Property and Oppression: Voices from the Margins

Abstract

Literature is produced by individuals with sufficient time and inclination to write. By comparison, huge numbers of early modern English men and women living and working in the countryside simply never had the opportunity to turn their experience of rural life into literary form. They lived rather on the margins of English society, all but excluded from the nation’s dominant cultural traditions. Apart from the obvious constraints on the time and energy of a rural labourer, most people at this level of society achieved at best a crudely functional form of literacy, and only very few gained the sort of cultural literacy that underpinned the work of writers such as Ben Jonson or Alexander Pope. Yet some men and women of low social degree managed nevertheless to thrust their voices into the public domain, and research in recent decades by literary and social historians has done much to bring such work to our attention. While it would be overly simplistic to claim such texts as direct and unmediated expressions of those on the margins of society, they provide startling and rewarding instances of writers confronting elite perceptions of rural life and struggling to articulate visions for change.