Hello my name's Catherine Richardson and I'm professor of early modern studies at the University of Kent and that means I get to work on the most fascinating
period of British history. 

It's a period of high profile politics between the Reformation and the Civil War and it's one of technological and cultural change. 

It's the start of print culture and of commercial entertainment for instance but what do you know about everyday life in early modern England when Elizabeth the first and James the first were on the throne or William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe were writing their plays. Well when I was at school I learned about the order in which the monarchs appeared one after the other and about how many dresses Elizabeth the first had. It was a girls' school after all. 

For my own children things are much improved largely by the Terrible Tudors now of course that tends to be about the reigns of monarchs. We learn for instance a truly great Queen was old Lizzie, she went charging about being busy. 

Or at the other end of the social scale we learn about the fascinatingly quirky world of disease hanging drawing and quartering or stupid death. This horrible history with the nasty bits left in has been crucial to widening children's and their parents sense of what life in the past was like for people outside the elite circles of the Royal Court and it's intensely and memorably appealing. 

But our research is aimed to get to grips with a broad social group in between the aristocracy in the poor. People who don't get much direct space in history books because they're harder to pin down. They're known at the time as the middling sort and they're working households above the level of the poor but below the level of the elite they include the households of professional writers of clerics, physicians, tradesmen, lawyers and urban administrators but also larger farmers and craftsmen. 

We're interested in them because they're the key movers and shakers in this society. In our contemporary terms they were the influences of style and fashion, the main producers and consumers of the creative industries. They're theatrical entrepreneurs and theatre goers, they're poets and playwrights like Shakespeare and Marlowe. Marlowe was the son of a shoemaker and Shakespeare of a glover. But we're not only interested in such famous figures we're also working to uncover much less well known lives of men and women in provincial towns. We want to set the few whose work we're still reading and watching today in context so that we can see how typical they were of their peers and recognize the origins and impact of their creativity in relation to their social mobility. 

By the end of his life Shakespeare had become a gentleman. So, for us, understanding the amazing literary legacy of the period is only possible if we first understand what everyday lives were like in it. We need to think about what enables people to fulfil their creative potential - the backgrounds, the education, the communities that we think help them to produce great art but also the places and the equipment that they need to write or draw or to make music. 

So I want to give you a snapshot of our work in these areas now. It's collaborative work across disciplines and it involves bringing together the widest possible range of different sources. At the end I want you to ask us to join us in that work on this social group by letting us know about evidence you might have come across for these individuals. 

So, our main focus so far has been on an area of life that was crucial to the early modern middling sort and is vital to us now but on which there's very little concentrated research before we started our work and that's 'the household'. Households and domestic life are more visible today thanks to a range of TV programmes from Grand Designs Houses Through Time, etc. but until recently domestic experience hasn't really been valued by historians. 

Now our group lived in these houses of course but they also worked there, perhaps writing sermons or plays or running businesses as merchants, grocers, successful craftsmen; making the things that their neighbours needed to furnish their own houses. And our argument has been that houses are the most important spaces to study because unlike public spaces they shape the perceptions of men and women, of adults and children, masters and servants on a regular basis. They provide the context within which things and ideas are encountered and explored. 

So this is our key triangle of interests. The interactions between the identity of the middling sort, the shape of their houses and the nature of their possessions. But in early modern England there's more to it than that. 

Here are some contemporary quotes:

The household is "the schoole wherein are taught and learned the principles of authoritie and subjection." That's William Perkins. Or Richard Braithwaite, the origins of this phrase: "and as every man's house is his Castle,so is his family a private Common-wealth, wherein if due government be not observed, nothing but confusion is to be expected." 

So without a police force it's the household that guarantees order and that's...those quotes are part of a political analogy, a system of analogies in which the household head works in a similar way to the mayor over his town and the monarch over his kingdom but also Christ over his church. 

So that's an intensely political space where social moral and spiritual order is instilled in ways that guarantee the order of the whole realm. And if it sounds as I'm giving the space a kind of agency there then I am. The household isn't passive. Domestic material culture - the way people decorate and fill their houses - directly impacts the establishment of the public nature and role of household affairs and here's why: these are highly decorated and colourful spaces and they're also didactic ones. 

This is what remains of a very large mural - you can see a part of it there that would have surrounded this entire room - in Midhurst and it's a mural of Naboth's Vineyard. The biblical story that is a reminder not to covet thy neighbour's goods. So, sitting in this room is being reminded of an important moral message and those messages are instilled not only through images but also through text. 

You can see here another example from Ledbury: "The fear of Lord is the beginning of wisdom" it reads. 

And the things that are kept within these spaces are changing in this period. The middling sort experienced the start of a kind of consumer revolution, there are lots more things available. There's a greater variety of wooden furniture and people tend to own it in larger numbers; also of soft furnishings. Here are some things that you would put on your tables or your chairs in this period to make the space more comfortable. 

And then explicitly aimed at a middling market rather than an elite one, a provision of tablewares. Here's an earthenware mug. And these things can be customised with extra details. The inscription here reads "obey the King": more didacticism. Or with names and dates for example. 

They're replaced more quickly because they're now made of less durable stuff, ceramics and glass for instance instead of pewter, and frequent change with a little variation through those customisations led to something like domestic fashion for the first time. And that, of course, helps to mark status.

