The Written Self The Century That Wrote Itself

My name is Adam Nicolson. I'm a writer, and ever since

I was a teenager, I have been gripped by the 17th century.

It was Britain's most revolutionary century, when all

the forces of modernity began to stir under the old order, slugging

it out on the great battlegrounds of religion and politics.

Two civil wars, one king almost blown up,

another with his head cut off, the third simply got rid of.

But more important than any of that was the factor which drove

the revolutionary changes in this first truly modern century -

writing.

Writing was everywhere.

Notebooks, chapbooks, account books, business correspondence, letters,

diaries, pamphlets, newspapers, this was the century of the written word.

It was the first great age of self-depiction.

All kinds of people were learning to read and write, and through

their writings, we can know them like never before in history.

A woman sent to prison for her conscience.

A sailor who wanted to share his adventures.

A solitary genius who used his notebooks to unlock

the secrets of the universe.

Reading and writing allowed people to question what

they had been told, to engage in fierce debate

and to rewrite the rules of politics and self-expression.

This was the beginning of the age we now live in,

the moment we left the Middle Ages behind

and set out on the track to modernity.

That transformation is what fascinates me

about the 17th century.

The early 1600s were thick with their medieval inheritance.

People used to kneel to their vicars, to the lord of the manor,

even to their own fathers.

This was a world dense with deference and hierarchy.

But this traditional society was soon to be turned

upside-down by a violent civil war,

a conflict waged not between rival dynasties

but between the supporters of King and Parliament.

It was a bitter struggle over principles, liberties,

and different ideas of God.

It was, in other words, an ideological war,

fought just as much with the pen as with the sword.

There were two big revolutions in the 1600s, one political

and one personal. Writing drove them both.

Words became public weapons, promoting revolutionary ideas,

allowing people to climb the social scale.

At the same time, diaries and autobiographies, written at every

level of society, started to reveal the innermost workings of the self.

These are ordinary people, not the great poets and dramatists.

And that is what I'm going to explore -

the first generations in this country who could write their own stories.

I'm going to tell the story through five different characters,

each playing a different part in this literacy revolution.

The first is a member of the gentry who turned his account books

into a detailed diary.

His name was John Oglander...

..a man who was so booked into the way things used to be that that change,

that social revolution, looked like nothing

but threat, or even disaster.

Oglander lived on the Isle of Wight,

and was the owner of thousands of acres.

He was born in 1585, already 57 when civil war broke out in 1642.

Deeply conservative, he loathed change.

The island sided with Parliament against the King.

Almost alone, Oglander remained loyal to Charles I.

Charles believed Parliament had the right to advise him,

but not to call the shots.

Many members of Parliament were worried about the King's religious policies -

fearful he wanted to destroy the people's liberties

and even restore the Roman Catholic faith.

Oglander, as a royalist, found himself in the thick of it.

His wife and children all apparently on the losing side.

In the 15th century,

literacy was only widespread among the aristocracy and the clergy.

But the invention of the printing press and the need to be able

to read the Bible triggered a literacy revolution.

For the first time, ordinary people started to write about their lives.

John Oglander was one of them.

Oglander wrote down every detail of that life, who he employed,

what he paid them, his assets, his debts.

And all of that went down into what he called his "books of accounts".

And five of these precious, leather-bound volumes have been

treasured ever since by the Oglander family.

Now this is a portrait of Sir John Oglander.

There he is, resplendent in his pink silk and his lace collar.

Which looks a bit like a strawberry blancmange with nice raspberries bespattered on it.

You may think so, but this will be his very expensively-purchased silk,

-made by a good tailor...

-I'll have you know!

-I think they called them doublets, didn't they?

-Yeah.

Oglander loved to budget.

"Sir John Oglander's book of accounts, December 20th 1642.

-"John Curtis, my butler's bill."

-Yes.

-"15 and six pence.

"For 10lbs of raisins, two and six pence."

It's rather like keeping all your accounts from Tesco's.

Like his ancestors, Oglander was making an audit of his money and his estate.

But unlike those ancestors, he also began to make an account of his own self,

of his own doubts, ambitions and life experiences, noted down on any available space.

Essentially, he was writing one of the first diaries.

"My son William's second son was born on the 15th March 1642."

He says this is a book of accounts,

but immediately launches off into stories about his children.

Look, here is a page where he has cut half of it out.

What's going on there?

It was an uncomfortable time, and I think he must have gone back

to his books and cut out bits that he felt, perhaps, were too risky to write.

He must have lived in real fear, because that's how it was.

It was a terrifying time and you didn't know when the dreadful knock

on the door was going to come and you were going to be whisked away.

