Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-r6qrq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-28T05:37:26.885Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
This chapter is part of a book that is no longer available to purchase from Cambridge Core

3 - Oral and scribal texts in early modern England

from ORAL TRADITIONS AND SCRIBAL CULTURE

By
Harold Love
Edited by
John Barnard  and
D. F. McKenzie
With
Maureen Bell
Harold Love
Affiliation:
Monash University
John Barnard
Affiliation:
University of Leeds
D. F. McKenzie
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
Maureen Bell
Affiliation:
University of Birmingham
Get access

Summary

Parliamentary histories tell us that on 22 February 1671 Charles II, present at the Lords for the second reading of the Subsidy Bill, was an unwilling listener to a severe critique of his policies from John, Lord Lucas. Lucas spoke on behalf of peers who would have been severely taxed under the bill, and who also objected to the methods of collection proposed, which they saw as an attack by the Commons on the Lords’ privileges. He and his kind had been loyal cavaliers in the past but were now beginning to exhibit ‘country’ inclinations that would flower mightily during the coming decade. Should the King upon a good occasion require a quarter or (in some versions) a half of his estate, Lucas would willingly give it; but the present predicament was not of this kind, nor was he able to meet even the more modest levy proposed:

For in ye tyme of ye last usurping powers, though great Taxes were exacted from vs, wee had then meanes to pay, wee lett our Lands, & sold our Corne, & Cattell, & there was plenty of Money through ye Nation, now there is nothing of this. Bricke is required of vs, & noe Straw allow’d vs to make itt with, for that our Lands are thrownevpon our hands, our Corne, & Cattell of little value is notorious to all ye World...

Keywords

manuscript textoral textsearly modern Englandhandwritten textprinted textscribal textsscripts for recitation
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain
, pp. 97 - 121
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2002

