2 - Words in English Record Office documents of the early 1800s

Summary

Introduction

English County Record Offices are ‘responsible for official and local authority records (both past and present) and also contain church and chapel records, the private records of businesses [and of individuals], local societies and political parties’ (Dewe 2002: 38). In this study I look at some of these records, which after about 1750 become plentiful for English written on all levels of ‘letteracy’ – minimally, partly, extensively and fully schooled.

I have restricted my research to England to avoid possible second-language interference, which could have occurred in partly schooled Welsh or Scottish English. The documents I look at are stored under three categories: (1) Church of England parish registers of baptism, marriage and burial; (2) bills written by and for artisans; (3) letters of application for relief, which members of the lower orders wrote (or got others to write) to parish overseers. Most documents were written between 1800 and 1835, but I also quote from others written earlier and later if I can connect them relevantly with those in the central period.

In these documents I look at certain classes of orthographic unit – that is, a group of graphs which a writer separated from other groups by two deliberate spaces. About 90 per cent of these groups are conventionally spaced words. I argue that how a writer wrote these units depended on their assumptions about the speaker and on how much and what type of schooling the writer had received.