So he's taken a knife and gone jaggedly, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut.

That must have had something pretty dangerous?

There must have been something on those pages that he really was

frightened that the wrong people might read... Well, his life was at risk.

What an incredible document that is.

A book of accounts, but something much, much more than that.

A whole life poured between its covers.

So this is where he lived, Nunwell.

This part of it here is where the family would have lived -

John Oglander and his wife and children - the grand, upmarket bit of it.

But round here, this is the working end of Nunwell.

This is where his 13 servants, all his dairy maids, his bailiffs, coachmen,

this is their world and to me, it's completely dripping in 17th-century atmosphere.

There would have been a dairy here, a brewery, a still room,

all kinds of rooms to store the produce of the farm with the huge estate he was drawing in.

But the Civil War had already brought changes to the island.

Oglander complained,

"We have here a thing called a Parliamentary committee,

"which overruled Deputy Lieutenants and also Justices of the Peace.

"First, Ringwood the pedlar, Maynard the apothecary,

"Matthews the baker, Wavell and Legge, farmers.

"These men ruled the whole island

"and did whatsoever they thought good in their own eyes.

"These men had no tradition of ruling, no titles, yet they now had power."

How did he react to the deep changes of the 17th century?

I think the key change, obviously, was the Civil War

and he reacts extremely badly to it.

And the whole of the 17th century seems threatening to him. He is, in a way, under siege?

Yes, I think that's right. And the more that he looks at the past, the more attractive it can seem.

He thinks of a golden age in the Elizabethan period,

and he then later on thinks even the 1620s were a golden age.

-It comes creeping up behind him.

-It comes creeping up behind him.

But what about writing? What part does writing play in that?

I think this is an interesting problem, isn't it?

I suppose he probably starts writing - we don't know -

but he probably starts writing mainly with practical

purpose in mind, to control this environment, financially, and control his life financially.

But obviously it does become a coping mechanism for him.

Writing provides a little private world in which everything is all right?

-Yes, it does indeed.

-Well, I end up loving him.

I think it's unavoidable, isn't it?

-If only because he's so concerned with himself.

-Exactly.

-There's nothing more lovable than a true egotist.

-No, that's right.

Oglander was concerned for himself,

but also for his growing family of four boys and three girls.

He looked forward to his eldest, George, taking over the family estate,

but right now, George had other ideas.

He was 22 and off to France for a holiday with his cousin.

George was adored by his father.

I have a copy here of what he wrote about him in his book,

where he called him, "Tall, strong of body and very well-made,

"a handsome gentleman of a good nature and loving disposition..."

Very clever, very hard-working, everything a father could dream of.

'The journey would take about ten hours

'on a ship which the Oglanders chartered.

'With many tears from his mother and sister,

'he set off for Normandy.'

So George has gone to France,

but his father is in a terrible state of nerves.

He's totting up all his expenses for the year here.

Huge amounts given to George.

£54 to spend on his lovely holiday.

The man who is taking him there, "Paid to John Barkham for carrying George into France,

"£1, 15 shillings."

But the really frightening part of it for him

is the total - £747, three shillings and five pence.

Gentlemen all over England

would have been doing their accounts like this,

but very, very few of them

would do what Oglander did next,

and that is get a needle,

prick his finger,

and write in his own blood,

"Sir John Oglander, with his own blood,

"his blood, grieving at his great expenses."

Well, I have a needle here

and I think I might do what Oglander did.

Ow! Ee!

Ah! It's quite painful.

It IS the most extraordinary thing to do.

It's like you're writing

your life onto the page.

It's as if, if you want to do it with passion,

this is the only ink that will do.

I could get into this!

HE LAUGHS

Great.

Look at that.

From the heart.

Oglander hoped the strain of running the estate

would be reduced when George returned.

His son had come of age and would inherit.

The father's dreams of passing his estate on to the next generation

were almost there.

He wrote, "He should succeed me

"in the affairs of the country

"and purchase my ease

"by undertaking the burden on his own shoulders."

In July, 1632, just about a month after George had left,

his father was at a meeting in Newport at the magistrates' court.

But something happened that morning

which really changed his whole existence.

"I heard a murmuring and a sadness amongst the gentlemen and clergy.

"And amongst the rest, Mr Price of Colborne

"told me he hoped that ill news that was come to town was not true.

"I, then being more suspicious,

"demanded whether he's heard any ill news

"of any of my family."

'And sure enough,

'his suspicions were well-founded.

'"The mayor came up to him and whispered in his ear

'"that he'd heard of some more disturbing news.

'"That my eldest son, George, was very sick

'"if not dead.