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ashbee, A. and Holman, P. (eds.) 1996 John Jenkins and his time: studies in English consort music, Oxford.Google Scholar
Beal, P. 1998 In praise of scribes: manuscripts and their makers in seventeenth-century England, Oxford.Google Scholar
Bellany, A. 1993 ‘Libellous politics in early Stuart England’, in Sharpe, K. and Lake, P. (eds.), Culture and politics in early Stuart England, Stanford.Google Scholar
Bradley, D. 1992 From text to performance in the Elizabethan theatre: preparing the play for the stage, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Carey, J. W. 1992 Communication as culture, London.Google Scholar
Cotton, Charles trans. Montaigne’s essays in three books with notes and quotations, 6th edn (London, 1743).Google Scholar
Cressy, D. 1980. Literacy and the social order: reading and writing in Tudor and Stuart England, Cambridge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Douglas, D. C. 1951 English scholars 1660–1730, rev. edn, London.Google Scholar
Dunlap, R. ed. The poems of Thomas Carew, (Oxford, 1949).Google Scholar
Elsky, M. 1989 Authorizing words: speech, writing and print in the English renaissance, Ithaca, NY.Google Scholar
Ezell, M. J. M. 1987 The patriarch’s wife: literary evidence and the history of the family, Chapel Hill, NC.Google Scholar
Fox, A. 1994 ‘Ballads, libels and popular ridicule in Jacobean England’, Past and Present, 145.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fraser, P. 1956 The intelligence of the secretaries of state and their monopoly of licensed news 1660– 1688, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Godzich, W. 1994 The culture of literacy, Cambridge, MA.Google Scholar
Goldberg, J. 1990 Writing matter: from the hands of the English Renaissance, Stanford.Google Scholar
Habermas, J. 1989 The structural transformation of the public sphere: an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society, trans. Burger, T. with the assistance of Lawrence, F., Cambridge, MA.Google Scholar
Hazen, A. T. ed. Harleian Miscellany in Johnson’s prefaces and dedications, (New Haven, Conn., 1937).Google Scholar
Hobbs, M. 1989 ‘Early seventeenth-century verse miscellanies and their value for textual editors’, English Manuscript Studies, 1.Google Scholar
Hobbs, M. 1992 Early seventeenth-century verse miscellany manuscripts, Aldershot.Google Scholar
Keeble, N. H. 1990 ‘“I would not tell you any tales”: Marvell’s constituency letters’, in Condren, C. and Cousins, A. D. (eds.), The political identity of Andrew Marvell, Aldershot.Google Scholar
Kelliher, H. 1978 Andrew Marvell, poet and politician 1621–78: an exhibition to commemorate the tercentenary of his death, London.Google Scholar
Kernan, A. P. 1987 Printing technology, letters and Samuel Johnson, Princeton, NJ.Google Scholar
King, K. R. 1994 ‘Jane Barker, Poetical recreations, and the sociable text’, English Literary History, 61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leedham-Green, E. 1986 Books in Cambridge inventories: book lists from Vice-Chancellor’s Court probate inventories in the Tudor and Stuart periods, 2 vols., Cambridge.Google Scholar
Love, H. 1993 Scribal publication in seventeenth-century England, Oxford.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Love, H. 1995 ‘Hamilton’s Mémoires de la vie du comte de Grammont and the reading of Rochester’, Restoration, 19, 1995.Google Scholar
Love, H. 1996a ‘Refining Rochester: private texts and public readers’, Harvard Library Bulletin, ns. 7.Google Scholar
Love, H. 1997 ‘Rochester’s “I’th’ isle of Britain”: decoding a textual tradition’, English Manuscript Studies, 6.Google Scholar
Manguel, A. 1996 A history of reading, London.Google Scholar
Margoliouth, H. M. ed. The poems and letters of Andrew Marvell, 3rd edn, rev. Legouis, P. and Duncan-Jones, E. E. (Oxford, 1971), II.Google Scholar
Marotti, A. F. 1995 Manuscript, print, and the English renaissance lyric, Ithaca, NY, and London.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McKenzie, D. F. 1976b ‘The London book trade in the later seventeenth century’, Sandars lectures 1976, Cambridge. Typescript copies deposited in British Library, London, Bodleian Library, Oxford and Cambridge University Library.Google Scholar
McKenzie, D. F. 1986 Bibliography and the sociology of texts, London.Google Scholar
McLuhan, M. 1962 The Gutenberg galaxy: the making of typographic man, Toronto.Google Scholar
Muddiman, J. G. 1971 The King’s journalist 1659–1689, London, 1923; repr. New York.Google Scholar
North, R. The life of the right honourable Francis North, Baron of Guilford (London, 1742).Google Scholar
Ong, W. J. 1982 Orality and literacy: the technologizing of the word, London and New York.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pebworth, T.-L. 1989 ‘John Donne, coterie poetry, and the text as performance’, Studies in English Literature 1600–1900, 29.Google Scholar
Raylor, T. 1994 Cavaliers, clubs and literary culture: Sir John Mennes, James Smith, and the Order of the Fancy, Newark, DE.Google Scholar
Robertson, J. M. ed. Characteristics of men, manners, opinions, times, etc., (London, 1900; repr. Gloucester, Mass., 1963), I.Google Scholar
Saunders, J. W. 1951 ‘The stigma of print: a note on the social bases of Tudor poetry’, Essays in Criticism, 1.Google Scholar
Shami, S. ed. John Donne’s Gunpowder Plot sermon. A parallel text edition, (Oxford, 1997).Google Scholar
Sharpe, K. 1979 Sir Robert Cotton 1586–1631: history and politics in early modern England, Oxford.Google Scholar
Spingarn, J. E. ed. Critical essays of the seventeenth century, 2 vols., (London, 1908; repr. 1957).Google Scholar
Stanwood, P. G. 1978 ‘John Donne’s sermon notes’, Review of English Studies, 29.Google Scholar
Styles, P. Sir Simon Archer 1581–1662 (Oxford, 1946).Google Scholar
Sullivan, W. W. II 1988 The first and second Dalhousie manuscripts: poems and prose, Columbia, MO.Google Scholar
Vieth, D. M. 1963 Attribution in Restoration poetry: a study of Rochester’s ‘Poems’ of 1680, New Haven.Google Scholar
Walker, K. 1992 ‘Jacob Tonson, bookseller,’, The American Scholar, 61.Google Scholar
Waller, E. Poems 1645. Together with poems from Bodleian MS Don. d. 55 (Menston,W. Yorks, 1971).Google Scholar
Wells, S. and Taylor, G. ed. The complete works: William Shakespeare, (Oxford, 1986).Google Scholar
Woudhuysen, H. R. 1996 Sir Philip Sidney and the circulation of manuscripts 1558–1640, Oxford.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×