But this isn't just about consumerism, our evidence includes a wide range of material domestic features that supported a kind of meditative or mindful practice. This trencher for example, used to serve the sweet course of a meal, contains a moral message - "It is a point of great foresight" it says in the middle, "unto yourselves to look a right" so pay attention to your actions.

Devotional modes of thought are expressed in many of these objects so this panel, for instance, shows Moses with a skull at his feet and Moses the character in the panel is addressing his audience. "The Lord will stir up among the Brethren a prophet like unto me." 

That's from Deuteronomy and it suggests thoughts about what is at stake in the spiritual leadership that men undertake in the household. So the investment which this group made in domestic material culture was intended to lead to meditation. The narratives and the texts with which things and spaces were decorated encouraged mindfulness on
spiritual matters. 

And we've learnt a lot about how different men's and women's daily lives were. Even when they were working in the same household space. We've explored how gender and relative
domestic status were lived out day by day. And we've been able to reinstate a contemporary sense of the rhythms of life, the relative amounts of time, of effort and of attention spent in particular places engaged in specific tasks. 

For instance I'll give you one small court case about bad behaviour. In 1586 Thomas Bolter, who's a tailor from Romford in Essex, comes to court and he gives his evidence. He ays that shortly after Easter, Marjorie Oliver was drying of clothes, so it's a day for clothes drying and in the afternoon of the same day when the clothes were dry the fore
said Margery Oliver came to his house and smoothed the same. 

While she was there unfortunately, Elizabeth Stephen slandered her, calling her such unpleasant names I couldn't possibly repeat them in a very loud voice being in the next house where she dwelt. And Thomas says he was there with Marjorie and with Agnes his wife and Sarah his daughter. So you get the sense of this very lengthy task and a very sociable way of approaching it. The people are gathering together to talk and to slander as they go. 

We can look at the variety of objects and processes with which that these women would have engaged, to understand the kinds of skills they developed and how those
skills moved across different types of categories such as, for instance, literacy to read recipes, complex ways of preparing ingredients and making fires
of just the right heat. 

By doing this work we can understand women's pride in their skills and how good they were at what we would now see is multitasking. So understanding what individuals did on a daily basis and how they did it makes it possible to appreciate how their social religious and political identities came into being just a little at a time. Hour by hour, day by day, as a layering of behaviours and encounters with different individuals. 

But perhaps the key issue that's come out of our reconstruction of these interiors is the role of text within them. Through working with this evidence we've come to understand literacy in the broadest possible terms as I hope you can see from some of the slides I've shown, as a series of practices that span wall-paintings, objects, administration, religious expression and reading to name a few. 

We've argued that we need to approach literacy as a household issue rather than an individual set of practices and skills, and aim to describe narrative spaces within which men and women - householders, servants and children - interacted together although never equally, so we're looking at narrative spaces rather than at texts per se. 

So let's come back to those famous writers then with our new project. One reason why the achievements of a glover's son from Stratford and a shoemaker's son from Canterbury have seemed so incredible is that we don't see writing as part of a wider set of creative practices. Some people have been so outraged by Shakespeare's background, his family's history of trade and craft practice and his lack of a university education that they've tried to find more suitable candidates for the authorship of his plays, ones that fit more closely with the kind of authorship that they expect. 

Those plays now are analysed by professors of English literature whereas the rest of his cultural life would be explored by history professors. But we don't live our lives in those types of compartment now and people certainly didn't then. When we think of Shakespeare or Marlowe, how do we imagine them? In the playhouse? Maybe writing great works in a study? We're probably influenced by Shakespeare in Love, but do we imagine them filling out their business accounts or going shopping? We adopt a one-sided view of these writers' cultural experience with a focus purely on what we now think of as creative activities and we value one kind of writing over another and writing over material practices. 

And yet to get a cultural experience in the past it's necessary to take the whole view. To understand the connections between all forms of production and consumption; artistic, material, literary, dramatic and administrative. And that includes reaching well beyond these well-known figures to explore the impact of those environments on their wives, on their sisters, their apprentices and their servants and neighbours. 

Individuals for whom a classical Grammar School education was not a possibility but who nevertheless experienced its impact, the impact of that knowledge in their community, in the domestic and urban environments in which they lived and worked. For example as books in a household but also as sayings and images painted on the walls and on
objects. 

So as a project we're coming out of the household into the religious and administrative spaces of these communities. Their streets, their markets, their guild halls and their churches. We want to understand this group's investment in processes of making of various kinds across these different types of environment to see the connections across those environments and to see how these fed into their consumption patterns to explore their mastery of skills and to see how it aided their social mobility. 

With our project partners, The Weald and Downland Museum and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, we want to use Shakespeare and his peers as a way of giving historical context to our contemporary debates about the relationship between social status and creativity and about creativity's role in social mobility. As part of this work we're going to be doing a few things that we would like help with. 

We're going to be curating an online exhibition of things and middling things are really hard to find. They're not catalogued or recorded under famous names like elite cultural artefacts. Some of them, like the houses and the decoration that I was showing earlier, are in private hands and in smaller local museums and archives. So we're going to be searching these people and their things out over the next few years but if you come across them, please do let us know about objects, about wall paintings and about documents that you've found interesting. 

And we will also be recreating a virtual room. This is the first floor room of an extension of around 1620 to an urban house from Reigate, now re-erected at the Weald and Downland Living museum. And we're going to fill this room with things digitally so that we can step into it and understand the nature and the quality of rooms, of things and the material basis of cultural lives that inspired and supported the creative work of early modern England. Thank you.