Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 78-07(E), Section: A.

Adviser: Keith Wrightson.

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This dissertation is concerned with social inequality in England, c. 1550-1750. It has two main arguments. First, domination and subordination were the most significant aspects of social relations and must be understood dialectically. They shaped the subjectivities of individuals of all social positions and often did so in insidious ways. Second, language -- at the levels of ideology and social practice -- was a medium thorough which relations of domination and subordination were actualized and experienced. As such, language played a central role in the reproduction of inequality over the course of the period.

These arguments are advanced in six thematic chapters, which employ an eclectic range of sources. The bulk of the material considered here was produced between 1550 and 1650, when changes in the social structure and fortunes of various social groups were most seismic. The groundwork that was laid during these decades continued to inflect social relations into the eighteenth century.

Chapter one focuses on schemes for the standardization of vernacular English and explores how language came to be understood as `classed.' These schemes served a dual function. First, they contributed to a process of class (and state) formation. Their valorization of a supra-regional standard language helped create a novel and socially amorphous ruling bloc. Second, they provided a means through which old and new forms of obedience could be inculcated among plebeians. If language had always been a medium in which relations of social domination and subordination were articulated, during the early modem period there was an expansion in the range of forms that this articulation assumed.

Chapter two reconstructs the scripts that governed subordinate-superior interactions. Such exchanges maintained the social hierarchy and occupied a significant place in the contemporary imaginary. The conduct books considered here simultaneously reflected the anxieties that underpinned social power and offered strategies for containing them. For superiors, these anxieties these anxieties were legion. But these interactions were also taxing for subordinates. Their dispensation of deference involved navigating their superiors' contradictory expectations and soothing their unease about the clarity of their own social positions.

Chapter three explores what contemporaries said about how it felt to possess (and to lack) social power in subordinate-superior interactions. These were variously described in terms that were conceptually similar to gifts or in transactional languages of economic instrumentality in which `affable' encounters with inferiors were seen as payments on an installment plan toward the attainment of idealized social relations. But regardless of the type of economic parallels that were drawn, subordinate-superior interactions were often described as exchanges in `pleasure.' The sources and nature of this enjoyment varied in relation to a speaker's social position. Exploring these differences allows us to re-conceptualize various aspects of social relations, including the mechanics of domination and subordination and the ideological work that was done to euphemize and obscure the operation of the former.

Chapter four analyzes certain varieties of inarticulacy (e.g. stammering) in relation to the social structure of early modern England and the deference that it demanded of, and engendered in, subordinated individuals. For superiors, speaking inarticulately constituted a failure to project the effortless domination that was expected of them. It involved loss of face and a diminution of the social and affective trappings that were meant to accrue to them by dint of their position and authority. For plebeians, the consequences of inarticulacy were more severe. Inarticulacy reaffirmed prejudices regarding their fundamental irrationality and provided proof that they were beyond the pale of the respectable polity. It also helped to naturalize their subordination.

Chapter five uses a set of seventeenth-century Star Chamber cases to explore the class politics involved in procuring and giving legal testimony. The suit and counter-suit in question alleged that a pair of laborers was twice suborned to give false evidence on behalf of their social superiors who were embroiled in a property dispute. This litigation generated a large number of depositions, most of which were given by laborers. These present a rare opportunity to analyze the subordinates' understandings of perjury and to reconstruct the constraints that circumscribed the ability of marginalised individuals to contest or negotiate the terms of their subordination.

Chapter six explores the linguistic aspects of contemporary thought about labor discipline. For superiors, linguistic discipline and labor discipline were mutually constitutive. Linguistic markers -- which indicated how tractable prospective subordinates were (and, in turn, how productive they were likely to be) -- were taken into account during the hiring process and remained an important concern for the duration of a given economic relationship. Linguistic discipline involved the prevention of whole categories of conversation amongst workers, which were deemed inimical to productivity or threatening to the employer's authority. Its presence or absence could have quantitative implications for productivity. It could also have qualitative implications with respect to the satisfactions derived from domineering over their inferiors.

Over the course of the period, however, inherited modes of thinking about the management of subordinate-superior relationships, which emphasized the pleasures (and pains) that could arise from exercising one's authority in a personalized manner, came under strain. A long-term process of social differentiation diminished the frequency and altered the terms on which superiors and inferiors encountered one another. In turn, subordinates' deference -- a fraught and unknown quantity at the best of times -- supposedly became more difficult to secure. The withdrawal of superiors from the daily management of their subordinates may well have diminished undesirable contact what Edward Thompson termed the plebeian `blur of indiscipline.' But it also rendered them reliant on a stratum of middlemen who could only ever imperfectly approximate their own authority. These twin developments had a deleterious impact on their experience of domination. One might well hold the laboring population in contempt, and simultaneously desire the satisfying deference that they could provide. In such circumstances, novel modes of impersonal discipline were developed in an attempt to preserve earlier assumptions about social relations in amber.