'"What a case I was in.

'"And so deeply strooken

'"insomuch as I have much ado to get home."'

Deeply strooken, he struggled back

to Nunwell on his horse.

At the end of his description

of this most terrible event in his life,

he added this and it is written, as he says,

in his tears, in a silvery-grey script.

"With my tears instead of ink, I write these last lines.

"George, my beloved George, is dead.

"And with him, most of my terrestrial comforts."

And above it, in the margin, maybe a little later,

but this time in his own blood,

he wrote,

"Oh, my son, George, my son, George. Would my life

"could have excused thine."

It's an incredibly moving statement, that,

and it's as if

no time at all has passed between

him writing it and now.

I feel his grief

coming up off the page.

'The margins of the account book had become a diary

'where Oglander wrote down his most intimate thoughts and feelings.

'To make sense of his loss,

'he confides again and again in his trusted book.'

Sir John never recovered

from the death of his beloved son, George,

and he had a little effigy made of him, here in the Oglander Chapel,

in Brading.

Surrounded by their ancestors,

because George had been the great hope for the future.

After the Civil War,

really when Oglander's world fell apart,

he had his own effigy made to go on his tomb here.

Dressed in a completely medieval way,

medieval armour,

even his legs crossed in the way that Crusader knights

used to cross their legs on these tombs.

'That is the story of Sir John Oglander.

'A bereft father and the victim of truly cataclysmic political change

'in the middle of the century.

'He'd been dethroned by shopkeepers who'd learnt to write

'and so, to rule.'

The most modern thing about him was his writing.

An account book used as a diary,

where he wrote down his emotional credits and debits.

This IS the writing revolution in action.

CHURCH BELLS PEAL

There was one area of 17th-century life where this new literacy wave

was to have powerful and lasting consequences.

And that was religion.

Literacy, and the access it gave to the words

of the Bible, allowed people

to enjoy a new direct relationship to God.

And nowhere is this spirit of liberation clearer

than in Cumbria, where my second character lived.

Margaret Fell,

who found herself swept up in one of the most radical

of the new Protestant groups,

the Quakers.

Quaker beliefs threatened inherited ideas.

Through the power of the word, they were going to change society.

And Margaret Fell, one of the leading Quaker writers,

bombarded England with letters and pamphlets

promoting the new Quaker gospel

of equality and tolerance.

For her, written words were not,

as they were for Oglander,

a private refuge,

but the instrument of revolution.

# King of peace, I will love thee... #

One Sunday, Margaret Fell, with her three children,

was singing hymns at her local church.

In walked George Fox,

a renegade Quaker preacher.

His views had already got him jailed for blasphemy.

'He stood up on a pew.'

"Do I have the liberty to speak?"

Well, the minister who was in the pulpit there, gave George Fox

the liberty to speak.

And the words he said

completely changed Margaret Fell's life.

They were all about how the established church,

the Church of England, was not the true church.

It was full of falsehood for George Fox.

And instead, true religion

should attend to the words of Christ himself.

'Fox was suggesting that people should ignore the clergy

'and interpret the Bible for themselves.

'The church service disintegrated

'as the constables tried to throw him out.

'But Margaret was captivated.

'I have a copy of a passionate letter

'Margaret wrote to Fox once she was back home at Swarthmoor Hall.'

The geometry of her whole world had shifted.

And she wrote Fox an extraordinary letter.

It's almost a love letter, or a letter in which

the language of love is completely fused

with the language of religion.

"My own dear heart,

"thou knowest that we have received thee into our hearts,

"and shall live with thee eternally,

"and it is our life and joy to be with thee.

"And so, my dear heart,

"let not the power of darkness

"separate thy bodily presence from us."

Margaret Fell had found her calling.

She joined with Fox and became

one of the founders of the Quaker movement,

with her home, Swarthmoor, as its base.

And at the rebellious heart of the movement

was writing.

Pamphlets were sent out, sparking political debate

up and down the country.

Margaret argued for freedom of assembly,

free speech, a free press,

and the rights of women as preachers.

This type of writing stirred up

a whole new conversation

about what kind of society people wanted to live in.

But this impassioned writing

was not without its critics.

Margaret and her fellow Quakers

were seen as radicals

who threatened to destabilise the country.

'What Margaret wrote brought down the wrath of the establishment

'on her head.

'In 1664,

'Margaret Fell, mother and leader of the Quaker movement,

'was sentenced to life imprisonment.

'She had refused to swear allegiance to the king.

'She was one of 6,000 Quakers

'who were imprisoned in that decade.

'Her wealth couldn't protect her from the squalor of incarceration.

