This volume performs the useful task of clarifying what English folk meant when they addressed or described one another as “Goodman” or “Goodwife,” “Mother,” “Old,” “Master,” “knave,” and other things, familiar and loving or alienating and harsh. Postles, a prolific scholar whose many works span medieval and early modern history, has recently concentrated on naming. In 2006 he also published Naming the People of England, c. 1100–1350 (Cambridge), Personal Naming in the Medieval British Isles (Medieval Institute), and The North Through Its Names: A Phenomenology of Northern England (Oxford). The present volume is an offshoot of all this anthroponymy.
Fellow in English at the University of Leicester, Postles combines theatrical texts with local records to tease out the circumstances surrounding these descriptors. Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, and William Rowley stand shoulder to shoulder in his notes with quarter session records, wills, account books, parish registers, subsidy rolls, hearth tax records, and De Republica Anglorum. Social Proprieties moves away from formal descriptions of social hierarchy and toward an understanding of how social relationships operate in the community. At the same time, it gives a look at how audiences might have understood theatrical exchanges that play on these descriptors. Postles concludes that the use and later disuse of many of these forms shows us how social stresses undid some traditional relationships—such as the much wider use of “master/mistress” in urban centers and the decline of “goodwife/goodman” in the seventeenth century.
He finds there were formal and informal addresses. The formal included “master” and “mistress,” while the informal used “old,” “mother,” “father,” and “widow,” either alone or in combination. “Goodman,” “Goodwife,” and “Goodie” lie somewhere between them. All but the most formal were local in application and indicated a recognition by the speakers of the qualities of the person named.
To be called “Master” or “Mistress” at the beginning of the era was a reflection of elite social and economic standing. Postles illustrates the point neatly by plotting the burials of people so described in parish registers, demonstrating their wealth and power through prime locations. However, there was an inflation of honors infecting the title, so that the numbers of people so described increase across the centuries, perhaps because it was expected that servants refer to their employers as such, and because people who held office insisted on the title. To be called “Goodman” or “Goodwoman” did not require gentility or a formal office. It was reserved for social peers.
Those outside the regular structures of a local community appear in the records, too. Postles calls them the imperfectly known. The anonymous beggar who died in the parish, the bastard of uncertain paternity, and others with unclear identity and social status were often nameless, or called only by given name, or a master's name. Bastards might be better known locally, but they might rank an “alias” as the parish clerk navigated between the name of the mother and the assumed name of the father.
Emotive expressions, both affectionate and disaffectionate, come into the mix, too. People addressed as “friends” and “loving friends” were often called upon for service or advice, the title evoking neighborliness. “Railing” and “reviling” included a wide range of insulting words that were aimed at dishonoring their targets, as when the churchwardens of Romford were called “gentlemen beggerlie knaves” (93). Naturally, the written records are most eloquent about the insults offered to the authorities.
The last sorts of address he considers are forenames, though they are not exactly equivalent to the other forms of address. He begins with hypocorisms, or pet names. Thus, Antonio becomes Tony. These shortened or pet names are associated with familiarity, but they may also be accepted by the larger community, and the bearer, as their proper name. Thus Mary Frith is known as Moll Cutpurse in The Roaring Girl. Postles reminds us that in early modern England forenames might well be associated with confessional identities. Zeal-of-the-Land Busy is a satirical Puritan, but Catholics may have had their equivalents. Cuthbert and Frideswide, for instance, continued in use in areas where those saints were traditionally valued. He also notes that bastards were sometimes given names, perhaps by the community, that marked their status. Identity as a filius/a populi in the baptismal record might result in a name that fit, like “Transgression,” “Charity,” or some other unusual name that set the bearer apart.
The book is replete with examples illustrating his taxonomies, and one sometimes feels that it could have been shorter. However, it is a useful guide to anyone who is trying to understand what these forms of address meant in any sort of text. Moreover, it stands as a warning against assuming we know intuitively what they mean. It will be a useful tool for anyone attempting to grasp the reality of social relations in early modern England.
