handwriting, the protocols of layout, blank
space and the manuscript page, how a letter was folded and the significance
of features of seals. Likewise, the sending of correspondence necessitated some
degree of knowledge of postal conditions, of social and spatial geography, of
correspondence networks and even sometimes the intricate workings of man-

uscript networks. To be ‘fully literate’ in the epistolary arts was thus to be alert
to the rhetorical, semiotic and the material aspects of the form. Yet, any defi-
nition of ‘epistolary literacy’ – which Susan Whyman has persuasively argued
needs to be incorporated as a new cultural category – when applied to the early
modern period must be elastic enough to encompass a breadth of letter-writing
practices and experiences, sensitive to the nuances of different levels of social
interaction with letters, and the overlapping and interlocking of manuscript,
print, visual and oral epistolary modes.65 Our understanding of the complexi-
ties of letter-writing must incorporate writing and reading practices that are
collaborative as well as those that are personal. It must acknowledge visual,
physical and oral forms, and be aware of the often makeshift and improvised
nature of letters. At one end of the spectrum we have the visual symbol of the
gallows on the address leaf of a letter connoting to a partially literate bearer the
urgency of his dispatch; the Elizabethan woman who dictated her correspond-
ence, signing with a personal mark; and the artisan who paid a scrivener to pen
a love letter for him to be sent to his mistress. In each case, it is implicit that the
inability to read or write script fully did not prevent at least partial engagement
with epistolary culture; it did not preclude communication by correspondence,
nor did it hamper understanding of meaning. Illiteracy did not inhibit interac-
tion with the letter medium, but it did restrict and condition the nature of that
interaction. At the other extreme, we witness writers well-versed in the politics
of letter-writing, with far flung networks of correspondents, engaging in diverse
epistolary activities – patronage broking, clandestine correspondence using
secret codes, correspondence in multiple languages, the dissemination of news
and propaganda and the circulation of letters in manuscript and print. Above
all, what is clear is the degree to which the period experienced the increasing
proliferation of letter-writing skills in their broadest sense throughout the social
spectrum, the range of ways that individuals and groups not normally associ-
ated with literacy gained access to cultures of letter-writing, and that techniques
were varied, improvised and uneven.
First and foremost, The Material Letter aims to enhance our understanding of
the early modern letter-writing process in all its nuanced complexity, as it is
traced from the preparation of epistolary materials and the textual production
of letters, through their subsequent delivery and circulation, to the various
ways in which letters were read and latterly preserved for posterity. It is this
epistolary process that provides the guiding organisational principle for the
book as a whole, as chapters in turn delineate the peculiarities of epistolary
culture and practices. Chapter 2 therefore examines the materials and tools
associated with letter-writing, dealing with the physical features of paper,
ink, quill pens and penknives, writing surfaces and the material conditions
Introduction 29
of letter-writing as well as seals. In addition to the tools and materials of

letter-writing, Chapter 3 explores a number of other epistolary technolo-
gies: pedagogic, exploring the ways in which the skills of letter-writing were
learned; models, in the form of printed letter-writing manuals; and finally,
authorship, as viewed through methods, modes and practices of composi-
tion. Having outlined the distinct physical features of early modern letters,
Chapter 4 interprets the materiality of manuscript letters, examining the
significant meaning attached to seals, handwriting, paper, folding and water-
marks, and the social signals conveyed by elements, such as layout and use
of manuscript space. Chapter 5 reconstructs the complexities of postal condi-
tions during the sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth century, assessing
the physical structures underlying the delivery of letters (the conditions of
England’s network of roads and bridges, the nature of travel in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, and perceptions and awareness of the geography
of the highways of the realm) before delineating the main methods of letter-
delivery during the period: the royal ‘standing posts’, the carriers, foot-posts,
the Merchant Strangers’ post, and the more nebulous practices of employing
personal servants as bearers. Chapter 6 examines the manuscript practices
associated with secret letters in early modern England. Focusing on the mate-
rial aspects of covert correspondences – codes, ciphers, signs, symbols, invis-
ible ink, enigmatic, shared or secret languages, the ways in which clandestine
communications were disguised as innocuous everyday forms of correspond-
ence, and hidden or clandestine modes of delivery – it unites many of themes
of the book exploring the materials of letter-writing, the mechanics of compo-
sition, the relationship between handwritten letters and printed manuals, the
intricacies of delivery, as well as the materiality of the social contexts of letters.
Chapter 7 looks at the copying and scribal circulation of letters. It focuses on
the genre of the letter-book as an early modern form of self-writing and a way
of ordering knowledge; it also elucidates the broad range of letters that were
scribally copied, before examining the mechanics of the circulation of items
that travelled as manuscript separates, as part of larger bibliographic manu-
script compilations (such as pamphlets of related correspondence, collections
of general letters and miscellanies) as well as printed collections. It attempts
to highlight the manuscript forms and writing technologies that facilitated
circulation, to sketch the complex textual afterlives of letters beyond the con-
temporary contexts of composition, delivery and reading, and to consider the
reception of copies. As such it problematises the standard model of epistolar-
ity, which conceptualises early modern letter-writing as a two-way epistolary
exchange anchored within an historically specific moment. The final chapter
considers the afterlife of letters, their preservation and subsequent uses and
status. As a coda it considers the nature of early modern archives, their for-
mation and the extent to which modern-day archival practices, preservation
techniques and digitisation projects are in tension with the interests of schol-
ars concerned with issues of materiality.
2
Materials and Tools of
Letter-Writing
The task of writing in early modern England was a rather laborious one – far
more complicated than merely picking up ‘pen and paper’ – and various
skills had to be acquired and materials assembled before sitting to write a
letter.1 Paper was an expensive commodity, often imported, that needed
to be treated before it could be written on, cut to size and folded correctly.
The colour, thickness and size of sheets, the measurement of chain lines
and identification of watermarks that they contain all offer invaluable clues
that shed significant light on specific letters and the habits and practices
of individual letter-writers. A range of other materials was employed in the
task of the writing of letters: pens and penknives for cutting and re-cutting
quills; feathers of varying types to turn into quills; ink for writing with and
its accoutrements, an inkpot or inkhorn for holding the ink, a dust box,
sand box or pounce pot for sprinkling sand onto a manuscript in order to
blot wet ink; wax, string, floss, ribbons, seals and signets used for sealing cor-
respondence. Personal and household accounts and inventories and receipt
books detail the purchase and provisioning of items related to letter-writing,
which connects the art of writing to the domestic and household sphere
as well as office spaces. This in turn suggests that letter-writing was not
merely an elite activity associated with government and business, but one
in which wide-ranging social groups, including women could engage. The
account books of John and Richard Newdigate dating from October 1618
onwards while they were undergraduates at Oxford record regular purchases
of materials associated with letter-writing: ink, quires of paper, wax, a desk,
writing tables, paper books, printed epistolary texts (‘Plinnies’s Epistles’
and ‘Simachas Epistles’) as well as frequent payments for the carrying of
letters.2 Likewise, the household accounts of Margaret Spencer (d.1613)
record purchases of three quires of paper (12d.), ‘inke & quilles’ (10d.), ‘2
rolles of harde wax’ (12d.), ‘a payer of tabell bouckes’ (12d.) and an inkhorn
(12d.).3 Rather more revealing of the location of writing is the August
1556 household inventory of Sir William More of Loseley in Surrey, which
depicts a private ‘closett’ replete with all the materials and tools requisite
30
Materials and Tools of Letter-Writing 31
for corresponding: ‘a standyshe of pewter’ ‘a perpetuall Kalendar in a frame’

for dating, ‘a deske to wryte on’, ‘a dust boxe of bone’ for pounce, ‘a payre
of sesers’, ‘too whetstones’ for sharpening knives, ‘a haere of bone to make
a sele’, ‘a penne of bone to wryte wt’, ‘a Sele of many Seles’, ‘a penknyf’ for
cutting quills, ‘a foote rule’, ‘a penne of yron’, ‘Sr Thomas Eliots Dictionary’
(that is, a Latin-English dictionary) and ‘a boke of papere’.4 The materials,
tools and technologies of letter-writing were varied and complex; the act of
writing itself somewhat unfamiliar to a modern-day writer. Thus, a central
concern of this chapter is to examine the physical characteristics of the
different materials and tools associated with letters and to reconstruct and
investigate the material practices peculiar to early modern letter-writing.
Analysis of the materials of letter-writings raises a series of issues relat-
ing to their consumption, use and social meaning. How widespread was
the ownership of writing materials, over the period, across social groups?
Where, how often and at what cost did people acquire paper, ink and quills?
Did such items need to be purchased or could they be fabricated within the
household? To what extent was paper readily available outside of large met-
ropolitan centres? How did people acquire the knowledge of how to make
their own ink or cut their own quills? In short, was letter-writing an ‘every-
day’ activity within the affordable reach of a large proportion of the popu-
lation? Printed writing manuals, household books and Renaissance books
of secrets provided instructions of how to make ink, how to cut quill pens,
make wax and treat and preserve paper. Manuscript receipt books and note-
books frequently contained instructions for the making of ink. Furthermore,
studies of the retail trade using probate inventories further indicate the
relatively widespread access that consumers had to such goods, not only via
chapmen, peddlers, and itinerant market retailers, but also through perma-
nent retail shops in towns of varying sizes. An early-seventeenth-century
‘list of such shops & Houses as doe ioyne the church of St Paul vpon the
North-side, beginning at the greate North-Doore’ enumerates nineteen
shops, including seven booksellers of varying sizes, two book-binders’ shops,
a paper-seller’s shop and a scrivener’s.5 Writing materials were also read-
ily available outside of main metropolitan centres and in more far flung
regions. In addition to the specialist places, paper was sold at a surprising
range of outlets. Cornish retailers in the first half of the seventeenth century
purveyed paper, parchment, sealing wax and galls (derived from oak-galls,
which are outgrowths of oak trees produced by insects), which were used
for making ink.6 The 1585 inventory of the printer and bookseller Roger
Ward listed wax, penhorns, ink pots and white paper among his Shrewsbury
stock.7 Two inventories of the stock of the Bristol Grocers, Thomas Nelmes
and John Dowell dating from 1634 and 1635 listed three reams of papers
valued at 12s., as well as quills, bibles, small books, ABCs and hornbooks
used for teaching children to read.8 A study of retailers’ inventories in Kent
and Cornwall for the period 1600 to 1649 reveals that 11 per cent of Kentish
and 44 per cent of Cornish shops carried paper as a commodity.9 The evi-
dence of household accounts shows the frequent purchase of wide-ranging
materials associated with letter-writing, which suggests that writing was a
quotidian activity even for social groups below the ranks of the nobility and
gentry and beyond mercantile groups.
The meanings of letters were affected by the physical tools and materials
employed, but equally important were the material conditions that impacted
on letter-writing. An important argument in this chapter is that letters were
inflected by the circumstances, contexts and environments in which they
were written. While we might expect the writing of letters to belong to a
‘private’ sphere, the categories of ‘public’ and ‘private’ as they relate to spa-
tial geography continually expand and contract in relation to early modern
correspondence. Letters were penned in various places, in private chambers,
studies or closets, in secluded settings inside and outdoors, in communal
rooms within the household, as well as in public places, such as inns and
taverns, at parliament or court; they were penned aboard ship and on the
battlefield, written alone and in company, among family, friends, servants
and messengers and other assembled persons. Correspondence was also
produced under different circumstances and conditions, sometimes marked
by a hurried spontaneity occasioned by the urgings of a departing bearer,
while at other times, letters were the products of more leisured, calculated
composition. Letters thus reflect varying levels of spontaneity and media-
tion; they can be communal and collective, individual and exclusive. The
chapter is divided into five distinct sections, each of which deals with a dif-
ferent material or tool associated with the letter-writing process: paper, ink,
quill pens and penknives, writing surfaces and the material conditions of
letter-writing, as well as seals and sealing.
Paper
Paper was ordinarily used for correspondence throughout the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries for various reasons: it could be produced relatively
quickly in a high volume, was easily folded, needed little preparation for
writing, and individual sheets were lightweight and therefore eminently
transportable in small quantities.10 By contrast, parchment (which was pro-
duced from animal skin) was still utilised throughout the period for legal
documents, official records and presentation manuscripts where preserva-
tion was vital, since it was more durable. The majority of paper used in
England during the early modern period was imported mainly from France,
but also from the Low Countries, Italy and Spain. Paper mills, however, had
been established in England since the late-fifteenth century, but production
of white writing paper was not firmly established until the late-seventeenth
century. By 1588 Sir John Spelman had set up a paper mill in Dartford and
been awarded the monopoly for collection of rags, the basic raw material for
paper-making; he did make brown wrapping paper, but could not compete
with imported writing paper.11 The manufacture of paper was an intricate
craft. Sheets were produced one or two at a time using a wooden frame or
tray, with fine horizontal wires and thicker vertical wires (or chains) strung
from one side to the other at intervals of between 18 and 30 millimetres,
and an identification mark of the manufacturer fashioned out of wire. This
arrangement produced an uneven surface with characteristic laid marks.
The paper pulp (typically made from linen or cotton rags) poured into the
mould stuck to these wires, leaving distinct marks – a watermark (and coun-
termark), chain lines and wire marks – which are visible to the eye with the
use of a cold lamp or light box, an image of which can be captured using
digital photography or radiography, which has largely replaced the practice
of tracing or sketching.12 This method produced ‘laid paper’, as opposed to
‘wove paper’ which was common from the 1800s onwards. Paper was turned
out of the mould onto felt, which produced a ‘felt side’ and a ‘wire side’,
the former being slightly smoother to the latter, and detectably so to the
touch. Furthermore, it was common practice to use two trays for producing
paper, alternating one for the other during the production process, which
produced similar, but not identical ‘twin’ watermarks.13
These material characteristics encoded into the very fibre of paper dur-
ing the process of manufacture allow us to ‘finger-print’ individual sheets,
indentifying the paper mill, papermaker, country of origin and date of
production. This is possible because of the unique nature of early modern
watermarks, produced by individual wooden trays, each of which was hand-
made. The fact that these trays wore out through overuse meant that they
were regularly repaired or replaced with similar, but not identical moulds,
which imparted slight differences in watermarks and chainlines, detect-
able through accurate measurements and comparison against established
datable documents. Watermarks varied greatly in nature over the early
modern period: some were highly individualised, depicting images such as
elephants, but among the most common marks were pots (usually incorpo-
rating the papermaker’s initials, often along with details of grapes, baubles
and handles) and the ‘hand’, which is distinctive of French paper-makers.
Indeed, France was the dominant source of paper for English printing and
manuscript use throughout the early modern period, accounting for an
estimated 98 per cent of paper used in the early-seventeenth century; and
French pot paper was a standard grade of writing paper. Other common
watermarks include the unicorn, the wheel, grapes, fleur-de-lis, the arms of
Burgundy, post and pillar, and small initial letters with crown.14 Although
not an exact science, watermarks can be used to date letters in cases where
the writer failed to record the year; although this method is complicated
by the fact that paper stocks could have been lying around for some
time.15 An undated letter from Madame de Riou to Lady Lisle was dated to
1535, rather than 1538 (as in Letters and Papers) on the basis of watermark
evidence; while a missive from Charles I can be dated to 1646 by matching

the watermark and lines to other dated correspondence, a date corroborated
by circumstantial evidence.16 Similarly watermarks can be used to establish
the provenance of paper. Further in-depth analysis of watermarks is required
to shed light on a range of unanswered questions. When travelling was
paper among the items packed for the journey or was it purchased locally?
When writing from someone else’s household or at court, was it customary
to be provided with paper from the household, or was a writer expected to
provide his or her own? Gauging how long paper was stockpiled within a
household might also assist in providing an idea of how often members of
the family wrote letters.
Sizes, quality and therefore prices of paper varied greatly throughout the
sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth centuries, ranging from pot paper
at the bottom of the scale (measuring approximately 400 mm by 310 mm),
through foolscap (c.420 mm by 320 mm), crown (c.450 mm by 350 mm)
and demy (c.500 mm by 350 mm), to royal paper (c.570 to c.600 mm by
c.440 mm), the last mentioned being made in France and Italy during the
sixteenth century.17 Paper was normally sold by the quire (a standard unit
of 25 sheets for French or Italian paper, or 24 for English or Dutch) or by
the ream, which traditionally represented twenty quires of paper, or 480 or
500 sheets, depending on country of manufacture, though this was open
to abuse. For bulk purchases, a bale equated to ten reams.18 The amount of
paper imported increased dramatically over the course of the period, from
approximately 12,000 to 26,000 reams for the 1560s, 40,000 reams annually
in the 1580s, rising to a around 80,000 reams by 1620 and c.95,000 reams
by the mid-1630s, reflecting an increased demand for printing and book
production, government and legal documents, as well as the proliferation of
manuscript writing in forms such as letters, diaries, notebooks, miscellanies
and other handwritten genres.19 Sheets of paper varied in quality: the best
paper according to Dard Hunter was creamy coloured, while inferior grades
were brown or grey.20 Costs differed according to the type, size and quality
of paper. According to The Rates of Marchandizes (1604) ordinary paper was
assessed at 2s. 6d. for a ream for the purposes of taxation, while royal paper
cost 6s. 8d. per ream.21 In practice though, paper could cost a lot more than
this: in 1618 Lord William Howard paid 4s. for ‘4 quier of royall paper’.22
Francis Clement recommend for schoolboys ‘The whitest, finest, and
smoothest, is best’.23 The smoothest, whitest writing paper, most of which
was imported from France, was thus a relatively expensive commodity.
An examination of accounts suggests that paper was a fairly regular house-
hold purchase, but entries rarely provide details of the sort of paper bought,
other than relaying quantity and price. For the early-Tudor period, the house-
hold accounts of Sir Henry Willoughby record several purchases of paper:
4d. paid for paper in October 1521, 8d. for three quires in 1523, and 2s. 8d.
paid for a ream in November 1524.24 The household accounts of Sir Thomas
Lovell for 1523 include payments of 8s. 4d. ‘payd for ij reames of clene papur
to wryte on accomptes, letters, remembrances, and other thynges’, and the
1523 accounts for Princess Mary’s household highlight regular purchase of
white paper, along with black, silver and gold paper.25 The earl of Leicester’s
accounts for 1558 to 1561 show several purchases of paper: ‘Item for i quire
browne paper and one white vjd’, ‘Item to Mr Bewe for paper by him bought
at sundry times ijs iiijd’.26 The Cheshire gentlemen Richard Grosvenor made
frequent purchases of paper: in 1637 he bought 6 quires of paper in March
and June for 2s., a further three quires in September for 1s; and a ream of
paper the next month for 6s. 8d.27 Household accounts also reveal pur-
chases of paper by women. The accounts of the Roberts family of Boarzell in
Sussex for the period 1568 to 1582, which were principally kept by Margaret
Roberts, record payments for paper of 8d. and 4s. 8d. presumably for a much
larger stock of paper.28 Accounts for the years 1600 to 1602 reveal that Lady
Anne Clifford on a trip to London spent 5d for ‘half a quier of guilt paper’,
3d. for ‘a quier of ordynarie paper’, and at a later date purchased two quires
of paper and two quills for 9d.29 Paper was also a regular item of expenditure
for undergraduates for correspondence and note-taking. The undergraduate
Anthony Gawdy paid 4d. for a quire of paper in 1623, and the undergraduate
account books of John and Richard Newdigate record frequent payments for
paper between 1618 and 1621.30 Memoranda on the front and back covers of
a manuscript translation of Tacitus’ De moribus Germanorum likewise record
the purchase of writing paper in early Stuart Oxford.31 Within municipal
government a ready stock of paper for purposes of correspondence was essen-
tial. Between 1587 and 1588, the Corporation of Bath bought a new stock
of ‘red wax’ and paper for use in its official correspondence.32 The Receiver’s
Accounts of the Corporation of Exeter record frequent annual purchases
of paper between 1588 and 1600, ranging from 1s. 6d. for ‘fiue Quires of
writinge paper’ in 1588, to 11s. 3d. paid for ‘iij Reames & vj quires of paper
and for Ryall Paper for the Cityes vse’ for the accounting period 1593 to
1594.33 Meanwhile the City Chamberlain’s accounts for Bristol record pay-
ments in 1557 of 40s. for ‘the making of this booke and for paper for the
hole yere’, and in 1628 payment of 10s. for ‘Royall paper & other paper for
the Audit bookes, and for paper and partchement used . . . about the Citty
business this year’.34 In some cases an annual amount for writing materials
was allowed to the city clerk: in 1571 4s. 4d. were paid to John Hawys, the
town clerk of Ipswich, ‘for inke and paper’.35 Requests for paper can also be
observed in letters: in his time as Deputy Governor of Guernsey Edward Lord
Zouche wrote to the goldsmith Henry Bannister, ‘I pray you send me halfe a
dozen quire of guilt paper for this is all spoyled as you se that I brought wth
me’.36 Paper prices increased over time, and varied according to quality, type
and size. At the cost of around two to five pence per quire (24 sheets) during
the Tudor and early Stuart period, roughly approximate to a labourer’s daily
wage, it was a relatively expensive item, beyond the pockets of those except
the wealthier social groups or those engaged in administration and trade.37

Nonetheless, household economising, the trimming of excess paper, the
cutting of large sheets to fashion multiple pages for writing, using the entire
page for writing or reducing the length of letters all helped to make paper
stretch further. A letter from the seventeenth-century Puritan artisan James
Cole to his wife lamented, ‘I am forced to conclude for want of paper’.38 The
size and quality of paper were important signifiers of social status, as will be
discussed in Chapter 4.
While most paper purchased for writing was pre-prepared to take ink,
having been treated with size, a glutinous or viscid wash applied to paper
after it was removed from the mould, other paper needed to be treated with
powdered gum sandarac (a resin derived from the sandarac or avar tree) or
Calais sand before it could be written upon and to dry the ink on the page.
Too much size slowed the pen and sixteenth-century writing masters cau-
tioned against its use.39 Peter Bales advised using the best paper:
let not your paper be too rough nor too smooth: for being too rough, it
marreth your pen; and being too smoothe, it will be too slipperie, that
you cannot write steadilie thereon: but yet of both, the smoother is the
better, for therby you may make your letter the cleaner.40
The accounts of the Reynell Family of Forde in Devon record payment of

one penny in 1627 ‘for Callis sand’, which along with paper was a regular
household purchase.41 Household manuals and books of secrets described
in detail for a domestic market the process of preparing paper to take ink.
Hugh Plat’s The Iewell house (1594) provided instructions ‘to make bad paper
beare inke’, which instructed ‘Rvb your paper wel ouer with the fine powder
or dust of Rosen and Sandrach mingled with equall parts before you write
therwith. Note that you must tie the powder hard in a rag of Laune or thin
Cambrick’ (both, kinds of fine linen).42 A Very Proper Treatise (1583) con-
tained instructions ‘To take grease out of parchment or paper’, while Ruscelli
Girolamo’s The Secrets of the Reuerend Maister Alexis of Piemont (1595) pro-
vided a recipe ‘To make a kind of Vernish, but much fairer and better than
that which Scriueners doe vse, and is of lesse cost, & stinketh not as other
varnish doth’, which was later recycled in Johann Jacob Wecker’s Eighteen
Books of the Secrets of Art & Nature (1660):
take egge shelles what quantitie you will, taking awaie the little skin
within side: and when you haue groselie stamped them, put them into
a pan, such a one as will endure the heate of the fire, couering it with
some couer, then set it in some glasiers or potters furnace, or in a bricke,
tile, or lime makers kill, leauing it there until all the shelles be come into
a verie white pouder, which is called egge lime: sift it and keepe it. And
when you wil occupie it, caste a little quantitie of it uppon the paper
or parchment, and spread the pouder well upon it, rubbing it well with
a hares foote, or wtherwise; then taking awaie that which is too much,
write upon it, and you shall finde it of better effect then the Vernix.
When the writing is drie, if you will take awaie the said pouder, yea the
common vernish, for feare least men should white their hands, rubbe the
paper or parchment with crumbs of white breade, for it will draw to it
selfe, and take awaie all the vernishe or pouder that is vpon it.43
The same manuals also provided instructions on how to preserve paper, to

prevent it from being eaten by mice. Letters once received were archived
and stored, though they might also find a secondary use as paper for rough
notes, calculations, doodlings or for handwriting and signing practice. Thus,
a late-Elizabethan letter from Sir Thomas Reynell concerning the local militia
was used as scrap paper by its recipient Edward Seymour, who covered the
blank space below the signature and the address leaf with lists of munitions
and numerical calculations.44 In the early 1570s Anne Bacon practised her
signatures on the bottom of her husband’s drafts of her correspondence.45
The bottom or reverse of correspondence was also commonly used for pen-
ning draft replies. Indeed, the Somerset gentleman, John Trevelyan drafted
a reply at the foot of a letter he received in 1576 from John Doddington.46
On one occasion Anne, Lady Bacon returned to her son Anthony a letter
she had received from him, with a reply scrawled on the bottom of it in
her own distinctive handwriting.47 The antiquarian Hannibal Baskerville
(1597–1668) used letters he received from his mother Mary as the site for
an account of his early life and his mother’s separation from her second
husband Sir James Scudamore.48 Letters and the paper on which they were
written might thus enjoy ancillary uses and new meanings detached from
the contexts of their initial composition.
Ink
Ink was another important commodity necessary for letter-writing, one

that like paper could be purchased ready-made. The early-sixteenth-century
accounts of Edward Stafford, duke of Buckingham record payment of 2d.
for ‘ink at divers times’; Sir Thomas Lovell paid 10d for ink in 1523.49 The
early-seventeenth-century brothers John and Richard Newdigate regularly
purchased ink during their Oxford undergraduate career, at the normal cost
of two-pence, and ink occurs commonly in the accounts of Lord William
Howard.50 Writing to his brother in 1601, Philip Gawdy informed him that
his ‘booke’ and ‘inke’ would be brought or sent by carrier, on another occasion
promising to bring him red ink.51 It was also possible to buy the raw materials
(namely oak galls) to make ink oneself. In 1525 Sir Henry Willoughby paid
4d. ‘for stuffe to make ynkee’, while later household accounts for Wollaton
record payment in 1573 for galls (4d.), gume (4d.) and copperas (2d.), and the
household book of Katherine, countess of Devon records payments in 1524 of

4d. ‘For ink, copperas, gum and gall’.52 Thus, unlike paper, ink could also be
easily made. Iron-gall ink, which came into use in the early medieval period
was a mixture of oak-galls and copperas, an iron sulphate, and gum arabic
used as a binding agent. It produced a free-flowing ink suitable for use with
quills, paper and parchment. As Michael Finlay has argued, it ‘remained the
basis of European writing inks until the advent of the commercially produced
steel pen in the second quarter of the nineteenth century’.53 Altering the
mixture slightly produced inks of varying colour and consistency, suited for
different purposes: a runnier ink for a writer with a fast hand; blacker more
viscous ink for a formal or presentation text produced by a professional scribe.
The making of ink was a practice taught to children as a key part of learning to
write. John de Beau Chesne and John Baildon’s early English writing manual
printed in 1571 included instructions ‘To make common yncke’, how to make
ink in haste, to keep it longer and how ‘to make special black yncke’:
To make common yncke of vvyne take a quarte,

Tvvo ounces of gomme, let that be a parte,
Fyue ounces of Galles of copres take three
Longe standing dooth make it better to be:
If wyne ye do want, rayne water is best,
And asmuch stuffe as aboue at the least:
If yncke be to thicke put vinegre in:
For water dooth make the colour more dymme.54
A similar recipe is found in Francis Clement’s The Petie Schole (1587) which
advises letting it ‘stand couered in the warme sunne’, adding that the process
is hastened by boiling, but that ‘the unboyled yeldeth a fayrer glosse’. Wine or
vinegar should be used to ‘refresh’ ink once it gets too ‘thick’.55 John Brinsley’s
Ludus literatus (1612) advised care that inke must be ‘thin, lacke, cleere; which
wil not run abroad, nor blot’.56 Beyond the schoolroom, instructions for mak-
ing ink were also widely found in printed books, such as household manuals
and Renaissance books of secrets, connecting writing to the domestic sphere
and the kitchen. John Partridges’s The Widdowes Treasure (1595) described
how ‘To make a perfect black Inke’ as well as green, emerald green, red and
gold inks, which were produced by adding different ingredients to affect the
colour.57 Girolamo Ruscelli’s The Secrets of the Reuerend Maister Alexis of Piemont
(1595) contained numerous recipes for black and coloured inks, including
one for an ink suited to portability that could be kept as a dried powder and
reconstituted when needed by the addition of liquid:
A good way and maner how to make Incke for to carie about a man in
a drie pouder, which (when he will write with) hee must temper with a
little wine, water, or vinegar, or with some other licour, and then he maie
incontinent put it in experience: with the saide pouder all other incke
may be amended, be it neuer so euill;
and another ‘To make a great deale of Inke quicklie, and with little cost’.58
William Philip’s Booke of Secrets (1596) provided dozens of recipes for inks of
various colours.59 John Bate’s The Mysteryes of Nature (1634) included instruc-
tions for making green and blue coloured inks.60 Francisco Dickinson’s
A Precious Treasury of Twenty Rare Secrets (1649) informed readers ‘How to
make a Powder that will make good Ink in an instant’.61 Noticeably it is the
same recipes that are circulated in printed form, as they were recycled by
publishers in later publications.62 Alongside print, recipes for making ink
routinely crop up in manuscript notebooks and miscellanies. The pocket
notebook of a mid-sixteenth-century merchant contains a recipe ‘to make
blacke ynke’; the notebook of the seventeenth-century antiquarian Sir Roger
Twysden similarly has a recipe for making ink; the seventeenth-century
clergyman William Rawley’s miscellany includes a recipe entitled ‘quantity
for good ink’; while the rent-book of Mary Sandys, widow of Miles Sandys,
of Latimers, Buckinghamshire for the period 1603–13, contains at the back
a recipe ‘to make good inke’, as does the Dering family remembrance book
(c.1580–1644).63 Ink recipes also frequently appeared in household receipt
books, as they circulated in manuscript form, disseminated from one gen-
eration to the next. A manuscript receipt book belonging to the Elizabethan
gentlewoman Elizabeth Bourne contained instructions ‘to make inke’, while
a late-seventeenth-century receipt book belonging to Mary Granville and
her daughter Anne contains the recipes ‘To make inke ye Spanish waye’, and
‘To make double Incke’, which an annotation informs is the ‘way and receat
[recipe]’ her brother gave her in January 1671.64
Differences in the quality of ink may be related to the occasion of writ-
ing or may indicate someone ill-practiced at making ink, and therefore less
familiar with the writing arts. Posture, the cut of the quill, the writing sur-
face and the way in which one wrote all affected the flow of ink on the page.
Ink blots on the page might indicate sloppiness or haste, and may confirm
to us the draft or rough copy status of a letter. Variations in ink within the
same letter – changes in quality, thickness, darkness, flow, size of strokes,
heaviness or fineness of the quill – can be used to indicate different stages
of the writing process. Differences in ink, along with identifiably different
scripts, make it possible to discern multiple scribes.65 The standard colour
of ink was brown or black. Coloured inks were used in certain letters for
decorative or honorific effect. A letter from ‘Philoponus Tlimon’ to Queen
Elizabeth stating that her displeasure has made the earl of Essex prey to
melancholy was partly written in red ink with an elaborate symbolic device
at the head of the page. Written in Latin, the writer claimed that it was the
ignorance of monarchs, of which Diocletian speaks, that moved him to write
to the Queen.66 Weather conditions might also pose material constraints on
writing. The Booke of Pretty Conceits (1586) included instructions on how ‘to
keepe Inke from freezing’.67 It appears that chilling temperatures did indeed
render the use of ink more challenging. In a letter expressing his love to his
wife in the early 1580s, Percival Willoughby stressed that although my ‘ink
freese for cold, my good will in fervency shal fry’.68 Writing in December
1621 from London, John Prouse, MP for Exeter, informed the city’s mayor
that ‘the weather is bitter cold and my Inke freesethe to fast to contynewe
a Long letter’.69 Correspondents often complained of not having access to
good ink. The early-seventeenth-century gentlewoman Lady Dorothy Bacon
apologised to her niece Lady Anne Drury for her ‘ell wrytten lettar’, explain-
ing that ‘my penn is naught, my eycke worse, and my inwensyon worst of
all’; and writing in December 1603 from Winchester Castle, Lord Cobham
begged the recipients of his letter to ‘excus’ his ‘scribled lins’: ‘good pen, ink
nor paper I cannot get’.70 The quality of ink was a common trope employed
by letter-writers, bemoaning their ‘sribbled lines’, ‘rude writing’ or ‘ill
hands’. Writing from Sir William Warham’s house in 1555, the dowager
marchioness of Exeter wrote to her son, ‘be caues my hand ys so yll to reede
I haue wrettyn a nother lettar’, a sentiment echoed in letters from Fulke
Greville and Sir John Conway, both of whom importuned the recipients of
their letters for troubling them with their ‘ill-hands’.71 Excusing her ‘rude
lines’ Marie Herrick informed her uncle William that ‘because I rite so sel-
dom I can nether ritt well nor indit with elloquence’.72 Sir Henry Lee wrote
to Cecil troubling him ‘wt this scryboled fyste’; Robert Catesby entreated
Walter Cope to pardon his ‘scribeled and blurred letter’.73 The extent to
which these apologetics were merely rhetorical varied considerably from
writer to writer across the entire period. Nonetheless, penmanship and mas-
tery of ink on the written page became increasingly important for women as
well as men as the ability to write spread among social groups.74
In addition to the ink itself, a range of objects and accessories accompanied
its use for holding, writing and blotting. Various containers were used during
the period to store ink. The ‘inkpot’ or desk-bound ‘inkwell’ were common
fixed receptacles for ink, usually made from horn, lead, glass, stone and
porcelain, among other materials. In 1618 John and Richard Newdigate pur-
chased ‘ynke & glas’ for 3d., and in 1613 William Herrick asked his father to
send him his gilded ink-pot at Oxford.75 Often more sophisticated in design
was the standish or inkstand, a stand or tray designed to rest on the surface
of a desk, and intended to hold various writing materials, including inkpots,
pounce pots and pens. Surviving examples illustrate the range of stands avail-
able to cater for every taste and pocket, from cheaper wood, pewter and brass
artefacts, to more ornate luxury objects made of precious metals and even
bejewelled. Lists of royal jewels in 1519 and 1531 record a silver standish
decorated with the royal initials H and C and ‘A standish of Spanish work
well gilt, with a box of silver for ink’ weighing 95oz., while an inventory
of plate belonging to Cardinal Wolsey included a ‘standish standing upon
4 lions, with silver scissors’, and in 1585 Henry Percy purchased a ‘silver
standish’ for 100 shillings.76 Less extravagantly Margaret Willoughby was
bought a standish for 12d. in 1551, and in 1597 Lord Norris paid 6s. ‘for a
standish inke and paper’ on a journey in France.77 Stands of this nature could
be customised to include drawers, a candlestick for melting wax for seals,
and, as Peter Beal has argued, later examples might include a bell to sum-
mon servants to collect written letters.78 In 1596 Henry Maynard sent Robert
Cecil an unsealed letter from his father Lord Burghley that he wished him to
read and then seal ‘wth my Lordes seale that is in his standishe’.79 The 1639
inventory of Anne, viscountess of Dorchester listed an ‘Indian standish with
a looking glasse in it’ valued at £1, as well as one ‘other’ simpler standish
valued at 10s.80 For itinerant scribes and peripatetic letter-writers ink-horns
were used to carry ink when on the move, in some cases with an attached
‘penner’ or portable pen-case for quills.81 In 1526, the Marquis of Exeter paid
5d. for ‘penner and inkhorn’ and in the same year Hugh Willoughby paid
4d. for a ‘pener’ and ‘nynghorne’, the same price paid for very same items for
Margaret Willoughby in 1550; and in 1623 William Lord Howard paid 3s. 8d.
for ‘a paer of weights and ane ink-horne’.82
Pounce (also known as ‘pin-dust’), made from powdered pumice or cuttle-
fish, was used both to prepare the paper (as outlined above), and to absorb
excess ink after writing, as a precursor to blotting paper, although there is
evidence that ‘blotting paper’ was in use in the fifteenth and sixteenth cen-
turies.83 John de Beau Chesne’s writing manual advised children to:
Make stanche graine of allone beaten full smalle,

And twise asmuche rosen beatten with all.
With that in a faire cloute knit verye thinne,
Rubb paper or parchment, or ye beygn.84
Purchase of pounce is recorded in household accounts: Sir Thomas Lovell

in 1523 paid 6d. for ‘pynnedust’.85 The powdered substance was kept in a
pounce-pot or sander, which functioned almost as a salt pot, with a saucer-
shaped top or lid with holes that allowed one to sprinkle powder onto the
paper, and then easily return surplus pounce. These pots were made from
various materials (including wood, brass, pewter, bone, ivory and silver) and
as with inkstands they could be ornately decorated items of conspicuous
consumption. From the sixteenth century with the rise of lay literacy, such
items became increasingly associated as everyday objects within the house-
hold, which encouraged decorative designs.86
Quill pens and penknives
The quill pen – which was fabricated from a feather that was sharpened at
the tip, then slit to allow the retention, flow and application of ink – was
the dominant writing instrument in the Western world throughout the early
modern period. First introduced in the sixth century, it supplanted reed
pens and was itself only superseded in the nineteenth century by metal-
tipped or steel pens.87 Quills could be bought from booksellers and station-
ers either in their natural state, or ready prepared and cut. The inventory of
the Exeter bookseller Michael Harte (1615) listed quills among his stock.88
The household expenses of Sir Thomas Heneage record payment of 7d. in
1540 for ‘ink and quills and a tray’.89 Quills were among the purchases of
Henry Percy in the 1580s and 1590s; lists of expenses for Wollaton Hall in
1603 detail payment of 4d. for ‘Swane quills’; Margaret Spencer (d.1613)
paid 10d. for ‘inke & quilles’; Lord William Howard paid 14d. ‘for pens
and ynke bought at Heddon Bridge’ in 1623; while in 1636 Robert Smyth
enclosed with a letter to Sir Edward Nicholas ‘a Reame of paper, waxe and
quills’.90 Meanwhile, paintings of the period depict bundles of quills or
entire wings hanging from the eaves of stationers’ shops.91 More commonly
though, quill pens were home-made, fashioned by letter-writers, scriveners,
secretaries or amanuenses from feathers close at hand. The most common
feathers employed for this purpose were goose, with turkey, swan, crow and
duck also being widely used, as well as raven feathers, and less commonly
pelican and peacock feathers. Martin Billingsley’s The Pens Excellencie (1618)
recommended goose or raven feathers.92 Quills of varying sorts had different
qualities and came in various grades, swan being favoured for its durability.
Quills generally came from the first five feathers from each wing, with the
second and third feather (both known as a ‘second’) widely regarded as the
best, with the first (or ‘pinion’) considered the next best choice.93
Writing manuals of the period (including Palatino’s 1540 Libro nuovo
d’imparare a scrivere, Beau Chesne’s and Baildon’s English writing manual
of 1571, Clement’s Petie Schole and Bales’ The Writing Schoolemaster of 1590
commonly provided instructions or rules for ‘the making of the pen’.94
Preparation of the pen involved the tempering of the quill (natural was
preferred to artificial curing), and it was widely held that ‘round and clear’
quills were superior. Once the quill was tempered, the preparation process
involved cutting the feather away from the ‘stalk’; then if it were ‘horish
or skirtie’, in other words dirty or filthy, Clement instructed pen-makers to
‘scrape of the same with the backe or heele of your penknife’. The tip of the
quill was then sharpened with slantwise cuts and a slit made for ink to flow
along, before the nibbing of the pen to the required thickness. According
to the penman Martin Billingsley ‘if my pen be to write full, I cut off so
much more of the nibbe; if small, so much the lesse’.95 Differences in the
thickness, cut and angle of the nib produced variations in the style of writ-
ing, angularity of scripts and thickness of pen strokes. The production of
quill pens required the use of a pen knife or scribe’s knife; and maintaining
the sharpness of the nib, meant that a quill required constant trimming or
re-cutting. Pen knives were thus always close at hand during the writing
process, not only for fashioning nibs, but also for erasure, to scrape away ink
from the surface of paper. They frequently appear as purchases in household
accounts, and as with other accoutrements associated with the writing arts
they varied in price and quality from rudimentary articles to rather ornate
blades purchased for their beauty and design.96 It is possible that a pair
of knives were used, one for cutting, the other for scraping, with a third
perhaps employed for opening letters sealed with wax.97 For the choice of
penknife, Bales recommended ‘a right Sheffield knife is best: a good Razor
is next, being not too thicke or too thinne grounded’. ‘Manie other knives’
were available he instructed but ‘are indifferent good’. The knife was to be
sharpened on a whetstone or ‘hoane’.98 Clement warned ‘let not your paper
lye to hard for marring your pen’, while according to Bales leaning too hard
would ‘marre your penne and letter bothe at once’, and Billingsley advised
writers to hold the pen ‘very gently in the hand without gripping’ because
not to do so would mean that ‘command of hand’ is ‘vtterly lost’ and pre-
vent ‘speedy dispatch’. Bales further advised proper treatment of the quill:
Let not your pen be too full of inke, for feare of blotting: and when it
writeth not cleane, or is ouer worne, either wipe it, or mend it: If you
should write smaller, tourne your pen a little more a side, and write with
the lower neb thereof.99
Writing manuals such as Beau Chesne and Baildon’s frequently provided

rudimentary instructions of ‘howe to set writinge’, which was accompanied
by a woodcut demonstrating ‘Howe you ought to hold your Penne’.100 John
Davies’ Writing Schoolemaster recommended ‘to young children whose hands
are weake, give a small pen made of a soft quill’.101 Thus, the way the quill
was held, the deportment and positioning of the body were all thought to
affect the manner of writing.
Writing surfaces and the material conditions of letter-writing
The writing surface also significantly affected the nature of writing, whether
it be on parchment, in the margins of books, on privy walls, on pots,
embroidered onto fabric, tattooed onto bodies or penned on paper.102 Peter
Bales considered that ‘the best and easiest writing is vppon a Deske, for
the better auoyding of too much stooping, where by your health may be
impaired’. He recommended to writers:
place your body right forward, as it shall be most seemely and easie for
you: and tourne not you head too much aside, nor bed it downe too
lowe, for auoyding of wearines and paine: and for such as haue occasion
to sit long, I would wish them to sit soft, for their better enduring to
write . . .
Bales also advised covering the desk with green cloth ‘for comforting of the
sight’.103 The educationalist Richard Mulcaster in his 1581 book Positions
considered that in addition to ‘penne and penknife, incke & paper, com-
passe & ruler’ the child was well set up to write with aid of ‘a deske &
a dustboxe’.104 Writing desks were commonplace within the early modern
household, the term ‘desk’ denoting both a portable desk with a slanting top
(often lockable) designed to rest on a table or flat surface, or the table or desk
itself, which developed in various forms over the centuries (with slanted as
well as flat surfaces), ‘the common factor’ of which, according to Peter Beal,
is that it is ‘a table designed specifically for reading and writing purposes’.105
Such a desk might bear a standish, as listed in the revels accounts of 1510;
and Francis Clement recommended to the student, ‘set your standish, or
inckehorne on your right hande, for feare of ouerthwarte blotting’.106 The
counting-house in the Lisles’ Calais household during the 1530s contained
‘a desk of coffyns’, which Muriel St Clare Byrne has argued was ‘a cabinet-
desk, with a front flap which let down to form a sloped writing surface,
revealing an interior composed of a number of drawers for storing papers
and documents’.107 The inventory of Mr Withers in September 1531 listed in
the parlour ‘a joined cupboard with a desk’, and another desk in the study
by the parlour, while the household of John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester in
1534 included eight round desks in the great study with his bedchamber
and four round desks in the north study.108 The 1601 inventory of Hardwick
Hall listed among the various furniture within the countess of Shrewsbury’s
bedchamber ‘three deskes covered with lether whereof one a great one,
a lyttle deske to write on guilded’.109 The study of Jervais Smythe, minister
of Polstead in Suffolk in 1606 contained books, papers, letters, notes and a
desk, while that of the Worcestershire gentleman Henry Russell in 1610 con-
tained ‘on chayer, on ironbounde chest, fouer deskes and many bookes’.110
In May 1625 Edward duke of Ubbeston bequeathed to Phebe Styles a ‘desk
as it stands with the things therein & a bible’.111 Edward Dering described
in a letter of 2 June 1634 to his wife, his ‘study table’ on which he kept
two books, including a ‘paper book’ into which he wrote his ‘Justice mat-
ters’.112 The list of furniture that Lady Mary Scudamore took with her on
entering into her second marriage to Sir James Scudamore in 1599 included
‘an Indian desk worth £10’; while the 1639 inventory of Anne, viscountess
of Dorchester listed various tables and cabinets associated with writing and
the keeping of papers, including ‘A French cabinet redd and gilt, and lyned
with watchet with an inckhorne in it’.113 The location of desks or wooden
tables used for writing according to early modern inventories was often
within ‘private’ spaces or rooms within the household – the study, closet
or bedchamber – which works to configure the act of letter-writing as a pri-
vate act. Nonetheless this ‘private’ space as Alan Stewart and Lena Cowen
Orlin have importantly shown was one to which some servants (especially
secretaries) and family members, notably wives, had access. The concept of
spatial privacy as it relates to the writing, reading and storing of letters is

thus not necessarily singular or solitary, but one that involved being alone
in chosen company, a definition of privacy that was familial rather than
individual.114
While letter-writing was often associated with private spaces such as stud-
ies and closets, household inventories also locate writing surfaces, such as
desks and tables, along with writing implements within more communal
rooms, such as halls.115 This was more likely to be the case in small houses
where recourse to private space was more difficult, and architecturally the
hall ‘remained a general living area where cooking, eating, sitting and took
place’. In larger households with the increasing range of private rooms, the
hall was less frequently used for the multiple functions of earlier periods.116
The 1587 inventory of the Surrey widow Joan Kidwelle records ‘in the
hawle . . . an old Cobard with a Deske uppon it’, while that of Christopher
Curson of Dulwich in Camberwell dating from 1593 recorded in the par-
lour ‘a cupbord cloth with a Deske’, meanwhile in 1599 in the hall of John
Brownewend, clerk and parson of Long Ditton was ‘a Joyned Cubbard with
a Descke’, and in 1600 the hall of Thomas Grace a blacksmith from Kingston
upon Thames contained ‘a cubbord with a deske to it’.117 The Oxfordshire
Elizabethan yeoman Thomas Taylor kept in the hall ‘a Cubbarde with a
Settle’ in which he stored ‘an olde Standishe with certayne other Tryfles’.118
The inventory for David Oldfield, clerk of the parish of St Stephens in
Bristol recorded in the Hall, ‘one small deske and certaine writing bookes
of Arithmeticke & Ciphering and some loose papers’.119 The great chamber
was another form of reception room within the household, and the 1585
inventory of John Edwin of Wandswoth listed ‘in the great chamber . . .
a deske’ and ‘the bookes’.120 Letters were written in various contexts and
environments, both private and public, alone and in company. This can
be further viewed from the study of mid-seventeenth-century Dutch genre
paintings, which represent the social currency of letters in scenes of every-
day life, being composed, delivered and read in closets and taverns, alone
in private and in the company of bearers, secretaries or servants. Vermeer’s
women, for example, are often shown reading or writing letters accompa-
nied by servants or maids.121 Letter-writing was thus not necessarily a soli-
tary activity associated with seclusion: letters were often written and read
collaboratively and communally.
Further details of the material conditions of letter-writing are mentioned
in letters themselves, writers commonly mentioning where their letters
were written from, normally including at least the town, county or country,
making it possible to deduce whether they were corresponding from home
or abroad, in another lodging or at someone else’s house. Letters frequently
impart further details of the location of corresponding, stating whether they
were sent from an office or workplace, or whether written from an inn or
tavern, from court, university or prison, aboard ship or from the battlefield.
Details of this nature tell us something about the spatial and material condi-
tions of letter-writing, and the impact that this may have had on composi-
tion. Thus, a letter from John Dudley, earl of Warwick to the Privy Council
was ‘Scribbled in my bed this morning, at 4 of the clock, the 16th of June
1551’, another from Charles Carthy was dated in 1602 ‘from my close study
at Westminster’, while another to Robert Cecil was scribbled ‘in haste’ by
Gilbert, earl of Shrewsbury ‘at the Parliament house’ in 1578.122 The letters
of Rowland White to his master Robert Sidney from 1595 to 1602 provide
various locations of composition, often merely from London, ‘the Strand’
or the court (where he presumably found a convenient place to write); oth-
ers were penned wherever opportunity afforded. One was written from a
‘Scriueners Shop by the Exchange’, another from ‘Capt. Berries Chamber in
Fleetstreet’.123 Thomas Howard, earl of Surrey closed a letter to Henry VIII
written prior to the departure of an expedition to Picardy in 1522 as ‘all the
ships wer vnder sayle’, a letter ‘wryten In the mary rose In dartmouth rode
the last of June’.124 Likewise, a letter of 1593 from the earl of Cumberland to
Robert Cecil was penned ‘from abourd the Lion vnder sayle’; Fulke Greville
wrote in 1597 ‘from abord the Triumph in hast’, while a letter from Sir
Robert Mansell to the Lord Admiral in July 1602 was written ‘Aboard the
Hope, in the Narrow Seas’.125 Sir John Russell signed a letter dated 31 August
1524 ‘writtin at the siege before Marseilles’.126 William Lyllé wrote to the earl
of Essex from ‘The Campe before Amiens this 21 of August 1597’.127 Space
clearly impacted on the material conditions of letter-writing, influencing
the degree of privacy and seclusion, immediacy and spontaneity or other-
wise that a writer might enjoy.
In addition to place of composition, letter-writers also sometimes men-
tioned the time of writing or receiving letters, which suggests that early mod-
ern letter-writing was a highly reactive activity, governed by the irregular
rhythms of the arrival and departure of bearers, responding to exigencies and
crises of state and the changing circumstances of family life as they arose.
Correspondence was delivered and written throughout the day and night.
Robert Lord Ogle sent a letter to the earl of Surrey ‘skrybylyd thys Satturday
att nyght, att ij of the clok’; in a letter to Cromwell written from Windsor in
September 1536, Sir Ralph Sadler ended ‘at xij a clocke of the night which is
or accustomed hower in the courte to go to bed’.128 On a trip to London in
late 1538 Lady Lisle frequently corresponded with her husband. Shortly after
her arrival on the 6 November ‘at x of the clock’ she began to write a letter
to her husband: ‘this letter I began yesternight at supper time, intending to
have sent it to you by John Nele . . . but contrary to his promise he went his
way at iij of the clock in the morninge giving me no warning’, which meant
that the letter was finished the next day.129 In 1564, Edward St Loe wrote
in haste to Hugh Smyth of Ashton Court in Somerset ‘this present night
at one of the cloke’ sending him copies of letters ordering his arrest.130 In
1601 Philip Gawdy ended a letter ‘This present fryday night late’, while Joan
Thynne finished a letter to her husband John with ‘I end with sleepy eyes’.131
The unpredictability of when letters would arrive is clear from another letter
of Joan Thynne to her husband in which she expressed her ‘fear’ to ‘hear that
there was a messenger come from Longleat at that time of night after my first
sleep’.132 In a letter written from the court on the night of the 26 February
1608 and endorsed ‘Newmarket, the 26 Febr. at 6 in the morning’, Sir Thomas
Lake explained to the earl of Salisbury that he had received two packets from
him, one ‘in ye morning about two or three of ye clock . . . the other . . . this
evening’.133 The claim of writing ‘in haste’ was a commonplace apology of
letter-writers throughout the period: John Davy signed a letter to his mistress
Honor Lisle ‘from your maner of womberlegh in haste’; a letter from Mary
Willoughby was written ‘from my howse at Barbican in hast’; the Devonshire
gentleman Sir William Courtenay ended a letter concerning the defence
of Plymouth ‘so in haste I ende’; the countess of Bedford ended a letter to
Robert Cecil ‘Cheines in hast’.134 While this kind of disclaimer may in some
cases have been for rhetorical or deferential effect, its ubiquity nonetheless
attests a culture of letter-writing that was rarely leisured.
Letters were thus written when need arose, irrespective of whether or not
one was at home. Material objects likewise sketch the activities of the travel-
ling or itinerant letter-writer. In addition to the inkhorn and penner, which
allowed ink and quills to be transported safely, writing on the move was
facilitated by portable writing cases or boxes, which provided writers with
a sloping surface on which to write which could either be placed on a flat
surface or on the lap. This kind of portable desk was what the earl of Oxford
was referring to when in 1596 he informed Robert Cecil, ‘The wrightinge
wch I have ys in the contrye, for I hadd suche care thereof as I carried yt wth
me in a lyttel deske’.135 Another kind of portable writing technology was
provided by early modern ‘writing-tables’ (also referred to as ‘table-books’
or ‘tables’), which were erasable writing surfaces that could be written on
with a stylus and re-used. These were commonly produced, incorporated
into almanac form from the sixteenth century, and there is some evidence
that they were used for drafting letters.136 In some cases travellers carried
other writing materials with them: among the goods that Richard Grosvenor
recorded having taken with him on journeys to Reading in 1636 and 1637
was ‘a standish & penknife’.137
Thus far letter-writing has been depicted as a rather spontaneous, reactive
activity dependent on undependable external factors, including the irregu-
larities of postal conditions. Yet regular habits of conducting correspondence
were much in evidence over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. The demands of trade encouraged the routine despatch of mer-
cantile letters, while ambassadors and state officials continuously engaged
in the sending of diplomatic and government missives. The appetite for
news and information stimulated the development of newsletters and from
the late-sixteenth century onwards professional letter-writers like John Pory
wrote serial news-letters.138 Letter-writing played an increasingly constant

role within the realm of private life too: servants or men of business (such
as John Husee in the 1530s or Rowland White during the late-Elizabethan
period) regularly kept their masters or mistresses in touch with events in
London or at home.139 Husbands and wives kept in touch during periods
of separation for reasons of household and estate management, as well
as affect and amour.140 Parents corresponded with children away at court,
school, university, the Inns of Court, placed within another household or
(with more difficulty) when they were on their travels.141 Elizabeth Smyth
wrote regularly to her son Thomas between 1622 and 1641 while he was at
Oxford and in London, and in one letter thanked him for his ‘weekly’ letters
to her.142 While correspondence was clearly occasioned by the exigencies of
dispatch, there were thus a range of factors that encouraged regularity, and
the diaries of men like Adam Winthrop for the years 1596 to 1610, and in
the second half of the seventeenth century Roger Lowe and Samuel Pepys
record frequent interactions with letters.143 A detailed study of the diary of
Lady Margaret Hoby – a woman assiduous in the recording and measuring
of her life – indicates the development of her own more regularised habits
of letter-writing during the period 1599 to 1605. She commonly conducted
her correspondence early in the morning after private prayers and either
before or just after breakfast, and then again in the evening after supper,
before going to bed; the reading and writing of letters was also fitted around
mealtimes. The part of the evening before she retired to bed was often the
time that she wrote to her husband when he was absent from the house-
hold.144 This habit of conducting correspondence at the end of the day,
when undistracted by the pressures of daylight hours, appears to have been
the case with several married couples, including the mid-sixteenth-century
Calais merchant John Johnson who habitually wrote to his wife at the end
of the day when commerce was over: one letter exclaimed ‘fare well and
good night wife’, another written at 10 o’clock at night added ‘wold ye were
in my bed to tary me’.145 This practice of regular correspondence among
married couples was undoubtedly practical for reasons of commerce and the
smooth running of the household, but also was comforting during periods
of absence.146 Over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
the reading and writing of letters became an increasingly regular feature of
everyday life. The regularity of routine of daily letter-writing, with distinct
set periods of the day set aside for dealing with one’s correspondence devel-
oped further during the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with the
increased regularization of the postal system and postal times.
Seals and sealing
Prior to the invention of envelopes, which were used from the early-
eighteenth century onwards, English letters were folded to form an oblong
packet measuring roughly 80mm by 100mm and sealed with wax and floss.
The process of sealing envelopes, rather than letter paper, was itself super-
seded by the development of the gummed envelope in the 1840s.147 During
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries correspondents utilised the stand-
ard ‘tuck and seal’ method of folding, which was achieved by first creasing
the bi-folium letter twice horizontally, then folding it twice vertically, before
tucking the left portion inside the right one.148 Folding a bifolium in this
manner, where the writing did not continue to the second folio, had the
distinct advantage of ensuring secrecy: effectively it provided an extra layer
of blank paper as a cover, in much the same way as an envelope functions
today. At the same time there was no bleed-through of ink from the second
folio to obscure superscriptions on the address leaf and postal endorsements
or instructions on the outside of the letter. With the letter folded thus,
warmed wax was then normally inserted into this seam before a seal matrix
or die (a hard engraved negative design) was applied to the paper on top
of the soft wax, leaving a ‘positive’ imprint or relief of the seal impressed
in the paper.149 In this practice, the matrix never actually touches the wax;
this method also has the advantage that the warm wax (which would take
months to dry properly) was covered by paper. The practices of sealing were
outlined by the Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives:
in our day, we fold the letter, which if it is not tied, is said to be ‘unfas-
tenable’ or ‘able to be opened’, as when one sends a letter to someone to
be read first before he delivers it. We tie it with a string on the surface or
right through the middle of it or sometimes with a strip of the same paper
when we do not have a seal; also with a seam made of paper, cut in the
form of a circle, a small one in the case of commercial transactions, or a
large one when writing to important persons. Thus a letter may be tied
with a string or fastened with a seam.150
Other methods of sealing were also widely used. Instead of placing wax
between the folds of paper, letters might be sealed across the seam, with the
wax and matrix applied to the outside of the letter, leaving an outer exposed
seal. One letter dated 1599 from the earl of Bath to Edward Seymour, his
deputy lieutenant, was sealed twice, once internally with wax used to stick
the bifolium pages of the letter together, the second seal applied within the
seam created by the final folding of the paper.151 A further method was use of
a ‘papered seal’, where wax was overlaid with a square or rhombus of paper,
then stamped with a hand-held seal matrix while the wax was still warm,
leaving an impression of the seal in the paper, a process that was commonly
used in royal letters where the signet seal was used to authenticate letters.152
A papered seal was attached to a letter from Charles I to Colonel Edward
Seymour in 1643, authenticating a document commanding free passage for
Captain George Martin to enter the port of Dartmouth. Four small slits at
either end of another of Charles I’s letters to Seymour suggest how a seal
might have been added using strips of paper or ribbon.153 Several of John
Donne’s letters display seals on the outside of the letter, which had been
attached on top of a separate tongue of paper that had itself been secured
onto what appears to be a cross of wax applied to the outside of the letter in
its folded rectangular form and on the opposite side to the address leaf.154
Bundles of letters were also often wrapped in an outer covering to prevent
soiling and for protection against damage as they were carried in postbags.
Postmasters were expected to endorse the outside of such packets with the
place and time of arrival.155 In most instances, these wrappers have not sur-
vived; since their purpose was merely functional they were readily discarded.
A number of examples of outer wrappings, however, do remain, including
several Jacobean examples of coverings sent to the earl of Shrewsbury, as well
as a fragment of the wrapper of a letter dated 1639 addressed from Algernon,
earl of Northumberland to Sir John Pennington on board the Unicorn in the
Downs, which includes postal endorsements the last of which indicates that
it reached ‘Canterbury past six o’clock at night’. A similar wrapper survives
for another letter from Northumberland to Pennington, dated ‘From my
house in Queenes street this seventeenth of October 1639 Thursday neere
twelve att night’.156 The practice of using an extra sheet of paper as an outer
wrapping ensured that no one could read the contents of a letter that might
have bled through the second folio.157 It was also practical since it provided
space on which to address the letter. In addition to the ‘tuck and seal’ method
other common sealing practices were the ‘slit and band’, accordion and sewn
method, the last two mentioned feature in the correspondence of Bess of
Hardwick as described by Alison Wiggins.158 The ‘slit and band’ method was
employed when several sheets of paper were used, making the ‘tuck and seal
method’ tricky. In the former mode of sealing, the sheets were folded in half,
then half again on the short side, with parallel slits made through the sheets
at each end. A strip, probably of paper, was then inserted through these
holes, the two ends joined and sealed with wax in the normal way.159
Sealing wax could be purchased ready-made. It consisted of a mixture of
beeswax and colophony (a powdered resin), tallow (the hard fat from sheep
or cows also used to make candles), or shellac (a resin from the East Indian
beetle, Tachardia Iacca). Exeter Corporation purchased four pounds of red
wax in September 1594 for 3s. 10d.; in 1619 John and Richard Newdigate
paid 1d. for ‘i oz of hard waxe’, and wax of varying sorts (hard, soft and red)
was a regular expense for the household of Lord William Howard during
the early Stuart period.160 Household manuals also contained recipes for the
making of sealing wax: John Partridge’s The Treasurie of Commodious Conceits,
& Hidden Secrets (1573) informs the reader how ‘To make red sealyng wax’:
Take to one pound of Wax. iii. ounces of cleare Turpentyne in Sommer, in

Winter take fowre: melte them together with a soft fyre: Then take it from
the fire and let it coole: Then put in Vermylion verye fynely grounde,
and Salet Oyle, of each an ounce, and mix them well together, and it is
perfect good.161
A recipe ‘To make red and greene sealing wax’ was included in A Very Proper
Treatise, Wherein is Briefly Sett Forthe the Arte of Limming (1583), while Johann
Jacob Wecker’s Eighteen Books of the Secrets of Art & Nature (1660) contains
recipes to make red, green, black and white wax.162 Wafer seals made of flour,
egg white and isinglass were also used in the late-sixteenth and seventeenth
century. First patented in 1635, these seals were heated in hot water then
applied to paper and used to join two surfaces pressed together and stamped
with a matrix.163 Wax softened by heat was applied warm to paper, and when
it was particularly wet it soaked into the paper, sometimes bleeding through;
the indenting of the seal matrix sometimes tore the paper around the edges,
which one can observe on certain letters. The opening of letters without the
careful use of a knife also resulted in seal tears, where the part of the page
bearing the seal was ripped leaving a fragment of paper still attached to the
seal. This often caused tears in the page of the text, so much so that Sir John
Holles on the address leaf of a letter to his wife in 1599 wrote, ‘have a care
in opening this letter for tearing the writing’.164 Seals by their very nature
are relatively fragile and in many cases do not survive intact, but their use
is observable by remaining fragments, feint traces or smudges, indents or
impressions of seals. Where there are no signs of a seal this may indicate
several different things: that a letter was sent unsealed, that it was not in fact
actually sent, or that the particular manuscript is a draft or copy.
Seal matrices or dies – the hard engraved negatives used to make an impres-
sion in soft material – used in correspondence were normally small and round,
measuring approximately 15mm to 30 or 40mm in diameter. During the early
modern period several forms of seal stamp were used: a ring or signet seal
attached to a ring worn on the finger; a desk seal fixed to a handle; and a fob
seal that was attached to a chain. In 1532 the earl of Rutland paid 6s. 8d. to
Cuthberd Strode ‘for gravinge my Lorde’s seale of armes’, and in 1582 it cost
Richard Stoneley two shillings to get his seal repaired.165 Henry Percy paid £3
14s. 8d. in June 1593 to the goldsmith, Mr Podmeare ‘for making and graving
twoe seales’ containing ‘his armes cyrculed with the Garter’, while William
Petre paid 4s. for a seal for his wife in 1597.166 The Cornish gentleman Edward
Aryndell bequeathed 40s. to his niece Cecily in 1589 for ‘a ringe to seale’ and
to his sister Isabel two angels (or 20s) to make a seal ‘with my badge in it’; in
1620 and 1621 Francis, earl of Rutland paid a sealmaker £7 in two instalments
for a ‘forrest seal’ and 8s. 6d. ‘for making my Lorde’s signet seale, with armes
and garter’; and Thomas Knyvett asked his wife to ask a servant to ‘looke in
the the littel pocketts of my breeches for my silver seale’.167 The designs of
seals connected to office, family or the person conveyed significant meaning,
as discussed in Chapter 4.
Early modern letter-writing was thus a complex art, the peculiarities of

which needed to be learned and understood. To write it required facility
with a range of materials and tools, as well as the mastery of a series of
practices, nuanced by social status and circumstance, and connected to pen-
ning, sealing and dispatch. Epistolary practicalities, as discussed in the next
chapter, were imparted in the schoolroom, as a key part of early modern
pedagogy; they were taught at home by writing masters, tutors and parents;
and they were disseminated more broadly through printed books, such as
educational, letter-writing and household manuals. Household accounts
and probate inventories reveal widespread access to and ownership of com-
modities connected to writing, while receipt books informed readers how
to make ink and wax. The cost of paper, however, meant that letter-writing
was relatively expensive and therefore for many not an everyday activity.
Nevertheless sparing use and recycling of paper was widespread below the
social elites. Differences in the physical characteristics of the materials and
objects associated with letter-writing manifested themselves physically on
the early modern manuscript page, which encoded in correspondence the
sorts of social meanings outlined in Chapter 4. The cut and sharpness of a
quill, the consistency of ink, the kind of writing surface used and the quality
of paper affected the formation and quality of handwriting. Likewise, the
nature of letters themselves was influenced by the material conditions of
corresponding, the spaces, environments, times and circumstances of com-
position. Letters were penned in a multitude of spatial contexts, in company
as well as in solitude; collaboratively as well as alone; routinely as part of a
bureaucratic procedure as well as clandestinely in fleeting moments afforded
by challenging conditions. For most of the period, letter-writing was a reac-
tive activity. Letters were penned at all times of the day and night, governed
by the irregular rhythms of early modern postal conditions, responsive to
crises and events. Alongside this rather ad hoc and chaotic epistolary cul-
ture there developed an emerging regularity of correspondence, particularly
in the realms of trade and diplomacy, the areas of household management
and in communications between family members. Even before the regula-
risation of postal times by the eighteenth century, there developed during
the sixteenth and seventeenth regular patterns and habits of letter-writing
which responded to the opportunities and flexibilities of the letter as a writ-
ing technology.
3
Epistolary Writing Technologies
The practical side of letter-writing was learned and disseminated through

pedagogy, print and practice. Formal letter-writing skills formed a central
part of the curriculum for boys at grammar school and university; classical
epistolary models (as taught in Erasmus’s De conscribendis epistolis) were a
staple for anyone educated beyond the elementary level. Girls of elite fami-
lies too were schooled in letter-writing by tutors and governesses, and were
encouraged to practise writing letters to develop a useful social skill. More
broadly, the writing of letters by children to parents formed a crucial part of
the process of socialisation that inculcated deferential codes of filial obedi-
ence. In addition to these formal methods of tuition, knowledge of the intri-
cacies of letter-writing was gained from contact with the form and through
an increasing body of vernacular epistolary manuals, which sought to distil,
popularise and disseminate rules and protocols of humanistic letter-writing.
How far these models were adhered to in actual practice is hard to deter-
mine, and varied greatly according to a range of factors, including the type
and genre of letter, the situation and circumstance of writing, and the social
status, gender and education of the letter-writer. Attention to the mechanics
of composition highlights a broad range of epistolary practices, both singu-
lar and collaborative. The task of composition was in many cases layered,
involving planning, drafting and redrafting, and might involve the produc-
tion of a fair copy for sending, and copying for records. Different levels of
mediation were possible at each distinct stage of this complex process with
the involvement of secretaries and amanuenses: a letter might be drafted
by a secretary before being copied in neat by the signatory in his or her
own hand, while a secretary might also be tasked to copy a sent autograph
into a letter-book. This suggests the interlocking of personal and communal
writing technologies. Definitions of what constitutes a ‘letter-writer’ must
therefore incorporate cultural writing practices that are collaborative as well
as those that are personal. The chapter is divided into three distinct sec-
tions, each exploring a different technology intrinsically connected to the
teaching and practices of early modern letter-writing: pedagogic, exploring
53
the ways in which the skills of letter-writing were learned; models, in the
form of printed letter-writing manuals; and finally, authorship, as viewed
through methods, modes and practices of composition.
Learning to write letters
The skills of letter-writing were acquired through formal tuition, within the
household by tutors and governesses, and at schools and universities; as well
as informally through book-learning and first-hand contact with the form. The
methods and means by which letter-writing was taught and practised can be
reconstructed from surviving curricula, book-lists, grammar school and other
teaching manuals, and from actual examples of children’s letters and exercise
books that survive, as well as from correspondence with parents who sought
to critique, cajole and even sometimes encourage their offspring in their early
epistolary efforts. Letter-writing as taught in educational institutions was
largely formal and Latin-based, closely connected with the humanist emphasis
on rhetoric, yet at the same time instruction also focused on utility and ver-
nacular correspondence. Pupils were in effect learning a transferable life skill.
The teaching of writing only occurred once a child had learned to read,
and most of those receiving any formal elementary education had normally
left before they could write. Writing was taught in elementary schools, by
itinerant writing masters and scriveners, by household tutors and govern-
esses, and informally by family members.1 The school that Sir William
Borlase founded in Great Marlow in 1624 made provision for 24 boys to
be taught to ‘write, read and cast accounts in writing’; girls, however, were
to be taught to ‘knit, spin and make bone lace’. Overall, girls undoubtedly
enjoyed less access to writing tuition than their male counterparts, and
female literacy rates although they increased over the course of the period
remained significantly lower than men’s.2 Opportunities for formal tuition
in writing did exist for women; in the first half of the seventeenth century,
Anne Higginson recommended to Lady Ferrers, a school for girls in Windsor
that taught ‘reading, writing, danceing’ and ‘musicke’.3 Interestingly, writ-
ing lessons were often viewed as an added extra, to be paid for separately.
Thus, accounts for the early-Tudor schoolboy, James Bassett’s education
in France, record ten sous paid ‘at the writing-school’; and writing tuition
for three months cost 60 sous.4 Likewise, charges connected with teaching
Robert Sidney to write include 2s paid to ‘The usher that taught Mr Roberte
to wryte’ at school, and 5s paid ‘for teaching him to write’ at Oxford.5
Reading and writing literacy in English and Latin was normally a prerequi-
site for entry to grammar schools.6 Children’s handwriting practice (includ-
ing scrawled signatures, sentence fragments, alphabets, ownership marks,
pen-trails and doodles) is commonly found in school exercise books, on the
backs of letters and in family manuscript miscellanies, evidence of more
informal methods of learning and practice.7
Epistolary Writing Technologies 55
Once children had acquired the basic skills of writing (as detailed in
Chapter 2), the teaching of letter-writing formed a central part of the
grammar school curriculum. Epistolary training was useful in many ways,
since letter-writing exercises could incorporate various lessons, including
Latin and English grammar, orthography, punctuation, rhetoric (structures,
topics, thinking about an audience and amplification) and composition.
Letter-writing also had more practical worldly uses, in that boys could prac-
tice writing in different social situations, and the social conventions of the
letter itself taught behavioural and hierarchical codes.8 Set texts are outlined
in grammar school statutes, giving instructions for the syllabus. Those for
Ipswich School (1523) list a selection of Cicero’s Letters and Horace’s Epistles;
boys at Eton in 1560 studied Johannes Sturm’s edition of a selection of Cicero’s
epistles in the third form, while in the fifth form they studied the full collec-
tion as in 1530; Cicero’s and Horace’s Epistles were also on the curriculum of
Sandwich School (1580); Rivington (1576) and Harrow schools (1591) both
studied selections of Cicero’s letters, with Harrow also using Cicero’s Epistolae
familiares; Cicero’s Epistolae minores selectae was a set text at St Bees School,
Cumberland in 1583; while rules made for the Probation Day at Merchant
Taylors’ School in 1606–7 listed Cicero’s Epistles among those works on which
the boys were to be tested.9 Grammar school textbooks or manuals outlined
the ways in which letters were introduced into the curriculum. Simpler letters
from Cicero’s Ad familiares were used for younger pupils to teach them to read
Latin, to learn syntax, provide phrases for re-use and form the basis of com-
position exercises. Once the basics were mastered, pupils were encouraged to
write letters within realistic schoolboy situations, and to respond to scenarios
gleaned from classical texts. William Kempe recommended that from the
third form pupils should learn letter-writing through varying phrases from
Cicero’s Ad familiares and through double translation, as did Roger Ascham’s
Scholemaster (1570).10 The schoolmaster John Baret described the way in
which he ‘vsed’ his pupils ‘often to write Epistles and Theames together, and
dailie to translate some peece of English into Latine, for the more speedie and
easie attaining of the same’.11 In John Brinsley’s grammar book, A Consolation
for our Grammar Schooles (1622) he included a section on ‘Epistles and Letters’
guiding schoolmasters towards particular authors and collections of letters
suitable for practice and emulation:
For patterns of short Epistles and pithy letters of all sortes of matter; see
the Laconicall Epistles, to wit, the shortest and pithiest gathered out of
Tullie, Manutius, Politian, Erasmus, and many others, comprised in a little
volume of purpose to this end.
For example, seruing and directing for imitation of sundry kindes of
Epistles, both Consolatory, Gratulatory, and also Hortatory, with all the
rest of the kinds of Examples: see Flores & Sententiae Scribendi, Formulae
illustres.
For pure phrases more peculiarly belonging to Epistle, see Manutius

phrases [Aldus Manutius, Latinae linguae phrases]
He explained elsewhere, ‘For direct and patterns for writing pithy and
short letters in English, which is amongst vs, both most commendable,
and of principall and daily vse. The Laconicall Epistles, translated into a
good English style, with the Grammar order and propriety in the mar-
gents.’12 Ciceronian letters (conceived as ‘most fitte for children’, far more
appropriate for ‘young scholars’ than the manuals produced by either the
Dutch humanist Georgius Macropedius or the Lutheran scholar Christoph
Hegendorff) were the example Brinsley used to illustrate the pedagogical
merits of epistolary composition is his earlier 1612 text Ludus literatus,
in a chapter entitled ‘How to make Epistles imitating Tully, short, pithie,
sweete latine and familiar; and to indite Letters to our friends in English
accordingly’. His method in teaching children to write letters is explained
in dialogue form: first, they were to read Cicero’s letters twice a week; to
imitate an epistle in both Latin and English, and to summarise it in both
languages; they should then imitate another of Cicero’s letters applying it
to some friend, changing numbers, tenses, persons, places and times, first
in English and then in Latin; the next day they should frame a reply to the
letter, answering every sentence point by point. In this manner, not only
would students improve their letter-writing – a skill ‘being of perpetuall
vse in all our whole life’ – but also it was a way of instructing them in the
rule of grammar and allowing them to practise composition.13 The com-
mentaries in particular collections of letters assisted in teaching letters for
rhetoric and composition. A 1574 edition of Cicero’s Ad familiares prepared
by Hegendorff provides marginal commentary on the structure of rhetori-
cal argument, while a ready-made textbook edition of Cicero’s epistles was
printed in 1611, ‘together with a short Treatise, containing an order of
instructing Youth in Grammer’.14
The teaching of letter-writing at the grammar school level was facilitated
by the use of a standard letter-writing manual, foremost among which was
Erasmus’s De conscribendis epistolis (1522), which was reprinted over 100
times during the sixteenth century and along with Cicero’s Epistles was
frequently found in library lists of the period.15 Schools such as Rivington,
Harrow and Eton all used Erasmus’s letter-writing manual.16 At the out-
set the text deals with the form and style of the letter, attacking narrow
Ciceronianism and what Erasmus saw as the barbaric, rigid, politeness of
the medieval ars dictaminis (discussed below), before outlining forms of sal-
utation and greeting, titles, closing formulae, the order of the letter, direct
and indirect beginnings, and generic rhetorical arguments that can be
applied to all types of letters.17 Erasmus distinguished between ‘mixed’ and
‘unmixed’ letters, covering a single or many topics, sub-dividing ‘unmixed’
letters along oratorical lines into deliberative, demonstrative and judicial
letters. To these he added a fourth category, the ‘familiar’ letter, and under
each of these four categories he provided instructions for a large number
of different genres of letter, including the letter of advice, encouragement,
persuasion, invective, apology, reproof, entreaty, instruction, commenda-
tion, request, thanks, lamentation, consolation and congratulation. For
each letter type, Erasmus discussed the nature of the genre and the kinds
of arguments that one might employ, offering exemplary materials from
classical letter-writers as well as modern (including some of his own letters).
In discussions of the letter of encouragement, for example, pupils were
instructed to tailor letters to their audience, to think about suitable strate-
gies or arguments, either from praise, hope, fear, love, hatred or pity, and a
series of examples are provided from which they might borrow.18 As Peter
Mack argues ‘Erasmus’s manual combines thinking about the situation of
the letter with material from commonplace books to produce a finished let-
ter’.19 Erasmus recommended Ovid’s verse epistles, the Heroides as a text for
boys to practice letter-writing, and this was the case at Eton in 1528.20 Other
manuals were also employed by grammar schools: at Blackburn in 1597,
Cicero’s ‘familiar Epistells’ were used alongside Macropedius’s Methodus de
conscribendis epistolis, which according to Brinsley in 1612 was the most
popular letter-writing manual for ordinary schools, although it only occurs
once in curricula, possibly because it was printed alongside other works in
volumes of multiple discourses. Other letter-writing manuals of the period
aimed at grammar school instruction include texts by Hegendorff, Lippus
Brandolinus and Juan Luis Vives, but only the latter is mentioned once in
curricula of the period.21 Schoolmasters also prepared their own materials as
is evident from the notebook of the Elizabethan Devon schoolmaster John
Conybeare, which includes English and Latin examples for pupils to copy
and emulate of letters to parents and model letters concerning other social
situations.22 One of the earliest examples of a schoolboy’s model letter sur-
vives from towards the end of Henry VII’s reign, scribbled in the margins of
a book by someone presumed to be a pupil at the grammar school attached
to Magdalen College, Oxford.23 A Bodleian manuscript school notebook
dating from the early-seventeenth century likewise contains exercises in
letter-writing in Latin and English.24
At university level too, there was a continuation of grammar school
teaching of letter-writing. Erasmus’s De conscribendis epistolis was a highly
popular title on book lists in Elizabethan Oxford and Cambridge, while
the manuscript ‘Directions’ for study thought to have been produced by
John Merryweather of Magdelene College, Cambridge used the epistles
of Cicero and Ovid as a way of studying logic, ethics and controversy.25
Student notebooks reveal evidence of undergraduates practising exercises
in letter-writing. The Oxford copybook of the Yorkshire undergraduate
Robert Batt contains Latin letters, as well as declamations, theses and
verses written by him during the years 1581 to 1584, and the notebook of
the Elizabeth scholar and diplomat Sir Thomas Smith (1513–77) includes
a selection from Cicero’s Epistulae ad familiares.26 An early-seventeenth-
century small paper book connected to the William family of Huntingdon
includes model letters in Latin, and examples of letters ‘commendatorie
and swasorie’. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that the volume was
used by younger members of the family: many of the pages are replete with
scribbles, doodles, sample signatures, practice capital letters, and an alpha-
bet in secretary hand.27 The diary fragment of the Cornish Elizabethan
Oxford undergraduates Richard and Matthew Carnsew reveals that they
practised letter-writing, as indeed is evidenced by the surviving Latin
letters from Matthew to his father William during his years at Oxford
between May 1572 and November 1574.28 Several Latin epistles of filial
obedience survive from Charles and Framlingham Gawdy to their father
Bassingbourne Gawdy II – written in copybook italic and using ruled lines
for guidance – further indicating the role of parents in stimulating practice
in letter-writing.29 Indeed, Sir John Holles corresponded in Latin, Italian
and French with his son John when the latter was at Christ’s College,
Cambridge in 1611, partly to improve his son’s linguistic and writing
skills, but also to practise his own languages.30 Robert, earl of Salisbury
in a letter critiquing his son’s Latin translation recommend that he ‘read
sometimes’ Cicero’s epistles, arguing that ‘the stile wilbe of more use vnto
you for familiar speech, & by the methode used therein you may learne in
what manner to penn yor owne letters’.31
The most detailed case study of an early modern schoolboy learning to
write letters is that of 10-year-old James Bassett (c.1526–58), whose corre-
spondence during the 1530s with his mother, Honor Lady Lisle, illustrates
not only epistolary pedagogy in practice, but also the ways in which letter-
writing was an important tool in inculcating codes of obedience in children.
The young James was educated in France, since his mother and stepfather
were Lord and Lady Deputy of Calais, and his schooling took place at a
boys’ school in Paris; at St. Omer, where he was tutored by a priest; and
in the household of the substantial Parisian merchant, Guillaume le Gras;
and he also spent a year at the College de Navarre, Université de Paris.32
His surviving letters from this period (1537–39) are all written in French, a
tongue (absent from the grammar school curriculum) that was beginning
to rival Latin as the language of diplomacy, and consequently was increas-
ingly viewed as useful by parents.33 There is also reference to him learning
to write Latin letters, but actual examples have not survived.34 The ways
in which the youngest of Honor Lisle’s children was taught to write letters
emerges from a study of the palaeographical evidence of his own corre-
spondence, the holograph status of which is sometimes hard to establish.
While he clearly wrote many of the letters in his own hand (and developed
his own personal style) others display the influence of his tutor, who on
at least one occasion may have actually penned a letter which James then
signed.35 A series of letters suggest that letter-writing was taught by a process

of copying out templates written by a tutor. Indeed, Muriel St Clare Byrne
identifies four possible copy letters, writing that in these items ‘James was
either imitating his tutor’s hand when composing his letter or else treating
letters written out for him by Bunel [Claude Bunel, James’s tutor] as copy-
book exercises in which he attempted to follow his tutor’s style as well as
his spelling’.36 Dictation may also have been another way in which children
practised their epistolary skills, since James complained in one letter to his
mother that he had been forced to write ‘certain letters . . . sore against my
will, and because my master hath dictated them and enforced me to the
writing thereof’.37 Other letters that can be more readily identified as his
own ‘developing’ hand and style, illustrate his practising the form and style
of a letter, the modes of address and closing, paragraphing, orthography and
handwriting, as well as his French, routinely signing his name ‘Jaques bas-
set’.38 A letter dated 20 February 1538, described by St Clare Byrne as ‘James’s
diploma piece in French composition’, in particular illustrates not only his
mastery of French, but also his technical skill as a letter-writer. Written in a
very neat, regular and clear schoolboy hand, with distinct paragraphs (but
without punctuation), the letter adheres to standardised epistolary conven-
tions of address (his mother is addressed, ‘My treshonnoree dame et mere’)
as well as salutations, and it trots out commonplace sentiments of the
youthful would-be scholar: ‘I endeavour myself to be a good scholar and to
learn things of honesty and virtue, and to profit in the love and fear of Our
Lord’.39 A letter from 1539, a year after his return from France, penned in a
fairly accomplished humanist italic script, demonstrates the overall success
of the methods by which he was taught to write letters.40
James Bassett’s letters also betray signs of pedagogical designs to inculcate
codes of obedience and patterns of deferential behaviour. This is clearly dis-
played in extracts from an early letter to his mother written from Paris on
18 April 1537: ‘Madame, I most humbly recommend me to your good favor.
Madame I most humbly pray you to recommend me to the good favor of
my lord my father, and to my sisters. Madame, I thank you for the demy-
angelot . . .’41 While the scribal process may well have accentuated social
hierarchies, the repetition of the formal mode of address for his mother,
‘Madame’, combined with the staccato stiffness of the short formal and
formulaic sentences, imbued with a vocabulary of deference, serve to rein-
force the strict boundaries of the mother–son relationship. The letter is also
indicative perhaps of an unpractised writer, and shows the ways in which
early efforts at letter-writing were central to strict practices of upbringing.
Thus, the writing of letters to family members could be part of the educative
process, as part of childhood socialisation to enforce deferential codes of
filial respect. In a similar manner, a youthful Framlingham Gawdy sent an
undated three-line letter to his father, which was written on ruled lines to
guide ascenders and descenders (pen-strokes which extend above and below
the body of a letter) and the lower case letters. The letter addressed ‘To my
good father’, was both writing practice and a product of filial duty:
deare father i thought good in these few words to

remember my duty when i am a better scholar you
shall haue a better letter
your louing sonne
framlingham gaudy42
The process of writing a letter in many ways forced an individual to com-

pose a self; the act of addressing another person prompted letter-writers to
evaluate themselves in terms of gender, age and social status. In short, letters
were a technology that restructured thought; while the choice of language
is reflective of social position and standing as it also works to construct real-
ity.43 Deference learned in the early stages of upbringing formed the basis
of obedience in later life.
Although excluded from the world of grammar schools and universities,
sixteenth-century girls were clearly tutored to write letters. A small number
of girls (royal or court women, and the daughters of humanists) received a
classical education along the lines of their male counterparts, of which the
letter played an integral part.44 Grace Mildmay records the way in which
in 1560 her governess made her practise the writing of letters to various
individuals: ‘and when she did see me idly disposed, she would set me to
cipher with my pen . . . and sometimes set me to write a supposed letter
to this or that body concerning such and such things’.45 At the turn of the
seventeenth century, Elizabeth Cary honed her letter-writing skills at an early
age by translating Senecan epistles; while the sixteen-year-old Rachael Fane
(1620–80) in her notebooks practised French translation of ‘epistles choisen
out of’ Seneca as well as ‘an epistle of Isocrates’.46 Several examples of practice
letters by girls survive from the period, including three beautifully written
and highly ornate letters that Katherine Oxinden sent home to her mother
in the early-seventeenth century, which reveal her use of faint pencil lines to
guide carefully the formation of lower- and upper-case letters, and ascend-
ers and descenders (Figure 3.1).47 This manner of ruling lines often with use
of a ruling pen (or dry quill) was widely recommended by writing masters,
including John Brinsley and Peter Bales, in order to promote straight and
regular writing.48 Parental pressure and enthusiasm was likewise a spur for
girls to practise and acquire epistolary skills. Robert Sidney regularly praised
his daughter Mary from about the age of nine for her letters.49 It was com-
monplace for upper-class girls to have been encouraged to write letters: an
early letter written in French survives from Anne Boleyn; an eleven-year-old
Jane Grey wrote to Thomas Seymour; a teenaged Princess Elizabeth corre-
sponded with Catherine Parr, Protector Somerset, her half-brother and sister
Edward and Mary; an eight-year-old Anne Clifford penned an ornate letter to
Figure 3.1 Katherine Oxinden to her mother: BL, Add. MS, 28004, fol.9r, n.d.
Reproduced by permission of The British Library, London.
her father; and Lady Mary Talbot wrote dutifully to her parents.50 During the
1530s Honor Lisle, herself unable to write beyond producing a rudimentary
signature, ensured that her own daughters received instruction in letter-
writing: a holograph letter in English survives from her daughter Katharine
Bassett, while her daughter Anne was proficient in dictating letters in French,
and several of her daughter Mary’s French letters are probably holograph.51
Boys were likewise the recipients of a mixture of parental praise and cen-
sure on the subject of their letter-writing. Alongside formal tuition, early
modern mothers and fathers sought to extol the virtues of letter-writing. In
the early-seventeenth century, Lady Katherine Paston wrote encouragingly to
her son William, ‘I doe like that thow doest inditt thy owne letters thy selfe . . .
and of the ell wrightinge of them: the vse of wrightinge will perfict your hand
very much’.52 Rebuke rather than praise was received from the Oxford under-
graduate William Bagot from his father Walter, who criticised the ‘forme’ of
his writing and the ‘barrenness’ of his ‘invention’; Sir John Holles expected
his son Denzel, then at Christ’s College, Cambridge to ‘cause’ his letters to be
‘writt legibly that every proportion may be well read’.53 In letters to his son
William, then an undergraduate at Cambridge, Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury
criticised his orthography and handwriting, which illustrates well the rules of
letter-writing deemed fit for an educated gentleman. In one letter he wrote to
his son that his hand was like that ‘of a scrivener’ advising ‘write w[i]thout
rule, for that is like a child’, another admonished, ‘your hand is not good,
for thogh it be romane yet it doth not leane in yo[u]r l[ett]res, as jentlemens
hands do, but rather like a woman or a scholar’, while a third offered a much
fuller critique of his faults as a letter-writer:
Will: I lyke it well that you do write vnto me because I may obserue your
hand, w[hi]ch I see would mend if you were well taught, yett do I fynd ill
orthographi w[hi]ch agreethe not w[i]th an universitie, neyther will I lett
passe the absurditie of your marking y[ou]r parenticise thus I (thanke
god) bothe w[hi]ch yow may see I haue noted, not that I account these
faults in yow, but to shew yow the weaknese of those that are about yow,
who do suffer yow to erre in these Childishe thinge, to w[hi]ch I will add
this one thing (worse then the rest) that your letters are without date,
from any place or tyme; w[hi]ch makes me doubt whither yow be at
Roystone at some Horse race, or at Cambridge . . . your name is not well
written, and therefore I haue written it vnderneathe as I would haue it,
I haue also sent yow a peece of paper fowlded as gentlemen vse to write
theire letters, where yours are lyke those that come out of a grammar
schoole. yow must not thinke I am angry w[i]th yow for these toyes, but
take them as omissions . . . .54
Part of what Salisbury complained about in his son’s letters was his failure
to master the material nuances: the way in which his letter was folded, the
lack of date and place of sending, his use of parentheses and the paucity of his
hand and signature. In this manner, parental feedback worked alongside for-
mal tuition to inculcate habits and practices of early modern letter-writing.
Models and printed letter-writing manuals
While the teaching of letter-writing (utilising Latin treatises) was a central

part of grammar school education for boys during the sixteenth and early-
seventeenth centuries, the period also saw the proliferation of a range of
vernacular manuals that spanned the classroom and household. These
letter-writing manuals in English catered for a wider audience, providing
instruction and epistolary models for the unlearned, the socially aspiring
and for women.55 The period as a whole witnessed the complex devel-
opment in letter-writing theory, from the influence of the medieval ars
dictaminis, through humanist letter-writing manuals to the spread of vernac-
ular English manuals, and the proliferation of printed works which offered
instructions on how to write letters, or proffered exemplary materials for
emulation and entertainment. While later sixteenth-century authors such
as William Fulwood, Abraham Fleming and Angel Day closely followed the
rhetorical principles of humanists such as Erasmus, the seventeenth century
witnessed a series of generic and stylistic developments. First, these years
saw the rise of the ‘secretary’, a form catering for the requirements of the
unschooled which emphasised utility and a plain epistolary style. Secondly,
we see the emergence of publications claiming to offer collections of ‘newly
discovered’ letters, titles that played on their claims of ‘private’ correspond-
ence for purposes of amusement. Thirdly, it is not until the seventeenth
century that manuals were published specifically aimed at women. Lastly,
throughout the period there was a burgeoning market for manuals aimed at
more specialist interests, mercantile and legal, which provided form letters
tailored to these requirements. Letter-writing manuals frequently discussed
matters of a material nature – how to seal or fold letters, protocols of page
layout, where to place the signature, subscription and superscription – these
aspects are discussed more fully in Chapter 4. This section sketches the
main contours of the developments in epistolary theory, outlining the main
printed forms that provided letter-writing instruction or offered model let-
ters, before considering the relationship between epistolary theory and ‘real’
correspondence, and the degree to which letter-writing manuals scripted
social relations.
Dominant throughout the medieval period from the eleventh century
was the ars dicataminis, which became a perennial feature of the pedagogic
landscape. Widely taught in cathedral and monastic schools and later in
universities, it offered model letters for various situations, outlining correct
structure and form for different types of letter, prescribing opening and clo-
sural formulae and salutations in a manner that rigidly accentuated social
differences between individuals.56 Recent scholarship has argued that the

impact of the ars dictaminis declined by the fifteenth century (or was at least
indirect), and that most correspondence was modelled on vernacular royal
missives and Privy Seal or other official letters. Letter-writing was, therefore,
a professional skill requiring legal and business expertise, linked to the legal
rhetoric available in the ars notaria of common law and royal administra-
tion.57 The revival of classical texts by humanist scholars (notably Petrarch’s
discovery of Cicero’s Epistolae ad Atticum in 1345 in Verona and Coluccio
Salutati’s recovery of Cicero’s Epistolae ad familiares in 1392) further dimin-
ished the influence of medieval dictaminal theory and placed the ‘familiar’
letter alongside rhetorical style firmly at the centre of Renaissance letter-
writing theory as exemplified by Erasmus’s De consribendis epistolis.58
Composite early modern epistolary theory was, as Jonathan Gibson
has argued, comprised of three interrelated traditions – the medieval ars
dictaminis, early modern rhetorical theory, and the revived classical theory
of the familiar letter – which were available in printed English letter-writing
manuals and formularies modified for an increasingly receptive gentry and
mercantile audience.59 The first vernacular English letter-writing manual
was William Fulwood’s The Enemie of Idlenesse (1568). Dedicated to the
Merchant Taylors of London, the dedicatory epistle claimed ‘I meane not
I / the cunning clerks to teach / But rather the unlearned sort / a few pre-
cepts to preach’.60 It was, however, a translation of the anonymous French
manual Le Stile et manière de composer, dicter, et escrire toute sorte d’epistre,
ou lettres missiues, tant par response, que autrement (1553), itself based on
the earlier Le prothocolle des secretaires & aultres gens desirants savoiue l’art
et manière de dictes en bon français toutes lettres missives et epistres en prose
(1534), and Pierre Fabri’s Grant et vray art de pleine rhetorique (1521).61 Early
English vernacular epistolographies were thus indebted to the French mod-
els.62 Fulwood’s volume is split into four books, the first of which provides
‘Instructions how to endyte Epistles and Letters, &c’ (sig.A3r), defining the
letters, distinguishing different sorts and outlining the parts of the letter
(the salutation, subscription and superscription) with examples. It ends with
a lengthy section on ‘The Diuision of an Epistle or Letter’, which follows
oratorical theory in positing that ‘euerie Epistle conteineth three partes’:
the cause, the intent and the conclusion, before providing exemplars, such
as ‘How to Write in a mans behalfe for a Ciuil cause’ (sig.D2r), and ‘How
to Write vnder the Demonstratiue gender, blaming or dispraysing another’
(sig.F1r). The second book offers ‘copies of sundry learned mens Letters and
Epistles’; the third teaches ‘the maner and forme how to write by answere’,
offering essentially pairs of letters written in exchange, including a father to
a son and the latter’s reply, a wife to her husband and his reply. The fourth
book contains ‘sundry Letters, belonging to Loue, as well in Verse as in
Prose’. There was little innovation in Fulwood’s text, which drew generously
from Erasmus. In similar vein, Abraham Fleming’s A Panoplie of Epistles, Or,
a Looking Glasse for the Vnlearned (1576) was essentially an English transla-
tion of a Latin formulary, offering exemplary letters by ‘the best and most
eloquentest Rhetoricians that haue liued in all ages and haue been famous
in that facultie’, including letter-writers from ancient Greece and Rome,
the continent and England, with examples from Cicero, Seneca, Socrates,
Erasmus and Roger Ascham.
Both Fleming and Fulwood offered very different books, but within the
humanist tradition: the former was a collection of model Latin letters,
while the latter offered instruction and letters geared towards everyday
life in addition to exemplars of erudition and eloquence. It is perhaps this
broader appeal of Fulwood’s manual that made it so popular; it appeared in
some ten editions before 1621, and spawned several imitators. In his 1578
A Short Discourse of the Life of Servingmen Walter Darell included a section
entitled ‘Certeine letters verie necessarie for servingmen and other persons
to peruse’, which mixed practical advice and set pieces for entertainment.63
Other books that included model letters alongside other prose and verse for
purposes entertainment as well as instruction were The Forrest of Fancy by
‘H.C.’, a miscellaneous collection of songs, sonnets, epigrams and epistles
printed only once in 1579, and William Phiston’s, The Welspring of Wittie
Conceites (1584), which was translated out of Italian.
Altogether more influential was Angel Day’s The English Secretorie, which
was first printed in 1586. It was then revised and expanded in 1592 with
new sections on tropes and figures, familiar letters and one entitled ‘Of the
parts, place and Office of a Secretorie’; and was reprinted in more or less this
form in 1595, 1599, 1607, 1614, 1621, 1625 and 1635. As with the earlier
work of Fulwood, Day’s manual draws on Erasmus and provides a compen-
dium of rhetorical theory and instruction, practical formulae and vernacular
exemplary materials. Book one offers a fairly comprehensive digest of letter-
writing theory that synthesises Erasmian and broader humanist approaches
with older traditions. Early chapters outline the commodities, use and fram-
ing of the epistle, stressing the main rhetorical parts of the letter: the exor-
dium (introduction), the narratio or propositio (declaration of the substance
of the letter) the confirmatio (amplification) and the peroratio (conclusion).64
It then outlines the nature of salutations, greetings, farewells and orders of
subscriptions and superscriptions. Letters are then divided into four sepa-
rate genres: demonstrative, deliberative, judicial and familiar letters, with
numerous subdivisions within each. The volume then offers brief instruc-
tions on the main characteristics of each genre and sub-genre, followed by
a series of original examples of letters with the rhetorical parts noted in the
margin alongside the corresponding section of the letter on the page.65
The Renaissance rediscovery of the familiar letter, its absorption into
Latin humanist epistolographies, which in turn influenced the vernacular
letter-writing manuals of Fulwood, Fleming and Day, transformed the early
modern letter into a more flexible form, capable of dealing with a range of
more personal and intimate concerns.66 While aspects of the ars dictaminis
held some influence, early modern epistolary theory in general terms
marked a transition from medieval letter-writing styles which were rigidly
hierarchical, stiff and formal, markedly utilitarian – used either to convey
information or to make practical requests – and characteristically mechani-
cal in methods of composition. By contrast early modern epistolary theory
stressed the adaptability of the letter form to any given subject or situation:
Erasmus advised improvisation, while both Vives and Macropedius encour-
aged writers to experiment with the content and structure of their
letters.67 Where the medieval dictamen had emphasised social distinctions,
Renaissance theorists revived simpler epistolary forms of antiquity, encour-
aging the adoption of an easy, intimate style and expressions of individual
feelings of affection.68 Indeed, Erasmus in an oft-quoted phrase consid-
ered that ‘the wording of a letter should resemble a conversation between
friends’.69 The epistolary disciples of these Latin theorists likewise embraced
generic flexibility of the familiar letter, Day illustrating their employment
for ‘ordinary causes and matters’, while Fulwood considered ‘domestical’
and ‘familiar’ were ‘more in use than any other for so much as their nature
they are very necessary, to let our frendes understande of our estate, and of
our businesse be it of helth, prosperitie, sicknesse, aduersitie, or any other
domesticall and familiar thyngs’.70 They also adopted the more intimate
epistolary styles expounded by humanists, in addition to the rhetorical pre-
scriptions of the Latin manuals. Fulwood urged use of a ‘certaine familiar
reuerence’ in correspondence with equals; Day advised letter-writers to write
‘louingly’ to friends.71 Nonetheless both writers upheld social and gender
hierarchies within the family and society more broadly. Sons and daughters
were enjoined to display filial obedience in writing to parents; wives to be
obedient to husbands.
The popularity of the familiar letter genre led to the publication of sev-
eral collections of familiar letters during the late-Elizabethan and Jacobean
periods, more for entertainment than emulation.72 These included a transla-
tion of the Spanish Familiar Epistles of Sir Anthonie of Gueuara (1574), which
went through several reprintings, and Geoffrey Fenton’s Golden Epistles
(first published in 1575 and then in 1577 and 1582), and Edmund Spenser’s
Three Proper, and Wittie, Familiar Letters published twice in 1580. The first
two titles attest the influence of Spanish, Italian and French letter-writing
as well as Latin.73 This interest in familiar letters continued into the seven-
teenth century, with the publication of collections such as James Howell’s
Epistolæ Ho-Elianæ (1645), which reappeared in several editions during the
second half of the seventeenth century, and English translations of Jean-
Louis Guez, seigneur de Balzac’s familiar letters were first published in the
late 1630s under the titles New Epistles of Mounsieur de Balzac (1638) and
A Collection of Some Modern Epistles of Monsieur de Balzac (1639); Thomas
Forde’s Virtus rediviva (1660) which included a section entitled ‘Foenestra in
pectore: or a century of familiar letters’; and Collonel Henry Marten’s Familiar

