Kate Learns to Write:
Her Personal Notebook and Her Times

The inscriptions on the first page of 'Kate's' notebook.

Sometimes little things have great implications. A young girl’s personal notebook is a case in point. The covers of the book are worked in long stitch, and inside, on the first page, is written “My Dear Lady died ye 29 of october (1685)” in adult’s handwriting, and then, just underneath in a less assured hand, “My Dear Lady died the 29 of october 1685.” We think that this was a daughter learning to write by copying her mother’s hand. The book also embodies the education of a young gentlewoman. Needlework had long been part of a young woman’s education, literacy, however, was a more modern accomplishment.

This notebook allows us a momentary glimpse of three generations of seventeenth-century women, a grandmother who had just died, a mother, and a daughter. Let us be presumptuous enough to call the young woman Kate. She is growing up to be a very different woman from her grandmother. She is already a skilled needlewoman who is probably well on the way to completing the many needlework panels needed for her cabinet (see sidebar). Besides this, Kate is literate – we note, incidentally, that she has been taught to write “the” instead of the older “ye” used by her mother. By the end of the seventeenth century, “the literate woman” was a new figure in fashionable society, and writing diaries and letters had become one of her social accomplishments.

Pen, ink, and somewhere to write
Feminine literacy, of course, was not just a social and personal accomplishment – it required things, things that we now call antiques. Kate wrote with a quill pen that had been made from one the five outermost feathers on the left wing of a goose. Her servant had pulled the feathers in the spring when they were newly grown and at their strongest. He chose the left wing because its feathers would curve away from Kate’s right hand as she wrote. For finer lines, Kate’s quill would have been drawn from a crow. Collectors are unlikely to find one of these pens, because the acid in the oak gall ink that Kate used ate the quill. According to one estimate, a quill pen lasted a week. Cutting a new pen was a frequent necessity until the steel nib appeared in the nineteenth century and instantly consigned quill pens to oblivion.

Kate’s ink was made in the kitchen out of tannic acid from oak trees mixed with “copperas” (iron salts) and gum Arabic. The tannin was harvested from the galls or swellings produced by wasp larvae boring under the bark of the tree. The ink was almost transparent when it was used, but darkened as it dried and oxidized, and sometimes soot was added to make it easier for the writer to see what she was writing.

Kate would have taken her pen, ink, and notebook to a writing table to write her brief memorial to her grandmother. The writing table was a brand new form of furniture produced specifically for women like Kate and her mother. It was the first table to be made for a single, dedicated purpose, and was light and feminine in appearance, at least in comparison with the massive oak furniture of its day.

Its masculine equivalent, the scrutoire, entered the fashionable household at about the same time, or a little earlier. The scrutoire, (or escritoire, a writing desk) was a large, impressive piece of furniture that was packed with drawers and pigeon holes for all the documents that a man needed to conduct his business. It was an office desk and filing cabinet combined. The writing table had a simple flat surface for writing letters or diaries only. The scrutoire and the writing table were both the consequence, and evidence, of the fact that writing had become a normal household activity.

The literate woman
Late seventeenth-century women used their literacy primarily for personal writing such as diaries and, particularly, letters. For letter writing to become a fashionable social activity, a postal service was every bit as necessary as an appropriate form of furniture. The post office and the writing table met the same social needs, and so, predictably, they developed in the same period. In 1660, not many years before Kate’s grandmother died, an Act of Parliament had established the General Post Office. Charles II ordered a post to run between London and Edinburgh, and to take no more than six days. This post was to take “all such letters as shall be directed to any post town in or near the road.”

The postal service was the first of the communication media that now dominate our society. It was also a sign of a society in which literacy was spreading rapidly. Literacy was one of the many modern necessities whose roots lie in the second half of the seventeenth century. Like all new beginnings, it started at the top and spread downwards. In the diocese of Norwich between 1580 and 1700, for example, documents show that 98 percent of the gentry could sign their names, 65 percent of yeomen, 56 percent of tradesmen, 21 percent of husbandmen, 18 percent of servants, and 15 percent of laborers. Another study tells us that in 1642, 30 percent of men could write their names but only 10 percent of women. Literacy depended upon social rank and gender. Kate had the advantage of rank, and was overcoming the disadvantage of gender.

It is culturally significant, too, that Oroonoko, the first novel written in English, was published in 1688, just as Kate was growing up, and that it was written by a woman, Aphra Behn. Behn also wrote plays and was the first woman in English history to earn her living by her writing. The literate woman had never before figured significantly in the English social fabric, and her importance was destined to increase to an extent that Kate could never have imagined. Toni Morrison, Jane Austen, and their millions of readers are the direct descendents of Kate and her little notebook.

Literacy, religion and
the New World
Another social movement in which Kate participated was the secularization of literacy. Earlier, literacy had been almost exclusively associated with the church and with the Puritans in particular. The Puritans eagerly promoted literacy, particularly among the lower orders and especially in children. “They that cannot [read] let them see the want of it to be so great in themselves that they bring up their children unto it.” (Nicholas Bownde, 1590). “Let children be taught to read…or else you deprive them of a singular help to their instruction and salvation.” (Richard Baxter, 1673.) Reading encourages people to think for themselves, as John Ball clearly understood when he wrote in 1633 that the ability to read “enables us to better judge of the doctrines taught…thereby we are better fitted for the combat…and many evils are prevented.” Reading freed people from accepting blindly what their elders and betters told them: the non-conformist churches promoted literacy, the established church did not.

We must note here, however, that it is easier to read, particularly printed works such as the Bible, than to write. There is an interesting instance indicating that people who could read print could not necessarily read handwriting. John Penry was a Welsh non-conformist who was jailed by Queen Elizabeth for his beliefs. In a letter he wrote to his wife from prison, he acknowledged that she would have to find someone to read it to her, but he urged her to continue reading the Bible on her own and to teach their daughter to read.

Most non-conformists or Puritans came from lower in the social order than Kate, and their reading was directed to their religion. Kate’s literacy was more personal, for she could read and write the cursive script of handwriting. But even though she was preparing herself to be a letter writer and a diarist, her literacy still had religious connections; in her notebook, she practiced her handwriting by copying a printed sermon: “…for that day shall not come except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition: and for this course God shall send them strong delusion, that they shall believe a lie, for the time is come that judgement shall begin at the house of God…”

The Church of England did not encourage widespread literacy. A century and a half earlier, when he broke with Rome and established the Church of England, Henry VIII published the Bible in English, yet still wanted to confine its readers to men in the higher ranks. The Act for the Advancement of True Religion (1543) stated that, “No women, artificers, prentices, journeymen, serving-men of the degree of yeoman or under, husbandmen or labourers” should be allowed to read the Bible for themselves. Literacy was, potentially at least, socially disruptive if not revolutionary, and the non-conformists, of course, wanted to change English society. On finding that the task was beyond them, many emigrated to America.

In the New World, they founded a society in which the connections between Puritanism, a new social order, and literacy were particularly close. In New England in the first half of the seventeenth century the literacy rate was more than 50 percent, far higher than that of the country the settlers had left. By 1710 it had risen to 70 percent. By the time of the American Revolution, it had reached an astonishing 90 percent. Colonial America was one of the most literate societies in the world.

Kate has written more than a memorial to her grandmother in her notebook. In reading it we can understand her as a young woman poised on the threshold of modern society, leaving behind her the late medieval society of her grandmother. Most of what we take for granted in our social life has its origin in the seventeenth century. Kate and her notebook are no exception. But today, we suppose, she’d write a blog.