Alexandra Shepard and her research team are to be commended for the research that went into producing Accounting for Oneself. It is an excellent example of the type of labor-intensive social history that is seldom done anymore. Shepard asks how ordinary people in early modern England described their “worth.” She explores how this “calculus of esteem,” or the relationship between wealth and social identity changed over the early modern period (1). To answer her question, Shepard mines witness testimony from the ecclesiastical courts. The courts ascertained the credit or worth of a witness by asking about his or her material circumstances. As Shepard says, the question presumed a “direct correlation between wealth and honesty” (36). The book's dataset includes an impressive 13,000 witness statements between the years 1550 and 1728 from nine church courts that served dioceses in primarily southern, southeastern, and northern England.
The question the court posed to witnesses was, “What are you worth in moveable goods if your debts are paid?” Most witnesses answered this question by indicating a cash sum that represented the net value of their moveable goods. Shepard's toughest sell is in addressing the accuracy of witnesses' self-description of their worth. She admits that their estimates were not “precise,” that witnesses could be evasive in their answers, and that witnesses frequently cited certain rounded, threshold sums (such as 40 shillings) because they had cultural resonance. But Shepard argues that the estimates were “reasonably reliable” and that the court officials did not challenge them. One of her intriguing arguments for reliability is what she calls an early modern “culture of appraisal” (2). She argues that men and women were skilled at appraising one another's goods. They did so for marriage negotiations, taxation, and inheritance, as well as in the marketplace and for moneylending.
They could certainly do so in court, too. Shepard did not completely convince me that the sums witnesses cited were “accurate” appraisals of their worth, but she did thoroughly persuade me that she had put considerable thought into the question. More importantly, she considers the mindset of contemporaries, who utilized a “mode of numeracy” different from our own (85).
Witness testimony allows Shepard access to a wide spectrum of early modern society. Witnesses included people below the middling sort, especially the laboring (as opposed to relief-receiving) poor, and women (who made up almost a quarter of the witnesses). We learn that for the working poor the lack of debt or lack of receipt of poor relief was an important threshold, even if they also lacked goods. The acceptability of poverty was also gendered, with more women than men calling themselves poor. While some who lived by their labor stated an occupational title, such as carpenter, for how they “got a living” others stated tasks, such as silk-winding, nursing children, and gardening. These tasks, cast in action verbs, allow Shepard to trace the often hidden work of married women, and the evidence leads her to posit that women commonly took on independent work during marriage, rather than upon widowhood, when it is more visible in the records.
Witnesses from among the working poor described themselves as living by their own labor but did not call themselves laborers. Their self-descriptions also deployed a language of honesty and industry. Nevertheless, others questioned the credibility of those who lived by their own labor rather than off their own means, considering them dependent and equating them with the poor. As Shepard eloquently puts it, “labouring was not only an activity; it was a relationship to others that could all too readily be deemed suspect” (190). Ironically, those elites who denigrated the poor for their dependency could see it as a positive for those of their own status such as heirs, married women, and retainers.
Shepard has produced a fine example of gendered history, examining the worth of both men and women. Her evidence allows her to illuminate the lives of married women in new ways. Wives were the least likely to establish their worth based on their own wealth, with many making reference to their coverture. Nevertheless, Shepard argues, a “significant proportion” of wives described joint marital worth or even independent means. Shepard also adds to recent work on gender, credit, and reputation, although she differs from Laura Gowing in seeing greater overlap in how the sexes were discredited. Shepard finds that just as many male witnesses were accused of sexual dishonesty as they were of drunkenness and that accusations involving women's sexuality are a surprisingly small proportion (22 percent) of the objections made to the character of female witnesses.
Shepard provides compelling evidence for some of the major trends and changes over the Tudor and early Stuart periods. For instance, witness statements illustrate that the redistribution of wealth in England after 1550 seems to have been more profound than once thought. Responses to questions of worth became more polarized, with a widening chasm between the wealth of the gentry and yeomen, on one side, and husbandmen, artisans, and laborers, on the other. The gentry's worth increased fivefold between 1550 and 1625, but the yeomanry's increased an astonishing fifteen times. Husbandmen's wealth only doubled over the period, and increasing numbers clustered on the low end of the spectrum. Widows actually saw their worth decline over the period. A second major shift charted in witness testimony was from “having” to “getting” a living. This transition from classifying worth in terms of estate to occupations that generated an income occurred in the later seventeenth century.
Shepard also makes an important intervention in studies of early modern consumption, arguing that the shift in the seventeenth century was not so much “towards growing acquisitiveness” but rather “a rebalancing of the functions of consumption” (31). An individual's goods became less a source of savings and investment and more a sign of status and display. In terms of a person's worth, what was now important was the flow rather than the stock of goods.
This review does not even begin to cover the myriad smaller interventions Shepard makes in Accounting for Oneself. Her book will be an important resource for any social or economic historian of early modern England. And her evidence helps to paint a more complete picture of the laborers, women, and the poor.