Letters to his Lady of Delight (1662) and in the same year Robert Loveday’s
Letters Domestick and Forreign (1662). The discovered packet of letters was
another popular print genre. Writers like Nicholas Breton in A Poste With a
Madde Packet of Letters (1602) utilised letters as a framework for social satire
and semi-fictional writing (Figure 3.2). The commercial success of this vol-
ume, which was published at least another 21 times before 1685 in new and
enlarged versions, led to a series of imitators: The Prompters Packet of Private
and Familiar Letters (1612); Anthony Nixon’s A Straunge Foot-Post With a
Packet Full of Strange Petitions (1613) which was reprinted in 1616 under the
title The Foot-Post of Douer; Gervase Markham’s Hobson’s Horse-Load of Letters
(1613); Conceyted Letters, Newly Layde Open (1618); The Post of Ware with a
Packet Full of Strange Newes out of Diuers Countries ([1622]); Cupids Messenger
(1629); and W.I Gent’s A Speedie Post With Certaine New Letters (1629). As
with other volumes of this nature, they were more likely intended to amuse
than instruct.
Alongside these semi-fictional collections the seventeenth century wit-
nessed the development of more practical manuals, or ‘secretaries’, which
were less wedded to the high blown rhetoric of classical models. Instead
they stressed utility and plain writing and were aimed at the unschooled.
These include the anonymous A President for Young Pen-Men. Or The Letter-
Writer (1615; 1620 and 1638), Thomas Gainsford’s The Secretaries Stvdie
(1616), which was expanded in 1652 by Samuel Sheppard. Meanwhile,
George Snell’s The Right Teaching of Useful Knowledg (1649) included a chap-
ter entitled ‘The most useful and excellent art of writing letters to persons
of all estates’. Later examples of this printed form include Ralph Jonson’s
The Scholar’s Guide (1665), E. Young’s The Compleat English Scholar (1680)
and John Hill’s, The Young Secretary’s Guide: Or, A Speedy Help to Learning
(1687).74
More specialised letter-writing instruction was delivered by books tailored
to the distinct needs of particular groups, such as merchants, women and
government officers. John Browne’s The Marchants Avizo (1589), which
went through at least four editions, was marketed at merchants and con-
sidered ‘verie necessarie for their sonnes and seruants when they first send
them beyond the seas, as to Spaine and Portingale or other countreyes’.75
Dedicated to Thomas Aldworth and the Merchants’ Company of Bristol,
Browne’s manual offered instructions for factors trading abroad (knowledge
of wares, weights and measures and the value of money) before provid-
ing template letters, and model documents connected to trade with the
Iberian Peninsula, including ‘the Forme of a Spanish accompt’ and ‘A forme
for making a bill of lading’.76 These paper instruments were preceded by
‘A briefe forme of all such letters as you shall neede to write throughout your
whole voyage’. Epistolary situations were structured by the trading process
and included ‘A Letter to be Written to you Master, if your ship be forced
Figure 3.2 Title-page of the 1633 edition of Nicholas Breton’s A Poste With a Packet
of Mad Letters [10920 ccc 12]. Reproduced by permission of The British Library,
London.
by weather into any place, before you come to your Port of discharge’,
‘A Letter to be Written to your Master presently vpon your arriual at your
Port’, and ‘A Letter to be sent in that ship Where you haue laden goods for
any Marchant’. The volume ended with a section of superscriptions, and
considered that ‘this breefe & plaine order in your letters’ was suitable in
writing ‘to most sortes of persons’.77
A large number of prescriptive manuals and formularies were also pro-
duced providing letter-writing instruction and template legal letters and
documents. Indeed, Lawrence D. Green has argued for a ‘strong native
English tradition’ in legal dictamen.78 A work very much in the tradition
of the ars dictaminis was the legal compendium, A Newe Boke of Presidentes,
which was printed in 1543 with a preface by Thomas Phayer and appeared
in several dozen editions prior to 1641.79 Alongside various model legal
instruments were exemplary letters, including ‘The fourme of a letter one
frende to another for the collation of a benefice by the kynge’.80 An entry in
the stationers’ register records a no longer extant volume, entitled Pleasaunte
Letters to be Used in Suetes of Lawefull Maryages (1567–68).81 Several compila-

tions of legal letters appeared after the Civil War, including Richard Hutton’s
The Young Clarks Guide: or An Exact Collection of Choice English Presidents
(1649) which ran to several subsequent editions; William Small’s An Exact
Collection of Choice Declarations (1653), and the anonymously published The
Compleat Clark, and Scriveners Guide (1655).
Finally, from the mid-seventeenth century onwards, several letter-writing
manuals were published in English aimed at a specifically female audience,
including Jacques Du Bosque’s The Secretary of Ladies (1638), translated from
the French, as well as Henry Care’s The Female Secretary (1671) and Hannah
Wolley’s The Gentlewoman’s Companion (1673), and a series of model letters
were included in A Supplement to The Queen-Like Closet (1674).82 Samuel
Sheppard’s expansion of Thomas Gainsford’s The Secretaries Studie had partly
been occasioned by the desire to cater for women: ‘wherein ladies, gentle-
men, and all that are ambitious to write and speak elegantly and elabo-
rately’.83 Female epistolary forms, however, can be traced back to antiquity,
and model letters geared towards a female audience are extant from the late
medieval period.84 In the early-fourteenth century letter-writing guides in
French provided models of letters by women, with rules and instructions
given in Latin.85 Furthermore, Christine de Pizan’s The Treasure of the City of
Ladies included, ‘an example of the sort of letter the wise lady may send to
her mistress’.86 During the sixteenth century too early English letter-writing
manuals by Fulwood, Day and Breton all furnished exemplary materials
for use by women.87 The 1595 edition of Day’s English Secretorie outlined
‘a letter remuneratory from a Gentlewoman of good sort to a nobleman her
kinsman’.88 Such examples suggest that letter-writing skills were a feature
of an informal female curriculum outside of male-dominated educational
institutions.
How far early modern letters in practice adhered to epistolary formulae
is a complex issue, one nuanced by considerations of social status, purpose
and genre, and on which scholars tend to disagree.89 The more formal the
occasion of writing, the more closely letters followed templates of protocol,
since not to do so would be considered inappropriate, a social affront. Thus,
royal letters, letters of petition and recommendation, condolence letters and
legal correspondence and other sub-genres of officialdom, rigidly conform to
the rules of rhetoric in terms of uniform structure and content. The formality
of occasion – a moment of social anxiety in writing – as well as the need for
legal exactitude both encouraged the adoption of recognised letter-writing
conventions. Peter Mack has persuasively shown the way in which business
forms of correspondence and letters of condolence followed vernacular letter-
manuals, by borrowing topics and commonplace arguments. ‘By following
well established norms’ he argues, such letters ‘conveyed a sense of order and
reassurance. Originality in letters of this type would be a sign of anxiety, of
uncertain or inappropriate sentiments on the part of the writer’.90
The letter of petition was a distinct genre where letter-writers closely fol-
lowed the precepts outlined by writers such as Angel Day. Day’s instructions
for organisation of letters of petition were similar to those of Erasmus. The
request, he argued, should begin with praise for the addressee in order to
gain the ‘good will, fauor, or good liking of him to whom we write’; then the
writer should stress his or her ‘acquaintance with the party, his estate credit,
or support’, as a reason for granting the request. Next, the request should be
‘just, lawful, and honest’, and within the power of the addressee to perform.
Fifthly, the letter-writer should explain the ‘order or meanes’ whereby the
request may be carried out, before expressing ‘gratitude and remuneration’
for the favour and willingness of ‘thankeful acknowledgement or requitall
of the same.’91 The stylised nature of this form of business correspondence
emerges in Roderick Lyall’s examination of Scottish letters of petition con-
tained in a collection of nearly 300 letters to Mary of Loraine.92 Recent work
on women’s letters of petition and recommendation has shown that they
most closely adhere to the formalities of Renaissance letters outlined in epis-
tolographies in terms of structure and argument.93 In an important article
Lynne Magnusson identifies two different recurring linguistic strategies or
‘social scripts’ that were used in Elizabethan female suitors’ letters, those of
‘humility and entreaty’ and ‘supposal and assurance’. Adapting Angel Day’s
prescriptions for petitioning letters in his English Secretorie, Magnusson dem-
onstrates that letters of humility and entreaty (‘trouble-making’) are marked
by tropes of deference and self-deprecation, while letters of supposal and
assurance (‘trouble-taking’ letters) are characterised by authority, confidence
and assertions of social expectations. While these scripts are often highly
formulaic and conventional, it is in the choice of script – whether bold or
timid – that one may discern elements of female individuality. In this sense,
there is a correlation between a woman’s language and her self-perception of
her power.94 It is the appropriation, selection and deviation of conventional
rhetorical forms that lends formal letters a degree of individuality.
There exists then a division between formal epistolary modes and what
might loosely (and rather inadequately) be termed ‘everyday’ correspond-
ence. Indeed, Mack argues that ‘practical letters devoted to the conduct
of business tend to convey expected content in a standard form’ whereas
‘renaissance letters of friendship are characterised by considerable freedom
in structure and content’.95 Alan Stewart goes even further arguing that
‘“real” or extant early modern letters are perversely ignorant of anything
approaching the epistolary theory that was supposed to dictate them’.96 On
the whole, surviving letters are divorced from Ciceronian, Erasmian or even
modern models of the ‘personal’ letter, but rather exhibit traits of more
pragmatic, business-related epistolary forms.97 Newsletters, letters contain-
ing instructions and familiar letters to family and friends were much less
restricted by epistolary prescriptions, and display greater freedom in terms
of subject-matter and organisation of the body of the letter than is found
in petitionary epistles. Letters of this nature were rather protean in form,

wide-ranging and diverse in the topics they discussed, with matters set down
as they occurred to the writer, and postscripts often added later for supple-
mentary materials. The newsletters that John Chamberlain wrote between
1597 and 1626 betray a rather haphazard tumbling of events and happen-
ings; while the semi-professional newsletters that digested continental and
domestic news for the countess of Shrewsbury during the second half of
the sixteenth century were organised by country and topic into distinct
paragraphs.98
A letter of instruction from Lady Elizabeth Cavendish to her bailiff Francis
Whitfield in November 1552 was written almost as a list, discussing the
progress of building at Chatsworth, provisioning and repairs. The letter
instructs Whitfield to look well to all things at Chatsworth until her aunt
Marcella Linacre arrives: to cause Bronshawe to manage things at Pentrich
Wood; to stock up with charcoal, wood and beer; to ensure that the floor
in her bedchamber is made even, and to mend the glass in the windows; to
provide for her sister Jane’s needs; to pay her midwife and her sister’s nurse;
to inform another servant James Crompe that she received the £5 he sent
her. The letter also upbraids Whitfield charging him with a lack of honesty
and discretion in his dealings with her sister, adding that she would not
wish a stranger in her house to be used in such a manner.99 Robert Sidney’s
letters to his wife Barbara were likewise fluid in form and content, again
often resembling a series of points or lists. A letter written from the court
at Windsor in August 1593 and that accompanied parcels, announced that
he was going to Wilton where he was afraid he would find his sister ill, that
Rowland White had sent him word that she had an ague. He continued
that he expected to go to court at the end of the week or the beginning
of the next; that the Queen travels to Sunninghill; that the countess of
Huntingdon has asked after her and the children; that he sent to John Olds
about a house, but has had no word; his business proceeds slowly; and that
the earl of Essex keeps to his bed after a fall.100 This humdrum relaying
of news and events is typical of letters of this nature. Nonetheless several
scholars have noted that those schooled in classical rhetoric found it helpful
‘in selecting arguments and determining the shape of the letter’, especially
when dispensing moral advice, making requests or apologies.101 Gemma
Allen has highlighted the use of sententiae in letters of counsel from the
highly-educated Cooke sisters, while Lynne Magnusson notes the effects
of Ciceronian models of letter-writing on the letters of the apprentice John
Herrick and his cousin Tobias Herrick, a grammar school boy and Cambridge
undergraduate.102
Where early modern letters most closely adhere to the epistolary norms
outlined in letter-writing manuals, however, is in the use of conventional
opening and closing modes of address, and in the rendering of forms of
salutation, subscription and superscription. Highly conventional in form,
the superscription provided details of the recipient (often including name

and title) and sometimes the location of where the letter was to be delivered.
Forms of address were extensively outlined in printed letter-writing guides,
and were intended to encode the relative difference in social status between
sender and recipient. Fulwood in his Enemie of Idlenesse wrote that:
the Superscription, which. must be vpon the back syde, the letter being
closed, sealed, and packed vp after the finest fashion, whereupon must be
written his name to whome the letters shold be addressed, & his dwelling
place (if it be not notoriously knowne) placing therwith the name of his
dignitie, Lordship, Office, Nobilitie, Science, or Parentage. And if we write
moe than one, the cheifest and permanent dignities must be written
first, then the consangunitie: and afterwards the mutable dignitie, as for
example, to my Lord of such a place, my cousin, Maister of the Requestes
of our soueraigne Lord the King.103
Both Day and Fleming provided examples of proper superscriptions suitable

for personages of differing social ranks. In general terms sixteenth- and early-
seventeenth-century letters tended to follow fairly standardised opening
and closing formulae and modes of address that adhered to distinct social
hierarchies: ‘My good lord’, ‘Sir’, or ‘Madam’ when writing to social superi-
ors, with surnames often employed for servants or social subordinates. The
most marked change in epistolary modes of address that took place over the
period can be observed in letters between family members, especially those
between husbands and wives. While the majority of wives’ letters for the
sixteenth century utilised more formal modes of address – ‘My Lord’, ‘Good
husband’, ‘Mr Thynne’ – there were throughout examples of more relaxed
and intimate forms. In the 1530s Honor Lisle addressed her husband as
‘mine own sweetheart’, ‘mine own sweet heart root’ and ‘good mine own’;
Dorothy Gawdy wrote to her husband as ‘sweet Bas’, and in 1640 Lady
Unton Dering addressed her husband, the Kentish politician Sir Edward
Dering as ‘My Dearest Heart’.104 By the early-seventeenth century the more
informal modes of address, terms of endearment, pet-names and shortened
forms of Christian names that emerged during the sixteenth century were
employed by women with much greater regularity.105 Husbands’ letters for
the same period by contrast reflect greater levels of informality and inti-
macy in opening modes. Indeed analysis of marital correspondence for the
period 1540 to 1603 reveals that some 70 per cent of husbands employed
pet-names, terms of endearment or wives’ Christian names compared with
17 per cent of wives.106 Lord Lisle addressed his wife as ‘Sweetheart’ and ‘My
very heart root’; Edward Allen wrote to his wife as ‘my good sweett harte and
loving mouse’; while the soldier Sir Thomas Baskerville addressed his wife as
‘swete mall’, ‘best beloved’, and ‘dearest frend’.107 For the early-seventeenth
century, Thomas Knyvett wrote to his wife as ‘My deare harte’ and ‘sweete
harte’; and Edward Dering addressed his wife as ‘Deare Jewell’, ‘My dear-
est joy’ and ‘my true love’.108 The degree to which epistolary rules scripted
modes of address employed between husbands and wives varied over time,
and was inflected by various factors, including social status, gender, person-
ality and circumstance. In broad terms, spousal modes of address certainly
softened over the course of the period. Husbands were much more likely
than women to employ affectionate and informal forms, which is partly
explained by higher levels of male literacy, great linguistic facility and that
men were unencumbered by the gendered behavioural codes restricting
wifely behaviour.
Thus, while letter-writing in its classical form was instilled in grammar
school boys and undergraduates, it appears to have had little applicability
outside of the schoolroom and universities, with the exception of formal
genres of letters, such as the letter of petition, recommendation or con-
dolence, where deviation from established protocols would be impolitic
or impolite. Likewise, the distillation of these espistolary theories into
vernacular English letter-writing manuals of the sixteenth century had lit-
tle practical impact on the writing of ‘everyday’ correspondence, though a
smattering of classical learning can be discerned in various correspondences.
It is, however, in the opening and closural modes, salutations, subscriptions
and superscriptions that early modern letters generally tended to follow pre-
scribed protocols, as indeed they still do! While deviations from these norms
might express personality, affect or circumstances, they could also signify
ignorance and lack of experience as a letter-writer. In practice, therefore, the
early modern letter was a relatively flexible and open genre capable of adapt-
ing to an increasingly wide range of social situations, purposes and subject
matters. The range of extant early modern letters is thus exceedingly diverse
in nature and format. Rather than conforming to strict epistolary codes
or a dominant culture of letter-writing, sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-
century correspondence was marked by a relaxed un-fixedness, an unstruc-
tured spontaneity and by a plurality of cultures of letter-writing.
Authorship, composition and secretaries
Letter-writing became for many an increasingly personal activity during the

early modern period. As literacy levels rose an expanding range of social
groups, including women and men lower down the social scale, seized
opportunities to write letters, and broadening numbers of social situations
demanded that letters be personally written.109 Yet throughout the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries a significant proportion of correspondence was
scribally produced, distanced from personal writing technologies. Letters
were dictated to amanuenses; written from notes by secretaries; styled on
form letters, templates or exemplars; passed to family members and friends
for comments and amendments; they were drafted and reworked by legal
counsel and government officials. This section, therefore, examines the

varied textual methods by which letters were constructed, in order to eluci-
date the complex, often collaborative as well as solitary nature of the letter-
writing process. Central here are the social conventions of letter-writing that
dictated when to write oneself and when to delegate the task to a secretary.
Furthermore, letters survive in different forms other than an autograph
‘original’ dispatched to an addressee. Drafts were later reworked; secretarial
copies kept as records, as separates or in formal letter-books; neat copies
were produced for presentation; and transcripts made for wider circulation
in manuscript (Chapter 7). In some cases, multiple texts of a stem letter sur-
vive, each situated within a specific context, produced for a separate purpose
and working in a different way. These kinds of textual and scribal variations
which can be uncovered through palaeographical analysis and codicology
generate significant meaning, and thus challenge scholarly notions of letters
as single texts, and personal correspondence as identified with the private
and the singular.
Throughout the early modern period various parties might be involved
in the process of composing correspondence, in addition to the person in
whose name the letter was sent: secretaries, scribes, scriveners and clerks.
Amanuenses of varying kinds were also involved informally in the letter-
writing process. Husbands wrote letters on behalf of wives; children penned
letters on behalf of parents, and epistolary advice could be sought from
family, friends and neighbours.110 Thus, the Elizabethan recusant Thomas
Tresham drafted a letter for his wife Muriel to the countess of Worcester;
while Elizabeth, countess of Shrewsbury informed Lord Burghley, ‘I am
inforced to vse the hand of my sonn William Cavendysshe, not being able
to wryte so much for feare of bringing great payne to my hed’.111 Alongside
these ad hoc arrangements, semi-professional letter-writers or scriveners
were widely available.112 In October 1538, Thomas Theobald enclosed in a
letter to Thomas Cromwell Italian verses ‘which were agenste the pope &
cardynalls’ that had been copied by a scrivener.113 In March 1600, one
Dennis McCartye requested Thomas Watkins, a scrivener, to frame a petition
to Sir Robert Cecil to ‘enforme’ him ‘of his Imprisonmente vppon an accion
of batterye’; and in Charles I’s reign, Thomas Willis, a Westminster-based
scrivener was instructed to draw a petition ‘in the name of the poulters
of London’ directed to the Privy Council’.114 During the mid-seventeenth-
century, the Yorkshire Yeoman Adam Eyre and the Lancashire apprentice
shopkeeper Roger Lowe both regularly performed letter-writing functions for
friends and neighbours.115 While family, friends, neighbours and household
servants might pen correspondence as a favour or duty, scriveners would
have charged different rates depending on circumstances of production.
Peter Beal estimates that manuscripts produced by the early-seventeenth-
century professional scrivener dubbed by him the ‘Feathery scribe’ cost
between 3/4d to 1 1/2d a page, while H.R. Woudhuysen cites costs varying
from 1 1/2d to 5d per page.116 At roughly a penny or two a page (with a folio
side being the most common length for letters) recourse to professional or
semi-professional penmen while not entirely prohibitive, was probably for
most below the social elites an occasional extraordinary expenses for formal
or special missives.
The cost of retaining a private or personal secretary on the other hand was
much more expensive, since secretaries received salaries or retainers for their
services. In the 1530, Lord Lisle’s secretaries John Husee and Peter Beckwith
drew the daily personal retinue wage of 8d which was compounded at £6
13s 4d; Henry Cuffe, former Regius Chair of Greek at Oxford, was paid 40
pounds per annum by the earl of Essex to enter his service as a secretary, and
John Coke was paid 30 pounds to leave Cambridge to work for Fulke Greville,
though both men must have been at the top of the scale in Elizabethan
England.117 In addition to retainers of this nature, secretaries received other
payments, including allowances for ‘paper, ink and parchments’ and reim-
bursements for rewards to messengers. The earl of Leicester’s personal secre-
tary regularly received payments in the 1580s reimbursing him for rewards
to messengers, as well as purquisites pertaining to his office: the chamber-
lain of Bristol recorded payment in March 1577 of 30s to ‘Mr Atye, my Lord
of Leicester’s secretary’ to forward a suit for the city.118 Gratuities of this
nature were commonplace for secretaries well-placed to influence their mas-
ters in matters of patronage; and as Burghley’s patronage secretary Michael
Hickes certainly benefited in this manner.119 In the case of the secretaries
of Henry Percy, ninth earl of Northumberland, Francis Wycliff received a
yearly wage of 10 pounds in 1599 and Hugh Potter, secretary for the years
1627–32, was made an annual allowance of 10 pounds 10 shillings; both
were involved in legal suits, and received a retaining fee as well as separate
fees for individual cases.120 Costs of retaining personal secretaries prohibited
their widespread use below the ranks of the elite and government circles, but
access to scriveners and literate family and other social contacts suggest the
wide availability of secondary assistance in letter-writing.
Secretaries were widely employed for letter-writing throughout the early
modern period in the same way that they are today, for business and formal
missives, for procedural and technical writing. Their employment might
also be demanded by the old age, ill-health or incapacity of the would-be
letter-writer. In the medieval world, recourse to a secretary or scribe for pur-
poses of letter-writing was purely conventional. Indeed, Giles Constable has
argued that almost all late medieval letters were dictated, although this may
have been more pronounced among women than men.121 The task of writ-
ing was viewed as routine and mundane, disconnected from the intellectual
effort of composition and authorship. This cultural practice continued in
various forms into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, where col-
laborative models of authorship were perfectly normal.122 Secretaries were
employed by monarchs to draft their formal correspondence; government
officials were assisted by bureaucracies and secretariats; men and women

of the nobility and gentry were served by personal secretaries; and mer-
chants appointed clerks for various responsibilities.123 Household lists and
accounts often record secretaries, but normally these are anonymous figures
only identified by their handwriting. The household of Anne Clifford and
the Earl of Dorset contained a secretary, Mr Edwards, who is listed in the
Catalogue of the Knole Household (1613–24) along with a scrivener, one
Edward Lane.124 John Donne acted as secretary for Sir Robert and Lady Anne
Drury between 1611 and 1612, and was more famously Egerton’s secretary,
while John Holles from 1617 advised and drafted letters for among others
Elizabeth, Lady Hatton, the estranged wife of Sir Edward Coke.125 During
the early modern period, the role of a secretary was ordinarily assumed by
men, in contrast to modern day practice. However, several examples survive
of women acting in secretarial capacities.126 Elizabeth Dallison, for example,
informed her cousin Sir Henry Oxinden, ‘I am my mothers scribe’.127
Palaeographical analysis of a body of correspondence for particular indi-
viduals suggests that personal secretaries were not always the norm, but
rather that many employed various amanuenses over a period of time in
their letter-writing. For the late-fifteenth century, Agnes Paston’s letters
were written in eight different hands, while those of Margaret Paston fea-
ture 29 hands.128 During the 1530s in Calais, Lord Lisle used at least five
different scribes for his correspondence, while three different scribal hands
are detected in his wife, Lady Lisle’s correspondence.129 For the Elizabethan
period, Alison Wiggins has identified at least 21 different hands across the
76 letters sent from Bess of Hardwick; and the five scribal letters that Joan
Thynne sent to her son Thomas between 1607 and 1611 were in four dif-
ferent hands.130 Work on medieval scribes and women’s correspondence
for later periods is generally far more advanced than for the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries in general. The role of multiple scribes across large
corpora of correspondence is an area that requires significant further study.
Nonetheless, the current state of research undercuts the notion of single,
identifiable secretaries associated with a given letter-writer. It suggests
within larger households there were a range of people who might be used
for writing. This may have been accentuated in the case of married women,
who were less likely to have access to their own personal secretaries within
the household.
The various roles of the secretary – archival, organisational and
compositional – and their relationship to letter-writing are discussed in
manuals of the period. One of the earliest manuals published containing
theoretical discussion of the role of the secretary was Francesco Sansovino’s
letter-writing treatise, Del secretario (Venice, 1564), later expanded as Il sec-
retario (Rome, 1589) by Giulio Cesare Capaccio, which stressed the impor-
tance of faithfulness and secrecy in any secretary serving the Prince.131 In
1592, two tracts were produced in manuscript by former private secretaries
of Sir Francis Walsingham: Nicholas Faunt’s ‘Discourse touchinge the Office

of principall Secretarie of Estate’, and Robert Beale’s ‘Instructions for a
Principall Secretarie’ ostensibly produced for Edward Wotton prospective
Secretary of State.132 Additional manuscript treatises that deal with secre-
tarial duties include John Herbert’s short ‘Tytles of matters whereof I am
charged to haue regard as a Counsellor and Secretary’ (1600) and Robert
Cecil’s ‘The State and Dignitie of a Secretarie of State’, which was later pub-
lished in 1642.133 The first printed and fullest English work to theorise about
the role of a secretary, however, was Angel Day’s English Secretorie, which in
the second part of the 1595 edition outlines ‘the partes, place and Office’ of
a secretary (Figure 3.3). Principal among the ideal secretary’s skills, accord-
ing to Day, was ‘the vse and exercise of the Pen, the Wit and Inuention’:
To the execution of this office, it is requisite the Secretorie be for the perfec-
tion of his hand, in the variety and neat deliuery of his letters in writing,
singularly to bee commended, that he haue with himselfe also therein a
very ready vse, quicke, and speedy conueyance for dispatch, that warily
hee giue heed to obserue the Order, Method and Forme to him from his
Lord or master deliuered: forasmuch as in discharge hereof he is vtterly
to relinquish any affectation to his own doings, or leaning herein to any
priuat iudgment or fantasie. His pen in this action is not his owne, but
anothers, and for this cause the matters to him committed, are to depend
vpon the humor of his commanded, and vpon none others.134
According to Day the secretary was a skilled penman capable of writing vari-
ous hands, who was well-versed in epistolary techniques, and who subordi-
nated his own judgement, ventriloquising his master’s (or mistress’s) voice.
Above all, he was a trusted servant, ‘a keeper and conseruer of secrets’ who
should act with ‘Honestie, troth, and Fidelitie’.135 Faunt likewise advised
‘secrecie and faithfulnes’ as the chief characteristics of a secretary: ‘of neces-
sitie the [Principal] Secre[tary] must vse one as his owne penne, his mouth,
his eye, his eare, and keeper of his most secrett Cabinett’.136 In his manu-
script ‘Some Rules and Orders for the Government of the House of an Earl’,
the poet and writer Richard Brathwaite (1577/8–1673) emphasised that a
secretary should not blab ‘abrade that which he should keepe secret and
vnrevealed’.137 The direct connection between the figure of the secretary
and the art of letter-writing is implicit in the titles of later seventeenth-
century printed letter-writing manuals, including Thomas Gainsford’s The
Secretaries Stvdie (1616), John Massinger’s 1640 translation of Jean Puget de
la Serre’s The Secretary in Fashion and John Hill’s The Young Secretary’s Guide
(1687). Visually too secretaries were associated with letters. The frontispiece
of Hill’s manual depicts a secretary sitting with his master; while engravings
in the 1654, 1668, 1673 and 1683 editions of Massinger’s translation of de
la Serre’s book show a secretary writing letters.
Figure 3.3 ‘Of the parts, place, and Office of a Secretorie’ in Angel Day, The English
Secretorie (1592), book 2, p.108 [C 131 de 17 (2)]. Reproduced by permission of The
British Library, London.
While Day was at pains to outline the functions of the secretary and
‘to frame him both in Person, birth, Education, Qualitie, Disposition,
Conuersation, and Abilitie’, he devoted little space to the day-to-day work-
ings of the secretary. By contrast, Nicholas Faunt describes in detail the
inner workings of the secretariat serving an Elizabethan Secretary of State.
Beyond the principal servant, ‘in whome the greatest trust is to bee reposed,
it shalbe also co[n]venient to bee prouided of another for the dispatch of
ordinarie matters, and cheifly for Continuall attendant in the Chamber
where the papers are . . . This servaunt besides his Charge of orderinge the
papers . . . may alsoe bee a remembrancer of all such matters as are of most
necessarie dispatch’. In addition to ordering and sorting papers, maintain-
ing a memorial book to record letters received and dispatched, this secretary
made ‘answere to all priuate home Lettres’. While the senior secretary was
chiefly charged with ‘foreign matters’, the second secretary attended to
matters of intelligence, cipher and ‘secrett advertisementes’.138 Faunt and
Robert Beale both advised a small number of trusted secretaries to ensure
security.139 This model of male intimacy between secretary and master has
been most forcefully elucidated by Alan Stewart, a relationship transacted
on shared secret knowledge which might be rendered potentially problem-
atic by the proprieties of gender relations in instances where a male servant
wrote for a mistress.140 The secretary thus might acquire intimate knowledge
of his or her employer’s business, so much so that Henry Percy, ninth earl
of Northumberland warned his son of men who sought such employment:
‘very witty they are, but poore withall, and want noe ambition . . . that by
yow they may clime’.141 Intimacy and access brought power and influence
which in turn meant the position of secretary was open to abuse. There
were, therefore, matters for which the services of a secretary were dispensed
with. Furthermore, the lack of a trusty secretary was often employed as an
excuse for not writing. Thus, Anne Bassett informed her mother ‘I according
to my duty have not written unto you since my coming into England. For .
. . I know not whom I may trust to open my mind unto’.142
In working practice, secretariats often included a range of secretaries, some
of whom specialised in key areas, while others performed general and comple-
mentary tasks. Between 1580 and 1598, Burghley was served by five secretar-
ies; while the earl of Essex by late 1595 had four secretaries working for him
as he ratcheted up his campaign to become Secretary of State.143 While the
roles of various secretaries can be sketched, it is harder to uncover the precise
relationship between secretaries and the letters on which they collaborated.
Letters might be dictated, either verbatim or partially, leaving the scribe to
provide opening and closing modes of address; they might be written from
notes, penned from oral instructions or derived from epistolary models and
templates; their invention might also be entirely ghosted by a secretary.144 Use
of pro-forma letters was standard. A undated draft letter ostensibly penned by
Lord Burghley to the University of Cambridge on behalf of his servant John
Gerard to be a fit person to plant the gardens was endorsed, ‘John Gerard.
A l[ett]re of his owne drawing for ye L[ord] Tre[a]s[urer’s] to signe to ye vniver-
sity of cambridg for planting of gardens’ (Figure 3.4).145 Ordinarily, once
penned secretarial drafts were subsequently perused, amended and refined by
signatories before they were then fair copied for despatch; large numbers of
such drafts survive bearing interlinear revisions and deletions. On occasion,
Henry VIII, a monarch well-known for his less than enthusiastic attitude to
paperwork, corrected drafts of official correspondence. An early version of a
letter to the earls of Angus, Cassillis and Glencairn in 1543, written out with
large gaps between the lines, was covered with corrections in the King’s hand
(Figure 3.5).146 A scribal draft of a letter of condolence from Elizabeth I to Lord
and Lady Norris on the death of their sons Thomas and Henry in Ireland in
August 1599 survives with corrections in the queen’s own hand.147 A further
notable exception is a letter penned by Henry Cuffe for the earl of Essex,
which, as Alan Stewart has shown, illustrates something of the potential
intricacies of collaborative letter-writing. Cuffe in a letter to a fellow secretary
Edward Reynoldes (whom he asked to assist in redrafting) described in great
detail the layered nature of composition, claiming that he had,
penned very truly according to his Lordships Large enstructions, by which

besides my owne knowledge he enformed me of sundry particulers of
moment in the processe therof. And after I had penned it as plainely
as I might alteringe little or nothinge of his owne drawght, I caused his
Lordship to peruse it on[c]e againe and to adde extremam manum, which
he hathe donne, as you may perceve by the enterlyneinge.
The letter in question was an account of Essex’s 1596 Cadiz expedition,

which Cuffe was tasked to write, as part of Essex’s propaganda campaign
in the aftermath of this expedition. This had involved him physically
‘penning’ the letter according to Essex’s instructions, adding further details
himself, before presenting it to the earl for his perusal and to add the finish-
ing touches, which he did interlinearly on the face of Cuffe’s text. A further
layer of complexity is added by the fact that Cuffe and Essex’s authorial
identities were to be erased from the letter; a ‘fair transcript’ was thus to be
made by a third party before it was delivered to a ‘good printer . . . to publish
it’.148 Precisely who ‘composed’ the letter is hard to say, since the hands of
a host of individuals are associated with it. What it illustrates though is the
sophistication of manuscript production during the early modern period,
the often collaborative and layered nature of epistolary composition.
Recent studies of the involvement of secretaries in the composition
of early modern correspondence have thus further complicated how we
should conceptualise and understand scribally produced letters. What has
emerged from immensely detailed studies of the correspondence of Edmund
Spenser (himself secretary to Lord Deputy of Ireland Arthur Grey) and Bess
Figure 3.4 The form of a recommendation to be signed by William Cecil, Lord
Burghley, n.d.: BL, Lansdowne MS, 107, fol.155. Reproduced by permission of The
British Library, London.
82
Figure 3.5 Draft letter from Henry VIII to earls of Angus, Cassillis and Glencairn, 19
October 1543: BL, Add. MS 32652, fol.228r. Reproduced by permission of The British
Library, London.
of Hardwick (a woman served by various scribes and secretaries throughout

her lifetime, including by professional secretariats at Sheffield Castle, c.1567
to 1582 and at Hardwick Hall, c.1601 to 1604) is the diverse complexity
and plurality of secretarial practices. Where multiple secretaries dealt with
a person’s correspondence, each was assigned particular duties, delegated
according to skill and hierarchy. Individuals might be responsible for differ-
ent elements of the letter (the main body, signature, the superscription and
address, and endorsements), although obviously this varied depending on
attendance and availability. Analysis by Christopher Burlinson and Andrew
Zurcher of the letters with which Spenser was involved as part of Lord Grey’s
Dublin secretariat between 1580 and 1582, reveals an immensely complex
secretarial environment, which was exacerbated by issues of security in
Ireland at the time. As the key secretary in Grey’s Dublin bureaucracy,
Spenser penned letters on behalf of others, often reviewing letters penned
for Grey by another secretary; he added postscripts and superscriptions;
composed as well as copied letters for his master; and addressed letters writ-
ten by other secretaries, only one example existing of a letter he wrote that
was addressed by another secretary. Despite the centrality of Spenser’s role,
it has convincingly been shown that Spenser did not draft diplomatic letters
that survive in Grey’s own hand; nor did he achieve the level of secretarial
intimacy for which previous generations of scholars have argued.149 The
evidence of Spenser’s secretarial correspondence duties, however, reveal a
distinct hierarchy of secretaries, each delegated to perform different epis-
tolary functions. Similarly the scribal letters of Bess of Hardwick produced
by the Hardwick secretariat between circa 1601 and 1604 reveal a variety of
hands and inks, highlighting the ways in which individual secretaries were
responsible for different aspects of a letter.150 In this way, palaeographical
analysis of different hands and changes in ink reveal the degree to which
letter-writing emerges as a layered and collaborative multi-stage process,
which might involve drafting, the making of a fair copy, encryption, sub-
scription, the appending of a signature or autograph postscript, and the
application of a superscription before the final dispatch. Study of the scribal
characteristics of a corpus of letters thus provides a more rounded picture of
epistolary authorship, the degree of secretarial input and varying levels of
control that signatories might enjoy.
The practical side of letter-writing was thus set down in printed manuals
of the period. Epistolographies of varying sorts outlined the conventions,
rules and methods of letter-writing, providing models for emulation tailored
to a wide range of social situations. How far templates scripted social com-
munications depended on considerations of genre and circumstance. Formal
modes and occasions of letter-writing were more likely to follow standard
forms than ‘everyday’ correspondence, newsletters or familial letters, which

exhibit greater degrees of flexibility in terms of structure and subject matter.
Standard opening and closing phrases, salutations, greetings, subscriptions
and superscriptions most notably adhere to convention, though over the
course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there was a marked shift
towards the employment of warmer, more informal modes of address among
husbands and wives, and other family members. While book-learning was
a key mode of dissemination, knowledge was also gleaned through formal
tuition, informal methods of teaching and contact with the form. Classical
Latin epistolary instruction was a pedagogical tool at grammar school and
university level, though early modern pedagogues also stressed the impor-
tance of vernacular correspondence and utility. Parents encouraged sons
and daughters to practise writing letters, informally critiquing their efforts
in order that they might hone and improve their epistolary skills. Letter-
writing after all was a practical skill and the ability to write oneself had
pragmatic benefits outside of the schoolroom, college and household. While
use of personal writing technologies increased over the period, collaborative
epistolary practices flourished throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. Access to scriveners or other literates allowed those unable to write
to communicate by letter. Finally, the process of composition itself was often
layered, involving differing levels of input by secretaries and amanuenses to
draft, refine, copy, address and dispatch correspondence. This in turn fur-
ther complicates our understanding of the status of individual manuscript
letters, which survive as ‘original’ or sent letters, as drafts and as copies of
different kinds, each of which might betray the hallmarks of collaboration.
How we interpret autograph and scribal letters, and the meanings attached
to handwriting, form a crucial component of the analysis of the materiality
and social signs of letters explored in the next chapter.
4
Interpreting Materiality and
Social Signs
While the previous two chapters were concerned with materials, tools and
technologies of letter-writing, this chapter concentrates on investigating the
meanings attached to distinct physical characteristics and attributes of let-
ters, paying particular attention to the social signs, codes and cues inscribed
materially within the form. Several scholars including A.R. Braunmuller and
Jonathan Gibson among others have drawn attention to the material mean-
ings of early modern English letters, especially as they relate to the problems
of editing. Building on this initial work the present chapter, which is based
on the examination of well over 10,000 manuscript letters, offers a detailed
examination of the social significance of a complex range of physical aspects
of early modern correspondence.1 It considers a broad cross-section of letter-
writers from elite and non-elite backgrounds, mercantile and professional
groups, men as well as women, and by writers of different generations, chil-
dren as well as adults. In addition it analyses varying types or categories of
letters, including formal petitions, official correspondence, love letters, let-
ters of condolence, familiar or private letters. It thus broadly examines how
the physical forms of the English letter changed over the period, considering
the impact of social status and gender and codes of deference and humility,
as well as the form, function and material conditions of writing. What, for
example, was the significance of different sizes and qualities of paper, the
quality of ink, the type of handwriting used and whether a letter was scribal
or autograph? How should one interpret the physical layout of the page,
the use of blank space and margins, the placement and form of signatures,
and dating practices? What was the significance of the ways in which let-
ters were folded, sealed and fastened, and how were superscriptions and
endorsements socially inflected? How far did epistolary practice match the
precept outlined in Renaissance letter-writing manuals? Methodologically
then, the chapter is more concerned with the kinds of analyses traditionally
associated with codicology, palaeography, sigillography and diplomatics,
than with what might be termed social materiality, that is the social and
cultural practices of letter-writing and the contexts in which letters were
85
composed, delivered, read and preserved, though the two areas of investiga-
tion are closely interrelated. The aim throughout is not to privilege material
readings of early modern letters, but instead to argue that analysis of physi-
cal characteristics must reside alongside and complement literary, stylistic,
linguistic, historical and more recent gender-based approaches to letters in
order to understand them more fully.
Handwriting
The politics of handwriting was fundamental to understanding meaning

in early modern letter-writing, and directly related to the scribal status of a
letter. Whether a letter was scribal (in other words written by a secretary) or
autograph (penned in a letter-writer’s own hand) conveyed a distinct mes-
sage, as did the type of script used or the nature of an individual’s hand.2
Individuals commonly delegated the task of correspondence to secretaries,
as indeed still remains the case today. Use of an amanuensis may be a sign
of illiteracy, as in the case of professional scriveners employed by the unlet-
tered to write letters. Nonetheless, the engagement of a secretary might be
explained by ill-health, old-age, personal habit and inclination, purpose
and circumstance of writing and type of letter.3 Significant meaning was
also attached to the status of autograph and scribal letters. Correspondence
penned in a writer’s own hand was deemed more intimate than that written
in the hand of a third party. Erasmus expressed the warmth felt on receiv-
ing personally written letters from friends or scholars: ‘We feel as if we were
listening to them and seeing them face to face’.4 Meanwhile, the Spanish
humanist Juan Luis Vives bemoaned those aristocrats who equated nobility
with ignorance ‘of the art of writing’.5 Seth Lerer has noted the rarity of
occasions on which Henry VIII personally wrote to other men, arguing that
his love letters to Anne Boleyn represent the most sustained correspond-
ence penned in his own hand, which enhances their emotive quality.6
Interestingly, Edward Lord Zouche, while he served as Deputy Governor of
Guernsey between 1600 and 1601, wrote outgoing correspondence in his
own large flourishing italic hand, but had a clerk copy the letters into a
letter-book for his own records.7 A division existed here between an outward
display of social courtesy and the drudgery of an administrative task. As lit-
eracy levels rose and letter-writing skills became more widely dispersed there
was a discernible cultural shift in attitudes towards personally written cor-
respondence; an increasing expectation that letters among family, friends,
confidantes and associates dispense with clerkly assistance. Failure to cor-
respond in one’s own hand was accompanied by lavish apologies. Husbands
and wives conducted private exchanges by letter; not to do so if ability
permitted was a sign that something was amiss. Children were extolled to
practise their epistolary skills, while confidential matters were consigned
to paper divorced from secretarial gaze. Where scribes were utilised for the
Interpreting Materiality and Social Signs 87
main body of a letter, more personal sentiments or delicate matters were

conveyed in autograph additions. In 1596 William, earl of Bath appended
an autograph postscript to a secretarial letter to his cousin Edward Seymour
concerning the repair of bands of soldiers to Plymouth, in which he cau-
tioned him about ‘mislyke and murmure’ in the county.8 Personal hand-
writing also carried with it the authority of the writer, testimony of their
assurance and bond. Thus, the Staffordshire gentleman Walter Bagot assured
his sister Margaret Trew in 1619 that his letters written with his ‘owne hand
and sealed with’ his ‘owne seale’ would bind him to pay the £200 she was
owed.9 Over the course of the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centu-
ries, writers carved out for themselves private epistolary spaces for a range of
uses, political, diplomatic and business-related; personal, creative and inti-
mate; spiritual and confessional. The act of writing oneself, although often
practical, conveyed emotion, politeness and respect. An autograph hand,
therefore, might be interpreted as a marker of affect, duty and obligation, or
represent a desire for secrecy.10
Scribal letters on the other hand represent a more formal mode of writ-
ing, connected to government, ambassadorial, legal and business spheres,
and signify a different meaning from autographs. Secretaries drafted, com-
posed and copied routine administrative letters.11 Literary figures such as
Edmund Spenser, John Donne and John Dryden were regularly employed
in a secretarial capacity.12 Professional penmen were also employed for
technical expertise, as in the case of Latin secretaries (or Secretaries for
Foreign Tongues) where linguistic proficiency was required.13 Both Roger
Ascham and John Milton served in these capacities.14 Letters of petition and
other formulaic missives which follow prescribed conventions or required
specialist knowledge, therefore, tended to be scribal. Occasion could also
demand that a letter-writer sit down with a scribe. Indeed, letters to the
monarch tended to be secretarial, because to write oneself was considered
over-familiar, a social faux pas. The formality of writing to the King or Queen
was itself a performance of ritual politeness, invested with epistolary proto-
cols – secretaries would have been well-trained in codes of politeness. Where
letters to royal personages are in fact autographic this normally indicates
particular favour and intimacy, as with letters from the earl of Leicester and
countess of Shrewsbury to Elizabeth I, rather than ignorance.15 How far this
extended to occasions where subordinates wrote to social superiors below
the ranks of royalty is uncertain, and raises a series of questions relating to
the correct usage of handwriting in correspondence. Further research needs
to be undertaken in this area; nevertheless preliminary investigations indi-
cate that a complex matrix of social relations were at work. While one might
write to a ‘friend’ or equal in one’s own hand, it was more usual to employ
a secretary for letters to social inferiors. Thus, Mary Herbert, countess of
Pembroke wrote herself to the earls of Leicester and Essex (her uncle and
uncle’s stepson, so perhaps not surprising), Lord Burghley and Robert Cecil,
and Barbara Sidney (née Gamage), the earl and countess of Shrewsbury
(and also incidentally to Queen Elizabeth), while her letters to the Wiltshire
gentleman, her neighbour John Thynne and Julius Caesar were scribal.16
The extent to which such handwriting practices were impacted by gender is
unclear, though it may have been deemed inappropriate to write personally
to a woman to whom one was unrelated or unknown.
Differences in script – defined as an identifiable type or system of hand-
writing (such as italic, secretary or mixed) – employed in correspondence
also indicate social distinctions, practical concerns and epistolary conven-
tions. Italic or ‘roman’ script with its association with Humanism began as
a scholarly hand in fifteenth-century Italy and was adopted by aristocratic
English writers in the 1500s, including Robert Devereux, earl of Essex,
though some, the earl of Leicester for example, preferred to write a form
of secretary hand.17 It soon became the preferred hand of royalty, and was
taught among others to Edward VI, Elizabeth I and James VI and I.18 The
earl of Salisbury in 1608 criticised his son William’s italic hand for its lack
of gentility: ‘I like your letters well but your hand is not good, for though
it be romane yet it doth not leane in your letters as gentlemens hand do,
but rather like a woman or a scholler’.19 By the turn of the seventeenth cen-
tury italic became established as the predominant script taught to women,
because, according to Martin Billingsley, it ‘is conceived to be the easiest
hand that is written with Pen’.20 Writing almost 50 years later Edward
Cocker considered ‘italick’ ‘the Universal Character over all Europe . . . a . . .
form generally written by Schollars, and most Gentlemen, it is commonly
used by Merchants, and is of excellent use for Women, which they may imi-
tate with facility, and write with dexterity’.21 It was thus a marker of learn-
ing, social status and latterly gender, although women did master other
forms of script. Italic was adopted by the daughters of humanists from the
1530s, yet many early-Tudor women letter-writers used later gothic, angli-
cana and cursive scripts. During the Elizabeth period, some women wrote
secretary as well as mixed hands, and a number mastered more than one
type of script, utilised for different occasions.22 Italic though was commonly
used in Latin epistles and presentation letters. Thus, in 1580 the Oxford
divine John Rainoldes employed italic for a Latin missive to Walsingham,
and on the same day dispatched a letter in English to a friend written in
secretary hand.23 It was the hand commonly used in letters from the uni-
versities of Oxford and Cambridge and for international correspondence to
France and Italy.24 Italic might be employed for titles and, as with print, to
emphasise particular words or phrases, because of the ease with which it was
read, and it was reserved for flourishing signatures as a sign of refinement
by men who normally preferred secretary.25 Secretary script by contrast
represents the dominant form of handwriting employed for everyday busi-
ness correspondence from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, although
it gradually evolved into a mixed or rounded script by the mid-seventeenth
century.26 Predominantly associated with male writers, secretary was also

performed by some women, although examples are thin on the ground.27
While Latin correspondence was normally italic, secretary was generally
used for business letters in the vernacular. Idiosyncratic scripts are also
occasionally found. Several examples survive among the Oxinden family
papers of letters written from Oxford to Henry Oxinden in a manner to
replicate roman print typeface, which was presumably modish at the early
Stuart university as a calligraphic exercise.28 Another letter dated 1639 from
George Oxinden to his kinsman Henry Oxinden, whom he addressed as
‘Noble Sir’ is penned in an extravagantly looping hand as a mark of polite
respect.29 A further complication is the use of cipher texts for purposes of
encryption (see Chapter 6).
Differences in ‘hand’ – in other words, the way in which an individual
writer rendered the particular characteristics or forms of a given script – are
also telling in many ways. It was perfectly acceptable for noblemen and
noblewomen to write with scrawling almost illegible hands, a mark of aris-
tocratic reserve, or in the case of Anne Bacon, a sign of intellectual disdain
or distraction – what Graham Williams has described as ‘uglyography’.30
Women and children in particular often received censure for their
poor handwriting and orthography: John Winthrop, future Governor of
Massachusetts commented on his wife’s ‘scribbling hand, the mean congru-
ity, the false orthography and broken sentences’ of her first letters.31 Letters
might be sent replete with inks blots, smudges and crossings out indicating
informality or the writer’s superior status; poor penmanship equally distin-
guished ill-practiced writers. Yet such tardy penmanship was unacceptable
in letters to the monarch which were written as fair presentation copies. The
countess of Pembroke’s missive to Elizabeth I dated 1601, for example, was
transcribed in neat without the deletions and ink blots that feature in her
other autograph letters.32 Writers utilised distinct forms of script for differ-
ent occasions, types of letter and different corresponding tasks.33 According
to Angel Day it was requisite for a secretary to perfect a ‘variety’ of hands.34
During his employment as personal secretary to Lord Grey in Ireland from
1580 to 1582, Edmund Spenser employed three separate types of script in
his letter-writing: a secretary script for the main text; a mixed hand for
Latin texts, for titles and some names and for occasional addresses, endorse-
ments and marginalia; and a formal italic or Italian hand.35 Similarly, as
Sara Jayne Steen has expertly shown, Arbella Stuart used two separate hands
for different sorts of letters. Her familiar letters and the rough drafts of her
court letters were written in an informal or free italic hand, whilst in the
presentation copies of her court letters she used an elegant, formal italic
hand.36 Individual hands might develop and change over time, and it seems
to have become accepted that hands practised in adolescence matured
and settled with age, as with the handwriting of Elizabeth I.37 Differences
in handwriting style may also reflect generational, regional and gendered
distinctions as the models taught vary accordingly. The material conditions

of writing likewise affected handwriting. The type, quality and condition
of writing implement employed produced nuances in hands, as did the
quality of paper, writing surface and ink used: an autograph letter from the
Devonshire JP, Sir William Courtenay, was written in a rather tortuous scrawl,
reflecting the poor quality of ink used and a rather worn quill.38 Apologies
for poor handwriting – ‘scribbled lines’ – are extremely common, although
in many cases such self-deprecatory remarks belong to a troped language of
deference. Occasionally a more elaborate excuse was offered, blaming the
quality of materials, ill-health, infirmity or old age. Thus, Lady Katherine
Paston apologised to son William, complaining in one letter, ‘I write this as
much in hast as may be: with a pen of my Cosine Cooks which I think haue
writen many an indenture, it is but a bad one’ and in another added in a
postscript ‘never wors pen never wors paper nor wors writer’.39 Handwriting
thus varied according to a range of factors, including social status, literacy
and educational ability, time and circumstance.
How far one can interpret handwriting (and assign particular reasons
for changes in the quality of hand or material features such as ink blots,
smudges, corrections, deletions or insertions) beyond this is to enter
the extremely uncertain territory of graphology, a supposedly ‘scientific’
approach to the study of handwriting that seeks to uncover the character,
temperament or personality of individual writers, what Jonathan Goldberg
might term the ‘interiority’ materialised in a hand.40 Several early modern
scholars have sought to analyse handwriting displayed in letters in this
manner: Roy Davids, for example, argues that ‘different moods and indispo-
sitions’ of the earl of Essex ‘are reflected quite noticeably in his handwrit-
ing’.41 It is also highly speculative to identify apparent water damage to a
draft petition from Arbella Stuart to King James as tear-stains, though such a
conclusion fits the high-flown rhetoric with which she presented herself ‘In
all humility’ as ‘the most wretched and vnfortunate creature that euer lived
prostrates it selfe at the feet of the most mercifull King’.42 Such attempts at
graphology have exacted winces from forensic handwriting experts. Indeed,
one such recent foray was described by the handwriting guru Tom Davis as
‘outrageous, and therefore amusing: it is precisely what handwriting analy-
sis needed to be rescued from, nearly a hundred years ago’.43 The extent to
which one can detect certain moods, emotions, temperaments or even the
age and sex of a writer, or the impact of different writing implements, from
deviations in stylistic norms of handwriting is, however, an area that requires
further expert research that is beyond the remit of this present study.
Significant space and layout of the manuscript page
Social meaning was also registered spatially on the written page, as has
been noted by several scholars who have emphasised the significance of
manuscript space in early modern correspondence.44 Letter-writing manuals

of the time delineated clear rules for the placing of subscriptions or signa-
tures, modes of address and salutations, and superscriptions or addresses on
the outer leaves of letters. Space was closely linked to social status, simul-
taneously a marker of deference and a signifier of standing and wealth,
depending upon precisely how it was utilised. The significance of space is
made explicit in William Fulwood’s Enimie of Idlenesse (1568), which out-
lines rules for the positioning and wording of the subscription in a letter:
which must be doone according to the estate of the writer, and the qualitie
of the person to whom wee write: For to our superiors wee must write at
the right side in the neither end of the paper, saying: By your most hum-
ble and obedient sonne, or seruaunt, &c. Or, yours to commaund, &c. And
to our equals we must write towards the middest of the paper, saying: By
your faithfull friend for euer, &c. Or, yours assured, &c. To our inferiours
wee may write on high at the left hand, saying: By yours, &c.45
Angel Day similarly connected the size of gap left between the body of
the letter and the signature with the relative social standing of writer and
addressee, but does not follow Fulwood in correlating social status with the
left and right placing of the signature:
writing to anye personne of accompt, by how much the more excellent

hee is in calling from him in whose behalfe the Letter is framed, by so
muche the lower, shall the subscription therevnto belonging, in any wise
be placed.
And if the state of honour of him to whome the Letter shall be directed
doe require so much, the verye lowest margent of paper shall doe no
more but beare it, so be it the space be seemelye for the name, and the
roome fayre inough to comprehende it, which subscriptions in all sorts to
be handled shall passe this order or substaunce to be framed.46
Later epistolographies including Philip Massinger’s 1654 edition of The

Secretary in Fashion, a translation of Jean-Puget de La Serre’s Le Secretaire à la
mode (Paris, 1640) and Antoine de Courtin’s The Rules of Civility (an English
translation of his Nouveau traité de la civilité) followed this rule prescribing
on the gap between the main body of the letter and the subscription, add-
ing that the addressee’s title should precede the subscription in a separate
line, a mid-seventeenth-century innovation.47 Thus, de Courtin maintains,
‘At the end of the Letter, to signifie our submission to a person not much
our superiour, we put Sir, and that Sir is to be placed in the middle of the
blank, betwixt the end of the Letter and these words, Your most humble and
obedient servant, which are to be put quite at the bottom of the paper’.48
The spacing between the salutation or greeting (‘My Lord’, ‘Sir’ or ‘Madam’,
for example) and the main body of the letter was also important – space
denoted deference – as noted in Vives’s De conscribendis epistolis (1534):
‘nowadays it is customary to leave a blank space between the salutation
and the letter itself, wider or narrower according to the rank of the person
to whom it is written. One may call it, if you wish, the honorary margin’.49
This practice was latterly followed by Massinger and de Courtin.50 Turning
to the address leaf, Massinger also specified the gap required between the
first and second line of the superscription.51 The prevalence of theoretical
discussions on the physical organisation of text on the page indicates a
well-established set of rules governing the decorum of epistolary manuscript
space, and the ‘semiotic function’ of space in correspondence to register
social differences. From her survey of letter-writing manuals for the period
1500–1900, Sue Walker argues that ‘rules of this sort, where physical space
echoes social distance between writer and receiver, remained in place well
into the eighteenth century’.52
In practice too letter-writers adhered to the conventions of spacing
throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, demonstrating a
conversance with the protocols outlined in Renaissance epistolographies.53
Scholars remain unclear though about exactly how widespread these spatial
practices were among early modern correspondents, and Sara Jayne Steen has
tentatively argued that ‘early modern letter-writers rarely follow Fulwood’s or
Day’s or any of the letter-writing manuals, and it would be surprising if they
did, so we must interpret space loosely, and again within the context of the
writer’s usual practice if we can’.54 Initial conclusions from an examination
of many thousands of items of correspondence for the early modern period,
however, indicate that the degree to which letter-writers considered the
social politics of manuscript space in the physical layout of their letters was
far more extensive than previously acknowledged.55 Deferential use of space
in the placing of signatures and salutations was particularly prevalent in
letters of petition alongside a rhetoric of humility, where the sender sought
to convey a sense of their own social inferiority or obeisance in relation to
the recipient. In 1602, John Donne in writing to his estranged father-in-law,
Sir George More, employed deferential tropes in seeking a rapprochement
after his clandestine marriage to More’s daughter Anne: ‘I humbly beseeche
yow’ he wrote in one letter ‘so to deale in yt, as the persuasions of Nature,
reason, wisdome, and Christianity shall informe yow; And to accept the
vowes, of one whom yow may now rayse or scatter’.56 He sought to under-
line his contrition in this series of letters by signing his name in the extreme
bottom right hand corner of the letter, a departure from his normal signing
practice.57 He similarly subscribed the beseeching letters he wrote to Egerton
after his dismissal from the Lord Keeper’s service, and subsequent imprison-
ment in the Fleet.58 Courtesies of this nature were even more pronounced in
the letters monarchs received from their subjects. In this kind of ritualised
social situation deviation from conventional epistolary norms would have
been interpreted as an affront, and letter-writers took great care to register

their submission materially. The earl of Essex’s letters to Queen Elizabeth
were almost universally signed in the bottom right hand corner of the page,
with hatchings between the closing salutations and subscription; where
letters continued horizontally into the margin there was still an attempt
to place the signature in the corner.59 Spacing was also used by women for
persuasive effect in order to bolster their abject position. Thus, in 1627 the
widow Barbara Godsalve approached her kinsman Roger Townshend, bar-
onet, for assistance in the redemption of her land on which she currently
dwelled. The letter was addressed ‘Worthy Sir’ in her own handwriting, with
a vertical space and marginal indentation, with the signature placed in the
bottom right hand corner of the page, perhaps a visible signal of her inferior
social position and dependence upon his favour.60 In a petitionary letter
to Charles I for financial assistance – a response to her husband’s wrathful
behaviour after her conversion to Catholicism – Elizabeth Cary deferentially
closed by placing her signature in the right-hand bottom corner of the page,
‘an appropriately humble “honorary margin”’. In so doing, Lady Falkland
respectfully registered her loyalty towards the monarch, buttressing the
heartfelt claims that she was experiencing ‘extreame wants’: ‘I am heere,
in an estate’, she informed Charles, ‘so miserable, as to sterue, is one of my
least feares: because if I shoulde do so, and not bee guilty in it, of mine owne
destruction, it were the end of my afflictions’.61 Conversely, the absence of
space between text and subscription and the leaving of a blank space below
the signature was a way of signifying one’s superior social status and author-
ity. Thus, in a cursory missive of recommendation to his cousin Edward
Seymour dating 1598, the second earl of Essex signed his name at the top
of the page close after his six-line text, leaving a gap of 210 millimetres to
the bottom of the page.62 At a time when paper was a relatively expensive
commodity, conspicuous consumption of this sort was a reflection of social
status.
While one might expect more formal letters and situations to require
adherence to epistolary conventions (and certainly spatial practices are most
widespread and pronounced here), the rules concerning material represen-
tation of social status also extended in practice to family correspondence.
Manuscript space often registered visually the social hierarchies within dif-
ferent relationships, as is evident in children’s letters to parents. A dutiful
letter penned by an eight-year-old Anne Clifford to her father, as an exercise
in childhood socialisation, conforms to all the stylistic and material codes of
deference, with the signature placed at the bottom right-hand of the page
as a sign of filial respect.63 Adult children too utilised spacing conventions
for honorific purposes. In writing to his mother, the dowager countess of
Shrewsbury, Henry Cavendish left a sizeable gap between the place and dat-
ing of his letter and the subscription, as did her son Charles and daughter
Grace, who also added hatchings before her signature to prevent anyone
filling the space with words other than her own.64 In each case the noble
status of the parent may have demanded such visual signs of obedience.
Deference to seniority registered through the use of manuscript space also
extended to other family members. Thus, Richard Oxinden left a five cen-
timetre gap before subscribing his letter to his older brother Henry, while
Ann Hobart writing to her uncle Sir John Hobart left a one centimetre gap
between the mode of address (‘Good Syr’) and the start of her letter; at the
end, she left space of four centimetres before signing herself ‘your assured
louing nece’.65 An examination of the papers of the Norfolk gentry family
the Gawdys, further illustrates the relative ubiquity of knowledge con-
cerning the politics and practices of manuscript space.66 The ten volumes
which cover the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries include correspondence
of writers from a broad range of social backgrounds and positions, and
display various hierarchies rendered spatially. For example, in a polite let-
ter dated 1588 to the Norfolk magistrate Bassingbourne Gawdy requesting
a pair of breeding swans, Alexander Duke, a servant from Castle Rising,
signed his name in the bottom right hand corner, as did a Gawdy relation,
Francis Hynde of Maddingley, Cambridgeshire, in a letter of 1585 to Edward
Flowerdew, Baron of the Exchequer concerning his appearance before him
as a suitor at the Wisbech assizes.67 The letters of individual writers to dif-
ferent correspondents also reveal the differing social hierarchies as they are
inscribed in ink. Elizabeth Knyvett’s early-seventeenth-century letters to
Roger Townshend and his wife Anne display significant spatial variations. In
writing to her nephew, Elizabeth Knyvett started her letters ‘Honorable Sir’
then leaving an honorific space and marginal indentation before starting
the main body of the letter and signing towards the right hand of the page.68
The letter to Lady Anne however began ‘My deare sister, I thank you most
kindly’ without a line break after the opening mode of address, and contin-
ued to fill the entire page with the signature squashed in at the bottom of
the page.69 When writing to women of superior social standing, however,
the deferential codes of spacing clearly applied as can be viewed in a missive
from Edward Symonds, a servant to Lady Mary Townshend, in which he
referred to her reverentially as Good Madam, before leaving a vertical gap,
and signing in the bottom right hand corner about six or seven lines below
the closing, ‘your ladishippes allwayes reddy at command’.70 This protocol
of placement extended to joint correspondence. In the event of more than
one signatory to a letter (as, for example, letters sent collectively by the
Privy Council), names were subscribed in strict order of rank. Thus, the
lower an individual’s social standing the further down the page their signa-
ture would appear, and vice versa. A letter in 1595 to Edward Seymour con-
ferring on him a colonelship was signed by the Lord Lieutenant of Devon,
the earl of Bath and his deputies in descending order of precedence.71 Where
one signed on a page was material confirmation of one’s position within a
hierarchy, so much so that Charles Howard, the Lord Admiral was rumoured
to have cut out the earl of Essex’s signature from a joint report on the 1596
Cadiz expedition because it was placed so close to the text that others were
forced to sign below him.72 Although far from universal, the use of spacing
conventions where they can be discerned were inflected by issues of social
status, gender, intimacy, purpose and circumstance.
By the turn of the seventeenth century, the practice first outlined by Vives
of starting letters with the opening mode of address (‘Sir’ or ‘Madam’) fol-
lowed by a vertical space and marginal indentation appears to have become
more widespread, as can be observed in a 1606 letter from Thomas Shirley
to Edward Seymour, one dated 1630 from Villiers Harington, another dated
1643 from the Marquis of Hertford and letters from Sir Ralph Hopton and
James Kerr to Colonel Edward Seymour dated in 1644.73 Edward Peyton
wrote to his sister Anne Oxinden from Wadham College, Oxford in 1635
carefully laying out his letter according to the affected spatial conventions
of politeness then de rigueur: penned in a flourishing hand, the letter opened
with ‘Most honoured sister’ followed by a one centimetre gap before the
start of the main body of the letter; the remaining epistolary components
were liberally spaced out with gaps between the main text and closing ‘your
most affectionate Brother to comande’ before the placing of an ornate sig-
nature in the right-hand bottom corner of the page.74 This spatial form of
beginning letters became increasingly well established over the course of the
seventeenth century, and is reflected in manuals of the period, and although
practices were not always uniform, deviation from such epistolary norms
indicates an ill practiced or at least unfashionable letter-writer.75 Many of
the letters relating to the Newquay Right of Wreck in 1571, for example, dis-
play rather idiosyncratic manuscript layout, including a letter from Humfrey
Hendy of Camelford, which is rather crudely laid out, folded and addressed,
and one from Cornelius Clason (the Ship’s captain) and Cornelius Franson
(the captain’s mate), which disobeys all epistolary conventions and was sub-
scribed with a personal mark and seal.76 It is interesting then, as Diarmaid
MacCulloch has remarked, to find the nonagenarian Suffolk-based Puritan
magistrate Sir John Higham employing a secretary who ‘adopts the latest
letter-writing layout’.77
Signatures
Signing practices in themselves require careful interpretation and are of

special interest where individual signees deviate from conventional norms.
The primary function of the signature, whether signed in full or abbreviated
form or using initials, was authentication. It acted as a textual representation
of an individual’s identity, was legally binding and gradually supplanted the
seal as a device of authenticity. Often associated with a basic level of writ-
ing literacy, qualitative evaluations of the fluency of signatures indicate the
extent of writing abilities; those unable to write their names performed a
mark, as was the case with several freemen of Winchester in a 1626 letter
to Sir Edward Nicholas secretary to duke of Buckingham.78 Where marks
were employed the name of the individual was normally affixed alongside
by a scribe. Moreover, the precise form of the signature itself beyond its
placement and competency can offer interesting clues to interpretation. It
was common practice for Christian names to appear either in shortened
form, or abbreviated to the initial letter before surnames: ‘Ro. Cecyll’, ‘Tho.
Bromley’, ‘E Seyntelo’, ‘Wm Scudamore’. In the case of aristocratic letter-
writers, abbreviated first names appeared before titles, such as ‘k. suffoulk’,
‘W. Bathon’, ‘G. Shrewsbury’, ‘R: Leycester’. This was always the case with
women, but aristocratic men could sign only their titles, as in ‘Dorchester’,
‘Warwicke’ and ‘Northumberland’.79 Italic and flourishing signatures were
related to fashion and ostentation, while distinctive nuances and deviations
from normal signing practices may attain significant personal meaning.80
In 1571, the duchess of Feria signed herself in a letter to Thomas Harvey as
merely ‘the duches’.81 Variations occur in the second earl of Essex’s signa-
tures. After he became a Privy Councillor in 1593, Essex altered his signature
from ‘R. Essex’ to simply ‘Essex’, a transformation that signalled formality.82
In other letters he signed his name as ‘E’, and merely as ‘S X’ in a supplica-
tory missive to the Queen, which presumably had a shared association for
both of them.83 Equally, the letters that the antiquarian Hannibal Baskerville
received from his mother Mary (d.1632) in the years after the breakdown
of her second marriage to Sir James Scudamore (d.1618) are telling in the
unusual nature of their signatures. Mary, whose first match had been to
the Elizabethan naval commander, Sir Thomas Baskerville, was treated
quite monstrously by Scudamore and his father Sir John – the marriage was
repudiated in 1608 – and her misfortune was catalogued by Hannibal in his
notes on the Baskerville family history. In framing her signature in several
letters dated after 1608, Mary appears to have tried to dissociate herself from
Scudamore, by signing herself ‘Marie B’ or ‘Marie Baskeruile’ immediately
after the text, followed by the name Scudamore struck through as indicated,
at the bottom of the page, materially registering separation from her hus-
band.84 Signatures could also be invested with symbolic meaning. Fellow of
the Royal Society Sir Robert Moray’s signature included a pentacle Masonic
mark, and after her conversion to Catholicism Lady Falkland signed her
name ‘EM Falkland’ as opposed to ‘E Falkland’, the M representing her
confirmation name of Maria.85 Spacing, handwriting, abbreviations and
alterations in signatures thus conveyed not only meanings that were widely
understood, but also more personal signals shared only by those alert to
their coded implications.
Signatures were normally written by individuals in their own hands, but
it was perfectly standard practice for noble’s secretaries to pen and sign cor-
respondence that went out in their masters’ and mistresses’ names.86 Royal
signatures, technically referred to as ‘sign manuals’ from Henry VIII’s reign
onwards were produced using a wooden stamp; control of the King’s signa-
ture became a key ‘motor of government’.87 In letters signed by secretaries
on behalf of Charles I, the monarch’s signet appears at the top of the letter,
with the secretary’s subscription squashed into the right hand corner. This
was the case in a letter to Edward Seymour penned by the king’s secretary
Edward Walker, signed ‘By his Maties Command’.88 When letters were
signed in relation to other parts of the correspondence was also significant.
Christopher Burlinson and Andrew Zurcher have persuasively conjectured
that letters from the Council in Ireland during 1581 and 1582 were signed
only after the subscription had been made in the presence of the signatories.
In this way, the councillors could control what went out in their names, and
anything added below the subscription might be suspected as not represent-
ing the views of the unified Council.89 At the other extreme blank letters
might be signed, with a secretary entrusted to compose a routine missive, a
process that echoes Falstaff’s ‘letters, writ with blank space’.90 This is illus-
trated in a letter from James I to Sir Ralph Winwood in 1615, in which he
declared that he had ‘signed the five French letters ye sent me’, adding ‘but I
miss letters for three, the Duc of Guise, the Prince Jenville, and the Conte de
Candale, and because this despatch is to be sent away with all speed, I have
for hastening it signed three blanks which ye are to fill for them three,
and so to send away the packet’.91 The danger of pre-signed copies was of
course forgery, and in 1601, Richard Idelle, a servant to the scrivener John
Savage, was examined concerning the blanks letters with the great seal of
Scotland that were discovered in his desk. Idelle confessed that ‘his maister
John Savage hath vsed to make theis Blankes for the space of three yeares
last past. And that his said maister before his death did make divers of the
said Blankes for mr Robert Sauage Ironmonger, for Mr Nicholas Pero[n], for
Mr deputie Hanger and for Richard Marcoll. And that Mr Hangar hath the
deal engraven in wood’.92 Forgeries might be detected when letters deviated
from the material norms. In 1630, the Irish Council rejected a letter from
Charles I for William Poe conceiving it to have been ‘surreptitiously and
unduly gotten’. On examination, William Boswell discovered that the date
of the letter was ‘added in another hand . . . much different from the hand
wherein the whole body of the letter is written’; and that ‘the fold, and mak-
ing vp of this letter is much narrower then the ordinarie manner observed
in the said office, and it was never ‘entered or docquetted there’; the super-
scription was also incorrect, ‘besides the first three lynes thereof are in one
hand . . . and all the rest downward to the end, is written in an other hand,
by one George Hare, a scrivener dwelling in Westminster’.93
Paper
Size also matters as it relates to paper and was directly related to social
status, function and circumstance. As discussed previously, early modern
correspondence was ordinarily written on paper, rather than parchment or

velum, which was highly expensive and therefore reserved for legal docu-
ments and presentation copies of literary works and legal documents where
preservation was important. The standard size of a sheet paper produced
during the early modern period was approximately 305 to 350 millimetres
by 420 to 450 millimetres depending on the size of the paper mould which
varied from mill to mill and country to country.94 Common practice was
to fold the full sheet in half, thus creating a bifolium of four writing sides,
with the main body of the letter written starting on folio 1r, continuing to
1v and 2r if additional space was needed. The majority of letters were con-
tained in one side, the middle two sides were left blank, with the address
written on a portion of folio 2v only once the letter had been folded up
and the ends tucked in to form an address leaf. On occasion prolix writers
ran to an extra sheet, which was placed inside the outer bifolium and then
folded in the normal manner. Sometimes an extra sheet of paper was used in
which to wrap the written upon sheet in order to prevent bleed through of
the ink and to make sure that the letter could not be read from the outside.
Occasionally letters that ran over onto the verso side of the second folio
would simply be folded up to cover the written text of the letter and then
addressed. In its unfolded state the address leaf therefore appears below the
signature on fol. 2v, as in a three-and-a-half sided letter from the marquis of
Winchester and the lord Mayor of London to the Privy Council in 1559.95
Standard folio-sized paper was typically used throughout period for letters
sent by government administrators on official business and social elites,
where shortage and expense did not present problems. The letters of Edward
de Vere, earl of Oxford for the period 1563 to 1604 almost uniformly follow
this bifolium format.96 The use of a full sheet of paper for no more than a
few lines of writing signified a writer’s superior social standing, a sign of con-
spicuous consumption since paper was a relatively expensive commodity.
Utilising an entire sheet for no more than half a page might also convey
due respect to the recipient where the blank space was used deferentially to
place the signature in a subordinate position. Indeed, The Rules of Civility,
which was translated into English in 1671, prescribed the use of ‘large’
sheets of paper, even for short letters, as a mark of respect.97 Outside elite
culture, however, paper use varied greatly, differing from these kinds of elite
epistolary conventions, depending on length of message, personal practice,
utility and household economy. Correspondents below the aristocracy com-
monly wrote on scraps or fragments of paper, cut down from larger sheets,
which were cropped and trimmed to produce several (sometimes as many as
seven or eight) single pieces for letter-writing. This is clearly observed in the
papers of the Gawdys, a gentry family from Norfolk, the volumes of which are
full of missives of an irregular shape, produced by trimming off any excess.
Typical examples dating from 1605 are a letter that Barnaby Moyse wrote
to Bassingbourne Gawdy on a scrap of paper measuring 167mm by 155mm
and one from Elizabeth Everard to her sister, Mrs Sayer, on paper 162mm by
200mm in dimension.98 The letters relating to the Newquay Right of Wreck
in 1571 and the begging letters addressed to Sir Thomas Sutton were likewise
penned on paper of idiosyncratic size.99 Most of the letters of the unfortunate
Elizabethan gentlewoman Elizabeth Bourne were written on small scraps
of paper, perhaps evidence of or suggesting metaphorically the hard times
she found herself in after her estrangement from her reprobate husband
Anthony.100 The five letters extant from Margaret Brooke to her cousin the
antiquarian Thomas Baskerville dating from the period 1621 to 1638 were
likewise penned on small sheets of paper, measuring approximately 160mm
by 200mm.101 Standard sized sheets of paper were also cropped in half to pro-
duce a single sheet of two writing sides useful for making drafts or copies.102
Occasionally cropped half-sheets were used for actual letters sent, folded in
the normal way with the address appended to the blank verso, as with a
1571 letter from Edward Arundell of Barnstaple to his brother George and
one dated 1611 from the Oxford student Walter Seymour to Philip Richards
at Maiden Bradley, Wiltshire.103 Other of Seymour’s letters to Richards from
his time at Exeter College were written on much smaller pieces of paper, a
sign perhaps of student economy and his small stock of paper, connected
no doubt to youthful profligacy, especially since many of the letters concern
financial expenses.104 While these kinds of practices were usually considered
perfectly normal, within certain contexts inappropriate materials produced
social anxiety. Thomas Compton felt obliged to apologise to his mistress
Lady Mary Powell for the ‘poore peece of paper’ on which his letter was writ-
ten.105 The relationship between the amount of paper used and the length of
letter was extremely telling: while the utilisation of a full sheet for half a page
might exhibit due deference to a recipient of superior social standing, fuller
letters, which ran to more than one side, filling the entire page and continu-
ing in the margins indicate less social rigidity, and perhaps more emotional
or sentimental reasons for writing.
By the mid-seventeenth century, as H.R. Woudhuysen has argued in a
preliminary report of his extensive investigations into the taxonomy of
the early modern letter, the size and use of paper significantly changed,
whereby the folded folio sheet gave way to the folded half-sheet quarto (in
other words, a full sheet of paper cut in half and folded to form four writ-
ing sides).106 This change in paper usage is well illustrated by the Seymour
of Berry Pomeroy manuscripts recently deposited at Devon Record Office
by the Duke of Somerset (DRO 3799M-3) and the related collection of
Seymour manuscripts (DRO, 1392M) both of which include several hun-
dred letters (some familial, but mainly official) for the period 1575 to 1688.
What emerges from these collections is the dominance of the folio format
for official correspondence throughout the entire period (which may mean
that women were more likely to use smaller sized paper). Thus, a seven-line
missive dated 11 October 1598 from Robert Devereux, earl of Essex to the
Devonshire Deputy Lieutenant Edward Seymour utilised a whole folio sheet,

maintaining a large left hand margin, as did letters dated 13 October 1643,
15 and 16 August 1644 from William Seymour, first marquis of Hertford,
Charles I and Lord George Digby (later second earl of Bristol) to the royalist
governor of Dartmouth, Colonel Edward Seymour, as well as letters dated
17 and 27 November 1677 from Samuel Pepys.107 Despite the dominance
of the folio for official correspondence, there are a number of items within
the collection from the early 1640s that conform to the half-sheet quarto
format, including letters from the Devonshire parliamentarian gentleman
John Bamfield, Henry Grey first earl of Stamford and the former mayor of
Plymouth, the royalist Robert Trelawny.108 By the 1650s, Dorothy Osborne
was using this smaller format of paper for her letters to her future husband,
William Temple: the paper for most of the letters measures approximately
200 millimetres by 300 millimetres, and was folded in half to provide four
writing sides, although several letters were written on substantially larger
sheets of approximately 280 millimetres by 380 millimetres.109 Paper size
and format was thus related a range of factors including social status, gen-
der, function and economy. In relation to the latter, the 1635 postal reforms
which opened up the royal post to private letters charged for delivery not
only according distance, but also to the size of letters and numbers of sheets
of paper used. Shifts in epistolary formatting may thus have been driven by
the impetus of external postal changes. Smaller formats may also have been
enabled by smaller, more angular forms of handwriting popular by the mid-
seventeenth century.
The function of margins likewise changed with this shift in paper format.
On the whole, folio letters maintained large left-hand margins – a mark of
formality and decorum – but were written as close as possible to the right-
hand side of the sheet. In more informal correspondence, the paper was
turned horizontally to continue writing in the margins, although this prac-
tice was not widespread. Several Elizabethan women letter-writers used the
page in this way, indicative of the informality of purpose: Susannah Darnell
crammed every single available space of paper with writing in a letter to her
daughter Elizabeth, writing in the margin, using multiple postscripts and
even dividing the bottom section of the page in two with a vertical line to
providing two columns for postscripts; a letter from Dorothy Gamage to her
husband in 1580 filled the margin of the first writing side, and still contin-
ued to a second page; and Lettice, countess of Leicester frequently used the
margins if the need arose in letters to her son, the earl of Essex.110 With the
transition to the half-sheet quarto letter size, it was increasingly common
for letter-writers to fill the entire page, and utilise the margins for writing.
Indeed, Dorothy Osborne’s letters to William Temple written between 1652
and 1654 frequently filled every conceivable space of the page, and on occa-
sions where she had no room to append her signature, she would return to
the first page and invert the paper in order to sign it, so that when reading
the letter the signature would appear upside down above the first line. The
basic format of the letter thus remains the same, with a left-hand margin,
but at the end of writing these supposedly blank spaces get used up.111
In most cases the paper used for letter-writing was ordinarily plain, but
pre-decorated sheets were available. Alathea Talbot and Anne Clifford both
wrote on paper painted with a colourful floral border design.112 A rough
Cambridge memoranda book used to record copies of outgoing letters was
made of red-tinted paper.113 Gilt-edged paper could also be bought: Lady
Anne Clifford’s account book records payment of 6d for ‘half a quier of guilt
paper’, and in 1629 Arthur Cappell spent 9s for ‘tenn quires of gilt paper
and tenne quires of ordinarye paper’, and in 1635 Edward, viscount Conway
spent 6d on gilt paper and in a letter to George Rawdon he asked to be sent
‘somme guilt paper in a large quarto to write to woemen’.114 Such refined
paper was a clear marker of status. According to George Nicolson, James VI
of Scotland wrote to Elizabeth I on ‘gilt paper’; the emperor of Russia wrote
to James I early in his reign on paper with a gilt edge with a black pattern.115
Other types of high-quality paper were associated with important occasions
and wealthy social groups. Refined Italian paper (distinguished most com-
monly by its double ‘pennant flag’ watermark) could be purchased from a
stationer, and as Mark Bland has shown was favoured by government offi-
cials and people associated with the court, and could achieve high prices:
in 1604 the House of Lords paid £1 10s for three reams of fine Italian flag
paper.116 Meanwhile, Spanish paper survives in English documents from the
late 1590s, the early 1620s in documents relating to the Spanish match, and
during the 1630s and 1640s typically in paper used in Spain for documents
then sent home.117 Under extreme circumstances letter-writers utilised
whatever materials came easily to hand: pages torn from books and scraps of
wrapping paper. The Jesuit priest John Gerard conveyed secret messages writ-
ten in invisible ink on paper used to wrap oranges.118 A letter from Elizabeth
Wetherton to her mother was penned on a fragment of printed breviary
with plainsong notation, presumably because paper was in short supply.119
Nancy Pollard Brown has also employed watermark analysis to show the
way in which distinct stocks of paper circulated among recusant Catholics
in Elizabethan England.120 The material sites used for letter-writing are thus
suggestive of the circumstances under which they were composed, size and
quality of paper reflecting social meaning.
Dates and dating
The manner in which letters were dated during the sixteenth and early-
seventeenth century was far from uniform. Dating practices changed over
the course of the period, differing according to social groups. While it is not
uncommon for letters to be without any form of dating, secretarial, official
and business missives were most likely to be dated, where training or the
imperatives of governance, diplomacy and trade required chronological pre-

cision. Printed calendars and almanacs provided widespread access to dating
technologies.121 Standard practice was to date letters giving the day (some-
times the day of the week), month and year as well as the place of composi-
tion, although with varying degrees of precision. Sir Francis Gawdy closed a
letter to his nephew Bassingbourne Gawdy ‘farewell from seria[n]ts Inne in
flete stret ye xxith of november 1578’; a letter signed by the Cornish gentle-
man Lewis Dart and his wife Elizabeth was dated ‘Pentewan 19 September
1619’; Thomas Sacheverille dated a letter to his uncle Robert Herrick ‘27
February’, while Sir Francis Bryan ended a letter to Lord Lisle with simply
‘thys sonday. In the mornyng’.122 The same kinds of variations are found in
women’s as well as men’s letters.123
From the late-sixteenth century the calculation of dates differed across
Europe during parts of the period, depending on whether the Julian or
Gregorian calendar was used. In the former, the calendar year was out of
synch with the solar year which meant that every fourth year was a ‘leap
year’ of 366 days instead of 365. The Julian calendar was used throughout
Europe for much of the medieval and early modern period, and is generally
known as ‘Old Style’ or OS. However, on 24 February 1582 Pope Gregory
XIII issued a Papal Bull ordering a reformed calendar, which was known as
New Style (abbreviated to NS). It was estimated that there was a discrepancy
of ten days between the old and reformed calendars, which effectively led
to the cutting of ten days out of the year 1582: 4 October was followed
immediately by 15 October. In England, a further complication for students
of documents was that from the fourteenth century onwards New Year’s
Day was taken to fall on 25 March. The Gregorian calendar, however, took
the year to begin on 1 January. A letter dated between 1 January and 24
March would be given a different year depending on the calendar used. In
modern dating, 3 January 1597 would become 3 January 1598, the correct
scholarly citation for which is 3 January 1597/8, and throughout I have
silently used new style dating, assuming the year to begin on 1 January. The
Gregorian reforms were proposed at the height of religious and political
turmoil throughout Europe, and were therefore adopted unevenly, gener-
ally speaking in Catholic countries, such as France, Italy and the Spanish
Empire.124 The Gregorian Calendar was not adopted in England, Wales
and Ireland until 1752, nor in Scotland with the exception that north of
the border the official start of the year was moved to 1 January in 1600.125
Nevertheless the two calendars coexisted, especially in the realm of foreign
diplomacy, and it was widespread practice for letter-writers corresponding
to or from the Continent to state which style they were employing. Thus,
Thomas Chester dated a letter to Robert Cecil ‘this 28th of March 1597.
french stile’; Richard Tomson wrote to Walsingham ‘the 25 of Aprill 1589
in newe stile’; Richard Hawkins dated a letter to Sir Henry Neville, ‘from
the Carcel de Corte in Madrid the 12th of Januarye 1600 after the Spanish
computacon’.126 Inconsistent usage remains though something of a schol-

arly headache: Thomas Jefferey, for example, dated a letter to Sir Francis
Walsingham ‘9th of February 1589 stille nova’, accounting for the ten days’
difference but failed to modernise the year.127 From 1582 onwards English
correspondence with the continent often provides both forms of dating.128
Thus Elizabeth of Bohemia dated a letter from the Hague to Sir Thomas Roe
‘10/20 March’ and Sir William Boswell writing again from the Hague dated a
letter to Secretary Windebank ‘11/21 June 1635’.129 Lady Fernihurst dated a
letter to Mary, queen of Scots ‘22 of October 1583 after the Scotts calendar &
4th of November after the French’.130
Regnal years were also sometimes employed by royal letter-writers in
official correspondence, which were calculated from the monarch’s acces-
sion date. Henry VIII acceded to the throne on 22 April 1509, which meant
that the regnal year ran from 22 April to 21 April, with the exception of the
thirty-eighth year of his reign which ran from 22 April 1546 to his death
in 28 January 1547, which was incidentally also the first day of the regnal
year of his son, Edward VI. Elizabeth’s regnal years ran from 17 November
(her accession was in 1558) to 16 November, except in her forty-fifth year
which ran from 17 November 1602 to 24 March 1603. James’s regnal years
ran from 24 March to 23 March, with his twenty-third year lasting four days,
24 March 1625 to 27 March 1625; he had already been ruling Scotland for
36 years (the year ending 23 July) and used regnal years of England and
Scotland in subsequent dating. His successor Charles I’s regnal years ran
from 27 March to 26 of March.131 In practice utilisation of regnal years in
regal correspondence was uneven, but appears to have been common when
writing to other sovereigns or on official business. A letter from Henry
VIII to James V of Scotland was dated Grafton, ‘16 Aug. 29 Hen. VIII’.132
Elizabeth dated a letter to Anne of Denmark from ‘our Manor of Richmond
the xxviijth day in the xxxviijth year of our reign. 1595’, while a letter to
George Carey, second Baron Hunsdon was dated ‘the xxth of August in the
forty-fourth year of our reign’.133 A letter to the earl of Salisbury from King
James was dated ‘Given under our Signet at our Palace of Westminster, the
sixteenth day of December in the eighth year of our reign’.134 Occasionally
non-royal letter-writers would also employ regnal years, as with a letter to
Lord Lisle from Richard Reynold, dated ‘at London the iiij day of marche the
xxix yere of our soueraign lordes raign’.135
Church festival days were also occasionally used for dating correspond-
ence, as were saints’ days in the pre-Reformation period.136 A letter written
in 1536 from the earl of Northumberland to Thomas Cromwell was dated
‘Christmas Day’; Sir Gilbert Talbot closed a letter to Wolsey ‘at Dover on
palme sondaye’; in 1523 Sir John Bulmer wrote to his father Sir William
on Saint Andrew’s Day ‘at vj of the clok at neghte’; John Smyth wrote to
Lord Lisle ‘ffrom London this trynyte Sonday’; Sir Thomas Smith wrote to
Burghley ‘from Blois this Palm Sonday 1572’; a letter from Sir Ralph Sadler
to Charles Brandon, duke of Suffolk was dated ‘Edinburgh. All Hallows Day,
at Night’; Sir Robert Neville wrote to his cousin William Plumpton ‘this
Satreday after Martinmas Day’.137
Differentiation in the placement and layout of dates is also telling. The
usual practice for most of the period was to date letters at the bottom, prior
to signing as a continuation of the closing salutation. It was, however,
increasingly common by the seventeenth century for dates to appear on
the bottom left hand side of letters parallel to, or above or below the sig-
nature, as in a letter from William Herbert, earl of Pembroke to Sir Lionel
Tollemache dated ‘Court at Woodstock this 26th of August 1619’ and a letter
from Henry Viscount Falkland to Secretary Dorchester dated in the bottom
left hand corner, ‘The Duchy Howse this laste of Feb: 1630’.138 At the begin-
ning of the period dates were sometimes placed at the head of letters, often
in a form that incorporated the religious prefixes ‘Jhesus’, ‘Jesus anno’ or
‘IHS’ (a Christogram based on the first three characters of ‘Christ’ in Greek).
The ship’s purser John Norton headed a letter to Lady Lisle with a cross, the
word ‘Jhesus’ and the year 1533; another was headed ‘+’, ‘IHS’, ‘Anno 1533
the iiijth day of July in Porchester’; Henry Huttoft, Mayor of Southampton
between 1525 to 1526 dated a letter to Lord Lisle ‘Anno 1533. the 25. day of
November in London’; Andrew Scare dated a letter to William Cecil at the
head of the page ‘The laste of June 1559’.139 This method of dating which
seemingly functioned as an invocation conforms with certain (though not
all) medieval dating practices, but is unusual from the second half of the
sixteenth-century.140 Nevertheless examples do survive of letters headed
with religious invocations: Lord John Russell began a letter to Norfolk
JP, Nathaniel Bacon, ‘Christus Jesus’; Edmund Gest started a letter to William
Cecil ‘Everlasting greetings in ye lorde’.141 This form of invocation was also
sometimes used by Catholics from Elizabeth’s reign onwards. Indeed, the
Catholic priest Nicholas Sanders wrote a letter from Madrid to William Allen
headed with a cross and the word ‘Jesus’; a letter by Mary Wilford to her
mother in the papers of the recusant Throckmorton family is headed with
the phrase ‘Jesus matia’.142 Writing in 1534 John Bassett began a letter to his
mother Honor Lisle with the abbreviated salutation, ‘s p ch p s d J B’, which
Muriel St Clare Byrne suggest might stand for ‘Salutem plurimam charissi-
mis parentibus suis dicit Johannes Basset’.143
Merchants’ letters were also often laid out with the date placed at the
top of the page in order to facilitate archiving and the retrieval of letters at
a later date. Instructions in John Mellis’s edition of Hugh Oldcastle’s 1543
tract on account-keeping instructed his readers to
remember to bee sure in all your letters, whether they be great or small, to
write the date of our Lorde the day of the month, the name of the place,
and your owne name, which name is accustomed to bee written under
the letters in the corner of the right hande: But among marchantes it is
vsed to write the date of our Lorde, and the name of the place aboue the
letters at the beginning.144
In practice too this manner of dating was followed by mercantile letter-

writers. Richard Culoke, Merchant of Dublin dated a letter to Sir William
Brabazon ‘+ Jesu gallway ye x day of november / 1537’.145 The correspond-
ence of the mid-Tudor Johnson family of Calais-based merchants was
ordinarily dated at the top often followed by the year, day and month and
place of sending.146 Thus Otwell Johnson started a letter to his brother John,
‘At London the 25. day in November 1544’.147 Often the dating includes
a cross or the prefix ‘Jesus a[nn]o’. This usage also extended to the letters
from Sabine Johnson to her husband John – one letter was dated ‘Jhus anno
1545 the 18 in october at glapthorne’ – indicating not only her conversance
with mercantile epistolary forms, but also that her letters, which themselves
dealt with business matters, were felt to be important to archive.148 Vives
felt that ‘the specifying of time and place is much more apt and fitting for
business affairs if it is done right at the beginning of the letter’ rather than
at the end.149
Seals and sealing
In most cases, the sealing of a letter with wax and floss was the last task for
a letter-writer or secretary to perform, once the superscription and instruc-
tions were appended to the outer address leaf, a practice indicated where
the address runs across a fold.150 Some letters were addressed after they were
folded and sealed, as in the case of several confidential letters from Lord
Grey addressed by Spenser in the early 1580s.151 The sealing of letters, bound
up as it was with authentication and privacy, was also fraught with its own
distinct set of material considerations with seals themselves conveying sig-
nificant meaning. Official seals tended to follow standard patterns. Royal
seals depicted the monarch enthroned; bishop’s seals usually presented a
standing prelate; monastic seals depicted their buildings, figures of saints
or biblical images, such as of the virgin and child and the annunciation;
local seals contained an emblem or device relating to the town. Personal
seals varied greatly and by the end of the fifteenth century designs were
becoming increasingly elaborate. Armorial family seals commonly feature
heraldic shields or crests, while those of non-armigerous individuals display
an immense diversity of designs, including bird and animal motifs, various
devices, emblems and mottoes, as well as rebusses or visual puns on the
owner’s name or profession.152 Anthony Gawdy’s personal seal was what
appears to be a turtle; Sir John Gilbert, custos rotulorum of Devon had a
squirrel on his seal; the Bacon family had a boar depicted on their seal; the
Devon MP Roger Papworth’s seal was of striding figure with a pack over his
shoulder.153 The household accounts for Henry Percy record payment of £3
14s. and 8d. on 18 June 1593 to ‘Mr Podmeare, goldsmyth, for making and
graving twoe seales att my Lord’s appointment of his armes cyrculed with
the Garter’.154 Family seals were passed down the generations and used by
numerous family members. Individuals, including women, also possessed
their own seals, and sometimes owned several different seals, reflecting their
changing circumstances. The early Tudor diplomat and poet, Sir Thomas
Wyatt, as Jason Powell has shown, owned at least three signet rings over the
course of his life, each of which represented a different kind of ‘public iden-
tity’: ‘a humanist royal servant to the scion of a gentle family, and, finally, to
a poet in the classical tradition’.155 Likewise, John Donne used at least three
different personal seals: a sheaf of snakes, a wolf rampant surrounded by a
sheaf of snakes, and after his ordination in 1615, a seal of Christ crucified on
an anchor; a fourth seal of a heraldic antelope passant crined which appears
on a letters written from the house of his friend Sir John Danvers may have
been borrowed simply for the purpose of sealing.156 The iconography of
seals was often highly personalised and could hold specific symbolic mean-
ings. Sir Robert Moray owned several highly emblematic seals, which were
invested with special meaning, including a Masonic pentacle representing
his ‘stoic-platonic-Christian ethic’; a very elaborate compass seal containing
an altar-like structure, a heart and a compass pointing to a five-pointed star
and the inscription ‘onely’; and an Eros seal, featuring a winged Eros shoot-
ing an arrow towards a heart, and the inscription of ‘Vne sevlle’ or ‘one
alone’ beside an altar, representing bereavement at the loss of his wife.157
In addition, other aspects of the seal, such as colour of the wax, floss and
fastenings, conveyed significant meaning. While the most common colour
for seals was red (of differing hues) produced by adding vermillion, different
colours of wax were used for different occasions, and medieval seals were col-
oured according to type of document (red for diplomatic, green for grants of
perpetuities and natural for routine business). Black seals – produced by add-
ing carbon or ‘black earth’ – signified mourning. Thus, Unton Dering during
the period of mourning after the death of her husband Sir Edward routinely
closed her letters with the family seal pressed in black wax, including one to
Henry Oxinden in which she expressed the ‘many vexatious troubles wch
attend the unhappie widow’.158 Massinger’s translation of Puget de la Serre’s
The Secretary in Fashion (1654) recommended that letters ‘be neatly sealed,
with silk, and Spanish wax, or otherwise. But if you use silk it ought to be of
colour befitting the writer, black if he mourn, both the wax and it’.159 Use of
silk or floss added a personal or emotive touch to the sealing of correspond-
ence, and was much used in love letters of the period. A romantic letter from
Jane Skipwith to her cousin Lewis Bagot had two red seals and blue and red
floss as a sign of intimacy.160 Elizabeth, countess of Southampton writing
to her husband closed her letter with two seals over green silk; and many
of the earl of Essex’s letters to Queen Elizabeth still retain their ornamental
silk ribbons and wax seals.161 Particularly noteworthy is the seal of a letter
from Maria Thynne to her estranged mother-in-law Joan Thynne, which

exhibits a lock of her hair, an intimate gesture to facilitate a rapprochement
between the pair after Maria’s clandestine marriage to Thomas Thynne.162
In a functional sense, seals in conjunction with signatures were used for
authentication purposes (a seal of approval) a guarantee that a letter was
genuine. Letters not bearing the correct seal were suspect, with no assurance
that their contents had been read and sanctioned before sending.163 Privacy
was the ultimate issue, however, and letters that arrived opened or showed
obvious signs of seals that had been tampered with were a cause for concern,
yet forgers were skilful in the art of undetectably removing and reapplying
seals to intercepted letters.
In relying on modern printed editions of early modern letters (which often

feature modernised spelling and punctuation) readers thus find themselves
a stage further removed from the archive and from the culture and practices
of letter-writing during this period. Content and style as they are registered
linguistically will of course remain central to the ways in which scholars
approach correspondence, as literary texts or historical documents capable
of registering meaning. Yet there is much that is missing when one reaches
for a volume from the bookshelf or selects an electronic printed edition,
instead of consulting a manuscript original. This is not, however, to fetishise
the archive in any kind of dusty antiquarian sense, nor to be mesmerised by
endless lists of manuscript call numbers, alluring though these may be. It is
simply to argue for the importance of material readings of early modern let-
ters to complement more traditional ways of understanding and interpreta-
tion. Social and cultural meaning was encoded into the very fabric of letters,
inscribed into the physical features of correspondence. Social hierarchies
were established in complex ways by the nature of handwriting, the scribal
status of a letter, the size of paper it was written upon and by the way in
which the manuscript page itself was laid out. Seals, foldings, watermarks
and ink all provide further clues to the ways in which letters worked and the
significant meaning they generated. It is clear, however, that material letter-
writing practices varied greatly, inflected by form and function, social status
and proficiency. Formal modes, such as letters of petition, were more likely
to follow strict rules in terms of layout and organisation of the manuscript
page, and much slower to adopt changes and innovations, whereas familiar
letters were less hidebound by epistolary strictures. For example, while the
folio page continued as the dominant paper format for official correspond-
ence well into the seventeenth century, the half-sheet quarto was increas-
ingly utilised for more personal correspondence. Adoption of the material
protocols more broadly was thus rather uneven, with clear social and
generational distinctions. Indeed, several of the collections surveyed that
contain a broader social spectrum of letter-writer, including the Newquay

