“By my Lords comand, I am to acquainte you”: An Edition of the Seventeenth-Century Correspondence of the Wentworth Family in the Folger Shakespeare Library Johanna Rastas MA Thesis English, English Philology School of Languages and Translation Studies University of Turku April 2016 The originality of this thesis has been checked in accordance with the University of Turku quality assurance system using the Turnitin OriginalityCheck service. UNIVERSITY OF TURKU School of Languages and Translation Studies / Faculty of Humanities RASTAS, JOHANNA: ”By my Lords comand, I am to acquainte you”: An Edition of the Seventeenth-Century Correspondence of the Wentworth Family in the Folger Shakespeare Library MA Thesis, 134 pp., appendices 9 pp. English philology April 2016 – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – This thesis is an edition of the correspondence of the Yorkshirean Wentworth family. The aim of the edition is to provide these handwritten manuscripts to a wider audience by transcribing them. The material has been acquired from the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the transcriptions presented in this thesis are a part of their database called Early Modern Manuscripts Online. My material consists of fifteen documents from the early modern period which have been sent to or sent by members of the Wentworth family. Fourteen of these documents are letters, and one is a warrant written in the form of a letter. In the Folger Shakespeare Library the documents form the section 2.1. Correspondence of the Wentworth family in a larger collection called Papers of the Cavendish-Talbot family. The documents have been transcribed diplomatically in order to retain the character of the original manuscripts. In addition to the transcriptions, background chapters on letter writing, the historical and linguistic context, and palaeography are provided. Furthermore, each text includes a commentary containing a brief summary of the text and a description of the manuscript. Notes concerning specific words or concepts are also provided to make the texts easier to understand. Additionally, the transcriptions are encoded in XML for the purposes of the Folger Shakespeare Library. These earlier unedited manuscripts reassert the status of the Wentworth family in the early modern English society and provide information about letter writing conventions, language, and palaeographical conventions in early modern England. This edition can be used in further studies, for example as part of a larger corpus. Keywords: Early Modern English, editing, correspondence, letters, manuscripts, palaeography, transcription Table of Contents 1. Introduction 1 2. Letters and Letter Writing 4 2.1. Letter writing as a genre 4 2.2. Manuals, forms and conventions in letter writing 6 2.3. Letters as physical objects 8 3. Historical Introduction 12 3.1. Society and culture in early modern England 12 3.2. The Wentworth family 16 3.2.1. Wentworths of the Wentworth Woodhouse 18 3.2.2. Wentworths of West Bretton 19 3.2.3. Wentworths of Woolley 21 4. Linguistic Introduction 22 4.1. Standardization 23 4.2. Spelling 23 4.3. Morphology 26 4.4. Syntax 28 4.5. Lexis and semantics 32 5. Palaeography 34 5.1. Handwriting in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England 34 5.1.1. Secretary script 36 5.1.2. Italic script 40 5.1.3. Mixing of the secretary and italic scripts and the emergence of the English national round hand 41 5.2. Abbreviation 42 5.3. Punctuation 46 5.4. Numerals and dates 51 5.5. Self-corrections 52 6. Material and Methods 55 6.1. Material 55 6.2. Methodological problems 58 6.3. XML-codings 60 6.4. Editorial principles 61 7. Documents and commentary 63 7.1. Text 1: Letter from Humphrey Baggerley to Thomas Wentworth 64 7.2. Text 2: Letter from George Barnby to Thomas Wentworth 67 7.3. Text 3: Letter from Peter Berwick to Grace Montgomery 71 7.4. Text 4: Letter from Henry Clifford to Thomas Wentworth 74 7.5. Text 5: Letter from Nathaniel Johnston to Thomas Wentworth 77 7.6. Text 6: Letter from Nathaniel Johnston to Thomas Wentworth 79 7.7. Text 7: Letter from Marmaduke Langdale to George Wentworth 82 7.8. Text 8: Letter from Francis Rockley to George Wentworth 85 7.9. Text 9: Letter from James Shiers to Thomas Wentworth 88 7.10. Text 10: Letter from William Wentworth to George Wentworth and Thomas Wentworth 91 7.11. Text 11: Letter from William Wentworth to George Wentworth and Thomas Wentworth 94 7.12. Text 12: Letter from William Wentworth to Matthew Wentworth 97 7.13. Text 13: Letter from John Whitehead to Matthew Wentworth 101 7.14. Text 14: