2.4 Authorship of the Texts

A high instance of anonymous publications is typical of early modern publishing, which is due to existing censorship laws (e.g. Feather 1988:85; Siebert 1965: passim), and usually harsh punishment for authors found guilty of libel throughout most of the period. Taking this state of affairs into account, anonymous publications, as well as those only identified by the putative initials of the author, were not completely excluded from the corpus, but were kept to a minimum and especial care was taken for them not to cluster in any one decade.

Each author is represented only once in the whole corpus. Texts whose authorship is given as a corporate body (stated on the titlepage or the Lampeter library catalogue), such as the East India Company, were also included; in contrast to really anonymous publications their authorship is definitely restricted to a certain socio-economic circle of people. Some authors have only been attributed the texts in question; those we have accepted as non-anonymous texts, but marked the attribution (in the text header).

Background information about the authors has been included in the text headers, as far as it could be found. Apart from anonymous texts (16 in all) and those with 'corporate' authors (only four), there are also some authors, though known by name, about whom no information whatsoever was found (11, supplied with an asterisk in the author index). However, in all other cases it was attempted to give as much background information as possible about the life and situation of the author (cf. chapter 3.2. for the structure of the header). As sources of information we used the Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) and the British Biographical Archive (BBA), both of which have their problems, but are still the only works of this kind available.

The classification according to socio-economic status is an important point socio-linguistically, but also the most problematic aspect of the author information. In order to formalize this particular kind of information we use social class labels (e.g. gentry) based on the model of English society in the 17th and 18th century below. Needless to say, it is difficult to re-create a sociological profile of a past society and the results of such attempts always have to be treated with some caution. Nevertheless, the following model, which is based on the research of such historians as Holderness (1976), Wrightson (1982, 1986), Clay (1984), Houston (1992), and Coward (1994), can be taken to present a fair picture of society at the time of the Lampeter Corpus. Factors that play a role in determining social status, which went into the making of the model, are birth, title, wealth and the nature of that wealth, life-style, occupation, form of land tenure, tenure of positions of authority and legal status, not all of which are of equal importance, however (Wrightson 1982: 22). Moreover, the model should not be seen as static; there certainly were shifts, even if only small ones, in the relationship between social groups during the 100 years covered by the corpus. Also, the occurrence of individual social mobility should not be neglected (Wrightson 1986: 180; 187).

Figure 2.1:

I. Nobility 1. Aristocracy / Peerage (dukes, earls, marquises, viscounts, barons) 2. Gentry (baronets, knights, esquires, gentlemen) 3. Archbishops & Bishops
A urban				B rural
II. Landed and Professional Classes
Officers (A) (army/navy)	Government Officials (A)	Lawyers (A / B)	Medical Professions (A / B)		Merchants & Manufacturers (A / B)	Clergy (A / B)	Yeomanry (B)
III. The "middling sort"
Freemen (masters, craftsmen, tradesmen)				Husbandmen Craftsmen / Tradesmen
IV. Lower ranks
Wage-earners (journeymen, apprentices, servants etc.)				Cottagers Craftsmen / Tradesmen / Labourers
V. The Poor

Not all members of society as found in this model are really relevant with regard to authorship, because literacy (especially the ability to write) was spread rather unevenly through society (Spufford 1981:21ff) and also because not all social classes would have had the same possibilities of access to the printing presses. Thus, most authors of the time - and in the corpus - will invariably come from the two top levels of society, whereas the two lowest levels in the above model can usually be completely disregarded in the question of (direct) authorship and the middling sort will also be under-represented.

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