Right of Wreck letters, the Gawdy papers and the Charterhouse Hospital
begging letters addressed to Sir Thomas Sutton, exhibit letters with more
idiosyncratic and individualised material practices – in terms paper size
and quality, handwriting, orthography, quality of ink, layout and folding
conventions – than are found in other collections. Such material differences
became more commonplace over the course of the seventeenth century as
rising literacy levels led to the social proliferation of letter-writing activity,
and the survival of correspondence by groups who did not conform to elite
forms and practices. Moreover, materially speaking manuscript letters them-
selves are far from being transparent and stable texts. The ways in which
correspondence was composed, dispatched and read, a letter’s scribal status
as copy, draft or epistle that was sent are all factors influencing the ways in
which individual letters should be read.
5
Postal Conditions
This chapter examines the peculiarities of early modern postal conditions

in the period before the postal reforms of Charles I. It focuses on the under-
lying physical structures upon which postal networks rested, the differing
postal modes utilised, and the mechanics, practices and nature of dispatch.
Examination of these different aspects of letter delivery raises interesting
questions about the speed, efficiency, cost and ultimately the security of
postal arrangements. A fundamental argument underpinning the whole
book is that one of the distinctive features of letter-writing throughout the
period was the un-systematised, idiosyncratic character of the postal condi-
tions, which shaped the very nature of the letter. Charles I’s 1635 proclama-
tion for the ‘setling of the letter office of England and Scotland’ transformed
the epistolary medium, opening up the royal post to private mail. Hitherto,
royal postal networks were largely inaccessible for the majority of the popu-
lation who relied on more traditional forms of conveyance. ‘Private’ letters
were dispatched in an ad hoc manner: they were delivered by personal
servants, entrusted to merchants and chance travellers; conveyed by carri-
ers and foot-posts. Analysis of methods of delivery reveals the complexity
of postal arrangements, the degree to which postal modes overlapped and
interlocked. Official government correspondence could be sent by royal post
and through diplomatic and ambassadorial channels; state officials could
employ royal pursuivants, but also simultaneously utilised personal serv-
ants and carriers for other seemingly business-related correspondence. The
boundaries between state and personal or private mail are thus extremely
fluid. In practice correspondents used various methods for conveying cor-
respondence depending on timing, circumstance and urgency. Thus, Lord
President of Munster, Sir George Carew, in August 1602 informed Robert
Cecil ‘The last I wrote unto you was by a man of Sir Edward Wyngfeld’s,
called Bacon . . . The 13th of July and the 20th of the same I sent your
Honour two other pacquets, the one by a servant of my own, the other by
an ordinary passenger to Brystowe, from thence by the running post [royal
standing posts] to the Court’.1 While there were long-standing routes and
109
methods for carrying letters, for much of the period, England was peripheral
to well-established, universal and affordable public European postal struc-
tures, ‘since the royal posts of both Kingdoms were neither regularly main-
tained nor systematically open to the paying public’.2 The letter therefore
remained a deeply insecure medium, which had obvious consequences for
composition. Letter-writers were careful what they committed to paper, and
sought to preserve the integrity of their correspondence through sealing,
requests to burn missives and use of secret codes (see Chapter 6). Epistolary
privacy was often compromised and letter-bearers were integral to the proc-
ess of letter-writing, acting as corporeal extensions of letters themselves.
Recovering how official correspondence travelled is relatively straight-
forward. By studying postal legislation (proclamations, orders, ordinances
and Privy Council acts), the declared accounts of Masters of the Posts, lists
of extraordinary expenses, maps and pamphlets we can establish the main
national and international postal routes and methods by which letters and
packets were carried. Furthermore, historical geographers, such as Mark
Brayshay, have used postmasters’ account rolls and endorsements on letters
themselves (giving times of receipt at different stages of the letter’s journey)
to study ‘connectivity’ during the Elizabethan and Jacobean period, assess-
ing speeds of official communications which has ramifications for the power
of the state and debates on nationhood. Estimates hold that England was
three-and-a-half days long and four-and-a-half days across, at the level of
government communication.3 Postal markings were not used until 1661,
and prior to this date the only marks found were manuscript rate marks.4
The sources relating to postage below government and official levels are
more piecemeal, making it harder to establish the nature, speed and cost
of epistolary communications by ‘private’ letter. Details though can be
gleaned from chance references in letters themselves. Comparisons of dates
of composition with endorsements of receipt represent a rough-and-ready
way of calculating approximate delivery times. Household accounts and
disbursement books detail regular incidental payments for informal letter-
carriers. At the level of towns, corporations and other official bodies,
Receivers’ and Chamberlains’ accounts specify payments to individuals for
carriage of letters and other official documents within the local geographi-
cal area, and also record payments for carrying letters beyond the locality,
especially to London. The centrality of delivery to letter-writing, and the
anxiety it occasioned, means that letters themselves reveal much about the
nature of postal conditions. Indeed, almost all letter-writers discussed details
of posting. The identities of bearers are sometimes revealed, along with
their reliability and relationship to the sender. Letter-writers also frequently
mentioned enclosures, or goods and commodities carried by the bearer, and
whether recipients should expect an oral message. Mentions of delays in
posting, the loss and non-receipt of letters, the lack of trustworthy bearers to
convey correspondence, attitudes to the post, the protocols of dispatch, the
Postal Conditions 111
desire for secrecy or whether a letter was to be passed around are all everyday
features of early modern letters. The manner in which letters were addressed
elucidates the mechanics of delivery and ways in which spatial geography
was understood in the early modern period. Address leaves also often include
instructions for delivery, which flesh out local postal arrangements.
A reconstruction of the vagaries of early modern postal conditions –
replete with delays, losses and correspondence that crossed over in untimely
fashion – destabilises simplistic notions of letters as intrinsically private
documents or models of epistolarity as a closed two-way exchange of cor-
respondence. The intricacies of postal arrangements make it impossible to
speak in general terms of single postal transactions, in the sense of a sole
bearer conveying a letter to its ultimate destination. Individual letters often
passed through multiple hands as they moved through different stages jour-
neying from sender to recipient. Even official government correspondence
conveyed by royal ‘standing post’ was handed from one postmaster and post-
boy to another as it travelled through successive postal stages. Where letters
deviated from the main routes and postal nodes financed by the crown,
postal provisions were idiosyncratic and improvised, relying on foot-posts,
messengers, or bearers who connected with official ‘post-rooms’. The chapter
begins by considering the physical structures underlying postal activities: the
conditions of England’s network of roads and bridges, the nature of travel
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and perceptions and awareness
of the geography of the highways of the realm. It then sketches the main
methods of letter-delivery during the period: the royal ‘standing posts’, the
carriers, foot-posts, the Merchant Strangers’ post, and the more nebulous
practices of employing personal servants as bearers. Finally, it considers
issues relating to the nature of postal conditions and their impact on the cul-
ture and practices of letter-writing, examining problems associated with the
post, epistolary insecurity, the role of the bearer, reading habits and concep-
tions of ‘personal’ correspondence. Ultimately the chapter argues that the
years 1512 to 1635 represent a distinct period in epistolary history before the
democratisation of the letter form that followed Charles I’s postal reforms
and the advent of affordable, secure and regular mail delivery.5
Underlying structures: roads and travel
At the heart of any consideration of early modern postal conditions lies the
infrastructure underpinning communications during the period: the qual-
ity, condition and extent of the network of roads and bridges that served
the country; the nature of early modern road-carrying, and methods of and
technological developments in transportation; and the nature and ease of
travel by foot, horse, cart and wagon. Older historiography has been almost
overwhelmingly maudlin about the appalling conditions of early modern
roads.6 Literary accounts colourfully bemoaning the quality of the roads
abound and social commentators were likewise gloomy. William Harrison in

his Description of Britain (1577) described the ‘common highways’ with their
‘clay or cledgy soil’ as ‘deep and troublesome in the winter’.7 In practice,
the repairing of roads was a local responsibility, falling on the shoulders
of the parish, and with increased road usage during the sixteenth century
legislation was introduced in 1555 and 1562 to try to deal with repairs
and upkeep of road surfaces.8 Harrison though considered the statutes to
be ineffective, lamenting the ‘daily encroaching of the covetous upon the
highways’; without any systematic centralised government oversight road
repairs were uneven and patchy.9 The quality of roads was also geographi-
cally uneven: the narrowness of Westcountry and Welsh roads made them
often unsuitable for wheeled vehicles.10 On the surface this suggests rather
challenging postal conditions, especially in far flung parts of the realm and
during winter months.11 Yet in reality early modern English postal methods
although improvised were effective and extensive.
The un-redeemably negative contemporary views of the backwardness of
early modern transport and communications have been challenged in sev-
eral important ways. First, the medieval network of roads inherited by the
Tudors was far from decaying and inefficient for the needs of domestic trade
and travel. Indeed, medievalists have outlined the ‘extensive and highly
developed’ pre-existing network of well-used roads and bridges that threaded
their way throughout England and Wales and to the Northern borders with
Scotland, which remained adequate for the volume of traffic throughout the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.12 Secondly, economic historians, such
as J.A. Chartres, have persuasively argued that by the seventeenth century
road travel was adequate enough to support a ‘complex network of scheduled
public carrying services’ and a key dynamic in the development of trade. As
the quality of roads improved so too did the ‘postal system’.13 Furthermore,
the historical geographer Mark Brayshay has expertly demonstrated the
increase in road traffic during the late-Elizabethan and early-Stuart period as
growing numbers of travellers, performers, soldiers, carriers, drovers, traders,
peddlers, chapmen, post-boys, foot-posts, pursuivants and messengers jour-
neyed along the highways.14 Historians of news have likewise elucidated the
ways in which information and intelligence was transmitted by manuscript
newsletters and separates through the mechanics of postal networks in the
period before the development of the newspaper. Such studies further break
down notions of disconnected provincial pockets, challenging conceptions
of an insular ‘county community’.15 Cumulatively these studies indicate
a remarkably high level of inter-regional, inter-urban travel, as well as dense
and interlocking patterns of countrywide communication, and lay to rest
misconceptions about the impenetrability and isolation of particular pro-
vincial communities, cut off from wider contact by impassable roads and
treacherous travelling conditions. They suggest a significant degree of ‘con-
nectivity’ in Tudor and Stuart Britain, arguing for what Professor Brayshay
has aptly described as the ‘joined-up’ nature of the realm.16 This current
orthodoxy in thinking concerning the regularity and routine nature of early

modern travel and communications undergirds our understanding of postal
conditions during the period, which were geographically extensive, but nev-
ertheless for the majority of the population un-systematised.
The road network during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was
based largely on six main arterial roads that connected London with the
important towns and cities of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. These
were the Dover Road (or Kent Road), which led via Canterbury to Calais and
the continent; the Berwick (or Great North) Road, which led via Stamford
and York to Scotland; the Chester Road (via Holyhead) leading to Ireland;
the Western Road to Plymouth via Salisbury and Exeter; the Bristol Road to
the southwest; while the Yarmouth Road led to the east coast.17 Customary
‘post-stage’ towns were dotted at regular intervals (of between eight to
twenty miles) along these main routes. Travellers journeying long distances
could ordinarily hire post-horses along the route at a series of ‘posting
houses’ or ‘post-rooms’, which were usually based on inns with an attached
commercial livery stable.18 The horses were ridden between postal stages
and on reaching the next stage were returned to their starting point by an
accompanying guide or post-boy, whose services also had to be paid for.
In August 1585, it cost three pounds for one of the earl of Leicester’s servants
to ‘ride post to London’ from Kenilworth when his lordship lay there, dem-
onstrating the enormous expense of travelling or posting by this means.19
John Ellowe’s notes of the charges incurred by his master Sir Timothy
Hutton on his journey to London in 1605 indicate the relative expense of
travelling by this means. For Hutton, the trip from North Yorkshire to the
English capital involved around fourteen changes of horses and guides, and
took three days. Typical is the first day’s entry totalling 9s. 6d. paid ‘to the
post at Tadcaster For 5 horses 8 myle’, which included payment for a guide
and six d. for the post-boy.20 These ‘ordinary’ or ‘commercial’ posts were
in existence long before the postal reforms of the sixteenth century and
beyond, and in fact operated alongside royal ‘standing posts’ when they
were not absorbed into that network.
Familiarity with the country’s road networks and a spatial awareness of
the practicalities of communications (and how to have a letter delivered)
were widespread during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Road
books containing details of the country’s highways were widely published
in cheap print format well before Ogilly’s Pocket Book of Roads (1679), mean-
ing that knowledge of road networks was extensive.21 The first road book,
A Cronicle of Yeres was published in 1541 and reissued several times includ-
ing re-titled as A Breuiat Cronicle.22 It produced tables detailing nine principal
thoroughfares in England and Wales connecting to London, including from
Walsingham, Berwick and York, Carnarvon and Chester, Cockermouth and
Lancaster, Yarmouth and Colchester, Dover, Saint Bruien, Bristol, and finally
Saint David’s to London. These tables were copied by Richard Grafton and
included as ‘The high waies to London’ at the back of his Abridgement of the
Chronicles of Englande (1570). In his A Litle Treatise (1571) Grafton greatly

extended the number of roads adding routes to London from Southampton,
Nottingham, Lincoln, Boston, Cambridge, Oxford and Rye, and cross-
country routes including from Bristol to Cambridge and ‘from Southampton
to Hayleforde in Cornewall all along the sea coastes’.23 Roads were also
listed in Harrison’s Description of England, Stowe’s Summary of Chronicles and
Holinshed’s Chronicles. William Smith’s Particular Description of England sum-
marises ‘The High Wais from any notable towne in England to the cittie of
London, and lykewise from one notable towne to another’, and the main
postal towns that lay along the roads from London to Berwick, Holyhead
and Dover road were listed in a manuscript volume, An Account of the State
and Force of the Kingdom.24 Early modern almanacs often contained tables of
roads and distances, including William Middleton’s 1544 almanac, contain-
ing ‘the ways leading to the notable places and the distance between the
same’.25 Maps, atlases and cartographical books, such as John Norden’s Speculi
Britanniae pars the Description of Hartfordshire (1598), similarly increased spa-
tial awareness of the country and its roads.26 A copy of Christopher Saxton’s
Atlas of the Counties of England and Wales (1580), owned by Burghley was
annotated with routes and distances between towns.27
The traditional guide to wayfaring was the itinerary, simply a list of places
to be passed through on a journey, and this linear fashion of route naviga-
tion underpinned early modern travel literature, like Moryson’s Itinerary and
guides to travel.28 Several specialised publications detailed the distance and
journey times between major towns and cities, and acted as practical manu-
als for travellers. Richard Verstegan’s The Post of the VVorld provided trade
and traffic routes throughout Europe, including ‘Certaine vsed wayes and
passages in England’.29 More practical still was a single sheet published in
1600, under the self-explanatory title A Table of the cheiffest citties, and townes
in England, as they ly [sic] from London and the distance of miles, howe a man
may travill from London to any of them or from any of them to London. A more
comprehensive regional guide was produced in 1625 by John Norden,
England An intended Guyde, for English travailers Shewing in generall, how far one
citie, & many shire-townes in England, are distant, from other, which included
forty plates of triangular distance tables, including ‘A Table shewing the
distance betweene all the Cities and Shire Townes of England, that are com-
prehended in the same’, also available as a broadsheet (Figure 5.1).30 The
evidence of travel guides and travellers indicates widespread acquaintance
with the highways of the realm. While in many ways imperfect, the road
network that served England and connected it to other parts of the British
Isles was satisfactory for the amount of traffic (and the volume of epistolary
communications) that it carried during the sixteenth and early-seventeenth
centuries. Roads and the increasing numbers of travellers on them were cru-
cial to postal and communication networks. A letter from Gilbert Talbot to
his step-mother Bess of Hardwick, reported ‘Suche newes as on the Quenes
Figure 5.1 John Norden, A Table Shewing the Distances Betweene all the Cities and Shire Townes of England [1625]. Reproduced by permis-
sion of The British Library, London.
115
hye wayes we have mett’, illustrating the pivotal role of road networks in the
spread of news and information in manuscript, orally and in print.31
Royal ‘standing posts’
The royal postal network, as successive generations of postal historians32

have reminded us, was a Tudor invention, traditionally dated to 1512 when
Sir Brian Tuke assumed the role of Master of the Posts, although stand-
ing relays of postal horses were organised for a short period in 1481 by
Edward IV.33 An efficient and effective postal and communication network
was vital to the extension of Tudor power and the exercise of political author-
ity, diplomatic relations and intelligence gathering during the early modern
period. Tuke was appointed to organise a new countrywide postal system
(with emphasis on the London to Dover road, and the route via Calais into
Europe) along the lines of those already well established on the continent,
such as in France and throughout the Empire organised by the imperial
Postmaster General, Francis de Taxis.34 Under Tuke’s oversight all English
towns were required to maintain and hold post-horses on standby and to
provide guides for use by royal messengers who carried placards or warrants
of authorisation from the Privy Council. This would ensure royal ‘through
posts’ (messengers riding the entire journey) a supply of fresh horses at each
postal town. The cost of this was borne almost entirely by the town or cor-
poration rather than the state.35 Prior to these Henrician reforms traditional
patterns of royal posting can be traced back to the early-thirteenth century
and certainly existed in Henry VII’s reign, whereby liveried royal servants,
court messengers or pursuivants hired horses (at the King’s price of half the
commercial rate) at well-known stages along the chief roads of the realm.36
Yet this customary practice was often unreliable, costly and prone to delays.
Building on established networks, Tuke’s reforms were thus a comprehensive
attempt to guarantee the speedy passage of royal missives.
Reforms in subsequent years sought to extend and improve the network of
royal posts. What evolved over the course of the sixteenth century was a net-
work of royal ‘standing posts’ (referred to as ‘postmasters’ by the seventeenth
century, or simply as ‘posts’), relays of men and horses on standby to deliver
government communications.37 Much of what we know about the workings
and nature of this network for the Elizabethan and Jacobean period rests on
the ground-breaking scholarship of Mark Brayshay.38 In return for crown
salaries, postmasters along key English roads (chiefly the routes to Dover
and Berwick) were responsible for carrying the ‘packet’ (a parcel of official
letters or dispatches) between postal stages as required. For a period the posts
on the Dover Road conveyed the royal packet in return for payment ‘by the
packet’. By the end of the Elizabethan period, however, as the volume of offi-
cial correspondence snowballed and postage costs mounted, this piece-rate
system on the Dover route was replaced by the more cost effective payment
of flat-rate daily wages of around 20d, and this was the norm on all other
routes.39 Whether paid by the packet or a daily wages, postmasters were
always expected to furnish post-horses (at the cost of 1d per mile in 1574
and 1 1/2d in 1584)40 and guides (at the cost of one groat, or 4d.) for anyone
appointed by royal warrant to travel on the monarch’s ‘special service’. In
light of the fact that remunerations for standing posts remained low, those
running the post-rooms were granted an effective monopoly on the hiring
out of horses to other travellers, which further recompensed them for their
services. Limits were also placed on the weight carried by post-horses (no
more than 40lbs in addition to the rider), and horses were not to be ridden
beyond the next stage.41 Postal boats or barques were also maintained and
paid for at Holyhead and Padstow to transport correspondence across the sea
to Ireland, and others were hired on an extraordinary basis when needed.42
Over the course of the second half of the sixteenth to the middle of the
seventeenth century, the royal postal system underwent a series of changes
or postal milestones, as successive monarchs and Masters of the Post sought
to deal with the intractable problems of an increasingly expensive network
that functioned at a local level only through the co-operation of poorly paid
provincial postmasters. Financial expedients for reform thus ran alongside
military, security and intelligence considerations, as the state sought tighter
control over postal communications. Tudor and Stuart regimes sought to
reform by issuing, and reissuing and restating a series of orders or ordinances
touching the post. The first post-Henrician attempts to tighten up postal
procedures were outlined in ‘Orders set forth in Queen Mary’s reign’. These
ordained that every post between London and the borders of Scotland ‘shalbe
bounde to haue alwaies the number of vi horses at the least, twoe for the pac-
quett and iiii for goers and comers by poste’, for which ordinary posts would
be paid the sum of 2d. per horse for each mile travelled; that ‘noe man shall
ryde poste without a gyde’, who shall have a ‘post-horn’ which he shall ‘blowe
at the Townes end wher the poste is laid, and shalbe bounde to carye the
Currours male’. In cases where demand for horses outstripped supply, hack-
neymen appointed by ordinary posts would furnish the shortfall, and it was
stipulated that they could not refuse.43 The Marian Privy Council also ordered
that posts northwards ‘shulde eche of them kepe a booke and make entrye
therein of every lettre that he shall receyve, the tyme of delyverie thereof unto
his handes, with the parties names that shall bring it unto him’.44
The need for further reform was recognised by Thomas Randolph, who at
the outset of his tenure as Master of the Posts in 1566 outlined a series of
‘reasons to move her Matie that orders may be appointed and sett downe
for the redresse of many things concerning the Postes’.45 Further ordinances
were compiled in manuscript in 1566 and 1574, setting out regulations for
the standing posts, which included the punishment of post-boys caught
asleep on the job, instructions that the post-boy was not to ‘suffer anie
manne to looke in his bagge to see what letters there are’, and that the post
should have a horn or ‘ordinarie signe’ hanging over their door indicating
that it was a post house.46 The 1574 orders reinforced the right of posts to
hire extra horses as needed, although there were certain dispensations, such
as to Oxford University.47 Attempts were made to ensure that only legitimate
placards or warrants were accepted by posts. Thus, in February 1567 the Privy
Council sought to remedy the issuing of warrants to diverse noblemen and
gentlemen ‘travaileng in theire owne pryvat busines’; and in 1578 the Privy
Council ordered that ‘no letters of commission to ride in post should be writ-
ten’ unless ‘moved at the council table, or directed by the secretary’.48 Those
entitled to use the standing posts for her Majesty’s business included the
Lord Treasurer, Principal Secretary, the Privy Council, President of the North
or his deputy, the Lord Governor of Berwick, the Lord Wardens of the North
marches, ambassadors or agents for her Majesty in Scotland, the Warden of the
Cinque Ports, and the Master of the Posts.49 Local mayors, Lord Lieutenants
and their deputies could send replies utilising the standing posts.50
Throughout the Elizabethan period a marked attempt was made to tighten
up security and procedures, to deal with abuses of the system, and to ensure
the effective monitoring of government dispatches. A version of the earlier
Elizabethan orders was printed in January 1584 under the title ‘Orders set
down for the Postes between London and Scotland’ which decreed that
ordinary posts discharging their duties by deputy should be removed; that
any man riding in post by commission was not allowed to take his horses
of any man except the ordinary and standing posts; and decreed that ‘euery
post shall be bounde to keepe a faire paper booke wel bound, to register the
names of all men so riding in post’, and exempted posts from attendance
at assizes, sessions, inquests and musters. They also set minimum speeds for
post-horses to travel, decreeing that for the ‘expedition of letters sent in her
Maiesties affaires’ posts should guarantee minimum riding speeds of seven
miles an hour in the summer and five miles an hour in the winter, mean-
ing ‘the packet may be caried in sommer betweene London and Barwicke in
fortie two houres, and in winter in threescore’.51 These Privy Council orders
were further reinforced by articles written in the same year by Thomas
Randolph, in which he commanded ‘that euery post for the seruice of the
packet for her Maiesties affaires, shall haue in his stable, or in a readinesse
throughout the yeere, three good and sufficient post horses, with saddles
and furniture fitte and belonging. Three good and strong leather bagges
well lined with bayes or cotton, to carrie the packet in. And three hornes to
blowe’; that posts receiving the packet should take no longer than quarter
of an hour to ‘cause it to be carried to the next post’.52 In the 1590 Privy
Council orders ‘touchinge the postes established in this Realme’ (a draft ver-
sion of which survives with amendments in Burghley’s hand) decreed that
‘every post shall kepe a Booke of v. or vi. quyre of paper’ to register receipt of
letters and packets’, a copy of which should be sent monthly to the Master
of the Posts.53
In 1608, James I ‘revived, renewed and published’ earlier postal directives

by printing Orders for the Postes, which was reprinted in 1621, the year of the
outbreak of the Thirty Years War that also witnessed the printing of Orders
Decreed Vpon for the Furtherance of Our Seruice, Asvvell in VVriting, as Riding
in Poste. In practice though, these did little more than merely restate the
details of the previous regime’s orders. At the outset of his reign though,
the new monarch had sought to deal with abuses of the system by those
who ‘pretend publique seruice by speciall commission’. In Orders for Thorow
Posts, and Curriers, Riding in Post in Our Affaires (first printed in 1604 and
then reprinted in 1621), he sought to reinforce the posts’ monopoly of hir-
ing out horses, allowing them to charge 2 1/2d. a mile for those ‘riding in
publicke affaires’, and that for ‘all others riding post with horne and Guide,
about their priuate businesses, the hire and prices are let to the parties dis-
cretions to agree and compound within themselues’. Efforts were also made
to maintain good postal connections between England and Scotland by
adding extra postal stages, in an attempt to integrate networks on both sides
of the border, and in July 1615 Sir William Seton applied to the Council in
Scotland to establish and superintend a postal service in Scotland; the next
year he was appointed Master of the Posts in Scotland.54
From the Elizabethan period onwards, there was a concerted effort to con-
trol official post delivered overseas, in order to prevent the interception of
state secrets and for the prosperity of trade. In 1585 orders were printed by
Lord Cobham, Warden of the Cinque Ports concerning posts established in
Kent, which sought to control all strangers coming into the realm by requir-
ing them to take horses from stage to stage at the hands of standing posts
only, and at the rate of 2s. 6d. per horse. These restrictions also applied to
the merchants of Flanders and France.55 In 1591 in the wake of religious and
political turmoil another proclamation was issued by the Queen this time
seeking to control those letters coming into and out of the country ‘by pro-
hibiting that no persons whatsoeuer, should take vpon them publiquely or
priuately to procure, gather vp, receiue, bring in, or cary out, any packets or
letters to or from the countreys beyond the Seas, except such our ordinarie
posts and messengers for thos parties’.56 This was reprinted virtually unal-
tered in 1609, when James I sought to reinforce the sundry orders and gen-
eral directions for matters of posting put forward by the Elizabethan Privy
Council, and was extended to Ireland in 1619.57 The impact of Elizabeth’s
1591 proclamation effectively prohibited the long-standing Merchant
Strangers post, organised by foreign merchants in England, which delivered
mail overseas.58 Yet in practice it appears that this covered carriage of mail
inland to and from Dover, rather than overseas. Usual practice was for sec-
retaries of state or the Master of the Posts to appoint special messengers to
transport letters ‘unto foreign parts’, which continued in ‘a casual and unde-
veloped way’ to the beginning of the seventeenth century, in contrast with
more sophisticated services available on the continent.59 It was widely felt
that further organisation of the transmission of foreign letters was needed,

and in 1619 a separate office of Postmaster of England for Foreign Parts
was created, held jointly by Matthew de Quester and his son. This formally
acknowledged the role he had played since 1606 in overseeing transmission
of mail overseas.60 In 1632 William Frizell and Thomas Witherings were
confirmed in the Office of Postmaster of England for Foreign parts, assum-
ing joint responsibility for ‘taking up, sending and conueying of all packets
and letters concerning’ the King’s service into foreign parts, in order that
‘the secrets thereof bee not disclosed to foreigne nations’.61
While the royal post could be somewhat idiosyncratic, there was never-
theless a marked expansion in the network of postal routes between the
1560s and the first decade of James I’s reign by which point Brayshay argues
that there were ‘scarcely any localities in England more than twenty or
thirty miles from a royal standing post’.62 The network of standing posts
on the royal payroll can be calculated from the accounts of the Masters and
Controllers of the Posts, which were prepared periodically for submission to
the Treasury.63 In 1500 there were no standing posts in royal service, but by
the mid-sixteenth century the key routes to Dover and Berwick were set up,
and in the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign routes were established connect-
ing London to Holyhead, Portsmouth, Plymouth and Bristol.64 Furthermore,
by the end of the sixteenth century the use of court messengers (or royal
‘through posts’ who rode the entire journey) for official correspondence –
a feature of early Tudor postal communications and the preferred mode
of delivery early in Elizabeth’s reign – declined as the volume of mail out-
stripped capacity.65 The royal postal network underwent significant change
during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, yet its development was not
entirely linear, but marked by expansion and contraction of coverage across
the realm. For much of the period the network of royally funded ‘stand-
ing posts’ was essentially ‘flexible and fluid’, responding to governmental
needs, which varied largely according to military demands and domestic
security. Posts were laid along vital routes for time-specific periods as occa-
sion required, and then discharged again as circumstances changed or as
crises passed.66
Throughout much of the Elizabethan period though it was only the
postmasters on the London to Dover and London to Berwick route towards
Scotland whose services were permanently engaged. Those on other roads
were employed on an occasional, temporary basis when circumstances
served.67 Royal post-horse routes to Ireland established to aid speedy com-
munications during the O’Neill rebellions were dismissed in December
1565 on the advice of the Lord Deputy, but renewed during subsequent
rebellions in 1579 and 1595, and in 1600 when the Spanish landed in
Kinsale.68 Indeed, throughout the period, postal communications between
London and the Lord Deputy in Ireland were vital. Thus in July 1578 Robert
Gascoigne, Postmaster of the Court, received a warrant ‘to lay thoroughe
postes betweene London & hollihead towardes Ireland’.69 At times when

standing posts were not laid, the route still existed, but neither the avail-
ability of the horses could be guaranteed, although purveyance rates (that
is, half price) could be demanded by ‘official’ travellers presenting a placard
whether or not there was a route laid. Special postal arrangements were
made on an ad hoc basis during times of emergency and crisis, or when the
regular royal post service was not available.
During royal progresses it was the responsibility of the Post of the Court to
lay extraordinary posts in order that the monarch might regularly be kept in
touch with Whitehall, although peripatetic monarchy of this nature further
complicated decision-making and the business of government.70 In the sum-
mer of 1578 when Elizabeth went on progress from Greenwich to Norfolk
arrangements were set up to facilitate speedy and efficient communication
between the Queen and her councillors.71 Extraordinary posts were laid for
James I’s progress of 1612 to Nottinghamshire and during his periods of
progress and hunting, and in 1614 and 1620 for the King’s progress into
Northern and Western parts. Similar arrangements were put in place for
Charles I.72 Temporary extraordinary posts of this nature illustrate the flex-
ibility of early modern royal postal arrangements, which compensated for
the geographical limitations of the ordinary post-road network.73
The speed of royal post-horse delivery can be estimated by using postmas-
ters’ endorsements on the outside of letters. At each stage of a posts’ journey
postmasters were expected to write the time and date of its arrival on the
outside of individual letters or on the wrappers or outer coverings of packets
or parcels of letters – the wrappings were thrown away, since their purpose
was to protect the letters as they were passed from one post-boy to another.
Indeed, ‘orders for posts betwixt London and Berwick’ in 1582 decreed
that every postmaster receiving packets of letters from Walsingham or the
Privy Council for her majesty’s affairs ‘shall vnto a labell annexed to the
said pacquett subscribe theire name daye and howre, testifying the receipte
of every packett or lres that shall come to their hands’.74 Several hundred
examples, however, have survived of individual letters being signed in this
manner which (although imperfect as accurate measures) can be utilised to
map postal times across the realm. A letter to Robert Cecil from the Mayor
of Bristol enclosing a packet from Ireland was endorsed at each stage as it
journeyed from Bristol at nine in the evening on 16 September 1601, arriv-
ing in Marshfield at quarter to eleven, Calne at four in the morning the next
day, Marlborough at quarter past seven and Newbury at quarter past ten.75
Averaging a speed of five miles an hour, the letter took just over thirteen
hours to travel around 66 miles. Others letters were endorsed solely with the
time of delivery. A letter from John Boxoll received by William Cecil was
endorsed ‘Delyuered at St James at nyne of the clock in the night the xixth
of nouember 1558’.76 Endorsements can be supplemented by one surviving
postmaster’s ledger, that of John Rigges, Her Majesty’s Post at Huntingdon,
which covers August 1585 and notes the date, time and number of packets
or letters received, the sender, origin, date and time of sending, as well as
the intended recipient. During this month Rigge handled some 70 items
often receiving several separate deliveries in one day, and at random times
throughout the day and night.77 Using this kind of serial data, giving
minimum, maximum and mean journey times, scholars have examined the
efficiency of early modern postal conditions and the speed of road travel
between London and provincial towns and cities.78 Naturally speeds of
delivery varied geographically, and there were distinct spatial variations in
‘core-periphery connectivity’. Those located on or close to the main arte-
rial roads of England were better served than those in more remote loca-
tions. While the dispatch of government communications from London to
Reading could be completed within six hours, St Albans in three and Dover
in ten, letters travelling from London to Exeter could take up to 100 hours,
and those from London to Ashburton and Plymouth up to almost 121 and
136 hours.79 Regional differences aside, this evidence argues for the effec-
tiveness of state level communications, demonstrating that they were rela-
tively quicker and farther reaching than previously thought.
While we have a good picture of the main post-horse routes and network
of post-rooms at regular intervals along the main highways, less clear is
what happened to items of correspondence once they reached these main
postal nodes, and needed to travel further off the main highways and into
the local hinterland. Occasionally formal orders were issued to facilitate
secure onward delivery. In 1618 John Stanhope ordered JPs to aid John
King, Postmaster of Southwark, in delivery of letters within ‘six miles
round’.80 Surplus payments might be made to posts making extra journeys
in order to deliver letters beyond the immediate vicinity of the post-room,
as is evidenced by the earl of Leicester’s household accounts: 5s. were given
‘to Gaskyng’s man the post master for bringe leatters from Mr Secretery to
Wansted to your lordship the same daye’.81 Improvised local arrangements
were commonly made to ensure delivery: foot-posts, messengers and serv-
ants were paid to carry letters from post-rooms to local residences or nearby
addressees. Private letter carriage of this kind could be costly, and was calcu-
lated according to weight and distance. Borough records detail payments to
local men who carried letters on the orders of the mayors and corporations.
The Borough of Plymouth’s foot-post Nicholas Lane during the 1580s and
1590s ran on foot to Sir Francis Godolphin’s home in Cornwall with council
letters.82 The Corporation of Exeter made extraordinary payments of 2s. for
‘portage of Letters from the Erle of Bathe to Sir Thomas Dynis by Mr Maiors
orders’, and 2s. 9d. for ‘carriage of a letter to dartmouth wch cam from the
court’.83
For other towns and cities not situated along the chief postal roads
similar ad hoc arrangements were made for the onward journey of letters.
During the Elizabethan period the city of Bath was not a ‘stage’ along ‘the
Bristol road’, which travelled through Marlborough, Chippenham and

Marshfield. Official communications to the Corporation of Bath were there-
fore unloaded at Marshfield, whose postmaster forwarded mail by foot-post
to Bath, a journey that could take upwards of three hours. The corporation
itself hired private messengers for the delivery of its own correspondence
and documents, and in 1587 and 1588 paid John Macey ‘for carrying a letter
to answer Mr Attorney’ and Thomas Gregory ‘for carrying a letter to Mr Ashe
[the city’s recorder].’84 Likewise, the Mayor and Aldermen of Barnstaple,
a Devonshire town off the main royal postal route sought to establish a
weekly foot-post to Exeter, in order to deliver and collect letters at a charge
of 6d. for a single letter, 8d. for a double, and to connect with posts from
London.85 These extraordinary postal arrangements indicate the degree
to which private enterprise extended the reach of the royal post network,
well beyond main arterial roads into relatively remote parts of the realm.86
Moreover, it demonstrates the important role of connective figures, such as
foot-posts and local messengers, in the workings of postal communications
at regional levels.
Periods of crisis occasioned further special postal arrangements at a local
level. During the tense years of 1587 to 1588, the town of Plymouth hired
spy boats to sight the Spanish fleet, payments for which are recorded in the
Receiver’s Accounts. News of Spanish vessels was then reported to Devon’s
Lord Lieutenant, the earl of Bath, and his deputies by local post-horse mes-
sengers and other riders hired in an ad hoc basis.87 In 1588, with threat-
ened Spanish invasion, effective communications with local militias were
paramount, and Lord-lieutenants were instructed ‘that there be a foote poste
appoynted in every parish within the shire, whose dwellinge should be cho-
sen, neere unto the churche, and a horse poste, in every market towne’.88
A letter sent from Plymouth in 1601 by one deputy lieutenant, William
Strode to another, Edward Seymour, endorsed ‘for her majesty’s special
service’ was to be conveyed ‘from pa[ri]sh to p[ar]ish by the cunstables or
other officers wth speed to be convayed’, with ‘haste, haste, post, haste’.89
Likewise, in August 1620, the earl of Bath and deputy lieutenants of Devon
ordered that two or three fit men were to be appointed in every parish by the
constables to be foot-posts for the conveyance of letters on all occasions.90
Within the localities then local elites relied on a dense web of informal postal
networks, that operated alongside official standing posts, and through which
they issued instructions, gleaned news and communicated with each other.
At a national level, however, the most significant postal reforms occurred
during Charles I’s reign with a proclamation of 1635, which officially
opened the royal postal service to private individuals ‘for the aduancement
of all his Maiesties Subiects in the Trade and correspondence’ (Figure 5.2).91
Thomas Witherings, Master of Foreign Posts was appointed to the new
office of Postmaster General, and it was his proposals earlier that year in
June submitted to Secretary Coke under the title ‘A Proposition for setling
124
Figure 5.2 By the King, A Proclamation for the Setling of the Letter Office of England and
Scotland (1635). Reproduced by permission of The British Library, London.
125
of Staffeto or pacquet post betwixt London and all parts of his Maiesties
dominions for the carrying and recaryying of his subiects lres’ that formed
the basis of the proclamation. Radical reforms of this sort were nothing new:
John Stanhope had drafted ‘Orders for a Letter office for missives within the
Land’, dated circa 1620, which proposed extending the reach of the postal
service, allowing delivery of private mail, thus making it more financially
sound.92 According to the 1635 proclamation ‘running posts’ operating
night and day were to be set up on the main arterial postal roads, connect-
ing London with Edinburgh (‘to goe thither and come backe againe in sixe
dayes’); Westchester, Holyhead ‘and from thence to Ireland’; Plymouth and
Exeter; Oxford and Bristol; and Colchester and Norwich. Letters were to be
delivered at post-towns along the roads, left at post-houses or other houses
deemed convenient; and by-posts were ‘to be placed at seuerall places along
the said roade’. The motivations behind these reforms were largely financial,
to cover the increasing burden of governmental mail. The cost of delivery
for ‘carrying and recarrying’ letters along the North or Berwick road to
Scotland and the Chester road to Holyhead and Ireland was to be 2d. for a
single letter under eighty miles, 4d. for a letter travelling between 80 and
140 miles, 6d. above 140 miles, and 8d. for letters delivered to Scotland
and the Borders. Packets of letters were more costly, and were to be charged
‘according to the bignesse of the said packet, after the rate as before’. For
letters delivered along the Western road to Plymouth, Witherings was ‘to
take the like port that now is paid as neere as possibly he can’, while routes
to Bristol and Norwich were to be settled ‘as soon as possibly may be’.
Postmasters were to make horses available on days required by the royal post
service ‘to carry such messengers with the portmantles’, and were to be paid
2 1/2d. per mile for one horse, and 5d. a mile for the use of two horses. The
proclamation also sought to establish a state monopoly on the carrying of
mail, with certain key exceptions:
from the beginning of this seruice or imployment, no other messenger or

messengers, foot-post or foot-posts, shall take vp, carry, receiue, or deliuer
any Letter or Letters whatsoeuer, other then the messengers appointed
by the said Thomas Witherings to any such place or places as the said
Thomas Witherings shall settle the conueyances, as aforesaid. Except
common known carryers, or a particular messenger, to be sent of purpose
with a Letter by any man for his owne occasions, or a Letter by a friend.
Local officials were charged to aid and assist Witherings, and ‘a seuere exem-
plary punishment was to be inflicted upon delinquents’.
These Caroline changes to the royal post were revolutionary in the sense
that they made official the carrying of ‘private mail’, however, there is evi-
dence that from the second half of Elizabeth’s reign standing posts carried
ordinary correspondence or ‘bye letters’ alongside official missives. Indeed,
Thomas Randolph’s 1584 articles hint at this in decreeing ‘that no Postes

seruant or boy ryding with the packet, shall deliuer any by letteres or pri-
uate packets, before he haue first discharged himselfe of the packet for Her
Maiesties affaires by deliuering the same unto the hands of the next standing
Post. Unto whom also he shall commit and deliuer all the by letters and pri-
uate packets’.93 In November 1583 Randolph himself drew up a list of ‘names
of such as do daily and ordinarily charge the postes with their priuate letters
and commissions for id the myle’, which included the earl of Shrewsbury,
the Archbishop of York, the Bishop of Durham and the Earl of Huntingdon.94
This was not a moratorium on carrying private mail, but insistence that it
should not interfere with delivery of official packets. Evidence of household
accounts also illustrates the payment to posts for carrying private corre-
spondence: Margaret Spencer (d.1613) paid 6d. ‘for [a] ler sentt to London
by the post att maydston’.95 Furthermore, in 1629 almost a decade before
Charles’ proclamation, official sanction was given for the carrying of private
letters on the road from London to Plymouth.96 In other instances, individu-
als established their own private standing posts to carry mail on routes and
into areas not covered by royal arrangements.97 From around 1625, Samuel
Jude, a London tradesman, ran a private post business carrying private pack-
ets (largely it appears merchants’ letters) between Plymouth and London,
a service about which the posts of the Western stages complained to the
council.98 The ease with which post-horses could be hired suggests that this
kind of private enterprise might have been much more widespread.
Nevertheless for much of the period the network of royal standing posts
was restricted geographically, hampered by bureaucratic inefficiencies,
neglect and corruption at a local level. Complaints of delays, the intercep-
tion, loss or theft of mail were rife, and several Masters of the Post became
embroiled in protracted litigation over jurisdiction.99 Governmental dis-
patches and packets were frequently lost, which was of great concern to offi-
cials involved. In July 1577, Anthony Powell and one William Liggon were
set upon and wounded, travelling on the highway at or near Worcester, and
the letters they were carrying from the council to the council in the Marches
of Wales were intercepted and taken. In 1627 Francis Harpar, the postmas-
ter of Hounslow, was questioned over a packet that was lost, supposedly
pushed under his gate at night by a footman when he and his family were
in bed.100 In 1625 Sir James Bagg, the Plymouth-based naval administrator
complained to Secretary Conway of the slowness of the posts and their
‘miscarriage of letters’.101 Posts themselves complained of the insufficiency
and occasionally non-payment of their salaries. Richard Swynshead, the
post of Ware petitioned Burghley for his wages for the last three-quarters of
a year, complaining ‘letters and packets come so fast . . . at the least 34 times
every month, and the charges so great, that, without payment’ he would be
unable to continue in service.102 There is evidence throughout the period
suggesting that the network of standing posts was under strain. In 1578
the inhabitants of the town of Grantham petitioned the Council over the
intolerable burden imposed by the increased practice of taking horses to ride
post. The previous year they claimed to have provided 473 post-horses in
addition to those required for the standing post.103 Posts also complained of
physical and verbal abuse, and that horses were mistreated and over-ridden
carrying too heavy a load. The Mayor of Guildford petitioned Walsingham
requesting that a certain poor man be paid for a gelding which was killed
by Mr Wynckfeld when he fell with the horse riding in post from Guildford
to Kingston: ‘in some furye’ Wynckfeld ‘thrust his dagger into the saide
geldinge . . . beate the saide guyde threateninge to kill him’.104 Countless
investigations were made into the inadequacies of the post, including
inquiries in 1583 and 1623 into sundry ‘disorders’ of the posts.105 Inquiries
of this nature evidence reforming impulses, but also demonstrate the inef-
fectiveness of generations of reforms.
Moreover, throughout the period there were widespread complaints about
the inefficiencies and cumbersome nature of governmental posts, which
undercuts further any analysis of the effectiveness of the royal network
of standing posts. In particular posts to Scotland and the North appear to
have been notoriously slow. Writing in 1543 John Dudley, Lord Lisle com-
plained to the Council that posts between London and Scotland ‘begin to
slack their diligence’: a letter dated at Westminster, Friday, 22 December at
5 p.m. took almost a week to arrive in Edinburgh, and a servant who met
the packet coming from Carlisle, claimed he found the post on foot leading
his horse although the packet declared ‘haste for thy life’.106 Sir Ralph Sadler
complained to Walsingham ‘I haue fownde the posts by the waye somwhat
slacke. I think they measher their paces according to the dyu[er]syties of the
Indorcements of the packetts.’107 Sir Henry Wodrington compiled a series
of articles of charges of negligence in the transmission of a dispatch from
Berwick to London, outlining the times taken at each stage of the jour-
ney.108 Sir Thomas Gorges complained to Robert Cecil that he had arrived
in Exeter at night, and demanded post-horses from the Mayor, John Davy,
but received none until 9 o’clock the next day, and then only such as were
suitable for carrying wood and unfit for haste.109 Thus, the relatively rapid
delivery times evidenced by local postmasters’ endorsements need to be
considered alongside this more negative evidence. Furthermore, the royal
post only applied to official correspondence at the highest governmental
level. While there is some evidence for the unofficial carriage of private
letters, for most ordinary people prior to 1635 they had to rely upon the
network of carriers to convey their correspondence.
The carrier network
At a time when the royal post was not intended for carrying private letters,
the cheapest and most accessible (yet slower) option for the majority of
people was to have their correspondence conveyed by a convenient car-

rier, an individual paid to carry goods, packages and letters.110 While there
was no nationally organised system, throughout the period there existed
a relatively widespread network of carriers both commercial and private.
Common carriers (often licensed) travelled the arterial routes of the country
in and out of London on a frequent and fairly regularised basis, though
carrier services were patchy and uneven, inefficient and at times unreliable.
Similar firms operated on a more regional basis, linking with national car-
rier routes, and town porters ferried deliveries locally once they had reached
a given central destination or entrepôt. In addition, private local carriers,
often simply men with handcarts, worked on an ad hoc basis; others could
be commissioned to take longer journeys on foot or horseback and even
individuals travelling in the right direction might be hired to deliver letters,
though they were likely to be more expensive.111 Ordinary common carriers
because of the volume of business undertaken would simply hand letters to
a porter at London, or drop letters at an Inn to be picked up there; however,
private carriers hired for a single delivery would present letters directly to
the addressee. Common carriers could achieve sizeable operations. Indeed,
the famous Cambridge carrier Thomas Hobson (1545–1631) used carts for
transportation and later wagons drawn by six or seven horses; he employed
servants for the driving rather than himself, and acquired a sizeable land-
holding.112 In 1632, the Norwich carriers were sizeable enough to employ
special letter carriers who operated separately and more speedily than the
waggons.113
Various family letter collections (including the Gawdys of Norfolk and
the Herricks of Leicestershire) detail the important role of the carriers in
maintaining communications and keeping families in contact. During the
early-seventeenth century, the Cambridge carriers kept the various sons
of Framlingham Gawdy in touch with parents, siblings and other rela-
tives based in London and Norfolk.114 In a letter written from his study in
Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, William Gawdy asked his father
‘I pray you let mee receive your letter the next weeke by the Cambridge
carrier’.115 Meanwhile, the Leicester carrier proved an invaluable way for
the ironmonger John Herrick and his wife Mary to keep in touch with their
children and their families who had moved to London, enabling them to
maintain regular correspondence, to send gifts of clothing and food, and to
receive from the children books and commodities afforded by the capital
where some of their sons were apprenticed and later worked.116 Carriers
were a key component in the connectivity of the realm, transporting not
only goods and letters, but also news in oral form gathered along the high-
ways and disseminated in inns and taverns.117 Carriers according to John
Earle’s Micro-cosmographie were ‘the ordinarie Embassador betweene Friend
and Friend’, a conduit of news ‘hee takes the sound out of your mouth at
Yorke, and make it bee heard as farre as London’.118 Philip Gawdy sent to
the carriers ‘to vnderstand if’ he ‘might have had some intelligence from
some good body at’ his Norfolk family home in ‘Harling’.119 Additionally,
men and women travelled with the carriers, either by walking alongside for
safety, renting a horse or sitting in the wagon. The Stratford carrier Richard
Greenaway charged 5s. to hire a horse for the journey between Stratford and
London; and the Oxford carrier was contracted to keep a dozen horses for
use by scholars at the cost of 6d. per day.120 In the 1630s Roger Harvey’s sis-
ter travelled to London with the carrier, unaccompanied by her husband.121
Nonetheless, social prejudices surrounded this form of travel: according the
Fynes Moryson’s Itinerary (1617):
Carryers haue long couered Waggons, in which they carry passengers

from City to City: but this kind of iournying is so tedious, by reason they
must take waggon very earely, and come very: late to their Innes, as none
but women and people of inferiour condition, or strangers (as Flemmings
with their wiues and seruants) vse to trauell in this sort.122
The most detailed guide to carrier services of the period is John Taylor’s
The Carriers Cosmographie (1637) which provides the routes and terminus
points of over 200 carriers and waggoners operating in and out of London,
details of foot-posts serving the capital, and ‘directions for to find out Ships,
Barkes, Hoyghs, and Passage Boats, that doe come to London from the
most parts and places by sea’.123 Although strictly published after the 1635
reforms to the royal post, the pamphlet reflects practices already well estab-
lished.124 Its main intention as outlined in the sub-title was to provide:
A Briefe Relation, of The Innes, Ordinaries, Hosteries, and other lodgings

in, and neere London, where the Carriers, Waggons, Foote-posts and
Higglers, doe usually come, from any parts, townes, shires and countries,
of the Kingdomes of England, Principality of Wales, as also from the
Kingdomes of Scotland and Ireland. With nomination of what daies of
the weeke they doe come to London, and on what daies they returne,
whereby all sortes of people may finde direction how to receiue, or send,
good or letters, unto such places as their occasions may require.
Entries were organised alphabetically by regional place-name, giving the

location of where individual carriers lodged or transacted business at the
London end of their operations. For example, ‘The Carriers of Blanvile in
Dorcestshire, doe lodge at the chequer neere Charing crosse, they doe come
thither every second thursday’; ‘The Carriers of Redding in Barkeshire doe
lodge at the George in Breadstreet, they are there on thursdaies and frid-
aies’. There was less certainty with others, ‘The Carriers from Rutland, and
Rutlandshire, and other parts of Yorkeshire’ for example ‘do lodge at the
Ram in Smithfield, they come weekly, but their daies of Comming is not
certaine’.125 Some carriers made several journeys a week, others travelled

once a fortnight, meaning carrier services were uneven throughout differ-
ent regions of the country. J.A. Chartres used Taylor’s Cosmographie to esti-
mate the regional share of the London carrying trade. The regions nearest
London, the Northern Home Counties and the South East accounted for
over one third (38.1 per cent) of carrier journeys, with 71.5 and 32 weekly
services respectively. The East Midlands and the South and West had 45 and
49.5 journeys (34.7 per cent of the national total), while East Anglia had
12.5 journeys (4.6 per cent), West Midlands, 15.5 (5.7 per cent), South West,
19 (7 per cent), Lancashire and Cheshire, 13.5 (5 per cent) and Yorkshire and
Lincolnshire, 11.75 journeys (4.3 per cent of the national total). Peripheral
regions predictably were less well served by the capital’s carrier services, with
the far north of England apparently without a carrying service to London,
only two trips to Wales, and a weekly post to Edinburgh.126 By Taylor’s own
admission his work is only a partial survey, and therefore probably underes-
timates the extent of carrier activity for the period.127 The collection is also
London-centric and tells us nothing about inter-regional and other local
carrier services that operated separately from traffic connected to the capital.
Carriers operating from Oxford to Winchester and to Newcastle are the first
recorded common carriers in 1394–5, and carriers operating from Bristol to
Exeter and to Buckingham are recorded from the late-fifteenth century.128
Similarly, local brokage accounts indicate a significant traffic of carriers to
Southampton from local towns and places further afield such as London,
Manchester, Gloucester and Yeovil during the mid-fifteenth century, and
well into the sixteenth century Westmorland pack-horse men regularly trav-
elled to and from Southampton carrying woollen cloths.129
Despite its imperfections, Taylor’s pamphlet depicts a regular and rela-
tively frequent network of carriers routed via London. It also illustrates the
main features of the carrier service, with the hub of activity based in inns
around the capital. If a given carrier changed location of operation he could
be tracked down through local knowledge: ‘by the learned intelligence of
some other Carrier, an hostler, or an understanding Porter’.130 Carriers trav-
elling particular routes made a series of deliveries on their way, stopping at
towns and places not named in the guide, where local carriers or posts would
undertake transportation to onward destinations: ‘if a Carrier of Yorke hath
a letter or goods to deliver at any towne in his way thither, he serves the
turne well enough, and there are carriers and messengers from Yorke to carry
such goods and letters as are to be past any waies north, broad and wide as
farre or further than Barwicke . . . the carriers or posts that goe to Exeter may
send daily to Plimouth, or to the Mount in Cornewall’.131 Letters travelling
regionally from London would thus be dropped off in particular inns in the
capital connected with the correct regional carriers; letters coming from the
provinces to London would be collected at inns; while for letters delivered
around the country various arrangements of a semi-regular or improvised
nature were made. In short, the carrier service was rather an idiosyncratic
and ad hoc affair, with a multitude of localised variations. The Cambridge
to Norfolk carrier in the early 1630s, for example, was persuaded by William
Gawdy to stop off at Harling, Norfolk where his father Framlingham Gawdy
resided ‘at his returne from Norwich to Cambridge’.132 Many of the letters
of the Oxinden family contained detailed instructions for delivery on the
outside of letters, revealing the successive stages of posting that letters were
required to undergo before reaching their final destination. James Oxinden’s
letter to his brother Henry of the 1 April 1634 sent from St John’s College,
Cambridge asked the carrier to ‘Leaue this at ye swan with 2 neckes in
Billingsgate with Sheapard ye Canterbury foote poste to be deliuered to
ye before saide Billingsgate’ from where presumably it would be delivered
to his house in Barham, Kent.133 Writing to his father Gilbert Mason in
Wigan, the London based apprentice Matthew Mason used William Hyton
‘a comon carryer betweene Lancashire and London’ to undertake the car-
rying of the letter, who in turn ‘had a lre delivered vnto him by a Porter to
bee delivered in Wigan’.134 For personal letters, the carriers often delivered
letters to their final destinations. The detailed household account book that
the Oxfordshire-based Mary Petway kept between 1628 and 1631 on behalf
of her master Sir William Pope recorded payment of 6d. on 15 December
1629 to the man of Thomas Banks, the local carrier for bringing a letter.135
However, recipients or servants probably also checked at the terminus inns
of carriers from the place where a sender resided.
The Carriers Cosmographie thus provided Londoners in the mid-seventeenth
century a ready-made guide to finding carrier services throughout the capital
for sending letters to different parts of the country. Nevertheless even before
its publication letter-writers were well aware of the intricacies of carrier serv-
ices and had a sense of the spatial geography of the capital. Thus, Thomas
Croft wrote in October 1580 to his brother-in-law George Mydlemore, a
letter addressed to him ‘at the singe of the Bushope in Fleate Streate’, ask-
ing him to send the enclosed letters ‘to the signe of the castle in woode
streate to be delivered to the carier of Ludlowe, whom you shall finde there
every weake from Thursday ii of the clocke vntell saterday xii of the clocke,
and also to expecte there an answer’.136 Writing some two decades later,
Dudley Carleton informed John Chamberlain that Woodhouse ‘the carrier
of Huntercomb dothe make his stay at the George in Bredstreet . . . his day
wednesday both of his going up and retorne’.137 Women were also knowl-
edgeable of the practicalities of the carriers: Elizabeth Dacre was asked by her
father’s servant to send an answer to his letter by the carrier of Carlisle.138
Ann Temple sent a letter of family news to her daughter Ann Busbridge at
Haremare by one Apps the carrier at The Spur in Southwark.139
The mid-sixteenth century onwards witnessed a marked expansion in the
geographical scope of areas where carriers were able to deliver letters and
parcels. Indeed, Chartres estimates a three- or four-fold increase in road
transport industry during this period, with an expansion of carting and

marketing facilities. The large wagon or wain supplemented small carts, per-
mitting carriers to operate over greater distances, and the number of firms
of carriers grew as a result of increased access to credit facilities.140 According
to John Stow writing in 1605, wagons were first seen in London around
the middle of the sixteenth century, replacing the use of carts: ‘About that
time, began long waggons to come into vse, such as now come to London
from Canterbury, Norwich, Ipswich, Gloucester etc. with passengers, and
commodities’.141 Certainly by the 1630s the carrier network was relatively
complex, but this form of road carriage was at least medieval in origins con-
nected with the growth of trade, marketing and fairs; the main towns and
cities licensed carriers they deemed trustworthy to transport goods within
their jurisdiction.142 The delivery of letters naturally developed on the back
of this system of transportation of goods connected to the growth of towns,
the development of the cloth industry and the increasing centralisation of
government from the late-fifteenth century onwards. Carriers travelling
along particular routes often also conveyed letters and parcels, which acted
as one of the only ways in which ‘ordinary’ people could have letters deliv-
ered.143 During the fifteenth century the Pastons used the local Norfolk to
London carrier for the transport of goods, money and letters; while John
Shillingford, Mayor of Exeter utilised a London-bound carrier during the
mid-fifteenth century.144 Early-Tudor evidence likewise shows relatively reg-
ular employment of carriers: in 1529 Stephen Vaughan, the merchant and
administrator sent to his master Thomas Cromwell by a ‘caryar of Norwiche’
‘all such lres as siche yor departure haue byn receyued here for yow, but
also wrytten youe a lre concernyng sondrye thyngs’; while in 1536 Edmund
Clerke informed Thomas Wriothesley that he had received his letters ‘by the
carier of Odiam’.145 Carriers were thus used throughout the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries for the delivery of letters.
The cost of having a letter delivered by carrier was relatively affordable,
although prices varied according distance. The undergraduate account book
of John and Richard Newdigate during their time at Oxford records payment
of ‘sending a lettre to London by the carryer November the xxixth [1618]’ at
1d, while it cost 2d. to send a letter by carrier between Oxford and Coventry,
and the same price was charged by the London–Coventry carrier, one
Kidney, a man used by the Newdigates since the early-seventeenth century
to transport letters and goods between Coventry and the capital.146 Prices
differed according to distance. In December 1623, Lord William Howard
paid 12d. to the carrier of Kendal ‘for carrying letters to London’.147 Payment
of carriers usually happened at the outset, carriage covered by the sender,
but there is evidence of supplementary payments being paid to carriers to
encourage their reliability: early in Henry VIII’s reign the Prior of Beauvale
recommended that the Prior of Charterhouse might give the carrier, Thomas
at Wode, a penny or twain that he may ‘the gladlyer com to you’, but no
more, ‘for I have paid for ye cariage’.148 Household accounts of Francis, earl
of Rutland show payment of 12d. on 13 November 1614 ‘to a carrier of
Melton that brought letterres from Mr. Sexten, from London’.149
Affordability for ordinary people was at the expense of speed. Dorian
Gerhold has estimated times of carriers using waggons from London to
Ipswich, a distance of 70 miles at three days in 1599; to Norwich, a dis-
tance of 110 miles at four days between 1609–40; Colchester, two days for
a journey of 52 miles in 1611–14; Dunmow, 39 miles in two days 1612–14;
Bury St Edmunds in 1613, 72 miles in three days; Leicester, a distance of
99 miles, five and a half days in April 1620; Chelmsford 30 miles in two
days in 1625; and has estimated that during the 1620s it took packhorses a
week to travel the 156 miles from London to Shrewsbury.150 Such estimates
reinforce Mark Brayshay’s argument that carriers’ role in the ‘rapid trans-
mission of news and correspondence was minimal’.151 In practice too the
slowness of carriers was a common complaint: Philip Gawdy reported that
‘comming home late was the cause that my oncle Anthony Gavdy fayled of
a letter. Neither have I as yet found any messinger but the hedgehogg, and
yet I have heard that the hedgehogg overran the hare, and so the carryar
may overrun the post’.152 Part of the problem affecting the speed of carriers
was that they had to delay their return journeys for a day or so in towns
for their return lading.153
Carriers also often enjoyed a less than favourable popular reputation, as
peddlers of news of dubious worth, occasionally light-fingered, partially lit-
erate, and as drunkards. According to John Earle ‘no man domineers more
in his Inne, nor cals his Host vnreuerently with more presumption, and this
arrogance proceeds out of the strength of his Horses. He forgets not his load
where he takes his ease, for he is drunke commonly before he goes to bed’.154
Correspondents frequently complained about the unreliability of carriers.
In a letter sent to Sir Timothy Hutton in Chelsea, John Price, the Rector of
Marske in Yorkshire excused his ‘neglect of dutie’ in writing blaming the
defect in convenient carriers:
But my excuse is that trowantly one of schoole-boyes, partly want of

argument . . . but especially the defect of convenient cariers; for our
Trotters of Richmond . . . make so light of our letters in winter, that they
make light of them indeede, and in soomer season they are so importable
that they still consecrate them to Valcan or to Deucalion. Now, having
met so meete a messenger, I may not permit him to part illiterat out of
our coasts.155
Richard Carmarden of Dartmouth thought ‘the carriers to London should

be well watched’.156 Thomas Butler complained to his mistress Olive Porter
that ‘the carrier doth use to keep the letters so longe that I can never get
them before he is come away againe to London’.157 Undoubtedly much of
this language was troped, excusing delays in writing, but equally it reflects
the nature of these postal conditions. While local officials sought to regulate
carriers on a regional basis, there was no formal national system of control
or coordination of carriers, despite Anne Wigmore’s 1630 petition to ‘erect
an incorporation of the carriers, footposts, hackney coachmen, badgers,
kidders, laders, polterers, maltsters and drovers of yor Maties kingdome of
England & Wales’.158 Carriers also had no system of insurance, although
they received some protection under common law. Delays were common
and letters mislaid; carriers were sometimes attacked on the highways, their
goods stolen. The timetables of carriers set the parameters and governed
the conditions of letter-writing; the dispatch of letters was dependent on
the vagaries of the carrier network, forcing delays in epistolary exchange,
and often the hurried completion of letters in order to catch a departing
carrier.159
Despite the apparent limitations of utilising the carrier network for epis-
tolary purposes, it remained the most accessible and affordable option for
ordinary letter-writers. Complaints of slowness and untrustworthiness were
levelled at almost every mode of postal delivery. Moreover, attempts to
impose a government monopoly on the carrying of mail had little impact
on the role of carriers. Indeed, the proclamation issued on 15 May 1609,
‘forbidding any person to cary Pacquets or Letters to or from any City, or
towne, by foot or on horseback except such as are allowed by Authoritie’,
appears not to have been imposed nationally, nor to have applied to carri-
ers, but rather was aimed at controlling foreign mail.160 Similarly the 1635
reforms excluded ‘common known carriers’.161 The delivery of letters by
carriers thus continued throughout the entire period, and well beyond the
opening up of the royal post to private mail.
Foot-posts, merchant strangers’ posts, bearers and servants
Running alongside the royal post and carriers were foot-posts, letter-carriers
or messengers who travelled on foot delivering various types of correspond-
ence, both official and private.162 Foot-posts as represented by Anthony
Nixon in The Foot-Post of Douer (1616) were generally more expensive than
the carriers, and therefore less affordable for many people. However, run-
ning footmen could cover a lot of ground and over long distances were
thought to be in fact faster than horses, which when not used in relays tired
more quickly. Thomas Lyne, the foot-post of Bristol, regularly carried let-
ters to and from London at the cost of around 15s., averaging thirty miles
a day, twice the speed of an ordinary carrier.163 Several foot-posts are listed
in Taylor’s Cosmographie, including ‘A foote-post doth come from the said
Berry [in Suffolke] every wedesday [sic] to the greene dragon in bishopsgate
street, by whom letters may be conveyed to and fro’.164 Richard Carew in
his Survey of Cornwall (1602) described the appointment of ‘a foot-Poast’ ‘for
carrying of such aduertisements and letters, euery thorow-fare weekly’.165

What distinguished foot-posts from carriers was their pedestrian mode of
transport; their inclusion by Taylor was presumably by virtue of the regu-
larity of their route and schedule of delivery. Foot-posts were commonly
employed by the towns and corporations for official correspondence travel-
ling within the region and nationally. In 1596 the Mayor of Southampton
received a letter from Robert Cecil by foot-post, which he acknowledged in
his reply, writing on the address leaf, ‘Post haste. Constables, posts and tith-
ing men see this letter conveyed accordingly at your utmost perils’.166 The
Hull-based customs searcher and sometime priest hunter, Anthony Atkinson
used the foot-post of Hull to dispatch a letter to Sir John Stanhope.167 John
Ellzey another Mayor of Southampton and Collector of Tenths kept up a
regular correspondence with Secretary Nicholas during the war years of the
second half of the 1620s, sometimes relying on the Southampton foot-post
to convey his official correspondence.168 Foot-posts were employed more
generally by others: Roger Lord North made several payments for foot-posts
to London during 1578 to 1580.169 The diarist and Deputy Governor of the
Isle of Wight, Sir John Oglander sent a letter to his brother-in-law Arthur
Broomfield by foot-post, his relative though choosing to send his reply by
a personal bearer.170
Foot-posts were a pivotal part of Thomas Witherings manuscript plans in
1635 to reform the post.171 The scheme proposed that all letters from London
to Edinburgh should ‘be put into one Portmantle that shalbe directed to
Edenburgh in Scotland and for all places of the saide roade or neere the saide
roade to be accordinglie put into ye saide portmantle with particular bagges
directed to such Postmasters as lie vpon the roade neere vnto any Cittie or
Towne corporate’. Once these separate bags reached their destinations, foot-
posts with a ‘knowne badge of his Mats Armes’ should on market day ‘goe to
all Townes within 6, 8 or 10 miles’ and ‘there receve & deliver all such lres
as shalbe directed to those places’. In towns and cities of note far from the
main roads, foot-posts would be provided with horses ‘for the execucon of
the saide service with more Expedicon’, including for foot-posts travelling
from Exeter to Plymouth and from Worcester and Shrewsbury to the Welsh
Marches. Foot-posts (supplemented in some instances by horses) were thus
viewed as vital for the smooth running of the postal network, presumably
recompensed on delivery; they were, as argued earlier, connective figures
linking up with post-horses on the main arterial routes. Foot-posts also
operated on the continent. While resident ambassador in Spain, Sir Thomas
Chaloner sent letters by the foot-posts of San Sebastian and Balbastro.172
A letter from Chaloner in Madrid to the Queen was sent by footpost, at the
cost of a half ducat per diem, travelling fifteen leagues a day, while he paid
a footpost eight ducats on receipt of a letter from Bilbao, which had taken
seven days to reach his hands in Balbastro.173 George Gilpin paid 20s. for a
letter received by an ‘expresse footposte’ in Antwerpe.174
Mercantile postal systems were also common throughout continental

Europe from the fifteenth century, and carried private mail. In England too,
the Merchant Strangers’ post, run by alien merchants residing in London
to convey letters overseas was well established by the middle of the six-
teenth century. By the terms of Intercursus Magnus treaty of 1496, Henry
VII granted the merchant adventurers of London the liberty to set up their
own postal service without government interference, which led to the
establishing of a private relay of horses to and from Calais, via Dover, along
the lines of mercantile postal systems operating in mainland Europe. The
merchant strangers had their own postmaster Christian Shuffling (d.1568)
through whose hands all incoming and outgoing foreign mail travelled
to be sorted. Merchant adventurers elsewhere in England, such as Bristol,
York and Newcastle utilised the London postal network; from 1509, the
merchant adventurers of Newcastle paid a composition of £8 per annum
to their London counterparts, while the York adventurers retained William
Paige as their postmaster in London, according to accounts from 1560 at
the cost of 20s. a year, and he was paid the annual sum of £1 for the weekly
despatch of letters from London. Merchant adventurers developed their
own networks of postal agents, who in turn had their own postmen and
also utilised continental town posts. There is evidence that the Merchant
Strangers’ post linked up with the Thurn and Taxis posts on the continent,
and the Merchant Strangers’ post was an important regular means by which
ordinary people could send letters and packets to mainland Europe.175
Finally, personal servants and private messengers were commonly uti-
lised for carrying correspondence, especially by the nobility and gentry,
as were family members and chance travellers. The identity of bearers can
sometimes be gleaned from letters themselves, where they were named as
a means of identification or introduction. Lord Grey of Wilton dispatched
a letter to Protector Somerset by his ‘man’; while Sir William Fitzwilliam,
Lord Deputy of Ireland, sent his man Enowes to carry a letter to Burghley.176
Philip Gawdy sent a letter to his brother by George his uncle Anthony’s
man; Lewis Bagot employed his ‘cosen Adderly’ to send a letter to his father
in London.177 The journal of the Lord Deputy of Ireland Sir William Russell
dating from 24 June 1594 to 27 May 1597, highlights the use of various
trusted bearers and servants for carrying official communications and pack-
ets between Dublin and London. Entries record ‘Mr. Henry Browne, my
Lord’s servant, went with the packet for England’; ‘A packet of letters sent
to England by post, and carried to Chester by the Bishop of Lawghlin’.178
Women too employed their own personal servants and family members for
postal duties. Thus, Jane Bullock employed her apprentice (‘a wicked boye’)
to deliver a letter to her cousin Nathaniel Bacon; Margaret Mumford used
‘her man’ to give a letter to Walter Bagot.179
Household accounts provide a more systematic depiction of the enor-
mous diversity of personal letter-bearers employed during this period, and
shed significant light on the cost and payment of letter-bearers. Accounts

frequently contain standing entries for riding charges, costs for footmen
and carrying letters, as well as incidental payments. The household papers
of Henry Percy, ninth earl of Northumberland reveal that he kept among his
servants several footmen, porters, coachmen, as well as five riders and a run-
ning boy, all of whom might be entrusted to carry private correspondence.
The accounts themselves also contain regular entries for ‘riding and outward
charges’ paid to his lordship’s servants at sundry times about their master’s
business and affairs; payments to Lady Russell’s footman, to a messenger
bringing parliament writs, to Captain Owen’s man, as well as payment of
6s. 6d. in May 1598 for the ‘cariage of letters’.180 The various household
accounts of the Willoughby Family likewise reveal costs of personal serv-
ants carrying letters: in 1526 13s. 4d. was paid ‘to Mr Palmer servauntt for
hys cosse from London and to London, bryngyng a letter of the kynges’, a
substantial amount of which presumably covered horse-hire, food and lodg-
ing.181 The accounts of the earls of Rutland include payments in 1540 of
12d. ‘to parson Thyrland servaunt, for bry[ng]ing letters from my Lorde with
a glas of treacle and a boxe of losenges for the childerne’, and in 1611 12d.
was a paid to ‘a fellowe that brought a letter from Newarke, from George
Sandwithe, with woord of the Lord Burghleye’s cominge to Bellvoer’.182 Lady
Anne Clifford paid 18d. ‘to robin the footman when he brought token &
lres to my ladie’.183 The accounts of Cheshire MP and Puritan Sir Richard
Grosvenor are especially interesting in that they provide an unusual amount
of detail of the numbers of letters written daily and how they were sent dur-
ing the years 1636 and 1638. An entry for 17 June 1636, for example, records
nine letters being written all of which were ‘Delivered 18 June by Beard
[Thomas Beard, a servant] to Norton all in one packett to Cap Scott’.184 Once
received the diverse letters within the packet were to be distributed to the
addressees. The evidence of these accounts illustrates the enormous varia-
tions in cost of private delivery, depending on length of journey and the
need to cover horse-hire and travelling expenses. Letters delivered over long
distances by personal servants using hired horses were extremely expensive.
More generally, payment to messengers or bearers was normally on receipt
of the letter, covered by the recipient. This was made clear in a letter from
William, earl of Bath in which he instructed his Deputy Lieutenants on the
address leaf: ‘I praye geue this messenger for his paynes Twoe shillngs. And
returne me yor aunswr by him’.185
One of fullest depictions of the complexities of informal letter-carrying
during the early modern period can be reconstructed using the house-
hold accounts and disbursement books of Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester.
Covering the years 1558 to 1561 and 1584 to 1586, the various surviv-
ing accounts detail payment for an extraordinary range of letter carriers,
bearers and messengers. Chiefly, Leicester employed his own personal
servants or footmen to carry his outgoing correspondence: 6s. 8d. was
paid ‘to Walter your lordship’s servant carrying letters to Kenelworth’, his
footman Archie Cragg received 2s. for ‘going with your lordship’s lettres
to Waltham Parke for a bucke’; other footmen were paid to deliver letters
to Lord Grey at Northampton, to carry letters from Leicester House to
the court and from Northall, Hertfordshire to Nonsuch Palace in Surrey,
and one entry reads ‘to Smulkyn your lordship’s futman when he went to
overtake Mr Cary with lettres of your lordship’s the same day, 2s. 6d.’ In
addition to payments to his own servants, he also provided rewards to the
personal servants of other members of the nobility and gentry delivering
missives to him; servants it appears were paid twice by sender and recipi-
ent. Henry Norris’s boy was paid 3s. 4d. for ‘bringing a letter’, 3s. 4d. were
given in reward ‘to a boy that brought letters from my Lady Shrewsbery’,
while rewards also went to personal messengers delivering letters from
Sir John Wolley, Sir Edward Wotton, Sir Francis Leak, Lord Strange, Lord
Burghley, the earl of Essex, Sir William Knollys, Sir Thomas Shirley, Edward
Lord Stafford, Lady Elizabeth Leighton and Sir Richard Browne among oth-
ers. As a Privy Councillor, courtier and magnate Leicester was also able to
take advantage of royal pursuivants or state messengers for delivering cor-
respondence. Entries include 20s. ‘to a pursuyvant that came with letters
to Witney to your lordship’, 6d. ‘to a pursevant that brought letters to your
lordship to Wodstock the same day’. The earl also maintained extensive
correspondences with several continental letter-writers, including George
Gilpin, secretary to the Merchant Adventurers and the Pfalzgraf Johann
Casimir, and appears to have had postal arrangements in place to main-
tain these correspondences: 3s. 4d. were paid ‘to the post of Andwerpe for
the bringing of letter and silk hoose from George Gylpin’, and on another
occasion 4d. was paid ‘for the convayinge of lettres to Andwerpe’; five
pounds was received by ‘Sulcot Deuk Cassemer’s man at hys going to hys
master with leatters from your lordship from Richmon[d]’. Leicester main-
tained good postal connections when he himself was abroad: 40s. were
paid ‘to one Jhon Dudley Syr Thomas Sherley’s man for bringing letters
to your lorship out of England and caring letters bacagan from your lord-
ship into England the xiiij of Aprel at Utrick’, 20s. were given ‘to Doctors
Doyles man by your lordship’s commandment at Leaster House the xj of
November for caryng of leatters for your lordship into Flanderse’. On the
domestic front too, as a nobleman with multiple residences and a courtier
and soldier much on the move, rather akin to a monarch on progress,
Leicester spent sums on ensuring that his correspondences kept abreast of
his travels. Several entries reveal the redirection of mail: 3s. 4d. paid ‘to one
that brought letters from Leicester House to Abbington’; 6s. 8d. paid ‘to
Mr Bouten that he gave to a man that brought letters from Mr Dockre from
Kyllingworth to your lordship’. Numerous other incidental postal expenses
are also itemised among the earl’s daily expenditures: 20d. ‘for botehier to
London with letters of your lordship’s’, 3s. 4d. ‘To Mr Cave the same day
he gave to a poore woman that delivered a supplication to your lordship at

Wanstead’, 5s. ‘to a pooreman that did cary letters from Newellmes from
your lordship to Justis Townesend’.186 These detailed accounts highlight
the huge variety and ad hoc nature of postal methods available to early
modern social elites, and the degree to which they employed personal
servants as bearers, but also had access to royal messengers. It is notice-
able though that the accounts do not show Leicester utilising the carriers
for his correspondence, perhaps because a man of his status had recourse
to a plethora of personal servants. Finally, the accounts also highlight the
practice of paying private letter-bearers on dispatch as well as receipt of
letters (with payments varying according to distance travelled, importance
of sender and the import of the missive).
In many instances carriage of correspondence depended largely on who
was to hand. One of the advantages though of personal servants over post-
boys, carriers or mercantile posts was the assurance that a letter would
be handed directly to the hands of the addressee or at least left at their
residence. Carrying a letter (sometimes of introduction or recommendation)
furnished a personal bearer with particular credentials, and could provide an
opportunity for an audience with the addressee. The extensive correspond-
ence of Sir William More of Loseley highlights this, revealing a category of
letter-carrier lower down the social scale. Thomas Boff, a smith at Egham
carried a letter to William More written on his behalf by John Cholmeley of
the manor of Windsor Great Park, asking that he receive justice for the theft
of a tool stolen from his shop by John King of Egham. The Berkshire-born
Tinker, Richard Payne, carried to More a letter from the Mayor of Guildford
asking that he be granted a licence to travel plying his trade in Surrey.187
In each case, the bearer carried a letter of support recommending their suit
or case; this was commonplace within a patronage society which relied on
personal recommendations. Elizabeth Mason recommended her chaplain,
the bearer of her letter to William More, for a benefice that More had in
his gift; Richard Davy of Lincoln’s Inn wrote to Bassingbourne Gawdy,
Sheriff of Norfolk, on behalf of the bearer, ‘Butfyld by name’ nominating
him to be clerk to the undersheriff.188 Similarly, when attempting to have
letters delivered to the monarch for his or her serious consideration, special
consideration was given to the choice of a suitable bearer of high stand-
ing at court, who could not only gain access to the royal presence (and
therefore deliver a missive in person) but also had influence enough to sup-
port any epistolary solicitations. John Erskine, earl of Mar approached Sir
William Cecil to deliver a letter to the Queen and procure him a favourable
answer and Katherine, duchess of Suffolk asked Cecil to deliver her letter
to Elizabeth requesting his ‘good word for furtherance of the same’.189 In
such highly specialised circumstances, powerful and personal letter-bearers
of this nature were essential to effective delivery and the successful pursuit
of patronage suits.
The nature of postal conditions
The bearer of a letter was an integral part of the entire epistolary process,
conditioning the writing as well as sending of correspondence. The exigen-
cies of dispatch, the sudden arrival and departure of a bearer, could encour-
age an urgent immediacy among letter-writers. Thus, Philip Gawdy informed
his father Bassingbourne Gawdy, ‘I am dryven to shortnes by reason of the
vncerteyne haste of the bearer herof’, and Edward, earl of Oxford used the
opportunity of a bearer departing from Padua in November 1575 to write to
his father-in-law, Lord Burghley.190 In addition to the physical act of carrying
letters, bearers were also corporeal extensions of letters themselves; meaning
was therefore generated orally and visually as well as textually. Personal serv-
ants, messengers or carriers known to writers passed on oral reports, messages
and news in addition to handing over letters in their charge. Correspondents
frequently referred to oral messages. Elizabeth Bagot informed her husband
Walter, ‘for our frendes in these p[ar]tes and the state of our busynes here
I referre to the reporte of this bearer’; while Robert Sidney sent a short mis-
sive to his wife explaining ‘I must not let Charles Scriven come to you with-
out a letter: and yet to him I will leave the telling of what news is here’.191
Recovery of these oral elements of letter-writing is rare, except perhaps in
instances where letter-bearers were questioned about the import of their
verbal conversations by early modern courts. In addition to these vestiges of
epistolary orality associated with the bearer’s role, correspondence was often
carried in conjunction with other commodities and enclosures similarly
entrusted to the person of the letter-carrier. Books were often accompanied
by gift-letters, consignments of goods by letters acting as lists and inventories,
a paper assurance that precisely what was sent was actually delivered. The
trustworthiness of bearers was a common source of anxiety for letter-writers
who wished to see their missives safely dispatched, and early modern letters
frequently contain apologies (real or feigned) for not having written due to
a lack of good bearers. Anne Bacon, wife of Nathaniel Bacon, apologised to
her mother-in-law, Anne Lady Bacon for not having written more often since
departing Gorhambury, having had so ‘fewe convenient messengers’; and
Philip Gawdy bemoaned the fact that ‘Synce our comming to London I colde
not meete withe one convenyent messynger, that went into Norfolke’.192
The slowness of early modern postal delivery was an ubiquitous com-
plaint of most correspondents, who bemoaned the slackness or negligence
of bearers, posts and carriers. Christopher Peyton apologised to Burghley
for ‘negligence in the bearer’ which delayed the delivery of his letters and a
book by eight or ten days; Thomas Wright complained to Anthony Bacon
in 1599 that his letter to the earl of Essex went undelivered due to the ‘neg-
ligence of the bearer’.193 In order to hasten dispatch of official mail, govern-
mental officials underlined the importance of haste to carriers, by writing
his or her ‘Majesties Especiall service’ on the outside, often accompanied
by the phrase ‘post haste, haste for life’ or variations thereof. The earliest
example collected is a letter dated 28 May 1513 from Thomas Lord Howard
to Henry VIII, which was endorsed ‘Haste post, on thy life’.194 This practice
was relatively commonplace for official correspondence by the middle of
the sixteenth century.195 A letter from Devonshire JP Sir William Courtenay
to the Deputy Lieutenant Edward Seymour was ‘marked hast post hast, for
her maiestes speciall service’ and included the instruction, ‘Counstable of
Newton see thus letter sent wth sped’.196 The effectiveness of this form of
postal superscription is alluded to in a letter from Sir Ralph Sadler and Sir
James Crofts to William Cecil, when they were commissioned to settle bor-
der disputes with the Scots in 1559: ‘when we write we indorse our Lres for
lyef though the mater requyre not somuche hast and so must yow doo or
ells the posts wooll make no spede at all’.197 Slightly less common was the
drawing of gallows on the outside of letters.198 Burghley informed his son
Robert that he had received a letter ‘directed with a pair of gallows for more
speed’.199 Likewise, a letter containing naval intelligence sent in September
1602 from Walter Ralegh to Robert Cecil a sketch of a gallows beneath ‘For
Her majesties especiall service’, which was written in non-joined up italic
writing. The letters were separated and rendered in a more accessible script
presumably (as with the visual image of the gallows) for ease of reading by
a partially literate bearer.200
Delivery times at all levels varied greatly according to geographical loca-
tion, as well as by the nature of bearer used. Standing posts and through
messengers or personal servants using relays of post-horses were the quickest
methods of dispatch, with carriers, footmen, and chance travellers normally
much slower. In some cases, the carrying of letters could be intolerably
and impracticably slow, far from conducive to effective government or
profitable trade. Two letters from Hugh Clotworthy in Atrim to his brother
Simon Clotworthy in the parish of South Molton Devon took almost three
months to arrive in the early-seventeenth century.201 Correspondence that
had to travel by water as part of its postal journey was fraught with delays,
and dependent on weather and tides. Writing from Flushing in August
1612 Robert Sidney complained to his wife that his letters had ‘been at sea
and . . . driven back’, explaining ‘this bearer I now send to you again: and
the wind being so ill as it is I make him go by land’.202 Henry Falkland, the
Lord Deputy of Ireland urged Secretary Conway in 1625 of the need for
speedier answers to his letters, complaining that the postal barque had put
to sea three or four times, only to be sent back to shore, by contrary winds,
with four packets, one of which was broken open.203 A letter from Walter
Ralegh to Robert Cecil sent from Terceira in 1597 took almost a month to
reach the Devon port of Lyme Regis by English merchant ship, but once
in the hands of the town’s Mayor it was delivered to the regular standing
post at Crewkerne within just over 24 hours.204 The passage of transatlantic
correspondence during the seventeenth century was likewise fraught with
problems.205 Indeed, Robert Trelawny, the merchant and Mayor of Plymouth

who in 1631 was granted a patent for planting and governing an area of
New England which included Richmond Island, experienced great dif-
ficulties in conducting correspondence with settlers due to the dangers of
transatlantic sea travel: his agent in Richmond, John Winter, informed him
‘what is lost by ship, that Cannot I helpe’, in another dated the 7 July 1634
he reported receiving Trelawny’s letter of 8 May, which had taken almost
three months to arrive.206
The unevenness in quality of postal conditions is further illustrated by
the example of Edward Lord Zouche, who during his residence in Guernsey
as Deputy Governor (a period he described as his ‘solitarie life’) between
July 1600 and April 1601 was often frustrated by the vagaries of the post,
and wholly dependent upon a supply of trusted bearers or paid messen-
gers, and the arrival and departure of postal barques from Portsmouth or
Southampton.207 A letter from Sir Francis Knollys, the younger, took almost
two weeks to arrive; another from Lady North was more than a month in
arriving, and a letter to Lady Leighton, wife of the Governor Sir Thomas
Leighton, had to be hurried by the sudden departure of a barque which came
so suddenly ‘staying one tyde’ and leaving the next.208 Letters were mislaid
or lost in transit; others arrived at different times out of order; new outgoing
letters were penned before replies were received, thus disrupting any cycle
of reciprocal epistolary exchange.209 Important correspondence that arrived
from Guernsey by ship in Southampton was then carried to London by spe-
cial messenger or foot-post. Indeed, in one letter he informed Leighton that
he had taken order ‘to send a man of purpose from [South]hampton . . . and
I have appointed to give him 10s. for his paines the usuall pay for a foote
man to London from that place’.210 At other times, letters were conveyed to
the trusted bearer John Andrewes, or ‘a man of purpose’ acting in his stead;
‘by this means’ Zouche informed Lady Leighton that her letters ‘may come
safely’.211 He reassured Lady North not to be discouraged by loss of her let-
ters, suggesting that in future they be conveyed to Henry Bannister, a London
acquaintance and goldsmith with whom Zouche was in regular contact and
by whom they would be safely delivered.212 Again, this illustrates the infor-
mal, improvised and imperfect nature of early modern postal arrangements.
Delays and non-delivery of letters were occasions of social anxiety, as
Bishop Parkhurst reported to Hans Wolf, pastor at the Zurich Frauenmünster,
after his German translation of Jewel’s Apology appeared to have been met
with silence: ‘I can not but disapprove of so obstinate a silence on the part
of Horne and Jewel. For either they were ungrateful, if they did not answer
your letter, or the couriers were dishonest if they did not care to pass on their
letter to you’.213 Letter-writing was a reciprocal activity, and therefore non-
arrival of letters, delays in replies, letters overlapping or sending more than
one letter before a response had been elicited were all delicate situations of
epistolary decorum, and created further uneasiness among letter-writers.
John Jewel apologised to his former tutor Parkhurst for receiving another
letter from him before he had replied to the first:
I never imagined that you would load me with your letter before my letter
might requite you for your previous one. For it has been my principle that
no-one should less want urging to write than a pupil to his tutor . . . I would
rather appear impudent by writing than ungrateful by staying silent . . .
I understand . . . that my letter never reached you. But I have done with
letter carriers, whose abject and abandone perfidy is notorious.214
Lady Katherine Paston wrote to her son William away at Corpus Christi
College, Cambridge, ‘I hope thou hast receiued as many letters from me as
thow hast written’.215 Parental expectations were for regular correspondence
from children, and at the very least that sons and daughters replied to pater-
nal and maternal letters. Failure on the part of a child to correspond with
parents was viewed as dereliction of filial duty. Robert Sidney informed his
wife that his daughter Mall was in his ‘debt a letter’, and chided his sons for
not writing: ‘tell your sons’ he informed his wife, ‘that so many messengers
coming, they might have written to me: but I think they are ashamed to
show their ill writing’.216
Matters of epistolary security were frequently mentioned in early modern
letters. Writers distrustful of the safety of communications by post were less
likely to commit sensitive matters to paper. Letters were prone to loss, mis-
carrying and interception. Seals were used by writers to close letters in order
to maintain secrecy, and concern was expressed when letters arrived open
with the seals broken or tampered with. Writing in 1550, Anne Seymour,
duchess of Somerset was anxious to hear from Katherine, duchess of Suffolk
that her letters had arrived unopened.217 The soldier Nicholas Saunders
complained to Robert Cecil that a letter delivered to him in Plymouth by
Sir Ferdinando Gorges arrived with the seal broken and the letter opened.218
The breaking of official seals was treated seriously for fear of interference
in the royal mail. In 1625 the Privy Council sought to ‘make search and
inquire’ where and by whom a packet sent from Secretary Morton to the
Lord Deputy of Ireland was broken open, and to bring the offender into
custody.219 The packet arrived at Brickhill with the seal already broken and
investigations drew assurances from the Posts of Barnet and St Albans that
the packet arrived and was delivered by them unopened. John Davies, the
Postmaster of Brickhill, wrote to the Privy Council explaining that the boy
delivering the packet from the post of St Albans claimed that his master had
not had a bag that would hold it, but tied it with his master’s girdle, which
did ‘breake the seales therof’. Thomas Boye, the Postmaster of Towcester in
another letter to the council informed their lordships that he had received
the packet from the Brickhill post-boy, but with the strings and box burst
open, leading him to re-tie the box securely and send it on its way.220
The mechanics of how correspondence was delivered (whether opened or

sealed) sheds significant light on the social practices of reading correspond-
ence.221 Letters were frequently sent unsealed, passed among family members
(often with names given of those to whom a letter might be shown) and
read aloud to assembled company; business missives were handed to secre-
taries, lawyers, and officials for comment and amendment; letters were also
circulated scribally and sometimes published in print. Writing to his wife,
Robert Sidney enclosed a letter to his household officer Thomas Golding:
‘I send it open unto you, because you may see it when you have read it
seal it and send it unto him’.222 Sir Nicholas Bacon sent his servant Francis
Boldero, an open letter that he had written to Miles Spencer, archdeacon of
Sudbury, for his servant Francis Boldero to ‘peruse’, asking him thereupon
‘to lett it be sealed and delyvered’.223 Husbands and wives appear to have had
access to each others’ correspondence: the Paris merchant Guillaume le Gras
advised Lord Lisle that he had not written to his wife Honor since she did
not read French, adding ‘if it may please her to accept this as if it were for
her’; Lettice Gawdy opened a letter to her husband Framlingham from her
cousin John Games, with ‘agredel of nues’ in it, which she recounted in her
own missive.224 Alongside these communal practices, however, developed an
emerging concept of privacy connected with personal writing technologies
and a rise in literacy levels. Over the course of the period correspondence
was increasingly regarded as singular, the property of the recipient. A letter
from John Husee to his master Lord Lisle dated 19 April 1538 was endorsed
‘Hast, hast, hast’ and instructed that the letter be delivered ‘in his own hand’,
indicative of the security demanded for his letter.225 Edward Lord Zouche
apologised to Thomas Leighton for opening a letter from him contained
within a packet: ‘If I have done a fault chide me but pardon me and I will
do no more’. On another occasion Zouche wrote to Leighton informing him
that ‘I have receaued other lers from Mr Cragge and yor sonne wch because
I take them to be of privat affaires I have not opened’.226 While it was essen-
tial that Zouche open correspondence relating to the ‘public’ business of
the Governorship of Guernsey, it was inappropriate to open ‘private’ letters
concerning personal affairs. Thus, over the period the opening of another
person’s missive (even by a spouse) became socially taboo, unless permission
had been given, and was thought worthy of apology.227 Indeed, Joan Thynne
apologised to her husband John for opening a letter addressed to him, hop-
ing that he would not take ‘it ill’.228 The Cambridge academic Joseph Mead
writing to his friend Sir Martin Stuteville in June 1620 of ‘affairs of state’
implored him ‘I pray keep not my letter to read to any body. The times are
full of jealousy, and he that means no hurt may be misconceived’.229
The ways in which letters were addressed with instructions for delivery fur-
ther highlights attitudes towards the reading of correspondence, in terms of
where letters were to be delivered, and what arrangements were in place if the
recipient was not there to receive a letter personally. Addresses found on early
modern letters varied greatly, from short perfunctory instructions to personal

messengers – such as ‘to my wife’, ‘to my father, give these’, ‘to my lady’ – to
more elaborate, honorific superscriptions: ‘To his verye worshippll good mr and
singular frinde Bassingbourne Gawdye Esquire deli[ver] theis at west harling.’230
Addresses usually provided the name of the recipient and place of delivery, the
house, town or even inn where the recipient was staying. John Hackett addressed
a letter to Robert Hobart, ‘To the wor[shipfull] my most respected Frende Mr
Robert Hobart at the seale office ouer against St Dunstans Church in Falcon
allie these be dd’.231 Mary Baskerville addressed a letter ‘To my louing sonne
Han[n]ibale Baskeruile att London giue these neer fleet bridge att the signe of
the goulden horshoo att Mr Standish House’.232 The addressing of correspond-
ence sometimes caused a problem when senders were unaware of the recipient’s
whereabouts. Thus, Thomas Brudenell complained to Sir Griffin Markham, ‘yor
lres were too naked both of newes and directions how I may address lres to you
only I remember ye scrivener in Paules churche yard yt you told me of’.233 In
most cases letters were directed to an individual or to a place where an indi-
vidual might be found, although in certain instances letters were addressed to
a group. During the 1590s letters from William, earl of Bath, Lord Lieutenant
of Devon to his deputies were addressed collectively with the expectation that
whoever received the letter would forward copies to the others, a point made
clear in the postscript of letter of 7 November 1597, in which he wrote ‘you to
whome this shall first com to sende the same forthe vnto the rest’.234 Similarly,
Bath addressed a letter to local JPs, ‘To my very lovinge frends Sir Ferdinando
Gorges knight Edward Seymor George Cary Richard Champernowne esqs and
the rest of her maties justices of the peace in the south devision of the county
of devon to any of them hast haste post haste for her Maties speciall service’.235
Circular letters of this sort were by their very nature intended for a collective
audience, and multiple copies were dispatched written in a pro-forma manner.
More difficult to recover, however, is what happened when a recipient was not
present to receive a letter on delivery. If addressed to a household or residence,
it might be accepted by a trusted servant or family member (who may or may
not be sanctioned to open and read it); and letters directed to a drop-off point,
such as an inn or shop might be held there until the recipient arrived. In 1634,
Bishop Wren of Norwich instructed a carrier to ‘Leaue this at Royston with
Goodman King & soe to be delivered to Mr Matthew Ensam at Hollowell wth
all speede’.236 Alternatively, if the addressee had departed or would be a long
time in coming, letters could be redirected or even returned to sender as with
Robert Cecil’s letter to Francis Darcy which arrived at Dover Castle after his
departure.237 Under such circumstances letters might remain unopened, never
read by their intended addressee.
Prior to the emergence of a genuinely universal postal system with the

founding of the Post Office after 1635, early modern postal arrangements
were remarkably makeshift. Letter carriage was improvised during times of

emergency and crisis, even at an elite and royal level, and largely depend-
ent on local conditions and circumstances. Throughout the sixteenth
and early-seventeenth centuries there were several differing modes of
posting – including ordinary posts, royal standing posts, pursuivants and
royal messengers, footposts, merchants’ posts, carriers, personal servants
and messengers and a myriad of idiosyncratic arrangements (friends, fam-
ily, neighbours and chance travellers who happened to be journeying in a
given direction) – all of which coexisted and overlapped to form an inter-
connecting world of communications. A given individual might on the
same day utilise several different methods of postal delivery, depending on
availability of particular bearers or services, as well as the type and import
of the letter. Likewise, individual letters might pass through many hands
during their journeys. At the highest governmental level, delivery speeds
could be relatively swift. This period witnessed the inception and develop-
ment of royal standing posts, which ushered in a new form of official mail
carriage, but even here letters and packets were prone to delays and losses;
postmasters were poorly paid and often criticised for their negligence; and
Masters of the Posts themselves were targets of litigation and rebuke, all of
which undercuts our understanding of the efficacy of official postal machin-
ery. Furthermore, although there is some evidence of ‘private’ letters being
carried alongside official correspondence, standing posts were largely con-
fined to governmental circles. The nobility and gentry employed personal
servants as letter-bearers, lending a highly personalised element to the car-
riage of letters, with the bearer acting as a corporeal extension of the cor-
respondence in their charge. For most ordinary people, however, the carriers
remained the most affordable and semi-regular form of mail delivery, but at
the cost of speed. Postal conditions and times also varied according to geo-
graphical location. For destinations off the main arterial highways or carrier
routes, further arrangements had to be made on an ad hoc basis to carry let-
ters onwards from the nearest postal node. Naturally places closest to major
urban centres and main post roads experienced superior postal conditions.
Carriage of letters overseas was also prone to significant delays. The irregular
rhythms associated with postal conditions imparted a sense of insecurity to
early modern epistolary communications: delays and crossed correspond-
ences were occasions of social anxiety, which disrupted the flow of the recip-
rocal exchange of letters. Threats of letters miscarrying, being intercepted
and falling into the wrong hands further heightened the degree of epistolary
insecurity felt, which affected the very nature of correspondence, causing
writers to self-censor and restrict what they committed to paper. Alongside
these structural concerns developed an increasingly perceptible sense of cor-
respondence as private, individualised, the property of the addressee, which
is reflected in the proliferation of personal writing technologies and solitary
reading practices. The desire for privacy also spawned a range of secret epis-
tolary forms, which will be explored in the next chapter.
6
Secret Letters
This chapter examines the manuscript practices associated with what I call
‘secret letters’ in early modern England. Clandestine communications were
often disguised as innocuous everyday forms of correspondence. The study
of secret letters is therefore a heightened version of the concerns of this
book. Its focus on the material aspects of covert correspondences – codes,
ciphers, signs, symbols, invisible ink, enigmatic, shared or secret languages,
the ways in which clandestine communications were disguised as innocu-
ous everyday forms of correspondence, and hidden or clandestine modes
of delivery – forces attention on the complex meanings generated through
material forms and contexts. While scholars have recently focused on hid-
den meanings contained in early modern writings – for example, textual
practices of allusion and metaphor as well as instances of silence, self-
censorship and communication face-to-face – little work has focused on
the development of secret epistolary writing technologies and their broader
social and cultural significance, within an emerging concept of privacy.1
The history of secret writing can be traced back to well before the early
modern period, with its roots in classical and medieval worlds, where the
arts of encryption and secrecy were intimately connected to military and
diplomatic activities.2 Nevertheless it is arguably the sixteenth century that
witnessed the most marked increase and development in secret forms of
letter-writing, attested by the publication of significant numbers of printed
cryptographies, the invention of sophisticated manuscript cipher systems,
and by thousands of extant manuscript letters employing ciphers or codes.
This period, with its heady mix of politics and religion, was marked by
themes of conspiracy and surveillance. In 1587 the diplomat Edward
Stafford informed Francis Walsingham, the Secretary of State, that ‘in theis
doubtfull tymes wherein so much mallice is borne agaynst England men are
loth to have ther names or exposition knowne’, a feeling echoed in Mildred
Burghley’s warning in 1573 to Sir William Fitzwilliam, Lord Deputy of
Ireland, to ‘kepe close your frends letters; for craft and malis never raygned
more’, adding ‘some about you may be corrupted to show them’.3 Writing
148
Secret Letters 149
in 1632, James, earl of Carlisle informed Sir Henry Vane, Ambassador to the
King of Sweden that ‘the passages are so dangerous that w[i]thout a cypher
I holld it not safe to use much liberty in writing’.4 Secret forms of letter-
writing increasingly crowd the archives of state papers foreign and domes-
tic, the by-products of internal plots and external threats; ambassadors and
agents, conspirators and spies used varying cipher and coded systems in
an attempt to convey information securely. Covert and concealed forms
of letter-writing developed more intensely during years in which society
and culture were pervaded by an atmosphere of uncertainty and insecu-
rity. Moreover, the Elizabethan period onwards experienced rising literacy
and greater incidences of personal writing activity among widening social
groups, who adopted and formulated their own modes of secret writing and
arranged resourceful ways of having correspondence securely conveyed. The
use of secret epistolary forms extended well beyond the realms of govern-
ment, diplomacy and the military, employed for an array of personal and
religious reasons with the increasing democratisation of writing. During
a period of persecution and exile, post-Reformation, English Catholics, it
will be argued, played an important role in the development of secret letter
protocols. Generic developments too meant that the letter no longer merely
functioned as a business missive, but developed as a key technology of the
self, as a private (in the sense of secret) and individual form of writing.
While some scholars have argued that ciphered writing was little used
between the end of Elizabeth’s reign and the start of the Civil War, this
chapter argues that secret modes of correspondence were prevalent from
the early-Tudor period onwards, continuing during the early Stuart period.5
Secret letters were a constant device employed in official statecraft through-
out the Tudor and early Stuart period, as well as for more subversive political
ends. John Stile, Resident Ambassador in Spain between 1509 and 1518, fre-
quently wrote to Henry VIII in ciphered letters; and ciphers were commonly
employed in the dispatches of Andrea Badoer, the Venetian Ambassador
to England.6 The Henrician and mid-Tudor diplomat Nicholas Wotton
encrypted messages in correspondence with William Paget, Protector
Somerset, Mary Tudor and the Privy Council.7 Elizabeth I’s reign witnessed
perhaps the highest concentration of letters in cipher; encryption was widely
employed by diplomats and by conspirators for clandestine communica-
tions.8 The use of ciphers was also widespread during the early-seventeenth
century. In 1607, Sir Edward Colpeper came across some ‘scrolls made vp &
infolded of parchment in which be wrytten straunge syphers’ that had been
found in the highway by a ‘poore fellow’.9 During James I’s reign, Sir John
Digby, Ambassador in Spain, and Sir Thomas Edmondes, Ambassador to
France sent reports to the King in cipher; and such practices continued well
into Charles I’s reign and beyond.10 During the Civil War, correspondence
were regularly enciphered, including between Henrietta Maria and Charles I,
and in letters from George Lord Digby, Prince Rupert and Sir Henry Vane.11
The continued use and interest in cryptography during the first half of the
seventeenth century is further testified by the important work of Nandine
Akkerman on the correspondence of Elizabeth of Bohemia and her circle
between 1603 and 1642, which reveals regular deployment of secret modes
of writing: ciphers, codes, riddles and invisible ink.12
Much of the evidence for secret writing technologies necessarily privileges
the early modern state and statecraft, since the state papers are the largest
repository for clandestine correspondence, ciphers and codes. Ambassadors,
soldiers, government agents and spies number highly among the practi-
tioners of the arts of secret writing.13 Cipher alphabets formed a common
part of the paperwork that accompanied ambassadors on their missions.14
Thus in 1537 when Sir Thomas Wyatt was sent to be resident ambassador
to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V his instructions were accompanied
by among other writings ‘The cipher’ and ‘The kings lres to Themperor’ and
notes ‘To cawse a cyphre to be made’.15 In late 1588, Thomas Bodley trav-
elled to The Hague as Ambassador to the United Provinces equipped with a
set of royal instructions, ‘A Catalogue of memorials, letters and writinges’,
a passport and a cipher.16 Similarly, Sir Henry Unton on his embassy to
France in 1591 received instructions from the Queen outlining how he was
to collect information and report it home, alongside ‘l[ett]res of credence’
from the monarch, as well as a cipher intended for use in diplomatic corre-
spondence.17 Sir Dudley Carleton was assigned a cipher for use as ambassa-
dor to James I in Venice.18 Ciphers were also employed for correspondence
with representatives of foreign countries: a copy of a cipher was given to
the Grand Chancellor of the Kingdom of Poland.19 Each ambassador had
his own cipher or multiple ciphers, and given the complexity of Tudor
and Stuart foreign relations a myriad of ciphers survive among the state
paper archives. For a cipher system to work in the field, both the sender
and recipient needed to be aware of the cipher in order that encrypted let-
ters could be deciphered. Ciphers were frequently updated, added to and
supplemented; they were also prone to problems, often lost or stolen and
needed replacing.
At the government and diplomatic level, regular correspondence with
agents abroad, the interception of correspondence and the organisation of
encryption and decryption of secret letters were all activities central to the
smooth running of early modern intelligence activities.20 Indeed, in 1592
Nicholas Faunt argued that it was essential for the Principal Secretary to
have a secretary who
may cheifly attend vnto matters of intelligence Cyfers and secrett adver-
tisementes to keep first in good order to extract the substance of them for
the present vse, and to see them well digested into small bookes if they
bee matteriall, and haue anie refferrence either to thinges past, present,
or that bee likely to fall out in accion.21
Secret Letters 151
Secretary of State Francis Walsingham maintained a network of spies and

informants throughout Europe during the 1570s and 1580s that com-
municated largely through secret means.22 Lord Treasurer, William Cecil,
Lord Burghley maintained his own web of intelligencers, and preserved a
collection or ‘coffer’ of ciphers for assistance in diplomatic correspondence
maintained by his chief secretary Henry Maynard. In Maynard’s absence,
these duties were performed by Burghley’s other secretaries; in October
1594, the patronage secretary Michael Hickes was asked to search among
the ‘coffer of ciphers’ for a cipher that the Lord Treasurer had himself made
for the Duc de Buillon.23 In the 1590s Robert Devereux, earl of Essex in an
attempt to make himself a viable candidate for the position of Principal
Secretary of State developed an intelligence arm to his secretariat.24 His
close friend Anthony Bacon maintained lengthy correspondences for him
with contacts abroad, and was used on occasion to decipher incoming cor-
respondence.25 In this capacity, Essex also availed himself of the services of
the cipherer Thomas Phelippes as an intelligencer, and sent him letters to
decipher during the latter’s imprisonment in the Marshalsea for debt at the
end of 1595.26 Secretaries who worked with ciphers had access to private
and powerful information, but levels of access might be strictly controlled,
as Christopher Burlinson and Andrew Zurcher have persuasively shown in
their work on Edmund Spenser’s role as secretary to Lord Deputy of Ireland,
Arthur Grey in the 1580s. Indeed, detailed palaeographical evidence focus-
ing on Grey’s two ciphers and in particular a letter to Queen Elizabeth
penned in Spenser’s formal italic hand with sections of cipher inserted by
the Lord Deputy himself shows ‘conclusively’ that Grey did not share his
ciphers with his secretary.27
The confiscation by the state of private papers and the interception of
suspicious correspondence by government intelligencers means that these
collections also contain materials of a more personal nature. It is possible
that what has not survived (or remains unrecognised) is that correspond-
ence that attained genuine secrecy, because it was either destroyed or
so effective that its import remains undetected by present day scholars.
Investigations of other kinds of archive and a careful reading of other cat-
egories of correspondence, including family collections and recusant papers
reveals that the use of secret epistolary forms extended well beyond the
realms of government, diplomacy and the military, employed for an array of
personal and religious reasons with the increasing democratisation of writ-
ing. The increasing deployment of covert forms of writing in correspond-
ence during this period occurred at a time when writing technologies were
expanding and evolving more generally. Alongside complex cipher systems
emerged new forms of shorthand writing or stenography, utilised for speed,
concision and secrecy. These new writing technologies found broad applica-
tion in different ways throughout a range of handwritten texts other than
letters, including diaries, commonplace books, notebooks and almanacs.
The chapter begins by briefly exploring the development of cryptology

theory, then considers the extent to which new devices found practical
applications in manuscript correspondence, before exploring more broadly
the range of secret writing forms employed by sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century letter-writers.
Cryptographies
Cryptography – the art of secret writing in ciphers – formed the subject of

