Accounting for Oneself

In this book Alexandra Shepard uses 13,686 witness statements (of which 3,331 were by women) made between 1550 and 1728 in the church courts of seven dioceses and two archdeaconries, alongside similar evidence from the Cambridge University courts, to examine the relationship between wealth, occupation and social identity across the long seventeenth century. Witnesses were asked both what they were worth in goods, their debts paid, and how they maintained or got a living, and their responses enable Shepard to track how the calculus of esteem was re-evaluated as assessments of worth moved from being based primarily on what one owned to how one earned a living. The book is organised into three sections, the first consisting of three chapters dealing with concepts of wealth and poverty; the second of three chapters addressing questions of maintenance; and the third comprising a single chapter on changing concepts of credibility. Between 1550 and 1650 lack of specie made farm animals, tools and ‘household stuff’ important as repositories of wealth and indices of credit which might be seized in lieu of debts, and Shepard argues that there was far less distinction between goods and currency than previous scholarship has assumed. Those witnesses who placed a cash value on their goods gave reasonably reliable, albeit minimum, values in round numbers of what they owned, often attaching qualifiers such as ‘more than’, ‘at least’, ‘almost’ and ‘scarcely’, or declaring that they were ‘not worth’ an amount. Scribes cast doubt on some estimates by inserting phrases such as she or he ‘believes’, ‘supposes’, ‘conceives’ or ‘says’, and the evidence reveals that fine gradations of poverty existed in relation to receipt of alms, absence of a stable living, quality of clothes, wage dependency, and lack of goods—with women, servants, the young and old especially likely to describe themselves as poor, dependent, subordinate, and lacking credit

Aesthetics · Art · Cash · Credibility · Currency · Debt · Economics · Identity (music · Order (exchange · Political science · Poverty · Scholarship · Sociology · Value (mathematics · Witness · Finance · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Law · Mathematics