Warrant for arrest 104 7.15. Text 15: Letter from unknown correspondent to Thomas Wentworth 107 8. Conclusion 117 References 119 Appendix 1: A partial pedigree: Wentworths of the Wentworth Woodhouse Appendix 2: A partial pedigree: Wentworths of West Bretton Appendix 3: A partial pedigree: Wentworths of Woolley Appendix 4: XML-coding example from text 2 Appendix 5: Finnish summary List of figures Figure 1. Wentworth coat of arms Figure 2. Text 1, p. 4 (Folger MS X.d.428 (148)) Figure 3. Text 1, p. 1 (Folger MS X.d.428 (148)) Figure 4. Text 2, p. 4 (Folger MS X.d.428 (149)) Figure 5. Text 2, p. 1 (Folger MS X.d.428 (149)) Figure 6. Text 3, p. 4 (Folger MS X.d.428 (150)) Figure 7. Text 3, p. 1 (Folger MS X.d.428 (150)) Figure 8. Text 4, p. 4 (Folger MS X.d.428 (151)) Figure 9. Text 4, p. 1 (Folger MS X.d.428 (151)) Figure 10. Text 5, p. verso (Folger MS X.d.428 (153)) Figure 11. Text 5, p. recto (Folger MS X.d.428 (153)) Figure 12. Text 6, p. verso (Folger MS X.d.428 (154)) Figure 13. Text 6, p. recto (Folger MS X.d.428 (154)) Figure 14. Text 7, p. 4 (Folger MS X.d.428 (156)) Figure 15. Text 7, p. 1 (Folger MS X.d.428 (156)) Figure 16. Text 8, p. 4 (Folger MS X.d.428 (157)) Figure 17. Text 8, p. 1 (Folger MS X.d.428 (157)) Figure 18. Text 9, p. 4 (Folger MS X.d.428 (158)) Figure 19. Text 9, p. 1 (Folger MS X.d.428 (158)) Figure 20. Text 10, p. 1 (Folger MS X.d.428 (159)) Figure 21. Text 10, p. 4 (Folger MS X.d.428 (159)) Figure 22. Text 11, p. recto (Folger MS X.d.428 (160)) Figure 23. Text 12, p. 4 (Folger MS X.d.428 (161)) Figure 24. Text 12, p. 1 (Folger MS X.d.428 (161)) Figure 25. Text 12, p. 2 (Folger MS X.d.428 (161)) Figure 26. Text 13, p. 4 (Folger MS X.d.428 (162)) Figure 27. Text 13, p. 1 (Folger MS X.d.428 (162)) Figure 28. Text 13, p. 2 (Folger MS X.d.428 (162)) Figure 29. Text 14, p. verso (Folger MS X.d.428 (167)) Figure 30. Text 14, p. recto (Folger MS X.d.428 (167)) Figure 31. Text 15, p. 4 (Folger MS X.d.428 (168)) Figure 32. Text 15, p. 1 (Folger MS X.d.428 (168)) Figure 33. Text 15, p. 2 (Folger MS X.d.428 (168)) Figure 34. Text 15, p. 3 (Folger MS X.d.428 (168)) List of tables Table 1. Texts according to the sender, recipient, and year List of abbreviations OE Old English ME Middle English EModE Early Modern English LModE Late Modern English PDE Present-Day English 1. Introduction This thesis is a documentary edition of the seventeenth-century correspondence of the Wentworth family. It is a collaboration project between the Folger Shakespeare Library (henceforth referred to as the Folger), situated in Washington, D.C., and the Department of English at the University of Turku. This means that the Folger has provided me with the digitized copies of the manuscripts, and I have provided them with my transcriptions of these manuscripts. This collaboration is part of their extensive project to create a database called Early Modern Manuscripts Online (EMMO). It will consist of semi-diplomatically encoded Folger manuscripts written between 1500 and 1700 (Wolfe 2013). My transcriptions are also part of the EMMO database. In my thesis, however, I have chosen to transcribe these manuscripts diplomatically, and not semi-diplomatically as they are presented in the EMMO database. The difference between these two methods of editing is that diplomatic transcriptions strive to reproduce the features in the original manuscript as closely as possible (Beal 2008, 122). Editorial activity is indicated with different symbols and brackets (Stevens & Burg 1997, 76). By contrast, semi-diplomatic transcriptions make small emendations to the manuscript, for example, abbreviations are often expanded (University of Cambridge 2016). In this thesis I shall provide transcriptions of fifteen documents sent to or sent by members of the Wentworth family. These documents form the section 2.1 Correspondence of the Wentworth family in the Folger’s larger collection Papers of the Cavendish-Talbot family (the Folger 2012). In addition, I shall provide general information relating to these manuscripts and a commentary to accompany each of the texts. These are provided for a better understanding of the documents. The texts have not been edited before, which makes this thesis an important source for future research. Documentary editing is also “an effective way of making history vivid” (Stevens & Burg 1997, 17). It it useful not only to the current, but also to future generations (Stevens & Burg 1997, 24). Documentary editing can be compared to translation in that it is a process in which original documents are converted into readable text (Stevens & Burg 1997, 12).