several Renaissance manuals, which drew on classical authors.28 One of the
earliest examples was the German Benedictine abbot Johann Trithemius’s
Steganographia, literally ‘covered writing’. Written in 1499, it circulated in
manuscript for more than a century before it was printed in 1606, and
offered simple ciphers and codes.29 In a later work Polygraphia (published
posthumously in 1518) Trithemius’s major innovation was the develop-
ment of the square table (‘tabula recta’) of 24 cipher alphabets. This poly-
alphabetical system functioned as a substitution cipher, with the first letter
of the message enciphered from the first alphabet, the second letter taken
from the second alphabet, and so on until the message was completed.
This system improved upon earlier polyalphabetical techniques of Leon
Battista Alberti – the inventor of the cipher disk – whose contribution to
cryptology was that individual words could appear in different forms in
the same text; by Trithemius’s method the alphabet was changed for each
new letter.30 Several writers developed the polyalphabet cipher system fur-
ther. The Italian Giovanni Battista Belaso in a treatise published in 1553
recommended the use of a key or countersign as a way of identifying which
alphabets were being used in a multiple alphabet cipher.31 Another Italian,
Giovanni Battista della Porta recommended the mixing of alphabets, writ-
ing that the order of letters ‘may be arbitrarily arranged, provided no letter
be skipped’.32 While earlier writers invented and modified this system of
polyalphabetic substitution, it was not until the publication of Blaise de
Vigenère’s cryptographic compendium Traicté des chiffres (Paris, 1586) that
it was developed into its final form. The Frenchman succeeded in combing
the ‘tabula recta’ of Trithemius and Belaso’s countersign or key with Porta’s
mixture of letters to produce a ‘chiffre indéchiffrable’. To this he contributed
a new method for keying alphabets, adding extra alphabets at the top and
side of the cipher table ‘to show that alphabets of the text as well as of the
keys may be transposed and changed at will’.33
Continental developments in Renaissance cryptography influenced
English writers. Francis Bacon discussed ciphers in The Advancement of
Learning (1605), clearly borrowing from a range of authors:
For CYPHARS; they are commonly in Letters or Alphabets, but may

bee in Words. The kindes of CYPHARS, (besides the SIMPLE CYPHARS
Secret Letters 153
with Changes, and intermixtures of NVLLES, and NONSIGNIFICANTS)

are many, according to the Nature or Rule of the infoulding: WHEELE-
CYPHARS, KAY-CYPHARS, DOVBLES, &c. But the vertues of them,
whereby they are to be preferred, are three; that they be not laborious to
write and reade; that they bee impossible to discypher; and in some cases,
that they be without suspition. The highest Degree whereof, is to write
OMNIA PER OMNIA; which is vndoubtedly possible, with a proportion
Quintuple at most of the writing infolding, to the writing infolded, and
no other restrainte whatsoeuer.34
His own contribution to cryptography was the ‘biliteral cipher’, which per-
mitted the writing of ‘anything under cover of anything’, which is described
in some detail in De augmentis scientiarum (1623).35 Its chief benefit was
that a piece of writing would outwardly appear innocuous, and therefore
escape the attention of the decipherer. Bacon’s method required the use of
two alphabets, ‘one of true letters, the other of non-significants’. The writer
should then, ‘infold in them two letters at once, one carrying the secret,
the other such a letter as the writer would have been likely to send, and yet
without anything dangerous’. Anyone intercepting the letter would upon
reading it suspect nothing. A further contrivance was added to avoid any
suspicion, namely that:
the infolding writing shall contain at least five times as many letters
as the writing infolded; no other condition or restriction whatever is
required. The way to do it is this: First let all the letters of the alphabet
be resolved into transpositions of two letters only. For the transposition
of two letters through five places will yield thirty-two differences; much
more twenty-four, which is the number of letters in our alphabet.
In his sample biliteral alphabet, Bacon transmuted the alphabet to combi-

nations of the letters ‘a’ and ‘b’; thus the letter ‘a’ equals aaaaa, ‘b’ equals
aaaab, ‘c’ equals aaaba, and so on.36 Following this pattern, his worked
example rendered the Latin word ‘fvge’ (flee) as a combination of twenty
a’s and b’s: Aababbaabbaabbaaabaa.37 ‘When you prepare to write’ he stated
‘you must reduce the interior epistle to this biliteral alphabet.’ The next step
involved the infolding of a second alphabet: ‘Have by you at the same time
another alphabet of two forms; I mean one in which each of the letters of
the common alphabet, both capital and small, is exhibited in two different
forms – any forms that you find convenient’. The biform alphabet supplied
consisted of two slightly different forms of both capital and lower-case let-
ters for each letter of the alphabet, each of which was designated as ‘a’ or ‘b’.
The final stage of the process was as follows: ‘Then take your interior epistle,
reduced to the biliteral shape, and adapt to it letter by letter your exterior
epistle in the biform character; and then write it out’.38 Scholars have
traditionally interpreted the Baconian biliteral cipher as operating through

different printed type faces; however, Alan Stewart has recently shown that
the most innovatory aspect of this cipher was in fact its application to hand-
writing.39 He argues that Bacon’s biform alphabet is reproduced to replicate
handwriting, and that the two versions of each upper- and lower-case letter
were created by slight variations in the way in which a given letter was writ-
ten.40 The secrecy of Bacon’s cipher as it applies to manuscript thus lay in
the careful way in which each letter was handwritten.
The increasing deployment of cryptographical forms of writing in corre-
spondence during this period occurred at a time when writing technologies
were expanding and evolving more generally. Alongside complex cipher
systems emerged new forms of shorthand writing or stenography, utilised
for speed, concision and secrecy. These new methods found broad applica-
tion in different ways throughout a range of handwritten texts other than
letters, including diaries, commonplace books, notebooks and almanacs.41
Timothy Bright’s inventive but cumbersome and impractical Characterie
(1588) provided a complex writing system that acted simultaneously as a
shorthand and cipher. A single character or symbol was used to denote a
word composed of several letters. The characterie was alphabetical only in
the sense that individual letters of the alphabet were allocated a character;
different words beginning with the same letter were created by changing
this initial character through a combination of altering its position and by
adding a range of hooks or pricks; often quite intricate, these characters
were entered by hand to each individual book once it had been printed.
Bright provided characters for 537 ‘charactericall wordes’.42 Additionally, he
included ‘a table of English words’ associated with the ‘charactericall’ words
by similarity or dissimilarity. This was central to expanding the lexical range
of the system.43 Words without a character of their own were represented by
association: thus the word ‘beake’ used the character for ‘mouth’ with the
character for the letter ‘b’ placed to the left-hand side, indicating a similar
word beginning with ‘b’, while the word ‘bride’, for which there was simi-
larly no character, was represented by the character for ‘husband’ with the
character for the letter ‘b’ placed to the right-hand side, signifying dissen-
sion. A series of pricks positioned in relation to individual characters were
also used to indicate derived words, nouns, tenses, numbers, names and
repetitions.44 Finally, the manual presents a list of ‘appelatiue words’ pro-
viding synonyms for select ‘charactericall’ words.45 Bright further claimed
that his ‘inuention’ could function as a universal mode of written commu-
nication, whereby ‘Nations of strange languages, may hereby communicate
their meaning together in writing, though of sundrie tonges’.46 Meaning
was conferred by script rather than phonetic value, and unlike that other
lingua franca, Latin, Bright’s ‘characterie’ ensured greater secrecy. As Patricia
Brewerton has perceptively argued, in the diplomatic arena it contained
the potential to generate an intimate textual relationship between foreign
Secret Letters 155
princes, one not mediated by bearers or ambassadors, ‘by-passing the repre-

sentation of ideas in sound’.47
The secrecy facilitated by shorthand was also emphasised in Peter Bales’s
The Writing Schoolmaster, a tripartite manual teaching brachygraphie (or
‘short writing’), orthography and calligraphy. ‘For men of state’ he wrote
‘what maie better pleasure you than Brachygraphie? For by it you maie
swiftlie and secreatlie decipher your intelligence: and by seeking to enrich
this Arte, drawe such formes of writing, as the curious Decipherer maie
sooner breake his braine, than reach to your meaning’.48 Bales’s Writing
Schoolmaster and his re-titled 1590-text The Arte of Brachygraphie owe much
to Bright’s Characterie, but offered in many ways a much simpler system of
‘short writing’ and extended the range of vocabulary for utilisation. Bales
provided tables of words organised alphabetically, but each word was rep-
resented by the letter of the alphabet with which it began (rather than a
non-alphabetical character), which was then modulated by the use of four
distinct pricks or ‘tittles’, each of which could be placed in twelve different
places.49 During the seventeenth century shorthand manuals proliferated.50
John Willis’s The Art of Stenographie (1602) was the originator of alphabet-
based shorthand. It offered a new character alphabet with which to rep-
resent words and sentences; and required the reader to grapple with the
positioning of vowels and consonants (and those that could be ‘neglected’)
as well as syllable patterns, and to learn contractions and special symbols for
commonplace words and phrases.51 Willis’s volume ran to several editions,
appearing in Latin and as a schoolroom-text, and spawned a host of manu-
als dedicated to this new writing technology.52
Continental cryptographies with their complex cipher systems prob-
ably catered for a highly specialised market of ambassadors, scholars and
professional cryptographers, literally peddling the practice of secrecy. The
Elizabethan mathematician, astrologer and antiquary John Dee, for exam-
ple, owned a manuscript copy of Trithemius’s text.53 The proliferation of
printed books on shorthand, however, suggests that they enjoyed a wider
readership, which is reinforced by surviving manuscript evidence of short-
hand use. Print thus encouraged new forms of writing.54 The techniques
of secret correspondence though were most widely disseminated through
Renaissance books of secrets, a flexible hybrid genre, combining by the mid-
seventeenth century characteristics of the household manual and receipt
book with discoveries of natural philosophy.55 Most commonly these texts,
which employed the rhetoric of secrecy for marketing purposes, printed clas-
sical and medieval recipes for invisible ink and other devices for concealed
writing, which appeared alongside household recipes and ‘secrets of nature’.
Girolamo Ruscelli’s The Second Part of the Secrets of the Reuerend Maister Alexis
of Piemont (1560) included recipes ‘To make letters that can not be red, vnles
the paper be put in the water’, and another ‘To make letters that can not be
read but at the fire’.56 Thomas Lupton’s, A Thousand Notable Things ([1579])
described how ‘To make the letters of the cullour of paper’.57 Hugh Plat’s The
Jewell House of Art and Nature (1594), instructed ‘how to write a letter secretly,
that cannot easilie bee discerned or suspected’.58 Readers of William Phillip’s
A Booke of Secrets (1596) were instructed how ‘To write without inke, that
it may not be seen, vnlesse the paper be wet with water’.59 By far the most
detailed account of secret writing arts is Johann Jacob Wecker’s encyclopedic
Eighteen Books of the Secrets of Art and Nature (1660), which taught ‘The way
to write in an Egge’, ‘How to make Letters that lye hid appear, and to hide
those that are visible’, ‘How to conceal writings’, ‘Letters that will be made
visible by fire or water’, ‘Letters not to be read but in the night’, and a recipe
for ‘Letters rising suddenly in any place’ involved writing in ‘vinegar or
piss’, which proved invisible until rubbed ‘over with soot’.60 The popularity
of this genre is suggested by the frequency with which books of secrets ran
to multiple editions and their appearance in affordable cheap print formats.
Moreover, the connection between secret writing and the household – and
the kitchen as the locus of domestic experimentation – indicates the quo-
tidian nature of these techniques. Skills developed and practised within the
home usually by women and servants had direct application to the writing
arts. It thus usefully extends the use of concealed writing to social groups
not traditionally associated with such sophisticated written forms.
Practical use of ciphers and codes
In practice workaday cipher systems ordinarily consisted firstly of an alpha-

bet, usually based upon alphanumeric or symbolic representation of the
twenty-four letters of the standard English alphabet (the modern letters i/j
and u/v were not differentiated) and analysis here is based on several hun-
dred manuscript cipher alphabets and several thousand letters written in
cipher.61 Thomas Bodley’s cipher alphabet used during his embassy to France
in 1588 consisted of a series of Greek letters, numbers and characters substi-
tuted for each letter, as did Sir Henry Unton’s cipher as English Ambassador
to France in 1591.62 Some alphabets employed several different symbols for
commonly used vowels; capitals, double letters and punctuation marks were
also assigned individual symbols in order to render decryption more diffi-
cult.63 Messages conveyed in this manner read as a continuous stream and
were less susceptible to frequency analysis. Nulls or symbols of no signifi-
cance (nihil significantia) were utilised as red herrings. More complex ciphers
employed a form of polyalphabetical substitution, with a key denoting the
choice of alphabet used. As English ambassador to Paris, Sir Edward Stafford
used a cipher for correspondence with Burghley that allowed for three dif-
ferent options of alphabet.64 Codes were also frequently used, whereby key
names, places, words and phrases were denoted by a series of symbols, let-
ters or numbers. Stafford was provided with a code list of more than 60 key
political figures, countries and place names; these were later supplemented
Secret Letters 157
by twenty new code words.65 While Stafford’s word-list used a random series
of symbols, other systems were more uniformly based on alphabetical or
numerical sequences, though gaps could be left in the order either to allow
for nulls or for expansion at a later date. A cipher used between 1605 and
1607 by Sir Henry Wotton, the English Ambassador to Venice, for example,
in his correspondence with Sir Charles Cornwallis, English Ambassador to
Spain, was entirely number-based. The numbers 1 to 5 were ‘nullities’; ‘all
numbers fro[m] 6 to 66’ the instructions explained ‘doe signifye eyther
vowells or consonants: wherof fro[m] 6 to 30 inclusive shall signifye vowells
and every vowell shall have five changes’; while ‘all numbers fro[m] 30 to
66 inclusive shall signifye consonants: Every consonant having two change’.
The numbers 67 to 111 were used largely for names and places. In addition,
all numbers were to be distinguished by a point, obscuring any grammatical
sense; a line above any alphabetical number doubled the letter that it signi-
fied, and a line under any number denoted money (numerum numeratem).66
Numerical ciphers were popular in the early-seventeenth century, and were
employed in a cipher used by the duke of Buckingham in 1627 to commu-
nicate with France.67
Ciphers varied in level of sophistication. An intelligence letter dated 1595
from Edward Wilton to the earl of Essex was written with fourteen different
ciphers which were used interchangeably; decoding thus required a match-
ing alphabet.68 Others were written as a stream of numbers with no obvi-
ous syntactical or punctuation marks to offer clues or patterns of meaning.
Those used by Mary, Queen of Scots and her correspondents were highly
complex, where the letters of each word were encrypted by a system of sub-
stitute numbers, letters and symbols.69 Henrietta Maria corresponded with
her husband Charles I using a complex number cipher, where each indi-
vidual number was separated from the next by two dots, which presented a
continuous succession of numbers, making it impossible to discern words or
sentences.70 At the other end of the spectrum Rowland White in 1597 used
a very simple symbolic code to disguise Penelope Rich’s name when inform-
ing his master Robert Sidney of Lady Rich’s intercession with the queen
on his behalf to be made Warden of the Cinque Ports.71 Letter-writers also
sought to remain anonymous by signing using symbols or writing under
pseudonyms in order to preserve their identities; the master cryptographer
Thomas Phelippes used multiple aliases over his long career, among them
Peter Halins, John Morice, Henry Willsdon, and John Wystand.72 Most
correspondence, however, employed basic ciphers or codes only fleetingly
to disguise particular names and places or to encrypt certain passages and
phrases.73 In 1596 Richard Douglas used codenames from classical antiquity
in writing to his uncle Archibald Douglas about Scottish affairs.74 Workaday
ciphers and codes were often rudimentary, intended merely to delay decryp-
tion. Thus in 1539 Thomas Wriothesley informed Thomas Cromwell lately
one only ‘writes in cipher’ when ‘things be eyther very good or’ very bad;
William Cecil advised Sir Thomas Smith soon after his appointment as
English Ambassador to France in September 1562 to ‘wryte no more than
is nedefull’ when ‘wryty[n]ge ye chiphre’.75 Interestingly almost none of
Bodley’s correspondence, which numbers more than 1300 items in actual
fact contains any form of cipher, with the exception of a letter dated 7 April
1589 from the Hague to Walsingham, which uses symbols in several places
to disguise names.76 In reality, therefore, a disparity existed between for-
mal cryptology theory and actual practice, which is exposed by comparing
encrypted and coded correspondence alongside Renaissance cryptographies.
Indeed, the very act of using an obvious cipher drew attention to the letter,
highlighting that there was something to hide.
A more effective strategy ensured that the reader did not suspect that a
letter was in fact written in code. It was, therefore, common for writers to
devise code words that appeared innocuous to the searching eye. In cor-
respondence to Thomas Baldwin concerning Mary Queen of Scots in 1584,
Gilbert Curle, the queen’s Scottish cipher secretary, used a series of innocent
looking phrases in place of real names. Thus the queen of England was ‘the
merchant of London’, the queen of Scotland ‘the merchant of Newscastle’
and Walsingham ‘the merchants wyfe’; Curle explained, ‘yf I will write the
Scottishe Queen shal not be remoued then to write the marchant of new-
castle shall not goe beyond the sea’.77 The spy Thomas Rogers ordinarily
disguised his letters to Walsingham and Sir Horatio Palavicino as mercantile
correspondence in order to transmit information about the movements of
Catholic conspirators on the continent. In this way, Rogers penned short mes-
sages concerning business written in normal ink, which provided the cover
for the covert intelligence that followed penned in invisible ink unreadable
by the naked eye. A letter to Walsingham dated 18 October 1585, describing
plans for the invasion of Scotland read to the outward observer: ‘I have sent
ii severall paterns of suche stuff as yor honor requyred, one was sent the 18th
of September, the other of the laste of the same, wch was all I sent sithence I
sent by my ffrend. The marchante who conveyed soche parcells as I sent here-
tofore hathe sent me worde, that in respect of the warres he will not send any
more stuff of suche valewe least yt shoulde myscarrie . . . ’.78 Secrets were com-
monly transmitted in this way under cover of mercantile business. Merchants
routinely sent international mail in their own languages from foreign places.
Anyone else who did so was suspect, and therefore if foreign correspondence
appeared outwardly to be commercial in nature it did not elicit suspicion.
Similarly, an anonymous Catholic informant writing in 1594 employed com-
monplace epistolary phrases to carry hidden meaning in letters to the earl of
Huntingdon in an attempt to pass the letter off as ‘familiar’ correspondence.
Thus, commendations to his sister and news that his brother was dead meant
that there was no likelihood of invasions or wars, while assurances of his
health and speedy return indicated that great preparations were being made
for war against England.79
Secret Letters 159
A more sophisticated cipher was used by William Cotton in correspond-

ence with the exiled Marian Privy Councillor, Sir Francis Englefield, sent
from Madrid in June 1574. In addition to a standard cipher alphabet and
list of codewords for key names and places, Cotton’s system incorporated
a lengthy list of ordinary words, organized alphabetically, which were
represented by various special characters (Figure 6.1). Cotton’s real innova-
tion though came in his invention of a character-based system in which
each letter of the alphabet was represented by an initial character and all
subsequent words beginning with the same letter were then represented by
variations on this stem character. Thus the letter ‘g’ was shown as a circle
with a diagonal cross through it; the next word in the list of g-words, ‘god’,
was represented with the variation of a small circle added to the lower left
descender, and so on. This is reminiscent of Bright’s Characterie, but Cotton’s
invention pre-dated this work by some 14 years. An instruction appended at
the end of Cotton’s second cipher reads ‘when I send any secret I must write
in this ciphre great letters and 3 crosses aboue’.80 While none of Cotton’s
own letters apparently survive, several of his correspondents, including
Francis Englefield and Anne, countess of Northumberland wrote to him
using cipher, sometimes merely to disguise certain words, at other times to
render whole passages secret.81
The intricate workings of enciphering and the related task of deciphering
are perhaps best studied through the career of Thomas Phelippes, a man
who spans the Elizabethan and early-seventeenth century and who rep-
resents one of the most interesting characters associated with the secret
writing arts. His extraordinary gifts as a cryptographer and especially as a
decipherer make him hardly representative of more mainstream practices,
but he provides an important benchmark and his activities reveal much
about the workings of Elizabethan intelligence as well as the habits and
methods associated with decryption. As a young man in the employ of Sir
Amias Paulet the English Ambassador in Paris, Phelippes’ skills as a deci-
pherer had already reached the attention of the Principal Secretary, Thomas
Wilson.82 Throughout the 1580s Phelippes was a key linchpin at the heart
of Walsingham’s intelligence networks, and was responsible for a range
of activities including, the handling of letters intercepted by the govern-
ment; encrypting and deciphering secret correspondence; and collecting
examples of cipher alphabets and systems of codes.83 During this period
he was instrumental in cracking the ciphers of Mary, Queen of Scots and
in 1586 uncovering Spanish plans for the Armada, which led to the burn-
ing of enemy ships at Cadiz in 1587, thus delaying the Armada for a year.84
Phelippes’s remit also extended to Turkish affairs, in which capacity he
deciphered for Burghley a letter dated 1594 sent by Edward Barton, English
Ambassador in Turkey concerning overtures made to him by Sinan Pasha,
Viceroy of Turkey, for peace with the Holy Roman Emperor. Although not
equipped with an alphabet for the letter, Phelippes ‘collected’ or worked out
160
Figure 6.1 William Cotton’s cipher (or ‘characterie’): BL, Cotton MS, Caligula BVIII,
fol.287r (7 June 1574). Reproduced by permission of The British Library, London.
Secret Letters 161
his own imperfect one. He informed Burghley that since ‘the causes of that
country [Turkey] require secrecy’ he framed a more satisfactory numerical
cipher that he claimed was ‘easier to be written with and likewise to read by
him that knoweth it, a copy whereof I have by me if occasion serve’.85 His
talents were not exercised as regularly after Walsingham’s death, a fact that
was compounded by long periods of imprisonment for debt and embezzling
of crown revenues and later on grounds of suspicion of corresponding with
the Catholic conspirator Hugh Owen. Yet even in 1622 Girolamo Lando, the
Venetian ambassador in London, described Phelippes as one ‘unequalled in
deciphering’ by whom he had been ‘frequently amazed’, and in 1625 his
mercurial gifts were again recognised by the Venetians who used him to test
the security of diplomatic correspondence.86
Although Phelippes was something of a polyglot as an intelligencer, his
main energies appear to have been directed towards decryption, a task by
his own admission that could be immensely gruelling. A letter to Robert
Cecil written during his imprisonment in March 1597 explained that a
ciphered letter from Count Olivares in Walsingham’s time which led to the
discovery of the Spanish invasion had ‘held’ him ‘twenty days in work’.87
Furthermore, the task of deciphering was made more difficult when he was
unable to work from original papers (rather than copies made by those
inexperienced in cryptography) and more so when he was forced to work
under confinement which caused him a distracted mind, weakened his
mental powers and meant that he had to work without the massive body
of papers that he accumulated. It is possible to detect Phelippes’s normal
working practices from the vast materials that survive in his handwriting
scattered throughout the State Papers and papers of government officials;
these include correspondence, cipher alphabets, decipherings or workings in
the margins or on the back of letters, neat copies of deciphered letters and
by-papers. A particularly good example of Phelippes’s working methodology
is provided by a letter from Dr William Gifford (cousin of Gilbert Gifford
who died in 1590) to Thomas Throckmorton in Rome, all of whom were
Catholics.88 The first step in deciphering the letter appears to have been to
make a fair copy of the original upon which to work. The back of this six-
folioed letter contains much of the apparatus used to crack the cipher: five
variant alphabets that were presumably intercepted (an explanation reads,
‘these figures at the side of the word shewe by wch alphabet to write’);
a list of the code numbers used by Gifford and besides them identification
of the names of the person or place they were used to represent (which in
some instances was later amended); and finally a partial alphabet used for
frequency analysis. Throughout the main body of the letter decipherings
have been added; names have been placed next to coded numbers and pas-
sages decrypted. Marginal annotations further reveal the working process: at
one point Phelippes wrote, ‘where he writes owt of character [not in cipher]
he disguiseth by these termes of she & wenche as if he spoke of women’;
elsewhere, he explored the possibility of Gifford having made a mistake in

his letter, demonstrating the importance of context and intelligence as a
mode of deciphering: ‘quere whether 83 were not mistaken by the writer
himself for 73 for yt is an abrupt transition to 83 wch in other places is
Parsons [i.e. the Jesuit Robert Persons]’.89
Many of the methods employed by Phelippes represent good working
practice, which is found in use elsewhere. Decipherers commonly produced
a fair copy of the original letter from which to work, sometimes leaving con-
siderable gaps of space between the lines in which to write interlinear deci-
pherings; at other times, decrypted words were placed in margins, or written
next to or above ciphered sections (Figure 6.2). Once solved, a fair copy of
the deciphered letter was then made for use by government officials; if the
original was in a foreign language, which was often the case with diplomatic
correspondence, a further process of translation may have taken place. On
occasion, a short by-paper might be produced extracting the salient points
from a number of ciphered letters so as to provide an easily accessible sum-
mary for quick perusal. As Principal Secretary, William Cecil produced a
series of notes gathered from the secret correspondence conducted in cipher
between Mary, Queen of Scots and the duke of Norfolk; Privy Council clerk
Robert Beale produced a similar paper, endorsed ‘An extract taken out of
certaine decifered letters touchinge ye Scott. q & certaine Names of persons
wel affected to ye spa[nish] faction’.90 A letter concerning the Armada from
Edward Stafford written to Elizabeth I in the Lord Treasurer’s cipher (since
Stafford feared the queen might have lost her own) was prepared for her
to read by Francis Walsingham, who inserted the decipher above each of
the cipher words and marked important passages with trefoil for her atten-
tion.91 Intelligence was central to the deciphering of letters even where
cipher alphabets and code words had been obtained through interception.
Where information was not provided either through the reports and news-
letters of ambassadors or agents, it might be extracted through examination
and even torture, with prisoners being closely questioned about particular
aspects of letters. The scholar William Wake was examined in 1586 about
why he kept papers with figures and ciphers; while the priest William Holt
was questioned in great detail in 1584 ‘touching’ a letter in cipher and one
written in Italian, asked to identify ‘from whom it came & from whence’,
‘to whom it was directed’ as well as ‘what is understood’ by various words,
phrases or characters.92 In circumstances where the decipherer did not have
the cipher alphabet or a list of code words, he was forced to use frequency
analysis to identify patterns of letter use in order to decode the letter fully.
Where patterns were not discernible cryptographers had to try to decode
letters from their context.
Cryptography certainly appears to have been an elite form for much of
the period, with cipher-systems as Margaret Ferguson explains regarded by
some ‘Renaissance men of letters’, ‘as a second-order mode of literacy, like
163
Figure 6.2 Partial key to the cipher of a letter from Thomas Jennings to the Countess
of Northumberland, 20 June 1572: TNA, SP15/21, fol.119. Reproduced by permission
of The National Archives, Kew.
Latin, which had for centuries served as a social as well as an epistemologi-

cal marker distinguishing elite literate men’. She argues further that:
As vernacular literacy spread in the early modern period, as scripts became

standardized and easier to read through the technology of print, and as
even women and some lower-class men were able to pick up some Latin,
the men of letters who served as diplomats, letter-writers, and spies for
the monarchs of Europe grew increasingly interested in a ‘Renaissance’
of the ancient art of ciphers.93
While ciphers were most commonly used in diplomatic, military and reli-
gious contexts, it is clear that over the course of the period, secret modes of
letter-writing were also adopted by broader social groups usually unidenti-
fied with these kinds of higher literacy skills, including women. The learned
Anne Bacon (1528–1610) used a weak cipher of a kind in letters to her
son Anthony by transliterating into Greek and Latin, and possibly Hebrew
characters critical comments about Whitgift, the countess of Warwick and
rumours of Essex’s sexual affair with one of the Queen’s maids of honour,
a practice of encoding employed by the Edwardian humanist and diplo-
mat Richard Morison in letters to William Cecil in the early 1550s.94 Mary
Phelippes, wife of the master cryptographer Thomas Phelippes, took over
some of her husband’s correspondence after his imprisonment in the wake
of the Gunpowder Plot for his continued correspondence with the fugitive
Catholic Hugh Owens.95 During the Civil War great efforts were made by
women to conceal information dispatched by letter. Women often addressed
family letters of import, since a female hand was less likely to arouse sus-
picion.96 The parliamentarian gentlewoman Brilliana Harley in correspond-
ence with her son Edward used a technique first devised by the Italian
physician, mathematician and astrologer Girolamo Cardano (1501–76),
whereby a message conveyed within what appeared to be an ordinary piece
of writing could only be understood by pinning to it another sheet with
holes cut into it which revealed the relevant letters and words. Her fear of
interception was expressed in a missive of 17 November 1638, in which she
warned her son ‘when you rwite by the carrier rwite nothing but what you
may see, for many times the letters miscarry’. In another letter she crypti-
cally referred to the form of concealment ‘I haue toold you if you remember
of a paper that some statemen make use of, when they would not haue
knowne what they riwit of. Rwite me worde wheather you vnderstand what
I meane’, before offering instructions in a later letter, ‘You must pin that
end of the paper, that has the cors made in incke, vpon the littel cros on
the end of this letter; when you would write to me, make vse of it, and giue
the other to your sister Brill’. This was a technique she employed in writ-
ing to Edward in several letters dating from 1642 and 1643.97 As with male
correspondents, the women described here employed ciphers and codes to
Secret Letters 165
protect political and state secrets. Lower down the social scale, Mary Deane
while imprisoned in Bridewell for adultery communicated with her lover in
1600 in a secret cipher she had learned from her mother. Unable to crack her
code, the Bridewell authorities arranged for her to be whipped and deported
to Scotland.98 Secret writing here was employed for clandestine amorous
purposes.
Other forms of secret letter-writing
Alongside more formal cipher systems individuals or groups developed their

own coded forms, improvising new methods of conveying meaning secretly
for use in a widening range of social situations. Codes or secret language
were used during the early modern period for matters of intimacy between
husbands and wives to conduct amorous and occasionally sexual relation-
ships.99 Maria Thynne employed doggerel Latin to disguise her lascivious
longings in a letter to her husband, presumably to avoid the prying eyes of
servants and bearers.100 William Trew addressed his wife Margaret informally
as ‘My G S M’, possibly an abbreviation for ‘M[y] G[ood] S[weet] M[all]’,
a secret language indicative of marital intimacy.101 Shortened forms of
Christian names and pet-names known only by married partners or sweath-
earts operated in a similar manner to convey private affect.102 Symbols and
signs marked in and around the texts of letters likewise carried intimate
meaning. The earl of Leicester frequently used a personal mark shaped like
eyes and eyebrows to sign off letters to Elizabeth, a covert reference to her
nickname for him, ‘Eyes’. It was a device that Elizabeth herself used in a
letter to Leicester dated 19 July 1586.103 In a similar manner, Christopher
Hatton referred to himself as ‘liddes’ (the named of affection applied to
him by the queen); on at least one occasion he used a symbol shaped like
a crown to represent the queen; several letters were simply addressed with
the symbol of a crown represented by three small triangles underlined with
a flourish; and elsewhere he allegorically spoke of himself as ‘the sheep’ and
the earl of Oxford as ‘the boar’.104 These coded and private references within
letters of conventional courtly love suggest closeness and royal favour. Use
of pet names and shared intimacies of this nature were likewise employed
by James VI and I in letters to his own courtiers. Robert Cecil was com-
monly referred to by the king as ‘my little beagle’.105 A letter to Lord Henry
Howard was addressed to ‘My honest black, I dare not say faced, 3’, the
number three representing Howard, the blank space instead of the epithet
‘black-faced’ which his recipient disliked.106 In writing to George Villiers,
duke of Buckingham he referred to him as ‘My only sweet and dear child’ or
by the pet-name ‘Steenie’ (or ‘sweet Steenie’, or ‘My Sweet Steenie gossip’)
a Scottish contraction for Stephen, and later as ‘Sweet Hart’, styling himself
‘thy dear dad’, or ‘Christian gossip’.107 Secrecy was also generated more
generally by allusions to shared knowledge or experiences unintelligible to
the outward observer. Thus in 1549 William Paget asked Protector Somerset
to ‘Remember what youe promysed me in the galerye at Westmynster
before the breathe was owt of the body of the king that dead ys’, alluding
to their private arrangements for the succession on the death of Henry
VIII.108 Elizabeth of Bohemia’s correspondence routinely relied on shared
associations, puzzles and enigmas.109 Allusions and euphemisms of this
nature operated throughout correspondence of the period as a shared secret
language that worked to cement personal bonds between individuals.
Other forms of secret writing were developed in an ad hoc manner. The
Elizabeth gentlewoman Elizabeth Bourne wrote under the pseudonyms
of Frances Wesley and Anne Hayes, which she referred to as her ‘secrete
syphers’, during her difficult separation from her husband. As Anne Hayes
she corresponded with Sir John Conway, hiding her identity in order to
keep business between them secret. Elizabeth Bourne assumed the pseu-
donym Frances Wesley, to write to Conway’s wife, Lady Eleanor (whom
she addressed as Elizabeth Poule) a rather splenetic missive in which she
rebuked her ‘unkynd syster’ for demanding that she submit to her tyran-
nical husband Anthony, and mocked her ‘barbarous speech’ and lack of
‘eloquence’.110 Among children too secret codes formed a part of a distinct
culture of childhood. The letters of James Basset, the rather precocious ten-
year-old son of Lady Lisle, reveal something of the imaginative world of a
Tudor schoolboy, in which letter-writing was perhaps regarded as a child-
hood game, replete with secret codes. One letter complains of ill-treatment
by his schoolmaster, claiming that his correspondence was heavily cen-
sored and that he was forced to write letters to his mother against his will:
‘Madame’ he wrote ‘I would have you know that all letters which I send you
shall be false, and not written of my own will, if they be not closed with my
seal, as you see this one is’. Another letter conveying a pair gloves by a serv-
ant, which requested his mother to write to him describing how they were
made, suggests a secret game designed to outwit light-fingered servants:
‘Madame, I have sent you some gloves by one of Mr Bryan’s servants. I shall
not tell you how they are made, for I fear lest they might be exchanged, for
lack of care, because he has many others’.111 Behind this use of personal seals
to authenticate, lies a childish desire for epistolary privacy, connected to a
wilful expression of personality. The desire among children more broadly
that their correspondence be kept secret is suggested by the seventeenth-
century autobiographer, Lady Elizabeth Delaval, who recorded childhood
exchanges of letters which she ‘carefully kept’ in her ‘bosome’.112
Another popular form of secret writing was the art of making invisible ink,
which was well-known during the early modern period, and became linked
with confessional secrecy and freedom of religious conscience. Printed
books of secrets and manuscript recipe books instructed readers in the use
of various substances – alum powder or salt armoniack, vinegar, urine, or
the juice of oranges, lemons and onions – all of which were undetectable
Secret Letters 167
unless treated with water, heat or a fine powder such as coal dust.113 The
ingredients for invisible ink were readily at hand (sometimes quite literally)
and easily improvised. Invisible ink and other devices were widely used by
Elizabethan Catholics conducting clandestine correspondences to transmit
news, information and spiritual advice through underground networks.114
The Jesuit priest Henry Garnett used invisible ink in a letter from prison
addressed to the gunpowder plot conspirator, Ambrose Rookwood, under
the alias Thomas Sayer, filling almost every available inch of blank space
on the manuscript page with messages unreadable to the naked eye. The
letter was signed by William Waad, Lieutenant of the Tower, through whose
hands the letters must have passed.115 The autobiography of the Jesuit
priest John Gerard provides an unusually detailed account of his secret
letter-writing activities during his imprisonment. In the period after his
torture, Gerard describes training his broken hands to write again and the
makeshift writing tools he was able to secure: a quill toothpick fashioned as
a pen; oranges, the juice of which was preserved for use as invisible ink; and
paper, ostensibly to wrap up and send rosaries crafted out of orange peel,
acted as the innocuous carrier of his hidden messages.116 Letters were then
secretly conveyed with the knowledge of the warder, whose cooperation was
bought (partly with the flesh of the oranges). In this manner he was able
to communicate with fellow prisoners and friends outside. His recipients
knew to look for writing on the wrappings; communication in this manner
was common practice within Catholic circles. Charcoal and later pencil was
used to write simple messages, with interlinear text written in orange juice:
‘In the pencilled letter I confined myself to spiritual topics, but in the white
spaces between the lines I gave detailed instructions to different friends of
mine outside’.117 Once assured of the warder’s reliability and partial illit-
eracy (in that he was unable to read script), Gerard was able to send sealed
letters penned in ink, even though he did not use the true names of his
recipients, but forms of address that they would recognise: ‘I called one “my
son”, another “my friend” or “my nephew”, and their wives “sister” and
“daughter”’.118 In his writings, he drew an important distinction between
the different properties of lemon juice and orange juice. ‘I never used lemon
or citron juice’, he wrote:
There was one occasion when I did in my previous prison and that was
for the letters which Wade [William Waad, Governor of the Tower] inter-
cepted but then there was a special reason. They were letters of recom-
mendation and had to be read in one place and then taken on to another;
and lemon juice has this property, that it comes out just as well with
water or heat. If the paper is taken out and dried, the writing disappears
but it can be read a second time when it is moistened or heated again.
But orange juice is different. It cannot be read with water – water in fact
washes away the writing and nothing can recover it. Heat brings it out,
but it stays out. So a letter in orange juice cannot be delivered without

the recipient knowing whether or not it has been read.119
Orange juice was thus a more secure medium for communication. More
broadly though, secrecy here was intimately connected to matters of reli-
gious conscience. Use of invisible ink was not uncommon beyond Catholic
circles. The spy Thomas Rogers routinely employed invisible ink in his
letters to Walsingham and Sir Henry Palavicino (Figure 6.3).120 In 1598,
Andrew Facy of Stonehouse near Plymouth wrote from Spain asking the
Lord Admiral to send him answer in a letter written ‘wth ye iuyce of a lym-
men’.121 One William Steven wrote to Jacques Mytens a letter containing
a postscript in orange juice or milk.122 Writing from Lisbon, one Arnauld
Backer sent a Dutch letter discussing business to the merchant Sir Robert
Williamson, which was interlined with an English letter written in invis-
ible ink.123 Again, mercantile writing acted as the cover for clandestine
correspondence.
The increasing use of covert and hidden forms of correspondence coin-
cided with wider application of personal writing technologies and a devel-
oping sense of the letter as a private form. It became more common for
letter-writers to pen missives of a personal or sensitive nature themselves,
rather than rely upon the auspices of a secretary or scribe. Convention also
dictated that letters between family and close acquaintances be personally
written, where literacy permitted. More broadly, letters exhibit concern for
epistolary secrecy. Writers implored recipients to burn letters, anxious to
safeguard contents; others requested for their letters be returned once read
in order that they might retain them. The intentional destruction of letters
was a tactic commonly deployed by those unwillingly to allow the confisca-
tion of their papers. When Lord Lisle was accused of treason, Lady Lisle had
much of her correspondence ‘cast in a jakes’ (or privy) to prevent its sei-
zure.124 Alternatively, the recusant Northamptonshire gentlemen Sir Thomas
Tresham intended to preserve his papers securely intact, a plan carried out
by his daughter, presumably in the aftermath of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot,
when the papers were ‘bound up in a lynnen cloth [and] sealed up with
hard waxe’, and then walled up in a closet that stewards’ accounts record
having been built in 1596.125 The building of secret architectural spaces and
the walling in of clandestine Catholic books and papers again reinforces the
strong link between secrecy and religious conscience. More ordinarily, let-
ters were sealed to prevent them being read by bearers, and directed to spe-
cific individuals by whom they were intended to be read. Where seals were
damaged or letters were already opened on arrival readers worried that the
security of their correspondence had been compromised. Correspondence
increasingly came to be defined as private and personal, the property of the
recipient; to read another person’s letters without permission transgressed
an unwritten social code.126
169
Figure 6.3 Invisible ink used in a letter from Thomas Rogers to Walsingham, 25
August 1585: TNA, SP15/29, fol.59r. Reproduced by permission of The National
Archives, Kew.
Hidden modes of delivery
Before the evolution of the Post Office, the letter remained a highly insecure
medium entirely dependent on the trustworthiness of bearers. While this
could lead to degrees of self-censorship or messages being conveyed orally
by dependable bearers, efforts were also made to have letters transmitted
through secure means. Government dispatches normally travelled along
official postal routes; private individuals employed trusted servants to carry
correspondence on their behalf. Novel techniques were also employed to
have correspondence secretly conveyed. Letters were carried sewn into col-
lars, sleeves or other clothing; they were hidden in trunks, pots, barrels and
staffs. The famous Babington Plot letters were conveyed in a barrel stopper.
An unknown author attempted to shoot an arrow into Edinburgh Castle
attached to which was a note in cipher, giving details of the number of
Englishmen besieging the walls.127 Ingenious methods of secreting letters
about the person, stitched into clothing, were devised: the seventeen-year-
old recusant Thomas Cauze of Drayton, county Salop, was apprehended
in 1595 in Chester ‘purposed to travayle into Spayne’, with a letter in
Latin ‘sewed’ up in his ‘doublet’; one Reynold Bisley carried letters into
England sewn ‘in his [coat] Buttons’.128 When incarcerated in the Tower,
the Elizabethan Jesuit priest John Gerard sent letters of recommendation for
two boys travelling to St Omer; the letters were written in lemon juice, and
the paper was ‘wrapped around one or two collars to make it look as if it
was being used to keep the collars clean’.129 In March 1600, fearful that his
letters would be intercepted on the rebel-held highways leading to Dublin,
Sir Nicholas Walsh, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas informed Sir Robert
Cecil that he had caused them to be sewn into the ‘owld truise [trews]’ of the
messenger, adding ‘wch for the raggednes therof none would covet!’.130
Certain groups developed more sustained and continuous postal networks
to transport vital correspondence. Underground Catholic networks were
instrumental in conveying clandestine letters throughout Europe, con-
necting priests operating in England with Rome and providing important
channels of communication for English recusants, routes that enabled the
transmission of letters, books and personnel.131 The Catholic exile Richard
Verstegan functioned as an important linchpin during the 1590s and early-
seventeenth century for networks of leading Catholics dotted throughout
England and Europe.132 Based in Antwerp from 1587, Verstegan despatched
and forwarded letters to and from Catholics in England, Spain, Italy, France
and the Low Countries, postal activities that can be reconstructed not
only from his own correspondence, but also from the interrogations and
confessions of captured priests and Catholics. He appears to have been at
the centre of an elaborate network of communications, and for the period
1591 to 1617 engaged in sending newsletters or ‘intelligences’ (themselves
often utilising simple ciphers for names and places), which he had easily
Secret Letters 171
conveyed to a range of correspondents along with books and money.

Among his chief English-based correspondents were Henry Garnet, Robert
Southwell and John Gerard; in Spain he corresponded with Robert Persons,
Sir Francis Englefield and Richard Walpole; in Italy he acted as intelligencer
for William Allen, Joseph Creswell and Roger Baynes; in France he wrote
to Thomas Fitzherbert and John Colville; while his Low Countries corre-
spondents included William Holt, the Welsh exile Hugh Owen and Henry
Walpole.133 Indeed, under interrogation Henry Walpole confessed that
‘ther is one Verstegan in Antwerpe who conveyeth all the letters betwixt
F Garnet & those who write vnto him from beyond seas’, that ‘Versetegan
sends vp & down letters & intelligences & bookes betwixt the Cardinall,
Persons, Holt, Owen and England’, and that Allen, Persons and Holt ‘receyve
all their intelligences that I know of by Verstegan’.134 Verstegan’s own news-
letters were sometimes sent in packets, included with enclosures and other
letters that he was forwarding to the same recipients; while at other times
they were despatched singly judging from the signs of sealing, either paper
seals or slits in the paper where bands would have been applied. The pre-
cise routes of delivery are hard to discern, although there is some evidence
that letters were sent directly from Antwerp to England; letters destined for
Rome normally travelled via Venice, but Milan was also used. He appears to
have engaged in regular weekly exchanges of correspondence with men like
Persons and Baynes. While interception was a continual threat, very few
letters were lost in this way, although in 1592, he ceased sending letters to
priests in England for a few weeks, having been informed that an English
spy was seeking to understand ‘which way and how’ Verstegan sent his
letters.135 On the continent, Verstegan presumably used the official post,
and he was on good terms with the Antwerp Postmaster, Charles de Taxis.
Indeed, it was claimed that ‘ye postm[aste]r in Bottels [Antwerp] doth often
take englyshe lett[e]rs, and for yt he canot wel read englysh useth to call the
sayd Ver[stegan] to read them being his familiar frend’.136 His knowledge of
European postal systems is testified by his publication of The Post For Diuers
Partes of the World (1576).
The evidence of testimonies gathered under examination further reveals
a plethora of private individuals who were prepared to carry letters between
the Low Countries and England, divulging the breadth of underground
postal activities operating during the late-sixteenth century, including one
Laurence, a Sheffield-born bookbinder living in Antwerp who ‘cometh
ouer very often w[i]th intelligences’ from Verstegan and sometimes from
Sir Timothy Mockett; and the Lille-based merchant Andrew Buzeline who
transported books to England, including copies of ‘Newes from Spayne &
hollande’.137 The examination of Simon Knowles, a cutler from Combe near
Greenwich based in the Low Countries, further highlights a series of indi-
viduals who were involved in the conveyance of letters and other materials,
including Anthony Jones, page and chief secretary to Sir William Stanley,
who was sent ‘abroade vpon messages aswell into England as elsewhere’;
the tailor Thomas Myntar, who was ‘imployed often vpon messages’ from
Antwerp and Brussels to Rheims. Another figure involved in the delivery
of clandestine Catholic correspondence was ‘one Damporte of the Temple’,
whose brother William, had served Sir William Stanley, and ‘receyveth
lres from beyonde the seas & sendeth likewise thither’. Father Holt it was
claimed had been a priest in his father’s house.138 On another occasion
Knowles admitted to carrying letters from Father Holt to the Jesuits Father
Braye and Nicholas Smith. He explained that in travelling with letters to
England he hired a post-horse and rode with Joos, the post of Antwerp, to
Lille, and there on finding wagons bound for Calais he paid the wagoner two
crowns ‘to lett him goe thether wth him as his man and hee lente him coate,
breeches, & a greate powche as though hee had bene his servante’; from
Calais he sailed to England in the boat of one Tidyman of Dover, landing at
Ramsgate.139 Cumulatively this interrogatory evidence attests a complicated
underground network of channels of communication, a range of individu-
als prepared to carry clandestine materials, the ingenuity with which corre-
spondence was concealed and the degree to which officials could be bribed.
It also highlights the peculiar role of the Catholics (English, but abroad;
vernacular, but foreign) in the development of secret letter protocols.
Furthermore, there is a gendered dimension to clandestine postal activi-
ties, with women as active participants in the underground Catholic net-
works that developed during Elizabeth’s reign. While Catholic men had to
conform publicly or outwardly to Anglicanism, recusant women fostered
a private, household-based Catholicism and were pivotal in sustaining
a traditional Catholic faith, with many active in hiding priests and con-
ducting clandestine correspondence.140 The recusant Elizabeth Vaux (née
Roper) harboured the Jesuit priests John Gerard and Henry Garnett, and
Gerard received daily newsletters from her.141 Another well-known recu-
sant, her sister-in-law, Anne Vaux, daughter of William Vaux, third Baron
Vaux of Harrowden, established a line of communication with Henry
Garnett, arranging for letters to be passed to him through his gaoler during
his imprisonment in the Tower in the aftermath of the gunpowder plot.
The letters themselves were outwardly innocuous, dealing with everyday
matters such as his spectacles, but contained secret messages written in
invisible ink (made using orange juice) at the bottom of the page.142 More
broadly, Catholic women were a central component in clandestine Catholic
networks that stretched across Europe, with some women able to wield
influence at a more public, diplomatic level. Jane, duchess of Feria and her
husband provided Philip II of Spain with invaluable intelligence concerning
England and its queen, which was gathered through the duchess’s network
of kin. After the abortive northern uprising in 1569, Anne, countess of
Northumberland enjoyed some influence as a high profile Catholic exile
on the continent. Based in Mechelen from 1571 (and later in Brussels, Liège
Secret Letters 173
and Luxembourg) she maintained a correspondence with other Catholics

who had fled Elizabethan England in the aftermath of the Papal Bull against
the Queen.143 The involvement of women in underground communication
networks was not unique to the Elizabethan period. During the 1650s, the
postal networks of continental convents were utilised by the exiled Charles
II for royalist communications, and Nadine Akkerman has shown the ways
in which the mail system of Alexandrine of Taxis was used by the Catholic
League.144
The correspondence of Mary, Queen of Scots provides an instructive case-
study of how letters might be secretly conveyed under restrictive condi-
tions of surveillance.145 Of particular interest is the pivotal role that women
played in conveying correspondence to Mary. This is clear from a letter
from Sir Amias Paulet, then Mary’s keeper at Tutbury Castle in Staffordshire,
to Walsingham, in which he describes the postal activities of the Scottish
Queen’s female attendants. A gentlewoman ‘dwelling not farr from Tutbury’
whose identity he could not uncover had, he informed Walsingham, passed
letters between the queen and her son. Likewise, the queen’s laundresses
had great liberty to do mischief; lodging outside the castle out of danger
of ‘watche and warde’, they were able to ‘carye and receave all things at
their own pleasure’. Information also travelled widely by word-of-mouth,
and Mary’s female attendants acted as effective brokers of news: Paulet
complained, ‘the two gentlewomen latelie admitted have filled this howse
full of newes and you must looke for larger measure yf any servants come
out of Fraunce’. In response to these conditions Paulet assured Walsingham
that ‘the laundresses being lodged wth in the howse, and the residewe of
this Q[ueen’s] trayne watched and attended in such precise manner as they
be, I cannot imagyne howe it may be possible for them to convey a peece
of paper as bigg as my finger’.146 News and intelligence was thus transmit-
ted through seemingly conventional domestic channels. Lord Seton sent
Lady Fernihurst a letter that he wished her to address and send to Mary,
presumably because a woman’s handwriting was less suspicious.147 Gender
could therefore play a pivotal role in secretive writing practices. Clandestine
correspondence disguised as ‘women’s letters’ – seemingly harmless and
apolitical – thus operated below the radar in the same way other letters mas-
queraded as mercantile business missives. Aping conventions and standard
forms was an important way by which correspondents sought to mask their
true intentions.
In conclusion, the development of writing technologies of concealment

occurred within a distinct set of conditions in early modern England. The
need for secure communications during a period of religious and political
conflicts led to the revival of classical and medieval traditions of the secret
arts of letter-writing, techniques that were subsequently expanded and

adapted by continental and English theorists. In reality, however, a dispar-
ity existed between formal cryptology theory and actual practice, which is
exposed by comparing of encrypted correspondence alongside Renaissance
cryptographies. Workaday ciphers were often rudimentary, intended merely
to delay decryption and rarely involving the intricacies found in the pages
of Porta, Belaso, Blaise de Vigenère or even Francis Bacon. Once thought to
be the sole preserve of governmental and ambassadorial circles, secret modes
of letter-writing were adopted by a wider range of social groups (includ-
ing women and children) usually unidentified with these kinds of higher
literacy skills. The genre of the Renaissance book of secrets did much to
popularise secret writing practices, but also people devised their own unique
systems of codes or secret methods based on a shared private language or
understanding of symbols. Secret letters were a constant device employed in
official statecraft throughout the Tudor and early-Stuart period, as well as for
more subversive political ends. As secret writing became more widespread
over the period, one can identify an increase in the range of purposes to
which it was put. It was employed not only to convey confidential govern-
ment, military and diplomatic information, but also as a way of maintaining
personal, amatory and religious privacy (especially Catholic); secret codes
even formed a part of childhood games. Moreover, the development of
secret writing practices enlarges our understanding of an emerging concept
of privacy during the early modern period, and the ways in which it con-
structed a series of spheres, spaces, social transactions and relationships that
were closed and confidential, such as state secrets, family and other intimate
relations, and questions of religious conscience.
7
Copying, Letter-Books and the
Scribal Circulation of Letters
Early modern letters survive to us today in range of material forms. While

multiple copies of an individual letter may be textually identical, one might
survive as an ‘original’ letter sent ostensibly to its first reader; another as
a copy made by the sender or recipient and preserved in a formal ‘letter-
book’; and ten others might be copies – extant as separates or contained
within manuscript ‘miscellanies’ – made by compilers, later readers who
read it through scribal publication. Many scholars (literary critics as well as
historians) use text from sent letters, letter-books and miscellanies almost
interchangeably without noting the important differences inflected by
nuances in scribal status. The letter-book as genre was intimately connected
with bureaucratic practice, concerned with the preservation of outgoing and
incoming letters for purposes of record. At the same time, the selection of
letters to be copied, and the ways in which correspondence was ordered to
represent an individual and his or her epistolary connections in a particu-
lar light has a powerful impact on the ways in which we should read and
interpret letter-books. Thus letter-books, which form the focus of section
one of this chapter, preserved single copies of letters sent or received by an
individual or group. Copies of certain letters, however, enjoyed wider cir-
culation in manuscript (and print) beyond the named addressee of a letter
and the relative privacy of a letter-book. Notable examples include Philip
Sidney’s Letter to Queen Elizabeth, the earl of Essex’s Letter of Advice to the Earl
of Rutland and Thomas Alured’s Letter to the Lord Marquess of Buckingham.
The ‘scribal publication’ of such letters has been treated in large-scale dis-
cussions of manuscript transmission by Harold Love, H.R. Woudhuysen and
Arthur Marotti, as well as in seminal work by Peter Beal on Philip Sidney’s
letter to Queen Elizabeth and Andrew Gordon on the circulation of letters
associated with Francis Bacon and the second earl of Essex, and my own
analysis of Lady Rich’s Letter to Queen Elizabeth.1 These studies have tended
to concentrate on individual or discrete groups of letters or on individual
manuscript volumes, rather than on the broader phenomenon of the scribal
circulation of letters that developed from the late-Elizabethan period well
175
into the 1640s and beyond, coinciding with increased general interest in
news and politics. Indeed, Steven May has argued that ‘hundreds of private
letters with a broader appeal circulated widely’ during the early modern
period, both as manuscript separates and copied into commonplace books,
diaries, notebooks and manuscript ‘miscellanies’.2 The final two sections
of the chapter therefore examine the scope of this activity, outlining the
broad range of letter texts that were copied and collected, the mechanics of
transmission, and reading and the reception of copies.
Some scribal copies of letters survive as individual manuscripts or unbound
‘separates’ distinct from larger collections. The majority, however, are col-
lected in manuscript miscellanies, a rather broad term denoting volumes
containing different genres of writing by several authors, compiled from
various sources. These volumes form the main source for studying the cir-
culation of letter texts, and this part of the chapter is based on an examina-
tion of over 200 such manuscript collections alongside numerous separates.
The terms ‘letter-book’ and ‘miscellany’ are distinguished throughout. The
former were primarily kept for administrative purposes to record incoming
and outward correspondence, while the practices that led to the compiling
of manuscript miscellanies are more akin to the habits of common-placing,
where various letters by an individual writer, group or various letter-writers,
were collected and copied (along with other genres) for purposes of politi-
cal, religious and historical interest, as well as for emulation. In practice, the
term ‘letter-book’ is employed interchangeably by archivists and scholars to
denote both formal letter-books or entry books as well as ‘miscellanies’, and
it must be stressed that boundaries between the two are not impermeable.3
Hybrid forms of manuscript books survive, such as Francis Fane’s miscel-
lany (BL, Additional MS 34218), which collects transcripts of letters and
documents relating to him, his family and estates, alongside correspond-
ence of well-known letter-writers. The term ‘miscellany’ itself, however, is
rather a baggy one that masks the complexity of the ways in which letters
were copied. Individual letters circulated as discrete collections related to
particular letter-writers or events, within general compilations of letters, as
well as within miscellaneous volumes containing verse and other forms of
prose. One might usefully, therefore, draw distinctions between the letter-
book or record or entry book; the ‘letter miscellany’, which includes discrete
pamphlets of related letters that circulated together as well as ‘general let-
ter-books’ collecting a body of letters; and the ‘general miscellany’, which is
the aggregation or collection of letters alongside other genres, such as verse,
prose, libels and recipes.4
In examining the copying and manuscript circulation of letters we are
confronted with a series of intractable methodological problems relating to
compositional practices, provenance and dating, and the identity of copy-
ists, compilers, manuscript owners and readers. First, it is difficult to know
from the way in which the letters are now preserved, bound into large
Copying, Letter-Books and the Scribal Circulation of Letters 177
manuscript volumes or copied into miscellanies, what their original manu-

script form was and how they operated initially. Separates were often bound
in large composite volumes alongside other miscellaneous manuscript
materials; clusters of letters and other documents are subsumed in larger
collections. What now survive as seemingly coherent volumes are often sev-
eral individual manuscript units assembled in one place. The survival and
arrangement of letters in this manner usually relates more about later habits
of collecting and archiving, than about earlier circulation. The scribal pub-
lication history of separates remains frustratingly elusive, other than in the
most general sense, except where indirect evidence permits reconstruction
of the contexts of production and reception. Letters are sometimes men-
tioned as epistolary enclosures, or details of scribal publication occasionally
discussed in legal cases.5 Surviving miscellanies are likewise complex and
layered manuscripts, often hard to date or to link to particular individuals
or groups, unless ownership marks or annotations survive. Many volumes
are now merely catalogued as miscellaneous letters, state papers or histori-
cal papers, or as commonplace books or prose and verse miscellanies, with
no indication of ownership. Sometimes the contents themselves offer clues
of association to particular circles, such as a particular Inn of Court, an
Oxbridge college or aristocratic household, or to a geographical region, or
at least may indicate a particular political or religious leaning or interest.
Volumes were frequently the product of multiple compilers, featuring many
different hands of copyists. They were passed from one individual, family
generation or group to the next, with new material added (and sometimes
excised) throughout the volume’s history; they passed into the hands
of antiquarians, were purchased by private collectors and subsequently
deposited in libraries and repositories. The long scribal, working ‘shelf life’
of these volumes means that it is often tricky to know when material was
added. When was a separate acquired and collected? If it was copied into a
volume at what stage was this done: at the time the letter was supposedly
written, or a later date for some other purpose or reason? In this manner,
letters attained different meanings at different stages of their lives. A letter
copied at the time of its first writing was operating in a very different con-
text from the same letter copied 20, 30 or 40 years later. Traditionally it has
been assumed that letters were copied as models for emulation, collected
as exemplars of the epistolary style of famous letter-writers. While this was
sometimes the case, it will be argued that scribal copies circulated for other
reasons: political, religious, historical and antiquarian.
Letter-books
The manuscript letter-book (or copy-book) developed as a popular form dur-

ing the late-sixteenth century as a way of preserving outgoing and inward
correspondence. While the early modern period was important in the
evolution of the genre, the practice of collecting letters has a long tradition,
tracing back to antiquity, and well attested by patristic letter-writers. Letter-
books were compiled in the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
by monasteries, as well as royal and great households for administrative and
legal purposes to record chronologically the issuing of correspondence and
other documents. In this sense they were similar to episcopal and papal reg-
isters, and the later development of Privy Council registers or entry books.6
Alongside these bureaucratic and historical motivations to preserve, copies
of letters were retained for stylistic elegance and moral considerations as well
as for the importance or celebrity of their writers, and were arranged with
an eye to variety of both style and subject matter.7 Letters were also kept as
exemplars for emulation: indeed, Alice de Bryene maintained a letter-book
of diverse correspondence in French for purposes of educating girls within
her household.8 During the early modern period, letter-books were most
commonly kept by government officials, diplomats and churchmen, care-
fully recording time in office. Latin secretaries (or Secretaries for Foreign
Tongues), such as John Wolley, Roger Ascham, Thomas Reade, Thomas
Smith, George Weckherlin and John Milton who were responsible for com-
munications with foreign powers, routinely entered fair copies of outgoing
correspondence and related documents that they composed.9 Ambassadors
routinely and necessarily preserved records of diplomatic missions and
negotiations. Sir Henry Unton kept a letter-book during his time as English
Ambassador to France (1591–1592) into which were copied incoming and
outgoing correspondence as well as instructions for his embassy and his
cipher.10 Letter-books also survive from regional and local officials con-
cerned with military, financial and judicial tasks. The Elizabethan Cornish
MP, Peter Edgecombe, kept a letter-book in his capacity as a Justice of the
Peace and Deputy Lieutenant, in which he kept letters and orders from
the Council and Justices of the Peace, many of which concerned the mus-
tering of trained bands, suggesting a military imperative for maintaining
epistolary records in this manner.11 The demands of ecclesiastical office
also generated significant occasion for the ordering of correspondence, and
bishops’ letter-books commonly survive, detailing diocesan administration,
including those of Thomas Bentham, Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield
(1560–61), John Parkhurst, Bishop of Norwich (1571–75) and Bishop Wren
of Norwich and Ely (1636–40).12 Merchants utilised letter-books to record
correspondence connected to trade; several examples survive belonging to
the Factors of the East Indies.13 A small notebook belonging to an unidenti-
fied mid-sixteenth-century merchant, included ‘a coopye of a lre sent vnto
the worshipfull companye of the staple at callys’ and ‘the coope of a lre’
alongside notes on the wool trade, proclamations, model petitions, bills
and acquittances and travel directions.14 Scholars and university men also
recorded their correspondence. The seventeenth-century Cambridge scholar
Alexander Bolde recorded outgoing correspondence in an otherwise mainly
academic miscellany.15 Outside of these circles letter-books were maintained

by a range of individuals below the ranks of social elites: by the mid-
seventeenth century by women, notably Mary Evelyn and Esther Masham,
and by ordinary men, such as the puritan artisan Nehemiah Wallington.16
Although often administrative in impulse, connected to office, letter-books
were also compiled by a wide range of letter-writers for individual, spiritual
and creative purposes. Based on an examination of more than 100 individ-
ual early modern manuscript letter-books this section examines the nature,
function and material aspects of the genre. In part this is a corrective, since
letter-books have been little studied, except by scholars producing modern
editions.17 It thus investigates the ways in which letter-books operated as a
form of ‘self-writing’, a way of textualising a life (or aspects of a life) in an
enduring letter form, although it will be suggested that this term does not
quite adequately convey what is going on with letter-books.
The increased use of letter-books was a part of a much wider prolifera-
tion of writing technologies during the early modern period, as expanding
social groups seized pen and paper for a broadening range of activities that
encompassed diary-writing and common-placing to shorthand and ciphers.
For many, the habit of recording letters was developed during youth, as a
schoolroom or university exercise, which later translated into practice in
the wider world. The custom of making copies of letters continued outside
of the walls of the universities. Indeed, Edward Franklin’s pocket letter-book
begun as an undergraduate at Christ’s College, Cambridge in 1601 spanned
his university career and beyond, ending in 1630 when he was rector of
Great Gressingham in Norfolk, and from which parish he was ejected in
1644.18 Containing mainly Latin correspondence dating from 1601 to 1630,
the volume also includes a section starting at the back, and written upside
down, for letters in English (fols160v–179v), which comprises letters of con-
dolence, friendship and business for the years 1616–29. The habit of keeping
letter-books thus passed from generation to generation.
For those engaged in daily transactions by correspondence – whether diplo-
matic or dealing – the maintaining of up-to-date organisation of letter-books
was a crucial part of the bureaucratic paperwork associated with their activi-
ties. Writing in 1550 in his Advice to the King’s Privy Council, William Paget
recommended that ‘the clearke having charge of the counsaill booke shall
dayly entre all orders and determynacions by the counsaill, all warrantes for
money, the substance of all letters, requiring answere’, and that ‘the secre-
tarie shall se to the keping of all lettres, minutes of lettres, to and from the
king from the counsaill, instruccions and suche other writinges as shalbe
treated vpon by the counsaill’.19 Rules about the keeping of letter-books were
outlined in secretarial and accounting manuals of the period. In advice to
Secretaries of State, Robert Beale and Nicholas Faunt both recommended the
use of journals or paper books for the recording of correspondence. Faunt
advised the keeping of a ‘memoriall booke’ intended as a remembrance of
items necessary for dispatch, and ‘the vse of another paper booke to bee
called a Journall wherein is Continually to bee recorded, the certaine day of
the month and the howers when anie dispatch is made or receiued’. Separate
books should be kept for present negotiations, intelligence and intercourse
with a range of foreign powers, France, the United Provinces, Scotland,
Germany, Denmark, Muscovy, Russia, Turkey, Barbary, Levant and Ireland.20
This is largely how these papers survive today. Beale’s ‘A Treatise of the Office
of a Councellor and Principall Secretarie to her Ma[jes]tie’ likewise recom-
mended that a clerk or servant ‘keepe a iournall in forme of a Callendar by
day, Month and yeare of the time of the receipts of his l[ett]res and likewise
of his dispatches by Post or otherwise’, adding ‘The Secretarie shall do well to
appoint the Clercks of the Councell to keepe perticular bookes of messages
w[hi]ch they shall sende away from the Councell . . . And the Secretarie’s
Clerck is to keepe the like booke for such messages as he shall dispatch of
himself’.21 The keeping up-to-date of a letter-book was a central task for
any merchant, and Hugh Oldcastle, James Peele and John Mellis advised
maintenance of a register into which copies of letters sent and received were
entered. In addition to maintaining ‘three bookes, called the Memoriall,
Jornall, or Quaterne, in their perfect order’ Peele recommended ‘it is a thyng
very nedefull, that there bee a booke kepte, wherin to write all copies of let-
ters sent to any parties beyonde the seas: to whom, and by whom thei be
sent, and what numbre and date thei were of’.22 Templates for emulation
were also provided by printed exemplars of the form. Since the Renaissance
there was a long history of Latinate correspondence by individuals such
as Marsilio Ficino, Erasmus and all his friends, a tradition to which Roger
Ascham also belongs. Vernacular printed collections of correspondence
including by John Donne, Henry Wotton, Francis Bacon and Tobie Matthew
were much later, and the second half of the seventeenth century witnessed
a marked increase in such publications.23
Yet what marks early modern manuscript letter-books is their remark-
able variety in form, appropriated by individuals in a highly idiosyncratic
and personalised manner. While many employed special volumes solely
for the purposes of copying correspondence, other writers recorded let-
ters less systematically in a series of hybrid manuscripts, which lends the
genre a relative flexibility. Individual manuscript books performed multiple
functions, and letters were copied variously into muster books, journals
of voyages, accounts, commonplace books and almanacs. A ‘Booke of the
trayned souldiers’ in Devon dating from the late 1590s included a section
at the back for letters.24 A journal begun on 9 February 1615 describing
travels to the East Indies recorded copies of letters dispatched home, includ-
ing correspondence to the recorder’s wife.25 Sir John Harrington’s com-
monplace book contains full texts and notes of letters that he had written,
and even has pasted into it a folded printed almanac dated 1612 on the
back of which he recorded a list letters that he had sent to London.26 The
anonymous keeper of a small notebook now in the Bodleian Library detail-

ing travels from Rome to Spain between 27 September 1605 and about the
end of September 1606 included a ‘list of letters written and received’.27
A manuscript miscellany kept by the clergyman and religious controver-
sialist, Daniel Featley (1582–1645) collected together a series of theological
pieces, alongside assorted correspondence, including a letter to Mrs Sutcliffe
on the death of her husband in 1629, letters to Dr John Prideaux, rector
of Exeter College, Oxford, and four love letters to ‘Mrs Anne’ in France.28
Manuscript volumes were utilised for differing purposes over time. On
Bishop Parkhurst’s death, pages were torn from his letter-book for use as
scrap paper.29 The seventeenth-century Cambridge undergraduate William
Edmundson began his ‘commonplace book’ as a repository for exemplary
Latin letters composed while he was a student, as well as for college exercises
and verse, including the straight-laced ‘The things yt make a virgin please’.
In later life the volume was used for various functions and included ‘a let-
ter to the young Lady Willys upon the death of her husband Sir Tho[mas]’,
as well as ‘direction to my pupils for their behaviour’, ‘directions for the
study of divinity’, notes on sermon writing and a list of books to be read
for theological study.30 The writing of letters was also routinely recorded by
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century diarists (such as Anne Clifford, Margaret
Hoby and Adam Winthrop).31 In addition to formal letter-books, George
Weckherlin, Secretary of Foreign Tongues to Charles I, kept what might
be described as a correspondence diary, in which he meticulously listed in
diary-entry form all the correspondence he conducted in official duties and
private life, and the letters and packets he received.32
The size of early modern letter-books varied greatly from large thick folios
to small octavo and duodecimo volumes of a few gatherings, which itself
influenced the function, location and portability of these manuscripts.
Some were intended as deskbound books, which is commonly the case
with the formal letter-books associated with office, such as that of the royal
physician Sir Theodore Turquet de Mayerne (which measured 380mm by
258mm).33 Smaller books appeared in cheaper, more improvised formats
(stitched together from a few loose pages as with the early-seventeenth-
century student Louis Rondel’s letter-book)34 and were capable of portable
use: the undergraduate Edward Franklin and puritan artisan Nehemiah
Wallington both owned duodecimo letter-books which were neatly pocket-
sized.35 While some correspondents may have improvised copybooks from
several sheets of paper folded to form a manuscript book, others clearly
purchased readymade items tailored to their particular requirements and
needs. The undergraduate account books of John and Richard Newdigate
for the period 1618–21 record the purchase of several ‘paper bookes’ at 7d.,
8d., 10d., 1s. and 1s. 6d. each, as well as purchase of ‘a paper book’ for 2s.
8d. for their sister ‘Mistress Lettis’ bought from one Mr Holland, a London
paper supplier.36 Pre-made paper books were easily acquired; indeed, a 1616
pamphlet entitled, The Orthographiall Declaration advertised writing paper,

parchment and writing books that could be purchased pre-prepared, ‘with
all manner of lines, in any colour or distance’. It claimed to be of use for
‘Yoong Schollers, which learne to write, and helpfull for such as would pen
any Bookes faire and euen’, adding:
I haue thought good to let thee vnderstand, That at the Stationers and
Booke-Sellers, in Paules Church-yard, and else-where in London, as also
at Chaundlers that Sell and Retaile Writing Paper: All such Ruled Paper,
Parchment, and Writing-Bookes, are, and may be sold at a reasonable
rate and price: And also at the Kings Bench you may have your Paper and
Parchment Ruled and Impressed, after what manner and distance you
please, either meerely with white Lines, or else with Marginall Incke-
lines, and with white Lines to write on them.
Dependent on their nature these paper volumes were usually bound for
their protection, normally in hard or loose vellum, although occasionally
recycled materials easy to hand were also utilised. The letter-book kept by
Ralph Baron Eure as one of the Commissioners for Musters in the North
Riding (1598–1606) was covered in a vellum leaf from a late twelfth-century
Latin theological manuscript, while the autograph letter-book of Sir Edward
Dering as Lieutenant of Dover Castle (1629–30) was bound in a fifteenth-
century vellum leaf of colourfully decorated printed breviary.37 Recycling
in this manner appears to have been common practice during the six-
teenth and seventeenth centuries.38 Where original bindings survive, they
are usually preserved separately by later generations of owners or archival
conservators. In rare instances bindings are found intact, as in the case of a
letter-book of Sir George Carew which still retains the original loose vellum
binding with a leather buckled strap.39 Contemporary headings or referenc-
ing systems inscribed on the fronts or spines of bindings sometimes provide
clues to the ways in which letter-books were kept. A fragment of the spine
of the original binding for John Baron Digby’s letter-book (1622–23) bears
the number ‘178’, suggesting that it may have been shelved within a series
of books.40
Letter-books were organised in several different ways, chronologically,
thematically or randomly, depending on the method, process and time
of copying. Letter-books that were kept up-to-date on a continuous daily
basis tended to follow a linear date order as correspondence was dispatched
and received, sometimes with gaps left for letters not copied in sequence
at the time. Breaks in the chronology are usually explained by a letter
being added at a later date; this was often related to delays in receiving
correspondence. Compilers of letter-books also frequently maintained
distinct sections for different types of correspondence. Bishop Parkhurst’s
letter-book featured two main sections, one for ‘business’ letters, broadly
defined, the other for correspondence with his Zurich friends; gaps of blank
pages were left between the different groupings to allow for the addition of
subsequent items.41 Likewise, George Carew’s letter-book which he kept as
Treasurer at War in Ireland and Lord Deputy grouped copies of letters from
the Queen (fols13r–26r) separately from a section of letters from the Privy
Council (fols27r–65v), divided by numerous blank pages.42 Henry Cary, Lord
Falkland kept copies of letters dispatched in his capacity as Lord Deputy
of Ireland, 1622–4 in the first half a copybook, the remaining folios of
which upon his death were used to record petitions presented to the Lords
Justices of Ireland from 24 June to 24 November 1636.43 Many of the vol-
umes display their original pagination and letter-books were often indexed
in order to ease navigation around their contents.44 More often than not,
indexes merely listed letters in the order of appearance by item, page or
folio numbers. The letter-book of the Norfolk gentleman Sir Bassingbourne
Gawdy was preceded by a small section containing abstracts of each item
of correspondence.45 Occasionally, attempts were made to systematise the
retrieval of individual items. John Holles’s letter-book organised its index
alphabetically by surname of correspondent, borrowing from the practice
of common-placing. This reinforces the sense in which manuscript prac-
tices were used interchangeably, blurring the distinctions between different
genres.46
The most common copying practice employed in early modern English
letter-books was to transcribe letters in full, often including postscripts, details
from the address leaf and explanatory notes where applicable. Copying ver-
batim provided an invaluable legal record for later use. Occasionally, how-
ever, modes of address, greetings, salutations and other epistolary formulae
were shortened for speed; and in some cases copyists merely provided a
précis of letters sent. The scribe responsible for Bishop Thomas Bentham’s
letter-book from the early years of Elizabeth’s reign regularly paraphrased his
master’s outgoing correspondence, including, dating from September 1560,
‘a letter writen to Margarett Einsworth of Uttoxater to conform her selfe to
lyve with her lawfull husband or els to come and shewe some lawfull & good
reason why she shold not do etc’.47 Bishop Wren of Norwich and Ely kept a
rough folio letter-book of sorts into which he made brief notes of letters dis-
patched between 1636 and 1640.48 Several instances survive of letter-books
kept in shorthand: a 1626 letter-book of Dudley Carleton, Ambassador to
The Hague employed a shorthand system borrowed from Willis’s The Art of
Stenographie (1602) and the London-based Devonian merchant Thomas Hill
possibly followed Thomas Shelton’s Zeiglographia (1650) in keeping his own
shorthand letter-book.49 Similarly, William Jessop improvised a phonetically
based system of shorthand to compile his letter-book of correspondence
to the early settlers as secretary to the Providence Island Company.50 This
practice continued and expanded during the seventeenth century with the
increased popularisation of shorthand. Samuel Pepys, well-known for his
shorthand diary, also sometimes utilised this timesaving writing technique

for copying letters, and the mid-seventeenth-century Anabaptist preacher
Alatheus Dodsworth recorded a letter to Mr Norton, minister of St Martin’s-
le-Grand in London partly in shorthand.51
The manuscript page of letter-books conformed to discernible patterns
of layout, connected to secretarial practice and presentation. Normally
margins were left at the top and left-hand side of the page, providing space
for headings and side notes containing the name and address of recipients,
and the date and place of composition. Occasionally, side margins might
contain further annotations concerning the contents of letters. Sir Walter
Aston’s letter-book kept by his secretary during his second embassy to Spain
(1635–38) provided marginal annotations of key names, places, events
and groups for easy location of diplomatic correspondence.52 Henry, Lord
Falkland’s letter-book of outgoing correspondence for the years 1622–24
when he was Lord Deputy of Ireland likewise briefly summarised each
entry in marginal annotations.53 In several volumes red ink was used to
accentuate margins and facilitate administrative efficiency; and certain let-
ter-books appear to have been marked out like an account book, such as
Sir Thomas Jervoise’s copies of Privy Council orders and letters relating to
Basingstoke for the period 1617–40.54 The secretary who maintained two of
Sir Edward Dering’s letter-books as Lieutenant of Dover Castle neatly dated
and numbered each entry in red ink, underlining the end of the letter in
red to demarcate it from others, and in the margin in a very neat secretary
hand are annotations guiding the reader as to the substance of the letter.55
Furthermore, the ways in which letters were represented materially on the
page is telling. For some copyists the main concern seems to have been
content, with letters merely neatly transcribed to facilitate easy reading. For
others, however, greater care and attention was paid to presentation, with
efforts made to preserve the form and appearance of letters and not merely
their contents. Where paper was not at a premium each individual letter had
its own page, otherwise new items were copied directly one after the other.
Often letters were displayed in almost calligraphic intricacy, even produced
with facsimile signatures as if to replicate exactly important letters received.
In particular copies of royal correspondence were made to look like the
genuine article. In one notable instance, a letter-book kept by John Baron
Digby during negotiations for the Spanish marriage in the 1620s, the copyist
took care to score dry-point ruled lines across the page in order to achieve
scribal consistency and neatness. Presumably the import of these dispatches
as important matters of state necessitated their almost ceremonial inscribing
in this lavish folio manuscript.56
Autograph letter-books are not uncommon, as in the case of Sir Edward
Dering, Sir Isaac Wake, Nehemiah Wallington and later John Evelyn – but
ordinarily the task of compiling or updating a letter-book was delegated
to a secretary or scribe.57 The letter-book of the Lord Justice of Ireland,
Sir William Pelham, was compiled by his secretary Morgan Coleman, who
on its ornately coloured title-page inscribed the verses:
Within this book inserted is the travels of Belona’s knight, Which, as

compel’d by duty bound, I here produce in open sight. Let not, therefore,
the staggering hand nor ragged pen, which wrote the same, Work his
dislike that it compris’d, nor blemish worthy Pelham’s fame. Morganus
Colmanus.58
A book used by Edward Lord Zouche during his time as Lord Warden of
the Cinque Ports was maintained by Sir Edward Nicholas who served as his
secretary.59 The process by which letters were copied down varied greatly
according to when and how they were compiled. Some books were assem-
bled at a particular point in time from sorted papers that had accumulated
over a period, while others appear to have been regularly kept up-to-date
as part of the routine of corresponding. Habitually copies were normally
made from originals or perhaps even drafted in letter-books before they were
copied out in neat for sending. A copy-book of letters of the Privy Council
covering the period 1571 to 1581 was transcribed from corrected drafts by
among others Edmund Tremayne, Clerk of the Council, with certain items
corrected by the Lord Treasurer.60 Where such practices were broken by over-
sight or the pressures of imminently departing bearers, it was quite common
for individuals to ask for the return of their letters in order that copies might
be made. On several occasions William Lord Paget urgently requested to
have returned or a copy made and sent back to him of a letter that he had
dispatched without first retaining a copy. Writing to Sir Thomas Smith he
requested: ‘I praye you do so muche as to send me a minute of my lettre to
Master petre and you of the xxiiijth of this present; it is written with myn
own hand. Master Honinges will copie it out at the furst for me’.61 Likewise,
in the mid-seventeenth century Lydia Dugard asked her cousin to return a
letter that she had been unable to copy before the departure of a messenger:
‘pray cousin will you doe so much as send me this letter again tis call’d for,
and so I cant have time to transcribe it. I know it is not worth it but Im loath
to break an old custome. dont forget to send it’.62 A copy-book of Sir Julius
Caesar’s covering the period 1580 to 1617 offers an interesting variation on
the compiling of books of correspondence. Instead of being transcribed into
an individual volume, manuscript separate copies of Caesar’s correspond-
ence (exhibiting signs of folding, endorsements and distinct watermarks)
were collected together and bound, with an accompanying contents page
(fols1r–7r). Each letter was assigned a folio number, as with the following
example, ‘1o Octob. 1590. The copy of my letter to the erle of Essex touching
a m[aste]rship of requests’ (fol.9).63
Edward lord Zouche was particularly assiduous in maintaining copies of
his correspondence during his service as deputy to Sir Thomas Leighton,
Governor of Guernsey, and his letter-book well illustrates the mechanics

and motives of such epistolary practices, which he continued to follow
elsewhere throughout his career.64 Zouche’s outgoing correspondence for
the period 31 July 1600 to 28 April 1601 was copied out in a letter-book
now in the British Library (BL, Egerton MS 2812), which is headed in his
own hand, ‘A booke of all such letters as I doe send to any place begune the
seventeenth of August 1600’.65 His reasons for keeping a letter-book during
this period emerge from the first letter in the volume to Sir John Stanhope,
in which he explained that financial necessity (the weakness of his estate)
had forced him to take up the post, but that his intent was to ‘give some
proffe of my cariage in that place’.66 The letter-book itself comprises 142
folios, and was updated on a regular basis by Zouche’s secretary, often with
several different entries for the same date. The 18 August 1600 for example
includes letters to Lady and Sir Thomas Leighton, the goldsmith Henry
Bannister, his son-in-law William Tate, his cousin William Fulkes, and one
Foxley. Interspersed out of sync between the letters to Bannister and Tate are
copies of two letters to Sir Drew Drury and Sir Francis Knollys, both of which
were dated 19 August, suggesting that letters were copied from separates out
of date order once they were dispatched. The letter-book appears to have
recorded the almost daily flow of missives from Zouche’s pen to a range of
correspondents, including influential government figures such as Robert
Cecil, William Davison, Thomas Lord Grey and Sir Thomas Leighton, as well
as notable churchmen such as archbishop Whitgift. He wrote to Sir Walter
Ralegh in his then capacity as Governor of neighbouring Jersey, and corre-
sponded with the botanist Matthias de L’Obel, Laurence Chaderton, Master
of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and with family members and servants,
including his son-in-law, William Tate, his cousins Robert Middlemore and
Anne Shorland and his daughter Mary. The letter-book was clearly not
merely a repository for official documents, but the destination for copies
of most of his outward correspondence, a feature unrepresentative of other
letter-books of the period, which largely functioned as documents of record.
A significant number of his correspondents were powerful noblewomen
and gentlewomen with whom he sought to curry favour, including Anne
Dudley, countess of Warwick, Margaret Clifford, countess of Cumberland,
Susan Grey, countess of Kent, Lady Dorothy North, Lady Isabel Bowes, Lady
Cicely Ridgeway, Lady Margaret Yelverton, and Lady Elizabeth Leighton, the
wife of Sir Thomas Leighton. One of the main motivations then for keep-
ing of the letter-book was to facilitate and record these epistolary transac-
tions and patronage activities. His letters to these women are marked by an
attempt to keep in touch, and full of apologies for not writing more often,
not attending upon them in person, or for not having sent a servant to
attend upon them, what he described in letters to the countesses of Warwick
and Cumberland as his ‘wants’ in ‘ceremonyes’.67 A constant refrain of the
letters is an anxiety (perhaps feigned) about writing to them: he apologised
to Margaret Clifford for ‘presuming to trouble’ her ‘once againe wth’ his
‘scribled lines’.68 Writing to his daughter Mary, whom he married to the son
of his employer Thomas Leighton, Zouche expressed his unease in writing
to ‘honorable personages’: ‘I had written to my La: of warwicke my selfe
to whom you may tel her I would often haue written but yt I hold it not
manners to writ to so honorable a p[er]sonadge wthout great cause’.69 To the
countess of Kent he wrote ‘my hope is yt I remayne in yor honorable good
opinion wch I desire much & is a spetiall cause why I direct these [letters]’.70
In writing to these women, Zouche displayed confidence in their abilities to
do him good offices; the letter-book recorded his pursuit of favour during a
period of what he saw as political ‘exile’.
While the keeping of letter-books was for many habitual, an important
part of diplomatic or governmental routine, for others the task was occa-
sioned by particular circumstances or demands. Thus, Bishop Parkhurst was
impelled to organise his correspondence more methodically in the face of
urgent exchequer demands in 1571–72 for payment of arrears in taxation.
In many ways his letter-book represents an attempt to order his loose cor-
respondence and papers.71 William Paget kept several letter-books each for
distinct purposes. Diplomatic letter-books survive from his negotiations in
1549 with Charles V and from his embassy to France of January to February
1550.72 A further letter-book collecting Paget’s major correspondence with
Protector Somerset was produced, possibly compiled at a time when Paget
was barred from public office; the volume includes two conventional poems
whose themes deal with changing fortunes and the pleasures of the rural
idyll as opposed to public life. While the letter-book cannot be precisely
dated to connect with Somerset’s fall from power in October 1549, there
is strong internal evidence that the volume was produced to protect Paget
against charges of corruption.73
In each of these preceding instances the connection between letter-books
and office or assignment is striking, which may also explain the reason
why so few letter-books compiled by women survive until the second half
of the seventeenth century. Women clearly preserved incoming letters,
which explains the survival of so much marital correspondence.74 Women
were also the compilers of their own collections of letters in letter-books
and commonplace books. Lady Margaret Hoby recorded in her diary ‘after
dinner I Coppied out a letter which Mr Hoby had wretten to the Busshopp
of Limbricke [Limerick] touching his agreement to peace’.75 Several
seventeenth-century examples survive, including Lady Anne Southwell’s
commonplace book which includes two copies of letters written by her,
one to her friend Cecily MacWilliams, another addressed to Henry Carey,
viscount Falkland.76 However, the nature of surviving letter-books com-
piled by women is different from those compiled by men. Anne Clifford
commissioned a volume of her mother’s letters, which contained chiefly
her correspondence to Privy Councillors and others during her suit for her
daughter’s lands. This was drawn up as part of her efforts to memorialise her
Clifford family.77 Several letter-books survive associated with Mary Evelyn,
wife of the diarist John Evelyn. The first is an autograph notebook of 37
folios (with an additional four blank pages) consisting of tipped-in copies of
Mary Evelyn’s outgoing correspondence to family and friends dating from
the late 1660s and early 1670s.78 Fragments of a further autograph letter-
book also survive as a single gathering of eight leaves containing transcripts
of ten letters (most addressed to her cousin Sir Samuel Tuke), which is
accompanied by a bifolium with copies of another two letters. The keeping
of a letter-book, perhaps imitating her husband, performed various func-
tions, not least of which was the scribal publication of a series of stylised
and model letters for emulation, and representative of her mastery of the
letter as a literary form and vehicle of intellectual exchange.79 A further two
letter-books of Mary Evelyn’s correspondence were compiled by her great-
granddaughter, another Mary Evelyn – perhaps as an educational exercise.
The first survives as fragments and contains fifteen of Mary Evelyn’s letters;
the second, is also incomplete and appears to have been transcribed partly
from Mary Evelyn’s own autograph copies on ‘August the 10, 1730’, as indi-
cated in the inside cover.80 Thus, by the eighteenth-century women such
as Mary Evelyn’s great-granddaughter, but also including Esther Masham
and Lady Sarah Cowper, compiled letter-books as an authorised form of
family history.81 Cassandra Willoughby kept a small quarto volume entitled
‘An Account of the Willughby’s of Wollaton, taken out of the Pedigree, old
letters and old Books of Account in my Brother Sir Thomas Willoughby’s
study, Dec., A.D. 1702’, into which she transcribed family letters, many of
the originals of which are no longer extant, alongside details of generations
of the Willoughbys tracing back to the reign of Edward I.82
Throughout the early modern period, as these examples indicate, letter-
books were intimately connected with the construction of self, and a strong
argument can be made for considering the genre as a form of life writing,
a claim made for an increasingly diverse range of written modes. Yet with
letter-books there appears a particular potency for this claim. Indeed, the
connection between compilations of letters and the construction of the self
has been drawn by Lisa Jardine, in her study of the published correspondence
of the Dutch humanist Erasmus.83 The selecting, editing and organising of
epistolary materials, where this can be reconstructed in light of wider cor-
respondence, illuminates much about the manner in which people wished
to represent themselves and their correspondence. This is well illustrated by
way of a case study of the letter-book of the Norfolk-based puritan gentleman
Bassingbourne Gawdy (c.1532–90), for whom the recording of correspond-
ence significantly appears to have operated as a form of ‘self-writing’.84 The
volume covers the years 1576–89, during which period Gawdy sat on the
Suffolk and Norfolk benches, became Sheriff of Norfolk and was elected
MP for Eye in 1584. Begun around the time of his moves to become Sheriff
of Norfolk, it includes his incoming and outgoing correspondence, with

very little in the way of family or personal letters. At first sight, the volume
appears essentially as a way of memorialising time in office. The letter-book
was organised into two distinct sections. The first was labelled ‘A note and
coppy of dyvers letters and instructions sent vnto me from the lordes of
ye Counsayle and other personages of accounte’ (fol.1r), which included
letters from members of the Privy Council, Edmund, bishop of Norwich
as well as missives from numerous high-ranking noblewomen: Dorothy
Stafford, Elizabeth, countess of Lincoln, Mary Scudamore, Anne, countess
of Warwick, and Jane, countess of Westmoreland. The second section con-
tained ‘letters and warrants directed vnto me from the deputis Leiftenaunts
for mustering and trayning of my company’ (fol.47r), and throughout there
is a concern for musters, munitions, religion and recusancy. A desk-bound
scribal volume of 63 folios (measuring 190mm by 290mm) Gawdy’s letter-
book betrays its bureaucratic roots: pages contained neat margins on all sides
and were numbered; letters were also sequentially numbered, and marginal
annotations guided readers through their contents. This administrative habit
was inherited by his son, Sir Bassingbourne Gawdy (1560–1606), whose own
letter-book survives as BL, Additional MS, 48591.85 Yet it is the selection,
grouping and elaborate presentation of letters that is particularly informa-
tive. Whereas many such volumes merely transcribe the contents of letters
for purposes of record, every attempt has been made here to retain scribal
traits. Addresses are rendered in full at the head of each entry, emblematic of
a concern for status. Typical is a letter addressed ‘To the right worshipp[fu]ll
our loving ffrend Bassingbourne Gavdy Esqr geve these’ (fol.33r). Attempts
were also made to replicate signatures, especially in letters from the Privy
Council where the characteristics of individual subscriptions were followed,
and where copies were often started on a new page. A letter to the Queen
concerning ‘Christmas Lane’ was laid out in a presentation format on two
separate pages, following the conventions of manuscript spacing, leaving an
honorific gap between the mode of address ‘To the Queens most excellent
Matie’ and the main body of the letter. Read bureaucratically this volume
attests to Gawdy’s effectiveness as an administrator of puritan leanings – his
actions against recusants are a particularly prominent feature. Read materi-
ally it betrays a concern for status and reputation, intimately connected to
his position as a local magistrate. Moreover, the letter-book appears to have
occupied an interesting place within the household. Pen trails and signatures
of other family members, including his daughter-in-law Dorothy (second
wife of his eldest son and namesake), indicate the less than ‘private’ nature of
this volume. Presumably on his death, Gawdy’s letter-book passed to his son.
This was not a manuscript kept under lock and key in a study, but perhaps
intended for show, ‘scribally published’ to be read more widely within the
family and local community.86 The term ‘self-writing’ though in many ways
does not quite adequately describe what is going on with these texts. Letters
by their very nature do not represent a singular person, even though an indi-
vidual maybe the chief writer or recipient of correspondences. Furthermore,
the ways in which letter-books were compiled was often not about an indi-
vidual self, but often about an office, or collectives (family, corporation, the
Privy Council, justices of the peace or deputy lieutenants). Bassingbourne
Gawdy’s letter-book, for example, included letters addressed to him along
with several other Norfolk justices, testimony of collective action and his
place within a hierarchy of local gentry; while the inclusion of letters from
so many ‘great ladies’ spoke of important court networks.
The most striking features of early modern letter-books are thus the pro-
tean quality of the genre when it comes to actual practice; the variety of
uses to which these volumes were put, and the almost osmotic nature of the
letter-book which we see influencing other forms, including autobiography
and family histories. The real peculiarity of correspondence, however, is its
survival in the first place. Letters in the early modern period were normally
treated as ephemeral; that they are now extant and organised in such a per-
manent form is more than mere serendipity. Formal letter-books were pro-
duced for varying reasons with an eye to posterity, the letters they contained
had an interesting afterlife (as with the scribally circulated letters discussed
below) working in ways distanced from the contexts in which they were
originally written, delivered and read.
The scribal circulation of letters
This section seeks to elucidate the mechanisms by which hundreds of manu-

script copies of letters were scribally circulated from the late-Elizabethan
period onwards. It argues that letters were disseminated in ways broadly
similar to other texts such as libels, verse, recipes and prose (sermons,
speeches, tracts, treatises and papers associated with Robert Cotton and
the Society of Antiquaries), utilising the kinds of networks and modes of
transmission that have been fleshed out in major studies by scholars such
as Mary Hobbs, Harold Love, Arthur Marotti, H.R. Woudhuysen and Peter
Beal.87 The starting point for my analysis is a simplified model of ‘scribal
publication’ of new texts typically characterised by a series of phases, that
extended from authorially controlled dissemination, through stages of
private unrestricted copying, to professional scribal production and a later
phase of print publication. At each of these stages a work was likely to be
incorporated into a larger bibliographic unit: first the ‘linked group’ of a
small number of related works, next the personal miscellany or common-
place book, and lastly the professionally copied anthology or aggregation.88
This distinctly Loveian model of ‘scribal publication’, often used to describe
the textual transmission of more straightforwardly literary texts, applies in
general terms to what happened to certain copies of letters as they moved
from private modes of production to more public forms of consumption.
Several explanatory models of the nature of manuscript circulation have

been forwarded: the closely defined coterie, the scribal community and
more nebulously the manuscript network. While scholars are becoming
increasingly sceptical of ‘coterie circulation’ as an explanation for manu-
script transmission, it remains useful in characterising certain aspects of
the dissemination of manuscript separates, but it hardly explains the wider
currency achieved by letters circulating indiscriminately and in genuinely
national scribal networks. Individual letter texts travelled as manuscript
separates, as part of larger bibliographic manuscript compilations (such as
pamphlets of related correspondence, collections of general letters and mis-
cellanies) as well as printed collections. This section attempts to highlight
the manuscript forms and writing technologies that facilitated circulation,
and to sketch the complex textual afterlives of letters beyond the contem-
porary contexts of composition, delivery and reading. As such it problema-
tises the standard model of epistolarity, which conceptualises early modern
letter-writing as a two-way epistolary exchange anchored within an histori-
cally specific moment.
The range of epistolary materials that were circulated, copied and collected
was diverse in nature, reflecting political, historical and religious interests of
the early modern period. The letters that achieved the widest currency were
those associated with monarchs (especially Elizabeth, James I and Charles I),
well-known politicians, public figures or bodies and institutions, such as
parliament, the Privy Council and the universities; and with identifiable
groups, such as the Catholics of England (whose petition to James I for
toleration was widely copied). Of those individuals whose letters were most
widely circulated, the most prominent are Walter Raleigh, Robert Devereux,
second earl of Essex, Francis Bacon and Philip Sidney. Letters connected to
what might broadly be called ‘matters of State’ achieved considerable cur-
rency in manuscript, before being printed in the Cabala in the second half
of the seventeenth century. These include Sir John Perrot’s letter to Lords of
Privy Council in 1586 on the threat of a Spanish invasion of Ireland; Francis
Tresham’s letter to William Parker warning him of The Gunpowder Plot;
Lord Rochester’s letter to Mr Overbury on the death of his son Sir Thomas;
the Countess of Nottingham’s letter to Sir Andrew Sinclair, principal coun-
sellor of the king of Denmark, touching some words uttered by the king
against her honour. Letters of a more overtly religious nature were also cop-
ied, circulating alongside prayers, psalms, sermons, deathbed speeches and
religious verse. These include letters of continental reformers, such as John
Calvin and Peter Martyr, and English puritan divines like Edward Dering
and Joseph Hall, as well as the correspondence of English martyrs, which
appeared in printed form in editions by John Foxe, Henry Bull and Miles
Coverdale.89 Such ‘godly and comfortable’ letters aimed at administering to
spiritually troubled consciences were commonly copied in manuscript form
in post-Reformation England. While religious women’s letters were rarely
printed, a number circulated in manuscript (a medium which provided a

more accessible forum for women’s writing), including letters of maternal
piety from Marie Wither, wife of the puritan minister George Wither, rector
of Danbury, Essex, and a letter from Anne Stubbe, ‘A notable Barrowist’.90
Catholic-related letters were circulated among underground Catholic scribal
communities as well as for anti-Catholic reasons.91 Among them were the
Babington conspirator Chidiock Tichborne’s letter ‘to his wyfe the night
before he suffred’ dated 19 September 1586 (which circulated alongside
his famous poem, ‘Tichbornes Lamentation’); and Robert Southwell’s let-
ter of exhortation to his father; as well as more anti-Catholic texts, such
as alleged Jesuit letters like ‘A letter found amongst some Jesuits lately
taken at Clerkenwell London, directed to the Father Doctor at Bruxells’,
and ‘A coppye of a letter which the Divell sent to the Pope of Rome’.92 The
kinds of letter-texts that circulated was thus diverse, reflecting wide-ranging
interests, tastes and purposes, from the political and pious to the emulatory
and entertaining. In most cases, the ostensibly ‘private’ nature of the letters
that circulated precluded their publication in print. One of the benefits of
scribal publication during the early modern period was that it allowed ‘sub-
versive’, scandalous and even erotic and obscene materials to travel under
the radar of the censor. Manuscript in this sense acquired a certain aura, a
political resonance, associated with ‘forbidden knowledge’. Copies of ‘pri-
vate’ letters were sometimes transcribed, read and preserved with a degree of
care and attention that might not be lavished on a printed pamphlet.93 In
this manner, ostensibly personal correspondences – between husbands and
wives, other family members, monarchs and subjects, spiritual ‘confessors’
and their correspondents – were in actual fact highly ‘public’ and political
documents that worked in complex ways, at both the time of composition
and initial circulation, and over the course of their textual afterlife as they
entered informal ‘scribal networks’ and acquired new meanings in different
periods and contexts for subsequent readers.
The scribal circulation of letters in the first stage of copying could be asso-
ciated with the nominal ‘author’ or signatory, who controlled, orchestrated
or oversaw initial dissemination of manuscript separates. There is concrete
evidence of a restricted and closed circulation of letters among closely
defined groups, which might loosely be termed ‘coteries’. It was common
practice throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for letters to be
passed around trusted circles of family and friends as a way of distributing
news, and individuals often circulated to third parties copies of personal let-
ters for advice and information. In 1587, Edward Stafford sent Walsingham
a copy of a letter he had written to Queen Elizabeth; while Lady Margaret
Hawkins sent Robert Cecil a copy of ‘her rude letter’ of solicitation to
Elizabeth I in 1596.94 Diplomatic correspondence also produced multiple
copies of correspondence. As Ambassador in Attendance to France from May
1559 to the early 1560s, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton regularly despatched
three letters home: one to the Queen, one to the Privy Council and one to
William Cecil. The standard structure of these letters was almost identical
in each case, with different information and detail added according to the
addressee.95 The letters sent to the Council tended to be more detailed, and
were necessarily circulated, as were those addressed to the Queen, which
sometimes survive in multiple copies.96 Letters directed to Cecil included
added materials, and letters to Robert Dudley might well include discussions
of policy.97 Multiple copies of circular letters were similarly sent by the Privy
Council. In other words, it was commonplace throughout the period for let-
ters to be read by persons other than the addressee.
An extension of this widespread social practice is the controlled dis-
semination of multiple manuscript copies of letters. An instance of the
tight control possible over the initial dissemination of individual letters is
highlighted by the way in which copies of a letter from the earl of Essex to
the Privy Council in June 1596 were carefully circulated in the first instance.
Written prior to the Cadiz expedition, the letter outlined Essex’s plan to
seize a permanent base in Spain, contrary to the Queen’s wishes. Delivery
of the original was carefully delayed until the fleet had reached the point
of no return. Indeed, Essex entrusted its despatch to his secretary Edward
Reynoldes: ‘Which yow shall deliver butt nott till the wind hath so served
us att least a weeke as yow may judg us to be in Spayne’.98 A small number
of copies was circulated at the time among a close circle of trusted friends;
dissemination at this stage was intentionally private and limited. A cor-
respondent sent a copy to Sir Thomas Kitson at Hengrave in Suffolk on 23
July 1596, writing in an accompanying letter ‘I beseeche you kepe yt very
private & ret[urn] yt safe enclosed in a sheete of paper when your worshippe
may conveniently. It may be you have seene yt before, but I am sure there
ar very few copies thereof & I came by this by great chance’.99 The circula-
tion of this was part of a much wider and well orchestrated policy of Essex
and his secretariat of circulating letters for propagandist purposes. His letter
of advice to the earl of Rutland, his secretary Henry Cuffe’s ‘Trve Relation’
on the Cadiz affair, Essex’s exchange of correspondence with Lord Keeper
Egerton, his Apologie published in epistolary form to Anthony Bacon, and
his penitent letters to Queen Elizabeth all appeared in manuscript, and occa-
sionally and unsuccessfully in print.
A letter to Queen Elizabeth from Philip Howard, the Catholic earl of
Arundel, explaining his flight from England in 1585 introduces another
dimension of the circulation of separates. The letter was apparently left
with the earl’s sister, Margaret Sackville, to be delivered once he had reached
France. It was alleged at his Star Chamber trial, however, that ‘a coppie’ was
provided to a priest called Bridges,
whereby they might be by him delivered abrode also. Whereupon they

were published and dispersed in manner of a slaunderous libell after his
departure. For the said Bridges caused divers coppies there of to be made
by scrivenors and to be published and dispersed in sondrie partes of the
realme to divers and sondrie persones.
Once the earl’s capture was known, Bridges made public the letter, which
was in fact never intended to be private, divulgating it among ‘Catholickes’
and ‘discontented men’. In 1589 at his arraignment it was further asserted
by the Attorney-General, Sir John Popham, that ‘500 coppies’ were made
of the ‘factious & traiterous letter of purpose for policye . . . which Bridges
scattered abroad’. Doubtless this figure is inflated for exaggerated effect;
nonetheless the survival of so many scribal copies in a wide range of miscel-
lanies indicates the degree of its circulation beyond any form of distinctly
Catholic scribal community.100
In the case of Arundel’s letter, and to a lesser extent Essex’s, it is thus
possible to discern distinct phases of dissemination: an initial controlled
circulation, followed by a less discriminate ‘casting abroad’ of multiple
scribal copies. In this rather more haphazard approach, copies of notorious
letters were scattered for ad hoc transmission (‘thrown abroad’, ‘cast into
the street’) or posted up in public places in the same manner as verse satires
or libels – an early modern equivalent of fly-posting.101 Such separates were
produced in multiple copies, either by an individual penman, an informal
group of scribes, or less likely by a professional scriptorium. In this way,
the Jesuit priest John Gerrard in the aftermath of the 1605 Gunpowder
Plot sought to clear himself from charges of collaboration by writing an
‘open letter in the form of a letter to a friend’ declaring his innocence, and
had copies of the letter made and ‘scattered about the London streets in
the early hours of the morning’, one of which was shown to the King by a
member of the Privy Council.102 In August 1599 ‘A letter of the pretended
earl of Desmond to the King of Spain’ condemning Elizabethan actions in
Ireland, was found in the street by a Justice of the Peace and passed onto
the Secretary of State, Sir Robert Cecil, for examination. The letter had first
been discovered by two bricklayers dwelling in the London parish of St
Clement Danes, who assumed by the way it was folded that it was a hand-
kerchief. Discovering instead that it was writing, the two men took it to the
scrivener John Harwood to have it read, who upon realising its seditious
nature advised them to carry it to John Morley the constable, who in turn
acquainted the justice of the peace with it. Justice Grange informed Cecil
that he knew not whether the letter was only a copy, ‘the true letter itself
be already known’, or ‘whether of purpose this and like copies be by evil-
affected persons thrown abroad’.103 This illustrates not only the range of lit-
eracies associated with early modern correspondence, but also the vigilance
with which authorities policed seditious materials.
The copies of letters considered thus far have all been associated with par-
ticular individuals, though in some cases the lack of an autograph ‘original’
makes attribution difficult. This method of casting multiple scribal copies

abroad was also used for anonymous letters. In 1606 a copy of an anonymous
libellous letter complaining that the earl of Salisbury was ‘still as violent
agaynst the Catholicke cause, as ever he was’ was ‘found in the street, at
one Lees dore, ouer against St. Clement’s church’.104 In February 1627, the
Mayor of King’s Lynn forwarded to Lord Keeper Coventry a letter critical of
the Forced Loan: ‘a scandelous and pernicious paper’ or letter directed ‘To all
English Freeholders, from a well wisher of theirs tendinge to the discourag-
inge and withdrawinge of the peoples harts from agreinge to any payment of
his maties loan’, which had been found in the street in King’s Lynn by one
Robert Symmes. Unable to read or write Symmes had shown it to a friend
who ‘perceyvinge the dangerous contents’ sent it to the Mayor. The copy
of the letter itself was signed from ‘London Grayes Inn’ by one ‘A.B.’, who
described himself as ‘your countries frend’, claiming legal connections.105 In
1628, a forged letter purported to be ‘found amongst some Jesuits lately taken
at Clerkenwell London, directed to the Father Doctor at Bruxells’ was slipped
among the papers of a Jesuit enclave discovered in March of that year.106 These
were effectively anonymous open letters which used the epistolary form as a
vehicle for subversive political ends. In practical terms, letters of this nature
functioned as libels, which Andrew McRae argues were broadly understood at
the time as ‘unauthorised and controversial texts’, ‘generally’ but not exclu-
sively ‘in poetic form’, which assailed or defamed the character of a person
or satirised political events; the circulation of copies of letters in this manner
was referred to as ‘libelling’ by contemporaries.107 Importantly here, the cir-
culation of these kinds of letters was indiscriminate. This was not the careful
garnering of targeted support, but some sort of attempt to influence public
opinion. Often copies were dropped in prominent places or at particularly
busy times in order to maximise their impact and readership. A letter dated
1627, which forecast imminent danger in May, was found in Norwich Street
during the Lent assizes. A further copy of the same letter was endorsed ‘This
noate was found in one Mr Ozburns shoppe in Norwitch and wrapped vpp
in a peece of browne paper and one mr Agard preacher of windon tooke this
Coppie & sent it to one Mr Beale at westminster for great news’.108 The place
in which letters appeared was clearly significant. As Andrew Gordon has
shown, the act of public posting of seditious materials ‘conscripted’ public
spaces traditionally associated with official communications, such as procla-
mations, a spatial transgression that leant them a sharpened political edge.109
Attention to the material conditions of circulation thus importantly shapes
our understanding of the reception of copies of letters.
Once copies were in circulation a healthy market existed for them. During
the early-seventeenth century, the Cheshire MP Sir Richard Grosvenor
collected various manuscript separates concerned with contemporary
politics, which included ‘Letters of Sir Francis Bacon uppon severall occa-
sions’ and ‘The Lord Norris letter to the king having slayne a servant of
the Lord Willoughbies’.110 There is considerable evidence to suggest that

these kinds of materials were readily available. Writing in April 1623 John
Chamberlain informed Sir Dudley Carlton that he had seen ‘a letter of Lord
Digby’s to the King’.111 Shortly after Sir Walter Ralegh’s death in 1618 John
Holles asked his son to ‘gather up as many of Sir W. Rawlies verses and
letters as yow can’.112 A fragment in the hand of Francis Davison entitled
‘Manuscripts to gett’ indicated his desire to procure ‘Letters of all sorts. espe-
cially by ye late E[arl] of Essex’.113 Among the papers catalogued in the study
of Thomas Norton in April 1584 were, ‘l[ett]res of submission written by John
Stubbes’, ‘a l[ett]re from the Q. of Scotts to the Erle Bothwell’, and ‘A l[ett]re
from k. henrie the viiith to the Bushoppe of London his Ambassador w[i]th
the Emperor’.114 Copies of letters were easy to come by and routinely
exchanged in London at least, in environments such as the Inns of Court and
parliament. The collecting of manuscript separates produced by scribes or
scriptoria, however, was a relatively expensive activity: estimates of the cost of
purchasing manuscripts range from three quarters of a penny to fivepence per
page.115 Accounts for Richard Grosvenor record the purchase in 1637 of ‘man-
uscripts’ for 2s. 6d., and payment of 6d. for the ‘King of Moroccoes letter’.116
Nonetheless the borrowing, circulation and copying gratis from others meant
that this kind of material achieved a much wider degree of currency.
Individual copies of letters were exchanged by hand, passed around in
a more targeted manner. Moreover, the letter itself was a key mechanism
for the circulation of copies of letter texts, which travelled via the standard
early modern postal networks, dispatched as enclosures alongside other
topical materials. Writing from Paris in 1580, Sir Henry Cobham enclosed
to Burghley ‘copies of ‘the King of Navarre’s letter to his Queen’, the Prince
of Condé’s letter ‘directed’ to the ‘King’ and ‘a copy of a letter from the
great Turk’.117 Edward Lord Zouche sent to Sir Thomas Laighton ‘a copie
of a letter from the Pope to the kings sister’, which he found in a packet of
letters dispatched to him in Guernsey, having already made a copy of it for
himself.118 In February 1622 Thomas Locke sent Sir Dudley Carleton a copy
of a letter from James I to the Lords.119 The Cambridge scholar Joseph Mead
transcribed letters that circulated as separates, including ‘a copy of the earl of
Arundel’s letter to the Upper House, and the words of his submission’ which
he sent to his friend Sir Martin Stuteville on 16 June 1621.120 Copies of polit-
ically noteworthy letters were circulated along with other kinds of topical
materials, and of course accompanied digests of news. Professional newslet-
ter-writers such as John Pory enclosed serial copies of ‘excellent discourses’
including letters in regular correspondence with clients.121 Fundamentally
then the letter acted as a kind of textual or cultural portmanteau, facilitating
the broader transmission of other manuscript texts (prose, verse, libels and
recipes) as well as in the wider dissemination of news, information, scien-
tific knowledge and ideas. As a result, early modern postal conditions and
networks are central to understanding scribal circulation. Copies of letters
travelled as enclosures with letters carried via royal post and carrier, but
given the sometimes seditious or secretive nature of certain texts it is highly
likely that many were conveyed by trusted servants or messengers (or even
conveyed by clandestine means) for fear of interception. This kind of activ-
ity illustrates a significant overlap between networks of correspondents and
‘scribal communities’.122 As a method for the transmission of texts, private
correspondence directed to individuals or groups is a more targeted manner
of scribal publication, at least in the first instance, one that preceded, but
also accompanied and facilitated successive and wider textual transmission.
Typically, after an initial phase of controlled dissemination, we witness ‘a
second stage of unrestrained private copying’, prior to profit-based volume
copying by commercial scriptoria, and also before later print publication
(although certain letters appeared in print at the time). Thus, after it had
entered the ‘public’ world of informal scribal networks (a term that implies
a national, interpenetrating web of communications and exchange) circula-
tion took place within and between ‘scribal communities’, based around
individuals, within institutions (the Universities, Inns of Court, or the court),
within the family and household, and between friends, business associates,
local communities or county neighbours. Circulation achieved a more glo-
bal dimension through diplomatic channels of communications, mercantile
networks and through the Republic of Letters. Unlike print publication,
scribal publication, as Harold Love reminds us, ‘took place not simultane-
ously, but consecutively’ and ‘the activity of production was dispersed, not
centralised’.123 Letters were disseminated as separates, as single bibliographic
units which survived as loose papers, and were absorbed into larger group-
ings, circulating as part of a small number of related texts, as with letters
and other materials associated with Essex, Bacon, Ralegh and the Spanish
Match crisis, which survive as discrete manuscript clusters. Bodleian Library,
Rawlinson MS, D.180 is a composite volume, which contains within it a
separate manuscript pamphlet (fols24r–52v produced on paper with a distinct
watermark and its own numbering sequence 1–56) of Raleghiana, including
letters, his apology and scaffold speech. Lady Rich’s letter to Queen Elizabeth
on behalf of her brother in late January 1600 survives in more than thirty
variant manuscript copies, often packaged with texts associated with Essex.124
Copies of letters enjoyed a peculiar afterlife finding their ways into personal
‘notebooks’, ‘paper books’, ‘commonplace books’, diverse ‘manuscript mis-
cellanies’, as well as latterly into professionally produced anthologies.125
Copying was connected to ‘common-placing’, a practice at the heart of
Renaissance pedagogy, which encouraged the habit of noting down items of
interest in ‘commonplace books’ under alphabetical headings for retrieval
and later use.126 Most miscellanies are much less strict in their organisational
principle, sometimes grouping texts by author, genre, theme or event, often
leaving blank spaces, as Jonathan Gibson has shown, for additions at a
later date. Others were more randomly organised, with texts copied as they
are received.127 Miscellanies were constructed in various ways. They were

formed from blank paper books (which could be purchased ready-made, or
fabricated from separate sheets which were later bound) into which texts
were copied; they might also be assembled from manuscript separates, small
gatherings of individual manuscript pages, paper booklets or pamphlets,
which were then collected together in a larger volume. Miscellanies some-
times bore the hand of a single scribe; alternatively composite volumes
feature wide ranging materials and hands; some volumes were profession-
ally copied by scribes working from loose papers or rough copies. Letters
were transcribed from manuscript and print sources, as well as transmitted
orally, copied down as they were read out or from memory. The professional
letter-writer John Pory writing in July 1610 to Sir Ralph Winwood quoted
‘some fragmentes wherof I remember’ from a letter from King James to the
Lords that he had heard read aloud by the earl of Salisbury.128 The lawyer
and diarist John Manningham recorded in April 1603 ‘A letter gratulatory
to the Lord Maior, Aldermen, and Citizens, was read in their court, which
letter came from his Majestie, dated at Halliroode House, 28 March 1603; it
conteined a promise of his favour, with an admonission to continue their
course of government for matters of justice’.129
The process of copying can occasionally be pieced together from marginal
annotations. A collection of letters of historical interest dating from 1618
and 1628, containing among other items Ralegh’s letter to King James before
his trial, Philip Sidney’s letter to Queen Elizabeth and the earl of Bristol’s let-
ter to the Upper House of Parliament is associated with the puritan minister
Robert Horn. Notes in the margins of this small quarto volume reveal some-
thing of the copying process, indicating that transcripts were made from
disparate papers kept at residences at Clunbury, Ludlow and Westhope in
Shropshire: ‘the last of my writings at Clunbury: they that follow are since
my remove to Ludlow’ (fol.83r); ‘all the following were written at westhope’
(fol.95r). Separate notes also sometimes identify the copyist and date of
transcription, occasionally with additional comments or glosses. At least
two of the articles according to annotations were ‘copied out by the hand
of Mr Herbert Jenks of the New Hall’, including a letter from the Archduke
of Palatine to the King dated 1622 (fol.54r). In several instances the scribe
notes when a letter was subsequently printed, as with ‘The Kings letter to
the Speaker in the Commons house printed since’ (fol.41v).130
Beyond the mechanics of copying and compilation, evidence of compilers,
owners, scribes and readers, although patchy nonetheless offers clues about
the mechanics of circulation, elucidating the circuits, pathways and net-
works of transmission.131 It maps in general terms the kinds of environments
in which the circulation of letters flourished and the sorts of social groups
actively engaged within manuscript culture. Among those miscellanies
containing copies of letters that can be identified either with an individual,
or a particular group, family or community, are: the commonplace book
of Gilbert Frevile, of Bishop Middleham, country Durham; the historical

collections of Kentish MP, Sir Peter Manwood; the commonplace book of
the Cheshire gentleman, Sir William Davenport; the entry-book (or regular
memorandum book) of Henry and Richard Wigley of county Derby; a col-
lection of transcripts of political letters and papers compiled for Sir Francis
Fane; a volume containing political pamphlets, prose and verse dating from
approximately 1620 to 1625, owned by John Rous, the Rector of Stanton
Downham in Suffolk; a mid-seventeenth-century volume of letters copied
by the Cheshire antiquary Sir Peter Leycester; the Farmer-Chetham MS
which dates from the 1620s and is traditionally associated with London
legal circles; the ‘commonplace book’ of the parliamentary official John
Browne; and a collection of sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century his-
torical letters and papers relating to Sir Humphrey Ferrers of Tamworth,
Norfolk, and his brother Thomas.132 Another miscellany connected to
groups of lawyers in the capital in the 1620s, and which contains letters of
political notoriety, is that associated with the Welsh lawyer Richard Roberts
who was associated with the group of wits sometimes referred to as the
‘Mermaid Club’.133 The ‘Waferer Commonplace Book’ is associated with the
Buckinghamshire gentleman, Richard Waferer and his son Myrth Waferer,
canon of Winchester, which in addition to poems, medical recipes, lists of
books, includes the much copied ‘A trewe coppy of Sir Walter Rawleigh his
letter vnto the king’ and the letter of Francis Tresham to William Parker
warning him of the Gunpowder Plot.134 A collection of documents relating
to Sir Walter Ralegh contains the ownership inscription, ‘Cha[rles] Kemeys’,
possibly Sir Charles Kemeys (c.1614–58), second Baronet of Cefn Mably,
county Glamorgan.135 While much of the circulation activity was centred on
the Universities, Inns of Court, parliament, and the court as well as gentry
and aristocratic households, the geographical diversity of owners and com-
pilers indicates dissemination of these materials, beyond the London orbit
and metropolitan centres into the provinces. Wider circulation of manu-
script letters is further suggested by the involvement of women, who were
active as compilers of manuscript miscellanies containing verse, prayers,
recipes, prose and libels.136 Elizabeth Lyttelton’s verse and prose miscellany
included ‘Sir Walter Rawleig’s letter to his wife after his condemnation’.137
The late-seventeenth-century commonplace book of Sarah Cowper con-
tained transcripts of various letters, including from William Lord Russell to
Charles II and the Duke of York, and the earl of Clarendon to Duke of York
and Duchess of York, on the latter’s conversion, a letter that also occurs in
Jane Truesdale’s commonplace book (1672–94).138
Altogether more difficult to reconstruct are the precise details of how the
copies of letters transcribed into miscellanies were garnered, the source or
provenance of materials, and the networks through which they travelled.
Indeed, Harold Love notes ‘the fact that most personal miscellanies rarely
record the circumstances of receipt of particular items, and almost never
those of further transmission, disguises their dynamic quality as points of

transit within networks of copying’.139 A notable exception is the Elizabethan
Chancery official Sir Stephen Powle whose manuscript networks have been
painstakingly reconstructed by Jason Scott-Warren. Powle documented ‘the
date, provenance and even, on occasion, the onward circulation of the texts
he copied’ revealing a manuscript community based upon his workplace,
family, household and neighbourhood.140 Manuscript materials were thus
borrowed, shared and given by friends and acquaintances, circulated among
interrelated and overlapping scribal networks that were cemented by ties of
kinship, friendship, neighbourhood, a sense of shared educational experi-
ence or common profession, and by factional association or ideological
persuasion.
Another owner who noted the provenance of copy texts is the antiquar-
ian and Kentish MP, Sir Peter Manwood, whose example offers another type
of circulatory network, that generated by scholarship and antiquarianism.
Manwood’s miscellany of transcripts of state papers was helpfully glossed in
the margins. A copy of James I’s letter to the House of Commons of 26 June
1604 ‘in the matter of subsidy’, was appended with the note that it had been
‘wrytten oute of ye printed coppy’.141 As with other manuscripts this volume
was produced by an anonymous scribe.142 However, throughout the miscel-
lany explanatory notes are appended in Manwood’s hand, and most docu-
ments are labelled ‘examinat’ or ‘examined’, signalling his habit of checking
transcriptions against a copy-text. An entry entitled ‘A replicacion against ye
clayme of the Duke of Yorke’ was according to a marginal annotation, ‘out of
a great booke of ye recordes of state pertayninge to ye Counsell’, suggesting
that Manwood may have had access to official records, conceivably through
his father Sir Roger Manwood, Chief Baron of the Exchequer.143 Manwood
clearly enjoyed access to state papers, since in 1612 the State Paper Office
lent him correspondence of English ambassadors to Constantinople dat-
ing from 1588 to 1611 for a history of the Turks. Manwood’s example is
not unique and the public records were an important source of manuscript
copying. While the first Keeper of the Records, Thomas Wilson, sought to
gather, stabilise and impose order on state documents, private individuals
could gain access for scholarly, personal and political purposes. Having lost
copies of letters he had sent to the earl of Essex between 1596 and 1598,
Sir Robert Naunton requested to borrow the originals from the State Paper
Office; and lists survive of papers which Robert Cotton ‘perused and tran-
scribed at divers times’. Moreover, Wilson, himself utilised the state papers
for service to the government, making transcripts of diverse documents for
Sir George Calvert and Sir Edward Conway when they were Secretaries of
State, and for the Treasurer, James Ley among others.144
Furthermore, Peter Manwood was also well-connected in antiquarian cir-
cles. In the 1590s he exchanged collections of notes on English history with
John Stow; and in July 1606 Robert Cotton lent him ‘Henry VIII’s Life with
certain notes’. Manwood was a patron of scholars and translators; and was
well respected by William Camden.145 Such connections offer another likely
source for acquiring copies of correspondence. The scholarly activities of
antiquarian collectors like Cotton and D’Ewes represent another major fac-
tor explaining the preservation, copying and circulation of letters of politi-
cal and historical interes.146 Various individuals borrowed from D’Ewes’s
library, including William Dugdale, Roger Dodsworth, John Selden and
James Ussher.147 The most extensive evidence for the exchange and copying
of manuscripts from a private collection, however, relates to the library of
Robert Cotton. Kevin Sharpe has argued that the ‘list of those borrowing’
from Cotton’s library ‘reads like a Who’s Who of the Jacobean administra-
tion’.148 Cotton lent materials to among others Ralph Starkey, Simon D’Ewes,
James Ussher, Sir Walter Ralegh, Francis Bacon and the earl Marshall, Thomas
Howard, earl of Arundel. Loan lists for Cotton’s manuscript collections show
that Hugh Holland was lent ‘a booke of letters of Learned men to Mr Camden
bound upp in lether and Clasped’; in 1608 Richard Bancroft borrowed a col-
lection of ‘royal and noble autograph letters’.149
Antiquarian and scholarly interest when considered alongside informa-
tion about miscellany ownership suggests a ready-made market for copies
of politically interesting letters. This was a market readily catered for by
professional scribes, such as Peter Beal’s ‘feathery scribe’, who copied a broad
range of texts, including ‘A Lre written by the Lordes: of the Councell, to
kinge James’ and ‘A Lre wrytten by Sir Philip Sidney, to his Brothe Robte
Sidnye’.150 British Library, Additional MS, 73087, which was probably owned
by the Hampshire MP and Royalist, Sir Richard Tichborne (c.1578–1652) was
a volume of state letters, the table of contents and first thirty items (and
part of the thirty-first) of which are transcribed mostly in a hand identified
by Peter Beal as that of the ‘feathery scribe’. Evidence of ownership of these
manuscripts, although problematic in that it does not necessarily correlate
with direct clients or original owners, nonetheless suggests a geographically
far-flung clientele that extended well beyond London, throughout England,
and occasionally from Wales, Scotland and Ireland.151 In the case of Philip
Sidney’s letter to Elizabeth I there is some suggestion of a more pro-active
and directed form of copying, galvanised around a particular issue. Indeed,
of the surviving copies of Sidney’s letter to Elizabeth, eleven (nearly a third)
are associated with the ‘Feathery Scribe’ and his scriptorium, which Beal
argues may well represent an orchestrated attempt to represent Sidney as
a champion of pro-Protestantism, during a period of anti-Catholic senti-
ment.152 Professional scribes or scriptoria were therefore instrumental in
producing single and multiple separates for targeted and wider dissemina-
tion, as well as small pamphlets of related texts; and they were also active in
producing bespoke miscellanies of letters for personal consumption.
Finally, copies of letters appeared in printed form, which enjoyed a com-
plicated relationship with manuscript versions. Letters might be printed
close to their appearance in manuscript, sometimes as a part of official

or ‘authorial strategies’ of wider dissemination or by enterprising printers
with an eye to profit. These include The Copie of the K. Maiesties Letter to
the L. Maior of the Citie of London and to the Aldermen and Commons of the
Same (1603) and Letters from the Great Turke (1606), which commonly occur
in personal manuscript miscellanies. Lady Rich’s letter to Queen Elizabeth
was printed with Essex’s Apologie in 1600.153 Appearance in popular cheap
printed pamphlet format ensured a text’s widespread dispersal in manu-
script, highlighting the inter-textuality between these two media. Letters
first appearing in handwritten form were seized by printers whose own pub-
lished versions were then read and copied by hand into manuscript books,
while printed copies were read, digested and compiled into miscellanies.
From the early-sixteenth century onwards there was a well-established tra-
dition of print publications employing the generic title ‘letter’ for political
tracts and religious treatises. Early examples include Henry VIII’s Copy of
the Letters . . . Made Answere Vnto a Certayne Letter of Martyn Luther (1527)
and John Knox’s A Godly Letter Sent Too The Fayethfull in London, Newcastell,
Barwyke . . . (1554). By the mid-sixteenth century, the printed letter form
was an established medium for the reporting of news, claiming to offer inti-
mate, first-hand accounts: A Copye of a Letter Contayning Certayne Newes, &
The Articles or Requestes of the Deuonshyre & Cornyshe Rebelles ([1549]) and The
Copy of a Letter Sent by One of the Camp, of the Prince of Conde . . . (1569).154
Although these were not always ‘real’ letters in the sense that they were sent
in manuscript, they nevertheless suggest a series of expectations that people
had about the ways in which letters worked. Letter texts that had long circu-
lated in manuscript often appeared much later in printed form, confirming
the reapplication of texts within different socio-political circumstances. In
particular from the Civil War period onwards the kinds of letters previously
regarded as state secrets (‘arcana imperii’) were produced for consumption
by a popular audience eager to read or own such historical documents.
The politically charged atmosphere of 1645 witnessed the confiscation and
subsequent publication ‘by special order of Parliament’ of a number of the
King’s ‘private’ letters under the title, The King’s Cabinet Opened, which in
turn spawned a series of propagandist pamphlets.155 More generally, letters
were published in different periods from their initial composition, as with
those of the second earl of Essex to the earl of Southampton ‘in the time
of his troubles’, which were published in 1642 and 1643, reigniting the
memory of Essex’s martial values and nostalgic image as the defender of
Protestantism at a time when Essex’s son became a leader of parliamentar-
ian forces.156 Letters of this nature thus acquired different meanings within
different contexts. A copy of ‘A letter found amongst some Jesuits lately
taken at Clerkenwell London’ dating from 1628 was ‘published for general
information’ in 1679 at the height of Popish Plot hysteria as A Copy of a
Letter Written by a Jesuite to the Father-Rector at Bruxels. The correspondence
of noteworthy individuals (such as Francis Bacon, Henry Wotton, John

Donne and Tobie Matthew) was collected together for publication.157 There
were general collections of state papers such as Cabala, Scrinia sacra, Scrinia
Ceciliana and The Compleat Ambassador, which produced letters and docu-
ments from the reigns of Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, James I and Charles I,158
as well as historical collections like John Rushworth’s Historical Collections
of Private Passages of State (1659), Thomas Fuller’s, The Soveraigns Prerogative
(1660) and John Nalson’s An Impartial Collection of the Great Affairs of State
(1682). The contents of several manuscript volumes closely resemble those
of the Cabala, though difficulties of precisely dating these manuscripts
make it hard to tell whether they in fact predate the printed artefacts.159
The textual relationship between these printed volumes of ‘state secrets’ and
their manuscript counterparts, not least the emergence of a distinct corpus
of early modern letters, requires substantial further research, and promises
to shed important new light on the circulation of letters and manuscript
networks in general.
Reading and reception: manuscript miscellanies
The issues of miscellany ownership and manuscript compilation raise

important questions of reading and reception. This section explores the
motivations that lay behind the manuscript circulation of letters, and ulti-
mately why and how individuals or groups read epistolary copies that they
collected. Similar questions have been investigated in relation to the con-
sumption of news, and particularly in recent years to the reception of verse
libels, which were transmitted in similar manuscript forms. Scholars have
varyingly explained the consumption of such materials as stemming from
a demand for news and contemporary issues, an interest in political and
sexual scandals; catering for learned or literary tastes, for those with a pen-
chant for wit and entertainment; or arising from a politicised form of legal
antiquarianism.160 Michelle O’Callaghan has shown the varying contexts of
reception of the ‘Parliament Fart’, which was copied between the 1610s and
1640s, read not only for its connection to contemporary legal and political
controversies, especially in relation to the ‘Addled’ Parliament of 1614, but
also ‘read as much for its wit and humor as for its politics’ in a particularly
heady world of male sociability.161 Given the enormous diversity of letter
texts that circulated, the ways in which they were read and appropriated
were necessarily multifarious. Questions of reception are necessarily influ-
enced by the reader and context. Peter Mack suggests the flexibility of the
‘model’ letter in terms of interpretation, arguing that a text such as the
letter Chidiock Tichbourne wrote to his wife on the eve of his execution
in 1586 ‘might serve as a historical document, an object for compassionate
meditation or a model of consolation’.162 Furthermore, the way in which
a letter might have been read and re-read was influenced by its rhetorical
classification, since those trained in classical rhetoric at the grammar schools

and universities were drilled in epistolary technique. Thus, a letter of advice
that deviated from a conventional structure and norms would be read in a
particular way, and a letter of ‘dispraise’, borrowing from David Colclough’s
study of the epideictic or demonstrative tradition, could be understood as
a legitimate form of political commentary and unofficial counsel.163 In its
analysis of reception, this section identifies several main reasons for which
copies of letters were read and consumed, which can broadly be summarised
as emulatory or ‘literary’; religious or spiritual; antiquarian, acquisitive and
historical; news-related and sensationalist; and legalistic and political.
Traditionally, it has been assumed that letters were copied for emulatory
or ‘literary’ reasons in its broadest sense. Copyists were concerned with col-
lecting letters for their epistolary merits and as templates for future practical
use. Such an interpretation may partially explain the purpose behind the
compilation of a slim early-seventeenth-century letter miscellany, Osborn
MS fb117 in Yale University’s Beinecke Library, entitled ‘A colleccon of many
learned letters’. The miscellany contains letters from Philip Howard, earl
of Arundel to his father, the fourth Duke of Norfolk and to Walsingham;
two letters from Essex to Elizabeth I; a letter from Philip Sidney to his
brother Robert; Penelope Rich’s letter to Queen Elizabeth; a letter from
Fulke Greville to an unknown recipient; and Essex’s exchange with the Lord
Keeper. The cast of well-known letter-writers, the range of epistolary exem-
plars, as well as the anonymity of Fulke Greville’s recipient all suggest the
collecting of letters by individuals associated with a high epistolary style.
Printed epistolographies were widely available, offering a mixture of real and
fictional exemplars suited to various social situations. It was also common-
place throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for individuals to
compile their own manuscript formularies, such as Folger MS V.b.36,8, fo.1r,
entitled ‘Greetinges Subscriptions & farewelles of letters’ dated circa 1610.
Robert Beale maintained two such formularies as clerk of the Privy Council.
One of the volume was organised alphabetically into nineteen sections
(such as ‘Messages and l[ett]res written to Rebelles in the time of warre and
commotions’ and ‘Sondrie l[ett]res written to divers persones in the time
of warre and rebelliones’), with vellum tags for ease of reference; the other
similarly was organised under various headings, including ‘The Stiles of the
princes letters to all kinds of noblemen and gents’, which provided forms
of address, and ‘L[ett]res to the Lorde Deputy of Irlande, the Presidents of
Yorck and Wales & co.’ (Figure 7.1).164 Peter Mack has argued that particular
types or sub-genres of letter might be collected as exemplars for practical
purposes, the most common of which are love letters, and letters of petition
and condolence.165 Various miscellanies collected anonymous or confected
model letters alongside copies of ‘real’ letters, blurring the distinctions
between emulation, and political and historical interest. British Library,
Additional MS 44848 includes alongside wide-ranging historical letters and
papers, ‘A gratulatory letter to his freind [sic] for many benefitts receiued wth
resolutions to continew the same’ and ‘A petitionary letter from ye Sonne
of his vnkle on the behalfe of his Father and himselfe’.166 It is highly likely
that Folger MS V.a.321 served either for stylistic exercises or as a practi-
cal manual, since it contains many of the main types of letters found in
printed guides of the period, including those of advice, consolation, peti-
tion, request and thanks. Indeed, Mack suggests the letters dealing with
Peter Ferryman’s admittance to Charterhouse (fols63v–65r) might have been
‘grouped as evidence to support a petition’.167
A further example of this kind of utilitarian compilation of letters in
manuscript miscellany form is British Library, Additional MS 33271, which
represents a grouping of ‘real’ letters collected as models and arranged under
various rhetorical headings: ‘Advise’, ‘Aunsweares to certeine petitions’,
‘Comendatory’, ‘Consolatorye’, ‘Expostulatory’, ‘Gratulatory’, ‘Orations’,
‘Narratory’ and ‘Supplicatory’. This particular hybrid manuscript blurs the
division between real letters preserved in letter-books and miscellaneous col-
lections of letters preserved as exemplars. An oblong folio volume produced
on vellum, this very expensive manuscript was probably intended as a lavish
presentation volume. That it was intended for practical use is suggested by
underlinings of certain passages in an ink different from that used in copy-
ing. It contains examples by numerous well-known letter-writers, including
Roger Ascham, William Cecil, Edward Dering, Tobie Matthew, Philip Sidney
and Sir Thomas Wyatt, as well as several examples of letters to women,
including letters consolatory from Roger Ascham to his wife on the death
of their son and a letter gratulatory to Katherine Astley.168 Moreover, several
of the letters were from members of the Bacon family, from Sir Nicholas
and Francis Bacon and a letter to Anthony Bacon from Thomas Norton on
the death of his father. This suggests a Bacon connection, and the possibil-
ity of the volume being used by the family for educational and utilitarian
purposes.169
In pedagogical terms, collections of epistolary templates were collected
by schoolmasters, such as the Elizabethan schoolmaster John Conybeare,
as stylistic exercises for pupils.170 Among the model letters that most widely
survive in manuscript miscellanies are supposed or archetypal love letters,
anonymous exemplary letters written (male- and female-voiced) to woo,
reject and lament. The Wafarer commonplace book contains copies of two
presumably fictitious love-letters from ‘Tho. B’ to his mistresses ‘S’ and ‘J’,
while a seventeenth-century verse and prose miscellany (BL, Additional
MS, 5956) included alongside several Essex-related letters examples of love
and valentine letters, as well as a ‘letter from a gentleman to a lady, on the
subject of woman’s affection’.171 Folger MS V.a.321 likewise contains a series
of anonymous assorted love letters to ladies and mistresses.172 Exemplary
materials of this nature were stock-in-trade for teaching the rhetorical skills
of letter-writing. Erasmus provided various amatory epistolary strategies for
206
Figure 7.1 ‘The Stiles of the princes letters to all kinds of noblemen and gents’ from
Robert Beale’s manuscript formulary: BL, Add. MS, 48150, fol.287r. Reproduced by
permission of The British Library, London.
pupils to imitate, advising ‘if we are seeking to arouse feelings of mutual

love in a girl, we shall make use of two instruments of persuasion, praise and
compassion’.173 While the survival of copies of form love letters in miscel-
lanies perhaps reveals pedagogical practice, the distinction between educa-
tion and entertainment in many volumes is unclear. Indeed, the assembly
of materials in Bodleian, Rawlinson MS D.431 suggests a mixed economy.
This pocket-sized volume connected to the University of Oxford is inscribed
on the flyleaf with the name ‘Arthur Squibb’ along with a fragment of verse
quoted from John Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays, ‘Good wench
deny my loue is closed / unlesse joyes grieue before enjoyed’.174 It comprises
a collection of form letters mainly in French on various subjects, and con-
tains eight amorous chansons in French, an English letter ‘to my factor at
the Canares’ (fol.87) and four letters from a lover to his mistress (fols93–4,
98). Stylistically there is an exemplary quality to the letters, which may
have acted as model letters for educative practice or templates for amatory
and other social situations. Given the nature of the materials assembled and
the context of compilation the boundaries between exemplar and enter-
tainment, titillation and the overtly sexual become blurred. Indeed, manu-
script was a forum for materials of an erotic, obscene or even pornographic
nature.175 The letter form was not a well-known vehicle for sexual obscenity,
and personal missives are marked by their lack of carnality: nonetheless
the collecting of amatory letters smacks less of the carefree romantic and
possibly more of the onanistic voyeur. Indeed, one seventeenth-century
miscellany included a letter from John Granger ‘To a she, a friende that had
caught the clap’.176 The range of letter-texts (real as well as fictional) that
were copied was thus diverse, reflecting varied interests, tastes and purposes
from the exemplary to the erotic.
Moving from the erotic to the pious, copies of religious letters were tran-
scribed and collected for spiritual purposes. A compendium volume of ‘let-
ters for reading on Sundays and Saints’ days’ once owned by Peter Manwood
was acquired by Robert Cotton.177 During the Elizabethan period there
was a discernible tradition of ‘scribal publication’ of ‘godly’ letters, which
paralleled and sometimes overlapped with print publishing.178 Among the
sermon notes in the miscellany of Gilbert Frevile of Bishop Middleham,
county Durham were gathered several examples of ‘godly and comfortable
letters’: ‘Mr Dearings letter to a godly gentlewoman, being in heavines of
spiritt’, which was printed in Edward Dering’s Workes (1597); and ‘A lre of
Doctor Cranmers, Archbishop of Canterbury, to one Mrs Wilkinson, a godly
matron, distressed in Q. Maries time’ similarly printed in John Strype’s
Memorials of Cranmer (1694).179 In his ‘commonplace book’ dating from
c.1578 to 1600 and written chiefly while he was a student at Oxford, the
Northamptonshire minister John Rogers, collected letters of Calvin, Peter
Martyr and others alongside his own letters of religious instruction and ser-
mon notes.180 Collections of spiritual letters of this nature acted as a kind of
spiritual epistolary self-help manual designed to administer to a wide range

of cases of troubled conscience. Typically the advice offered in such letters
was generic. Even those letters addressed to named individuals sought to
counsel and comfort a wider general audience.
Despite the availability of print collections, individuals fashioned ready-
made manuscript volumes to cater for their own use. This practice can
be observed in the ‘letter-book’ of the seventeenth-century London-based
puritan artisan Nehemiah Wallington.181 Entitled ‘Copies of profitable and
Comfortable letters’ (fol.6r), the small notebook of 209 folios (dated 1650)
is a rather peculiar hybrid form, a cross between a record of personal cor-
respondence and a collection of ‘godly and comfortable’ letters. Copies of
correspondence to and from Wallington, which comprise well over half
the entries in the volume, thus reside beside a copy of the Second Epistle
of St John, letters of Lawrence Saunders and other martyrs copied out of
John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, and letters from divines including Edward
Dering and Joseph Hall. Pasted into the volume was a printed letter from
Thomas Turner, minister of Wormingford, Essex, written on his death bed in
1646 to his ‘moste deare Father and Mother’ (fols152r–v). Wallington’s own
correspondence represents him in the role of spiritual counsellor, dispens-
ing epistolary advice on matters of conscience and admonishing wayward
behaviour. The volume includes ‘A Godly Letter sent to’ his father and
mother ‘advising them how to haue a speciall care in the matching of their
beloued Daughter’ (fols87r–89v), and a letter to his sister-in-law Dorothy
Rampaigne ‘of sharpe reproufe and louing Admonition for liuing in secret
sinne’, written by Wallington when he intercepted love letters to an Irish
Catholic. Yet in collecting his own correspondence alongside well-known
and established epistolary exemplars Wallington’s aim was practical: the
production of a pocket-sized duodecimo manual aimed at administering
to troubled consciences, both his own and also those of his family and the
local puritan community. The self revealed here is thus relational, defined
by social contacts and community. The volume was addressed to a public
audience, framed with a prefatory letter ‘to all readers’ (fols2r–5v), and
throughout many of the letters are glossed by Wallington for future read-
ers and it contains an index at the back. His own use of the book (and it
is inscribed ‘Nehemiah Wallington his Booke 1650’ (fol.1v)) is glimpsed by
an interesting comment annotated at the back of the volume (fol.205v) and
dated ‘June ye xxiii 1658’, a month or so before he died in Eastcheap in
August 1658. The inscription reads, ‘By the mercy of God I haue read ouer
this my writing Booke which is coppies of precious letters where in I observe
a few things’:
2 Rules to find whither God be with vs or no p 102

3 Motiues why we should bare ye losse of Relations p 108
Comfort in Affliction p 118
3 Rules for Cumfort p 149

6 Causes of Sadnesse in the worship of God p 150
4 Obseruations of ye danger in immoderate sorrow p 152
4 Causes of comfort p 151
Tryed Grace is precious grace p 350
4 wayes we suffer as a christian p 367
From these notes it appears that he turned to the volume as a source of

comfort and solace at the end of his life, and was determined to bequeath
his small notebook, itself a form of scribal publication, with a framework
to guide subsequent readers to its contents. Under Wallington’s ownership
mark on the first folio is written ‘Jonathan Houghton September IX 1658’,
the mark of its new owner, his son-in-law, who inherited all of his note-
books. In very striking fashion then the ‘scribal publication’ of godly letters
reflects personal utility as well as wider spiritual counselling.
Thirdly, copies of letters of famous individuals and state papers were
collected for antiquarian or historical interest, as highlighted by analysis
of individual miscellanies owned by antiquarians.182 The ‘commonplace
book’ of the Elizabethan antiquarian and Lancaster Herald, Francis Thynne,
relates largely to English and French history, and contains a letter in French
from Septsaux, pursuivant to the Chancellor of France to the English Kings
of Arms, Heralds and Pursuivants, complaining of ill-usage at the taking of
Harfleur in 1416.183 The volume’s overriding interest is noticeably heraldic,
ranging from the eleventh to the early-seventeenth century and concerned
with precedence, custom and ceremony. The miscellany associated with the
judge, antiquarian and Kentish MP Peter Manwood, however, reveals a more
contemporary preoccupation in the range of the compiler’s interests. A col-
lector of books, medieval and contemporary manuscripts, and himself a
patron of scholars and antiquarians, Manwood’s manuscript reflects interests
in history, political affairs and administration for the period 1564 to 1618.
The volume comprises large numbers of state papers, including Arundel’s
letter to Queen Elizabeth; letters from King James to the Commons in May
and June 1604; and Ralegh’s letter to King James the night before his death.
These were compiled alongside proclamations, extracts from parliamentary
journals, commissions, appointments and heraldic notes.184 These were
texts relating to contemporary issues of church and state, and the contents
of Manwood’s miscellany reflect the political application of antiquarian
scholarship.
Antiquarianism, as Daniel Woolf has shown, was incorporated into his-
torical culture during the sixteenth century, and the early modern period
witnessed a shift from antiquarian interest as simply a passion for ‘old
things’ towards an appreciation of ‘antiquities’ for their age and rarity.185
From the 1580s onwards, however, there emerged alongside a kind of ‘dry
as dust’ antiquarianism, or historical scholarship for its own sake, a more
utilitarian, legalistic antiquarianism fuelled by constitutional issues, a form

of antiquarian endeavour highlighted by Kevin Sharpe among others that
understood the fruits of scholarship contributing to the creation of a new
politics.186 During the 1620s and 1630s there was a ready market for histori-
cal and political materials that were linked to the burning legal and political
controversies of the day.187 Fuelled by antiquarian activity and more general
interest in political and historical events, noteworthy letters connected
to key issues and events – such as the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots,
Elizabeth’s courtships, conspiracies and plots, the succession of King James,
the Spanish match, Thomas Overbury’s murder, and parliamentary matters –
were consumed by an educated group of common lawyers, parliamentarians
and individuals involved in public life and interested in constitutional mat-
ters, whose interests were more than antiquarian in a reductive sense, in
that they recognised the political application of such papers. The copying of
letters in this manner is connected to what Alistair Bellany has described as
the proliferation of other forms of news production and consumption in the
period 1580 to 1640, connected to a ‘growing hunger for political commen-
tary and information of all kinds’.188 It is thus difficult to separate individual
letters from other materials with which they circulated, such as other related
letters, verses, libels and speeches. Letters and other materials associated
with the earl of Essex and his fall (such as the exchange with Lord Keeper
Egerton, Essex’s Apologie, his and Lady Rich’s letters to the Queen, his scaf-
fold speech and several verses) often circulated as a distinct group, attaining
collective meaning with different applications in different periods. Likewise,
copies of Ralegh’s letters to his wife, King James, Anne of Denmark, Robert
Carr and Ralph Winwood, circulated as a group sometimes with other texts,
such as his scaffold speech.189 The placement of the letters alongside other
materials provides a fuller pattern of compilers’ habits and interests, framing
and impacting the ways in which individual letter texts were read.
The contents of miscellanies are in themselves illuminating, and Arthur
Marotti has argued that ‘sixteenth- and seventeenth-century manuscript
miscellanies and poetry anthologies were a barometer of political activity
and conflicts’.190 The precise nature of political consciousness among owners
of manuscript miscellanies is, however, problematic and much debated by
historians studying the period prior to the Civil War.191 Nevertheless, David
Colclough among others has argued that the circulation of political poems
and other texts in miscellanies ‘is not fully explained by a general interest
in news or a taste for public scandal on the part of manuscript owners’.
Indeed, he argues interestingly that ‘in some cases compilers of miscellanies
are using their texts as something approaching a tool of political analysis’.192
Such readings become increasingly plausible where biographical details and
dating are in fact recoverable, anchoring miscellanies within a particular his-
torical timeframe or socio-cultural context, and displaying habits or patterns
of copying and preserving materials that reflect particular interests.
The copying habits of the Suffolk clergyman John Rous (1584–1644), par-
son of the parish of Stanton Downham, provide an excellent case study of
this form of analysis. Rous kept a miscellany and news diary for the periods
1617–25 and 1625–43, in which he recorded items of local, national and
international current affairs, and copied down verses, political prose, pam-
phlets and prophecies, as ‘a precedent of the times’.193 He transcribed into
his later diary a letter on the death of the Duke of Buckingham, ‘a copie of
a letter sent from the devill to the Pope’, Lord Falkland’s petition to Charles
I, and the humble petition of the gentry of York to Charles I alongside other
letters, verses and libels.194 The contents of his earlier miscellany betray
a keen interest in the Spanish Match Crisis, including a copy of Thomas
Alured’s letter to the Duke of Buckingham, ‘A Copie of the letter of his
Catholic Majestie to the Conde de Olivares’, the Palsgrave’s letter to King
James warning him against the Spanish match, as well as satirical verses
against the match and Thomas Scott’s highly critical attack on foreign
policy, Vox populi, or Newes from Spayne.195 Rous’s interest in these matters is
further suggested by the survival in his handwriting of a tract on the sub-
ject of English/Spanish precedence, enlarged from a tract by Robert Cotton
penned in 1599.196 Furthermore, the nature of the news diary, which does
more than merely record, offers a commentary on the events witnessed and
chronicled, a level of critical observation and analysis normally absent from
most miscellanies. Rous was, as Thomas Cogswell has argued, effectively
an apologist for Charles I against local critics. Nevertheless the dissolving
of parliament in the mid-1620s, combined with dubious fiscal expedients,
experiments with the established church and what he saw as a perplex-
ing foreign policy made this position increasingly difficult. An entry for
26 November 1627, for example, opined that the Anglo-French war might
in fact have been intended ‘to diverte us from helping the protestants of
Germany’.197 He was acutely aware of how his parishioners reacted during
the 1620s, writing ‘our King’s proceedings have caused men’s mindes to be
incensed, to rove, and project’.198 This was not a passive digest of news, nor
necessarily a mere chronicling of ‘a precedent of the times’, but rather a
politically aware churchman, actively engaging with parliamentary debates,
as well as issues of foreign and ecclesiastical policies, discussing them and
mediating at a local level.199
Moreover, as individual letters circulated, passing between hands and
generations, texts acquired new meanings and new applications in different
contexts and environments. Indeed, D.F. McKenzie has famously remarked
‘new readers of course make new texts, and their new meanings are a func-
tion of their new forms. The claim then is no longer for their truth as one
might seek to define that by an authorial intention, but for their testimony
as defined by their historical use’.200 Early modern manuscript culture as
Arthur Marotti has shown was less author-centred than print culture, and
this imparted a strong element of what he describes as ‘social textuality’.
Texts were malleable and unstable, they were miscopied, appropriated and
engaged with and cast in new frameworks.201 Copyists or ‘users’ responded
and added to the texts, as a form of commentary or social authorship and
for political or ideological motives.202 Viewed from the perspective of textual
editing, variants of this nature generate different traditions of a particular
text, traceable by reconstructing a stemma of textual transmission, an edito-
rial method that presupposes an authentic ‘authorial’ or autograph version
(often missing in the case of letters) which subsequent copies followed or
deviated from.203 In his analysis of Philip Sidney’s Letter to Queen Elizabeth
Peter Beal argues that textual variations in surviving copies stem from the
initial period of composition, and that significant nuances of meaning
reflect ‘political fine tuning’ as copyists chose to interpret particular phrases
in a way that fitted best their own ideological hues.204 The text of Lady
Rich’s Letter to the Queen likewise experienced some degree of instability in
the years after Essex’s execution, with several copies including an account
of what Lady Rich is rumoured to have responded to questioning by the
Council: ‘what I meant I wrott and what I wrott I meante’.205
Letters then did not merely circulate as models to be emulated, as exem-
plars of a given letter-writer’s epistolary style, or even solely as part of a corpus
of correspondence to be collected. Individual letters had a peculiar afterlife
beyond their initial application and reception, moving from a supposedly
private epistolary moment to a more public outing, circulating placed
among related letters and non-epistolary texts, gathering bibliographic units
as they snowballed, and were read with reapplications in different historical
conditions and contexts.206 This movement of separates into larger units,
gathered together with new materials, is a process that Harold Love has
termed ‘rolling archetypes’.207 One such letter that achieved wider circula-
tion in this manner, in manuscript (and posthumously in print) was that of
the administrator Thomas Alured to the duke of Buckingham (Figure 7.2).
Alured’s missive is a letter of ‘advice’ in which he urged the royal favourite
to block the proposed Spanish match for Prince Charles.208 Written in June
1620, the letter warned that marriage to the Infanta would ‘neither be safe
for the Kings person, nor good for this Church and Commonwealth because
that thereby may be an in-let to the Romish locusts’. The letter set forth
numerous precedents of disastrous Anglo-Spanish marriages (including
Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon and Mary and Philip II) and counselled
Buckingham to promote an English bride for the royal heir. Alured’s letter
was widely circulated in manuscript as a part of anti-Spanish match propa-
ganda and consumed as current news. Despite suggestions that Alured was
not in fact the author of the letter – it has been speculated that it was drafted
by the puritan divine John Preston and that Alured claimed responsibility
in order to ingratiate himself with the anti-Spanish court faction – he was
arrested and consigned to the Fleet prison, and only released after issuing an
apology. While this letter may have been read by MPs and legal antiquarians
as a letter of advice, a legitimate mode of informal counsel in the sense of

David Colclough’s argument about epideictic rhetoric, viewed from the per-
spective of the state censor it was seditious. The polemic had greatly angered
the Privy Council who considered it an infringement of royal prerogative.209
The letter was copied by several individuals who can be identified from their
miscellanies, including Francis Fane, Archbishop Sancroft, the antiquarian
Ralph Starkey, and a contemporary separate was tipped into a register of
the Council of Wales and the Marches, for the period circa 1586 to 1634,
presumably because of Alured’s connection to the council both as secretary
to Ralph Lord Eure until 1617, and thereafter through numerous adminis-
trative posts.210 The letter was also collected by the Suffolk clergyman John
Rous, alongside other materials relating to the Spanish match.211 It was also
later printed, the text finding reapplication as anti-royalist, hispanophobic
propaganda during the early 1640s at the outbreak of the Civil War, when
it was twice published in 1642 and 1643 under the titles The Coppie of A
Letter Written to the Dvke of Bvckingham Concerning the Match With Spaine . . .
(Figure 7.3) and The Humble Advice of Thomas Aldred to the Marqvesse of
Buckingham Concerning the Marriage of Our Sovereigne Lord King Charles. By
1659 it found its way in truncated form into John Rushworth’s Historical
Collections.212 It also features prominently in later seventeenth-century
manuscript collections of Cabala letters. Clearly then Alured’s letter had a
contemporary purpose as anti-Spanish propaganda, circulating as a separate,
was then copied and collected as a polemical political tract throughout the
1620s and 1630s, and resurfaced in popularity in the early 1640s, printed as
a part of a series of political pamphlets published at the outbreak of the Civil
War before its later consumption for antiquarian interest.
In conclusion, copies of early modern letters survive in a range of scribal

formats, as actual sent letters, texts inscribed into formal letter-books, and
as multiple copies disseminated as manuscript separates and compiled into
miscellanies. The material context of a letter’s survival forms an intrinsic part
of how it should latterly be read. Letter-books preserved letters with an eye
to posterity, and were capable of textually representing an individual self or
a collective identity forged through correspondence. The scribal circulation
of manuscript copies of letters operated in a series of stages extending from
controlled dissemination of separates, through widespread private copying
in miscellanies to professional scribal production and to print publication.
This Loveian model of ‘scribal publication’, often used to describe the tex-
tual transmission of more straightforwardly literary texts, also broadly fits
what happened to certain copies of letters as they moved from private modes
of production to more public forms of consumption. Once copies entered
manuscript networks their textual journey was complex and varied. They
214
Figure 7.2 ‘Mr Tho[mas] Alured (a privat gent.) to ye Marq[uess] of Buckingham ag[ains]t Prince Charles marrying w[i]th Dona Maria
Infanta of Spayne’: TNA, SP14/121, fols7v–8r. Reproduced by permission of The National Archives, Kew.
215
Figure 7.3 The Coppie of A Letter Written to the Dvke of Bvckingham Concerning the
Match With Spaine (1642): E 115 (12). Reproduced by permission of The British
Library, London.
were circulated as separates; as discrete bibliographic collections of related

correspondence in pamphlet form, often with other manuscript materials.
They formed part of larger accumulations of general letters, as well as being
included in miscellaneous manuscript volumes of assorted textual genres.
Alongside this broad interpretive framework what emerges is the high degree
of inter-textuality between oral, print and manuscript media: letters written
to be read aloud were scribally recorded or memorised for later transcription;
printed correspondence was written out by hand and copied into miscel-
lanies or notebooks; manuscript copies were published by printers. Various
manuscript forms and writing technologies facilitated scribal circulation.
The letter as an important conduit for transmission, intimately connected
with postal and communication networks; the miscellany as a storehouse
and clearing house for texts, allowing copies received to be transcribed and
then passed on to friends and acquaintances; the professional scriptorium
which catered for consumer demand of paying clients; and finally the per-
sonal manuscript collection, library or State Paper Office which acted as a
repository from which to borrow, and an archive in which to preserve. The
complex textual afterlives of letters generated new meanings, as they were
gathered together with new materials, and consumed by new readers in
contexts disconnected from those of their initial applications.
8
The Afterlives of Letters
Early modern letters once composed and dispatched had a peculiar afterlife
that is textual, historic and archival. Letters were preserved and archived by
contemporaries in a range of ways. They were locked in muniments rooms,
endorsed usually with the date and a brief note of contents then folded and
placed in bundles; they were kept in studies or closets, referenced for ease
of retrieval as part of complex filing systems; they were also hidden under
beds in trunks, and even threaded on wire. This concern for preservation
stimulated practices for safe-keeping correspondence. Recipe books of the
period include instructions for how to preserve paper and how to treat it to
prevent it from being eaten by mice. The kinds of formal letter-books and
manuscript miscellanies, discussed in the previous chapter, should likewise
be considered as ways of preserving correspondence. The process continues
today in repositories, record offices and research institutions. Later genera-
tions of conservators, charged with the task of safeguarding their ‘archives’
for posterity have sought to intervene in various ways – washing paper,
treating it with chemical preservatives, tightly binding individual letters
into leather-bound volumes, attaching manuscripts to gauze – though cur-
rent methods are far less intrusive. The reasons that motivated officials,
individuals or families to keep their correspondence, range from the bureau-
cratic and legal to the more personal and sentimental. The chapter focuses
on two main aspects relating to the preservation and afterlife of letters.
First, it examines the material preservation of actual letters, before secondly
considering the nature and formation of early modern archives, and the
extent to which current-day archival practices, conservation techniques and
digitisation projects are in tension with the interests of scholars concerned
with issues of materiality.
Filing and preservation
Once received, early modern letters underwent a complex process of recep-

tion and archiving, which often mediated the act of reading correspondence
217
itself. On receipt, letters were usually endorsed (literally ‘on the back’) with
a note on the back of the paper, typically giving the name of the sender,
a short summary of the contents of the letter, and the date it was sent or
sometimes the date the letter was received. A letter from Philip Sidney to
William Cecil, Lord Burghley was endorsed by one of his secretaries ’20
Octob. 1580 Mr Philip Sidney to my L. His suite to hir Maty for 100li in
impropriations’; while a letter from Sir Oliver Cromwell to Sir Thomas Parry
was simply endorsed ‘S[i]r Oliv[e]r Cromwell 1603’.1 Endorsements of this
nature allowed for ease of filing and facilitated later retrieval. Moreover, they
enabled secretaries to guide and assist addressees in their reading of letters,
making the contents readily accessible. Indeed, writing in 1592 Robert Beale
advised that letters intended for discussion by the Privy Council should
be abbreviated on the backside with the ‘substantiall and most materiall
pointes’ in case members had not had sufficient ‘leisure’ to peruse them.2
The physical evidence of endorsements indicates that this was a widespread
practice, usually performed by secretaries who enjoyed unrivalled access to
the correspondence of their masters and mistresses.
It is possible in some instances to reconstruct materially from the letters
themselves the ways in which they were originally filed before they were
stored flat (in other words, opened) bound into volumes by archivists.
Indeed, an examination of the fold lines in the paper and identification of
which parts are discoloured or dirty, as well as the location of endorsements,
provide clues about how letters might have been stored. A good case study is
the letters of Edward Seymour, Deputy Lieutenant of Devon during the late-
Elizabethan period, who assiduously preserved correspondence relating to
local administrative and military duties in Devon, and employed a system-
atic method of referencing for his correspondence.3 The letters preserved in
this collection conform to the standard bifolium or single folio letter format.
Sent letters generally contain two sets of distinct folds. The first set of folds
date from when the letter was sent and sealed, and were made by first fold-
ing the bifolium twice from top to bottom (with a third smaller fold which
was tucked inside) to produce an oblong packet; this was then folded again
twice lengthways, tucked and sealed to produce a letter measuring approxi-
mately 100 millimetres by 65 millimetres. The later set of folds was created
when the letters were stored in bundles in their closed state; these four folds
were made by folding the letter twice from top to bottom (probably in half,
and in half again). Single folio copies of letters were folded in exactly the
same manner, but of course do not exhibit the folds relating to sending.4
Once folded into a closed rectangular packet, each letter was then endorsed
(on the opposite side to that containing the address) with brief details of
the letter at the top of the column and a numerical reference at the bottom.
A letter of 5 September 1595 was endorsed, ‘A lre from my Lo of Bathe to ye
deputy leuietant for ye confirming of my colonelshippe’, with the number
16 written in the same hand at the bottom, a part of Seymour’s numbering
The Afterlives of Letters 219
sequence.5 Analysis of the discolouration or dirtiness of different parts of

the paper indicates that the letters were kept folded in this way in bundles.6
While the letters were later unfolded and are now preserved in their ‘flat’
state (as is typical elsewhere), the dirtiest parts of the letter are the address
leaf, which obviously would have been exposed when the letter was carried,
and the column of paper containing the endorsement, evidence that it too
was unprotected. By contrast other parts of the letter which would mostly
have been enclosed inside in their folded state appear significantly cleaner
and brighter.
Instructions on the organising, filing and recording of correspondence
are found in secretarial guides and mercantile accounting manuals from the
late-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. One of the most detailed descrip-
tions of the manuscript practices associated with organising and archiving
correspondence is contained in Nicholas Faunt’s ‘discourse touching the
office of the Principal secretary of estate’, written in manuscript form in
1592. As one of Francis Walsingham’s secretaries Faunt was experienced
with the routines of paperwork. He recommended sorting papers into bun-
dles of three kinds (home letters, council matters and diverse matters) for
daily use, then once dispatched to remove them to some chest or place to
avoid confusion or loss; cabinets and coffers were to be prepared in which
to keep such papers.7 Likewise, the seventeenth-century poet and writer
Richard Brathwaite in his description of the ‘place’ of the secretary in an
earl’s household outlined his archival functions:
He is to have a closet, with Cubbardes of drawing boxes and shelves,

therin and upon to place in dew order, all letters received from the Kinges
Majestie, from the Lords of the privy cownsell, and from other Noble
men and gentlemen. Likewise all copies of letters written by his Lord to
his Majestie, or any of the rest above written: he having written upon
every of them breeflye, parte of the contents, with their dates, that he
may readily finde them when he hath occasion.8
The ordering of correspondence was similarly viewed as an integral part of

efficient mercantile enterprise.9 James Peele in his mid-sixteenth-century
accounting manual recommended to merchants that:
all letters receiued from any partes beyonde the seas, to be at eche voi-
ages retourne, bounde vp and written on the[m] of what Marte or voiage
thei were of: and in what yere: and so orderly piled vp in your Comptyng
house.10
In another tract on keeping accounts, John Mellis’s 1588 edition of Hugh

Oldcastle’s A Profitable Treatyce (1543), a whole section was devoted to letter-
writing entitled ‘Of the forme and manner to keepe and order letters that are
sent to you from your friendes’, which discussed in some detail the ordering,
sorting and endorsing of letters for retrieval:
it is also necessarie that you haue a chyst in your counting house for
your letters, wherein you shall put them as soone as you haue red them,
and written the day of receite on the backe side, till the month be ended,
and gather all that yee receiued that moneth, and fold them somewhat
large, and binde them in a bundell. And in the case yee receiue diuers
letters from one place, as Venice, Iene [Genoa], Florence, London, Cyuill
[Seville], or Andwerpe, yee shall binde all that is from one of these places
in a bundell by themselues and write vppon the vpper letter Venice, or
Iene, or any other place that they come from.11
Collectively, these manuals describe the manuscript practices of ordering

and endorsing correspondence for easy retrieval, as well as the physical
spaces (closets, cupboards, chests and shelves) that housed archived letters.
The material conditions of the filing, storage and preservation of early
modern letters can be further reconstructed from a range of sources illustrat-
ing the existence of various practices among men and women.12 Paintings
of domestic and business-related interiors reveal something of the manner
in which letters were filed and sorted. Hans Holbein the Younger’s Portrait of
the Merchant George Gisze (1532) depicts several letters folded over a wooden
filing mechanism attached to the wall; while Jan Gossaert’s well-known
Portrait of a Merchant (c.1530) shows a merchant surrounded by two sets of
letters strung upside down and threaded onto a wire.13 Furthermore, physical
objects and furniture surviving from the period elucidate the kinds of recep-
tacles in which correspondence and other papers were stored.14 Lockable
trunks, chests or coffers for securely holding papers were commonplace. The
inventory of Mr Withers in September 1531 listed ‘in the over study ceiled
with wainscot’ ‘a trussing chest with writings’.15 Within Lord Lisle’s chamber
in Calais in the 1530s was ‘a trussing coffer & therein suche wrytinges as
were in my lordes closset’.16 The 1632 household inventory of the ninth earl
of Northumberland recorded ‘in the closet belonging to the old earl’s cham-
ber’ in addition to books and ‘pamphletts of all sorts’, ‘one wainscott boxe
with mappes & other writinges in it’.17 Women too utilised boxes of various
sorts to hoard letters. The countess of Essex in 1599 stored letters in a casket
under her bed; while in the mid-seventeenth century, Elizabeth Pepys kept a
bundle of papers including all the letters she received from her husband in
a locked trunk.18 Desks with locks were likewise commonly used for keeping
letters. In 1600, Sir Henry Nevill stored papers in his own lockable desk.19
Sir George Carew referred in a letter to Robert Cecil to papers locked up in
a desk in his lodging in London; and John Fortescue complained to the earl
of Essex that his ‘lewde and wretched butler’ had locked certain papers ‘in a
deske of his within’ an office.20 Within the household, correspondence and
other papers were frequently stored in studies and closets fitted with locks
for security. In 1601 John Littleton’s wife kept in a desk in her closet a packet
of letters ‘fast sealed wth hard wax’; while in 1636 Elizabeth Ratcliffe had a
closet at her residence in the Savoy, in which she kept a lockable little desk.21
Studies, closets, bedchambers and the desks, coffers and chests they held
were frequently searched by state authorities for incriminating correspond-
ence. In 1598 when the bailiffs of Wisbech searched the study of the Catholic
Nicholas Sanforde, they found incriminating letters within the chests there.22
If individuals were suspected in any way, their rooms were commonly sealed
up to allow time for letters and papers to be thoroughly searched.23 Precisely
who was entrusted with keys for locked closets and studies reveals much
about early modern concepts of privacy and the degrees of access individuals
allowed other parties, such as secretaries, servants, wives and other family
members to their papers.24 Evidence suggests that in many cases wives had
access to husbands’ studies, closets and correspondence. In 1634, Edward
Dering wrote to his wife asking her to send with the messenger ‘a little firre
boxe with a fewe papers and some evidence in itt’ which he informed her
was ‘upon the nearest corner of my study table’, while in 1623 the Norfolk
gentleman Thomas Knyvett sent his wife the key for his closet asking her to
‘looke for 2 letters which my cousin Abrahall writ, one to my selfe and the
other to my cousin Knyvett, and send them to me’.25 This was not always the
case though, as Lord Cobham informed Robert Cecil in 1605: ‘it is neadles to
troble my wife for any thing yt is in ye closett at Cobham, Sir John Lewson
hath ye key, who you may call for, and send down for ye cabinett it stand
vpon ye table whearin thear is nothinghe but privat letters’.26
Paper was sometimes treated before being filed and archived. Thomas
Lupton’s A Thousand Notable Things of Sundrie Sorts (1579) detailed how
to prevent mice from eating letters. Referencing the first-century Greek
physician Dioscorides’s herbal manual, De materia medica, the volume rec-
ommends ‘Wryting Inke tempered with water, wyne or vinegard, wherein
woormwood hath bene steeped: Myce wyl not eate the Papers or Letters
written with that Inke’.27 The circulation of this form of preparation of ink
appears to have been fairly widespread in print. William Philip’s A Booke of
Secrets (1596) similarly suggested that ‘a little wormewood water’ should be
added to the ink in order to deter mice and moths from eating or fretting
the paper.28 Meanwhile, Johann Jacob Wecker’s Eighteen Books of the Secrets
of Art & Nature (1660) included a section ‘To defend Letters from Mice’,
which suggested, ‘Temper Writing Ink with Wormwood water infused, and
this will keep your Letters from Mice, as the herb will keep Moths from your
Cloathes’.29 Lupton’s manual also included instructions for treating paper
‘that wrytings shall not burne in the fyre’:
take very strong vinegar and the whytes of egges, and put them together,
and put therto Quicksyluer mixing and sturring the Quicksyluer well
therein, and with the same mixture annoynt paper three times, and after
euery time, drye the same well: and after that wryte what you lyst on the
same paper, & then cast the same writing into the fyre, and you shal see
it leape out of the fyre without burning.30
The efforts to preserve paper outlined here further suggest an early modern
culture concerned with record keeping, preserving papers and saving cor-
respondence.
Early modern and modern archives
The final section considers the ways in which letters have survived, the
nature of early modern archives, and discusses some of the issues relating
to modern-day archives in terms of how letters are treated, stored and made
accessible to readers in a digital age. The survival of letters in institutional
and state archives or in the muniments rooms of stately homes precondi-
tions from the outset the kinds of correspondence that has survived down
to the present, and necessarily structures and restricts the range of social
groups that are represented in archival collections. Thus, for sixteenth and
early-seventeenth centuries surviving correspondence is predominantly
elite, formal, business-related, legal or subversive. Nonetheless collections
of family papers (which again privilege landed groups) often include letters
from women, children, servants and letter-writers from other social back-
grounds. The letters of individuals lower down the social scale are likewise
captured in legal and administrative archives: the records of church courts
and other law courts, such as Chancery, Requests and Wards frequently
include litigants’ letters as legal exhibits. Over the centuries, collections of
family papers were passed from one generation to the next, as with titles and
land. The fragmentation and dispersal of such manuscripts could be caused
by various factors, including a series of deaths over successive generations,
the extinction of particular titles, estates passing to different lines of the
family through marriage and remarriage.31 Furthermore, as part of the proc-
ess of preserving, archiving and collecting, bodies of private or family papers
that would at one time have resided together have been broken up and dis-
persed to libraries, repositories and private houses and individuals around
the world, a process that is exacerbated by the habit of collecting autographs
or signatures of famous letter-writers.32 The Loseley manuscripts are now
split between Loseley House, which still holds a number of volumes; Surrey
History Centre, the local record office entrusted with the safe-keeping of
a large number of manuscripts; and the Folger Shakespeare Library, which
acquired some 712 individual items in six different purchase transactions
between 1938 and 1954.33 Likewise, the dispersal of the Stiffkey archive from
the Raynham Hall muniment room has been painstakingly reconstructed
by A. Hassell Smith, who has recorded its plundering by antiquarians,
auctioning and purchase by private individuals and movement into record

offices and libraries around the globe.34 The dispersal of collections of let-
ters in this manner presents serious challenges for scholars trying to build
up a coherent sense of how early modern epistolary networks functioned at
a macro level. Moreover, the very nature of letter-writing itself, in that sent
letters reside with the recipients, who may or may not have preserved them,
presents further problems for reconstructing the correspondence (defined
here simply as incoming and outgoing mail) of particular individuals and
families, such as the earl of Leicester or Bess of Hardwick.35 This problem is
further compounded in the case of letters that were copied and circulated
scribally, and exist in multiple (often variant) versions, as with certain of Sir
Walter Ralegh’s letters.
The practice of collecting and preserving letters within archival repositor-
ies underwent a degree of change during the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. At a state level, the period witnessed the emergence of the state
paper office in 1578, established ‘for keeping papers and records concerning
matters of state and council’. A patent of 1610 placed it at Whitehall with
Thomas Wilson and Levinius Munck appointed as keepers and registrars
charged with organising the papers into a ‘set form or library’ to provide a
working archive and act as a permanent library of ‘public records’.36 Despite
these attempts to centralise the archiving of official government docu-
ments, many of the papers of the Principal Secretaries during the period
remained in private possession after their deaths or departures from office,
which hampered efforts. The Cecil papers, after Salisbury’s death ended up
at the library at Hatfield House, with another body of papers, the Burghley
papers, now residing in the Lansdowne collection at the British Library (BL,
Lansdowne MSS 1-122). Meanwhile, Sir John Coke’s papers (now held at the
British Library, Additional MSS 64870–64924, 69868–69935) accompanied
him home to Derbyshire; Edward Conway likewise kept hold of his papers
on leaving office, and these were only acquired by the Public Record Office
in 1857.37 Efforts to sort, arrange and bind the scattered state papers were
made more difficult by the private collecting activities of someone like Sir
Robert Cotton.38
There was a distinct interest in state papers during the late-Elizabethan
period and early-seventeenth century. Antiquarians, such as Robert Cotton
who was busy accumulating his own library, were active in privately col-
lecting state papers at a time when Sir Thomas Wilson, Keeper of the State
Papers was attempting to organise them in a more methodical manner.
Wilson accused Cotton of prejudicing his own efforts ‘by hauing such things
as he hath coningly scraped together’.39 Cotton acquired substantial quanti-
ties of early modern state papers, which arrived in bundles and needed to
be sorted and bound. Lists of acquisitions refer to acquiring ‘papers about
my lord of Essex and his trouble’, which despite the claim that they were
in ‘his owne hand’ were in fact copies; as well as ‘diverse letters’ from
Sir Edward Coke, Sir Francis Bacon and Sir Edward Neville.40 The antiquarian
Ralph Starkey (d.1628) made transcripts of state papers and political tracts,
and was an avid collector of contemporary letters, including those of Robert
Dudley, earl of Leicester, Sir Philip Sidney and Sir Francis Walsingham, as
is evidenced by the surviving catalogue of papers in his study (Huntington
Library, EL 8175) and the large number of manuscripts that survive in
his hand, many of them now residing among the British Library’s Harley
MSS.41 It was claimed by Sir Simonds D’Ewes that Starkey had ‘gathered
together many old deeds, and some old manuscripts and coins. But he had
great plenty of new written collections, and divers original letters of great
moment, and other autographs of later time’, and was reputed to have
at one time possessed forty-five packets of papers belonging to William
Davison, Elizabeth’s Secretary of State, before they were retrieved by the gov-
ernment. On Starkey’s death, D’Ewes purchased his collections for his own
library, which includes British Library, Add. MS 4149, a seventeenth-century
folio collection of transcripts of state papers and political tracts made chiefly
by Ralph Starkey, containing autograph notes in D’Ewes’ hand, as well as
original papers and transcripts of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century let-
ters and papers.42 Such antiquarians were among the first great collectors
of autographs and copies of letters, and acquisitive practices of this nature
assist in further explaining the dissemination into private hands and copy-
ing of state papers.43
Family and private letters and papers were kept in muniments rooms of
stately homes, preserved largely by continued residence in one place of suc-
cessive generations. The nature of early modern ‘muniments’ rooms is con-
veyed by Richard Brathwaite’s prescriptions that an earl ‘have in his house a
chamber very stronge and close, the walls should be of stone or bricke, the
dore should be overplated with iron, the better to defend it from danger of
fire’. The earl was advised to retain the key, and in this chamber:
should be cupboards of drawing boxes, shelves, and standards, with a

convenient table to write upon; and upon each drawing box is to be
written the name of the mannor or Lordship, the Evidence whereof the
box doth containe. And looke what letters Patents, Charters, Deeds,
Feofements, or other writings, or Fines, are in every box; a paper role if to
be made in the saide box, wherein is to be sett downe every severall deede
or writing, that when the Earle or any for him, hath occasion to make
search for any Evidence or writing, he may see by that role whether the
same be in the box or not. In the Standerds and upon the Shelves are to
be placed Courte Roles, Auditors accompts, Bookes of Survey etc.44
How far these collections are materials preserved in any ordered manner of
organisation varied from collection to collection, and it is often not until
the records either come under the supervision of archivists employed by the
family, or until they are deposited at local record offices, libraries and other
repositories that they are organised into a more coherent and easy-to-work-
with form. The Seymour manuscripts recently deposited at Devon Record
Office – which include a large body of letters from the 1590s and Civil War
and restoration periods – were discovered in two large boxes in the roof at
Maiden Bradley when the present Duke of Somerset was in the process of
moving. Only now with the assistance of an AHRC grant are they having an
archival order imposed upon them, as they are catalogued using the CALM
2000 archival software package, which structures the documents into estate
papers (including maps, surveys, rental, leases and deeds), family papers
(comprising personal correspondence, accounts and other papers), and offi-
cial papers (among which are catalogued correspondence, commandments,
commissions and appointments, muster papers, petitions and accounts).45
The systematisation and ordering of archives in this manner, and the imposi-
tion of classificatory structures (usually chronological, thematic, or by class
or category of manuscript or document) necessarily influences the ways in
which we interpret, treat and search for documents.46 Moreover, the standard
categories of ‘estate’, ‘family’ and ‘official’, while they work for later years are
not always as well suited to materials from the early modern period, when
boundaries between these spheres were much more flexible and fluid.
The locating of correspondence is facilitated by numerous finding aids,
catalogues and calendars. The first nationally organised survey of private
manuscripts and papers of historical interest held in British archives began
in 1869 (and continues in existence today, as part of the National Archives)
with the foundation of the Historical Manuscripts Commission, which pro-
duced a series of reports, latterly supplemented by regular calendars of col-
lections.47 Something of the sense of discovery in the initial investigations
of the commissioners is given by J.C. Jeafferson’s description of examining
the Loseley MSS at Loseley House in the late-nineteenth century:
I found on the closely packed shelves and in full drawers of the strong
closet of the same apartment a large quantity of old account books,
journals, patents, deeds, official records, private letters, and miscellane-
ous memoranda of which the world had never been informed, though
the orderliness of their arrangement indicated a purpose to render them
serviceable to students. In other recesses of the closet I came upon bags
and parcels of writings that had been put away without any attempt to
classify them, or even to reduce them to chronological order. Lastly, I was
invited by Mr. More Molyneux to examine the contents of a large antique
chest and certain boxes which were believed to have escaped the curious
observation of all previous searchers of the chamber.48
Several later institutional developments forwarded knowledge of private

as well as public archives. In 1945, the founding of the National Register
of Archives furthered the Commission’s duty to locate and record collec-

tions, and in 1965 G.R. Elton among others founded the List and Index
Society, whose purpose was ‘to publish . . . photographic copies of unprinted
lists and indexes kept in the Public Record Office, London, and of other
unprinted guides and aids to the use of public archives in the British
Isles . . .’.49 Libraries and record offices have printed (and increasingly
electronic) calendars, finding aids and catalogues to the documents they
hold, which have slowly replaced trays of index cards, although the last
mentioned still remain incredibly useful in searching some repositories.50
One of the first places to search for letters nowadays is the online ‘Access
to Archives’ (A2A) catalogue, yet this is by no means comprehensive (not
all repositories have joined up to this service, nor are all the collections of
those that have always listed) and the quality and details of individual cata-
logue records are uneven and often incomplete and must be supplemented
by other printed aids as well as on-site records.51 In using finding aids and
catalogues, correspondence usually appears as a separate category in archival
listings. However, miscellaneous letters are often hidden away in borough,
parish and estates records, where they are not identified as such by a higher
entry level search term. The level of detail of calendar or catalogue entry var-
ies enormously. The editor of the fourth volumes of the HMC Report on the
Rutland Manuscripts at Belvoir Castle in instances unhelpfully summarises the
contents of letters as ‘on business’.52 The interests of archivists and catalogu-
ers have changed over time. Letters that would once have been deemed of
little or negligible interest now receive more attention, and search categories
are no longer gender blind in the ways they once were.
Alongside the organisation and ordering of letter collections, archival poli-
cies and the modern preservation techniques employed by professional con-
servators are an important part of the afterlife of correspondence. Naturally
the primary function of conservators of records is their preservation for
posterity, and over the past 80 years or so a series of scientific techniques
have been developed for stabilising and treating manuscript documents
and printed books. Manuscript letters have not only been repaired, but also
been put through processes of de-acidification to neutralise acid inherent
in paper and ink. On the whole though, modern records are far less stable
than early modern letters, which were written on better quality paper, using
iron gall inks, as opposed typewriter ink and the kinds of dye-based inks
used in pens which suffered from higher acidity levels. Several processes
have been developed for treating damaged or fragile manuscripts, including,
lamination, a procedure whereby in the UK at least paper or nylon tissue
is applied to the face of the manuscript; encapsulation, which involves a
document being sandwiched between two polyester sheets; and leaf casting
where missing areas are filled with paper pulp.53 There is, however, a tension
between the role of conservators and the interests of scholars interested in
the material aspects of manuscripts such as letters and printed rare books.54
Anxiety is aroused among analytical bibliographers not in cases of indirect

conservation of documents (the correct housing and storage, with proper
environmental control), but rather where direct intervention alters or
removes entirely particular physical features of the manuscript.55 Washing,
bleaching and other treatments of paper can seriously alter its colour, tex-
ture and appearance.56 In the 1980s the letters of the seventeenth-century,
non-conformist and religious writer Richard Baxter, which are held at the Dr
Williams Library, were bleached (a process that will increase ink-galling and
eventually lead to the disintegration of the correspondence), tightly bound
in guard books, and all remnants of seals were removed and discarded
(and can now only be viewed on the microfilms made before these inva-
sive procedures) all of which has destroyed certain aspects of the material
record of these letters. Likewise, binding and rebinding individual letters in
hard-bound volumes or guard-books (and more recently the development
pioneered by the Bodleian library of housing single-sheet manuscripts in
fascicules) removes them from the bundles in which they were originally
stored.57 In recent years, there has been a useful dialogue between conserva-
tors and analytical bibliographers, which has led to the much more care-
ful and systematic recording of the conservation treatment of documents
undergoing repair, such that the pre-conservation state of the manuscript
or book is outlined alongside a detailed description of the repair process and
materials used.58 Where documents are altered in the process of repair, and
this has been recorded, scholars are thus able to attempt more successfully
to reconstruct the original state of a given manuscript.
Closely related to the issue of preservation are the copying, microfilming
and most recently the digitisation of letters. At the root of these initiatives
is the desire to reduce deterioration of original documents through over-
handling by supplying instead facsimile copies, though one suspects that
the carefree way in which staff at the then Public Record Office when it
first moved to Kew willingly placed large state paper volumes on the pho-
tocopier did nothing to preserve their longevity. In the case of xeroxes and
microfilms, while they reproduce the text, and enable analysis of the con-
tents of letters, and some material forms (such as handwriting) which is not
possible from transcripts or modern printed editions, they do not permit an
examination of paper, chain-lines, watermarks, ink, quality or size of paper,
nor do they adequately reproduce details of seals and fastenings. Microfilms
are also unable to deal with colour, and therefore they do not register col-
oured inks or seals, or patterned paper.59 Obviously digitisation of letters
suffers from many of the same problems in that viewing a replica image
will never be able to replace the experience of consulting a manuscript
first-hand.60 Nevertheless the proliferation of digital images of letters – by
full-scale digitisation projects, such as State Papers Online, The Cecil Papers
or by the personal use of digital cameras – in addition to increased access
and availability is revolutionising the ways in which current generations of
scholars are able to study and edit early modern letters.61 Technical advances
in digital technologies can aid the reading of difficult manuscripts, where
discoloured or damaged pages can be lightened and magnified electroni-
cally; digital editions permit comparison of transcriptions side-by-side with
actual images of letters; they facilitate the examination of autograph and
scribal hands more readily, and make it possible to perform keyword or free-
text searches of databases; and to link individual documents to enclosures,
related correspondence and other documents, calendars and biographical
materials, as well as permitting the provision of other metadata.62 It would
also be eminently possible to incorporate as standard details or images of
other material forms, such as seals, fastenings or watermarks, which would
facilitate analysis of these forms at a global level. Various software packages
are useful in analysing correspondence chronologically and geographically.
The ‘Simile timeline widget’, for example, allows the user to plot corre-
spondence on a timeline, while Google maps permits the investigation of
geospatial data relating to letters, such as location of authors and recipients,
route taken by a letter or the movements of correspondents.63 Furthermore,
large-scale projects such as Oxford University’s ‘Cultures of Knowledge’ are
using digital technologies to reconstruct the epistolary networks that under-
pinned the intellectual geography of the seventeenth-century Republic of
Letters.64 These are exciting and potentially very rewarding developments,
however, long-term sustainability of digital archives is a key issue. Lastly,
in order to achieve something akin to an early modern Republic of Letters
between disparate digitisation projects, there is a need for a common lan-
guage of description to permit compatibility and communication. The use
of Resource Description Framework (RDF) tags for encoding data as used by
the ‘Leigh Hunt Online’ project and ‘Cultures of Knowledge’ allow greater
levels of integration across platforms, as ‘part of the push towards a seman-
tic web experience’.65
9
Conclusion
Material readings are central to a full understanding of the early modern let-
ter, and represent a mode of analysis that complements traditional historical
and literary approaches, as well as more recent linguistic and gender-based
analyses. The physical characteristics of manuscript letters in addition to
rhetorical and stylistic features imparted social meaning, nuances in which
were readily understood by contemporaries familiar with epistolary cultures.
The politics of handwriting was carefully nuanced according to occasion,
social status and gender. The choice of script, use of a personal hand, the
employment of a secretary or scribe, and the quality and facility of pen
strokes were all socially coded, conveying intimacy and formality. While
one might write to a friend as a gesture of amity, to correspond with the
monarch without employing a scribe was offensively over-familiar, unless
a writer enjoyed particular favour. The use of a secretary to draft or make
preservation copies of correspondence, might sit side-by-side with the send-
ing of an autograph presentation text. The social conventions of scribal and
personal letter-writing practices were thus freighted with significance. The
material rhetorics of the manuscript page – the layout of the different parts
of the letter, the use of blank space and margins, the size, type and quality
of paper, and the placement and performance of the signature – was funda-
mental to the ways in which the letter communicated visually as well as tex-
tually. The deployment of significant space as a marker of deference worked
in tandem with rhetorical strategies of solicitous abasement in letters of
petition and request, as well as in correspondence from social subordinates.
Signing a letter close to the subscription indicated high social standing,
while cramming the page with writing, continuing into the margins was
a sign of household economy, informality or prolixity. The protocols and
pragmatics of sealing adds a further level of interpretational complex-
ity. Seals were routinely employed to authenticate missives and maintain
security. Letters were intentionally dispatched open for perusal and cor-
rection; tampered with or broken seals were a cause of anxiety. The colour
of wax employed, the use of floss, and the designs, mottoes and rebuses of
229
seal matrices or dies were all imbued with symbolism. Black wax signified
mourning; elaborate flossing could intimate affection. The ways in which a
letter was folded were related both to dispatch and archival practice, a mark
of social status, authenticity and bureaucratic procedure. A particular form
of folding might signify a formal or distinct type of missive, emanating from
a particular government department, or even convey gentility. Conversely
folding a secret or clandestine letter in the manner of a handkerchief was a
novel way of disguising its identity.
Furthermore, material readings necessarily pay attention to the ‘social
materiality’ of the letter, the social and cultural practices of manuscript let-
ters and the material conditions and contexts in which they were produced,
disseminated and consumed. Analysis of the epistolary process in its entirety
reveals the complexity of letter-writing during the sixteenth and early-
seventeenth centuries. Overall, the study challenges assumptions of early
modern epistolarity as a simplistic, closed two-way textual exchange, argu-
ing for an understanding of the multi-agent nature of what on the surface
appears to be ‘personal’ correspondence. Letters were composed in numer-
ous different ways. At varying stages of the process, letter-writing could
be a solitary or collaborative activity. Personal secretaries were not always
the norm; many employed a series of amanuenses over a period of time
in their letter-writing according to occasion and circumstance. Moreover,
palaeographical analysis of different hands and changes in ink reveals the
degree to which letter-writing was a layered, collaborative, multi-stage proc-
ess, which might involve drafting, the making of a fair copy, encryption,
subscription, the appending of a signature or autograph postscript, and the
application of a superscription before the final dispatch. Study of the scribal
characteristics of a corpus of letters thus provides an in-depth analysis of
epistolary authorship, the levels of secretarial input and varying degrees
of control that signatories might enjoy. Once dispatched a letter might
journey through many hands before it reached its final destination, which
complicates our understanding of the letter-bearer as an individual charged
with conveying correspondence to the hands of the addressee. An official
letter, for example, travelling by royal standing post might be signed by
the Secretary of State, folded, sealed and addressed by a secretary, passed
to the post of the court, who arranged for it to be transferred to the post
of London, before it subsequently passed through the hands of the various
postmasters and post-boys dotted along the main postal road on which it
travelled. If the addressee resided in a location removed from the final postal
node, special arrangements would then be made to have the letter conveyed
to its terminal point by foot-post or messenger.
The stylistic and material rules and conventions of letter-writing were
widely disseminated, learned in schools, universities and households as
part of pedagogic routine, imparted via printed manuals that catered for a
wider, socially aspirational and formally unschooled audience of readers, and
Conclusion 231
gleaned through contact with the form. In practice though, such theoretical
epistolary protocols rarely translated from the printed page or schoolroom to
manuscript, with of course the exception of particular forms, such as letters
of petition or request. In addition, particular parts of the letter, such as the
opening and closing modes of address, subscriptions and superscriptions,
most closely adhered to standard structures and formulae, where deviation
from conventional norms might cause offence or indicate ill-practice or igno-
rance. Adoption of the material protocols of spacing and signing was more
pronounced in formal missives, but also extended to family correspondence,
especially in letters from children to parents as a way of inculcating and
registering filial obedience. More broadly, practices were uneven, with clear
social and generational distinctions. The generic flexibility of the early mod-
ern letter, in part facilitated by the Renaissance revival of the ‘familiar’ letter,
leant correspondence a protean quality in terms of structure and content,
making it ideally suited to dealing with a range of personal and intimate
concerns. A distinctive feature of letter-writing was its often makeshift and
improvised nature. The period was thus not characterised by a single culture
of correspondence, but rather by a series of concentric and interlocking
cultures, inflected by local conditions, social status and gender. Letters can
be categorised by function, place or group, such as formal government or
legal missives, court letters and mercantile correspondence, children’s and
women’s letters. They can also be distinguished by form and genre, such as
the letter of request or intercession, the letter of condolence or love letter.
What survives within the archives is a surprisingly broad range of manu-
script formats, and it is possible to delineate further sub categories of letter
by paying attention to their scribal status: the original sent letter, the rough
draft, the personal copy, the letter-book, the ‘circular’ letter and the ‘scribally
published’ letter. The disparity between theory and practice, and the ad hoc
nature of epistolary culture is further highlighted by the study of ciphers and
codes in correspondence. A marked gulf existed between formal cryptology
theory and actual practice; workaday ciphers were rudimentary, intended
merely to delay decryption. Renaissance books of secrets popularised secret
writing practices, and from the Elizabethan period onwards widening social
groups adapted and formulated their own systems of covert writing based on
a shared private language or understanding of symbols.
Early modern epistolary culture was marked by a broad range of literacies,
with letters incorporating material, visual and oral as well as textual ele-
ments. The inability to write did not preclude involvement in correspond-
ing. Access to scriveners, to literate family and other social contacts suggests
wide availability of secondary assistance in letter-writing. The fact that
paper was a relatively expensive commodity meant that letter-writing for
many below the social or educated elites was undoubtedly not a daily activ-
ity. Nevertheless, household economy – the trimming of excess paper and
the making of quills and ink – and affordable carrier services extended the
writing and sending of letters down the social scale to groups not connected
with trade or government. Special circumstances, need or legal requirements
also occasioned the intermittent writing of letters by those unused to regular
contact with the form, as evidenced by the begging letters to Sir Thomas
Sutton, or the missives related to the Newquay Right of Wreck in 1571.
For others, however, letter-writing became a regular activity connected to
statecraft and diplomacy, scholarship and trade, as well as to concerns of a
more personal and amatory, or spiritual and confessional nature. Diversity
of practices were a feature of every stage of the epistolary process, from the
tools, materials and technologies associated with letter-writing, through the
compositional process and material conditions of writing, to the delivery,
reception, reading and archiving of correspondence. Formal, regularised sys-
tems co-existed alongside the ad hoc and informal: professional secretariats
served statesmen and officials, while illiterates might rely on neighbours
who could write; manuscript separates of copies of letters were custom
produced by professional scriptoria for refined collection, as well as hast-
ily copied, cast into the street for indiscriminate, popular consumption;
correspondence was preserved in formal deskbound letter-books, as well
as noted into improvised notebooks, fashioned from a couple of sheets of
paper stitched together.
Furthermore, throughout the entire period postal conditions were un-
systematised and idiosyncratic, which in many ways fundamentally struc-
tured the culture and practices of early modern letter-writing. While a
relatively efficient, but largely imperfect, network of royal standing posts
carried official government communications from around 1512 onwards,
‘private letters’ were largely excluded from this method, but were instead
transported by varying methods that overlapped and co-existed with offi-
cial modes of delivery. The carrier networks took correspondence on a
fairly regular basis; foot-posts delivered letters at local and regional levels;
merchant strangers’ posts conveyed mail abroad; while others consigned
letters to personal bearers, servants or chance travellers who happened to be
journeying in the right direction. Complaints were ubiquitous, irrespective
of delivery method, as letter-writers bemoaned the negligence or slowness
of those carrying their correspondence, the loss of letters or damage to seals.
Throughout the sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries then the letter
remained a consistently insecure form of communication, which forced
writers to censor what they committed to paper, and engendered various
forms of clandestine delivery. Viewed from the perspective of delivery, let-
ter-writing emerges as an innately reactive activity, dependent on the vagar-
ies of postal conditions, the availability or sudden departure of a suitable
bearer, or affected by the favourability of tides and weather. There were huge
discrepancies in terms of quality, cost and efficiency of postal methods,
with variations also dependent on geographical location and the time of
year. It was not until the 1635 postal reforms of Charles I, which permitted
Conclusion 233
the carriage of ‘private’ correspondence by the royal post, that the way was
paved for an affordable, regularised and secure postal service of national
coverage, and a genuinely more democratic period of letter-writing.
While postal idiosyncrasies remained constant over the period, the Tudor
and early Stuart era witnessed significant developments in the area of let-
ter-writing. In theoretical terms, the influence of the medieval ars dictami-
nis, already on the wane, was supplanted in the early-sixteenth century by
humanistic models of letter-writing, which encouraged simpler epistolary
forms. These Latin rhetorical treatises were digested and disseminated to a
wider audience by vernacular manuals alongside a plethora of printed works
that offered instruction on how to write letters or provided exemplary let-
ters for emulation or entertainment. Generically the letter influenced other
forms; there is close relationship between the letter-book, autobiography
and family histories. Increased literacy rates led to the diffusion of letter-
writing skills among growing numbers of men and women below the ranks
of social elites. The period saw greater use of personal writing technologies
for correspondence, and the emergence of the letter as an increasingly ‘pri-
vate’ form – a ‘technology of the self’ – utilised for a broadening range of
purposes, emotive and affective, spiritual and imaginative, clandestine and
covert. Correspondence was increasingly employed as a vehicle for confes-
sional and spiritual counselling; as well as acting as a medium for subver-
sive political ends. From the 1580s onwards, we see the development of
the newsletter alongside other news-related manuscript and printed forms,
which catered for a growing appetite for political commentary and informa-
tion in the period up to the Civil War. During the same period, scribal cop-
ies of politically sensitive, ostensibly private, letters were widely copied and
circulated for purposes of antiquarian, legalistic and contemporary political
interest. Such letters enjoyed a peculiar afterlife beyond their initial applica-
tion, read by new readers with reapplications in different conditions and
contexts, which complicates our understanding of letters as innately private
texts anchored to a particular historical moment. Thus, the ways in which
letters were latterly consumed, archived, ordered and preserved influences
the ways in which they are now read and understood. Above all, the early
modern letter was a pre-eminently flexible and protean form, which appro-
priated and absorbed new, innovative and rediscovered developments in
the writing arts, such as shorthand, ciphers and invisible ink, and adapted
to an extraordinary range of situations and uses. Letters were multifaceted
and layered forms, often collaborative or mediated and intended for wider
more ‘public’ dissemination; they formed part of broader social and tex-
tual transactions that involved multiple agents, enclosures, oral report and
reciprocal exchange; and they generated meaning textually, historically and
materially.
Notes
1 Introduction
1. CP88/58. The letter is rendered here approximately as it appears on the manu-
script page in terms of lineation.
2. CP88/60: 24/9/1601.
3. Mark Bland (2004) ‘Italian Paper in Early Seventeenth-Century England’, in
R. Graziaplena (ed.) Paper as a Medium of Cultural Heritage: Archaeology and
Conservation (Rome: Istituto centrale per la patologia del libro), pp.243–55.
4. A.G.R. Smith (1968) ‘The Secretariats of the Cecils, circa 1580–1612’, EHR, 83,
481–504. On Cecil’s own hand (a distinctive mixed hand, which was pure italic
except for occasional use of a secretary ‘e’) see, Giles E. Dawson and Laetitia
Kennedy-Skipton (1968) Elizabethan Handwriting, 1500–1650 (Faber and Faber),
pp.84–5. For a Cecil autograph see BL, Harley MS, 292, fol.79.
5. James Daybell (1999) ‘Women’s Letters and Letter-Writing in England,
1540–1603: An Introduction to the Issues of Authorship and Construction’,
Shakespeare Studies, 27, 161–86.
6. Hasler, 2, p.17.
7. Mark Brayshay, Philip Harrison, and Brian Chalkley (1998) ‘Knowledge,
Nationhood and Governance: The Speed of the Royal Post in Early-Modern
England’, Journal of Historical Geography, 24, 265–88. I am grateful to Professor
Brayshay for discussion on the postal endorsements in this letter.
8. On the Dover route see, Brayshay (1991) ‘Royal Post-Horse Routes in England and
Wales: The Evolution of the Network in the Late-Sixteenth and Early-Seventeenth
Century’, Journal of Historical Geography, 17/4, 373–89 (pp.379–81).
9. BL, Cotton MS, Caligula C/VI, fols66v–67r.
10. TNA, AO 1/1950/1–7, 1951/8–14, 1952/15–22, 1953/23–8, Declared Accounts of
the Masters of the Posts, 1566–1639.
11. CP88/60.
12. Charles Hughes (1905) ‘Nicholas Faunt’s Discourse Touching the Office of the
Principal Secretary of Estate, & c. 1592’, EHR, 20, 499–508 (pp.501–2, 503–4).
Bodl., Tanner MS, 80, fols91–4.
13. The Thirtieth Annual Report of the Deputy Keeper of the Public Records (1869), p.225.
14. On the history of the Cecil Papers see HMC, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Most
Honourable The Marquess of Salisbury, Preserved at Hatfield House Hertfordshire, 24
vols (1883–1973), 1, pp.iii–vii.
15. HMC, Salisbury, 11, p.394.
16. For a classic account of epistolarity see, Janet Gurkin Altman (1982) Epistolarity:
Approaches to a Form (Columbus, OH: Ohio State UP).
17. Daybell (2005) ‘Recent Studies in Renaissance Letters: The Sixteenth Century’,
ELR, 35/2, 331–62; idem (2006) ‘Recent Studies in Renaissance Letters: The
Seventeenth Century’, ELR, 36/1, 135–70. Recent linguistic approaches include
Graham Williams (2009) ‘Pragmatic Readings in the Letters of Joan and Maria
Thynne, 1575–1611, With Diplomatic Transcriptions of Their Correspondence’
(Ph.D. thesis, University of Glasgow).
234
Notes 235
18. Roger Chartier (1997) ‘Secrétaires for the People? Model Letters of the Ancien
Régime: Between Court Literature and Popular Chapbooks’, in Roger Chartier
(ed.) Correspondence: Models of Letter-Writing From the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth
Century (Cambridge: Polity Press), pp.59–111.
19. David M. Bergeron (1999) King James & Letters of Homoerotic Desire (Iowa City: U
of Iowa P); Alan Bray (1990) ‘Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in
Elizabethan England’, History Workshop Journal, 29 (1990), 1–19.
20. See also, T. Van Houdt, et al. (eds) (2002) Self-Presentation and Social Identification: The
Rhetoric and Pragmatics of Letter Writing in Early Modern Times (Leuven: Leuven UP).
21. Marie Boas Hall (1975) ‘The Royal Society’s Role in the Diffusion of Information
in the Seventeenth Century’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 29,
173–92; Maarten Ultee (1987) ‘The Republic of Letters: Learned Correspondence,
1680–1720’, The Seventeenth Century, 2, 95–112. On newsletters see Richard Cust
(1986) ‘News and Politics in Early Seventeenth-Century England’, P&P, 112,
60–90; F.J. Levy (1982) ‘How Information Spread Among the Gentry, 1550–1640’,
JBS, 21/2, 11–34; Ian Atherton (1999) ‘The Itch Grown a Disease: Manuscript
Transmission of News in the Seventeenth Century’, in Joad Raymond (ed.) News,
Newspapers, and Society in Early Modern Britain (Frank Cass), pp.39–65.
22. Daybell (2006) Women Letter-Writers in Tudor England (Oxford: OUP); Daybell
(ed.) Early Modern Women’s Letter Writing (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001); Jane
Couchman and Ann Crabb (eds) (2005) Women’s Letters Across Europe, 1400–1700:
Form and Persuasion (Aldershot: Ashgate).
23. On material approaches to letters see Daybell (2009) ‘Material Meanings and
the Social Signs of Manuscript Letters in Early Modern England’, Literature
Compass 6, 1–21; Alan Stewart (2009) Shakespeare’s Letters (Oxford: OUP), ch.1;
A.R. Braunmuller (1993) ‘Accounting for Absence: The Transcription of Space’,
in W. Speed Hill (ed.) New Ways of Looking at Old Texts (Binghamton, NY:
Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies), pp.47–56; Jonathan Gibson (1997)
‘Significant Space in Manuscript Letters’, The Seventeenth Century, 12/1, 1–9; Sara
Jayne Steen (2001) ‘Reading Beyond the Words: Material Letters and the Process
of Interpretation’, Quidditas, 22, 55–69. For the Victorian period see, Nigel Hall
(1999) ‘The Materiality of Letter-Writing: A Nineteenth Century Perspective’ in
David Barton and Nigel Hall (eds) Letter-writing as Social Practice (Amsterdam/
Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company), pp.83–108.
24. For the eighteenth-century, letters have received a fuller treatment: Clare
Brant (2006) Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan); Eve Tavor Bannet (2005) Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and
Transatlantic Correspondence, 1680–1820 (Cambridge: CUP); Susan E. Whyman
(2009) The Pen and the People: English Letter Writers 1660–1800 (Oxford: OUP).
25. Giora Sternberg (2009) ‘Epistolary Ceremonial: Corresponding Status at the Time
of Louis XIV’, P&P, 204/1, 33–88 (esp. pp.66–74).
26. See, for example, Victoria E. Burke (2007) ‘Let’s Get Physical: Bibliography,
Codicology, and Seventeenth-Century Women’s Manuscripts’, Literature Compass,
4/6, 1667–82; James Daybell and Peter Hinds (eds) (2010) Material Readings
of Early Modern Culture, 1580–1700 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan); Peter
Stallybrass (2004) ‘The Library and Material Texts’, PMLA, 119/5, 1347–52.
27. D.F. McKenzie (1986; 1999) Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge:
CUP), pp.13, 17; Roger Chartier (1989) ‘Meaningful Forms’, TLS, Liber no. 1. See
also G. Thomas Tanselle (1991) ‘Textual Criticism and Literary Sociology’, Studies
in Bibliography, 44, 83–143; Jerome J. McGann (1983) A Critique of Modern Textual
236 Notes
Criticism (Chicago: U of Chicago P); D.C. Greetham (1994) Textual Scholarship:

An Introduction (New York and London: Garland); Philip Gaskell (1972) A New
Introduction to Bibliography (Oxford: Clarendon Press).
28. McKenzie, Bibliography, p.39.
29. See for example, Mary Hobbs (1992) Early Seventeenth-Century Verse Miscellany
Manuscripts (Aldershot: Scolar Press); Harold Love (1993) Scribal Publication in
Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: OUP); Arthur F. Marotti (1995) Manuscript,
Print and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell UP);
H.R. Woudhuysen (1996) Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558–
1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press); Peter Beal (1998) In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts
and Their Makers in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press);
Margaret J.M. Ezell (1999) Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins UP); David McKitterick (2003) Print, Manuscript and the Search for
Order, 1450–1830 (Cambridge: CUP).
30. Tanselle, ‘Textual Criticism’, p.83. Heather Hirshfield (2001) ‘Early Modern
Collaboration and Theories of Authorship’, PMLA, 116/3, 609–22.
31. Heidi Brayman Hackel (2005) Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print,
Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge: CUP); Jennifer Anderson and Elizabeth Sauer
(eds) (2002) Books and Their Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies
(Philadelphia: U Pennsylvania P).
32. Jason Scott-Warren (2001) Sir John Harington and the Book as Gift (Oxford: OUP).
33. Michael Hunter (1995) ‘How to Edit a Seventeenth-Century Manuscript: Principles
and Practice’, The Seventeenth Century, 10, 277–310 (p.281); A.R. Braunmuller (1981)
‘Editing Elizabethan Letters’, Text, 1, 185–99. For recent editions that have sought
to represent in print the material aspects of early modern letters see: The Collected
Works of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, eds Margaret P. Hannay, Noel
J. Kinnamon, and Michael G. Brennan, 2 vols (Oxford: OUP, 1998), 1; Elizabeth
Cary, Lady Falkland: Life and Letters, ed. Heather Wolfe (Tempe, AZ and Cambridge:
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and Renaissance Texts from
Manuscripts, 2001); A.R. Braunmuller (ed.) (1983) A Seventeenth-Century Letter-
Book: A Facsimile Edition of Folger MS. V.a.321 (Newark, DE: U of Delaware P);
Edmund Spenser, Selected Letters and Other Papers, eds Christopher Burlinson and
Andrew Zurcher (Oxford: OUP, 2009). For pioneering work on electronic-based
letter texts see the AHRC Centre of Editing Lives and Letters [www.livesandletters.
ac.uk] [accessed 15 February 2012].
34. Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan and Peter Stallybrass (eds) (1996) Subject
and Object in Renaissance Culture (Cambridge: CUP). On theoretical approaches
see also: Bill Brown (ed.) (2001) ‘Thing Theory’, Critical Inquiry, 28, 1–378; Julian
Yates (2006) ‘What are “Things” Saying in Renaissance Studies?’, Literature
Compass, 3/5, 992–1000.
35. Patricia Fumerton (1992) Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice
of Social Ornament (Chicago: U of Chicago P), ch.2; Patricia Fumerton and
Simon Hunt (eds) (1999) Renaissance Culture and the Everyday (Philadelphia: U
of Pennsylvania P), pp.1–4. Clifford Geertz (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures
(New York: Basic Books). Cf. Douglas Bruster (2003) Shakespeare and the Question
of Culture: Early Modern Literature and the Cultural Turn (Basingstoke: Palgrave).
36. Raffaella Sarti (trans. Allan Cameron) (2002) Europe at Home: Family and Material
Culture, 1500–1800 (New Haven: Yale UP).
37. Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass (2000) Renaissance Clothing and the
Materials of Memory (Cambridge: CUP), p.11.
Notes 237
38. Julian Yates (2002) ‘Towards a Theory of Agentive Drift: Or, A Particular Fondness
for Oranges in 1597’, Parallax, 22, 47–58.
39. Mark Overton, Jane Whittle, Darron Dean and Andrew Hann (2004) Production and
Consumption in English Households, 1600–1750 (Routledge); Lorna Weatherill (1988)
Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in England, 1660–1760 (Routledge).
40. Rachel P. Garrard (1980) ‘English Probate Inventories and their Use in Studying
the Significance of the Domestic Interior. 1570–1700’, in Ad Van Der Woude and
Anton Schuurman (eds) Probate Inventories: A New Source for the Historical Studies
of Wealth, Material Culture and Agricultural Development (Utrecht: HES Publishers),
pp.55–82.
41. Margaret Spufford (1990) ‘The Limitations of Probate Inventory’, in John
Chartres and David Hey (eds) English Rural Society, 1500–1800: Essays in Honour of
Joan Thirsk (Cambridge: CUP), pp.139–74.
42. A Proclamation for the Settling of the Letter Office of England and Scotland (1635).
43. Philip Beale (2005) England’s Mail: Two Millennia of Letter-Writing (Stroud:
Tempus); Mark Brayshay, Philip Harrison and Brian Chalkley (1998) ‘Knowledge,
England’, Journal of Historical Geography, 24/3, 265–88.
44. Whyman, The Pen and the People, p.17 and passim.
45. Lena Cowen Orlin (2007) Locating Privacy in Tudor London (Oxford: OUP); Linda
Pollock (1993) ‘Living on the Stage of the World: The Concept of Privacy Among
the Elite of Early Modern England’, in Adrian Wilson (ed.) Rethinking Social
History: English Society 1570–1920 and Its Interpretation (Manchester: Manchester
UP), pp.78–96 (pp.79–80).
46. Claudio Guillén (1986) ‘Notes Toward the Study of the Renaissance Letter’, in
Barbara Kiefer Lewalski (ed.) Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History and
Interpretation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP), pp.70–101.
47. Judith Rice Henderson (1993) ‘On Reading the Rhetoric of the Renaissance
Letter’, in Heinrich F. Plett (ed.) Renaissance-Rhetorik Renaissance Rhetoric (Berlin
and New York: Walter de Gruyter), pp.143–62 (p.149).
48. Fulwood, Enemie of Idlenesse, sig.69v.
49. LMA, ACC 1876/F03/1–8; CRO, AR/15/4–41 [1571].
50. Diana O’Hara (1992) ‘The Language of Tokens and the Making of Marriage’, Rural
History, 3, 1–40 (p.16).
51. Peter C. Sutton, et al. (2003) Love Letters: Dutch Genre Paintings in the Age of Vermeer
(Greenwich, CT and Dublin: Frances Lincoln).
52. Stewart, Shakespeare’s Letters, p.5.
53. On autographs see A.N.L. Munby (1962) The Cult of the Autograph Letter in England
(Athlone Press); Ray Rawlins (1970) Four Hundred Years of British Autographs:
A Collector’s Guide ( J.M. Dent & Sons).
54. Hilary Jenkinson (1922) ‘Elizabethan Handwriting: A Preliminary Sketch’, The
Library, 3/1, 1–34 and plates (p.34). Cf. Beal, Dictionary, p.188.
55. Jenkinson (1926) ‘Notes on the Study of English Punctuation of the Sixteenth
Century’, RES, 2/6, 152–8 (p.156).
56. Daybell (1999) ‘Issues of Authorship’.
57. Daybell (2001) ‘The Social Conventions of Women’s Letter-Writing in England,
1540–1603’, in Early Modern Women’s Letter-Writing, pp.59–76.
58. On the reading of correspondence see, Daybell (2004) ‘“I wold wyshe my doings
myght be . . . secret”: Privacy and the Social Practices of Reading Women’s Letters
in Sixteenth-Century England,’ in Women’s Letters Across Europe, pp.143–61.
238 Notes
59. Atherton, ‘Manuscript Transmission of News’, pp.39–65; Daybell (2004) ‘“Suche

newes as on the Quenes hye wayes we have mett:” The News Networks of
Elizabeth Talbot, countess of Shrewsbury (c.1527–1608),’ in Daybell (ed.) Women
and Politics in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate), pp.114–31.
60. Guillén, “Notes Toward’, distinguishes at least seven kinds of writing associ-
ated with the letter: the neo-Latin prose letter, the vernacular prose letter, the
neo-Latin verse epistle, the vernacular verse epistle, the tradition of the theory
of the letter, practical manuals for letter-writing, and letters inserted within
other genres.
61. Household Accounts and Disbursement Books of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester,
1558–1561, 1584–86, ed. Simon Adams, Camden Society, 6 (1995), p.388.
62. Paul Hammer (1994) ‘The Uses of Scholarship: The Secretariat of Robert Devereux,
Second Earl of Essex, c.1581–1601’, EHR, 109/430, 26–51; Beal, In Praise of Scribes,
pp.109–46, 274–80.
63. Stewart, Shakespeare’s Letters, pp.14, 30.
64. Susan E. Whyman (2003) ‘Advice to Letter-Writers: Evidence From Four
Generations of Evelyns’, in Frances Harris and Michael Hunter (eds) John Evelyn
and His Milieu (British Library), pp.255–66.
65. Daybell, Women Letter-Writers, ch.4; Whyman, Pen and the People, p.9.
2 Materials and Tools of Letter-Writing

1. On early modern writing materials see, Michael Finlay (1990) Western Writing
Implements in the Age of the Quill Pen (Carlisle: Plains); Joyce Irene Whalley (1975)
Writing Implements & Accessories: From the Roman Styllus to the Typewriter (David
and Charles).
2. ‘The Undergraduate Account Book of John and Richard Newdigate, 1618–1621’,
ed. Vivienne Larminie, Camden Miscellany, 30 (1990), pp.149–269 (pp.162, 163,
166, 170, 189, 194, 198, 206, 212, 225, 264).
3. BL, Add. MS, 62092, fols1r, 7r, 8r, 11r, 11v, 12r, 14r, 16r: account book for personal
expenses of Margaret Spencer (d.1613), 1610–13.
4. John Evans (1855) ‘Extracts from the Private Account Book of Sir William More
of Loseley, in Surrey, in the time of Queen Mary and of Queen Elizabeth’,
Archaeologia, 36/2, 284–93 (p.290).
5. SP16/310, fols54r–55v.
6. Christine North (2004) ‘Merchants and Retailers in Seventeenth-Century
Cornwall’, in Tom Arkell, Nesta Evans and Nigel Goose (eds) When Death Do
Us Part: Understanding and Interpreting the Probate Records of Early Modern England
(Oxford: Leopard’s Head Press), pp.285–305 (pp.293, 295, 305).
7. Alexander Roger (1958) ‘Roger Ward’s Shrewsbury Stock: An Inventory of 1585’,
The Library, 13/4, 247–68 (p.262).
8. Edwin and Stella George (eds) Bristol Probate Inventories, 1: 1542–1650, Bristol
Record Society, 54, pp.85, 91.
9. Mark Overton, Jane Whittle, Darron Dean and Andrew Hann (2004) Production
and Consumption in English Households, 1600–1750 (Routledge), p.117.
10. For an insightful recent analysis of early modern paper see, Mark Bland (2010)
A Guide to Early Printed Books and Manuscripts (Oxford: Blackwell), pp.22–48.
On paper and papermaking in general see, Dard Hunter (1947) Papermaking: The
History and Technique of an Ancient Craft (New York: Alfred A. Knopf), pp.224, 241;
Jonathan Bloom (2001) Paper Before Print: The History and Impact of Paper in the
Notes 239
Islamic World (New Haven: Yale UP); Philip Gaskell (1995) A New Introduction to
Bibliography (Winchester: St. Paul’s Bibliographies), pp.57–77.
11. D.C. Coleman (1958) The British Paper Industry, 1495–1860: A Study in Industrial
Growth (Oxford: Clarendon Press); Alfred H. Shorter (1957) Paper Mills and Paper
Makers in England, 1495–1800 (Hilversum: Paper Publications Society); Allan
Stevenson (1967) ‘Tudor Roses from John Tate’, Studies in Bibliography, 20, 15–34;
Rhys Jenkins (1900) ‘Early Attempts at Paper-Making in England, 1495–1680’, and
‘Papermaking in England, 1588–1680’, Library Association Record, 2, 481–5, 577–88.
12. Allan H. Stevenson (1954) ‘Chain indentations in Paper as Evidence’, Studies in
Bibliography, 6, 181–95; Edward Heawood (1928) ‘The Position on the Sheet of
Early Watermarks’, The Library, 9/1, 38–47; Ian Christie-Miller (1997) ‘Digital
Imaging of Watermarks: A Practical Demonstration from Nantes MS. 521 (Fr.355),
The Quarterly, 24, 15–17.
13. A.H. Stevenson (1951) ‘Watermarks are Twins’, Studies in Bibliography, 4, 57–91;
Simon Barcham Green (1997) ‘Papermaking Moulds’, The Quarterly, 23, 1–6.
14. A.H. Stevenson (1961) Observations on Paper as Evidence (Lawrence, KS: U of
Kansas P); idem (1962) ‘Paper as Bibliographical Evidence’, The Library, 17,
197–212; Paul Needham (1994) ‘Allan H. Stevenson and the Bibliographical
Uses of Paper’, Studies in Bibliography, 47, 22–64; John Bidwell (1992) ‘The Study
of Paper as Evidence, Artefact, and Commodity’, in Peter Davison (ed.) The
Book Encompassed: Studies in Twentieth-Century Bibliography (Cambridge: CUP),
pp.69–82; H.E. Heawood, ‘Sources of Early English Paper Supply’, ‘Sources of
English Paper Supply: II. The Sixteenth Century’, ‘Papers Used in England after
1600: I. The Seventeenth Century to c.1680’, ‘Papers Used in England after 1600:
II. c.1680–1750’, The Library, 10 (1929/30), 282–307, 11 (1930), 263–89, 427–54,
11 (1931), 466–98; Thomas G. Tanselle (1971) ‘The Bibliographical Description
of Paper’, Studies in Bibliography 24, 27–67; idem (1979) ‘Paper as Bibliographical
Evidence’ in his Selected Studies in Bibliography (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P),
pp.203–43; William Proctor Williams (1987) ‘Paper as Evidence: The Utility of the
Study of Paper for Seventeenth-Century English Literary Scholarship’, in Stephen
Spector (ed.) Essays in Paper Analysis (Washington, DC: The Folger Shakespeare
Library), pp.191–9; Daniel W. Mossner, Ernest W. Sullivan and Michael Saffle
(eds) (2000) Puzzles in Papers: Concepts in Historical Watermarks (New Castle,
DE: Oak Knoll Books and the British Library). On resources for watermarks see:
Charles Moïse Briquet (1907) Les Filigranes. Dictionnaire Historique des Marques du
Papier dès Leur Apparition vers 1282 Jusqu’en 1600. Avec 39 figures dans le texte et
16,112 fac-similés de filigranes, 4 vols (Paris: A. Picard & Fils); Edward Heawood
(1950) Watermarks Mainly of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Hilverstrum:
Paper Publications Society); W.A. Churchill (1935) Watermarks in Paper in Holland,
England, France (Amsterdam: Menno Hertberger and Co.); ‘The Thomas L. Gravell
Watermark Archive’: http://www.gravell.org. [accessed 15 February 2012].
15. Bland, Guide, pp.35–9; David L. Gants (2000) ‘Identifying and Tracking Paper
Stocks in Early Modern London’, PBSA, 94/4, 531–40; Stevenson, ‘Paper as
Bibliographical Evidence’, pp.201–2
16. Lisle Letters, 3, p.153; 1, p.182, 4, pp.329, 444–6; Goddard H. Orpen (1921) ‘An
Unpublished Letter from Charles I to the Marquis of Ormonde’, EHR, 36/142,
229–34. On dating through watermarks see Allan H. Stevenson (1951–52)
‘Shakespearian Dated Watermarks’, Studies in Bibliography, 4, 159–64; Ruby Reid
Thompson (2001) ‘Arms of London Watermarks: A Means of Dating Undated
Manuscripts’, The Quarterly, 38, 1–10.
240 Notes
17. John Bidwell (2004) ‘French Paper in English Books’, in John Barnard and
D.F McKenzie (eds) The Cambridge History of the Book, IV, 1557–1695 (Cambridge:
CUP), pp.583–601 (p.590); Gaskell, New Introduction, pp.73–5; Bland, Guide,
pp.26–7.
18. Beal, Dictionary, pp.331, 332; CP130/159: ‘The abuses in paper and the remedye
of them’ [c.27/6/1605].
19. Coleman, British Paper Industry, pp.13, 21.
20. Hunter, Papermaking, 224, 241. Bodl., Rawl. MS, D398, fols156r–157r: Account of
various sorts of paper; their names, watermarks, sheets in a quire, inches in length
and prices per ream.
21. The Rates of Marchandizes . . . (1604; 1608 edition). This was reprinted in 1610,
1611, 1612, 1615, 1623, 1625, 1631 and 1635. These figures rose to 4s. 6d. and
20s. respectively by 1660, a rough indication that the price of ordinary paper
rose by 80 per cent while that of royal paper had trebled over the same period:
Coleman, British Paper Industry, p.123.
22. Selections from the Household Books of Lord William Howard of Naworth Castle,
1612–1640, ed. G. Orsnsby, Surtees Society, 68 (1878), p.91 and passim.
23. (1587) The Petie School, p.52.
24 HMC, Report on the Manuscripts of Lord Middleton, Preserved at Wollaton Hall,
Nottinghamshire (1911), pp.348, 351, 361, 369.
25. HMC, Report on the Manuscripts of his Grace the Duke of Rutland, Preserved at Belvoir
Castle, 4 vols (1888), 4, p.263. L&P, 3.ii.3375.
26. Household Accounts and Disbursement Books of Robert Dudley, Earl of
Leicester, 1558–1561, 1584–86, ed. Simon Adams, Camden Society, 6 (1995),
pp.43, 47.
27. The Papers of Sir Richard Grosvenor, First Bart (1585–1645), ed. Richard Cust, Record
Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 134 (1996), pp.56, 65, 72, 73.
28. Robert Tittler (ed.) (1977–79) ‘Accounts of the Roberts Family of Boarzell, Sussex,
c.1568–1582’, Sussex Record Society, 71, pp.xvi, 71, 73, 78.
29. Beinecke, MS b.27: Anne Clifford’s Account Book, 1600–02.
30. BL, Add. 27395, fol.165; ‘Undergraduate Account Book’, pp.162, 163, 166, 170,
passim.
31. Bodl., Rawl. MS, D59.
32. John Wroughton (2006) Tudor Bath: Life and Strife in the Little City, 1485–1603
(Bath: Lansdown Press), p.157.
33. DRO, Corporation of Exeter, Receivers’ Accounts, 1588–1601.
34. D.M. Livock (ed.) (1966) City Chamberlain’s Accounts in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries, Bristol Record Society, 24, pp.47, 130.
35. John Webb (ed.) (1996) The Town Finances of Elizabethan Ipswich: Select Treasurers’
and Chamberlains’ Accounts, Suffolk Records Society, 38, p.105.
36. BL, Eg. MS, 2812, fol.21v.
37. Coleman, British Paper Industry, p.11; James Sharpe (1987) Early Modern England:
A Social History, 1550–1760 (Edward Arnold), p.212; Keith Wrightson (1982)
English Society, 1580–1680 (Hutchinson), p.34.
38. BL, Sloane MS, 922, fols96r-v, c.1634.
39. Finlay, Western Writing Implements, pp.32–3.
40. Bales, Writing Schoolmaster (1590), sig.Q4v.
41. Todd Gray (ed.) (1995) Devon Household Accounts, 1627–59: Part I, Devon and
Cornwall Record Society, 38, pp.1, 2, 5, passim.
42. Plat, The Iewell House, p.46.
Notes 241
43. (1583) A Very Proper Treatise, Wherein is Briefly Sett Forthe the Arte of Limming, sig.
Ciiv; Girolamo Ruscelli (1595) The Secrets of the Reuerend Maister Alexis of Piemont,
p.96v; Wecker (1996) Eighteen Books of the Secrets of Art & Nature . . . p.330.
44. DRO, 1392M/L1601/10.
45. Folger, L.d.18, L.d.19, L.d.20, L.d.21: [1572–3].
46. Mary Siraut (ed.) (1990) The Trevelyan Letters to 1840, Somerset Record Society, 80,
p.82.
47. LPL, Bacon MS, 651, fol.207r-v: 6/6/1595.
48. Bodl., Rawl. MS, D859, fols3v–10v, 36r–7v, 71r–3r: 1613–23.
49. SP1/22, fol.65r-: Accounts of Edward Stafford, duke of Buckingham, 1521; HMC,
Rutland, 4, p.263.
50. ‘Undergraduate Account Book’, pp.177 189, 205. Household Books of Lord William
Howard, pp.110, 144, 208, passim. See also, The Household Papers of Henry Percy
Ninth Earl of Northumberland (1564–1632), ed. G.R. Batho, Camden Society (Royal
Historical Society, 1962), pp.35, 87, 91, 94, 98.
51. BL, Eg. MS, 2804, fols146, 223 [12/1601], n.y.
52. HMC, Middleton, pp.379, 429; L&P, 4.i.771.
53. Finlay, Western Writing Implements, pp.26–8; Whalley, Writing Implements,
pp.77–84. An alternative type of ink was carbon-based, using lampblack and soot:
Beal, Dictionary, p.202.
54. (1571) A Booke Containing Divers Sortes of Hands . . . un-paginated. See also, Edward
Cocker (1658) The Pen’s Triumph, p.23. For a fifteenth-century recipe for iron-gall
ink see, TNA, C47/34/1/3.
55. p.52.
56. sigsEr-v.
57. sigsBivr–Bvv.
58. Secrets of the Reuerend Maister Alexis, pp.90v, 94r–7r, 119v, 127r, 131r. Wecker,
Eighteen Books, also includes a recipe for ‘Powder of Ink that one may carry in a
Journey: so it be mingled with Wine or Water’ (pp.272, 329).
59. William Philip (1596) A Booke of Secrets . . . passim. See also (1583) A Very Proper
Treatise, Wherein is Briefly Sett Forthe the Arte of Limming, sigsBiiir–Bivr-v.
60. p.181.
61. sig.A3v.
62. ‘To make a Pouder, that will make ink in an instant’ was printed at the end of the
seventeenth century in (1697) A New Book of Knowledge Treating of Things . . . p.10.
63. Queen’s College, Cambridge, MS 34, fols48v; BL, Add. MS, 34163, fol.5; LPL MS
2086, fol.42r; BL, Add. 34307, fol.19; Folger, V.b.296, p.23. For other sixteenth-
and seventeenth-century recipes for ink see BL, Sloane MS, 4, fols2, 3r, 62r, BL,
Add. MS, 32658, fol.23; BL, Stowe MS, 850, fol.5; BL, Add. MS, 36308, fol.91v; BL,
Eg. MS, 2679, fol.1; Bodl. Rawl. MS, D1120, fol.140v. See also, Bodl., Rawl. MS,
D1056, fol.8v for recipes by one Edward Bastard, ‘To make a potte of good blacke
Incke’ and ‘To make iiij pintes of Incke suddenly’, 1641–49.
64. Daybell (2005) ‘Elizabeth Bourne (fl.1570s–80s): A New Elizabethan Woman
Poet’, N&Q, 250, 52/2, 176–8; Folger, V.a.430, pp.96, 103.
65. See, for example, Christopher Burlinson and Andrew Zurcher (2005) ‘“Secretary
to the Lord Grey Lord Deputie here”: Edmund Spenser’s Irish Papers’, The Library,
6/1, 30–75.
66. CP175/136: 7/12/1597.
67. sig.A3v.
68. HMC, Middleton, p.556.
242 Notes
69. DRO, ECA, Exeter City Archives, Corporation of Exeter, ‘Ancient Letters’, L203.
70. Joseph P. Regenstein Library, University of Chicago, Bacon MSS of Redgrave Hall,
4198 [1611]; CP102/56.
71. SP11/5, fol.77; CP173/124: Fulke Greville to Robert Cecil, 8/1596; SP84/5,
fol.147r–149v: Sir John Conway to Walsingham, 27/12/1585.
72. Bodl., Eng. Hist. c.475, fol.156: 16/5/1582.
73. CP78/32: 3/4/[1601]; CP90/48, [1601].
1540–1603’, in Daybell (ed.) Early Modern Women’s Letter-Writing in England,
1450–1700 (Basingstoke: Palgrave), pp.59–76.
75 ‘Undergraduate Account Book’, p.162; Bodl., Eng. Hist. c.481, fols25r–26r:
26/4/1613.
76. L&P, 3 (I): 463; L&P, 5: 1799; L&P, 4 (III): 6748. Household Papers of Henry Percy,
p.75.
77. HMC, Middleton, pp.403, 435; SP12/265, fol.218r: 1597.
78. Beal, Dictionary, pp.203–04.
79. CP42/22: 9/7/1596.
80. Francis Steer (1953) ‘The Inventory of Anne Viscountess of Dorchester’, N&Q,
198, 94–6, 155–8, 379–81, 414–17, 469–73, 515–19 (pp.416–17).
81. Finlay, Western Writing Implements, pp.35–9, 136–57; Whalley, Writing Implements,
pp.85–106; Beal, Dictionary, pp.203–04, 293, 395.
82. L&P, 4 (I): 1792; HMC, Middleton, pp.383, 401; Household Books of Lord William
Howard, pp.203, 253.
83. Finlay, Western Writing Implements, p.34; Beal, Dictionary, p.42.
84. A Booke Containing Divers Sortes of Hands, unpaginated; Bertholde Wolpe (1975)
‘John de Beauchesne and the First English Writing Books’, Journal for the Society of
Italic Handwriting 82, 2–11.
85. HMC, Rutland, 4, p.263.
86. Finlay, Western Writing Implements, pp.32–4, 133–4; Beal, Dictionary, pp.307–08;
Whalley, Writing Implements, pp.90–2.
87. On quills see Finlay, passim; Whalley, passim; Beal, Dictionary, p.329. Steel pens
were however in use during the sixteenth century (Whalley, Writing Implements,
p.41; Finlay, Western Writing Implements, pp.44, 47). In 1581 Richard Stonley,
a teller of the Exchequer of Receipt bought a ‘brasse penne’: Peter Stallybrass,
Roger Chartier, J. Franklin Mowery and Heather Wolfe, ‘Hamlet’s Tables and
the Technologies of Writing in Renaissance England’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 55/4
(2004), 379–419 (p.401).
88. DRO, ECA/Book 144, pp.129–34.
89. L&P, 16: 217.
90 Household Papers of Henry Percy, pp.36, 65; HMC, Middleton, p.464; BL, Add. MS,
62092, fols8r; Household Books of Lord William Howard, p.216; SP16/330, fols5r–6v:
2/8/1636.
91. Finlay, Western Writing Implements, p.89.
92. sigsD2v–D3v.
93. Finlay, Western Writing Implements, pp.3–4; Bales, Writing Schoolemaster,
sigsQ2r–Q3r; Clement, Petie Schole, p.53.
94. A.S. Osley (1980) Scribes and Sources: Handbook of the Chancery Hand in the Sixteenth
Century: Texts From The Writing Masters (Boston, MA: Godine), pp.92–6; A Booke
Containing Divers Sortes of Hands, unpaginated; Clement, sig.Diir-v; Bales, Writing
Schoolemaster, p.60; John Brinsley (1612) Ludus literatus, sigsE3r-v.
Notes 243
95. Clement, sig.Diir; Billingsley (1618) Pens Excellencie, sigsD2v–D3r.

96. On pen knives see Finlay, Western Writing Implements, pp.13–20, 102–07;
Whalley, Writing Implements, pp.33–40. Whalley consciously uses the form pen
knife rather than penknife to distinguish the early modern ‘scribal knife’ from
modern-day pocket penknives (p.38). Household Papers of Henry Percy, p.65.
97. Finlay, Western Writing Implements, p.13.
98. Bales, sig.Q2r.
99. Clement, sig.Divv; Bales, sig.Q3v; Billingsley, sig.D3v.
100. Unpaginated.
101. John Davies ([1631]) The Writing Schoolemaster, or, The Anatomie of Faire Writing.
102. Juliet Fleming (2001) Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England
(Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P); Susan Frye (2010) Pens and Needles: Women’s
Textualities in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P).
103. Bales, sig.Q4r.
104. Richard Mulcaster (1981) Positions Wherin Those Primitive Circvmstances Be
Examined, Which Are Necessarie For The Training Vp Of Children . . . sig.Eiv.
105. Beal, Dictionary, pp.117–18, 447. Cf. Lena Cowen Orlin (1998) ‘Gertrude’s
Closet’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 134, 44–67 (pp.57–8). Desks were also used to
stand books on.
106. L&P, 2 (II): 12.2; Clement, Petie Schole, sig.Divv.
107. Lisle Letters, 6, p.200, 1, pp.441–2; Frederick Fenn and B. Wyllie ([1904]) Old
English Furniture (Scribner), p.16, plate XV.
108. L&P, 5: 456: 30/9/1531; L&P, 7: 557: 27/4/1534.
109. Santina M. Levey and P.K. Thornton (2001) Of Houshold Stuff: The 1601
Inventories of Bess of Hardwick (National Trust Books), p.47.
110. CP118/105: William Waldegrave and Thomas Wakelin to the Privy Council,
28/9/1606; Malcolm Wanklyn (ed.) (1998) Inventories of Worcestershire Landed
Gentry, 1537–1786, Worcestershire Historical Society, 16, p.113.
111. Marion E. Allen (ed.) (1995) Wills of the Archdeaconry of Suffolk, 1625–1626,
Suffolk Records Society, 37, p.35.
112. CKS, U350 C2/43.
113. Bodl., Rawl. MS, 859, fol.68r; ‘Inventory of Anne Viscountess of Dorchester’,
p.516.
114. On closets see Alan Stewart (1995) ‘The Early Modern Closet Discovered’,
Representations, 50, 76–100; Orlin, ‘Gertrude’s Closet’; eadem (2007) Locating
Privacy in Tudor London (Oxford: OUP), ch.8. See also, James Knowles (1998)
‘“Infinite Riches in a Little Room”: Marlowe and the Aesthetics of the Closet’,
and Sasha Roberts (1998), ‘Shakespeare “creepes into the womens closets about
bedtime”: Women Reading in a Room of Their Own’, in Gordon McMullan
(ed.) Renaissance Configurations: Voices/Bodies/Spaces, 1580–1690 (Basingstoke:
Palgrave), pp.3–29, 30–63.
115. F.G. Emmison (1976) Elizabethan Life: Home, Work and Land: From Essex Wills and
Session and Manorial Records (Chelmsford: Essex Record Office), pp.16–17. See also,
Inventories of Worcestershire Landed Gentry; Annabelle Hughes (ed.) (2007) Sussex
Clergy Inventories, 1600–1750, Sussex Record Society, 91; D.M. Herridge (ed.) (2005)
Surrey Probate Inventories, 1558–1603, Surrey Record Society, 39; M.A. Havinden (ed.)
(1965) ‘Household and Farm Inventories in Oxfordshire, 1550–1590’,
Oxfordshire Record Society, 44); D.G. Vaisey (ed.) (1969) Probate Inventories of
Lichfield and District, 1568–1680, Staffordshire Record Society, 5 (1969); Peter
Wyatt (ed.) (1997) The Uffculme Wills and Inventories: 16th to 18th Centuries,
244 Notes
Devon and Cornwall Record Society, 40. Overton, Production and Consumption,
pp.90–2, 95.
116. Overton, Production and Consumption, pp.127, 129.
117. Surrey Probate Inventories, pp.249, 305, 371, 377. Parlour used here refers to a
reception room, but for differences in type of parlour see Overton, Production
and Consumption, pp.131–2.
118. See for example, ‘Household and Farm Inventories in Oxfordshire’, p.151.
119. Bristol Probate Inventories, 1, p.97
120. Surrey Probate Inventories, p.193. Overton, Production and Consumption, pp.132–4.
121. Peter C. Sutton, et al. (2003) Love Letters: Dutch Genre Paintings in the Age of
Vermeer (Greenwich, CT and Dublin: Frances Lincoln).
122. CP151/7; CP184/134; CP151/7; CP184/134, 18/9/1602; CP48/111: 23/1/1578.
123. HMC, Report on the Manuscripts of Lord De L’Isle & Dudley, Preserved at Penshurst
Place, 6 vols (1935–66), 2, pp.242, 245. Lisle C. John (1961) ‘Rowland Whyte,
Elizabethan Letter-Writer’, Studies in the Renaissance, 8, 217–35 (p.222).
124. BL, Cotton MS, Caligula D.VIII, fols251r–52v: 30/6/1522.
125. CP22/102 (23/6/[1593]; CP54/99 (30/8/1597); CP94/61.
126. BL, Cotton MS, Vitellius B.VI, fol.204r-v: 31/8/1524.
127. CP54/72.
128. BL, Cotton MS, Caligula B.III, fol.106r-v; SP1/106, fols217r–218v (27/9/1536).
129. Lisle Letters, 5, 1262.
130. Bristol RO, AC/C72, 1564.
131. BL, Eg. MS, 2804, fol.144 ([7/1601]); Alison D. Wall (1982) Two Elizabethan
Women: Correspondence of Joan and Maria Thynne, 1575–1611, Wiltshire Record
Society, 38: 40 (21/6/1602).
132. Wall, Two Elizabethan Women, 44 (5/3/1603).
133. CP120/95 (25/2/1608).
134. Lisle Letters, 5, 1092 (25/1/1538), Bodl., Tanner MS, 241, fol.33v (8/6/1588); DRO,
1392M/L1599/13 (3/8/1599); [1602]; CP111/96 (6/[1605]).
135. CP44/63: Edward, earl of Oxford to Robert Cecil, 6/9/1596.
136. On the use for drafting letters see H.R. Woudhuysen (2004) ‘Writing-Tables and
Writing Books’, BLJ, 1–11 (p.7); Stallybrass, ‘Hamlet’s Tables’, 379–419; Beal,
Dictionary, pp.408–09. HMC, Rutland, 4, p.335 records purchase in 1542 for
Thomas earl of Rutland of ‘a payre of wryteng tables of stone dellyweryd to my
Lorde hymselfe to wryte hes reymeymberances on, price xijd’.
137. Papers of Richard Grosvenor, pp.52, 59.
138. William S. Powell (1977) John Pory, 1572–1636: The Life and Letters of a Man of
Many Parts (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P).
139. Lisle Letters, passim; HMC, De L’Isle & Dudley, 2, passim.
140. Daybell, Women Letter-Writers, ch.8. Lisle Letters, 5 (Lord and Lady Lisle); SP46/5–7
(Johnson Correspondence); CUL, Hengrave MS, 88/1 (earl and countess of Bath);
BL, Harl. MS, 4762, passim (Sir Thomas Baskerville to Lady Margaret Baskerville);
Wall, Two Elizabethan Women (Thynne Family); Domestic Politics and Family Absence:
The Correspondence (1588–1621) of Robert Sidney, First Earl of Leicester, and Barbara
Gamage Sidney, ed. Margaret P. Hannay, Noel J. Kinnamon, and Michael G. Brennan
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); The Knyvett Letters (Thomas Knyvett to his wife); The
Dering Love Letters: A Collection of 17th Century Love Letters Sent by Sir Edward Dering
to his Beloved Wife Unton, ed. Alison Cresswell (Kent County Council, n.d.).
141. Barbara J. Harris (1990) ‘Property, Power and Personal Relations: Elite Mothers
and Sons in Yorkist and Early Tudor England’, Signs, 15, 606–32; LPL, Bacon MS
Notes 245
(Anne Bacon and Anthony Bacon); The Correspondence of Lady Katherine Paston,
1603–1627, ed. R. Hughey, Norfolk Record Society, 14 (1941); The Letters of the Lady
Brilliana Harley, Wife of Sir Robert Harley, ed. T.T. Lewis, Camden Society, 58 (1854).
142. Bristol RO, AC/C48/1–12, 14–21, 23–8, 29 (C48/12): Elizabeth Smyth to her son
Thomas Smyth at Oxford and London, 1622–41.
143. ‘The Diary of Adam Winthrop’, in L.J. Redstone (ed.) Winthrop Papers, vol.1,
1498–1628 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1929), pp.64–105, passim;
The Diary of Roger Lowe of Ashton-in-Makerfield, Lancashire, 1663–74, ed. William
L. Sachse (New Haven: Yale UP, 1938), passim; The Diary of Samuel Pepys: A New
and Complete Transcription, ed. R. Latham and W. Matthews 11 vols (Bell and
Hyman, 1970–83), passim.
144. The Private Life of an Elizabethan Lady: The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby, 1599–1605,
ed. Joanna Moody (Stroud: Sutton, 1998), pp.9, 11, 12, 28, 30, 39, 52, 53, 31, 32.
For a more detailed examination of Hoby’s letter-writing see: Daybell, Women
Letter-Writers, p.60.
145. 46/5/139, 141: John Johnson to Sabine Johnson, 8/11/1545, 15/11/1545.
146. Daybell, Women Letter-Writers, p.59.
147. H. Jenkinson (1968) Guide to Seals in the Public Record Office (HMSO, 1968);
H.S. Kingsford (1920) Seals (New York: Macmillan); Finlay, Western Writing
Implements, pp.59–62, 180–3.
148. Jean F. Preston and Laetitia Yeandle (1992) English Handwriting, 1400–1650
(Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies), p.60; Lisle
Letters, 2, 103.
149. See for example, DRO, 1392 M/L1595/8.
150. De conscribendis epsitolis (1534), ed. Charles Fantazzi (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1989),
p.113.
151. DRO, 1392 M/L1599/8.
152. Beal, Dictionary, p.281. See for example, DRO, Seymour MSS.
153. DRO, Seymour MSS, D3799 Add. 3, Box, 14706/ bundle 3, folder 4/302/130 and
306/132: Charles I to Edward Seymour, 2/12/1643, 13/12/1643.
154. Folger, L.b.528, L.b.533, L.b.534: 12/2/1602, 1/3/1602, c.15/2/1602.
155. Mark Brayshay, Philip Harrison and Brian Chalkley (1998) ‘Knowledge,
England’, Journal of Historical Geography, 24, 265–88 (p.270).
156. LPL, MS 694, fols47, 48v, 67, MS 707, fols46, 48, 51v, 53v, 57v, 59, temp. James
I; SP16/430, fol.164: 11/10/1639; SP16/431, fol.63: 17/10/1639; DRO, 1392M/
L1643/39a, 39b.
157. DRO, 1392/1643/39a, 39b.
158. Alison Wiggins, Bess of Hardwick’s Letters (forthcoming: Aldershot: Ashgate).
159. This process is expertly described in Burlinson and Zurcher, ‘Spenser’s Irish
Papers’, p.63. For use of this method for the earl of Essex’s correspondence see:
K. Duncan-Jones (1996) ‘Notable Accessions: Western Manuscripts’, Bodleian
Library Record, 15, 308–14 (p.312).
160. DRO, Exeter Receiver’s Accounts, Elizabeth, 1594–95; ‘Undergraduate Account
Book’, p.189; Household Books of Lord William Howard, passim. See also, Household
Papers of Henry Percy, passim.
161. sigsEiiiiv–Evr.
162. A Very Proper Treatise, sig.Ciiir; Wecker, Eighteen Books, pp.310–11.
163. Elissa O’Loughlin (1996) ‘Wafers and Wafer Seals: History, Manufacture, and
Conservation’, The Paper Conservator, 20, 8–15.
246 Notes
164. Letters of John Holles, 1587–1637, ed. P.R. Seddon, Thoroton Society, 3 vols, 1,
p.17 (29/12/1599).
165. HMC, Rutland, 4, p.271; Folger, V.a.459, fol.73v.
166. Household Papers of Henry Percy, p.25; Folger, V.a.334, fol.23r. On women’s seals
see Daybell, Women Letter-Writers, p.54.
167. Christine North (2001) ‘The Will and Inventory of Edward Arundell of Treveliew
and Lanherne, 1539–1596’, Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall, 11,
38–63 (p.42); HMC, Rutland, 4, pp.520, 523; The Knyvett Letters (1620–1644),
ed. Bertram Schofield (Constable and Co., 1949), p.62 (27/10–2/11/1623).
3 Epistolary Writing Technologies

1. David Cressy (1980) Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and
Stuart England (Cambridge: CUP), pp.20–5.
2. Cressy, Literacy, p.128.
3. Herbert C. Schulz (1942–3) ‘The Teaching of Handwriting in Tudor and Stuart
Times,’ HLQ, 6, 381–425 (p.408); Folger, L.e.[644], n.d.; Laetitia Yeandle (2005)
‘A School for Girls in Windsor’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 17,
272–80. On women learning to write see, Daybell (2006) Women Letter-Writers
in Tudor England (Oxford: OUP), pp.63–71; Heather Wolfe (2009) ‘Women’s
Handwriting’ in Laura Knoppers (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern
Women’s Writing (Cambridge: CUP), pp.21–39.
4. Lisle Letters, 4, pp.485–6. Schulz, ‘Teaching of Handwriting’, pp.398–9.
5. HMC (1935–66) Report on the Manuscripts of Lord De L’Isle & Dudley, Preserved at
Penshurst Place, 6 vols, 1, p.246.
6. Joan Simon (1966) Education and Society in Tudor England (Cambridge: CUP),
p.353.
7. BL, Add. MS, 27,632: ‘Commonplace book and papers of Sir John Harrington’, fols60,
69v–71v, 103v–04v; Folger, L.d.18, 19, 20, 21 (practice signatures of Anne Bacon).
8. Linda C. Mitchell (2007) ‘Letter-Writing Instruction Manuals in Seventeenth-
and Eighteenth-Century England’, in Carol Poster and Linda C. Mitchell (eds)
Letter-Writing Manuals and Instruction from Antiquity to the Present: Historical and
Bibliographical Studies (Columbia, SC: U of South Carolina P), pp.178–99 (pp.178–9);
Peter Mack (2002) Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice (Cambridge: CUP),
pp.12–14, 38–43.
9. David Cressy (1975) Education in Tudor and Stuart England (Edward Arnold), p.82;
Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric, p.13; T.W. Baldwin (1944) Shakspere’s Small Latine and
Lesse Greeke, 2 vols (Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P), 2, pp.239–87.
10. William Kempe (1588) The Education of Children in Learning, sigsG1r-v; Ascham
(1570) The Scholemaster, book 2, sigsKIIIr-v.
11. John Baret ([1580]) An Aluearie or Quadruple Dictionarie.
12. sigsK2v, L4v–M1r.
13. sigsY3r–Z2r.
14. Marcus Tullius Cicero ([1574]) M.T. Ciceronis epistolarum familiarium libri XVI;
(1611) Certaine epistles of Tvlly verbally translated . . .
15. Desiderius Erasmus (1522) De conscribendis epistolis in J.K. Sowards (ed.) Collected
Works of Erasmus, 25 (Toronto: U of Toronto P). A pirated earlier version was pub-
lished as (1521) Libellus de conscribendis epistolis (Cambridge: J. Siberch).
16. Baldwin, Shakspere’s Small Latine, 2, pp.242, 268–9; Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric,
p.13.
Notes 247
17. Gary R. Grund (1975) ‘From Formulary to Fiction: The Epistle and the English
Anti-Ciceronian Movement’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 17/2, 379–95
(pp.381–4).
18. De conscribendis, pp.7, 8, 13–14, 15, 19, 45–6, 50–60, 62, 65–70, 71–3, 74, 79–89.
On Erasmus’s letter-writing manual see, Judith Rice Henderson (2007) ‘Erasmus’s
Opus De Conscribendis Epistolis in Sixteenth-Century Schools’, in Poster and
Mitchell, Letter-Writing Manuals, pp.141–77; eadem (1983) ‘Erasmus on the Art
of Letter-Writing’, in James J. Murphy (ed.), Renaissance Eloquence: Studies in the
Theory and Practice of Renaissance Rhetoric (Berkeley: California UP), pp.331–55;
Aloïs Gerlo (1971) ‘The Opus de Conscribendis Epistolis of Erasmus and the
Tradition of the Ars Epistolica’, in R.R. Bolgar (ed.), Classical Influences on European
Culture A.D. 500–1500 (Cambridge: CUP), pp.103–14; Erika Rummel (1989)
‘Erasmus’ Manual of Letter-Writing: Tradition and Innovation’, Renaissance and
Reformation, 13, 299–312.
19. Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric, pp.25–6.
20. De conscribendis, p.24; Baldwin, Shakspere’s Small Latine, 2, p.242.
21. George Alfred Stocks (1909) The Records of Blackburn Grammar School, Chetham
Society, 66, p.74; Georgius Macropedius (1543) Methodus de conscribendis epistolis.
Juan Luis Vives (1534) De conscribendis epsitolis, ed. Charles Fantazzi (Leiden:
E.J. Brill, 1989). On Macropedius and Vives see Baldwin, Shakspere’s Small Latine,
2, pp.265–8. Cf. Justus Lipsius (1587) Epistolica institutio; Konrad Celtis (1537)
Methodus conficiendarum epistolarum; Christoph Hegendorph (1526) Methodus
epistolis conscribendi; Aurelio Lippo Bradolino (1498) De ratione scribendi libri tres.
22. (1905) Letters and Exercises of the Elizabethan Schoolmaster John Conybeare, ed.
F.C. Conybeare (Frowde), pp.1–14, 106–9.
23. Nicholas Orme (2001) Medieval Children (New Haven and London: Yale UP),
p.338.
24. Bodl., MS Eng. Misc. f.87, fols121r–133r, 144r–160v.
25. Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric, p.54; Cressy, Education, pp.132–3.
26. Bodl., Rawl. MS, D985 (1581–84); Foster, Alumni Oxonensis, 1, p.87. Queen’s
College, Cambridge, MS 83, fols21r–31r: Sir Thomas Smith’s notebook, 1560s,
1570s.
27. BL, Add. MS, 34398, fols16r–18r: [early-seventeenth century].
28. SP46/15, fols212–19: Diary of Richard and Matthew Carnsew [1572–1574];
SP46/71, fols12–25, 29, 33, 34.
29. BL, Add. 27395, fols51–4: 1601, n.d.
30. Letters of John Holles, 1587–1637, ed. P.R. Seddon, Thoroton Society Record Series,
3 vols, 31, 35, 36 (1975–1986), vol.1, 70, 78, 79, 80, 87, 91, 95.
31. CP228/28 (31/8/1609).
32. Lisle Letters, 4, pp.468–9, 488–90. Sarah Clayton, ‘Bassett, James (c.1526–1558)’,
ODNB.
33. Ibid., 3, pp.76–7.
34. Ibid., 4, p.494.
35. Compare a known holograph letter from Claude Bunel to Lady Lisle (SP 3/16,
fol.13, 5/3/1538) with James’s letter to his mother dated 10/12/1537 (SP3/1,
fol.111); Lisle Letters, 4, p.475.
36. Ibid., 4, p.475. SP3/1, fols104, 109, 112, 113.
37. Ibid., 4: 1062; SP3/1, fol.108.
38. He retained the small initial and lower case first initial for his surname, and some-
times signed his forename ‘Jacques’.
248 Notes
39. SP3/1, fol.107:20/2/1538. Lisle Letters, 4. 1061, p.496, n.1.

40. SP3/1, fol.105.
41. Lisle Letters, 4: 1046.
42. BL, Add. MS, 27395, fol.50.
43. This echoes Walter J. Ong (1986) ‘Writing is a Technology that Restructures
Thought’, in Gerd Baumann (ed.) The Written Word: Literacy in Transition, Wolfson
College Lectures 1985 (Oxford: Clarendon Press), pp.23–50.
44. Daybell, Women Letter-Writers, p.93.
45. Linda Pollock (1993) With Faith and Physic: The Life of a Tudor Gentlewoman, Lady
Grace Mildmay, 1552–1620 (Collins & Brown), p.26.
46. Barbara Lewalski (1993) Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard UP), p.180; Caroline Bowden (2004) ‘The Notebooks of Rachael Fane:
Education for Authorship’, in Victoria E. Burke and Jonathan Gibson (eds),
Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Writing: Selected Papers From the Trinity/Trent
Colloquium (Aldershot: Ashgate), pp.157–80 (pp.168–70); CKS, U269 F38/1/6, 11.
47. BL, Add. MS, 28004, fols9r–10v, 11r–12v, 13r-v, n.d.
48. (1612) Ludus literatus, sig.F1v; Bales, Writing Schoolemaster, sig.R2r.
49. CKS, U1475, C81/68, C81/83, C81/95, C81/98, C81/132.
50. Hugh Paget (1981) ‘The Youth of Anne Boleyn’, BIHR, 54, 162–70 (pp.163–4);
SP10/5/5; Steven W. May (2004) Queen Elizabeth: Selected Works (New York:
Washington Square Press), letters 1–11; Proud Northern Lady, p.43; LPL, Talbot MS,
3230, fol.399.
51. Lisle Letters, 1, p.87; SP3/1, fols121; Lisle Letters, 5, 1495 (Katharine Basset); Lisle
Letters, 3, 573, 578, 584, 592, 5, 1126, 1513 (Anne Basset); 3, p.148, 575, 587,
622a, 623a, 624; SP1/102, fol.183r-v, SP3/1, folsr-v, 125r-v (Mary Basset) Cf. SP3/1,
fol.124r-v.
52. (1941) The Correspondence of Lady Katherine Paston, 1603–1627, ed. R. Hughey,
Norfolk Record Society, 14, p.73 (6/1624?).
53. Folger, L.a.181: 22/4/1611; BL, Add. MS, 32464, fols121v–122r: 10/6/1616.
54. CP228/16, 23, 19: [1607], [1608], 15/5/[1607].
55. Jean Robertson (1942) The Art of Letter-Writing: An Essay on the Handbooks
Published in England During the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Liverpool UP);
Katherine Gee Hornbeak (1934) The Complete Letter-Writer in English 1568–1800
(Northampton, MA: Smith College). See also Mitchell and Poster, Letter-Writing
Manuals; Alan Stewart and Heather Wolfe (2004) Letterwriting in Renaissance
England (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library), pp.21–33.
56. On the ars dictaminis see Martin Camargo (1981) Ars Dictaminis, Ars Dictandi
(Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols); James J. Murphy (1994) Rhetoric in the Middle Ages
(Berkeley: U of California P); Malcolm Richardson (2007) ‘The Ars dictaminis, the
Formulary, and Medieval Epistolary Practice’ in Poster and Mitchell, Letter-Writing
Manuals, pp.52–66.
57. Malcolm Richardson (2001) ‘The Fading Influence of the Medieval ars dictaminis
in England after 1400’, Rhetorica, 19/2, 225–47; Martin Camargo (2001) ‘The
Waning of the Medieval Ars Dictaminis’, Rhetorica, 19/2, 135–40; Ronald G. Witt
(1982) ‘Medieval “Ars Dictaminis” and the Beginnings of Humanism: A New
Construction of the Problem’, RQ, 35, 1–35.
58. Gideon Burton (2007) ‘From Ars dictaminis to Ars conscribendi epistolis: Renaissance
Letter-Writing Manuals in the Context of Humanism’ in Poster and Mitchell,
Letter-Writing Manuals, pp.88–101; Norman Davis (1965) ‘The Litera Troili and
English Letters’, RES, 16/63, 235–7.
Notes 249
59. Jonathan Gibson (2000) ‘Letters’ in Michael Hattaway (ed.) A Companion to

English Renaissance Literature and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell), pp.615–19.
60. sig.Aiiiv.
61. Claude La Charité (2001) ‘Le Stile et Maniere de composer, dicter et escrire toutes sortes
d’Epistres, ou lettres missives (1553): de la dispositio tripartite de Pierre Fabri au
poulpe épistolaire d’Érasme’, in Catherine Magnien (ed.) L’épistolaire au XVIe siècle
(Paris: Éditions Rue d’Ulm), pp.17–32; Hornbeak, Complete Letter-Writer, pp.3–12;
Robertson, Art of Letter-Writer, pp.13–17; Lawrence D. Green (2007) ‘Dictamen in
England, 1500–1700’, in Poster and Mitchell, Letter-Writing Manuals, pp.102–26
(pp.110–11).
62. There is a burgeoning secondary literature on French epistolography: Claude La
Charité, ‘Review of Poster and Mitchell (eds) Letter-Writing Manuals and Instruction
from Antiquity to the Present’, Rhetorical Review, 62/2 (2008), 19–22.
63. sigsCiiiv–Eviv.
64. On Day see, Hornbeak, Complete Letter-Writer, pp.17–29; Robertson, Art of Letter-
Writing, p.7; Magnusson (1999) Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language
and Elizabethan Letters (Cambridge: CUP), pp.61–90; W. Webster Newbold (2007)
‘Letter Writing and Vernacular Literacy in Sixteenth-Century England’, in Poster
and Mitchell, Letter-Writing Manuals, pp.127–40 (pp.129–32).
65. Day (1592) English Secretorie, sigsI4v–K1r.
66. Henderson (1993) ‘On Reading the Rhetoric of the Renaissance Letter’, in
Heinrich F. Plett (ed.) Renaissance-Rhetorik/Renaissance Rhetoric (Berlin: Walter de
Gruyter), pp.143–62 (pp.149; 151).
67. Erasmus (1521) Conficiendarum epistolarum formula in Collected Works of Erasmus,
25, p.260; R.R. Bolgar (1983) ‘The Teaching of Letter-Writing in the Sixteenth
Century’, History of Education, 12/4, 245–53 (p.253).
68. Ralph A. Houlbrooke (1984) The English Family, 1450–1700 (Harlow: Longman),
pp.32–3.
69. Erasmus, De conscribendis epistolis, pp.20, 51.
70. Day (1592) English Secretorie, Book 2, p.64; Fulwood, Enemie of Idlenesse, sig.69v.
71. Fulwood, Enemie of Idlenesse, 3v; Day (1592) English Secretorie, p.4.
72. Elbert N.S. Thompson (1924) ‘Familiar Letters’, in Literary Bypaths of the
Renaissance (New Haven: Yale UP), pp.91–126.
73. Hornbeak, Complete Letter-Writer, p.35.
74. Green, ‘Dictamin’, pp.111–16.
75. It was printed in 1589, twice in 1590 and again in 1591.
76. sigsEiiv–Iiir.
77. Ibid., sigsBiW–Dir.
78. Green, ‘Dictamen’, pp.116; 117.
79. Ibid., p.106.
80. New Boke of Presidentes, sigsBiiiv–Biiiir.
81. Robertson, Art of Letter-Writing, p.17.
82. Sister Mary Humiliata (1949–50) ‘Standards of Taste Advocated for Feminine Letter
Writing, 1640–1797’, HLQ, 13, 261–77; Linda C. Mitchell (2003) ‘Entertainment
and Instruction: Women’s Roles in the English Epistolary Tradition’, HLQ,
66/3&4, 331–47.
83. Sheppard (1652) The Secretaries Studie Containing New Familiar Epistles . . . ,
titlepage.
84. Albrecht Classen (1988) ‘Female Epistolary Literature From Antiquity to the
Present: An Introduction’, Studia Neophilologica, 60, 3–13.
250 Notes
85. Dorothy Gardiner (1929) English Girlhood at School: A Study of Women’s Education
Through Twelve Centuries (Oxford: OUP), p.63.
86. (1405) The Treasure of the City of Ladies, trans. Sarah Lawson (Penguin, 1985),
p.98.
87. Daybell, Women Letter-Writers, pp.17–26.
88. Day, English Secretorie, book 2, pp.64; 67.
89. For recent discussions of this issue, see Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric, pp.115–24;
Magnusson, Shakespeare and Social Dialogue, pp.61–90; Daybell, Women Letter-
Writers, pp.22–6, 200–28; Stewart, Shakespeare’s Letters, pp.12–16.
90. Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric, p.116.
91. Day (1586) The English Secretorie, p.170; Erasmus, De conscribendis, p.172.
92. Roderick Lyall (1996) ‘The Construction of a Rhetorical Voice in Sixteenth-
Century Scottish Letters’, Prose Studies, 19/2, 127–35.
93. Daybell (2006) ‘Scripting a Female Voice: Women’s Epistolary Rhetoric in
Sixteenth-Century Letters of Petition’, Women’s Writing, 13/1, 3–20; Alison
Thorne (2006) ‘Women’s Petitionary Letters and Early Seventeenth-Century
Treason Trials’, Women’s Writing, 13/1, 21–37.
94. Lynne Magnusson (2004) ‘A Rhetoric of Requests: Genre and Linguistic Scripts
in Elizabethan Women’s Suitors’, in Daybell (ed.) Women and Politics in Early
Modern England, 1450–1700 (Aldershot: Ashgate), pp.51–66. Frank Whigham
(1981) ‘The Rhetoric of Elizabethan Suitors’ Letters’, PMLA, 96/5, 864–82.
95. Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric, p.114; pp.115–24.
96. Stewart, Shakespeare’s Letters, p.14.
97. Richardson, ‘Fading Influence’, pp.225–47.
98. (1939) The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. N.E. McClure, 2 vols (Philadelphia:
The American Philosophical Society); LPL, MS 3196, fol.221: 24/1/1569.
99. Folger, X.d.428 (82), 14/11/[1552].
100. CKS, U1475, C81/18 (27/8/1593).
101. Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric, p.116.
102. Gemma Allen (2009) ‘Education, Piety and Politics: The Cooke Sisters
and Women’s Agency, c.1526–1610’ (D.Phil thesis, University of Oxford),
ch.3; Lynne Magnusson, ‘Mixed Messages and Cicero Effects in the Herrick
Family letters of the Sixteenth Century’ in James Daybell and Andrew
Gordon (eds) Cultures of Correspondence in Early Modern Britain, 1580–1640
(forthcoming).
103. (1568), sig.Aviiir-v.
104. Lisle Letters, 5, passim; BL, Add. MS, 36989, fols14, 15, 17, 18 (1601–1602); CKS,
U275 C1/11 (1640).
106. Ibid., p.208.
107. Lisle Letters, 5, passim; Catalogue of the Manuscripts and Muniments of Alleyn’s
College, 5–6: 02/05/1593; BL, Harley MS, 4762.
108. (1949) The Knyvett Letters (1620–1644), ed. Bertram Schofield (Constable and
Co.), passim; The Dering Love Letters: A Collection of 17th Century Love Letters Sent
by Sir Edward Dering to his Beloved Wife Unton, ed. Alison Cresswell (Kent County
Council, n.d.), passim.
109. Daybell, Women Letter-Writers, pp.92–100; Susan E. Whyman (2009) The Pen and
the People: English Letter Writers 1660–1800 (Oxford: OUP), chs.3, 4.
110. Daybell, Women Letter-Writers, ch.3.
111. BL, Add. MS, 39828, fol.75r:10/12/1582; BL, Lansd. MS, 71, fol.2: 21/9/1592.
Notes 251
112. Keith Thomas (1986) ‘The Meaning of Literacy in Early Modern England’ in
The Written Word, pp.97–131 (pp.106, 110); A.E.B. Owen (1979) ‘A Scrivener’s
Notebook From Bury St. Edmunds’, Archives, 14/61, 16–22 (p.17).
113. BL, Cotton MS, Nero B.VI, fols137r–138v (fol.137r): 1/10/1538.
114. CP69/3: The Mayor and Alderman of Bristol to Robert Cecil, 18/3/1600;
SP16/475, fol.170r: Examination of Thomas Willis, n.d.
115. (1877) Adam Eyre, A Dyurnall, or Catalogue of all my Accions and Expences from
the 1st of January, 1646[7], ed. H.J. Morehouse, Surtees Society, 65, pp.15, 83; The
Diary of Roger Lowe of Ashton-in-Makerfield, Lancashire, 1663–74, ed. William L.
Sachse (New Haven: Yale UP, 1938), p.53, passim.
116. On scriveners charges see, Peter Beal (1998) In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts and
their Makers in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press), pp.69–72,
n.12; H.R. Woudhuysen (1996) Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts,
1558–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press), p.176 and passim. The accounts of the
Edward Stafford, duke of Buckingham dated 1521 record payments of 9s. 9d. ‘To
one Morgan of London, a scrivener, clerk of the Staple of Westminster for an
indenture’: SP1/22, fol.65r. In December 1620, Lord William Howard of Naworth
Castle paid 5s. to a scrivener for ‘writing a bond’, Selections from the Household
Books of Lord William Howard of Naworth Castle, 1612–1640, ed. G. Orsnsby,
Surtees Society, 68 (1878), pp.125, 262, 318.
117. Lisle Letters, 2, p.252; Paul E.J. Hammer (1994) ‘The earl of Essex, Fulke
Greville and the Employment of Scholars’, Studies in Philology, 91, 167–80
(p.175, n.40).
1558–1561, 1584–86, ed. Simon Adams, Camden Society, 6 (1995), pp.177, 202,
212, 315; Adams (1993) ‘The Papers of Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester. 2: The
Atye-Cotton collection’, Archives, 20, 131–44 (p.133).
481–504 (pp.486–8).
120. The Household Papers of Henry Percy Ninth Earl of Northumberland (1564–1632), ed.
G.R. Batho, Camden Society (Royal Historical Society, 1962), pp.xxxii, 3, 83, 88,
97, 101, 160, 164.
121. Giles Constable (1976) Letters and Letter Collections (Typologie des Sources du
Moyen Age Occidental, 17), pp.42–4. V.M. O’Mara (1996) ‘Female Scribal Ability
and Scribal Activity in Late Medieval England: the Evidence?’, Leeds Studies in
English, 27, 87–130 (pp.96–7).
122. Heather Hirshfield (2001) ‘Early Modern Collaboration and Theories of
Authorship’, PMLA, 116/3, 609–22.
123. On secretaries see Woudhuysen, Philip Sidney, pp.66–87; Karl Josef Höltgen
(1984) ‘Sir Robert Dallington (1561–1637): Author, Traveller, and Pioneer of
Taste’, HLQ, 47, 147–77; Daybell (2004) ‘The Social Conventions of Women’s
Letter-Writing in England, 1540–1603’, in Early Modern Women’s Letter-Writing,
pp.59–76.
124. The Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford, ed. D.J.H. Clifford (Stroud, 1990; repr. 1994),
pp.274–75.
125. Joseph P. Regenstein Library, University of Chicago, Bacon MSS of Redgrave
Hall, 4199, 4199v, 4202, 4203, 1611–1612; R.E. Bennett (1940) ‘Donne’s Letters
from the Continent in 1611–12’, Philological Quarterly, 19, 66–78; BL, Add. MS,
32, 464, fols137v–8r, 139r-v, 142v, 142v–3r, passim: Letter-book containing copies
of letters written by John Holles.
252 Notes
126. Daybell, Women Letter-Writers, pp.73–4. Julie Crawford (2009) ‘Women’s

Secretaries’, in Vin Nardizzi, Stephen Guy-Bray and Will Stockton (eds) Queer
Renaissance Historiography: Backward Gaze (Aldershot: Ashgate), pp.111–34.
127. BL, Add. MS, 28000, fol.136r: 18/11/1641.
128. Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, ed. Norman Davis, 2 vols
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971–76), passim; O’Mara, ‘Scribal Ability’, p.91.
129. Lisle Letters, 4, pp.225–7, 229–31.
130. Alison Wiggins, Bess of Hardwick’s Letters (forthcoming, Aldershot: Ashgate);
Graham Williams (2010) ‘“yr Scribe Can proove no nessecarye Consiquence for
you”?: The Social and Linguistic Implications of Joan Thynne’s Using a Scribe
in Letters to Her Son, 1607–1611’, in Anne Lawrence-Mathers and Phillipa
Hardman (eds) Women and Writing, c.1340–c.1650: The Domestication of Print
Culture (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer), pp.131–45 (p.133).
131. (1590) Il Secretario Overo. Formvulario Di Lettere Missive et Responsive Di
M. Francesco Sorsovino (Turin). Brian Richardson (1996) ‘Prose’ in Peter Brand and
Lino Pertile (eds) The Cambridge History of Italian Literature (Cambridge: CUP),
pp.181–232 (p.212); Alan Stewart (1995) ‘The Early Modern Closet Discovered’,
Representations, 50 (1995), 76–100 (p.84).
132. For Faunt’s discourse see Bodl., Tanner MS, 80, fols91–4, printed in Charles
Hughes (1905) ‘Nicholas Faunt’s Discourse Touching the Office of the Principal
Secretary of Estate, & c.1592’, EHR, 20, 499–508. BL, Add. MS, 48148, fols3v–9v:
Robert Beale, ‘A Treatise on the Office of Councellor and Principall Secretarie
to her Ma[jes]tie’, 1592, printed in C. Read (1925) Mr Secretary Walsingham and
the Policy of Queen Elizabeth, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 1, pp.423–43.
Patricia Brewerton (1998) ‘Paper Trails: Re-reading Robert Beale as Clerk to the
Elizabethan Privy Council’ (Ph.D. diss., U of London).
133. John Herbert, ‘Duties of a Secretary’, in G.W. Prothero (ed.) (1898) Select
Statutes and Other Constitutional Documents Illustrative of the Reigns of Elizabeth
and James I, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press), pp.166–8 (SP12/274, fol.200,
26/4/1600). Cecil’s treatise appeared in manuscript (Bodl., Ashmole MS, 826,
fol.29, ‘The State and Dignitie of a Secretarie of State’ as well as in print: Robert
Cecil (1642) The State and Dignitie of a Secretarie of Estates Place. Quotations are
to the printed volume.
134. Day (1595) English Secretorie, book 2, pp.131–2.
135. Ibid., pp.102–03, 133–4.
136. Hughes, ‘Faunt’s Discourse’, p.501.
137. Richard Brathwait (1821) Some Rules and Orders for the Government of the House of
an Earl, pp.17–18.
138. Hughes, ‘Faunt’s Discourse’, pp.501–03.
139. Beale, ‘Treatise’, p.427; Hughes, ‘Faunt’s Discourse’, p.500.
140. Stewart (2003) ‘Early Modern Closet’; idem, ‘Gelding Gascoigne’ in Constance C.
Relihan and Goran V. Stanivukovic (eds) Prose Fiction and Early Modern Sexualities
(Basingstoke: Palgrave), pp.147–69.
141. James Heywood Markland (1838) ‘Instructions by Henry Percy, ninth Earl of
Northumberland, to his son Algernon Percy, touching the management of his
Estate, Officers, &c. written during his confinement in the Tower’, Archaeologia,
27, 306–58 (p.348).
142. Lisle Letters, 5, 1126.
143. A.G.R. Smith (1977) Servant of the Cecils: The Life of Sir Michael Hicks (Jonathan
Cape); idem, ‘Secretariats of the Cecils’, pp.484–5; Paul E.J. Hammer (1994) ‘The
Notes 253
Uses of Scholarship: The Secretariat of Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex,

c.1581–1601’, EHR, 109/430, 26–51.
144. Daybell, ‘Issues of Authorship’, pp.161–86.
145. BL, Lansd. MS, 107, fols155r–56v, n.d.
146. BL, Add. MS, 32652, fols228–33b (19/10/1543).
147. SP12/272, fol.161 (6/9/1599). May, Selected Works, pp.232–4. On Elizabeth’s use
of secretaries see A.E.B. Owen (1973) ‘Sir John Wolley’s Letter Book as Latin
Secretary to Elizabeth I’, Archives, 11, 16–18. May, Selected Works, p.xxvi.
148. LPL, Bacon MS, 658, fol.88: Henry Cuffe to Edward Reynoldes, 1/7/1595. For an
in-depth analysis of this letter see: Alan Stewart (2009) ‘The Making of Writing
in Renaissance England: Re-thinking Authorship Through Collaboration’, in
Margaret Healy and Thomas Healy (eds) Renaissance Transformations: The Making
of English Writing, 1500–1650 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP), pp.81–96. I am grate-
ful to Professor Stewart for circulating to me a manuscript copy of this article.
See also, Hammer, ‘Employment of Scholars’, p.172; idem (1997) ‘Myth-Making:
Politics, Propaganda and the Capture of Cadiz in 1596’, HJ, 40, 621–42.
149. Christopher Burlinson and Andrew Zurcher (2005) ‘“Secretary to the Lord Grey
Lord Deputie here”: Edmund Spenser’s Irish Papers’, The Library, 6/1, 30–75, pp.31,
36, 37, 49, 50; Edmund Spenser, Selected Letters and Other Papers, eds. Christopher
Burlinson and Andrew Zurcher (Oxford: OUP, 2009), pp.xxx, xlviii–lvi.
150. Wiggins, Bess of Hardwick’s Letters.
4 Interpreting Materiality and Social Signs

1. A.R. Braunmuller (1981) ‘Editing Elizabethan Letters’, Text, 1, 185–99; idem
(1993) ‘Accounting for Absence: The Transcription of Space’, in W. Speed
Hill (ed.) New Ways of Looking at Old Texts (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and
Renaissance Texts and Studies), pp.47–56; Jonathan Gibson (1997) ‘Significant
Space in Manuscript Letters’, The Seventeenth Century, 12/1, 1–9. Cf. Michael
Hunter (1995) ‘How to Edit a Seventeenth-Century Manuscript: Principles and
Practice’, The Seventeenth Century, 10, 277–310.
2. BL, Cotton MS, Vespasian F.III: ‘Book of Hands’ (Collection of Autograph letters
of famous persons).
1540–1603’, in Daybell (ed.) Early Modern Women’s Letter-Writing in England,
1450–1700 (Basingstoke: Palgrave), pp.59–76.
4. Quoted in A.S. Osley (1980) Scribes and Sources: Handbook of the Chancery Hand in
the Sixteenth Century: Texts From The Writing Masters (Boston, MA: Godine), p.29.
5. Jonathan Goldberg (1990) Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance
(Stanford, CA: Stanford UP), p.113.
6. Seth Lerer (1997) Courtly Letters in the Age of Henry VIII: Literary Culture and the Arts
of Deceit (Cambridge: CUP), p.88.
7. BL, Eg. MS, 2812: Letter Book of Edward Zouche, Baron Zouche, 31/7/
1600–28/4/1601. For Zouche’s autograph see BL, Eg. MS, 1213, fol.150.
8. DRO, 1392M/L1596/6: 22/8/1596.
9. Folger, L.a.150: 22/5/1619.
10. On the difficulty of establishing autograph hands see Giles E. Dawson (1942)
‘Authenticity and Attribution of Written Matter’, English Institute Annual,
77–100.
254 Notes
481–504.
12. Edmund Spenser, Selected Letters and Other Papers, eds. Christopher Burlinson
and Andrew Zurcher (Oxford: OUP, 2009), pp.xxx–lvi; Louis A. Knafla (2003)
‘Mr Secretary Donne: The Years with Sir Thomas Egerton’, in David Colclough (ed.)
John Donne’s Professional Lives (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer), pp.37–71; Paul Hammond
(1981) ‘Dryden’s Employment by Cromwell’s Government’, Transactions of the
Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 8, 130–6.
13. Florence M.G. Evans (1923) The Principal Secretary of State: A Survey of the Office
From 1558 to 1680 (Manchester: U of Manchester P), pp.168–73; A.E.B. Owen
(1973) ‘Sir John Wolley’s Letter-Book as Latin Secretary to Elizabeth I’, Archives
11/49, 16–18.
14. BL, Add. MS, 35840, Royal MS, 13 B.I: Roger Ascham’s Latin Letter-Books,
1554–1568; Robert Thomas Fallon (1989) ‘Milton in Government: Denmark and
Savoy’, Milton Quarterly, 23, 45–57.
15. Folger, Add. MS, 1006 (3/8/1588); CP9/62, fols101–02 (17/3/1578).
16. The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke: Volume 1: Poems,
Translations and Correspondence, ed. Margaret P. Hannay, Noel J. Kinnamon, and
Michael G. Brennan (Oxford: OUP, 1998), pp.285–98; Steven W. May (2000) ‘Two
Unpublished Letters by Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke’, EMS, 9, 88–97. Of
five letters to Caesar, four are scribal and one is autograph, but social distance is
maintained through the lack of salutation and layout of the manuscript page: BL,
Add. MS, 12503, fols39r–40v.
17. Hilary Jenkinson (1922) ‘Elizabethan Handwriting: A Preliminary Sketch’, The
Library, 3, 1–35 (p.23).
18. Sir Edward Maunde Thompson (1916) ‘Handwriting’, in Sidney Lee and
C.T. Onions (eds) Shakespeare’s England, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press), I,
pp.284–310; Stanley Morison (1943) ‘Early Humanistic Script and the First
Roman Type’, The Library, 24, 1/2, 1–29; Roy Davids (1988) ‘The Handwriting of
Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex’, The Book Collector, 37, 351–65.
19. CP228/23: [1608].
20. (1618) The Pens Excellencie, p.37.
21. Edward Cocker ([1664]) The Guide to Pen-man-ship, sig.D1v.
22. Daybell, Women Letter-Writers, pp.63–71; Heather Wolfe (2009) ‘Women’s
Handwriting’, in Laura Knoppers (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern
Women’s Writing (Cambridge: CUP), pp.21–39.
23. Jenkinson, ‘Elizabethan Handwriting’, p.13; SP12/144/2, 3: 1/11/1580. C.E. Wright
(1960) English Vernacular Hands from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Centuries (Oxford:
Clarendon Press), p.xvi.
24. See for example, BL, Cotton MS, Titus B/I, fol.361: University of Oxford to
Thomas Cromwell, n.d.
25. Jenkinson, ‘Elizabethan Handwriting’, p.23; Alfred Fairbank and Berthold Wolpe
(1960) Renaissance Handwriting: An Anthology of Italic Scripts (Faber & Faber); Alfred
Fairbank and Bruce Dickins (1962) The Italic Hand in Tudor Cambridge (Cambridge:
Cambridge Bibliographical Society); Bertold Louis Ullman (1960) The Origin and
Development of Humanistic Script (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura); Herbert
C. Schulz (1942–43) ‘The Teaching of Handwriting in Tudor and Stuart Times’,
HLQ , 6, 381–425.
26. On secretary hand see, Giles E. Dawson and Laetitia Kennedy-Skipton (1966)
Elizabethan Handwriting, 1500–1650: A Guide to the Reading of Documents and
Notes 255
Manuscripts (Faber & Faber); Jean F. Preston and Laetitia Yeandle (1992) English
Handwriting, 1400–1650 (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and
Studies); M.B. Parkes (1969) English Cursive Book Hands, 1250–1500 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press), pp.xix–xxv; N. Denholm-Young (1954) Handwriting in England
and Wales (Cardiff: U of Wales P); L.C. Hector (1958; 1966) The Handwriting of
English Documents (Edward Arnold), pp.60–61; Muriel St. Clare Byrne (1925)
‘Elizabethan Handwriting for Beginners’, RES, 1/2, 198–209; R.B. McKerrow
(1927) ‘The Capital Letters in Elizabethan Handwriting’, RES, 3/9, 28–36; idem
(1972) ‘A Note on Elizabethan Handwriting’, in Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction
to Bibliography (Oxford: Clarendon Press), pp.361–7.
28. See for example, BL, Add. MS, 27999, fols24r–25v: Robert Hegge to Richard
Oxinden, 5/9/1624.
29. BL, Add. MS, 27999, fols336r–337v: 12/1639.
30. Graham Williams (2011) ‘Theorizing Uglyography: The Socio-cultural Implica-
tions of George Talbot’s Gouty Hand’ (Paper at the Cultures of Correspondence
Conference, University of Plymouth); Beal, Dictionary, p.184.
31. Keith Thomas (1986) ‘The Meaning of Literacy in Early Modern England’, in Gerd
Baumann (ed.) The Written Word: Literacy in Transition, Wolfson College Lectures
1985 (Oxford: Clarendon Press), pp.97–131 (p.117); Daybell, Women Letter-
Writers, pp.99–100.
32. CP90/147; Collected Works of Mary Sidney, I, p.291.
33. Thomas, ‘Meaning of Literacy’, pp.97–131.
34. (1595) English Secretorie, 2, p.132.
35. Christopher Burlinson and Andrew Zurcher (2005) ‘“Secretary to the Lord Grey Lord
Deputie here”: Edmund Spenser’s Irish Papers’, The Library, 6/1, 30–75 (pp.32–41).
36. The Letters of Lady Arbella Stuart, ed. Sara Jayne Steen (Oxford: OUP, 1994), pp.107,
and 112–13.
37. H.R. Woudhuysen (2007) ‘The Queen’s Own Hand: A Preliminary Account’, in Peter
Beal and Grace Ioppolo (eds) Elizabeth I and the Culture of Writing (British Library),
pp.1–27. Helen Darbishire (1933) ‘The Chronology of Milton’s Handwriting’, The
Library, 14, 229–35; Davids, ‘Handwriting of Robert Devereux’, 351–65.
38. DRO, 1392M/L1599/13: 3/8/1599. The paper used while good quality was also
slightly smaller than standard folio sized sheets.
39. The Correspondence of Lady Katherine Paston, 1603–1627, ed. R. Hughey, Norfolk
Record Society, 14 (1941) p.92 [Early April 1626?], p.83 [Late April 1625?].
40. Jonathan Goldberg (1988) ‘Hamlet’s Hand’, SQ, 39/3, 307–27 (p.316).
41. Davids, ‘The Handwriting of Robert Devereux, p.359. Cf. Sara Jayne Steen (2001)
‘Reading Beyond the Words: Material Letters and the Process of Interpretation’,
Quidditas, 22, 55–69 (p.59).
42. BL, Harl. MS, 7003, fol.146, n.d. Cf. Steen (1988) ‘Fashioning an Acceptable Self:
Arbella Stuart’, ELR, 18, 78–95 (p.93).
43. Tom Davis (1992) ‘The Analysis of Handwriting: An Introductory Survey’ in Peter
Davison (ed.) The Book Encompassed: Studies in Twentieth-Century Bibliography
(Cambridge: CUP), pp.57–68 (p.68).
44. See for example, Braunmuller, ‘Accounting for Absence’; Gibson, ‘Significant
Space’; Steen, ‘Reading Beyond the Words’; Stewart (2008) ‘The Materiality of
Shakespeare’s Letters’, in Shakespeare’s Letters (Oxford: OUP), pp.39–74; Daybell
(2009) ‘Material Meanings and the Social Signs of Manuscript Letters in Early
Modern England’, Literature Compass, 6, 1–21.
256 Notes
45. sig.B2v. Fulwood’s rules largely follow those outlined in the major source for his
work, Le stile de manière de composer, dicter, et escrire toute sorte d’espistre (1553).
Gibson, ‘Significant Space’, pp.2, 8, n.10.
46. Day (1586) English Secretorie, sig.C2r.
47. Editions of Massinger’s work also appeared in 1658 and 1668. The English trans-
lation of Antoine de Courtin’s Nouveau traité de la civilité first published in 1671
appeared in a further 6 editions: 1673, 1675, 1678, 1685 and twice in 1703.
48. de Courtin (1685), sigsI3r–v; I4r–v. See also Massinger (1654), sigsB5v–B6v.
49. De conscribendis epsitolis (1534), ed. Charles Fantazzi (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1989), p.91.
50. Massinger (1654), sigsB5v–B6r; de Courtin (1685), sigsI1v–I2r.
51. Massinger (1654), sig.B5v.
52. Sue Walker (2003) ‘The Manners on the Page: Prescription and Practice in the
Visual Organisation of Correspondence’, HLQ, 66/3&4, 307–29 (p.313); eadem
(2001) Typography and Language: Prescriptions and Practice (Harlow: Longman).
53. Gibson, ‘Significant Space’, pp.4–5; Walker, ‘Manners on the Page’, p.315.
54. Steen, ‘Reading Beyond the Words’, p.63.
56. Folger, L.b.526 (2/2/1602).
57. Folger, L.b.526, L.b.527, L.b.529, L.b.532 (Donne to George More, 1602). Cf.
L.b.542: Donne to George More, 22/6/1629.
58. Folger, L.b.528, L.b.530, L.b.534, L.b.533 (Donne to Egerton, 1602).
59. BL, Add. MS, 74286: Hulton MS (1590–1601).
60. Folger, L.d.305: 12/4/1627.
61. SP16/63/89: 18/5/1627. Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland: Life and Letters, ed. Heather
Wolfe (Tempe, AZ and Cambridge: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance
Studies, and Renaissance Texts from Manuscripts, 2001), p.40.
62. DRO, D3799/Add. 3, Box, 14706/ bundle 1, folder 1/97/61: 15/10/1598.
63. Proud Northern Lady, 43: 31/1/1598.
64. Folger, X.d.428 (11): 31/12/1605 (Henry Cavendish); X.d.428 (4, 5, 6), 6/11/[c.1585],
18/6/[c.1600], [c.1600] (Charles Cavendish); X.d.428 (8): 27/6/[1589] (Grace
Cavendish).
65. BL, Add. MS, 27999, fol.79r; BL, Eg. MS, 2715, fol.94: 10/06/[1608].
66. BL, Eg. MSS, 2713–2722.
67. BL, Eg. MS 2713, fol.217r (7/1/1588), fol.183r (21/10/1585).
68. Folger, L.d.384, L.d.387 (n.y., 29/12/1626). Cf. L.d.386, which leaves a space and
marginal indent after ‘Honorable Sir’, but does not have room for a respectful
space before the signature since the letter fills the entire page.
69. Folger, L.d.395, 14/9/[1626].
70. Folger, L.d.581: 9/6/1621.
71. DRO, 1392 M/L1595/3: 5/9/1595.
72. Davids, ‘Handwriting of Robert Devereux’, p.357.
73. DRO, D3799/Add.3, Box, 14706/bundle 2, folder 1/200/100 (4/6/1606); DRO, 1392M/
L1630/3; DRO, D3799/Add.3, Box, 14706, bundle 3, folder 3, 281 (13/10/1643);
bundle 3, folder 2/395/166 and 398/168 (23/9/1644, 4/10/1644), and passim.
74. BL, Add. MS, 27999, fols210r-v: 21/7/1635.
75. See, for example, Henry Ashforde’s letter to Edward Seymour, DRO, D3799/Add.
3, Box, 14706/bundle 3, folder 3: 18/10/1643.
76. CRO, AR/15/12: 3/3/[1571], AR/15/16: 20/4/1571. See also, AR/15/18: Robert
Cade, Mayor and Hugh Hexte from Barnstaple to Sir John Arundell, 1/[6/1571];
AR/15/20: William Kendall from Lostwithell to Edward Arundell, 11/6/[1571].
Notes 257
77. Letters from Redgrave Hall: The Bacon Family, 1340–1744, ed. Diarmaid MacCulloch,
Suffolk Records Society, 50 (2007), pp.xxiii, 114; Joseph P. Regenstein Library,
University of Chicago, Bacon Papers of Redgrave Hall, 4234: Sir John Higham to
Sir William Spring, 20/3/1626.
78. BL, Eg. MS, 2584, 16/5/1626. Paul J. Rylands (1911) ‘Merchants’ Marks and
Other Mediaeval Personal Marks’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire
and Cheshire, 62, 1–34; Charles Sisson (1928) ‘Marks as Signatures’, The Library,
91, 1–34; Thomas, ‘Meaning of Literacy’, pp.100–02.
79. BL, Harl. MS, 292, fol.79; BL, Eg. MS, 2713, fol.40r-v; Folger, X.d.428 (83);
SP16/270, fol.6; SP10/10, fol.19; DRO, 1392M/L1595/1; SP12/201, fol.39;
BL, Cotton MS, Titus B.III, fol.99; SP16/113, fol.107; DRO, 3799M-3/0/1/50:
(13/7/1644); SP14/216/2, fol.173.
80. Jenkinson, ‘Elizabethan Handwriting’, p.30.
81. SP70/118, fol.117: 2/6/1571.
82. Michele Margetts (1997) ‘“The wayes of mine owne hart”: The Dating and
Mind Frame of Essex’s “fantasticall” letter’, Bodleian Library Record, 16/1, 101–10
(p.101).
83. BL, Add. MS, 9828, fol.5; Davids, ‘Handwriting of Robert Devereux’, p.355.
84. Bodl, Rawl. MS, D859, fols4r, 7r, 8r, 10r (28/5/1621, 14/10/1622, 25/10/1622,
12/3/1624). Ian Atherton, ‘Scudamore family (per. 1500–1820)’, ODNB.
85. David Stevenson (1984) ‘Masonry, Symbolism and Ethics in the Life of Sir Robert
Moray, F.R.S’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 114, 405–31
(p.410); Lady Falkland: Life and Letters, p.33.
86. Jenkinson, ‘Elizabethan Handwriting’, pp.31–2.
87. Daybell (2002) ‘Henry VIII’s Sign Manual’ in Heather Wolfe (ed.) The Pen’s
Excellencie: Manuscript Treasures at the Folger Shakespeare Library, A Festschrift on
the Retirement of Laetitia Yeandle (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library),
pp.36–8.
88. DRO, D3799/Add. 3/Box, 14706/bundle 3/folder 5, 380/157: 15/8/1644.
89. Burlinson and Zurcher, ‘Spenser’s Irish Papers’, p.57.
90. William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor, II.i.72–3.
91. (1984) Letters of King James VI &I, ed. G.P.V. Akrigg (Berkeley: U of California
Press), p.349.
92. CP88/166: 21/10/1601.
93. SP63/250, fols204r–207v (fols204r–205v): 1630.
94. Dard Hunter (1947) Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf), p.229; Lisle Letters, 2, 103.
95. SP12/6/3: 7/8/1559.
96. Alan Nelson, ‘Letters and Memoranda of Edward de Vere 17th earl of Oxford’,
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~ahnelson/oxlets.html. (19/8/1563–3/1/1604).
[accessed 15 February 2012]
97. de Courtin, Rules of Civility, sig.11v.
98. BL, Eg. MS 2715, fols2, 5, passim: 25/1/1605, 6/4/1605.
99. LMA, ACC 1876/F03/1–8; CRO, AR/15/4–41.
100. BL, Add. MS, 23212, passim (1577–88).
101. Bodl., Rawl. MS, D859, fols14r–23v.
102. On cropping see, BL, Lansd. MS, 14, fols185r–86v, Edward de Vere’s letter to
Burghley dated 22/9/1572, a bifolium measuring 265mm x 230mm and 265mm
x 195mm. On a single sheet used for a copy see DRO, 1392 M/L1595/6: Privy
Council to Earl of Bath, 9/11/1595.
258 Notes
103. CRO, AR/15/8: 24 Feb. 1571; DRO, 1392M/L1611/4 (1611). Alumini Oxoniensis,
4: 1337. See also DRO, 1392M/L1608/1, L1643/14, 15, L1643/24, L1644/2,
L1645/13 (Elizabeth Fulforde to Edward Seymour, 28/5/1645).
104. DRO, 1392M/L1608/3, L1610/1, L1611/1, 3, 5, 6 (1608–11).
105. Folger, X.c.51 (39): 14/03/1633. Compton’s letter was approximately ‘one-
quarter of a standard-size letter’: Stewart and Wolfe, Letterwriting in Renaissance
England, p.51.
106. H.R. Woudhuysen (2008) ‘The Early Modern Letter: Shapes and Forms’ (Paper
at the ‘Material Readings in Early Modern Culture, 1550–1700’ Conference,
University of Plymouth). Professor Woudhuysen’s analysis is based on various
sources, including items from the Albin Schram collection, sold at Christie’s in
2007. On paper size see also, Graham Pollard (1941) ‘Notes on the Size of the
Sheet’, The Library, 22/2, 105–37.
107. DRO, 3799M, 97/61 (11/10/1598). 3799M-3/0/1/38 (13/10/1643); 3799M-
3/0/1/52 (15/8/1644); 3799M-3/0/1/53 (16/8/1644); 3799M-3/0/1/80
(17/11/1677) 3799M-3/0/1/81.
108. DRO, 3799M, 251/113 (9/1/1641), 271 (26/7/1643), 273/119 (11/9/1643). See
also, 1392M/1644/8 (15/2/1644), 1392M/1644/35 (20/6/1644), 1392M/L1644/34
(29/6/1644), 1392M/L1644/33 (2/6/1644); 1392M/L1644/49 (22/7/1644),
1392M/L1644/50 (22/7/1644), 1392M/L1644/52 (25/7/ 1644), 1392M/L1645/15
(29/5/1645), 1392M/L1645/14 (28/5/1645).
109. Dorothy Osborne, Letters to Sir William Temple, ed. Kenneth Parker (Penguin,
1987), p.19; Robbie Glen (2007) ‘Lines of Affection: Dorothy Osborne and
Women’s Letterwriting in the Seventeenth Century’ (Ph.D. diss, University of
Pennsylvania), pp.86–7.
110. SP46/24/224, n.d.; SP46/60 fol.8 (1/2/1580); WCRO, Essex Letter Book, MI 229,
n.d.
111. BL, Add. MS, 33975, passim; Letters to William Temple, p.19.
112. David N. Durant (1977; 1999) Bess of Hardwick: Portrait of an Elizabethan Dynast
(Weidenfeld and Nicolson), pp.217, 245 n.2 (31/1/1599); Kendal RO, Proud
Northern Lady, p.43.
113. Bodl., Rawl. MS, D917, fols55r–66v.
114. Beinecke, MS b.27, unfoliated, 8/11/1602; CP200/108_a: Accounts, 26/5/1629;
SP16/285, fol.43; SP/16/321, fol.99r-v: 18/5/1636.
115. SP52/62, fol.54r-55v (31/7/1598); CP134/122: 5/[1607].
116. Mark Bland (2004) ‘Italian Paper in Early Seventeenth-Century England’, in
R. Graziaplena (ed.) Paper as a Medium of Cultural Heritage: Archaeology and
Conservation (Rome: Istituto centrale per la patalogia del libro), pp.243–55
(pp.246–8); idem (2010) A Guide to Early Printed Books and Manuscripts (Oxford:
Blackwell), pp.31, 38, 43–8.
117. Bland, ‘Italian Paper’, p.244.
118. (1951) The Autobiography of an Elizabethan, trans. and ed. Philip Caraman
(Longmans, Green and Co.), p.117.
119. SP46/24/91: [temp. Mary I/Eliz I].
120. Nancy Pollard Brown (1989) ‘Paperchase: The Dissemination of Catholic Texts
in Elizabethan England’, EMS, 1 , 120–44.
121. In cases where letters are undated scholars attempt dating by using inter-
nal evidence and through broader contextualisation: a letter-writer maybe
known to have resided at a particular place at a given time. See, for example,
Michael Brennan and Noel J. Kinnamon (2003) A Sidney Chronology: 1554–1654
Notes 259
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). On dating by handwriting see Hilary Jenkinson

(1927) The Later Court Hands in England from the Fifteenth to the Seventeenth Century,
2 vols (Cambridge: CUP); Dawson and Kennedy-Skipton, Elizabethan Handwriting;
Fairbank and Dickins, Italic Hand in Tudor Cambridge. On dating by paper and
ink analysis see Mitchell C. Ainsworth (1922) Documents and their Scientific
Examination (Griffin); Charles Moïse Briquet (1907) Les Filigranes. Dictionnaire
Historique des Marques du Papier dès Leur Apparition vers 1282 Jusqu’en 1600 . . .
4 vols (Paris: A. Picard & Fils); Edward Heawood (1950) Watermarks Mainly of
the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Hilverstrum: Paper Publications Society);
Daniel W. Mosser, Michael Saffle and Ernest W. Sullivan II (eds) (2000) Puzzles in
Paper: Concepts in Historical Watermarks (British Library). One of the problems with
dating using watermarks is that even where paper can be dated, there is no telling
when stocks of paper were used up; furthermore a hand learned in one generation
might be carried through to the next. Sometimes letters can be dated more or less
approximately from endorsements on receipt. Where it is impossible however to
establish precisely when a letter was written, it is common practice to provide a
probable range of dates, the terminus a quo (‘boundary from which’) and terminus
ad quem (‘boundary to which’), or to date a letter to a particular period or reign.
122. BL, Eg. MS, 2713 fols69r–70v; CRO, Tremayne Family of Heligan, St Ewe, T/2091;
Bodl., MS. Eng. Hist. c.475/fol.146; Lisle Letters, 5, 1093.
124. On dating see C.R. Cheney (ed.) (1945; 1996) Handbook of Dates for Students of
English History (Cambridge: CUP); Beal, Dictionary, pp.106–09.
125. Cheney, Handbook of Dates, p.4.
126. SP78/39, fol.88: 14–28/3/1597; SP77/5, fol.16: 15–25/4/1589; SP12/274, fol.2:
1–12/1/1600.
127. SP78/21, fol.44: 30/1–9/2/1590.
128. Cheney, Handbook of Dates, p.11.
129. SP16/262, fol.87: 10–20/3/1634; SP16/290, fol.154: 11–21/6/1635.
130. BL, Cotton MS, Caligula CVII, fol.338r-v. The date should have been 1 November.
131. Cheney, Handbook of Dates, pp.12–13, 24–6.
132. BL, Add. MS., 19401, fol.33: 16/8/ 1537.
133. Edinburgh University MS De 1.12/9: 26/1/1596; Steven W. May (2004)
Queen Elizabeth I: Selected Works (New York: Washington Square Press), p.242
(20/8/1602).
134. CP128/175: 16/12/1610.
135. Lisle Letters, 5, 1113: 4/3/1538.
136. Medieval letters were commonly dated by saints’ days: The Plumpton Letters and
Papers, ed. Joan Kirby, Camden Society, 8 (1996), letters 170, 171, 172, 176,
185, 187, 190, 195, 198, 212 and passim; The Cely Letters, 1472–1488, ed. Alison
Hanham, Early English Text Society, 273 (1975), 111, 121, 139, 144, 157 and
passim; Kingsford’s Stonor Letters and Papers 1290–1483, ed. Christine Carpenter
(Cambridge: CUP, 1996), 136, 144, 145, 154, and passim.
137. SP1/113, fol.28: 25/12/1536; SP1/3, fol.133: [20/3/1513; SP1/233, fol.312:
30/11/1523; Lisle Letters,1: 8 (8/61533); SP70/123, fol.32 ([30/3]/1572); BL, Add.
MS, 32,653, fol. 2v (1/11/1543); Plumpton Letters and Papers, 228 ([16/11/1532]).
138. Folger, X.d.145; SP16/185, fol.113: (28/2/ 1631).
139. Lisle Letters, 1: 16, 14, 84, and passim; SP/12/4, fols227r–228v: 30/6/1559.
140. Cely Letters (30–8, 224, 225 and passim); Kingsford’s Stonor Letters (250, 251 and
passim).
260 Notes
141. Folger, L.d.510: 10/11/[1572]; SP/12/6, fols70r–71v: 31/8/1559.

142. WCRO, Throckmorton, CR 1998/Box 60/Folder 4: 19/09/n.y.
143. Lisle Letters, iii. p.72, n.3.
144. [Hugh Oldcastle] (1588) A Briefe Instruction and Maner Hovv to Keepe Bookes of
Accompts, ed. John Mellis, sigsF7v–F8r.
145. SP60/5, fol.112. One of the reasons that so many of the medieval Cely letters are
dated at the top is perhaps because they are mainly business letters: Cely Letters,
passim.
146. SP46/5–7.
147. SP46/5/1, fol.39.
148. SP46/5/1, fol.136; Daybell, Women Letter-Writers, p.56.
149. De conscribendis epsitolis, ed. Fantazzi, p.91.
150. DRO, 3799M-3/0/1/2: John Gilbert to Edward Seymour, 24/11/1598; DRO,
3799M-3/0/1/25: William, earl of Bath to Edward Seymour, 10/6/1601; DRO,
1392M/1595/3: William, earl of Bath to Edward Seymour, 5/9/ 1595; 1392M/
L1595/7: William, earl of Bath to Deputy Lieutenants, 8/12/1596; 1392M/
L1600/1: William, earl of Bath to Deputy Lieutenants, 19/2/1600; DRO, 1392M/
L1601/17: William, earl of Bath to Justices of the Peace, 8/5/1601.
151. Burlinson and Zurcher, ‘Spenser’s Irish Papers’, p.60.
152. Roger H. Ellis (1986) Catalogue of Seals in the Public Record Office: Monastic Seals,
vol. 1 (HMSO); idem (1979, 1981) Personal Seals, 2 vols (HMSO); Walter de Gray
Birch (1900) Catalogue of Seals in the Department of Manuscripts in the British
Museum (British Museum); A.B. Tonnochy (1952) A Catalogue of British Seal Dies
in the British Museum (British Museum). Bodl., Ashmole MS, 1138: Collection of
seal impressions; Allan Wyon (1887) The Great Seals of England (Elliot Stock).
153. BL, Eg. MS, 2713, fols57v, 61v, 62v; DRO, D3799/Add. 3, Box 14706, Bundle 1,
folder 3/30/14, Bundle 1, folder 4/13/5; Stewart and Wolfe, Letterwriting, p.36.
G.R. Batho, Camden Society, 93 (1962), p.25.
155. Jason Powell (2007) ‘Thomas Wyatt’s Ivy Seal’, N&Q, 54/3, 242–4.
156. John Donne’s Marriage Letters, eds M. Thomas Hester, Robert Parker Sorlien and
Dennis Flynn (Washington, DC, Folger Shakespeare Library, 2005), p.33.
157. Stevenson, ‘Masonry, Symbolism’, pp. 412–13, 416, 420–3.
158. BL, Add. MS, 28001, fols236r–237v, see also 268r–269v, 276r–277v, 278r–279v,
280r–v (1646, 1647).
159. sig.B8r.
160. Folger, L.a.852, L.a.853: 14, 17/04/[1610].
161. CP100/1 (30/5/1603); K. Duncan-Jones (1996) ‘Notable Accessions: Western
Manuscripts’, Bodleian Library Record, 15, 308–14 (p.312).
162. Alison D. Wall (1982) Two Elizabethan Women: Correspondence of Joan and Maria
Thynne, 1575–1611, Wiltshire Record Society, 38, p.21 (15/9/1601).
163. R.C. Backus (1917) ‘The Origin and Use of Private Seals Under the Common
Law’, American Law Review, 51, 369–80.
5 Postal Conditions
1. LPL, Carew MS, 604, p.177.
2. Paul Arblaster (2006) ‘Posts, Newsletters, Newspapers in A European System of
Communications’ in Joad Raymond (ed.) News Networks in Seventeenth-Century
Britain and Europe (Routledge), pp.19–34 (p.22).
Notes 261
3. Mark Brayshay, Philip Harrison, and Brian Chalkley, ‘Knowledge, Nationhood

and Governance: The Speed of the Royal Post in Early-Modern England’ (1998)
Journal of Historical Geography, 24, 265–88 (p.281).
4. Francis Granville (1972) ‘Postal Markings’, Archives, 10/47, 103–6.
5. The 1635 reforms were seriously disrupted by the Civil War, and notwithstanding
the efforts made by the Interregnum government to restore a state-run system,
the benefits of the state monopoly public letter carrying service were not fully
realised until after 1660.
6. C.H. Wilson (1965) England’s Apprenticeship, 1603–1763 (Longmans), p.43.
7. William Harrison (1577) The Description of England: The Classic Contemporary
Account of Tudor Social Life, ed. George Edelen (Washington, DC: Folger
Shakespeare Library, 1968; 1994), p.444. Thomas Procter (1607) A Worthy
Worke Profitable to this Whole Kingdome Concerning the Mending of all High-Waies,
sig.A3v. Virginia A. LaMar (1960) Travel and Roads in England (Charlottesville: UP
of Virginia), pp.10–13.
8. 2 and 3 Philip and Mary c.8; 5 Eliz.1 c.13. William Lambarde (1591) The Duties of
Constables . . ., sigs C2r-v.
9. Harrison, Description, p.443.
10. Mark Brayshay and P. Harrison (1997) ‘Post-Horse Routes, Royal Progresses and
Government Communications in the Reign of James I’, Journal of Transport
History, 18, 116–33 (p.122).
11. Michael Reed (1995) ‘The Cultural Role of Small Towns’ in Peter Clark (ed.) Small
Towns in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: CUP), pp.121–47 (p.125).
12. D.F. Harrison (1992) ‘Bridges and Economic Development 1300–1800’, EcHistRev,
45/2, 240–61 (p.259); B.P. Hindle (1976) ‘The Road Network of Medieval
England and Wales’, Journal of Historical Geography, 2/3, 207–21 (pp.207, 217 and
passim).
13. J.A. Chartres (1977) ‘Road Carrying in England in the Seventeenth-Century: Myth
and Reality’, The EcHistRev, 30/1), 73–94 (pp.73–4, 87); idem (1977) Internal Trade
in England, 1500–1700 (Macmillan), pp, 39, 40–1, 55.
14. Mark Brayshay (2005) ‘Waits, Musicians, Bearwards and Players: The Inter-
Urban Road Travel and Performances of Itinerant Entertainers in Sixteenth- and
Seventeenth-Century England’, Journal of Historical Geography, 31/3, 430–58
(pp.430–1, 451).
15. Richard Cust (1986) ‘News and Politics in Early Seventeenth-Century England’,
P&P, 112, 60–90 (pp.62–3); F. J. Levy (1982) ‘How Information Spread Among the
Gentry, 1550–1640’, JBS, 21/2, 11–34 (pp.20–3).
16. Mark Brayshay, A Joined-Up Realm: Historical Geography of Early Modern Road
Communications in England and Wales (Forthcoming, Exeter: Exeter UP).
17. H.C. Darby (1973; 1976) New Historical Geography of England to 1600 (Cambridge:
CUP), pp.288, 289; LaMar, Travel and Roads, pp.18, 20; BL, Stowe MS, 570, fol.99r:
1576.
18. Peter Clark (1983) The English Alehouse: A Social History, 1200–1830 (Longman),
pp.7, 9.
1558–1561, 1584–86, ed. Simon Adams, Camden Society, 6 (1995), p.298.
20. The Correspondence of Dr Matthew Hutton, Archbishop of York, With a Selection
from the Letters, etc. of Sir Timothy Hutton Knt, His Son; and Matthew Hutton, Esq,
his Grandson. ed. James Raine, Surtees Society, 17 (1843), pp.197–204. See also,
CP192/51: [1]/1606.
262 Notes
21. Herbert George Fordham (1924) The Road-Books and Itineraries of Great Britain,
1570–1850: A Catalogue with an Introduction and a Bibliography (Cambridge:
CUP).
22. Herbert George Fordham (1927) ‘The Earliest Tables of the Highways of England
and Wales, 1541–61’, The Library, 8/3, 349–54.
23. Richard Grafton (1571) A Litle Treatise . . .
24. LaMar, Travel and Roads, p.20; William Smith, The Particular Description of England,
1588, ed. H.B. Wheatley and E.W. Ashbee (1879), pp.69–72; SP12/96, fols191r–v,
1578.
25. Adam Smyth (2008) ‘Almanacs, Annotators, and Life-Writing in Early Modern
England’, ELR, 38/2, 200–44 (p.239); Catherine Delano-Smith (2006) ‘Milieus
of Mobility: Itineraries, Route Maps, and Road Maps’, in J. R. Akerman (ed.)
Cartographies of Travel and Navigation (Chicago and London, U of Chicago P),
pp.16–68 (pp.38–9).
26. Laurence Worms (2002) ‘Maps and Atlases’, in John Barnard, D.F. McKenzie
and Maureen Bell (eds) The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, volume 4,
1557–1695 (Cambridge: CUP), pp.228–45.
27. BL, Royal MS D.III. .
28. Delano-Smith, ’Milieus of Mobility’, p.34.
29 Verstegan (1576) Post of the World . . ., pp.52–5. James Wadsworth (1641) The
Evropean Mercury.
30. Norden ([1625]) A Table Shewing the Distances Betweene all the Cities and Shire
Townes of England.
31. Folger, X.d.428 (114): [1589].
32. On the history of the post see: Philip Beale (2005) England’s Mail: Two Millennia
of Letter-Writing (Stroud: Tempus); Christopher Browne (1993) Getting the Message:
The Story of the British Post Office (Stroud: Sutton); R.M. Willcocks (1975) England’s
Postal History to 1840 With Notes on Scotland, Wales and Ireland (By the Author);
J. Crofts (1967) Packhorse, Waggon and Post: Land Carriage and Communications
under the Tudors and Stuarts (Routledge and Kegan Paul); Howard Robinson (1953)
Britain’s Post Office: A History of Development from the Beginnings to the Present Day
(Oxford: OUP); Peter Gaunt (1987) ‘Interregnum Governments and the Reform
of the Post Office, 1649–59’, BIHR, 60/143, 281–98.
33. L&P, 1 (I), p.669, 2 (II), pp.1454, 1458, 20 (II), p.445. Robinson, British Post
Office, pp.8–10; J.A.J. Housden (1903) ‘Early Posts in England’, EHR, 18, 713–18
(pp.714–15).
34. BL, Cotton MS, Galba B.IV, fol.48: Francis de Taxis to Tuke, 23/3/1517. On com-
parisons with European mail systems see, Mark Brayshay (1992) ‘Post-Haste by
Post-Horse: Communications in Europe, 1400–1600’, HT, 42, 35–41; E.J.B. Allen
(1973) Post and Courier Service in the Diplomacy of Early Modern Europe (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff); Arblaster, ‘Posts, Newsletters’, pp.19–22.
35. Beale, England’s Mail, p.144; SP1/78 fol.128: 17/8/1533.
36. Mary C. Hill (1961) The King’s Messengers, 1199–1377 (Edward Arnold).
37. The term ‘post’ during the early modern period had several meanings: the per-
son travelling with the letter or at the inn or post-house, the post-horse used
for transportation, the entire system of delivering mail and news delivered in
letters themselves: Stewart and Wolfe (2004) Letterwriting in Renaissance England
(Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library), p.122.
38. Brayshay, ‘Post-Horse Routes in England and Wales’; idem (1991) ‘Royal Post-
Horse Routes in South-West England in the Reigns of Elizabeth I and James I’,
Notes 263
Devonshire Association Report and Transactions, 123, 79–103; idem (1992) ‘The
Royal Post-Horse Routes of Hampshire in the Reign of Elizabeth I’, Proceedings of
the Hampshire Field Club and Archeological Society, 48, 121–34.
39. BL, Add. MS, 25460, fol.273 (1/4/1594); Brayshay, ‘Post-Horse Routes in England
and Wales’, p.373; Brayshay, ‘Post-Horse Routes in South-West’, p.81. The term
postmaster to denote ‘the official at each of the stations or stages of a post-road,
whose primary duty it was to carry the mail to the next stage, and to receive and
deliver or send out letters for his own town or district’ was first employed at the
start of the seventeenth century (OED); previously they had merely been known
as ‘posts’.
40. SP12/96, fols109r–110v (1574); SP12/167 fol.64 (1584).
41. DRO, City of Exeter Book, 55, p.181; J.M.W. Stone (1987) The Inland Posts,
1392–1672 (Christie’s-Robson Lowe), p.25.
42. A.K. Longfield (ed.) Fitzwilliam Accounts, 1560–65 (Stationery Office, Dublin for
the Irish Manuscripts Commission, 1960), pp.65, 66, 88; HMC, De L’Isle & Dudley,
1 p.403; APC, 13, p.156; SP63/95 fol.192, 30/9/1582; BL, Lansd. MS, 78, fol.23;
APC, 30, p.500; SP12/282 fol.15: 6/10/1601; APC, 32, pp.304, 305; CP91/76:
28/1/1603; CP86/103: 18/6/1608.
43. BL, Lansd. MS, 78, fol.222r: 1556.
44. APC, 5, p.315: 29/7/1556.
45. SP12/41, fol.187: 1566.
46. SP12/41/189: 1566; ‘SP12/96, 109r–110v: 1574.
47. APC, 8, p.379.
48. APC, 7, p.326 (12/2/1567); APC, 10, p.219, 1/5/1578; Florence M.G. Evans
(1923) The Principal Secretary of State: A Survey of the Office From 1558 to 1680
(Manchester: U Manchester P), p.279.
49. CP141/367: 1/1/1591.
50. I am grateful to Mark Brayshay for discussion on this point.
51. (1583 [1584]) Orders Set Downe and Allowed by the Lordes of her Maiesties Priuie
Counsell, and Appoynted to be Put in Print for the Postes Betweene London, and the
Borders of Scotland; SP12/167, fol.64.
52. Articles Set Downe by the Right Worshipfull Thomas Randolph Esquier ([c.1618]). This is a
later printing of earlier articles in 1584 to tie in with the Elizabethan proclamation.
53. BL, Lansd. MS, 78, fols224r–227v: 1590.
54. Register of the Privy Council of Scotland, 6, pp.566–7 (27/4/1603, 1/5/1603), 10, 832
(1/7/1615), 12, p.82 (15/9/1619); Beale, p.246.
55. SP12/176 fol.32.
56. ([1591]) By the Queene. Whereas Heretofore Sundry Wayes Haue Bene Deuised to
Redresse the Disorders Among the Postes of our Realme . . .
57. (1609) By the King Whereas Heretofore Sundry Wayes Haue Bene Deuised to Redresse
the Disorders Among the Postes of Our Realme . . . ([1619]) By the Lord Deputie and
Councell Whereas the Kings Most Excellent Maiestie . . . Did Giue and Grant to Iohn
Lo. Stanhope of Harrington . . . the Office of Maister of His Maiesties Posts . . .
58. J.A.J. Housden (1906) ‘The Merchant Strangers Posts in the Sixteenth Century’,
EHR, 21, 739–42.
59. Evans, Principal Secretary, p.280.
60. (1618 [1619]) Letters to Restraine Carrying Packets by Shippers, &c.; SP14/155, fol.89:
19/12/1623. CP124/118: ‘Mr. Questor’s note of packets sent and received from
beyond the seas’, 21/11/1606 to 1/7/1607.
61. (1632) A Proclamation Concerning the Post-Master of England for Forreigne Parts.
264 Notes
62. Brayshay, ‘Post-Horse Routes in England and Wales’, p.386.

63. TNA, AO 1/1950/1–7, 1951/8–14, 1952/15–22, 1953/23–28, Declared Accounts of
the Masters of the Posts, 1566–1639.
65. Ibid., pp.373, 375, 386; Brayshay, ‘Speed of Royal Post’, p.270.
67. Ibid., pp.379–82.
68. Ibid., pp.382–84; Brayshay, ‘Speed of Royal Post’, p.269.
69. SP63/67, fol.142.
70. Mary Hill Cole (2007) ‘Monarchy in Motion: An Overview of Royal Progresses’,
in Jayne Elizabeth Archer, Elizabeth Goldring and Sarah Knight (eds) The
Progresses, Pageants and Entertainments of Queen Elizabeth I (Oxford: OUP),
pp.27–45 (p.33).
71. PC 2/12 fol.229: 14/7/1578.
72. SP38/19 (24/6/1625); APC, 40, p.103, 145, 162, APC, 46, p.101; SP/16/223/63,
SP16/274/37.
73. Brayshay and Harrison ‘Post-Horse Routes’, pp.126–30; BL, Add. MS, 5755
fol.244r; APC, 33, pp.134–5, 257, 486.
74. BL, Cotton MS, Caligula C.VI, fols66v–67r: 30/9/1582. SP15/27/1, fol.187:
1/10/1582, enclosing SP15/27, fol.188: ‘Orders by Queen and Council to be
observed by all the posts between London and Berwick’, 1582.
75. CP88/47: 16/9/1600.
76. SP/12/1/5: 19/11/1558.
77. CP138/202. Stone, Inland Posts, pp.223–5; Brayshay, ‘Speed of Royal Post’,
pp.275–9.
78. Brayshay, ‘Speed of Royal Post’, pp.270–5; M.S. Archer (1987) ‘Letters to London
from the South Coast Ports 1573–1601’, The Philatelist 7, 60–2.
79. Brayshay, ‘Speed of Royal Post’, pp.276–7.
80. SP14/104, fol.37: 10/12/1618.
81. Household Accounts and Disbursement Books of Robert Dudley, pp.269; 342, 343.
82. Brayshay, ‘Post-Horse Routes in South-West’, pp.81–2, 85.
83. DRO, ECA, Receivers’ Vouchers, Box 1, folder 2; ECA, Exeter Receiver’s Accounts,
22–33, Elizabeth, 1580–91.
84. John Wroughton (2006) Tudor Bath: Life and Strife in the Little City, 1485–1603
(Bath: Lansdown Press), p.150.
85. Stone, Inland Posts, p.69.
86. Brayshay, ‘Post-Horse Routes in South-West’, p.79.
87. Mark Brayshay (1987) ‘Plymouth’s Coastal Defences in the Year of the Spanish
Armada’, Devonshire Association Report and Transactions, 123, 169–96 (pp.189–90).
88. John Bruce ([1798]) Report on the Arrangements Which Were Made, for the Internal
Defence of These Kingdoms, When Spain, by its Armada, Projected the Invasion and
Conquest of England, p.cxxx;
89. DRO, 1392/M/L1602/2; APC, 1588, p.68.
90. HMC, The Manuscripts of the Duke of Somerset, the Marquis of Ailesbury and the Rev.
Sir T. H. G. Puleston, Bart (1898) p.63.
91. (1635) A Proclamation for the Setling of the Letter Office of England and Scotland.
92. SP16/291 f.230: 6/1635. Kevin M. Sharpe (1984) ‘Thomas Witherings and the
Reform of the Foreign Posts, 1632–40’, BIHR, 57, 149–64; Beale, England’s Mail,
pp.249–51, 66–7. SP15/42, fols61r–65v.
93. ([c.1618]) Articles Set Downe by the Right Worshipfull Thomas Randolph.
Notes 265
94. SP12/163, fol.182: 23/11/1583.

95. BL, Add. MS, 62092, fols7r.
96. DRO, ECA, Ancient Letters, 329: 21/11/1629.
97. Beale, England’s Mail, pp.187–8, 197–8, 258–9; Brayshay, ‘Post-Horse Routes in
England and Wales’, p.374.
98. SP16/161, fol.42: 19/2/1630; SP16/531, fol.12: [2]/1630. APC, 45, p.921.
99. Beale, England’s Mail, ch.12; Evans, Principal Secretary, pp.279–80, 281, 285.
100. APC, 10, pp.128; SP16/51, fol.38, 25/1/1627.
101. SP16/6, fol.95: 9/12/1625.
102. CP10/61.
103. SP12/127, fol.113.
104. SP12/214, fol.147.
105. SP12/163, fol.185: SP14/143, fol.81.
106. BL, Add. MS, 32649, fol.2: 1/1/1543.
107. SP53/13, fol.53: 3/9/1584.
108. SP15/31, fol.60: 1589.
109. SP12/253, fol.34: 16/7/1595.
110. On carriers see Crofts, pp.22–41; David Hey (1980) Packmen, Carriers and Packhorse
Roads: Trade and Communications in North Derbyshire and South Yorkshire (Leicester:
Leicester UP); Beale, England’s Mail, ch.7; Alan Stewart (2008) ‘Shakespeare
and the Carriers’, in Shakespeare’s Letters (Oxford: OUP), ch.3; Dorian Gerhold
(2005) Carriers and Coachmasters: Trade and Travel Before to Turnpikes (Chichester:
Phillimore); idem (1993) ‘Packhorses and Wheeled Vehicles in England,
1550–1800’, Journal of Transport History, 14/1, 1–26.
111. Beale, England’s Mail, p.134.
112. Thompson Cooper, ‘Hobson, Thomas (1545–1631)’, rev. Dorian Gerhold,
ODNB.
113. Gerhold, Carriers and Coachmasters, p.41.
114. John Venn (1913) Early Collegiate Life (Cambridge: Heffer and Sons), pp.191–239.
115. BL, Add. MS, 36989, fol.42.
116. Bodl., Herrick Papers, MS Eng. Hist. c.474, fols76, 78, 80, 81, 163, 183–4,
MS. Eng. Hist. c.477, fol.149 , MS. Eng. Hist. c.478, fols51–2.
117. Adam Fox (2000) Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford: OUP),
pp.343, 348–9, 350.
118. SigsD4r–D5r.
119. BL, Eg. MS, 2804, fol.35.
120. James Shapiro (2005) 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (Faber &
Faber), p.261.
121. SP16/390, fol.203.
122. Part 3, p.62.
123. Joan Parkes (1925) Travel in England in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: OUP), p.80.
124. A few years later Taylor published a condensed, cheaper print version (1642)
A Brief Director for Those That Would Send Their Letters to Any Parts of England,
Scotland, or Ireland . . .
125. Carriers Cosmographie, sigsA4r, C1r.
126. Chartres, ‘Road Carrying’, pp.76, 77, 80. Carriers Cosmographie, sig.C3r.
127. Carriers Cosmographie, sigsA2r-v.
128. Gerhold, Carriers and Coachmasters, p.14.
129. M.A. Jones (1960) ‘Westmorland Pack-Horse Men in Southampton’, Transactions
of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, 59,
266 Notes
65–84; O. Coleman (1960, 1961) The Brokage Book of Southampton, 1443–44,

2 vols, Southampton Record Series, 4 and 6; E.A. Lewis (1993) The Southampton
Port and Brokage Books, 1448–49, Southampton Record Series, 36.
130. Carriers Cosmographie, sig.A2v.
131. Ibid., sigsA2r-v, A3r.
132. BL, Add. MS, 36989, fol.64.
133. BL, Add. MS, 27999, fols205r–206v: 1/4/1634.
134. SP14/107/66iii, iv: 31/3/1619.
135. Folger, V.b.139, fols224.
136. SP12/143, fol.91.
137. SP12/266, fol.119: 6/3/1598.
138. CP77/71: 20/3/1601.
139. East Sussex RO, Correspondence of the Roberts family DUN 51/49: 18/3/1633.
140. Chartres, Internal Trade, p.10; idem, ‘Road Carrying’, p.87.
141. Stow (1632) Annales, p.867.
142. Beale, England’s Mail, ch.7; Gerhold, Carriers and Coachmasters, p.3.
143. Beale, England’s Mail, pp.125–30, 132–4.
144. H.S. Bennett (1922; 1995) Pastons and their England (Cambridge: CUP), pp.106,
120–1, 161–2, 163–4; Letters and Papers of John Shillingford, Mayor of Exeter,
1447–50, ed., Stuart A. Moore, Camden Society, 2 (1871), pp.23, 148, 150.
145. SP1SP1/54, fol.44; SP1/113, fol.148.
ed. Vivienne Larminie, Camden Miscellany, 30 (1990), pp.149–269 (pp.166,
179, 173, 185, passim).
147. Selections from the Household Books of Lord William Howard of Naworth Castle,
1612–1640, ed., G. Orsnsby, Surtees Society, 68 (1878), p.215.
148. SP1/229, fol.14: 8/6/1510.
Castle, 4 vols (1888), 4, p.504.
150. Gerhold, Carriers and Coachmasters, pp.191–2.
151. Brayshay, ‘Royal Post-Horse Routes’, p.374.
152. BL, Eg. MS, 2804, fol.37.
153. SP16/291, fols230–231.
154. Earle, Micro-cosmographie, sig.D5v.
155. Correspondence of Dr Matthew Hutton, p.205.
156. CP57/1: 7/11/1597.
157. SP16/423, fol.246: 15/6/1639.
158. SP16/162, fols14, 15.
159. Beale, England’s Mail, p.131.
160. SP14/73 fol.112: Beale, England’s Mail, p.247.
161. Proclamation for the Setling of the Letter Office.
162. Crofts, Packhorse, ch.8.
163. Ibid., pp.53–4.
164. Carriers Cosmographie, sigsB1r, B3v, B4v, C2v, C3r.
165. p.85.
166. CP44/64, 6/9/1596.
167. SP12/270, fol.187: 10/5/1599.
168. SP16/100, fol.108, 8/4/1628.
169. ‘Household Charges of Lord North, 1575–81’, ed., W.H. Stevenson, Archaeologia,
19 (1821), 283–301, pp.298, 299, 300.
Notes 267
170. Isle of Wight RO, Oglander Collection, Papers Relating to the Estate of Thomas
Kemp of Beaulieu, 1613–1631, OG/EE/52: 17/10/[1625].
171. SP16/291, fols230–31.
172. SP70/67, fols151, 153, 157, 164; SP70/72, fol.187.
173. SP70/72, fol.123, 20/6/1564; SP70/67 fol.228, 31/1/1564.
174. SP83/14, fol.35: 25/2/1581.
175. Housden, ‘Merchant Strangers Posts’; Beale, England’s Mail, pp.189–95. CP23/66:
15–25/2/1595.
176. SP50/4, fol.98: 8/6/1548; SP63/41, fol.94: 15/6/1573.
177. BL, Eg. MS, 2804, fol.150: 12/5/1602; Folger, L.a.66, c.1610.
178. LPL, MS 612.
179. Folger, L.d.200, n.d.; Folger, L.a.640:29/9/1615.
180. The Household Papers of Henry Percy Ninth Earl of Northumberland (1564–1632),
ed. G.R. Batho, Camden Society, 93 (1962), pp. 4–6, 24, 35, 36, 48, 49, 57, 59,
64, 70, 76, 87, 91, 95, 100, 148–9.
181. HMC, Report on the Manuscripts of Lord Middleton, Preserved at Wollaton Hall,
Nottinghamshire (1911), p.382.
182. HMC, Rutland, 4, pp.295, 475.
183. Beinecke, MS b.27.
184. The Papers of Sir Richard Grosvenor, First Bart (1585–1645), ed. Richard Cust,
Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 134 (1996), pp.64, 78–95.
185. DRO, 3799M–3/0/1/22: 22/5/1600.
186. Household Accounts and Disbursement Books of Robert Dudley, passim. F. von
Bezold (ed.) (1882–1903) Briefe des Pfalzgrasen Johann Casimir (Munich).
187. Surrey History Centre, Woking, LM/COR/3/33, 5/6/1563; LM/COR/3/139,
17 /7/1573.
188. LM/COR/3/674, n.d.; BL, Eg. MS, 2713, fol. 65r-v: 18/11/1578.
189. SP52/17 fol.18: 28/1/1570; CP157/48–9.
190. BL, Eg. MS, 2804, fol.1, 19/10/1579; CP8/76, 27/11/[1575].
191. Folger, L.a. 48: 7/7/1614; CKS, U1475/C81/217, 7/7/1611.
192. Folger L.d. 15; BL, Eg., 2804, fol.201.
193. SP63/125, fol.37: 12/7/1586.
194. SP1/229, fol.183
195. Housden, ‘Early Posts’, p.717; Crofts, Packhorse, pp.76–7.
196. DRO, 1392M/L1599/12: 3/8/1599.
197. SP52/1, fol.218: 30/9/1559.
198. SP12/266, fol.91; SP15/2, fol.171; SP63/187, fol.126; SP16/489, fol.52;
CP94/60; SP59/37, fol.21; DRO, 1392M/L1599/3; 1392M/L1599/11; 1392M/
L1599/14.
199. SP59/37, fol.127, 19/7/1598.
200. SP12/285/5.
201. CRO, T/(2) 231/2, 3.
202. CKS, U1475/C81/236, 17/8/1612; CKS, U1475/C81/237, 17/8/1612.
203. SP63/239/25: 6/3/1625. SP63/239/33, SP14/185/119.
204. CP55/21.
205. David Cressy (1987) Coming Over: Migration and Communication Between England
and New England in the Seventeenth Century (New York: CUP).
206. James Phinney Baxter (ed.) (1884) Documentary History of the State of Maine:
Volume III. Containing the Trelawny Papers (Portland: Hoyt, Fogg and Donham),
pp.34, 44–6.
268 Notes
207. BL, Eg. MS, 2812, fol.3r and passim. SP70/48, fol.165; CP154/16, 18; BL, Lansd.
MS, 11, fol.68.
208. BL, Eg. MS, 2812, fols9r, 26v.
209. Ibid., fols20r–21v.
210. Ibid., fol.12r.
211. Ibid., fols11r, 12v, 36v, 39v.
212. Ibid., fols26v, 7r–8r, 20r–21v, 57v–58v, 73r–76v, 89r–91r, 102v, 106v–107r, 114r,
117r–118r, 119v, 134r–136r.
213. The Letter Book of John Parkhurst, Bishop of Norwich Compiled During the Years
1571–1575, ed. Ralph A. Houlbrooke, Norfolk Record Society, 43 (1974, 1975),
pp.67, 72.
214. Ibid., p.78 [1555–56].
215. The Correspondence of Lady Katherine Paston, 1603–1627, ed. R. Hughey, Norfolk
Record Society, 14 (1941), p.90 (3/1626?).
216. CKS, U1475/C81/132, 29/4/[1597]; CKS, U1475/C81/262, 6/8/1611.
217. SP10/10/25: 8/9/1550.
218. CP42/40:13/6/1596. Hasler, iii. 345–6.
219. APC, 39, p.504.
220. SP14/185, fols198–200.
221. Daybell (2005) ‘“I wold wyshe my doings myght be . . . secret”: Privacy and the
Social Practices of Reading Women’s Letters in Sixteenth-Century England,’ in
Jane Couchman and Anne Crabb (eds) Women’s Letters Across Europe, 1400–1700:
Form and Persuasion (Aldershot: Ashgate), pp.143–61.
222. CKS, U1475/C81/63, 21/8/1595.
223. Joseph P. Regenstein Library, University of Chicago, Bacon Papers of Redgrave
Hall, 4077 [11/1/1567].
224. Lisle Letters, 4, 1048; BL, Add. 27395, fol.143r–144v.
225. Lisle Letters, 5. 1148.
226. BL, Eg. MS, 2812, fols5r, 21v-22v, 18/8/1600, 22/9/1600.
227. Daybell, Women Letter-Writers, p.139
Thynne, 1575–1611, Wiltshire Record Society, 38, p.30: 5/3/1603.
229. Thomas Birch (1848) The Court and Times of James the First, 2 vols, 2, p.264.
230. BL, Eg. MS, 2713, fol.103v: 2/7/1580.
231. Bodl., Tanner MS, 74, fol.228v.
232. Bodl., Rawl. MS, D, 859, fol.6r, 16/9/1622.
233. CP191/61: 21/10/1605.
234. DRO, 1392M/L1596/17.
235. DRO, 1392M/L1596/20.
236. Bodl., Rawl. MS, C.368, fol.18.
237. CP88/58, 60.
6 Secret Letters
1. Mary E. Hazard (2000) Elizabeth Silent Language (Lincoln and London: U of
Nebraska P); Curtis C. Breight (1996) Surveillance, Militarism and Drama in the
Elizabethan Era (Basingstoke: Macmillan).
2. Ian Arthurson (1991) ‘Espionage and Intelligence from the Wars of the Roses to the
Reformation’, Nottingham Mediaeval Studies, 35, 134–54.
Notes 269
3. SP78/17, fols99r–100v (fol.99r) [24/3]/1587; Bodl., Carte MS, LVI, fol.475

(26/10/1573).
4. SP16/210, fol.6r: 2/1/1632.
5. Sabrina A. Baron argues that early-seventeenth-century ‘manuscript letters did
not resort to codes, ciphers, or shorthand as letters filled with sensitive informa-
tion would do during other periods of political stress such as the Civil Wars’:
(2001) ‘The Guises of Dissemination in Early Seventeenth-Century England:
News in Manuscript and Print’, in Brendan Dooley and Sabrina A. Baron (eds)
The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe (Routledge), pp.41–56 (p.48).
6. BL, Cotton MS, Vespasian C.I, fols23, 25, 26, 30, 34, 36, 43, 50, 53, 56, 60, 63, 65,
69, 71. L&P, I (I): 7, 264, 360, 737; L&P, I (II): 2716, 3009.
7. SP1/225, fol.165; Sheila R. Richards (1974) Secret Writing in the Public Records:
Henry VIII to George II (HMSO), pp.3–16.
8. Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum
Cryptography (Fourth Estate, 1999), pp.1–44.
9. CP124/5.
10. Richards, Secret Writing, pp.71–86; BL, Add. MS, 72399. For early-seventeenth-
century use of ciphers see also BL, Add. MS, 72388 (Trumbull Papers); BL, Add.
MS, 35097: Letter book of John Scudamore, 1635–1639; BL, Stowe MSS, 172, 174
(Edmondes Papers, 1611–1614); John Holt Schooling (1896) ‘Secrets in Cipher’,
Pall Mall Magazine, 8, 119–29, 245–56, 484–9, 608–18.
11. Richards, Secret Writing, pp.120–44; Lois Potter (1989) Secret Rites and Secret
Writing: Royalist Literature, 1641–1660 (Cambridge: CUP). See for example,
SP16/502, fol.81, SP106/10, nos. 5, 7 and 9; SP16/502, fol.82; SP16/502, fol.84;
SP16/506, fol.22; SP21/16, fol.53.
12. Nadine Akkerman, ‘Enigmatic Cultures of Cryptology’, in James Daybell and
Andrew Gordon (eds) Cultures of Correspondence in Early Modern Britain, 1580–
1640 (forthcoming).
13. Robyn Adams and Rosanna Cox (eds) (2011) Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).
14. M. Le Baron Kervyn de Lettenhove (1890) Relations Politiques des Pays-bas et de
l’Angleterre, sous le Règne de Philippe II (Brussels: F. Hayez).
15. SP1/116 fols256r–268v: [12/3]/1537. For a letter in cipher from Wyatt to Cromwell
see, BL, Cotton MS, Vespasian C.VII, fol.24 (11/3/1539). See also, BL, Harl. MS,
282, fols119, 126, 232.
16. BL, Cotton MS, Galba D.III, fols264r–266v (20/11/1588), 267r-v (1588), 272, 273r-v,
275 (28/11/1588).
17. BL, Hargrave MS, 17, fols208r-v: 25/7/1591.
18. Schooling, ‘Secrets in Cipher’, p.252.
19. Bodl., Tanner MS, 79, fols56r–57v [temp. Eliz.].
20. Florence Evans (1923) The Principal Secretary of State: A Survey of the Office from
1558–1680 (Manchester: Manchester UP), pp.7–8, 116, 130, 181, 228–9, 286–90;
Alan Haynes (1992) The Elizabethan Secret Services (Stroud: Sutton Publishing).
Principal Secretary of Estate, & c. 1592’, EHR, 20, 499–508 (p.502).
22. Conyers Read (1926) Mr Secretary Walsingham and the Policy of Queen Elizabeth,
3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press).
23. CP173/137: Henry Brooke to Robert Cecil, 1/10/1594. For collections of ciphers
in the Cecil papers see CP205/131, ‘Key to an Italian cipher [temp Elizabeth];
CP140/54, ‘French cipher key’; CP140/64, ‘The Cipher Mallroy’; CP140/67, cipher
270 Notes
letters endorsed ‘Legate’; CP169/9: ‘Italian cipher keys’; CP329/3, cipher contain-
ing signature of Edward Reynolds, Essex’s secretary.
24. Paul E.J. Hammer (1994) ‘The Uses of Scholarship: The Secretariat of Robert
Devereux, Second Earl of Essex, c.1581–1601’, EHR, 109/430, 26–51 (pp.35, 39–40).
25. Joyce Freedman (1979) ‘Anthony Bacon and His World, 1558–1601’ (Ph.D diss.,
Temple University), p.237.
26. CP47/6, CP47/15, CP47/17, SP12/242, fol.69r-v.
27. Edmund Spenser, Selected Letters and Other Papers, eds Christopher Burlinson and
Andrew Zurcher (Oxford: OUP, 2009), pp.xlvi–xlvii; SP63/82, fols139r–141v.
See also SP63/83, fols11r–12v, an autograph letter from Grey to Walsingham writ-
ten using his usual cipher.
28. In strict technical terms, the words code and cipher have different meanings.
A code is where a word or phrase is replaced with a word, number or symbol; a
cipher refers to a system where individual letters of the alphabet are substituted
rather than whole words. It was common practice throughout the period for
cipher alphabets to be complemented by a series of coded words. For general
works dealing with Renaissance ciphers see, Peter Way (1979) Codes and Ciphers
(Aldus Books); Singh, Code Book, chs.1, 2.; David Kahn (1966) The Codebreakers:
The Story of Secret Writing (Weidenfeld & Nicholson), pp.6–37; William F.
Friedman and Elizabeth S. Friedman (1957) The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined
(Cambridge: CUP), pp.15–50.
29. Johann Tritheimius (1606) Clauis generalis triplex in libro steganograhpicos Iohannis
Trithemii (Darmstadt: Balthasar Hofmann).
30. Johann Trithemius (1518) Polygraphia libri sex (Oppenheim). Roland Behrendt
(1974) ‘Abbot John Trithemius (1462–1516), Monk and Humanist’, Revue
Bénédictine, 1, 212–29; Way, Codes and Ciphers, pp.18–21.
31. Charles J. Mendelsohn (1940) ‘Blais de Vigenère and the “Chiffre Carré”’,
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 82/2, 103–29 (p.120).
32. Giovanni Battista della Porta (1563; repr. 1591) De furtiuis literarum notis, pp.101,
114–33. Mendelsohn, ‘Blais de Vigenère’, p.121. See also, pp.113, 120.
33. Mendelsohn, ‘Blais de Vigenère’, p.110; Blaise de Vigenère (1586) Traicté des chif-
fres, ou secrètes manières d’escrire (Paris), sig.50v; David Kahn (1980) ‘On the Origin
of Polyalphabetic Substitution’ Isis, 71/1, 122–7.
34. (1605) The Twoo Bookes of Francis Bacon. Of The Proficience and Aduancement
of Learning, Diuine and Humane, 2, sigsP4v–Q1r. Francis Bacon (1605) The
Advancement of Learning. See also The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding,
Robert Leslie Ellis and Douglas Denon Heath, 7 vols, (1859–64) I, pp.841–4; The
Advancement of Learning, ed. Michael Kiernan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000),
pp.318–19; Francis Bacon: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers
(Oxford: OUP, 1996), p.232.
35. Francis Bacon (1623) De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum libros IX, pp.279–82.
36. Ibid., p.279.
37. Ibid., p.280.
38. Works of Francis Bacon, I, pp.841–4.
39. Alan Stewart (2011) ‘Francis Bacon’s Bi-literal Cipher and the Materiality of
Early Modern Diplomatic Writing’ in Adams and Cox, Diplomacy and Early
Modern Culture, pp.120–37; Alan Stewart and Heather Wolfe (2004) Letterwriting
in Renaissance England (Washington, DC: Folger), p.156. Cf. Friedman and
Friedman, Shakespearean Ciphers, pp.28–36. An example of a slightly different
kind of biliteral cipher can be found in Porta: Works of Francis Bacon, I, p.842.
Notes 271
40. Bacon, De augmentis scientiarum, p.280.

41. On shorthand see E.H. Butler (1951) The Story of British Shorthand (Pitman); Edwin
Chappell (ed.) (1933) Shorthand Letters of Samuel Pepys. From a volume entitled ‘S.
Pepys’ Official Correspondence 1662–1679’ (Cambridge: CUP); Albert Foyer (1953)
‘Extracts From the Shorthand Diary of the Rev. John Wade, M.A., Minister of
Hammersmith’, Transactions of the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society,
11/2, 168–72.
42. Timothy Bright (1589) Characterie: An Arte of Shorte, Swifte and Secret Writing by
Character, sig.A9v. See also, Patricia Brewerton (2002) ‘“Several keys to ope’ the
character”: The Political and Cultural Significance of Timothy Bright’s “char-
acterie”’, SCJ, 33/4, 945–61. A manuscript copy of Bright’s ‘characterie’ also
survives, BL, Add. MS, 35333, fols70r–74v: ‘Arte of Characterye’, c.1600. Vincent
Skinner recommended Bright’s art of shorthand to Michael Hickes, and sent him
a letter containing an ‘epistle of Titus’ as a specimen: BL, Lansd. MS, 51, fol.55v:
1586.
43. Bright, Characterie, sig.C1r.
44. Ibid., sigsA12v–B3r.
45. Ibid., sigsA12v–B3r. The Bodleian copy of the text consulted contains marginal
annotations in a reader’s hand, registering attempts to expand and personalise
the manual’s vocabulary; the hundreds of manuscript additions made to the
‘Table of English Wordes’ were taken from Peter Bale’s The Writing Schoolmaster
(1590): Madeline Doran (1936) ‘Manuscript Notes in the Bodleian Copy of
Bright’s Characterie’, The Library, 16/4, 418–24.
46. Bright, Characterie, sigsA3r-v.
47. Brewerton, ‘Several Keys’, pp.954–6. See also, Jonathan Goldberg (1990) Writing
Matters: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP),
pp.204–5. This idea of applying the rules of ‘closed’ communications to open or
universal language systems was one that developed more fully during the sev-
enteenth century most notably by the Hartlib circle: Gerhard F. Strasser (1994)
‘Closed and Open Languages: Samuel Hartlib’s Involvement With Cryptology
and Universal Languages’, in Mark Greengrass, Michael Leslie and Timothy
Raylor (eds) Samuel Hartlib and The Universal Reformation: Studies in Intellectual
Communication (Cambridge: CUP), pp.151–62.
48. Bales (1590) The Writing Schoolemaster, sig.B2r.
49. Bales (1597) The Arte of Brachygraphie, sig.Biv; Bales, Writing Schoolemaster,
sigsC2r-v, C4r. The table was absent from the later The Arte of Brachygraphie.
50. Thomas Shelton (1630) Short Writing the Most Exact Methode; idem (1642), A Tutor
to Tachygraphy, or, Short-Writing . . .; idem (1650) Zeiglographia, or a New Art of
Short-Writing; John Wilkins (1641) Mercvry, or the Secret and Swift Messenger . . .;
William Cartwright (1642) Semography, or Short and Swift Writing; Thomas Heath
(1644) Stenographie or The Art of Short-Writing; Jeremiah Rich (1646) Charactery
or, A Most Easie and Exact Method of Short and Swift Writing; idem (1669) The Pens
Dexterity Compleated: Or Mr Riches Short-Hand Now Perfectly Taught.
51. John Willis (1602) The Art of Stenographie . . .
52. Art of Stenographie was reprinted in 1617, 1618, 1622, 1628, 1632, 1638, 1639,
1644, 1647. John Willis (1618) Stenographia; idem (1622, 1628, [1647]) The School-
Maister . . .
53. John E. Bailey (1879) ‘Dee and Trithemius’s “Steganography”’, N&Q, 11, 401–2,
422–3. SP12/27, fol.264, 16/2/1563 (letter from Dee to William Cecil); Bodl.,
Ashmolean MS, 434.iii (a manuscript copy of part of Steganographia).
272 Notes
54. Ciphers and secret writing were also printed in the mid- to late-seventeenth
century for their fascination value linked as they were to contemporary politics
and intrigue. Richard Browne’s publication in 1645 of The Lord Digbies designe to
betray Abingdon, carryed on for divers vveeks by an intercourse of letters, for exam-
ple, included ‘the cipher which the Lord Digby sent him’. Political interest and
entertainment aside, there is also a sense in which the publication of ciphers in
popular literature of this kind encouraged emulation. John Cotgrave in his Wits
Interpreter (1655) included ‘Cardinal Richelieu’s Key, his manner of writing Letters
by Cyphers’, pp.123–4, 125–7.
55. On medieval and Renaissance books of secrets see William Eamon (1994) Science
and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP).
56. Girolamo Ruscelli (1560) The Second Part of the Secrets of the Reuerend Maister Alexis
of Piemont, pp.26–7. The text appeared in multiple editions.
57. Thomas Lupton [(1579]) A Thousand Notable Things, p.150.
58. Hugh Plat (1594) The Iewell House . . ., pp.13–15.
59. William Phillip (1596) A Booke of Secrets . . ., sig.Biv.
60. Wecker, Eighteen Books, pp.268–71. See also, Francisco Dickinson (1649) A Precious
Treasury . . ., sig.A2v. A copy was also printed by La Fountaine.
61. The largest collection of cipher alphabets is SP106/1–10, Secretaries of State, State
Papers Foreign, Ciphers, Elizabeth I to 1791. Within this category SP106/1–3
cover Elizabeth I’s reign, 106/4 (James I), 106/5 (Charles I), 106/6 (Charles II),
106/7–8 (Anne to George II), 106/10 (Italian and other ciphers) which is a col-
lection of mainly alphanumeric cipher code tables and keys to ciphers, both in
manuscript and printed forms.
62. BL, Cotton MS, Galba D.III, fol.273: 28/11/1588; BL, Hargrave MS, 17, fol.209v,
25/7/1591.
63. See for example, BL, Add. MS, 35831, fol.344r; BL, Lansd. MS, 111, fols70, 76; BL,
Cotton MS, Galba B.XII, fol.170v, ‘Cyphers for Dymmock’; BL, Add. MS, 35831,
fols342r-v.
64. BL, Cotton MS, Galba E.VI, fols365r–366r, n.d. See also ‘Secretary Walsingham’s
cipher to Sir Edw[ard] Stafford in ao 1588’ (fols376r–377v); SP78/13, fols101r–102v:
Stafford to Walsingham, 10/4/1585. BL, Cotton MS, Galba CVI.1 fol.155r,
‘A Cipher for Corbett’; BL, Add. MS, 33594, fols34r, 39r, 28 Nov. 1583; BL,
Add. 33591, fols166r–167v: ‘[Thomas] Rand[olph’s] Cipher Aug. 31, 1559’; BL,
Add. MS, 4277, fols200r–1v, ‘Sir Henry Wotton’s Cipher’; Bodl., Tanner MS, 79,
fols56v–7r.
65. BL, Cotton MS, Galba E.VI, fols365r-v.
66. BL, Add. MS, 39853, fols15r-v, [1605–1607]. Cf. BL, Add. MS, 4277, fols200r–1v.
67. Schooling, ‘Secrets in Cipher’, p.254.
68. CP35/112: 30/10–9/11/1595.
69. Richards, Secret Writing, plates II, III; SP53/32: Cipher alphabet of Mary Queen of
Scots, 1586; BL, Add. MS, 33594, fol.34r: ‘alphabet contained in the deciphering
of a copy of a letter from Seton to Mary, Queen of Scots, 28/11/1583 (see also
fols58r, 39r).
70. SP106/10/9: 22/9/1645.
71. HMC, Report on the Manuscripts of Lord De L’Isle & Dudley, Preserved at Penshurst
Place, 6 vols (1935–66), 2, pp.253, 273 (19/3/1597, 30/4/1597).
72. BL, Add. MS, 33592, fols116r-v: Thomas Barnabie (alias Randolph) to Sir Ralph
Sadler and Sir James Croft, 19/11/1559. See also, CP178/69: [1598].
Notes 273
73. See for example, BL, Cotton MS, Caligula E.XII, fols6r–7v: ‘Queen Elizabeth’s
Instructions to her Ambassador in France’, 28/2/1559; BL, Cotton MS, Galba D.I,
fols49r-v: Buckhurst to Walsingham, 8/6/1587.
74. CP173/114: 7/8/1596.
75 SP1/143, fols106r–16v: 19/2/1539; BL, Lansd. MS, 102, fol.37: 13/11/1562.
76. SP84/32, fol.19r. The cipher symbols (for Sir Thomas Morgan and Lord
Willoughby) both occur in Bodley’s cipher of 28/11/1588: BL, Cotton MS, Galba
D.III, fol.273.
77. BL, Add. MS, 33594, fols86r (Curle’s cipher), 85r (Curle to Baldwin, 20/9/1584),
87v (A copy of Curle’s letter). See also, CP46/60: Thomas Nichol’s Letters,
26/11/1596.
78. SP12/29, fols70r–73v: Thomas Rogers to Walsingham, 18/10/1585. See also,
SP12/29, fols69r–70v, SP12/29, fols71r–72v, SP12/29, fols77r–78v, SP12/29, fols84r–
85v, SP12/29, fols108r–109v.
79. SP12/248, fols49r–50v: R.H. to earl of Huntingdon, 14/3/1594.
80. BL, Cotton MS, Caligula BVIII, fols286r–287v.
81. SP12/103, fols118r-v, SP12/108, fol.83r-v: Sir Francis Englefield to William Cotton,
28/5/1575, 2/6/1576; SP12/107, fols60r-v, SP12/107, fols75r–76v, SP12/108, fols89r–
90v, SP12/108, fols103r–104v, SP12/108, fols163r–164v, SP12/108, fols165r–166v,
SP12/108, fols171r–172v: countess of Northumberland to William Cotton from
Liege, 21/1/1576, 11/2/1576, 9/6/1576, 26/6/1576, 7/8/1576, 7/8/1576, 8/8/1576,
16/8/1576.
82. SP83/7, fols39r–40v: Wilson to Walsingham, 30/6/1578.
83. The fullest account of Phelippes’ career is William Richardson, ‘Phelippes,
Thomas (c.1556–1625x7)’, ONDB. See also, Hasler, 3, 219–20; Paul E. J. Hammer
(1999) The Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics: The Political Career of Robert Devereux,
2nd earl of Essex, 1585–1597 (Cambridge: CUP), passim.
84. SP12/187, fols133r–137v: Thomas Rogers [alias Nicholas Berden] to Walsingham,
[3?]/1586. Deciphered by Phelippes.
85. List and Analysis of State Papers Foreign Series, Elizabeth I, vol V July 1593–
December 1594, ed. R.B. Wernham (HMSO, 1989), 728; SP97/2, fols291r–292v:
Thomas Phelippes to Burghley, 10/7/1594, which enclosed SP97/2, fols283r–284v,
10/5/1594, a decipher of SP97/2, fols281r–282v: Edward Barton to Burghley,
10/5/1594.
86. CSP Venetian, 1621–23, p.289; CSP Venetian, 1623–25, pp.600, 601, 604, 626; CSP
Venetian, 1625–26, pp.5–6. SP14/184 fol.58r–59v: Phelippes to Conway, 23/2/1625.
87. CP38/97: Phelippes to Robert Cecil, 6/3/1597.
88. BL, Cotton MS, Caligula B.VIII, fols327r–332v. On Dr William Gifford, see Haynes,
Elizabethan Secret Services, pp.41, 47, 62, 64, 72, 94; E.C. Butler and J.H. Pollen
(1904) ‘Dr William Gifford in 1586’, The Month, 103, 243–58.
89. BL, Cotton MS, Caligula B.VIII, fols332v, 327v, 329v.
90. BL, Cotton MS, Caligula C.II, fols76r–77v: ‘Extract out of ye lres in ciphre 1570
1571 Concerning ye Scott Queen and ye D. of Norfolk’; BL, Add. MS, 48049,
fols255r–56v.
91. SP78/18, fols52r–56v: Stafford to Elizabeth I, 25/2/1588.
92. SP12/192, fols40r-v: examination of William Wake, 12/5/1586; Bodl., Tanner MS,
79, fols185r–186v: ‘Articles ministred to William Holt 1584 29 Eliz.’
93. Margaret Ferguson (1998) ‘The Authorial Ciphers of Aphra Behn’, in Steven
N. Zwicker (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1650–1740
(Cambridge: CUP), pp.225–49 (p.227).
274 Notes
94. For Anne’s ciphers see, 651, fols108r, 328r, 653, 343r (in Greek) and LPL, 649,
fol.23 (in Latin); The Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, 7 vols
(1861–74), I, p.112. On Anne Bacon’s use of cipher, see Gemma Allen (2009)
‘Education, Piety and Politics: The Cooke Sisters and Women’s Agency, c.1526–
1610’ (D.Phil thesis, University of Oxford), pp.129–31. On Morison’s use of
Greek transliterations see SP68/6, fols213r–214v, SP68/10, fols24r–25v, SP68/10,
fols37r–38v, SP68/11, fols53r–54v, SP68/12, fols26r-v, SP18/12, fols169r–170v.
95. CP123/132: Roger Williams [alias of John Ball] to Mary Phelippes, 10–20/12/1607;
HMC, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Most Honourable The Marquess of Salisbury,
Preserved at Hatfield House Hertfordshire, 24 vols (1883–1973), 19, pp.386–7;
CP119/65: William Roberts to Mary Phelippes, 19–29/12/1607 [in same hand
as previous letter]; CP197/41: Mary Phelippes to Salisbury, [c.2/1609]; CP/
P.1144: petition of Mary Phillips to Salisbury [12/1607]. Richardson, ‘Phelippes,
Thomas’, ODNB.
96. Daybell (2004) ‘“Suche newes as on the Quenes hye wayes we have mett:’ The
News Networks of Elizabeth Talbot, countess of Shrewsbury (c.1527–1608)’, in
Daybell (ed.) Women and Politics in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate),
pp.114–31 (p.116).
97. The Letters of the Lady Brilliana Harley, Wife of Sir Robert Harley, ed. T.T. Lewis,
Camden Society, 58 (1854), pp.11, 37, 40, 55, 191–9. Jacqueline Eales (2004)
‘Patriarchy, Puritanism and Politics: The Letters of Lady Brilliana Harley (1598–
1643)’, in Daybell (ed.) Early Modern Women’s Letter-Writing, pp.143–58 (p.148).
98. Guildhall Library, London, MS 33011/4 fols184, 194v. Bernard Capp review
of Daybell, Women Letter-Writers (review no. 654): http://www.history.ac.uk/
reviews/paper/capp3.html. [accessed 15 February 2012]
99. Madeleine Foisil (1989) ‘The Literature of Intimacy’, in Roger Chartier (ed.)
History of Private Life: III. Passions of the Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
UP), pp.327–61 (p.352).
Thynne, 1575–1611, Wiltshire Record Society, 38, pp.37–8: n.d. [1607?].
101. Folger, L.a.912: 29/11/1599.
102. Daybell, Women Letter-Writers, ch.8.
103. Folger, Add. MS, 1006: Leicester to Elizabeth, 3/8/1588. SP84/9, fol.38r: Elizabeth to
Leicester, 19/7/1586. See also SP15/17, fols83r-v, fols205r-v, SP15/20, fols21r, 173r-v,
SP15/28/1, fols47r-v, 92r, SP84/8, fols292r–294v, SP84/18, fols211r–212v, 217r–218v,
SP15/30, fols84r-v; CSP Dom, Addenda 1566–1579, p.575. Cf. SP84/8, fols78r–80v.
104. SP/12/91, fols100r–101v; SP12/91, fol.116r; SP12/142, fols18r–19v; SP12/142,
fols73r–74v; SP12/89, fols142r–145v; SP12/92, fols42r-v; SP/12/92, fols49r–50v.
105. CP134/49 (1604?), CP134/48 (2/1605), CP134/89 (23/1/1606). See also CP134/53,
55, 56, 59, 66, 71, 72, 79, 84, 87, 91, 98, 116, 128, 131, 132, 133, 140, 141, 143,
145, 146, 147, 149, 152, 154, 155. Cf. letters before James ascended to the
English throne: CP134/4, 28, 35, CP135/80.
106. Letters of King James VI&I, ed. G.P.V. Akrigg (Berkeley: U of California Press,
1984), pp.221–2, pp.253–5, 263–4, n.1; BL, Cotton MS, Vespasian F.III, fol.76.
See Alan Stewart (2004) ‘Government by Beagle: The Impersonal Rule of James
VI and I’, in Erica Fudge (ed.) Renaissance Beasts: of Animals, Humans, and Other
Wonderful Creatures (Champaign, IL: U of Illinois P), pp.101–15.
107. Letters of King James, pp.372–3, 374, 386–7, 409–10, 418–19, 423–4, 425–6,
431–2, 436–42. He addressed his son and Buckingham together as ‘My sweet
boys’ (Letters, passim).
Notes 275
108. SP10/8, fols8r–11v (fol.8v): 7/7/1549. On another occasion Paget wrote to

Somerset partly in cipher: SP68/3, fol.155r–156v; copies BL, Cotton MS, Titus BV,
fols30r–31r and Galba B.XII, fols41r–41v.
109. Akkerman, ‘Enigmatic Cultures of Cryptology’.
110. BL, Add. MS, 23212, fols199 (Anne Haynes), 193r–93v (Frances Wesley), n.d.
111. Lisle Letters, 4: 1062, 1070.
112. Helen Wilcox (1992) ‘Private Writing and Public Function: Autobiographical
Texts by Renaissance Englishwomen’, in S.P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne
Davies (eds), Gloriana’s Face: Women, Public and Private in the English Renaissance
(Hemel Hempstead: Harvester), pp.47–62 (p.47).
113. BL, Eg. MS, 1527 [c.1685]. See also BL, Add. MS, 27427, fol.118v.
114. SP12/155, fols44r–45v: confession of a servant of Sir Thomas Copley’s, 27/8/1582;
SP12/156, fols31r-v: W. Williams to Walsingham, 15/12/1582; SP12/203, fol.54:
Copies of letters sent by Thomas Phellipes to Gilbert Gifford, 7/9/1587;
SP12/234, fol.77r: Thomas Cely to Burghley, 8/12/1590; SP14/17, fol.48r:
Examination of Thomas Strange, Jesuit, 12/12/1605. CP113/34: ‘Interrogatories
to be ministered to Tho. Strange, alias Hungerford [c.2/1606]; CP110/8: Henry
Wright to Salisbury, 12/2/1606.
115. CP110/16 [2/2/1606]. See also SP14/216/2, fol.201.
116. The Autobiography of an Elizabethan, ed. Philip Caraman (Longmans, Green and
Co., 1952), pp.116–18.
117. Ibid., p.118.
118. Ibid., pp.118–19.
119. Ibid., p.118. See also, pp.92–3.
120. SP15/29, fols50r, 52r, 59r , 65r, 70r, 84r, 98r.
121. CP63/47: Andrew Facy to the Lord Admiral, 13/8/1598. CP167/22: Relation of
William Pittes [1592].
122. SP12/241/115, fol.176r: 5/4/1592. See also, SP12/248, fol.138r: Examination on
interrogatories of Laurence Minter, 8/4/1594.
123. SP12/271, fol.61r-v: 24/6/1599.
124. Lisle Letters, 6, p.147.
125. BL, Add. MS, 39829 (Tresham MSS), fols190r-v, 192r, 71r; HMC, Various, 3 (1904),
p.v; Gerard Kilroy (2005) Edmund Campion: Memory and Transcription (Aldershot:
Ashgate), ch.5.
126. Daybell (2005) ‘“I wold wyshe my doings myght be . . . secret”: Privacy and the
Social Practices of Reading Women’s Letters in Sixteenth-Century England’, in
Ann Crabbe and Jane Couchman (eds) Women’s Letters Across Europe, 1400–1700:
Form and Persuasion (Aldershot: Ashgate), pp.143–61.
127. BL, Cotton MS, Caligula C.IV, fols87v (Sir William Drury to Burghley, 19/5/1573)
88r (deciphered letter).
128. SP12/253, fols39v–40r: Examination of George, son of Thomas Huxley, 2/7/1595;
SP12/240, fol.234r [1591], SP12/242, fol.161r; SP12/243, fols245r-v, 248r. See also,
SP59/16, fols186r–187v: Lord Hunsdon to William Cecil, 30/1/1570.
129. Autobiography of an Elizabethan, p.92.
130. SP63/207/2, fols30r–31v: Sir Nicholas Walsh to Sir Robert Cecil, 4/3/1600.
131. On the Catholic communications networks see, John Bossy (1964) ‘Rome
and the Elizabethan Catholics: A Question of Geography’, HJ, 7/1, 135–49;
A.J. Loomie (1963) The Spanish Elizabethans: The English Exiles at the Court of
Philip II (Burns & Oates); R. Lechat (1914) Les Refugiés anglais dans les Pays-bas
espagnols durant le règne d’Elizabeth (Louvain: Bureau du Recueil).
276 Notes
132. On Verstegan see, Paul Arblaster (2004) Antwerp & The World: Richard Verstegan
and the International Culture of Catholic Reformation (Leuven: Leuven UP); idem,
‘Verstegan [Rowlands], Richard (1548x50–1640)’, ODNB; A. G. Petti (1957) ‘A Study
of the Life and Writings of Richard Verstegan’ (MA diss., University of London).
133. The Letters and Despatches of Richard Verstegan (c.1550–1640), ed. Anthony G.
Petti, Catholic Record Society, 52 (1959), xv–xxii. See also, Letters of Thomas
Fitzherbert, 1608–1610, ed. L. Hicks, Catholic Record Society, 41 (1948); Letters
of William Allen and Richard Barret, 1572–1598, ed. P. Renold, Catholic Record
Society, 58 (1966); Letters and Memorials of Father Robert Persons, S.J., Vol.1 (to
1588), ed. L. Hicks, Catholic Record Society, 39 (1942); John B. Wainewright
(1926) ‘Some Letters and Papers of Nicolas Sander, 1562–1580’, Catholic Record
Society, 26, Miscellanea, 13 (1926), pp.1–57; Patrick Ryan ‘Some Correspondence
of Cardinal Allen, 1579–85; From the Jesuit Archives’, Catholic Record Society,
9, Miscellanea, 7 (1911), pp.12–105; A.H. Dodd (1939) ‘Correspondence of
the Owens of Plas Du 1573–1604’, Transactions of the Caernarvonshire Historical
Society, pp.47–54.
134. SP12/249, fols22r–24v (24r): Further confession of Henry Walpole, 1594;
SP12/249, fols75r-v: Confession of Henry Walpole, 1594.
135. Letters and Despatches of Richard Verstegan, pp.xxi–xxiii, 87: Verstegan to Persons,
29/10/1592.
136. CP29/12: to ‘Mr Peter Hallins’, 2/12/1594.
137. Letters and Despatches of Richard Verstegan, pp.xxi–xxiii. CP26/10: Examination
of Simon Knowles, 2/4/1592; CP26/5: Matters disclosed by Robert Barwts, priest
[31/3/1594]; SP12/249, fol.28r: Examination of Henry Walpole before Attorney
General Coke, 17/6/1594.
138. CP26/10: Examination of Simon Knowles, 2/4/1592. On Stanley, see Rory
Rapple, ‘Stanley, Sir William (1548–1630)’, ODNB.
139. CP26/1: The Examination of Simon Knowles, Cutler, 30/3/1594. For another
copy see SP12/248, fols102r–103v. See also, SP12/248, fols181r–184v, 207r–208v,
244r–245v, SP12/249, fols6r-v, 25r-v, 28r: Examinations of Henry Walpole, Jesuit.
140. Marie B. Rowlands (1985; 1996) ‘Recusant Women 1560–1640’, in Mary Prior
(ed.) Women in English Society 1500–1800 (Routledge), pp.149–80.
141. SP14/216/1, fols22r–23v, 112r-v; SP14/16, fols84r–85v, 160ar-v; SP/17, fols19r–20v;
Autobiography of an Elizabethan, p.208.
142. SP14/18, fol.167r–168v, SP14/216/2, fols139r–140v, 141r-v, 152r–153v, 201r–
203v, 203r–204v, 206r–207v, 208r–210v, 211r–212v, 213r; SP14/19, fols17r–20v,
25r–26v; SP14/20, fols29r–31v, 91r-v; CP115/13. Anne Vaux also corresponded
with Guy Fawkes, whom she sheltered at her house in Enfield Chase: SP14/16,
fols17r-v.
143. Daybell (2011) ‘Women, News and Intelligence Networks in Elizabethan
England’, in Robyn Adams and Rosanna Cox (eds) Diplomacy and Early Modern
Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), pp.101–19 (pp.111–13).
144. Claire Walker (2000) ‘Prayer, Patronage and Political Conspiracy: English Nuns
and the Restoration’, HJ, 43/1, 1–23; Nadine Akkerman (2011) ‘The Postmistress,
the Diplomat, and a Black Chamber?: Alexadrine of Taxis, Sir Balthazar Gerbier
and the Power of Postal Control’, in Adams and Cox, Diplomacy and Early Modern
Culture, pp.172–88.
145. A.E. MacRobert (2002) Mary Queen of Scots and The Casket Letters (I.B. Tauris).
146. SP53/17 fol.3r–4v: 9/1/1586.
147. BL, Cotton MS, Caligula C.VII, fols338r-v.
Notes 277
7 Copying, Letter-Books and the Scribal Circulation

of Letters
1. Harold Love (1983) Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford:
Clarendon Press); H.R. Woudhuysen (1996) Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation
of Manuscripts, 1558–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press); Arthur F. Marotti (1995)
Manuscript, Print and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca: Cornell UP); Peter Beal
(1998) ‘“Hoping they shall only come to your merciful eyes”: Sidney’s Letter to
Queen Elizabeth and Its Transmission’, in In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts and their
Makers in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press), pp.109–46,
274–80; Andrew Gordon (2007) ‘“A fortune of Paper Walls”: The Letters of
Francis Bacon and the Earl of Essex’, ELR, 37/3, 319–36; idem (2010) ‘Copycopia,
or the Place of Copied Correspondence in Manuscript Culture: A Case Study’ in
James Daybell and Peter Hinds (eds) Material Readings of Early Modern Culture,
1580–1730: Texts and Social Practices (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), pp.65–82;
Daybell (2010) ‘Women, Politics and Domesticity: The scribal Publication of Lady
Rich’s Letter to Elizabeth I’, in Anne Lawrence-Mathers and Phillipa Hardman
(eds) Women and Writing, c.1340–c.1650: The Domestication of Print Culture
(Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer), pp.111–30.
2. Steven W. May (2009) ‘Some Renaissance Scribal Communities’ (Paper Delivered
at the Annual Conference of the Renaissance Society of America, Chicago).
3. Beal’s definition of ‘Letterbooks’ illustrates the fluidity of the term as applied
contemporaneously, as well as by modern scholars: Dictionary, pp.226–7. A.R.
Braunmuller (ed.) (1983) A Seventeenth-Century Letter-Book: A Facsimilie Edition
Folger MS V.a.321 (Newark, DE: U of Delaware P).
4. Strictly the term letter-book refers to a manuscript book employed for the copy-
ing of incoming and outgoing correspondence (Beal, Dictionary, pp.226–7), but
the terms copy-book, register, journal, entry book or paper-book represent manu-
scripts used for similar functions.
5. Gary Schneider (2008) ‘Libellous Letters in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England’,
Modern Philology, 105/3, 475–509.
6. Giles Constable (1976) Letters and Letter Collections (Typologie des Sources du
Moyen Age Occidental, 17), pp.28, 56–62; John Taylor (1980) ‘Letters and Letter
Collections in England, 1300–1420’, Nottingham Medieval Studies, 24, 57–70
(pp.62–4); W.A. Pantin (1933) ‘English Monastic Letter Books’, in J.G. Edwards,
V.H. Galbraith and E.F. Jacob (eds) Historical Essays in Honour of James Tait
(Manchester), pp.201–2; E. Rickert (1927) ‘Documents and Records: A Leaf from
a Fourteenth-Century Letter Book’, Modern Philology, 25, 249–55.
7. Constable, Letters, p.60.
8. Ffiona Swabey (1998) ‘The Letter Book of Alice de Bryene and Alice de Sutton’s
List of Debts’, Nottingham Mediaeval Studies, 42, 121–45 (p.136).
9. A.E.B. Owen (1973) ‘Sir John Wolley’s Letter-Book as Latin Secretary to Elizabeth I’,
Archives, 11/49, 16–18; Florence M.G. Evans (1923) The Principal Secretary of State: A
Survey of the Office From 1558 to 1680 (Manchester: MUP), pp.168–73. BL, Add. MS,
35840, BL, Royal MS, 13 B.I (Ascham’s letter-books, 1554–68); SP104/164 (Smith’s
Foreign Entry book, 1603–07); BL, Add. MS, 38597 (Reade’s Letter-Book, 1619–24);
BL, Add. MS, 38669 (Weckherlin); Leo Miller ([1992]) John Milton’s Writings in the
Anglo-Dutch Negotiations, 1651–1654 (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne UP).
10. BL, Add. MS, 38137, 1591–92.
11. Bodl., Rawl. MS, B285: Letterbook of Peter Edgecombe, 1569–93.
278 Notes
12. National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, MS 4919D (Letter-book of Thomas

Bentham, Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, 1560–61); CUL, Ee ii. 34 (Letter-book
of John Parkhurt, Bishop of Norwich, 1571–75); Bodl., Rawl. MS, C368, fols1–18
(Letter-book of Bishop Wren of Norwich and Ely, 1636–40).
13. For examples of Factors’ letter-books, see BL, Eg. MSS, 2121–23, 2086.
14. Queens’ College, Cambridge, MS 34, fols47r, 50v.
15. St John’s College, Cambridge, MS S.34, fols24r, 32r-v, 32v–33r, 33v, 34r: first quarter
of the seventeenth century, and then c.1650.
16. Frances Harris (1998) ‘The Letterbooks of Mary Evelyn’, EMS, 7, pp.202–
15; Douglas Chambers (2003) ‘“Excuse These Impertinences”: Evelyn in his
Letterbooks’, in Frances Harris and Michael Hunter (eds) John Evelyn and His
Milieu (British Library), pp.21–36; BL, Sloane MS, 922.
17. See, for example, The Letter Book of Robert Joseph, Monk-Scholar of Evesham and
Gloucester College, Oxford, 1530–3, eds Hugh Aveling and W.A. Pantin (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1967); The Letter Book of John Parkhurst, Bishop of Norwich
Compiled During the Years 1571–1575, ed. Ralph A. Houlbrooke, Norfolk Record
Society, 43 (1974, 1975); ‘The Letter-Book of Thomas Bentham, Bishop of
Coventry and Lichfield 1560–1561’, eds Rosemary O’Day and Joel Berlatsky,
Camden Miscellany, 22 (1979), pp.113–238; The Letter Books of Sir William
Brereton, 1645–1646 ed. R.N. Dore, 2 vols, Record Society of Lancashire and
Cheshire, 123, 128 (1984, 1990).
18. BL, Add. MS, 4296. Venn, Alumni Cantabriensis, 2, p.175.
19. ‘The Letters of William Lord Paget of Beaudesert, 1547–63’, eds Barrett L. Beer and
Sybil M. Jack, Camden Miscellany, 25 (1974), pp.1–141 (p.100).
Principal Secretary of Estate, & c.1592’, EHR, 20, 499–508 (pp.501–2, 503–4).
Bodl., Tanner MS, 80 fols91–94.
21. Robert Beale (1592) ‘A Treatise of the Office of a Councellor and Principall
Secretarie to her Ma[jes]tie’ printed in C. Read, Mr Secretary Walsingham and the
Policy of Queen Elizabeth, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), 1, pp.423–43
(pp.427, 428). BL, Add. MS, 48148, fols3v–9v.
22. Peele ([1554]) Maner and Fourme, sig.Aiiiv. Peele’s ([1569]) The Pathe Waye to
Perfectnes, in Th’Accomptes of Debitour, and Creditour refers to ‘the booke or copies
of letters’ (sig.Avir). [Hugh Oldcastle] (1588) A Briefe Instruction and Maner How to
Keepe Bookes of Accompts, sigsF6r–F8r.
23. Cecil H. Clough (1976) ‘The Cult of Antiquity: Letters and Letter Collections’, in
Cultural Aspects of the Italian Renaissance: Essays in Honour of Paul Oskar Kristeller
(Manchester: Manchester UP), pp.33–67. Lisa Jardine (1993) Erasmus, Man of
Letters: The Construction of Charisma in Print (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP); Roger
Ascham ([1576]) Disertissimi viri Rogeri Aschami, Angli.
24. DRO, D3799/ Add. 3, Box, 14706/ folder 3.
25. BL, Eg. MS, 2121: journals of voyages to the East Indies.
26. BL, Add. MS, 27632, fols95v–7r, 101r–2r, 103r–5v.
27. Bodl., Rawl. MS, D1286, fols81v–86r: 1605–06.
28. Bodl., Rawl. MS, D47, fols4v, 15v, 16r, 48v, 49r, 51r, 51v: Commonplace book of
Daniel Featley. On Featley, see Arnold Hunt, ‘Featley, Daniel (1582–1645)’, ODNB.
29. Letter Book of John Parkhurst, p.19.
30. Bodl., Rawl. MS, D.214, fols1–41, 81v, 48r, 52r–66v, 82r–116r.
31. The Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford, ed. D.J.H. Clifford (Stroud: Sutton Publishing,
1990; reprinted 1994), passim; The Private Life of an Elizabethan Lady: The Diary
Notes 279
of Lady Margaret Hoby, 1599–1605, ed. Joanna Moody (Stroud: Sutton, 1998),
passim; L.J. Redstone (trans) (1929) ‘The Diary of Adam Winthrop’, in Winthrop
Papers, vol. 1, 1498–1628 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society), pp.64–105,
passim.
32. BL, Add. MS, 72433. Leonard Foster (1993) ‘The Weckherlin Papers’, BLJ, 19/2,
133–41.
33. BL, Add. MS, 20921.
34. BL, Add. MS, 72445.
35. BL, Add. MS, 4296; BL, Sloane MS, 922.
ed. Vivienne Larminie, Camden Miscellany, 30 (1990), pp.149–269 (pp.163, 188,
194, 198, 264).
37. BL, Add. MS, 36293, fol.1; BL, Add. MS, 52798A, folsiii, iv.
38. Adam Smyth (2008) ‘Almanacs, Annotators, and Life-Writing in Early Modern
England’, ELR, 38/2, 200–44.
39. BL, Add. MS, 49609 A, 1599–1603.
40. BL, Add. MS, 48166.
41. Letter Book of John Parkhurst, pp.17–19.
42. BL, Add. MS, 49609 A.
43. Bodl., Rawl. MS, C439.
44. See, for example, BL, Add. MS, 32464 (Letter-book of Sir John Holles, 1598–1617);
BL, Add. MS, 36451 (Letter-book of Sir Walter Aston, 1620–1625); BL, Sloane MS,
922 (Letter-book of Nehemiah Wallington, 1650–58).
45. BL, Add. MS, 48591, fols10–13 (1588–1604).
46. BL, Add. MS, 70505, fols1v–3v: John Holles’s letter-book 1597–1614.
47. National Library of Wales, MS 4919D, fol.52.
48. Bodl., Rawl. MS, C368, fols1–18.
49. BL, Add. MS 36778, fols14v, 15r, 15v, 16r, 16v, 17r, 17v; The Letter Book of Thomas
Hill, 1660–1661, ed. June Palmer, Devon and Cornwall Record Society, 51 (2008),
pp.lxx–lxxii.
50. BL, Add. MS, 10615: letter-book of William Jessop, Secretary of the Providence
Island Company, 1634–41; BL, Add. MS, 63854 A and B (papers relating to the
letter-book of William Jessop).
51. Shorthand Letters of Samuel Pepys. From a volume entitled ‘S. Pepys’ Official
Correspondence 1662–1679, ed. Edwin Chappell (Cambridge: CUP, 1933), p.x;
Bodl., Rawl. MS, D327, fol.11r-v, n.d.
52. BL, Add. MS, 36450. See also, BL, Add. MSS, 36499, 36451.
53. BL, Add. MS, 36450. Cf. BL, Add. MS, 36449. Bodl., Rawl., MS 439, fols1–91.
54. BL, Add. 18642, fols286r–293v: letter-book of Sir Isaac Wake, 1615–23. Cf. BL,
Add. MSS, 18639–18641, 34310, and 34311. Bodl., Rawl. MS, D666, fols47–90.
55. BL, Add. MSS, 47788, 47789: 1630–37.
56. BL, Add. MS, 48166: Letter-book of John Baron Digby, 1622–29.
57. BL, Add. MS, 52798; BL, Add. MSS, 34310, 34311; BL, Sloane MS, 922; BL, Add.
MSS, 78298, 78299.
58. LPL, MS 597 (1579–80).
59. BL, Add. MS, 37818 (1619–24).
60. BL, Add. MS, 32323: 1571–81.
61. ‘Letters of William Lord Paget’, p.49. See also, pp.53, 55, 81, 140–1.
62. Folger, X.d.477 (22). Alan Stewart and Heather Wolfe (2004) Letterwriting
in Renaissance England (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library),
280 Notes
pp.182–3. Cousins in Love: The Letters of Lydia DuGard, 1665–1672, ed.

Nancy Taylor (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies,
2003).
63. BL, Lansd. MS, 157: Julius Caesar’s Copy Book, 1580–1617.
64. BL, Add. MS, 37818: Register of Lord Zouche Warden of Cinque Ports 1618–24;
BL, Eg. MS, 2584: Letters etc. to Lord Zouche as Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports,
1615–36.
65. BL, Eg. MS, 2812: Letter Book of Edward Zouche, Baron Zouche, 31/7/1600–
28/4/1601 (fol.2r). On Zouche see GEC, XII (2), pp.949–54; Louis A. Knafla,
‘Zouche, Edward la, eleventh Baron Zouche (1556–1625)’, ODNB; Hasler, 2,
pp.458–60.
66. BL, Eg. MS, 2812, fol.2r.
67. Ibid., fol.2v: Zouche to Anne Dudley, countess of Warwick, 31/7/1600; Zouche to
Margaret Clifford, countess of Cumberland, 8/8/1600.
68. Ibid., fol.61v: 19/11/1600.
69. Ibid., fol.141v: n.d.; The Visitation of Shropshire Taken in the Year 1623, ed. George
Grazebrook and John Paul Rylands, The Publications of the Harleian Society, 29
(1889), p.324.
70. BL, Eg., MS, 2812, fol.113r, 7/3/1601.
71. Letter Book of John Parkhurst, p.18.
72. BL, Cotton MS, Galba B.XII; BL, Cotton MS, Caligula E.IV, fols201–18.
73. Northampton RO, Fitzwilliam of Milton: letter-book of Sir William Paget, 1547–
49. ‘Letters of William Lord Paget’, pp.7–9. See also B.L. Beer, ‘The Paget Letter
Book’, Manuscripta, 14 (1970), 176–9.
74. Daybell, Women Letter-Writers in Tudor England (Oxford: OUP), p.36.
75. Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby, p.162.
76. Folger, V.b.198, fols3r–4r.
77. Richard T. Spence (1997) Lady Anne Clifford: Countess of Pembroke, Dorset and
Montgomery (1590–1676) (Stroud: Sutton), pp.177–9.
78. BL, Add. MS, 78438, 1635–1709. Harris, ‘Letterbooks of Mary Evelyn’.
79. Chambers, ‘Evelyn in his Letterbooks’; BL, Sloane MS, 922.
80. BL, Add. MS, 78439.
81. Newberry Library, Case MS. E5.M 3827: Letters from Relations to Esther Masham,
Book 1, 1722; Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies, Panshanger MSS, D/EP
F228–235: Lady Sarah Cowper’s ‘Family books’, 1692–1737.
82. Nottingham University Library, Middleton MSS; HMC, Report on the Manuscripts
of Lord Middleton, Preserved at Wollaton Hall, Nottinghamshire (1911), p.504.
83. Jardine, Erasmus, Man of Letters.
84. On Bassingbourne Gawdy see, Hasler, 2, p.176; Joy Rowe, ‘Gawdy family
(per. c.1500–1723)’, ODNB; Malcolm Richardson (2003) ‘The Gawdy Papers
(1509–c.1750) and the History of Professional Writing in England’, The Journal of
Business Communication, 40/4, 253–65.
85. BL, Add. MS, 48591.
86. Fol.ir contains Dorothy’s signatures, attempts at salutations and pentrails, which
also suggests that she might have used the volume as a repository of exemplary
missives for emulation.
87. Mary Hobbs (1992) Early Seventeenth-Century Verse Miscellany Manuscripts
(Aldershot: Scolar Press); Love, Scribal Publication; Woudhuysen, Philip Sidney;
Marotti, Manuscript, Print; Beal, In Praise of Scribes; Love and Marotti (2002)
‘Manuscript Transmission and Circulation’, in David Loewenstein and Janel
Notes 281
Mueller (eds) The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge:
CUP, 2002), pp.55–80.
88. Harold Love (2002) ‘Oral and Scribal Texts in Early Modern England’, in John
Barnard and D.F. McKenzie (eds) The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain,
Volume IV, 1557–1965 (Cambridge: CUP), pp.97–121(pp.105–7).
89. See for example, BL, Eg. MS, 2877, fols84r–85v, 89v; Bodl., Rawl. MS, D273.
90. Folger, V.a.321, fols23v–24v; BL, Add. MS, 29546; Corpus Christi College, Oxford,
MS 294. Victoria E. Burke (2007) ‘Let’s Get Physical: Bibliography, Codicology
and Seventeenth-Century Women’s Manuscripts’, Literature Compass, 4/6,
1667–82 (p.1668).
91. Nancy Pollard Brown (1989) ‘Paperchase: The Dissemination of Catholic Texts in
Elizabethan England’, EMS, 1, 120–44.
92. BL, Add. MS, 44848, fols153v–155r; Bodl., Tanner MS, 82, fols210r–214r; BL, Add.
MS, 4108, fols95v–98r; BL, Add. MS, 22587, fol.20v.
93. Pauline Croft (1995) ‘Libels, Popular Literacy and Public Opinion in Early Modern
England’, Historical Research, 68, 266–85; Steven W. May (1993) Manuscript
Circulation at the Elizabethan Court’, in W. Speed Hill (ed.) New Ways of Looking
at Old Texts: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 1985–1991 (Binghamton,
NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies), pp.273–80 (p.278).
94. SP78/17, fol.118 (4/4/1587); CP42/81 (24/7/1596).
95. On Throckmorton’s career see, Stanford Lehmberg, ‘Throckmorton, Sir
Nicholas (1515/16–1571)’, ODNB; Gary M. Bell (1990) A Handlist of British
Diplomatic Representatives, 1509–1688 (Royal Historical Society), pp.85, 88–9. For
Throckmorton’s correspondence from France see, SP70. I am grateful to Fritz
Levy for drawing to my attention this aspect of Throckmorton’s diplomatic
correspondence.
96. A letter to the Queen of 15/10/1562 survives in three copies (SP70/43, fols3r–6v,
SP70/43, fols7r–10v, SP70/43, fols18r–22v) along with a decipher of certain pas-
sages of Throckmorton’s letter to the Queen: SP70/43, fols11r–14v.
97. The tailoring of standardised letters for different parties is illustrated by three
letters Throckmorton sent from Paris on 8 September 1560: SP70/18, fols18r–22v
(to Queen Elizabeth), 24r–26v (to Cecil; SP70/18, fol.27r–28v is a corrected partial
copy), 29r–33v (to the Privy Council).
98. Copies include DRO, 3799M–3/0/1/6; SP12/259, fols33r–37r, 38r–43v; Folger,
V.b.214, fols103r–105r; V.b.142, fols15r-v 45r-v; Society of Antiquaries, London, MS
200/201, no. 56; Bodl., Tanner MS, 77, fols89r–92v. The original letter is SP12/259,
fols30r–31v. Paul E.J. Hammer (1997) ‘Myth-Making: Politics, Propaganda and the
Capture of Cadiz in 1596’, HJ, 40/3, 621–42 (pp.629–30).
99. Bodl., Tanner MS, 77, fol.93v.
100. John Pollen and William MacMahon (eds) (1919) The Venerable Philip Howard,
Earl of Arundel, 1557–1595, Catholic Record Society, pp.99–100, 338; The Lives
of Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel, and of Anne Dacre, His Wife, ed. The Duke
of Norfolk (1857), pp.30–1, 61; Earle Havens (2005) ‘Notes from a Literary
Underground: Recusant Catholics, Jesuit Priests, and Scribal Publication in
Elizabethan England’, PBSA, 99/4, 505–38 (pp.505–7).
101. Tiffany Stern (2006) ‘“On each Wall / And Corner Post”: Playbills, Title-pages,
and Advertising in Early Modern London’, ELR, 36/1, 57–85. On libels see
Pauline Croft (1991) ‘The Reputation of Robert Cecil: Libels, Political Opinion
and Popular Awareness in the Early Seventeenth Century’, TRHS, 1, 43–69; Adam
Fox (1994) ‘Ballads, Libels and Popular Ridicule in Jacobean England’, P&P, 145,
282 Notes
47–83; Alistair Bellany (2007) ‘The Embarrassment of Libels: Perceptions and

Representations of Verse Libeling in Early Stuart England’, in Peter Lake and
Steven C.A. Pincus (eds) The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England
(Manchester: MUP), pp.144–67. See also, BL, Cotton MS, Caligula C.VIII, fol.227;
SP80/1, fol.40; SP84/7, fol.77; SP84/25, fol.54; SP12/247, fol.15; CP/14/53,
CP125/175.
102. The Autobiography of an Elizabethan, trans. and ed. Philip Caraman (Longmans,
Green and Co., 1951), p.203.
103. CP72/7: 2/8/1599; SP63/203, fols273, 275, 276; CP72/6; CP68/98. Croft, ‘Libels,
Popular Literacy’, pp.270–1.
104. SP14/216/2, fol.89: 8/1/1606.
105. SP16/54, fol.145: 23/2/1627; SP16/54, fol.146.
106. John G. Nichols (1852) ‘The Discovery of the Jesuits’ College at Clerkenwell
in March 1626–28, and a Letter Found in Their House’, Camden Miscellany, 2,
pp.1–64 (pp.10–11, 31–40). Martin J. Havran (1958) ‘Parliament and Catholicism
in England 1626–1629’, The Catholic Historical Review, 44/3, 273–89 (p.281). I am
grateful to Gary Schneider for discussion on this letter.
107. Andrew McRae (2000) ‘The Literary Culture of Early Stuart Libelling’, Modern
Philology, 97 (2000), 364–92 (pp.367–8).
108. SP16/60, fols43, 44. These two copies were enclosed in a letter from John
Rychers to Thomas Locke (SP16/60, fols41: 12/4/1627) along with a second
inflammatory letter supposedly given to his son Henry Rychers by his schoolfel-
low, Edward Lombe (SP16/60 fol.42).
109. Andrew Gordon (2002) ‘The Act of Libel: Conscripting Civic Space in Early
Modern England’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 32/3, 375–97
(pp.385–90).
110. The Papers of Sir Richard Grosvenor, First Bart (1585–1645), ed. Richard Cust,
Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 134 (1996), pp.43–51.
111. Thomas Birch (1848) The Court and Times of James the First, 2 vols, 2, p.385.
112. Letters of John Holles, 1587–1637 (ed.) P.R. Seddon, Thoroton Society Record
Series, 3 vols (1975–86), 2, p.219.
113. BL, Harl. MS, 298, fol.159v.
114. CP140/51: 4/1584.
115. On scriveners charges see, Beal, In Praise of Scribes, pp.69–72, n.12; Woudhuysen,
Philip Sidney, p.176, passim.
116. Papers of Sir Richard Grosvenor, p.77.
117. SP78/4A, fol.65: 3/5/1580; SP78/4A, fol.86: 9/6/1580; SP78/4B, fol.185 SP78/4B,
fol.185: 10/12/1580.
118. BL Eg. MS, 2812, fols5r–7r, 10v–11r, 18 and 19/8/1600.
119. Birch, Court and Times, 2, p.290.
120. Ibid., 2, pp.259, 382.
121. William S. Powell (1977) John Pory, 1572–1636: The Life and Letters of a Man of
Many Parts (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P), p.56.
122. Jason Scott-Warren (2000) ‘Reconstructing Manuscript Networks: The Textual
Transactions of Sir Stephen Powle’, in Alexandra Shepherd and Phil Withington
(eds) Communities in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester UP), pp.18–37
(p.19).
123. Love, ‘Oral and Scribal Texts’, pp.106–07.
124. Daybell ‘Women, Politics and Domesticity’.
125. Love, ‘Oral and Scribal Texts’, pp.105–07.
Notes 283
126. On commonplace books see Peter Beal (1993) ‘Notions in Garrison: The
Seventeenth-Century Commonplace Book’, in, New Ways of Looking at Old Texts,
pp.131–47.
127. Gibson (2010) ‘Casting Off Blanks: Hidden Structures in Early Modern Paper
Books’, in Daybell and Hinds, Material Readings, pp.208–28.
128. Powell, John Pory, pp.28, 67.
129. The Diary of John Manningham, of the Middle Temple and of Bradbourne, Kent,
Barrister-at-Law, 1602–1603, ed. John Bruce, Camden Society (1868), p.160.
130. Bodl., Rawl. MS, B151.
131. Woudhuysen, Philip Sidney, p.157; Scott-Warren, ‘Reconstructing Manuscript
Networks’, p.20.
132. BL, Eg. MS, 2877; BL, Add. MS, 38139; Cheshire RO, CR 63/2/19; BL, Add.
MS, 6704; BL, Add. MS, 34218; BL, Add. MS, 28640; Cheshire RO, Ms DLT
B8.; Chethams Library, Manchester MS Mun. (Farmer-Chetham Manuscript)
A.4.150; Beinecke, Osborne FB155; BL, Stowe MS, 150.
133. Bodl., MS Don. C.54. I.A. Shapiro (1950) ‘The “Mermaid Club”’, MLR, 45, 6–17;
I.A. Shapiro and Percy Simpson (1951) ‘“The Mermaid Club”: An Answer and a
Rejoinder’, MLR, 46, 58–63.
134. BL, Add. MS, 52585, fols41v–42r, 73v: c.1591–1627.
135. BL, Add. MS, 73086.
136. Victoria E. Burke and Jonathan Gibson (eds) (2004) Early Modern Women’s
Manuscript Writing (Aldershot: Ashgate); Folger, MS E.a.1, fols6v–22v: Anne
Denton’s Prose miscellany, c.1550–c.1590; BL, Add. MS, 10309: Miscellany
belonging Margaret Bellasys, c.1630.
137. CUL, Add. MS, 8460, pp.173 rev. to 171 rev (c.1655–1714).
138. Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies, D/EP F37, pp.168–9, 183–4, 171,
281–93); Beinecke, Osborn MS b.188, fols47r–63v.
139. Love, Scribal Publication, pp.80; 79–83.
140. Scott-Warren, ‘Reconstructing Manuscript Networks’, pp.22, 27. Bodl., Tanner
MSS, 168, 169.
141. BL, Add. MS, 38139, fol.64v: 26/6/1604. SP13/8/77 and 78 (printed copies);
(1604) The Copie of His Maiesties Letter to the Commons House of Parliament, in the
Matter of Subsidie.
142. Woudhuysen, Philip Sidney, pp.130–1.
143. BL, Add. MS, 38139, fols266v, 267r.
144. (1869) Thirtieth Annual Report of the Deputy Keeper of the Public Records, pp.217,
225, 237, 238–9.
145. BL, Lansd. MS, 89, fol.185. Louis A. Knafla, ‘Manwood, Sir Peter (1571–1625)’,
ODNB.
146. C.E. Wright (1958) ‘The Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries and the Formation
of the Cottonian Library’ in Francis Wormald and C.E. Wright (eds) The English
Library Before 1700 (Althone Press), pp.175–211 (pp.195–7).
147. Andrew G. Watson (1966) The Library of Sir Simonds D’Ewes (British Museum),
p.9.
148. Kevin Sharpe (1979) Sir Robert Cotton 1586–1631: History and Politics in Early
Modern England (Oxford: OUP), p.78.
149. Colin G.C. Tite (2003) Early Records of Sir Robert Cotton’s Library: Formation,
Catalogue, Use (British Library), pp.68, 46, 157, 189, 195; C.J. Wright (ed.) (1997)
Sir Robert Cotton as Collector: Essays on an Early Stuart Courtier and His Legacy
(British Library), pp.8–9.
284 Notes
150. Beal, In Praise of Scribes, pp.229–31, 256–7.

151. Ibid., pp.77, 94–6.
152. Ibid., pp.132–4.
153. Robert Devereux, earl of Essex ([1600]) [An Apologie of the Earle of Essex].
154. Paul J. Voss (2001) Elizabethan News Pamphlets: Shakespeare, Spenser, Marlow and
the Birth of Journalism (Pittsburg: Duquesne UP). The tradition of letters from ‘a
gentleman’ or some such generic individual was a standard trope in early modern
print: ([1571]) A Copie of a Letter Lately Sent by a Gentleman, Student in the Lawes
of the Realme, to a Frende of his Concernyng. D. Story; Francis Bacon (1599) A Letter
Written Out of England to an English Gentleman Remaining at Padua Containing a
True Report of a Strange Conspiracie, Contriued Betweene Edward Squire . . .
155. Derek Hirst (2003) ‘Reading the Royal Romance: Or, Intimacy in a King’s
Cabinet’, Seventeenth Century, 18/2, 211–29.
156. ([1642]) The Earle of Essex His Letter to the Earle of Southampton . . .; (1643)
A Precious and Most Divine Letter From That Famous and Ever to be Renowned Earl of
Essex . . . to the Earl of South-Hampton, in the Latter Time of Queen Elizabeths Reigne;
Hammer, ‘Devereux, Robert, second earl of Essex (1565–1601)’, ODNB.
157. Bacon (1648) The Remaines of the Right Honorable Francis, Lord Verulam; (1656)
The Mirrour of State and Eloquence Represented in the Incomparable Letters of
the Famous Sr. Francis Bacon; (1661) Resuscitatio; Wotton (1651) Reliquiae
Wottonianae; Donne (1651) Letters to Severall Persons of Honour; Matthew (1660
[1659]) A Collection of Letters, Made by Sr Tobie Mathew.
158. (1654 [1653]) Cabala, Mysteries of State; (1654) Scrinia Sacra; (1663) Scrinia
Ceciliana; Sir Dudley Digges (1655) The Compleat Ambassador.
159. BL, Add. MS, 4108; Bodl., Tanner MS, 82.
160. Bellany, ‘Embarrassment of Libels’; David Colclough (2005) Freedom of Speech in
Early Stuart England (Cambridge: CUP), ch.4; McRae, ‘Literary Culture’, 364–92;
Michelle O’Callaghan (2007) The English Wits: Literature and Sociability in Early
Modern England (Cambridge: CUP).
161. O’Callaghan (2006) ‘Performing Politics: The Circulation of the “Parliament
Fart”’, HLQ, 69/1, 121–38 (pp.130–6).
162. Peter Mack (2002) Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice (Cambridge: CUP),
p.110.
163. David Colclough (2000) ‘“The Muses Recreation”: John Hoskyns and the
Manuscript Culture of the Seventeenth Century’, HLQ, 61, 369–400.
164. BL, Add. MS, 48150 (Yelverton MS, 161, part 2); BL, Add. MS, 48018 (Yelverton
MS 19). See also BL, Add. MS, 48012 (Yelverton MS. 12): Ecclesiastical Formulary,
1490–1581; BL, Royal, 17B.XLVII, Collections on Dictamen or the art of letter-
writing.
165. Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric, pp.114–16.
166. BL, Add. MS, 44848, fols169r-v.
167. Braunmuller (ed.) Seventeenth-Century Letter-Book; Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric,
pp.109–10.
168. BL, Add. MS, 33271, fols39v–40r, 46r.
169. Stewart, Shakespeare’s Letters, pp.198–9.
170. (1905) Letters and Exercises of the Elizabethan Schoolmaster John Conybeare, ed. F.C.
Conybeare (Frowde), pp.1–14, 106–09.
171. BL, Add. MS, 52585, fols66v–7v; BL, Add. MS, 5956, fols35r–6v, 38-r-v.
172. Folger, V.a.321, fols25v–8v.
173. De conscribendis epistolis, pp.24, 204.
Notes 285
174. Bodl., Rawl. MS, D431, fols1–55, 87, 93–4, 98. Michel de Montaigne (1603) The
Essayes Or Morall, Politike and Millitarie Discourses, trans. John Florio, bk 2, ch.15,
p.356.
175. Ian Frederick Moulton (2000) Before Pornography: Erotic Writing in Early Modern
England (New York: OUP); Marotti, Manuscript, Print, pp.76–82.
176. Bodl., Ashmole MS, 781, p.124.
177. Tite, Early Records, p.227.
178. Miles Coverdale (1564) Godly, Fruitful, and Comfortable Letters; Edward Dering
(1590; 1614) Certaine Godly and Verie Comfortable Letters (Middelburg).
179. BL, Eg. MS, 2877, fols84r–85v, 89v.
180. Bodl., Rawl. MS, D273.
181. BL, Sloane MS, 922.
182. Graham Parry (2007) The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth
Century (Oxford: OUP); Woudhuysen, Philip Sidney, pp.116–33.
183. BL, Stowe MS, 1047, fol.220. David Carlson (1989) ‘The Writings and Manuscript
Collections of the Elizabethan Alchemist, Antiquary, and Herald Francis Thynne’,
HLQ, 52/2, 203–72.
184. BL, Add. MS, 38139 Knafla, ‘Manwood’, ODNB; Woudhuysen, Philip Sidney,
pp.129–33.
185. Daniel Woolf (2003) The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture
1500–1730 (Oxford: OUP), ch.5.
186. Sharpe, Robert Cotton; Philip Styles (1956) ‘Politics and Historical Research in the
Early Seventeenth Century’ in Levi Fox (ed.) English Historical Scholarship in the
Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Dugdale Society by OUP), pp.49–72.
187. Beal, In Praise of Scribes, pp.88, 94–6, 105–7.
188. Alistair Bellany (2002) The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News,
Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603–1660 (Cambridge: CUP), pp.131–4; idem
(2007) ‘Railing Rhymes Revisited: Libels, Scandals, and Early Stuart Politics’,
History Compass, 5/4, 1136–79 (p.1144).
189. See for example, Bodl., Ashmole MSS, 781, 830, Rawl. MS, B151, Tanner MSS, 74,
82, 299; BL, Add. MSS, 4108, 22587, fols5r–17v, 37r, 34631, 40838, 44848, 73087,
fols22r–46v; BL, Sloane, 3520; BL, Harley MS, 39.
190. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, p.83.
191. John Morrill (1976; 1999) Revolt in the Provinces: The People of England and the
Tragedies of War (Allen and Unwin; rev. edn, Longman), pp.34–47, 179–83.
192. Colclough, ‘The Muses Recreation’, pp.382, 391.
193. BL, Add. MSS, 28640, 22959. Matthew Steggle, ‘Rous, John (bap.1584, d.1644)’,
ODNB; Diary of John Rous, incumbent of Santon Downham, Suffolk, from 1625 to
1642, ed. M.A.E. Green, Camden Society, 66 (1856), p.xi.
194. Diary of John Rous, pp.27, 38–9, 77–8, 47, 91.
195. BL, Add. MS, 28640, fols63, 51, 41, 58v.
196. BL, Add. MS, 29304.
197. Diary of John Rous, p.13; Cogswell (1990) ‘The Politics of Propaganda: Charles I
and the People in the 1620s’, JBS, 29/3, 187–215 (pp.187–9).
198. Diary of John Rous, p.19.
199. The miscellany of the clergyman Robert Horn (1564/5–1640) highlights a similar
level of engagement: Bodl., Rawl. MS, B151, 1618–27.
200. D.F. McKenzie (1986; 1989) Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (British
Library), p.29.
201. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, p.135.
286 Notes
202. ‘User publication’ is a term coined by Harold Love: Scribal Publication, pp.46–7,
79–83.
203. D.C. Greetham (1992) Textual Scholarship: An Introduction (New York and
London: Garland, 1992), pp.323–35, 363, 364.
204. Beal, In Praise of Scribes, pp.130, 274, passim. See also, Beal (2002) ‘Philip
Sidney’s Letter to Queen Elizabeth and that ‘False Knave’ Alexander Dicsone’,
EMS, 11, 1–51; H.R. Woudhuysen (1984) ‘A Crux in the Text of Sidney’s A Letter
to Queen Elizabeth’, N&Q, 31, 172–3; Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, ed.
Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan Van Dorsten (Oxford: OUP, 1973), pp.33–57,
181–5.
205. Bodl., Rawl. MS, C744, fol.60v. A.B. Grosart (ed.) The Farmer Chetham Manuscript:
Being a Commonplace Book in the Chetham Library, Chetham Society Historical
and Literary Remains connected with the Palatine Counties of Lancaster and
Cheshire, 2 vols 89, 90 (1873), 1, p.47.
206. Adam Smyth (2006) ‘“Reade in One Age and Understood I’ Th’ Next”: Recycling
Satire in the Mid-Seventeenth Century’, HLQ, 69/1, 67–82.
207. Love, Scribal Publication, pp.134, 346–47.
208. Simon Healy, ‘Alured, Thomas (bap.1583, d.1638)’, ODNB; Joshua Eckhardt
(2009) Manuscript Verse Collectors and the Politics of Anti-Courtly Love Poetry
(Oxford: OUP), ch.4; Thomas Cogswell (1989) ‘England and the Spanish Match’,
in Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (eds) Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in
Religion and Politics, 1603–1642 (Longman), pp.107–33.
209. Among the copies examined are, Bodl., Tanner MS, 299, fols44r–45v; Bodl., MS
Eng. Hist. c.319, fols35r–40v; Bodl., Tanner MS, 205, fols1–3; Bodl., Ashmole MS,
830, fols135r–6v; BL, Add. MS, 44848, fols131v–138v; BL, Add. MS, 4108, fols78v–
83r; BL, Add. MS, 40629, fol.117; BL, Sloane MS, 1455, fols20–23; BL, Sloane MS,
1710, fol.307v; BL, Add. MS, 34217, fol.18; BL, Add. MS, 22473. fol.74; BL, Add.
MS, 28640, fol.63; BL, Add. MS, 18201, fol.13; BL, Add. MS, 72387, fol.71; BL,
Add. MS, 48044, fols223r–236v; BL, Add. MS, 4149, fol.158; BL, Add. MS, 37999
fol.52; BL, Eg. MS, 2882, fol.208; BL, Harley MS, 6021, fol.137. See also CSPD,
1619–1623, p.150.
210. BL, Add. MS, 34217, fol.18; Bodl., Tanner MS, 299, fols44r–45v; BL, Add. MS,
4149, fol.158; BL, Eg. MS, 2882.
211. BL, Add. MS, 28640, fol.63.
212. Rushworth (1659) Historical Collections of Private Passages of State . . ., p.91.
8 The Afterlives of Letters

1. CP12/13 (10/10/1580); BL, Cotton MS, Caligula E.X, fols113r–114v (fol.114v)
(1/12/1603).
2. Robert Beale, ‘A Treatise of the Office of a Councellor and Principall Secretarie to
her Ma[jes]tie’ printed in C. Read (1925) Mr Secretary Walsingham and the Policy of
Queen Elizabeth, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press), I, pp.423–43 (p.425).
3. DRO, Seymour Family of Berry Pomeroy, 1392M/L15, 16.
4. See also, Christopher Burlinson and Andrew Zurcher (2005) ‘“Secretary to the Lord
Grey Lord Deputie here”: Edmund Spenser’s Irish Papers’, The Library, 6/1, 30–75
(p.59).
5. DRO, 1392M/L1595/4: earl of Bath to Deputy Lieutenants of Devon, 5/9/1595.
6. This kind of analysis is still possible despite the efforts of conservationists to ‘wash’
the paper.
Notes 287
Principal Secretary of Estate, & c. 1592’, EHR, 20, 499–508 (pp.501–2, 503–4).
Bodl., Tanner MS, 80, fols91–4.
8. Richard Brathwait (1821) Some Rules and Orders for the Government of the House of
an Earl set Downe by R.B. at the Instant Request of his Loving Frende M.L., pp.17–18.
9. Alan Stewart (2008) Shakespeare’s Letters (Oxford: OUP), pp.165–72.
10. James Peele ([1554]) The Maner and Fourme How to Kepe a Perfecte Reconyng After
the Order of the Moste Worthie and Notable Accompte, sig.Aiiiv.
11. [Hugh Oldcastle] (1588) A Briefe Instruction and Maner How to Keepe Bookes of
Accompts, sigsF6r–F8r.
12. Daybell (2006) Women Letter-Writers in Tudor England (Oxford: OUP), pp.56–7.
13. Stewart, Shakespeare’s Letters, pp.165–7.
14. F.G. Emmison (1976) Elizabethan Life: Home, Work and Land: From Essex Wills and
Session and Manorial Records (Chelmsford: Essex RO), pp.19–21.
15. L&P, 5: 456 (30/9/1531).
16. Lisle Letters, 6, p.167.
G.R. Batho, Camden Society, 93 (1962), p.118.
18. The Egerton Papers, ed., J. Payne Collier, Camden Society, 12 (1840), p.322; Ralph
A. Houlbrooke (1988) English Family Life, 1576–1716: An Anthology of Diaries
(Oxford: Blackwell), p.72.
19. CP83/26: Henry Neville to Robert Cecil [c.10/1600]. For lockable desks see also,
CP191/143 [27/11/1605]; SP78/8, fols.28r–29v (27/8/1582); SP63/132, fol.39:
[17/11/1587].
20. CP106/165 (10/9/1604); CP60/28 (8/3/1598).
21. CP76/81: John Wasshebourne, Sheriff of Worcestershire to Robert Cecil,
17/2/1601; SP16/317, fol.103: ‘Affidavit of Elizabeth Ratcliffe minutely detailing
the way in which Gray, Griffin, and Wainewright searched her residence in the
Savoy’, 26/3/1636.
22. CP64/90: Thomas Hewar and Alex Blam to the Council, 7/10/1598.
23. CP202/105 (11/6/1572); CP55/50 (24/9/1597); CP76/72 (15/2/1601); CP184/116
(9/9/1602);CP85/13 (5/2/1602); CP184/116 (9/9/1602); CP122/164 (27/12/1607);
CP184/106 (5/9/1602), CP49/74 (26/3/1597).
24. Alan Stewart (1995) ‘The Early Modern Closet Discovered’, Representations, 50,
76–100; Lena Orlin (2007) Locating Privacy in Tudor London (Oxford: OUP), ch.8.
25. CKS, U350 C2/34, 10/1/1633, U350 C2/43, 2/6/1634; The Knyvett Letters (1620–
1644), ed. Bertram Schofield (Constable and Co., 1949), p.58: 23/4/1623 (see also,
pp.75, 105–07, 111, 123–4, 124).
26. CP113/144: Lord Cobham to Viscount Cranborne [c.4/5/1605].
27. Lupton (1579) A Thousand Notable Things of Sundrie Sorts, p.147.
28. W[illiam] P[hillip] (1596) A Booke of Secrets, sigsB1r-v.
29. Wecker, Eighteen Books of the Secrets, pp.271, 126.
30. Lupton, A Thousand Notable Things, pp.20–1.
31. W.J. Connor (1973) ‘The Fairfax Archives: A Study in Dispersal’, Archives, 11/50,
76–85.
32. For an example of a collection of autographs see BL, Add. MS, 12907: Autographs
of Statesmen and Noblemen.
33. Laetitia Yeandle and W.R. Streitberger (1987) ‘The Loseley Collection of
Manuscripts at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC’, SQ , 38/2, 201–7
(p.204).
288 Notes
34. The Papers of Nathaniel Bacon of Stiffkey, 1556–1577, ed. A. Hassell Smith, Norfolk
Record Society, 46 (1978), pp.xx–xxxiv.
35. On the dispersal of Leicester’s letters see: Simon Adams (1988) ‘The Lauderdale
Papers, 1561–1570: The Maitland of Lethington State Papers and the Leicester
Correspondence’, Scottish Historical Review, 67/1, 28–55; idem (1992) ‘The Papers
of Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester. 1. The Browne-Evelyn Collection’, Archives,
20, 63–85; idem (1993) ‘The Papers of Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester. 2: The
Atye-Cotton Collection’, Archives, 20 (1993), 131–44; idem (1996) ‘The Papers
of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. 3: The Countess of Leicester’s Collection’,
Archives, 22/94, 1–26.
36. R.B. Wernham (1956) ‘The Public Records in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries’, in Levi Fox (ed.) English Historical Scholarship in the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries (Dugdale Society by OUP), pp.11–31; F.S. Thomas (1849)
A History of the State Paper Office (Eyre and Spottiswoode); Florence M.G. Evans
(1923) The Principal Secretary of State: A Survey of the Office From 1558 to 1680
(Manchester: Manchester UP), p.187; Alan Marshall (2000) ‘The Secretaries Office
and the Public Records’, State Papers Online, 1603–1714 (Cengage Learning EMEA
Ltd); M.S. Guiseppe (1963–66) Guide to the Contents of the Public Record Office, 3
vols (HMSO).
37. Evans, Principal Secretary, pp.186–8; Andrew Thrush (2010) ‘The Government
and its Records, 1603–1640’, State Papers Online, 1509–1714 (Cengage Learning
EMEA Ltd).
38. Wernham, ‘Public Records’, p.22.
39. SP14/81, fol.120: Thomas Wilson to Ambrose Randolph, 24/8/1615; Wernham,
‘Public Records’, p.22; C.E. Wright (1958) ‘The Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries
and the Formation of the Cottonian Library’, in Francis Wormald and C.E.
Wright (eds), The English Library Before 1700 (The Althone Press), pp.175–211
(pp.195–7); Colin G.C. Tite (1994) The Manuscript Library of Sir Robert Cotton, The
Panizzi Lectures, 1993 (British Library), pp.14, 21; C.J. Wright (ed.) (1997) Sir
Robert Cotton as Collector: Essays on an Early Stuart Courtier and His Legacy (British
Library), p.4.
40. Tite (2003) Early Records of Sir Robert Cotton’s Library: Formation, Catalogue, Use
(British Library), pp.4, 52, 57.
41. Peter Beal (1998) In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts and their Makers in Seventeenth-
Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press), pp.269–73.
42. The Autobiography and Correspondence of Sir Simonds D’Ewes, Bart. ed. James
Orchard Halliwell, 2 vols (1845), 1, pp.391–2; Andrew G. Watson (1966) The
Library of Sir Simonds D’Ewes (British Museum), pp.17, 24–6.
43. A.N.L. Munby (1962) The Cult of the Autograph Letter in England (The Athlone
Press), p.2. BL, Harl. MS, 374 is a collection of autograph letters made by Sir
Simonds D’ Ewes. See also, BL, Add. MS, 12097; BL, Sloane MS, 2035B, fols13–
28.
44. Brathwait, Rules and Orders, p.18.
45. John Draisey (Nov. 2003) ‘An Exciting Discovery in Wiltshire’, Devon Record Office
Newsletter, 32, p.5.
46. Louise Craven (2008) What are Archives?: Cultural and Theoretical Perspectives:
A Reader (Aldershot: Ashgate). For more theoretical approaches see, Jacques
Derrida (1998) Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: U of Chicago P). On
the ordering of an early modern collection see, N.W. Alcock (1991) ‘The Ferrers
of Tamworth Collection: Sorting and Listing’, Archives, 19/86, 358–63.
Notes 289
47. R.H. Ellis (1962) ‘The Historical Manuscripts Commission’, Journal of the Society
of Archivists, 2/6, 233–42; idem (1969) ‘The Historical Manuscripts Commission,
1869–1969’, Archives, 9/41, 1.
48. J.C. Jeaffreson (1987), see the Appendix to the Seventh Report of the Royal
Commission on Historical Manuscripts (HMSO, 1879), p.597, cited in Laetitia
Yeandle and W.R. Streitberger, ‘The Loseley Collection of Manuscripts at the
Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC’, SQ , 38/2, 201–7.
49. http://www.listandindexsociety.org.uk/index1.html.
50. A good guide to early modern manuscripts was produced by the late Jeremy Maule
(revised in 2002 by Andrew Zurcher), ‘Routes Towards Early Modern Literary
Manuscripts: Prolegomenon towards the first draft of an elementary elucidar-
ium’: http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/ceres/ehoc/prolegomenon.html. [accessed
15 February 2012] The correspondence of major literary figures is listed by Peter
Beal in his monumental Index of English Literary Manuscripts, 4 vols (1980–93),
while North American collections of British and Irish manuscripts are covered in
Seymour de Ricci (1935–40) Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the
United States and Canada, 3 vols (New York: H.W. Wilson Company).
51. http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/a2a/?source=ddmenu_search1 [accessed 15
February 2012]
Castle, 4 vols (1888), 4, passim.
53. David Thomas (1983) ‘Conservation: New Techniques and New Attitudes’,
Archives, 16/70, 167–77; Denis Blunn and Guy Petherbridge (1976) ‘Leaf Casting:
The Mechanical Repair of Paper Artefacts’, The Paper Conservator, 1, 26–32; John
McIntyre (1987) ‘Leaf-casting in the National Library of Scotland’, The Paper
Conservator, 11, 22–31; Keiko Mizushima Keyes (1976) ‘A Manual Method of
Paper Pulp Application in the Conservation of Works of Art on Paper’, The Paper
Conservator, 1, 33–4; Keiko Mizushima Keyes (1978) ‘Manual Techniques of Paper
Repair: The Unique Qualities of Paper as an Artefact in Conservation Treatment’,
The Paper Conservator, 3, 4–8; Melvyn Jones (1978) ‘Traditional Repair of Archival
Documents’, The Paper Conservator, 3, 9–17.
54. Paul S. Koda (1979) ‘The Analytical Bibliographer and the Conservator: Some
Thoughts on Their Interrelationship’, Library Journal, 104/15, 1623–6; Mirjam
Foot (1984) ‘The Binding Historian and the Book Conservator’, The Paper
Conservator, 8, 77–82.
55. David Thomas (1983) ‘Conservation: New Techniques and New Attitudes’, Archives,
16/70, 167–77; (1983) ‘The Care of Records: Notes for the Owner or Custodian’,
British Records Association Memorandum 22, Archives, 16/7, 181–4; Peter Hanks
(1991) ‘Conservation or Restoration’, Archives, 19/85, 306–7; David Bayne-Cope
(1983) ‘Conservation: Why the Scientist Can Help’, Archives, 16/70, 162–6.
56. Margaret Hey (1977) ‘Paper Bleaching: Its Simple Chemistry and Working
Procedures’, The Paper Conservator, 2, 10–23; eadem (1979) ‘The Washing and
Aqueous Deacidification of Paper’, The Paper Conservator, 4, 66–80; Anne Lienardy
& Philippe van Damme (1990) ‘Paper Washing’, The Paper Conservator, 14, 23–30;
M.L. Bursall, C.E. Butler and C.C. Mollett (1986) ‘Improving the Qualities of
Paper by Graft Copolymerisation’, The Paper Conservator, 10, 95–100; Simon
Green (1986) ‘Conservation: The Papermaker’s Perspective’, The Paper Conservator,
10, 55–63.
57. Helen Lindsay and Christopher Clarkson (1994) ‘Housing Single-Sheet Material:
The Development of the Fascicule System at the Bodleian Library’, The Paper
290 Notes
Conservator, 18, 40–8; Clare Colvin (1986) ‘Forms of Documentation and Storage
in the Tate Gallery Archive’, Archives, 17/75, 144–52; Andrew Honey (2004)
‘Housing Single-Sheet Material: Fisherizing at the Bodleian Library, Oxford’, The
Paper Conservator, 28, 99–104; Nicholas Hadgraft (1994) ‘Storing and Boxing the
Parker Library Manuscripts’, The Paper Conservator, 18, 20–9.
58. D.G. Vaisey (1978) ‘Recording Conservation Treatment’, Journal of the Society of
Archivists, 6/2, 94–6; Gwyn Miles (1987) ‘Automated Systems for Conservation
Recording: Experiences at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford and the Victoria and
Albert Museum, London’, The Paper Conservator, 11, 81–6.
59. F.G. Emmison (1991) ‘Are Microfilms the Only Alternative to Production of
Originals’, Archives, 19/86, 433.
60. Alan Howell (2001) ‘Preserving Information in a Digital Age: What’s the
Difference?’, The Paper Conservator, 25, 133–50.
61. The Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at Queen Mary University of London is very
much at the forefront of important new work in this area: www. livesandletters.
ac.uk. [accessed 15 February 2012]
62. The ‘Electronic Enlightenment’ hosted by Oxford University is impressive in
the range of bibliographical and biographical material available at the touch of
a button, including different dating systems, details of encloses, related docu-
ments, versions and parent documents: www.e-enlightenment.com. [accessed 15
February 2012]
63. Matthew Symonds, ‘Timelines and the Bodley Project’ and Samuli Kaislaniemi
‘Geospatial Data’, unpublished papers presented at ‘The Digitising Correspondence
Workshop’, held at the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, Queen Mary
University, London, 17 September 2009.
64. Oxford University’s ‘Cultures of Knowledge: An Intellectual Geography of the
Seventeenth-Century Republic of Letters’: http://www.history.ox.ac.uk/cofk/.
[accessed 15 February 2012]
65. Jan Broadway, ‘Digitizing Correspondence Workshop Report’, http://www.
livesandletters.ac.uk/downloads/DC_report.pdf. [accessed 15 February 2012]
Select Bibliography
Primary sources
Manuscripts
The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven
Osborn MSS
12562
b.27: Anne Clifford’s Account Book, 1600–02
b.188: Jane Truesdale’s Commonplace Book of Prose Extracts and Sermons, 1672–94
fb.9: Commonplace Book, c.1610
fb.42
fb.69: Sir Francis Castillion, Letter-Book, c.1590–1638
fb.94
fb.117: Colleccon of Many Learned Letters
fb.137
fb.145
fb.155: John Browne’s Commonplace Book
fb.163
fb.164
fb.220.1
Berkshire Record Office, Reading, Berkshire
D/EN, Neville Family Papers
Birmingham Central Library
Z. Lloyd 53, Mucklowe Family Papers
Bodleian Library, Oxford
Ashmole MS 781: Miscellany, 1620–31
Ashmole MS 826, fol.29: Robert Cecil, ‘The State and Dignitie of a Secretarie of
State’
Ashmole MS 830
Ashmole MS 1138: Collection of Seal Impressions
Ballard MS 10: One Hundred and Eighteen Original Letters
Ballard MS 11: One Hundred and Four Original Letters from Knights
Carte MS LVI
MS Don. C54
Eng. Hist. c.120: Papers concerning Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of Essex
Eng. Hist. c.121: Contemporary Copies of Miscellaneous 16th- and 17th-century
Papers
Eng. Hist. c.272
Eng. Hist. d.138: Papers Concerning Sir Walter Ralegh
Eng. Misc. f.49: Seventeenth-Century Notebook from Oxford
Eng. Misc. f.87: School Notebook, Early-Seventeenth Century
Herrick Family Papers, MS Eng. Hist. b.216, c.474, 475, 477, 484
MSS North, Family and Estate Papers of the North Family of Wroxton, Oxfordshire
Perrot 1: Letter-Book of Sir John Perrot
291
292 Select Bibliography
Rawlinson MSS
A170–195: Pepys Papers
A331: Copies of Letters by Sir Amias Paulet, 1577–78
B151: Historical Collections of Robert Horn
B285: Letter-Book of Peter Edgecombe, MP for Cornwall, 1569–93
C232
C368, fols1–18: Letter-Book of Bishop Wren of Norwich and Ely, 1636–40
C439: Letter-Book of Henry Cary, Lord Falkland as Lord Deputy of Ireland, 1622–24
C744
C859 A–C: A Short-Hand Note-Book of Samuel Pepys
C929: Papers of Sir Charles Cornwallis, 1607–23
D59: Translation by Sir John Borough of Tacitus’s De moribus Germanorum With Notes
on the Purchase of Paper, 1624–25
D116: Notebook of Nicholas Strelley, of Church Langton, Leicestershire, 1643–62
D189, fols24r–52v: Sir Walter Ralegh’s Apology, Lesser Apology and Scaffold Speech
D264: Miscellaneous Political and Academic Material, Sixteenth Century
D273: Commonplace Book of John Rogers, c.1578–1600
D327: Letters and Papers of Alatheus Dodsworth
D398, fols156r–157r, 158: Accounts of Various Sorts of Paper, and Account of Parcels
of Paper with Prices, 1674–75
D431: Commonplace Book, Seventeenth Century, Containing Model Letters
D666, fols47–90: Sir Thomas Jervoise’s Copies of Privy Council Letters, 1618–40
D859: Collections by Hannibal Baskerville, Antiquary
D917, fols55r–66v: Memorandum-Book of Money Expended for Gonville and Caius
College, Cambridge, 1557–71
D924
D985: Copy-Book by Robert Batt, Oxford Undergraduate, 1581–84
D1056: A Collection of Notes on Various Cases in Law by Edward Bastard, 1641–49
D1063, fols70–146: A Latin Exercise Book by Griffith Price, 1596
D1092, fols1r–23v: Commonplace Book kept by Schoolmaster of Saham Toney in
Norfolk, c.1618–23
D1286: Journal in Italian of Travels from Rome in Spain, 1605–06
D1392
Letters 77: Copies of Latin Dispatches from Queen Elizabeth to Various Potentiates,
Nobles and Townships in Europe, 1592–96
Letters 89: Letters to and Drafts of Letters from Archbishop James Ussher, 1612–46
Poet 212
Tanner MSS
74: Collection of Letters and Papers, 1611–19
75: Collection of Letters and Papers, 1603–10
76
79: Collection of Letters and Papers During Various Years in the Reign of Queen
Elizabeth
82: Copies of Letters, Memorials, Orders in Council &c During Various Years,
Seventeenth Century
168, 169: ‘The Commonplace Books of Sir Stephen Powle’
227
241: Letter-Book of Bassingbourne Gawdy, 1576–89
265: Transcripts of Letters and Speeches, 1618–23
278
290
299: Collection of Various Treatises and Letters, Transcribed by Archbishop Sancroft
University MS 152
Bristol Record Office
AC/C, Papers of the Smyth Family of Ashton Court, Correspondence
British Library, London
Additional MSS
4106
4108: Transcripts of Letters and State Papers From the MSS Collections of Francis
Bacon
4125
4130: Letters of Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex
4131
4136: Forbes Papers
4147: Letter-Book of Henry Montagu, Viscount Mandeville, 1621–22
4149: Transcripts of State Papers and Political Tracts Made Chiefly by Ralph Starkey
(d.1628)
4296: Letter-Book of Edward Franklin, Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge,
1601–30
4277
4379: Winchester School Exercises, c.1565
4757: Copybook of Letters and Papers Relating to the Administration of Ireland Under
Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, During his Office as Lord Deputy, 1600–02
5847
5495
5503: Copies of Letters of Francis Bacon
5956: Miscellanies in Prose and Verse, Seventeenth Century
6704
10309: Characters and Poems Selected from Various English Authors, c.1630; formerly
belonging to Margaret Bellasys
10615: Register Book of the Letters of William Jessop, 1634–41
11308
12097
18201: Copy of Correspondence Between James I of England, Ferdinand II, Emperor,
and Frederick, Elector Palatine, Relative to Affairs of the Palatinate, 1621–23
18639–18642: Letter-Books of Sir Isaac Wake, 1615–23
20921: Letter-Book of Sir Theodore Turquet de Mayerne, 1611–53
22473: Copies of State Papers, 1571–1627
22587
22601
22959: Diary of Public Events by John Rous, Rector of Stanton Downham, Suffolk,
1625–43
24113: Letter-Book of Sir Edward Dering, 1629–31
25460, fols273–286: Accompts of Sir John, Afterwards Lord, Stanhope, and His
Successors, Masters of the Posts, 1597–1639
25707
27395–27397: Correspondence of the Gawdy Family
27427
27632: Sir John Harrington’s Commonplace Book
27999–28005: Correspondence of the Oxinden Family, 1589–1710
28029
28356
28421
28640: Copies of political pamphlets, verse and prophecies chiefly relating to events
of the reign of James I made John Rous, Rector of Stanton Downham, Suffolk,
1617–25
29304: ‘A Breeff, Treatise of the Question for Precedeneye Betwixt England and
Spayne, Disputed of in the Dayes of Queene Elizabeth’
29315
29598: Miscellaneous Letters, 1611–1749
32091
32323: Copy-Book of Letters of the Privy Council, 1571–81
32464: Letter-Book of Sir John Holles, 1598–1617
32649
32652
32657
33271: Copies of Letters, Speeches, etc., 1545–79
33531: State Papers Relating to Scotland and England, 1449–1594
33591
33592
33594: Sir Ralph Sadlyer Correspondence and Papers, 1580–85
33975: Original Letters from Dorothy Osborne
34217
34218: Francis Fane, earl of Westmoreland, Miscellany
34307
34310, 34311: Letter-Books of Sir Isaac Wake, 1624–30
34394–34398: Letter-Books and Miscellanies of the Cromwell Family of Huntingdon
35097: Letter-Book of John Scudamore, 1635–39
35333, fols70r–74v: Timothy Bright’s ‘Arte of Characterye’, c.1600
35831: Hardwicke Papers
35840: Roger Ascham’s Latin Letter-Book, 1554–58
36293: Letter-Book of Ralph Eure, 3rd Baron Eure, 1598–1606
36449–36451: Letter-Books of Sir Walter Aston, 1620–38
36778: Letter-Book of Sir Dudley Carlton, 1626.
36989: Correspondence of the Gawdy Family, 1579–1703
37818: Register of Lord Zouche Warden of Cinque Ports, 1618–24
37999
38137: Letter-Book of Sir Henry Unton
38138: Register of Correspondence between Sir Thomas Parry and Sir Robert Cecil,
1602–03
38139: Historical Collections of Sir Peter Manwood, of Hackington, Kent
38669: Letter-Book of George Rudolph Weckherlin, 1627–35
39828–39838: Tresham Papers
39853
40629: Cassiobury Papers, volume V. Miscellaneous State Papers and Letters
40838: Vernon Papers: Transcripts of Political Papers, 1599–1622
44848: Historical Letters and Papers (English and Foreign) of the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries
47788, 47789: Letter-Books of Sir Edward Dering, 1630–37, 1630–35
48012: Ecclesiastical Formulary, 1490–1581
48018: Robert Beale’s Formulary for a Clerk of the Council, c.1575–85

48044: Papers Relating to Foreign Affairs and Parliament, 1525–1624
48046
48049
48078
48148 fols3v–9v: Robert Beale, ‘Treatise on the Office of Councillor and Principal
Secretary’, 1592
48150: Robert Beale’s Formulary for a Clerk of the Council, c.1572
48166: Letter-Book of John Baron Digby, 1st Earl of Bristol, 1622–29
48591: Letter-Book of Sir Bassingbourne Gawdy, 1588–1604
49609 A and B: Letter-Book of Sir George Carew, 1599–1603
52585: The ‘Waferer Commonplace Book’, c.1591–1627
52798: Letter-Book of Sir Edward Dering, 1629–30
62092: Account Book for Personal Expenses of Margaret Spencer, 1610–13
63854 A and B: Papers Relating to the Letter-Book of William Jessop, Secretary of the
Providence Island Company, 1634–41
70505: John Holles’s Letter-book, 1597–1614
72433: Diary of George Rudolph Weckherlin, 1633–42
72445: Louis Rondel’s Notebook and Letter-Book Kept While at Oxford, c.1622–24
72387, 72388, 72399: Trumbull Papers
73087: Miscellaneous Tracts and Letters, c.1571–1626
78196: Evelyn Papers
78438: Mary Evelyn’s Letter-Book, c.1665–1709
78439: Mary Evelyn’s Letter-Books of Outgoing Correspondence, c.1660–1730.
Cottonian MSS
Caligula B.VIII
Caligula B.IX
Caligula B.X
Caligula C.I
Caligula C.II
Caligula C.III
Caligula C.IV
Caligula C.V
Caligula C.VI
Caligula C.VII
Caligula C.VIII
Caligula D.I
Caligula E.IV
Caligula E.V
Caligula E.VI
Caligula E.VII
Caligula E.X
Caligula E.XII
Galba B.IV
Galba B.XII
Galba C.VI
Galba D.I
Galba D.III
Galba D.VII
Galba D.XI
Galba E.VI
Julius C.III: A Collection of 328 original Letters to Sir Robert Cotton
Nero B.XI
Titus B.I
Titus B.V
Titus B.VIII
Vespasian C.VII
Vespasian C.IX
Vespasian F.II
Vespasian F.III: ‘Book of Hands’ (Collection of Autograph Letters of Famous
Persons)
Egerton MSS
784: The Journal of William Whiteway of Dorchester, 1618–35
1213
1527: Pocket Book of the Duke of Monmouth [c.1685]
2013: Letter-Book of Sir Dudley Carleton, 1615
2086: Correspondence of Factors in the East India Company, 1611–44
2121: Journals of Voyages to the East Indies, 1615–16
2122: Register of Letters of the Factors of the East India Company, 1619–20
2123: Letter-Book of Factors of the East India Company, 1620–21
2584: Letters to Lord Zouche as Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, 1615–36
2598
2603
2713: Gawdy Papers
2812: Edward Lord Zouche’s Letter-Book, 1601
2877: Commonplace Book of Gilbert Frevile, of Bishop Middleham, Durham
2882
2884: Miscellaneous Historical Papers and Original Letters, 1452–1874
3054: Business Accounts of Joyce Jeffreys, 1638–48
Hargrave MSS
17
226
Harleian MSS
39
169
298
374: A Collection of Autograph Letters Made by Sir Simonds D’ Ewes
389, 390: Letters of Joseph Mead to Sir Martin Stuteville, 1620–31
523
677
6108
Lansdowne MSS
1–122: Burghley Papers
Royal MSS
13 B.I: Roger Ascham’s Latin Letter-Book, 1558–68
7B.X
17 B.XLVII, Collections on Dictamen or The Art of Letter-Writing
D.III: Burghley’s copy of Maps of Counties of England and Wales, Printed and Coloured;
From Drawings by Christopher Saxton
Sloane MSS
922: Nehemiah Wallington’s ‘Coppies of profitable and Comfortable Letters’
1455
1709
1710
2035B
3272
3520: Diverse Letters Written by Sir Walter Ralegh
Stowe MSS
150
166
168
172, 174, 175: Edmondes Papers, 1611–16
180
570
1047: Commonplace-Book of Francis Thynne, Lancaster Herald, 1602–08
Cambridge University Library
Add. MS 8460: Elizabeth Lyttleton’s Verse and Prose Miscellany, c.1665–1714
Dd. xi. 73: Commonplace Book of William Whiteway
Ee ii. 34: Letter-Book of John Parkhurt, Bishop of Norwich, 1571–75
Ee.v.23 (C.)
MSS 88/1–3: Hengrave Hall Manuscripts
MS Lett.9: Original Letters, temp. Elizabeth
Centre For Kentish Studies, Maidstone
De L’Isle MSS
U1475, U1500
Dering MSS
Mann (Cornwallis) Manuscripts, U24
U269 F 38/1/6, 11: Rachael Fane’s Notebooks
Cheshire and Chester Archives, Chester
Ms DLT B8
CR 63/2/19: The Commonplace Book of Sir William Davenport
Chethams Library, Manchester
MS Mun. (Farmer-Chetham Manuscript) A.4.150
City of Coventry Archives
BA/H/Q/A79: Letters to the Coventry Corporation
Clywd Record Office
D/E/2398, 2401, Erdigg MSS
Cornwall Record Office, Truro
AR: Arundell of Lanherne Papers
AR/15/4–41: Newquay Right of Wreck, 1571
B35: Basset of Tehidy, Letters Relating Mainly to the Civil War
B36: Basset of Tehidy, Transcripts of B35
BU and WH: Buller of Morval Papers
PB: Prideaux Brune of Place, Padstow
PD 324: Miscellaneous Receipts
R: Rashleigh of Menabilly Papers
T: Tremayne of Heligan Papers
V: Vyvyan of Trelowarren Papers
Corpus Christi College, Cambridge
MS 119
Derbyshire Record Office

D258: Gell Family of Hopton Hall
Devon Record Office, Exeter
City of Exeter Book
123M: Petre Family Papers
346M: Drake Family of Buckland, Correspondence
1148M: Acland of Broad Clyst Papers
1258M: Papers of Earl of Bedford
1262M: Fortescue of Castle Hill
1392M/ L15, L16: Seymour Family of Berry Pomeroy, Correspondence
1499M4/3–5: Tremayne MSS
D1508M: Courtenay Family of Powderham, Earls of Devon, Papers
1700M: Drake of Colyton
D3799/ Add. 3, Box 14705, 14706: Seymour Manuscripts
ECA, Exeter City Archives, Corporation of Exeter, ‘Ancient Letters’, 6 boxes and
fascicules
ECA/Book 144, pp.129–34: Inventory of the Exeter Bookseller Michael Harte, 1615
T.P.3. Documents in Possession of Commander L.G. Turner, Court Gate Farm, South
Brent
Doncaster Archives
DZ: Mucklowe Family, Correspondence
The Dulwich College Archive
Henslowe and Alleyn Papers
East Sussex Record Office, Lewes
DUN 51: Correspondence of the Roberts Family, the Temple Family, the Busbridge
Family, the Farnden Family and Other Correspondence
Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC
E.a.1: Anne Denton’s Prose miscellany, c.1550–c.1590
L.a.: Bagot Papers
L.b.: Loseley MSS
L.d.: Bacon/Townsend MSS
L.e.: Tamworth MSS
V.a.164
V.a.317
V.a.321: A Seventeenth-Century Letter-Book
V.a.334
V.a.373
V.a.381
V.a.421
V.a.430: Mary Granville and Anne Granville D’Ewes, Receipt Book, c.1640–c.1750
V.a.459
V.a.467
V.b.27
V.b.36, 8, fol.1r: ‘Greetinges Subscritpions & farewelles of letters’ [c.1610]
V.b.107
V.b.110
V.b.139: Household Account Book of Mary Petway, Kept on Behalf of her Master Sir
William Pope, 1628–31
V.b.198: Southwell-Sibthorpe Commonplace Book

V.b.214
V.b.248
V.b.296: ‘Dering Family Remembrance Book c.1580–1644’
V.b.303: Collection of Political and Parliamentary Documents, c.1550–c.1650
W.b.262–266
W.b.482–484
X.c.51 (1–46)
X.d.30: Privy Council Letters, 1545–1621
X.d.164 (1–8)
X.d.170
X.d.241
X.d.375
X.d.428: Cavendish/Talbot MSS
X.d.477: Letters from Lydia Dugard to Samuel Dugard [c.1665]–c.1672
X.d.486: Account Book of Sir William and Lady Cavendish, 1548–1550
X.d.490 (1–31)
X.d.493: Letters from Mary Hatton to Randolph Helsby, 1653–1655
Hatfield House, Hatfield, Hertfordshire
Cecil Papers
Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies, Hertford
Panshanger MSS, D/EP F228–235: Lady Sarah Cowper’s ‘Family Books’, 1692–1737
Huntington Library, San Marino, CA
1205i
Ellesmere MSS
EL 1612: State Papers
EL 8175: ‘Catalogue of Papers in Ralph Starkey’s Study’
Hastings MSS
HM 102: Copies of Letters
HM 267: Commonplace Book
HM 333–335: Privy Council Letters, 1600–02
HM 416: Walsingham’s Correspondence During his Embassy to France, 1570–72
HM 419
HM 420
HM 421
HM 898
HM 948: Legal Commonplace Book, Sixteenth Century
HM 951: State Papers, 1554–1649
HM 971
HM 1340: Sir Nicholas Bacon Miscellanea, from 1558
HM 2579
HM 2901
HM 4546–4555
HM 20004
HM 20027
HM 20028
HM 21227
HM 21712
HM 21714
HM 21715
HM 21716
HM 21807
HM 22295
HM 22297
Inner Temple, London
Petyt MS. 538/36
Isle of Wight Record Office
OG/EE: Oglander Collection, Papers Relating to the Estate of Thomas Kemp of
Beaulieu, 1613–31
The John Rylands University Library, University of Manchester
Legh of Lyme Correspondence
Joseph P. Regenstein Library, University of Chicago
Bacon Papers of Redgrave Hall
Keele University Library
Paget Letters, Miscellaneous, Box C
Kendal Record Office
WD/Hoth/Box 44, Hothfield MSS, Correspondence, unfoliated
WD/Hoth/A/988/5, Hothfield MSS, Receipts of Margaret Clifford (c.1598)
Lambeth Palace Library, London
MSS 596–638: The Carew MSS
MSS 647–662: The Papers of Anthony Bacon
MSS 694–710: Shrewsbury MSS
MSS 929–942: Gibson MSS
MS 2086: William Rawley’s Miscellany, 1620s–1640s
MSS 3192–3206: Talbot MSS
MSS 3470–3533: Fairhurst Papers
Lincolnshire Archives, Lincoln
Ancaster MSS
Leeds District Archives
Ingram Correspondence
Leeds University Library
North Family Papers
London Metropolitan Archives
ACC 1876/F03/1–8: Sir Thomas Sutton, Charterhouse Hospital Archives,
Correspondence
Longleat House, Wiltshire
Devereux Papers
MSS 1
Dudley Papers
MSS 1, 2
Seymour MSS
MSS 4, 5
Talbot MSS
MSS 1, 2
Thynne MSS
MSS 5, 6, 7, 8
The National Archives, Kew

AO 1/1950/1–7, 1951/8–14, 1952/15–22, 1953/23–28, Declared Accounts of the
Masters of the Posts, 1566–1639
SP1–7: State Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII
SP10: State Papers Domestic, Edward VI
SP11: State Papers Domestic, Mary I
SP12: State Papers Domestic, Elizabeth
SP14: Secretary of State, State Papers Domestic, James I, 1603–40
SP15: State Papers Domestic, Edward VI–James I, Addenda
SP16: State Papers Domestic, Charles I
SP46/- State Papers Domestic, Supplementary
5–7: Johnson Papers, 1543–53
9: Papers of Thomas Sexton, 1553–61
13–24: General Correspondence, 1559–1603
27–42: Exchequer Papers, 1559–1603
44–46: Darrell Papers, 1536–88
47–49: Williamson Papers, 1572–94
51–56: Daniel Papers, 1543–1616
57: Catesby Papers, 1552–1613
58 Reskymer Papers and Gresham Papers, 1543–1623
60: Papers of John Gamage, 1562–1642
61–65: Letters and Papers, 1603–22
71–74: Carnsew Papers, 1535–1630
75: Egerton Papers, 1610–11
76–77: Bayning Papers, 1614–40
78–81: Letters and Papers, 1625–49
124 General Correspondence, 1547–58
125 General Correspondence, 1559–1601
126 General Correspondence, Temp. Elizabeth
162 General Correspondence, 1523-Temp. Elizabeth
SP59: Secretary of State, State Papers Scotland, Border Papers, 1558–1603
SP63: State Papers Relating to Ireland, 1558–1782
SP70: Secretary of State, State Papers Foreign, Elizabeth I
SP104: Secretaries of State, State Papers Foreign, Entry Books, 1571–1783
162: France, Flanders, German states and Holland: Lisle Cave’s Letter-Book,
1571–89
163: Flanders, France, German states, Holland, Scotland, Spain, Poland, Morocco
and Sweden: Walsingham’s Letter-Book, 1577–79
164: Denmark, Germany, Italy and Russia: King’s Letter-Book, 1603–07
165: France and Holland: King’s Letter-Book, 1607–11
166: Denmark, France, Holland, Germany, Italy and Sweden: Secretary’s Letter-
Book, 1623–25
167: France, Denmark, Holland, Italy, Barbary States, Turkey, Flanders and Venice:
Secretary’s Letter-Book, 1625–27
168: Denmark, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Spain and Sweden: King’s Letter-
Book, 1626–27
169: Denmark, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Spain and Sweden: abstract of let-
ters to ministers abroad, 1627–28
170: Denmark, France, Holland, Italy and Turkey: Secretary’s Letter-Book, 1629–30;
1639–41.
SP106/1–10: Secretaries of State, State Papers Foreign, Ciphers, temp. Elizabeth I to 1791
National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh

Adv. MS 34.2.10
Adv. MS 34.2.14: Letters from Richard Scudamore to Sir Philip Hoby, 1549–50
Adv. MS 34.2.15: Letters to Sir Edward Hoby, c.1550–1638
MS De 1.12/9
National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth
Brogyntyn MSS
Clenennau MSS
Papers of the Wynn Family of Gwydir
MS 4919D: Letter-book of Thomas Bentham, Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield,
1560–61
Newberry Library, Chicago, USA
Case MS. E5.M 3827: Letters from Relations to Esther Masham, Book 1, 1722
Norfolk Record Office, Norwich
Aylsham MS 16
Jerningham MSS
KNY 668 Knyvett/Wilson Papers
Northamptonshire Record Office, Northampton
Fitzwilliam of Milton MS: Letter-Book of Sir William Paget, 1547–49
Isham Correspondence
Westmoreland and Apethorpe MSS
Nottingham University Library
CL C596: Clifton Correspondence
Middleton Collection
Portland MSS, PW A
Pepys Library, Magdalen College, Cambridge
PL 2002–2004, State Papers
Plymouth Proprietary Library, Plymouth
Halliwell Phillips MSS
Plymouth and West Devon Record Office, Plymouth
Corsini Letters
Queens’ College, Cambridge
MS 34: Merchant’s Notebook, Third Quarter of the Sixteenth Century
MS 83: Sir Thomas Smith’s Notebook, c.1560s and 1570s
Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Stratford-upon-Avon
DR 10, DR 37, Correspondence
Sheffield Archives
Bacon Frank Muniments
BFM/2/65: Letters and Papers of the Earls of Shrewsbury
Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments
Staffordshire County Record Office, Stafford
D603, D1734: Paget Papers
St John’s College, Cambridge
MS S.31: Collection of Letters, Prose Passages and Poems of University Matters, Early-
Seventeenth Century
MS S.34: Miscellany Compiled by Alexander Bolde of Pembroke College, Cambridge,

First Quarter of the Seventeenth Century, and Then c.1650
Suffolk Record Office, Ipswich
Adair Manuscripts
Suffolk Record Office, Bury St Edmunds
Clare Parish Records
Surrey History Centre, Woking
LM/COR/3: More Molyneux Family of Loseley Park, Historical Correspondence
Volumes, 1–14, 6729
LM/2046: Letter-Book of Charles, 2nd Baron Howard of Effingham and Earl of
Nottingham, 1586–1602
Warwickshire County Record Office, Warwick
CR 136/B: Newdigate Family of Arbury Papers
CR 1998/Box 60: Throckmorton Family Papers
MI 229: ‘Essex Letter-Book c.1595–1600’
West Sussex Record Office, Chichester
Kytson of Hengrave Hall MSS
West Yorkshire Archive Service, Leeds
Temple Newsam Collection
Wiltshire and Swindon Archives, Chippenham
The Marquis of Ailesbury, Seymour Family, 1300
Yorkshire Archaeological Society Library, Leeds
DD149: Slingsby of Scriven MSS
MD59/13: Middleton of Stockheld MSS
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Index
Bold entries refer to illustrations.
abbreviations, and Cecil’s letter to and nature of surviving letters, 222

Darcy, 6 and private collectors, 223–4
Access to Archives (A2A) catalogue, 226 and software for, 225, 228
addressing practices, 145–6 and sources for study, 21–2
and Cecil’s letter to Darcy, 6 and state papers, 223–4
and conventions of, 71–3 ars dicataminis, 63–4, 233
Akkerman, Nandine, 150, 173 Arundel, earl of, see Howard, Philip, earl
Alberti, Leon Battista, 152 of Arundel
Aldworth, Thomas, 67 Arundel, earl of, see Howard, Thomas,
Allen, Edward, 72 earl of Arundel
Allen, Gemma, 71 Arundell, Edward, 99
Allen, William, 171 Aryndell, Edward, 51
Alured, Thomas, and Letter to the Lord Ascham, Roger, 180, 205
Marquess of Buckingham, 175, 211, and letter-books, 178
212–13, 214, 215 as secretary, 87
Andrewes, John, 143 and teaching of letter-writing, 55
anglicana script, 88 Astley, Katherine, 205
anonymous letters, and circulation of, Aston, Sir Walter, 184
195 Atkinson, Anthony, 136
antiquarianism, and manuscript authentication
miscellanies, 209–10 and sealing of letters, 107
antiquarian networks, and circulation of and signatures, 95
letters, 200–1 autograph letters, 23
archiving of letters, 217, 222 and increasing expectation of, 86–7
and Access to Archives (A2A) and letter-books, 184
catalogue, 226 and meanings attached to, 86–7
and cataloguing of, 225 and social status of recipient, 87–8
and Cecil’s papers, 8–9 and status of, 86
and digitisation of records, 227–8
and dispersal of collections, 222–3 Babington Plot letters, 170
and facsimile copies, 227 Backer, Arnauld, 168
and family letters and papers, 224–5 Bacon, Anne Lady (née Cooke), 37, 89,
and Historical Manuscripts 141, 164, 274
Commission, 225 Bacon, Lady Anne (née Gresham), 37,
and List and Index Society, 226 141
and loss of physical features, 227 Bacon, Anthony, 151, 205
and modern conservation methods, Bacon, Lady Dorothy, 40
226–7 Bacon, Francis, 174, 175, 180, 201, 203,
and motives for, 217 205, 224
and muniment rooms, 224 and ciphers, 152–4
and National Register of Archives, and circulation of letters, 191, 195
225–6 Bacon, Sir Nicholas, 145, 205
335
336 Index
Badoer, Andrea, 149 Bentham, Thomas, bishop of Coventry

Bagg, Sir James, 127 and Lichfield, 178, 183
Bagot, Elizabeth, 141 Bergeron, David M., 14
Bagot, Lewis, 137 Bess of Hardwick, see Talbot, Elizabeth
Bagot, Walter, 62, 87 (née Hardwick), countess of
Bagot, William, 62 Shrewsbury
Baildon, John, 38, 42 bifolium, 2, 6, 98
Baldwin, Thomas, 158 and folding of, 49
bale of paper, 34 Billingsley, Martin, 42, 88
Bales, Peter bindings, and letter-books, 182
and paper quality, 36 Bisley, Reynold, 170
and penknives, 43 Bland, Mark, 101
and quill pens, 42, 43 blank letters, 97
and shorthand, 155 blotting paper, 41
and teaching of letter-writing, 60 Bodley, Sir Thomas, 150, 156, 158
and writing desks, 43, 44 Boff, Thomas, 140
Bamfield, John, 100 Bohemia, Elizabeth of, see Elizabeth,
Bancroft, Richard, 201 Princess [Elizabeth Stuart], queen
Banks, Thomas, 132 of Bohemia and electress palatine,
Bannister, Henry, 35, 143, 186 consort of Frederick V
Baret, John, 55 Bolde, Alexander, 178–9
Barton, Edward, 159 Boldero, Francis, 145
Baskerville, Hannibal, 37, 96 Boleyn, Anne, 60, 86
Baskerville, Lady Mary (née Borlase, Sir William, 54
Throckmorton), 146 Bourchier, William, earl of Bath, 49, 87,
Baskerville, Sir Thomas, 72, 96, 99 94, 96, 122, 123, 138, 146, 218
Bassett, Anne, 62, 79 Boswell, William, 97, 103
Bassett, James, 54, 58–60, 166 Bourdieu, Pierre, 13
Bassett, John, 104 Bourne, Elizabeth, 39, 99, 166
Bassett, Katherine, 62 Bowes, Lady Isabel, 186
Bate, John, 39 Boxoll, John, 121
Bath, Corporation of, 35, 135 Boye, Thomas, 144
Bath, earl of, see Bourchier, William, earl Brandolinus, Lippus, 57
of Bath Brathwaite, Richard, 77, 219, 224
Batt, Robert, 57 Braunmuller, A.R., 14, 85
Baxter, Richard, 227 Bray, Alan, 14
Baynes, Roger, 171 Brayshay, Mark, 110, 112, 116, 120, 134
Beale, Robert, 77, 79, 162 Breton, Nicholas, and A Poste With a
and endorsement of letters, 218 Madde Packet of Letters, 67, 68, 69
and letter-books, 179, 180 Brewerton, Patricia, 154–5
and manuscript formularies, 204, Bright, Timothy, 154–5
206 Brinsley, John
Beal, Peter, 41, 175, 190, 201, 212 and ink-making, 38
and scriveners, 74 and teaching of letter-writing, 55–6,
and writing desks, 44 60
bearer of letter, as part of epistolary Brooke, Margaret, 99
process, 141 Browne, Henry, 137
Beckwith, Peter, 75 Browne, John, 67–8
Belaso, Giovanni Battista, 152 and The Marchants Avizo (1589), 67–8
Bellany, Alistair, 210 Browne, Sir Richard, 139
Index 337
Browne, John (c.1608–1691), 199 and expansion of, 132–3

Brown, Nancy Pollard, 101 and features of, 131–2
Brudenell, Thomas, 146 as idiosyncratic and ad hoc affair,
Bryan, Sir Francis, 102 132
Bull, Henry, 191 and inter-regional and local services,
Bullock, Jane, 137 131
Bulmer, Sir John, 103 and lack of regulation, 135
Bunel, Claude, 59 and medieval origins, 133
Burghley, Lord, see Cecil, William and poor reputation of carriers, 134
Burghley, Mildred, see Cecil, Mildred and postal charges, 133–4
Burlinson, Christopher, 83, 97, 151 and regional share of London trade,
business letters 131
and dating of, 104–5 and role in family communication,
and filing of, 219–20 129
and filing of letters, 219–20 and size of carrier operations, 129
and letter-books, 178, 180 and speed of post, 134
and letter-writing manuals, 67–8 and spread of news, 129–30
and Merchant Strangers’ Post, 119, and Taylor’s guide to (The Carriers
137 Cosmographie), 130–1
Butler, Thomas, 134 and users’ knowledge of, 132
Buzeline, Andrew, 171 Carthy, Charles, 46
Byrne, Muriel St Clare, 44, 59, 104 Cary, Elizabeth (née Tanfield),
viscountess Falkland, 60, 93, 96
Cabala, 191, 203, 213 Cary, Henry, first viscount Falkland,
Caesar, Sir Julius, 88, 185 104, 142, 187, 211
calendars, 200 and letter-books, 183, 184
and dating of letters, 102–3 Casimir, Pfalzgraf Johann, 139
Calvin, John, 191 Catesby, Robert, 40
Camden, William, 201 Cauze, Thomas, 170
Capaccio, Giulio Cesare, 76 Cavendish, Lady Elizabeth, see Talbot,
Cappell, Arthur, 101 Elizabeth (née Hardwick), countess
Cardano, Girolamo, 164 of Shrewsbury
Care, Henry, 69 Cavendish, Henry, 93
Carew, Sir George, 109, 220 Cecil, Mildred (née Cooke), 148
and letter-books, 182, 183 Cecil, Robert, earl of Salisbury, 41, 46,
Carew, Richard, 135–6 47, 58, 62, 74, 87, 88, 102, 109,
Carey, George, second Baron Hunsdon, 121, 128, 136, 142, 144, 146, 161,
103 165, 170, 186, 192, 194, 220, 221,
Carleton, Anne (née Glemham), 223, 234, 252
viscountess of Dorchester, 41, 44 and archiving of papers, 8–9
Carleton, Sir Dudley, 132, 150, 183, 196 and letters to son, 62
Carlisle, earl of, see Hay, James, earl of and letter to Sir Francis Darcy, 1,
Carlisle 5: archiving of, 8–9; brevity, 2–6;
Carmarden, Richard, 134 layout, 2; postal directions, 6;
Carnsew, Matthew, 58 postal endorsements, 7, 8; returned
Carnsew, Richard, 58 to Cecil, 8; sealing, 6; significance
carrier network, 128–35 of, 1, 9–10; size, 2; watermark, 2,
and carrying of passengers, 130 3, 4
and coverage of, 129 and ‘The State and Dignitie of a
and delivery of letters, 133 Secretarie of State’, 77
338 Index
Cecil, William (Lord Burghley), 40, 41, and learning letter-writing, 60–2
74, 87, 104, 121, 140, 142, 151, 158, and paper purchases, 35
159, 162, 164, 193, 205, 218 and personal letter-carriers, 138
and letter of recommendation, 79–80, Clifford, George, earl of Cumberland, 46
81 Clifford, Margaret, countess of
Chaderton, Laurence, 186 Cumberland, 186, 187
chain lines, 30, 33, 227 Clinton, Elizabeth Fiennes de (née Lady
Chaloner, Sir Thomas, 136 Elizabeth Fitzgerald), countess of
Chamberlain, John, 71, 196 Lincoln, 189
Charles I, 10, 19, 100 clothes, 17
and postal reforms, 109, 123–6, Clotworthy, Hugh, 142
232–3; proclamation of 1635, 124–5 Cobham, Lord Henry, 40, 119, 196, 221
and regnal year, 103 Cocker, Edward, 88
and sealing of letters, 49–50 codicology, 11, 18, 85
and signature, 97 see also watermarks
Charles II, 173 Cogswell, Thomas, 211
Chartier, Roger, 14, 15 Coke, John, 75, 223
Chartres, J.A., 112, 131, 132–3 Colclough, David, 204, 210, 213
Chester, Thomas, 102 Cole, James, 36
children Coleman, Morgan, 185
and layout of letters, 93–4 Colpeper, Sir William, 149
and learning ink-making, 38 Colville, John, 171
and learning letter-writing, 26: girls, commonplace books, 180, 181, 187,
60–2; grammar schools, 55–7; 197–8
inculcating obedience, 58, 59–60; see also letter-books
James Bassett, 58–60; parental composition of letters, 53
encouragement/pressure, 60–3 and autograph letters, 86–7
and letters to parents, 53, 59–60, and collaborative nature of, 9, 12, 15,
60–2, 144 74, 75, 83, 84
and secret writing, 166 and mechanics, 23–4
Cholmeley, John, 140 and multiple scribes, 76, 83
church festivals, and dating of letters, and place of, 45–6
103–4 and scriveners, 74–5
Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 26, 55, 56, 58, and secretaries, 2, 23, 75–83, 87:
64, 65, 70, 71 complexity and plurality of
circular letters, 25, 146 practices, 83; day-to-day work of,
circulation of letters, see scribal 79; employment of, 75–6; payment
circulation of letters of, 75; role and function, 76–9
Clason, Cornelius, 95 and time of, 46–7, 48
Clement, Francis, 44 Compton, Thomas, 99
and ink-making, 38 Constable, Giles, 75
and instructions for making quill Conway, Sir Edward, 101, 200, 223
pens, 42 Conway, Sir John, 40, 166
and paper quality, 34 Conybeare, John, 57, 205
and penknives, 43 Cope, Walter, 40
Clerke, Edmund, 133 copying practices
Clifford, Lady Anne, 181, 187–8 and interpretation of letters, 212
and decorated paper, 101 and letter-books, 183: representation
and employment of secretary, 76 of letters, 184; requesting return of
and layout of letters, 93 uncopied letters, 185; timing, 185
Index 339
and manuscript miscellanies, 198 Cumberland, earl of, see Clifford,

and process of copying, 198 George, earl of Cumberland
and professional scribes and scriptoria, Curle, Gilbert, 158
201 cursive script, 88
and provenance of copy texts, 200
and scribal circulation of letters, 197, Dacre, Elizabeth, 132
198 Dallison, Elizabeth, 76
and textual variations, 212 Darcy, Sir Francis, 1, 2
Cornwallis, Sir Charles, 157 Darell, Walter, and A Short Discourse on
Cotton, Sir Robert, 190, 200, 201, 207 the Life of Servingmen, 65
as collector of state papers, 223–4 Darnell, Susannah, 100
Cotton, William, and cipher system, Dart, Lewis, 102
159, 160 dating of letters, 101–5, 259n121
Courtenay, Gertrude (née Blount), and business letters, 104–5
marchioness of Exeter, 40 and calculation of dates, 102–3
Courtenay, Henry, marquess of Exeter, and calendars used, 102–3
41 and Cecil’s letter to Darcy, 6
Courtenay, Sir William, 47, 90, 142 and church festivals, 103–4
Coverdale, Miles, 191 and layout of letters, 104–5
Cowper, Lady Sarah, 188, 199 and official correspondence, 101–2
Cragg, Archie, 139 and regnal years, 103
Creswell, Joseph, 171 and variations in, 102
Crofts, Sir James, 142 Davenport, Sir William, 199
Croft, Thomas, 132 Davids, Roy, 90
Cromwell, Sir Oliver, 218 Davies, John, 43, 144
Cromwell, Thomas, 74 Davison, Francis, 196
crown paper, 34 Davison, William, 186, 224
cryptography Davis, Tom, 90
and decryption, 161–2, 163 Davy, John, 47, 128
and development of theory of, 152–4 Davy, Richard, 140
and distinction between codes and Day, Angel, 63
ciphers, 270n28 and The English Secretorie, 65, 69,
as elite form, 162–4 78: layout of letters, 91; role of
and Phelippes (Thomas): career of, secretary, 77–9
159–61; decryption, 161–2 and the familiar letter, 66
and practical use of ciphers and codes, and letters of petition, 70
156–65: cipher systems, 156–7, and need to learn variety of hands, 89
159, 160; disguising use of codes, Deane, Mary, 165
158; disparity between theory and de Beau Chesne, John, 38, 41, 42
practice, 158, 231; level of systems de Bryene, Alice, 178
used, 157–8 de Courtin, Antoine, 91, 92, 256
and women, 164–5 Dee, John, 155
see also secret letters/writing deference, and layout of letters, 90–4
Cuffe, Henry, 75, 80, 193 Delaval, Lady Elizabeth, 166
Culoke, Richard, 105 delays and non-delivery of letters, 143–4
Cultures of Knowledge Project, delivery of letters, 232
University of Oxford, 228 and carrier network, 128–35: carrying
Cumberland, countess of, see Clifford, of passengers, 130; coverage of, 129;
Margaret (née Russell), countess of delivery of letters, 133; expansion
Cumberland of, 132–3; features of, 131–2;
340 Index
delivery of letters – continued and gallows drawings, 142

as idiosyncratic and ad hoc affair, and overseas post, 142, 143:
132; inter-regional and local transatlantic correspondence, 142–3
services, 131; lack of regulation, and postal endorsements, 121–2
135; medieval origins, 133; poor and royal post, 121–2
reputation of carriers, 134; postal and use of ‘post haste’ phrase, 141–2
charges, 133–4; regional share of della Porta, Giovanni Battista, 152
London trade, 131; role in family de Mayerne, Sir Theodore Turquet, 181
communication, 129; size of carrier demy paper, 34
operations, 129; speed of, 134; de Pizan, Christine, 69
spread of news, 129–30; Taylor’s de Quester, Matthew, 120
guide to (The Carriers Cosmographie), Dering, Edward (c.1540–1576), 191, 205,
130–1; users’ knowledge of, 132 207, 208
and foot-posts, 135: role in postal Dering, Sir Edward (1598–1644), 44, 72,
reforms, 136; speed of, 135; use on 73, 106, 221
continent, 136; users of, 136 and letter-books, 182, 184
and informal letter-carriers, 138–40 Dering, Lady Unton, 44, 72, 73, 106
and Merchant Strangers post, 119, 137 de Vere, Edward, earl of Oxford, 98, 141
and personal letter-carriers, 137–40 Devereux, Frances (née Walsingham),
and post-horses, 113 countess of Essex, 220
and post, meaning of, 263n37 Devereux, Robert, second earl of Essex,
and post-stage towns, 7, 113 2, 25, 39, 46, 71, 75, 79, 80, 87, 88,
and private standing posts, 127 90, 93, 99–100, 106, 139, 141, 151,
and royal post, 7, 116–28: Charles 157, 164, 175, 185, 196
I’s proclamation of 1635, 124–5; and circulation of letters, 191, 192,
expansion of routes, 120; flexibility 193, 194, 197, 200, 202, 204, 205,
of, 120–1; foreign letters, 119–20; 210, 212
inauguration of Tudor system, 19, and intelligence system, 151
116; onward delivery from and Letter of Advice to the Earl of
post-room, 122–3; opened to private Rutland, 175
mail, 123–7; political importance of, and signature, 95, 96
116; postal boats, 117; postmasters, de Vigenère, Blaise, 152
116–17; problems and inefficiencies, Devon, Katherine, countess of, 38
127–8; reforms of, 116, 117–18, D’Ewes, Sir Simonds, 201, 224
232–3; regulations covering, Dickinson, Francisco, 39
117–19; royal progresses, 121; Digby, Lord George, 100
special arrangements in times of Digby, Sir John, 149, 182, 184
crisis, 123; speed of, 121–2; those digital technology, and archiving of
entitled to use, 118 papers, 227–8
and secret letters, 170–3: hidden Dioscorides, Pedanius, 221
on person, 170; Mary, Queen of diplomacy, and secret letters, 149, 150
Scots, 173; underground Catholic diplomatics, 18, 85
networks, 170–2; women, 172–3 Doddington, John, 37
and significance of, 230 Dodsworth, Alatheus, 184
and state monopoly on carrying mail, Dodsworth, Roger, 201
126, 261n5 Donne, John, 180
delivery speed and layout of letters, 92
and carrier network, 134 and personal seals, 106
and complaints about, 141 and sealing of letters, 50
and foot-posts, 135 as secretary, 76, 87
Index 341
Dorchester, Anne, viscountess of, see palatine, consort of Frederick V,

Carleton, Anne (née Glemham), 103, 150, 166
viscountess of Dorchester Ellowe, John, 113
Dorset, earl of, see Sackville, Richard, Ellzey, John, 136
Lord Buckhurst, third earl of Elton, G.R., 226
Dorset Englefield, Sir Francis, 159, 171
Douglas, Richard, 157 English Civil War, and secret writing,
Dover, and postal route, 1, 7, 113, 114, 164
116, 120, 137, 234 epistolarity, 13
Dowell, John, 31 epistolary networks, 14
draft letters, 25 epistolographies, 2, 22, 204
Drury, Lady Anne, 76 see also letter-writing manuals
Drury, Sir Drew, 186 Erasmus, Desiderius, 14, 53, 63, 64, 65,
Drury, Sir Robert, 76 66, 70, 86, 180, 188, 205
Dryden, John, 87 and De conscribendis epistolis, 53, 55,
Du Bosque, Jacques, 69 56–7, 64
Dudley, Anne (née Russell), countess of and love letters, 205–7
Warwick, 164, 186, 187, 189 and meaning of personal letters, 86
Dudley, John, earl of Warwick, 46, 96, and wording of letters, 66
128 Erskine, John, 140
Dudley, Robert, earl of Leicester, 35, 75, Essex, Countess of, see Devereux,
87, 88, 96, 113, 122, 138–40, 165, Frances (née Walsingham), countess
223, 224, 288 of Essex
Dugard, Lydia, 185 Essex, earl of, see Devereux, Robert,
Dugdale, William, 201 second earl of Essex
Duke, Alexander, 94 Eure, Ralph, 3rd Baron Eure, 182
Duke, Edward, 44 Evelyn, John, 184
dust box, 30 Evelyn, Mary, 179, 188
Everard, Elizabeth, 99
Earle, John, 129, 134 exemplary letters, see model letters
Edgecombe, Peter, 178 Exeter, Corporation of, 35, 50, 122
Edmondes, Sir Thomas, 149 Exeter, Dowager Marchioness of, see
Edmundson, William, 181 Courtenay, Gertrude (née Blount),
education marchioness of Exeter
and extension of, 20 Exeter, Marquess of, see Courtenay,
and letter-writing as part of Henry, marquess of Exeter
curriculum, 53 Eyre, Adam, 74
see also teaching letter-writing
Edward IV, 116 Fabri, Pierre, 64
Edward VI, 88, 103 Facy, Andrew, 168
Electronic Enlightenment Project, Falkland, viscount, see, Cary, Henry, first
University of Oxford, 290n62 viscount Falkland
Elizabeth I, 25, 39, 60, 80, 87, 88, 89, Falkland, viscountess, see, Cary,
93, 101, 106, 149, 151, 162, 175, Elizabeth (née Tanfield), viscountess
192, 193, 197, 198, 201, 202, 203, Falkland
204, 209, 212 family life
and regnal year, 103 and layout of letters, 93–4
and secret writing, 165 and letter-writing, 48: socialisation of
Elizabeth, Princess [Elizabeth Stuart], children, 59–60
queen of Bohemia and electress see also children; marriage
342 Index
Fane, Sir Francis, 176, 199, 213 Frizell, William, 120

Fane, Rachael, 60 Fulkes, William, 186
Fane, Sir Thomas, 7, 8, 9 Fuller, Thomas, 203
Faunt, Nicholas, 8, 77, 79, 150 Fulwood, William, 20–1, 63, 69
and filing of letters, 219 and The Enemie of Idlenesse, 64,
and letter-books, 179–80 65: layout of letters, 91–2;
feathers, 30 superscriptions, 72
and production of quill pens, 42 and the familiar letter, 66
Featley, Daniel, 181 Fumerton, Patricia, 16
Fenton, Geoffrey, 66
Ferguson, Margaret, 162–4 Gainsford, Thomas, 67, 69, 77
Feria, duchess of see Suárez de Figueroa, gallows drawings, 6, 8, 28, 142
Jane (née Dormer), duchess of Feria Gamage, Dorothy, 100
Fernihurst, Lady, 103, 173 Garnett, Henry, 167, 171, 172
Ferrers, Sir Humphrey, 199 Gascoigne, Robert, 120–1
Ferryman, Peter, 205 Gawdy, Anthony, 35, 105
Ficino, Marsilio, 180 Gawdy, Sir Bassingbourne, 94
filing systems, 8, 217–18 and letter-books, 183, 188–90
and depiction in paintings, 220 Gawdy, Bassingbourne, II, 58, 189
and endorsement of letters, 218 Gawdy, Charles, 58
and instructions on, 219–20 Gawdy, Dorothy, 72
and reconstruction of, 218–19 Gawdy, Framlingham, 58, 59–60, 132
and storage of letters, 220–1 Gawdy, Sir Francis, 102
Finlay, Michael, 38 Gawdy, Lettice, 145
Fisher, John, Bishop of Rochester, 44 Gawdy, Philip, 129–30, 141
Fitzherbert, Thomas, 171 and ink purchases, 37
Fitzmaurice, Susan, 14 and personal letter-carriers, 137
Fitzwilliam, Sir William, 137, 148 and slowness of carriers, 134
Fleming, Abraham, 63, 65, 72 and time of composition, 46
and A Panoplie of Epistles, 64–5 Gawdy, William, 129, 132
Florio, John, 207 gender
Flowerdew, Edward, 94 and handwriting practices, 88
folding of letters, 49, 98, 218 and letter-writing, 14
and significance of, 230 and scripts used, 88–9
foolscap paper, 34 see also women
foot-posts, 135 Gent, W.I., 67
and role in postal reforms, 136 Gerard, John, 79–80, 101, 170, 171, 172
and speed of, 135 and circulation of letters, 194
and use on continent, 136 and secret writing, 167–8
and users of, 136 Gerhold, Dorian, 134
Forde, Thomas, 66–7 Gest, Edmund, 104
forgery, and signatures, 97 Gibson, Jonathan, 14, 64, 85
formal letters, and conventions of, 69 Gifford, Dr William, 161–2
Fortescue, John, 220 Gilbert, Sir John, 105
Foxe, John, 191 Gilpin, George, 136, 139
and Actes and Monuments, 208 gilt-edged paper, 101
France, and paper production, 32, 33 girls
Franklin, Edward, 179, 181 and learning letter-writing, 60–2
Franson, Cornelius, 95 and restricted access to writing
Frevile, Gilbert, 198–9, 207 tuition, 54
Index 343
see also children; women and scribal status of a letter, 86

Godolphin, Sir Francis, 122 and scripts used, 88–9
Godsalve, Barbara, 93 Hare, George, 97
Goldberg, Jonathan, 90 Harington, Sir John, 180
Golding, Thomas, 145 Harington, Villiers, 95
Gordon, Andrew, 175, 195 Harley, Lady Brilliana (née Conway),
Gorges, Sir Ferdinando, 144 164
Gorges, Sir Thomas, 128 Harley, Sir Edward, 164
Gossaert, Jan, 22, 220 Harpar, Francis, 127
gothic script, 88 Harrison, William, 112, 114
Grafton, Richard, 113–14 Harte, Michael, 42
grammar schools, and teaching of Harwood, John, 194
letter-writing, 55–7 Hatton, Christopher, 165
use of manuals, 56–7 Hawkins, Lady Margaret, 192
Granger, John, 207 Hawkins, Richard, 102
Granville, Anne, 39 Hawys, John, 35
Granville, Mary, 39 Hay, James, earl of Carlisle, 148–9
graphology, 90 ‘H C’, and The Forrest of Fancy, 65
Gras, Guillaume le, 58, 145 Hegendorff, Christoph, 56, 57
Greenaway, Richard, 130 Hendy, Humfrey, 95
Green, Lawrence D., 68 Heneage, Sir Thomas, 42
Gregorian calendar, 102 Henrietta Maria, Queen Consort, 149,
Gregory, Thomas, 123 157
Gregory XIII, Pope, 102 Henry VII, 57, 116, 137
Greville, Fulke, 40, 46, 75, 204 Henry VIII, 19, 46, 80, 96, 103, 133,
Grey, Arthur, fourteenth Baron Grey of 142, 149, 166, 200, 202, 203, 212
Wilton, 80, 83, 89, 105, 151 and draft letter from, 80, 82
Grey, Henry, earl of Stamford, 100 and rarity of personal letters, 86
Grey, Jane, 60 and regnal year, 103
Grey, Susan, countess of Kent, 186, 187 Herbert, John, 77
Grey, Lord Thomas, 186 Herbert, Mary, countess of Pembroke,
Grosvenor, Richard, 35, 47, 138, 195–6 87–8
Guernsey, 35, 86, 143, 145, 186, 196 Herbert, William, earl of Pembroke, 104
Guez, Jean-Louis, 66 Herrick, John, 71, 129
Guillén, Claudio, 24, 238n60 Herrick, Marie, 40
Herrick, Mary, 129
Hackett, John, 146 Herrick, Robert, 102
Hall, Joseph, 191 Herrick, Tobias, 71
handwriting Herrick, William, 40
and apologies for poor, 90 Hickes, Michael, 75, 151, 271
and autograph letters: meanings Higginson, Anne, 54
attached to, 86–7; social status of Higham, Sir John, 95
recipient, 87–8 Hill, John, 67
and correct usage of, 87 Hill, Thomas, 183
and factors effecting, 89–90 Historical Manuscripts Commission, 9,
and hands used, 89–90 225
and interpretation of, 90 Hobart, Ann, 94
and politics of, 86, 229 Hobart, Sir John, 94
and scribal letters, meanings attached Hobart, Robert, 146
to, 87 Hobbs, Mary, 190
344 Index
Hobson, Thomas, 129 Hutton, Sir Timothy, 113

Hoby, Lady Margaret, 48, 181, 187 Hynchley, William, 7
Hoby, Sir Thomas Posthumous, 48, 187 Hynde, Francis, 94
Holbein, Hans, the Younger, 22, 220 Hyton, William, 132
Holland, Hugh, 201
Holles, Denzel, 62 Idelle, Richard, 97
Holles, Sir John, 51, 58, 62, 76, 196 informal letter-carriers, 138–40
and letter-books, 183 ink, 30
holograph, 23 and access to, 40
Holt, William, 162, 171 and colour of, 39
Hopton, Sir Ralph, 95 and factors effecting use of, 39
Horace, 55 and freezing of, 40
Horn, Robert, 198 and iron-gall ink, 38
horses, and demand for, 7 and purchases of in household
Houghton, Jonathan, 209 accounts, 37–8
household accounts and inventories and quality of, 39, 40
and ink purchases, 37–8 and recipes for making, 38–9, 221
and paper purchases, 34–5 and variations within a letter, 39
and penknives, 43 inkpots/inkhorns, 30, 40, 41
and personal letter-carriers, 137 inkstands, 40–1
and postal charges, 133–4 intelligence
and pounce purchases, 41 and decryption, 162
and writing materials, 30–1, 32 and secret letters, 150–1
household manuals Intercursus Magnus treaty (1496), 137
and ink recipes, 38–9 invisible ink, 166–8, 169
and paper preparation, 36 Ireland, and postal communications
and sealing wax recipes, 50–1 with, 120–1
Howard, Charles, second Baron Howard iron-gall ink, 38
of Effingham and first earl of italic script, 2, 6, 58, 59, 86, 88, 89, 96,
Nottingham, 94–5, 168 142, 151, 234
Howard, Margaret (née Stewart),
countess of Nottingham, 191 James VI and I, 23, 88, 101, 120, 121,
Howard, Philip, earl of Arundel, 193–4, 149, 150, 165, 191, 196, 200, 203
204 and postal directives, 119
Howard, Thomas, earl of Arundel, 201 and regnal year, 103
Howard, Thomas, earl of Surrey, 46, 142 and signature, 97
Howard, Lord William Jardine, Lisa, 14, 188
and ink purchases, 37 Jeafferson, J.C., 225
and paper purchases, 34 Jefferey, Thomas, 103
and postal charges, 133 Jenks, Herbert, 198
and purchase of inkhorn, 41 Jennings, Thomas, 163
and purchase of quills, 42 Jervoise, Sir Thomas, 184
Howe, Antonye, 7 Jessop, William, 183
Howell, James, 66 Jewel, John, bishop of Salisbury, 143,
Hunsdon, Baron, see Carey, George, 144
second Baron Hunsdon Johnson, John, 48, 105
Hunter, Dard, 34 Johnson, Otwell, 105
Husee, John, 48, 75, 145 Johnson, Ralph, 67
Huttoft, Henry, 104 Johnson, Sabine, 48, 105
Hutton, Richard, 69 Jones, Ann Rosalind, 17
Index 345
Jones, Anthony, 171–2 and compilation by secretaries or

Jude, Samuel, 127 scribes, 184–5
Julian calendar, 102 and copying practices, 183:
representation of letters, 184;
Kemeys, Sir Charles, 199 requesting return of uncopied
Kempe, William, 55 letters, 185; timing, 185
Kent, countess of, see Grey, Susan, and definition of, 277n4
countess of Kent and development of habit of keeping,
Kerr, James, 95 179
King, John, 122 and ecclesiastical correspondence, 178
Kitson, Sir Thomas, 193 and emulation of exemplars, 178
Knollys, Sir Francis, 143, 186 and influence on other forms, 190
Knowles, Simon, 171, 172 and interpretation of, 175
Knyvett, Elizabeth, 94 and layout of, 184
Knyvett, Thomas, 51, 72–3, 221 and official correspondence, 179–80
and organisation of, 182–3:
Lake, Sir Thomas, 47 chronological, 182; indexes, 183;
Lando, Girolamo, 161 thematic, 182–3
Lane, Edward, 76 and pre-prepared paper books, 181–2
Lane, Nicholas, 122 and protean quality of genre, 190
Laurence (bookbinder), 171 and reasons for compilation, 178, 186,
law, and letter-writing manuals, 68–9 187
layout of letters and scholars, 178–9
and Cecil’s letter to Darcy, 2 and self-writing, 179, 188–90
and dating of letters, 104–5 and shorthand, 183–4
and letter-books, 184 and sizes of, 181
and letter-writing manuals, 91–2 and tradition of, 177–8
and margins, 100–1 and variety of, 180–1
and religious invocations, 104 and women, 179, 187–8
and significance of space, 90–5 letter delivery, see delivery of letters
and social status, 2, 91–5 letter-writing
and women, 93 and academic approaches to, 13–19:
learning letter-writing, see teaching material aspects, 14–16, 17–19
letter-writing and ad hoc nature of, 26, 231
Lee, Sir Henry, 40 and categorization of letters, 24–5,
Leigh Hunt Online Project, 228 26, 231
Leighton, Lady Elizabeth, 139, 143, 186 as collaborative process, 9, 12, 15, 74,
Leighton, Sir Thomas, 143, 145, 165–6, 75, 83, 84, 230
187 and complexity of process, 13, 52, 230
Leicester, earl of, see Dudley, Robert, earl and conventions of, 26, 229
of Leicester and cultures of correspondence, 231
lemon juice, and use as invisible ink, and diversity of practices, 232
167–8 and emergence as private medium, 12
Lerer, Seth, 86 and forms of letters, 12
letter-books, 25, 27, 213 and growth of interest in, 13
and administrative function of, 175, and habits of, 47, 48
176, 178, 179 and haste, apologies for, 47
and autograph letter-books, 184 as laborious task, 30
and binding of, 182 and material conditions for, 11, 45–8:
and business letters, 178, 180 variety of, 27, 32
346 Index
letter-writing – continued and Fleming’s A Panoplie of Epistles,

and material meanings of letters, 85 64–5
and mechanics of composition, 23–4 and Fulwood’s The Enemie of Idlenesse,
and multi-agent nature of, 13, 230 64, 65: layout of letters, 91;
and oral elements of, 141 superscriptions, 72
as part of wider transactions, 13 and layout of letters, 91
and parts of letters, 12–13 and letter collections, 63, 66–7
and personalisation of, 20 and practical manuals (‘secretaries’),
and personalisation of letters, 20 63, 67
and physical form of letters, 85 and proliferation of, 63
and place of composition, 45–6 and secretaries, 76–9
and privacy: emergence of concept, and specialised manuals, 63, 67–9:
20, 145, 168, 233: meaning of, commerce, 67–8; law, 68–9
44–5 and use in grammar schools, 56, 57
and private life, 48 for women, 63, 69
as a process, 11 letter-writing theory
as reactive activity, 232 and ars dicataminis, 63–4, 233
and reading practices, 24 and developments in, 63, 65–6, 233
as regular activity, 232 and early modern theory, 66
and re-use of letters, 37 and the familiar letter, 65, 66
and scribal status of letters, 23–4, and traditions of, 64
24–5, 73–4 and vernacular manuals, 64–5
and skills required for, 27–8 Leycester, Sir Peter, 199
and social scope of, 231–2 Ley, James, 200
as a social transaction, 9–10 libels, and circulation of, 195
and sources for study of, 21–2 Liggon, William, 127
and spread of skills in, 11–12, 20, 28, Linacre, Marcella, 71
233 Lincoln, countess of, see Clinton,
and time of composition, 46–7, 48 Elizabeth Fiennes de (née Lady
and training in, 26 Elizabeth Fitzgerald), countess of
and travellers, 47 Lincoln
and unfixedness of, 25–6 Lisle, Arthur, viscount Lisle. see
and variety of cultures of, 12, 20–1 Plantagenet
as widespread practice, 30 Lisle, Honor (née Grenville), viscountess
letter-writing manuals, 20, 22, 26, 53, Lisle, see Plantagenet
63–9 Lisle, John Lord, see Dudley, John, earl
and audience for, 63 of Warwick
and Darell’s A Short Discourse, 65 List and Index Society, 226
and Day’s The English Secretorie, 65, literacy
78; layout of letters, 91; role of and extension of, 20
secretary, 77–9 and letter-writing, 231–2
and degree to which conventions and signatures, 95–6
followed: everyday correspondence, Littleton, John, 221
70–1; formal letters, 69; forms L’Obel, Matthias, 186
of address, 72–3; freedom from, Locke, Thomas, 196
70–1; letters of petition, 70; Loveday, Robert, 67
spousal modes of address, 72–3; Love, Harold, 175, 190, 197, 199–200,
superscriptions, 71–2; women, 70 212
and Erasmus’s De consribendis epistolis, love letters, and manuscript
56–7 miscellanies, 205–7
Index 347
Lovell, Sir Thomas, 35, 37 Markham, Gervase, 67

Lowe, Roger, 48, 74 Markham, Sir Griffin, 146
Lupton, Thomas, 155–6, 221 Marotti, Arthur F., 175, 190, 210, 211
Lyall, Roderick, 70 marriage, and letter-writing, 48, 145
Lyllé, William, 46 modes of address between spouses,
Lyne, Thomas, 135 72–3
Lyttelton, Elizabeth, 199 Martin, Captain George, 49
Martyr, Peter, 191
McCartye, Dennis, 74 Mary of Loraine, 70
MacCulloch, Diarmaid, 95 Mary, Queen of Scots, 157, 162, 173
Macey, John, 123 Masham, Esther, 179, 188
McKenzie, D.F., 15, 211 Mason, Elizabeth, 140
Mack, Peter, 57, 70, 203, 204, 205 Mason, Matthew, 132
McRae, Andrew, 195 Massinger, John, 77
Macropedius, Georgius, 56, 66 and layout of letters, 91, 92
MacWilliams, Cecily, 187 and sealing of letters, 106
Magnusson, Lynne, 13, 70 materiality of letters
Manners, Francis, sixth earl of Rutland, and academic focus on, 14–16,
51, 134 17–19
Manners, Roger, fifth earl of Rutland and centrality of for understanding,
and letters of advice from Robert 229–30
Devereux, second earl of Essex, 25, and definition of, 10–11, 15
175, 193 and material turn in Renaissance
Manners, Thomas, first earl of Rutland, studies, 14–17
51, 244 and meanings generated by, 11
Manningham, John, 198 and physical features, 11, 16, 19, 85
Mansell, Sir Robert, 46 and reconstruction of epistolary
manuals, see letter-writing manuals process, 16
manuscript miscellanies, 216 and significance of, 229–30
and antiquarianism, 209–10 and social materiality, 11, 16, 18, 19,
and construction of, 198 230
and definition of, 176 Matthew, Tobie, 180, 205
and exemplary letters, 204–7 Maynard, Henry, 41, 151
and love letters, 205–7 May, Steven W., 176
and market for, 201 Mead, Joseph, 145, 196
and methodological problems relating Mellis, John, 104–5
to, 177 and filing of letters, 219–20
and news-related, 210 and letter-books, 180
and organisation of, 197–8 mercantile postal systems, 137
and political analysis, 210–11 Merchant Strangers post, 119, 137
and provenance of copy texts, 200, Merryweather, John, 57
201 methodology, 21–2
and reasons for compilation, 176, Middlemore, Robert, 186
203 Middleton, William, 114
and religious letters, 207–9 Mildmay, Lady Grace (née Sharington),
and women, 199 60
Manwood, Sir Peter, 199, 200–1, 207, militia, and communication with local,
209 123
Manwood, Sir Roger, 200 Milton, John, 87, 178
margins of letters, 100–1 Mockett, Sir Timothy, 171
348 Index
model letters, 53 Newbye, James, 7

and ars dicataminis, 63–4 Newdigate, John and Richard, 30
and Darell’s A Short Discourse, 65 and ink purchases, 37, 40
and Day’s The English Secretorie, 65, 78 and paper purchases, 35
and degree to which adhered to, 69: and postal charges, 133
everyday correspondence, 70–1; and purchase of paper books, 181
formal letters, 69; forms of address, and purchase of sealing wax, 50
72–3; freedom from, 70–1; letters Newquay Right of Wreck letters, 21, 26,
of petition, 70; spousal modes of 95, 99, 232
address, 72–3; superscriptions, 71–2; news
women, 70 and consumption of, 203
and Fleming’s A Panoplie of Epistles, and manuscript miscellanies, 210
64–5 and printed letters, 202
and Fulwood’s The Enemie of Idlenesse, and role of carriers in spread of,
64, 65; superscriptions, 72 129–30
and letter collections, 66–7 and role of roads in spread of, 114–16
and love letters, 205–7 newsletters, 24, 71, 233
and manuscript miscellanies, 204–7 and development of, 47–8
and practical manuals (‘secretaries’), Nicholas, Sir Edward, 42, 96, 185
63, 67 Nicolson, George, 101
and reception, 204–7 Nixon, Anthony, 67, 135
and specialised manuals, 67–9: Norden, John, 114
commerce, 67–8; law, 68–9 Norris, Lord Henry, 41, 80, 139
for women, 69 North, Dorothy Lady, 186
models North, Roger, second Baron North, 136
see also letter-writing manuals Northumberland, earls and countesses,
Moray, Sir Robert, 96, 106 see Percy
More, Sir George, 92 Norton, John, 104
More, Sir William, 30–1, 140 Norton, Thomas, 196, 205Nottingham,
Morison, Richard, 164 countess of, see Howard, Margaret
Morley, John, 194 (née Stewart), countess of
Moryson, Fynes, 130 Nottingham
Moyse, Barnaby, 98–9 Nottingham, earl of, see Howard,
Mulcaster, Richard, 44 Charles, second Baron Howard
Mumford, Margaret, 137 of Effingham and first earl of
Muncke, Levinus, 8, 223 Nottingham
municipal government, and paper
purchases, 35 O’Callaghan, Michelle, 203
muniment rooms, 224 Oglander, Sir John, 136
Myntar, Thomas, 172 Ogle, Lord Robert, 46
Mytens, Jacques, 168 Oldcastle, Hugh, 104, 180, 219
open letters, 145
Nalson, John, 203 orange juice, and use as invisible ink,
National Register of Archives, 225–6 167–8
Naunton, Sir Robert, 200 Orlin, Lena Cowen, 44
Nelmes, Thomas, 31 Osborne, Dorothy, 100–1
Neville, Sir Henry, 102, 220 Oteley, Matthew, 7
Neville, Jane (née Howard), countess of overseas post, 142, 143
Westmoreland, 189 and transatlantic correspondence,
Neville, Sir Robert, 104 142–3
Index 349
Owen, Hugh, 161, 164, 171 Parkhurst, John, bishop of Norwich,

Oxford, earl of, see de Vere, Edward, earl 143, 178
of Oxford and letter-books, 182–3, 187
Oxinden, Anne, 95 Parr, Catherine, 60
Oxinden, George, 89 Parry, Sir Thomas, 218
Oxinden, Henry, 89 Partridge, John, 38, 50–1
Oxinden, James, 132 Paston, Agnes, 76
Oxinden, Katherine, 60, 61 Paston, Lady Katherine, 62, 90, 144
Oxinden, Richard, 94 Paston, Margaret, 76
Paulet, Sir Amias, 159, 173
Paget, William, first Baron Paget, 149, Payne, Richard, 140
166 Peele, James, 180, 219
and letter-books, 179, 185, 187 Pelham, Sir William, 184–5
Paige, William, 137 Pembroke, countess of, see Herbert,
paintings Mary, countess of Pembroke
and depiction of filing systems, 220 Pembroke, earl of, see Herbert, William,
and quill pens in, 42 earl of Pembroke
as source for study, 22 penknives, 30, 42–3
palaeography, 11, 18, 85 Pennington, Sir John, 50
Palatino, Giovanbattista, 42 pens, 30
Palavicino, Sir Horatio, 158, 168 Pepys, Elizabeth, 220
paper, 30 Pepys, Samuel, 48, 100
and advantages of, 32 and shorthand, 183–4
and decoration of, 101 Percy, Algernon, tenth earl of
and gilt-edged, 101 Northumberland, 50
and identifying source of, 33 Percy, Anne (née Somerset) countess of
and imports of, 32, 33; increase in, Northumberland, 159, 163, 172–3
34 Percy, Henry, ninth earl of
and manufacturing process, 33 Northumberland, 75, 79, 138
and preparation of, 36–7 and purchase of a standish, 41
and preservation of, 37, 221–2 and purchase of quills, 42
and price of, 34, 35–6, 240n21 and purchase of seals, 105–6
and production in England, 32–3 and seals, 51
and production of laid paper, 33 Perrot, Sir John, 191
and purchases of: in household personal letter-carriers, 137–40
accounts, 34–5: undergraduates, 35; Persons, Robert, 162, 171
women, 35 petitionary letters, 24
and quality of, 34, 101 and conventions of, 70
and quantities of, 34 and layout of letters, 92
and re-use of letters, 37 as scribal letters, 87
and sizes of, 34, 98: cropping, 99; by women, 70
folded folio, 98; half-sheet quarto, Petrarch, Francesco, 64
99, 100; official correspondence, Petway, Mary, 132
99–100; scraps, 98–9 Peyton, Christopher, 141
and social status, 36, 93: gilt-edged Peyton, Edward, 95
paper, 101; size used, 98–9 Phayer, Thomas, 68
and use of scraps, 98–9, 101 Phelippes, Mary, 164
Papworth, Roger, 105 Phelippes, Thomas, 151, 157
parchment, and uses of, 32, 98 and career of, 159–61
Parker, William, 191, 199 and decryption, 161–2
350 Index
Phillip, William, 39, 156, 221 pounce, 41

Phiston, William, and The Welspring of pounce pots, 30, 41
wittie conceites, 65 Powell, Anthony, 127
Plantagenet, Arthur, viscount Lisle, 46, Powle, Sir Stephen, 200
72, 76, 102, 103, 104, 145, 168, 220 preservation of letters, 217, 221–2
Plantagenet, Honor (née Grenville), and loss of physical features, 227
viscountess Lisle, 33, 46, 47, 58, 62, and modern conservation methods,
72, 76, 104, 145, 166 226–7
and destruction of letters, 168 and motives for, 217
and time of composition, 46 see also archiving of letters
Plat, Hugh, 36, 156 Preston, John, 212
Popham, Sir Ralph, 194 Price, John, 134
Porter, Olive, 134 Prideaux, Dr John, 181
Pory, John, 47–8, 196, 198 printed letters, 201–3
postal charges, 126 prison letters, 27
and carrier network, 133–4 privacy
and personal letter-carriers, 138–9 and emergence of concept of, 20, 145,
postal conditions 168, 233
and development of postal system, 19 and meaning of, 44–5
and idiosyncratic nature of, 19, 24, and secret letters, 168
109, 146–7, 232 and storage of letters, 221
and insecurity of post, 10, 19–20, 110, private life, and letter-writing, 48
144, 170, 232 Prouse, John, 40
and nature of, 141–7: addressing pseudonyms, and secret writing, 166
practices, 145–6; bearer of letter, Puget de la Serre, Jean, 77, 91, 106
141; delays and non-delivery, pursuivants, royal, 139
143–4; delivery speed, 141–2;
emergence of privacy concept, quill pens, 41–2
145; overseas post, 142–3; security and penknives, 42–3
concerns, 144; transatlantic and production of, 42
correspondence, 142–3; unsealed quills, 30
letters, 145; use of gallows drawings, and availability of, 42
142; use of ‘post haste’ phrase, quire of paper, 34
141–2
and official correspondence, 110 Rainoldes, John, 88
and postal charges, 126 Ralegh, Lady Elizabeth (née
and road network, 111–14 Throckmorton), 210
and scribal circulation of letters, Ralegh, Sir Walter, 142, 186, 201, 223
196–7 and circulation of letters, 191, 196,
see also delivery of letters 197, 198, 199, 209, 210
postal endorsements, 7, 50 Rampaigne, Dorothy, 208
and Cecil’s letter to Darcy, 7, 8 Randolph, Thomas, 117, 126–7
and speed of post, 121–2 Ratcliffe, Elizabeth, 221
post haste, and use of phrase, 141–2 Rawdon, George, 101
post-horses, 113 Rawley, William, 39
postmasters, 7, 116–17 Reade, Thomas, 178
and first use of term, 263n39 reading practices, 24
posture, and writing, 43 and emergence of privacy concept,
pot paper, 34 145
Potter, Hugh, 75 and letters, 145
Index 351
and unsealed letters, 145 Roman Catholics

ream of paper, 34 and circulation of letters, 192
receipt books, and ink recipes, 39 and underground postal networks,
reception of letters 170–2: women in, 172–3
and antiquarianism, 209–10 and use of invisible ink, 167–8
and exemplary letters, 204–7 Rondel, Louis, 181
and factors effecting, 203–4 Rous, John, 199, 211, 213
and new-related letters, 210 royal paper, 34
and political analysis, 210–11 royal post, 7, 27, 116–28
and religious letters, 207–9 and expansion of routes, 120
and social textuality, 211 and flexibility of, 120–1
regnal years, and dating of letters, 103 and foreign letters, 119–20
religious invocations, and layout of and inauguration of Tudor system,
letters, 104 19, 116
religious letters, and manuscript and onward delivery from post-room,
miscellanies, 207–9 122–3
Renaissance studies, and material turn and opened to private mail, 109,
in, 14–17 123–7: Charles I’s proclamation of
Republic of Letters, 14 1635, 124–5
and scribal circulation of letters, 197 and political importance of, 116
retailers, and availability of writing and postal boats or barques, 117
materials, 31–2 and postmasters, 116–17
Reynell, Sir Thomas, 37 and problems and inefficiencies,
Reynoldes, Edward, 80, 193 127–8
Reynold, Richard, 103 and reforms of, 116, 117–18, 232–3
Richards, Philip, 99 and regulations covering, 117–19
Rich, Lady Penelope, 25, 157, 212 and royal progresses, 121
and circulation of letters, 175, 197, and special arrangements in times of
202, 204, 210 crisis, 123
Ridgeway, Lady Cicely, 186 and speed of, 121–2
Rigges, John, 121–2 and those entitled to use, 118
road network, 111–14 royalty
and adequacy of, 112–13, 114 and formalities of writing to, 87, 89,
and connectivity, 112 92–3
and increase in traffic, 112 and royal signatures, 96–7
and itineraries, 114 Ruscelli, Girolamo
and main arterial roads, 113 and ink-making, 38–9
and poor condition of, 111–12 and paper preparation, 36
and post-stage towns, 113 and secret writing, 155
and repairing of roads, 112 Rushworth, John, 203, 213
and road books, 113–14, 115 Russell, Henry, 44
and spread of news, 114–16 Russell, Sir John, 46
and travel guides, 114 Russell, Lord John, 104
Roberts, Margaret, 35 Russell, Sir William, 137
Roberts, R.A., 9 Rutland, earls of, see Manners
Roberts, Richard, 199
Rochester, Lord, 191 Sacheverille, Thomas, 102
Rockwood, Ambrose, 167 Sackville, Margaret, 193
Rogers, John, 207 Sackville, Richard, Lord Buckhurst, third
Rogers, Thomas, 158, 168, 169 earl of Dorset, 76
352 Index
Sadler, Sir John, 46 and public and political nature of

Sadler, Sir Ralph, 103–4, 128, 142 letters, 192
St Loe, Edward, 46 and public posting of, 195
Salisbury, earl of, see Cecil, Robert, earl and scribal communities, 197, 198–9,
of Salisbury 200
Salutati, Coluccio, 64 and scribal networks, 197, 200
Sancroft, William, archbishop of and scribal publication, 190–1, 213:
Canterbury, 213 advantages of, 192; controlled
sand box, 30 circulation, 192–3, 196, 197; phases
Sanders, Nicholas, 104 of, 190, 194; printed letters, 201–3;
Sandys, Mary, 39 wider circulation, 193–4, 197
Sanforde, Nicholas, 221 and social groups engaged in, 198–9
Sansovino, Francesco, 76 and variety of materials circulated,
Saunders, Lawrence, 208 191–2
Saunders, Nicholas, 144 and women, 191–2, 199
Savage, John, 97 scribal letters
Saxton, Christopher, 114 and meanings attached to, 87
Scare, Andrew, 104 and status of, 86
Schneider, Gary, 14 scribal status of letters, 23–4, 73–4
scholarly networks, and circulation of and handwriting, 86
letters, 200–1 scriptoria, 201
Scotland, and postal service, 119 Scriven, Charles, 141
Scott, Thomas, 211 scriveners, 27, 74–5
Scott-Warren, Jason, 200 Scudamore, Sir James, 37, 44, 96
scribal circulation of letters, 24, 25, Scudamore, Lady Mary (née
175–6, 190, 213, 233 Throckmorton), 37, 44, 96
and anonymous letters, 195 Scudamore, Mary Lady (née Shelton),
and antiquarian and scholarly 189
networks, 200–1 sealing of letters, 10, 30, 48–9, 105–7
and availability of copies, 196 and authentication, 107
and controlled dissemination of and breaking of seals, 144
multiple copies, 193 and Cecil’s letter to Darcy, 6
and copying of letters, 197, 198 and colour of seals, 106
and coterie circulation, 191, 192–3 and colour of wax, 106
and diplomatic correspondence, and design of seals, 105
192–3 and family seals, 106
and explanatory models of, 191 and iconography of seals, 106
and indiscriminate circulation, 195 and methods of, 49–50
and libels, 195 and official seals, 105
and malleability of texts, 212 and outer wrappers, 50
and market for, 195, 201 and personal seals, 105, 106
and methodological problems relating and sealing wax, 50; recipes for, 50–1
to, 176–7 and seal matrices or dies, 51
and motives for, 203 and significance of, 229–30
and postal conditions and networks, and use of silk and floss, 106
196–7 and wafer seals, 51
and professional scribes and scriptoria, secretaries and amanuenses, 12, 230
201 and access to, 27
and provenance of copy texts, 200, and compilation of letter-books,
201 184–5
Index 353
and complexity and plurality of and widespread use of, 149–50, 151
practices, 83 and women, 164–5
and composition of letters, 2, 23, see also cryptography
79–80 secrets, books of
and day-to-day work of, 79 and ink recipes, 38–9, 221
and employment of, 75–6 and invisible ink recipes, 166–7
and filing of letters, 218, 219 and paper preparation, 36–7
and formal nature of letters, 87 and popularity of, 156
and payment of, 75 and sealing wax recipes, 51
and role and functions, 76–9 and secret writing, 155–6
secretary (manual), 63, 67 security
secretary script, 88–9 and delivery of secret letters, 170–3
secret letters/writing, 148, 173–4 and insecurity of post, 10, 19–20, 110,
and allusions to shared knowledge, 144, 170, 232
165–6 Selden, John, 201
and atmosphere of suspicion and self-censorship, and insecurity of post,
distrust, 148–9 19, 147, 232
and books of secrets, 155–6 self-writing, and letter-books, 179,
and Catholics, 167–8 188–90
and children, 166 separates, 25
and cipher texts, 89 and circulation of, 176
and delivery of letters, 170–3: hidden and publication history, 177
on person, 170; Mary Queen of servants, as personal letter-carriers,
Scots, 173; underground Catholic 137–40
networks, 170–2; women, 172–3 Seton, Sir William, 119
and destruction of letters, 168 Seymour, Anne (née Stanhope), duchess
and diplomacy, 149, 150 of Somerset, 144
and disjuncture with theory of, 26 Seymour, Edward, 49, 50, 93, 95, 123
and distinction between codes and and filing of letters, 218–19
ciphers, 270n28 Seymour, Thomas, 60
and folding of letters, 49 Seymour, Walter, 99
and intelligence system, 150–1 Seymour, William, 100
and intimate/sexual relations, 165 Sharpe, Kevin, 201, 210
and invisible ink, 166–8, 169 Sheppard, Samuel, 67, 69
and material aspects of, 148 Shillingford, John, 133
and pet names, 165 Shirley, Thomas, 95
and Phelippes (Thomas): career of, Shorland, Anne, 186
159–61; decryption, 161–2 shorthand writing, 151
and political context of, 148–9 and development of, 154–5
and practical use of ciphers and codes, and letter-books, 183–4
156–65: cipher systems, 156–7, 159, Shuffling, Christian, 137
160; code systems, 156–7; disguising Shrewsbury, earls and countess, see
use of codes, 158; disparity between Talbot
theory and practice, 158, 231; level Sidney, Lady Barbara (née Gamage), 71,
of systems used, 157–8 88, 142, 144
and privacy, 168 Sidney, Lady Mary (Wroth), 60, 144, 157
and pseudonyms, 166 Sidney, Sir Philip, 25, 198, 205, 218, 224
and shorthand/stenography, 154–5 and circulation of letters, 191, 201, 204
and state papers, 150 and Letter to Queen Elizabeth, 175, 198,
and symbols, 165 201, 205, 212
354 Index
Sidney, Sir Robert, 46, 60, 71, 141, 142, Southampton, Elizabeth, Countess of,
144, 145, 204 see Wriothesley, Elizabeth (née
and learning to write, 54 Vernon), countess of Southampton
and letters to his wife, 71, 88, 142, 144 Southampton, earl of, see Wriothesley,
sigillography, 18, 85 Henry, third earl of Southampton
see also sealing of letters Southwell, Lady Anne, 187
signatures, 95–7 Southwell, Robert, 171, 192
and blank letters, 97 space, and significance in layout of
and Cecil’s letter to Darcy, 2 letters, 90–5
and forgeries, 97 Spanish Armada, and cryptography, 159,
and form of, 96 162
and function of, 95 Spanish Match letters, 211, 212–13, 214,
and literacy, 95–6 215
and marks, 95–6 Spelman, Sir John, 32–3
and royal signatures, 96–7 Spencer, Margaret, 30, 42, 127
and symbolic meaning, 96 Spenser, Edmund, 66, 80–3, 151
and timing in relation to rest of letter, and hands used, 89
97 as secretary, 83, 87, 105
signets, 30, 51 Squibb, Arthur, 207
silk, and sealing of letters, 106 Stafford, Dorothy, , 189
Sinclair, Sir Andrew, 191 Stafford, Sir Edward, 9, 148, 162
Skipwith, Jane, 106 and cipher system, 156
Small, William, 69 and circulation of letters, 192
Smith, A. Hassell, 222–3 and code system, 156–7
Smith, Nicholas, 172 and ink purchases, 37
Smith, Sir Thomas, 158 Stallybrass, Peter, 17
and dating of letters, 103 Stamford, earl of, see Grey, Henry, earl
and learning letter-writing, 57–8 of Stamford
and letter-books, 178 standish, 40–1
Smith, William, 114 Stanhope, John, 122, 126, 186
Smythe, Jervais, 44 Starkey, Ralph, 201, 213, 224
Smythe, John, 7 state paper office, 223
Smyth, Elizabeth, 48 state papers
Smyth, Hugh, 46 and access to, 200
Smyth, John, 103 and archiving of, 223–4
Smyth, Robert, 42 and manuscript miscellanies, 209
Snell, George, 67 and printed collections, 203
social status Steen, Sara Jayne, 89, 92
and autograph letters, 87–8 stenography, 151
and hands used, 89 Steven, William, 168
and layout of letters, 2, 91–5 Stewart, Alan, 13–14, 22, 25–6, 44, 70,
and paper, 36, 93; gilt-edged, 101; size 79, 80, 154
of, 98–9 Stile, John, 149
and scripts used, 88–9 Stow, John, 133, 200
social textuality, 211 Strode, Cuthbert, 51
Society of Antiquaries, 190 Strode, William, 123
software, and archiving of papers, 225, Strype, John, 207
228 Stuart, Lady Arbella, 89, 90
Somerset, Anne, duchess of, see Stubbe, Anne, 192
Seymour, Anne (née Stanhope), Sturm, Johannes, 55
duchess of Somerset Stuteville, Sir Martin, 145, 196
Index 355
Styles, Phebe, 44 Theobald, Thomas, 74

Suárez de Figueroa, Jane (née Dormer), Throckmorton, Sir Nicholas, 192–3
duchess of Feria, 96, 172 Throckmorton, Thomas, 161
superscriptions Thynne, Francis, 209
and Cecil’s letter to Darcy, 6 Thynne, Joan, 46–7, 76, 145
and conventions of, 71–2 Thynne, John, 88
and gallows drawings, 142 Thynne, Maria, 106–7, 165
and use of ‘post haste’ phrase, 141–2 Tichborne, Chidiock, 192, 203
Sutton, Sir Thomas, 21, 26, 99, 232 Tichborne, Sir Richard, 201
Surrey, earl of, see Howard, Thomas, earl Tomson, Richard, 102
of Surrey Townshend, Roger, 93, 94
Swynshead, Richard, 127 transatlantic correspondence, 142–3
symbols, and use in secret writing, 165 travel guides, 114
Symmes, Robert, 195 travellers, and writing materials, 47
Symonds, Edward, 94 Trelawny, Robert, 100, 143
Tremayne, Edmund, 185
table-books, 47 Tresham, Francis, 191, 199
Talbot, Alathea, 101 Tresham, Lady Muriel (née
Talbot, Elizabeth (née Hardwick), Throckmorton), 74
countess of Shrewsbury (‘Bess of Tresham, Sir Thomas, 74, 168
Hardwick’), 44, 50, 71, 74, 76, 80–3, Trevelyan, John, 37
87, 88, 93, 114, 223 Trew, Margaret, 87
Talbot, George, sixth earl of Shrewsbury Trew, William, 165
(d. 1590), 127 Trithemius, Johann, 152
Talbot, Gilbert, seventh earl of Truesdale, Jane, 199
Shrewsbury, 46, 50, 103, 114–16 Tuke, Sir Brian, 19, 116
Talbot, Lady Mary, 62 Tuke, Sir Samuel, 188
Tanselle, Thomas G., 15 Turner, Thomas, 208
Tate, William, 186 Twysden, Sir Roger, 39
Taylor, John, and The Carriers
Cosmographie, 130–1, 132, 135 undergraduates, and paper purchases,
Taxis, Charles de, 171 35
Taxis, Francis de, 116 universities, and teaching of
teaching letter-writing letter-writing, 57–8
and children, 26, 54: girls, 60–2; unsealed letters, 145
inculcating obedience, 58, 59–60; Unton, Sir Henry, 150, 156, 178
James Bassett, 58–60; parental Ussher, James, 201
encouragement/pressure, 60–3
and formal tuition, 54 Vane, Sir Henry, 149
and grammar schools, 55–7: use of Vaughan, Stephen, 133
manuals, 56–7 Vaux, Anne, 172
and universities, 57–8 Vaux, Elizabeth, 172
see also letter-writing manuals; model vellum, 98
letters Vermeer, Johannes, 22, 45
Temple, Ann, 132 verse libels, 203
Temple, William, 100 Verstegan, Richard, 114, 170–1
textbooks, and teaching of Vives, Juan Luis, 57, 66, 86
letter-writing, 55 and dating of letters, 105
see also letter-writing manuals and De conscribendis epistolis, 92
textual studies, and academic focus on and layout of letters, 92, 95
material aspects, 14–18 and sealing of letters, 49
356 Index
Waferer, Myrth, 199 Willis, John, 155

Waferer, Richard, 199 Willis, Thomas, 74
Wake, Sir Isaac, 184 Willoughby, Cassandra, 188
Wake, William, 162 Willoughby, Sir Henry, 34, 37
Walker, Edward, 97 Willoughby, Hugh, 41
Walker, Sue, 92 Willoughby, Margaret, 41
Wallington, Nehemiah Willoughby, Mary, 47
and letter-books, 179, 181, 184 Willoughby, Percival, 40
and religious and spiritual letters, Wilson, Sir Thomas, 8, 159, 200, 223
208–9 Wilton, Edward, 157
Walpole, Henry, 171 Windebanke, John, 7
Walpole, Richard, 171 Winter, John, 143
Walsh, Sir Nicholas, 170 Winthrop, Adam, 48, 181
Walsingham, Sir Francis, 77, 148, 158, Winthrop, John, 89
168 Winwood, Sir Ralph, 97, 198
and cryptography, 162 Wither, George, 192
and intelligence system, 151 Witherings, Thomas, 120
Ward, Roger, 31 and foot-posts, 136
Warham, Sir William, 40 and postal reforms, 123–6
Warwick, countess of, see Dudley, Anne, Wither, Marie, 192
countess of Warwick Withers, Mr, 44, 220
Warwick, earl of, see Dudley, John, earl Wodrington, Sir Henry, 128
of Warwick Wolf, Hans, 143
watermarks, 2 Wolley, Hannah, 69
and Cecil’s letter to Darcy, 2, 3, 4 Wolley, John, 178
and dating of letters, 33–4 Wolsey, Cardinal Thomas, 40–1, 103
and production of, 33 women
and variety of, 33 and layout of letters, 93
Watkins, Thomas, 74 and learning letter-writing, 53
wax, 30 and letter-books, 179, 187–8
Wecker, Johann Jacob and letters of petition, 70
and ink-making, 221 and letter-writing manuals for, 63, 69
and paper preparation, 36–7 and linguistic strategies, 70
and sealing wax recipes, 51 and literacy rates, 54
and secret writing, 156 and manuscript miscellanies, 199
Weckherlin, George, 178, 181 and paper purchases, 35
Westmoreland, Jane, countess of, and personal letter-carriers, 137
see Neville, Jane (née Howard), and scribal circulation of letters,
countess of Westmoreland 191–2, 199
Wetherton, Elizabeth, 101 and scripts used, 88, 89
White, Rowland, 7, 46, 48, 71, 157 and seals, 106
Whitfield, Francis, 71 as secretaries, 76
Whyman, Susan, 28 and secret writing, 164–5: delivery of
Wiggins, Alison, 50, 76 secret letters, 172–3
Wigley, Henry, 199 and storage of letters, 220–1
Wigley, Richard, 199 and underground Catholic networks,
Wigmore, Anne, 135 172–3
Wilford, Mary, 104 see also girls
Williams, Graham, 89 Woolf, Daniel, 209
Williamson, Sir Robert, 168 Wotton, Edward, 77
Index 357
Wotton, Sir Henry, 157, 180 writing materials

Wotton, Nicholas, 149 and availability of, 31–2
Woudhuysen, H.R., 74–5, 99, 175, 190 in household accounts and
Wren, Matthew, Bishop of Norwich, inventories, 30–1, 32
146, 178, 183 see also ink; paper; penknives; quill
Wright, Thomas, 141 pens; writing desks
Wriothesley, Elizabeth (née Vernon), writing surfaces, 43–4
countess of Southampton, 106 and portable writing cases, 47
Wriothesley, Henry, third earl of see also writing desks
Southampton, 106, 202 writing-tables, 47
Wriothesley, Thomas, 157 Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 106, 150,
writing, and teaching of children, 54 205
writing cases, portable, 47 Wycliff, Francis, 75
writing desks
and covering for, 44 Yates, Julian, 17
and design of, 44 Yelverton, Lady Margaret, 186
and location of, 44–5 Young, E, 67
and posture for writing, 43
writing manuals Zouche, Edward Lord, 35, 143, 145,
and holding a pen, 43 196
and ink recipes, 38 and autograph letters, 86
and instructions for making quill and letter-books, 185–7
pens, 42 Zurcher, Andrew, 83, 97, 151

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Early Modern Literature in History

Early Modern Literature in History Series Standing Order

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this

List of Illustrations viii

1.1a Watermark ‘G3’ contained in CP88/58. Reproduced by

6.3 Invisible ink used in a letter from Thomas Rogers to

Original spelling and punctuation have been retained throughout in quota-

EcHistRev Economic History Review

PBSA Publications of the Bibliographical Society of America

This book is the culmination of more than fifteen years of research on

Newman, David Norbrook, Kara Northway, Michelle O’Callaghan, Helen

On the morning of 23 September 1601 Secretary of State Robert Cecil sent

Sr Francys Darcy. I haue receaued this inclosed from the

the broader social and cultural practices of early-modern letter-writing, and

Figure 1.1a Watermark ‘G3’ contained in CP88/58. Reproduced by permission of the

Figure 1.2 Fol.1r of CP88/58. Reproduced by permission of the Marquess of

pre-fix, such as ‘good’ or ‘honourable’, reflects Cecil’s superior social stand-

Postal endorsements written across the sealed seam permit a reconstruction

passed through multiple hands (which complicates our understanding of a

The Material Letter represents the first full-length monograph study of

physical characteristics of manuscript letters and the meanings generated by

letter-writing: pedagogic, the ways in which letter-writing was taught; mod-

Approaches to letters and material readings

Studies in Renaissance letter-writing have witnessed a remarkable growth of

practices in Shakespeare’s dramatic works and studies early modern letter-

Whilst the majority of studies of material texts have tended to concen-

what ways do collaborative and communal epistolary practices erode notions

Methodologies and sources

our businesse be it of helth, prosperitie, sicknesse, aduersitie, or any other

particular categories of letter or manuscript: ciphered and coded correspond-

Early modern letters and letter-writing

Any analysis of an early modern letter necessarily starts with an examination

letters refigures them as potentially communal and collective, rather than

published’ letter.60 Where letters bear no signs of sending – addresses, fold-

The material conditions of letter-writing varied greatly, generating plu-

correspondence networks and even sometimes the intricate workings of man-

of letter-writing as well as seals. In addition to the tools and materials of

for corresponding: ‘a standyshe of pewter’ ‘a perpetuall Kalendar in a frame’

evidence; while a missive from Charles I can be dated to 1646 by matching

the wealthier social groups or those engaged in administration and trade.37

The accounts of the Reynell Family of Forde in Devon record payment of

The same manuals also provided instructions on how to preserve paper, to

Ink was another important commodity necessary for letter-writing, one

household book of Katherine, countess of Devon records payments in 1524 of

To make common yncke of vvyne take a quarte,

Make stanche graine of allone beaten full smalle,

Purchase of pounce is recorded in household accounts: Sir Thomas Lovell

Quill pens and penknives

Writing manuals such as Beau Chesne and Baildon’s frequently provided

Writing surfaces and the material conditions of letter-writing

spatial privacy as it relates to the writing, reading and storing of letters is

wrote serial news-letters.138 Letter-writing played an increasingly constant

Seals and sealing

Take to one pound of Wax. iii. ounces of cleare Turpentyne in Sommer, in

Early modern letter-writing was thus a complex art, the peculiarities of

The practical side of letter-writing was learned and disseminated through

Learning to write letters

For pure phrases more peculiarly belonging to Epistle, see Manutius

signed.35 A series of letters suggest that letter-writing was taught by a process

deare father i thought good in these few words to

The process of writing a letter in many ways forced an individual to com-

Models and printed letter-writing manuals

While the teaching of letter-writing (utilising Latin treatises) was a central

differences between individuals.56 Recent scholarship has argued that the