'The cells were filthy, rat-ridden

'and disease-filled.

'Sometimes thick with smoke.

'Margaret's response to imprisonment was typically defiant.

'She went straight to the top.'

"King Charles," her letter begins,

which is not how anybody in the 17th century would ever address a king,

and she says to him that he has

kept her here in prison "three long winters,

"in a place not fit for people to lie in."

'Her only consolation was being visited by

'her children, who had to cross Morecambe Sands

'at low tide to reach her.'

Anybody put into a place like this

is, by definition, deprived

of instruments of command and control.

But Margaret Fell had one thing -

her pen, and her pen WAS her sword.

'After four long years, her complaints were answered

'and she was released.'

For 50 years, Margaret Fell devoted herself to the Quaker cause.

Through her writing,

she fostered the Quaker movement,

turning it into a national network.

'On her death in April 1702,

'she was buried here in her beloved Cumbria

'at Sunbrick Burial Ground.'

It's an extraordinary place.

There are more than 200 Quakers buried here,

but there's not a single sign that there's a single body

under this turf.

In the 17th century, no Quaker wanted a gravestone

because that was too individualistic a thing.

'Margaret Fell was convinced of the Quaker idea that all people were equal.

'Her burial in a communal graveyard confirmed this belief.'

Through her pamphlets and letters and the writing of other Quakers,

these ideas sowed the seeds of religious freedom

that would in time become central to British society.

But not everyone was ready to join the battle lines.

My third character works yet another variation

on this relationship between writing and revolution.

Harry Oxenden was a small-time Kentish squire

who had no time for public life,

nor for the Civil War,

which the rest of his family was involved in.

Like many 17th-century gents,

his life was devoted to the letter.

He loved writing letters

and kept both every scrap he wrote

and everything written to him, making careful copies

of the letters he sent out.

He made himself the centre of a complex social network.

And he kept everything private

by devising his own private code.

'Harry was totally embedded in a new letter-writing system.

'The Royal Mail was opened up to general use in 1635.

'This was encouraging people to use writing to stay in touch.

'But Harry was using a more informal system.'

Everyone, from a baronet, to a small squire,

to a draper, to a highwayman,

was sending all kinds of messages and letters to each other

up and down these lanes.

And they sent them with young servants, who they called

"little mercuries."

Almost like e-mail.

But with boys rather than electricity.

'They borrowed money from each other,

'they offered each other advice,

'and they gave each other presents.

'They sent each other medicines and cooking tips.

'"The asparagus must be but a little more than scalded."

'An aunt sent her niece a tisane

'to ease the painfulness of her cough.

'Lanes were alive with family traffic.'

So this is Maydeacon. It's Harry Oxenden's house,

an incredibly beautiful place

in this lovely valley in the North Downs.

It was his father's house,

but when he came to live here, he made it even more beautiful,

planting gardens, orchards,

fruit trees, improving the house itself.

This is where he wrote all his letters.

This is where he stored that huge pile of letters

which have remained in his collection.

It was the early 1640s.

Religious and political tensions were escalating.

At Westminster, the quarrel between Charles I and those

who wanted to limit his kingly authority

was intensifying

and civil war was on the horizon.

News travelled the country in pamphlets spewing

out of the printing presses on both sides.

'The letters sent down to the country carried the latest intelligence.

'Harry stayed down here at Maydeacon,

'apparently completely oblivious

'to the great events that were just kicking off in London.'

But his best friend, and cousin,

Henry Oxenden was up there,

keeping tabs on exactly what was going on.

And writing to Harry, down here, luxuriating in Kent.

What was he doing? Didn't he realise this was the great crisis of the country?

So this is a letter

from Henry to Harry

in January, 1641.

"Were you but here to hear the drums,

"see the war-like postures

"and the glittering armour up and down the town,

"and behold our poor, bleeding liberties

"at stake,

"it would rouse your spirits, if you have any left

"from that deep, drowsy lethargy

"you are now overwhelmed in."

But there's one thing Harry did not tell his cousin in London.

The reason he was staying down here was that he'd fallen

very deeply in love.

'He had suddenly fallen uncontrollably

'for a 17-year-old girl, Kate Culling,

'the daughter of a humble yeoman farmer,

'well below his own status as a gent.

'In the 17th century,

'status was still everything to the gentry

'and his letter-writing neighbours were horrified.'

Harry was now 33

and I think probably for the first time in his life,

he was in love.

And he didn't know what to do about it,

this terrible affliction that had arrived in his life.

And so he wrote to a cousin a letter

about the various remedies he'd attempted,

including fierce exercise.

"I've tried to cure myself by exercise and diet and fasting.

"I've endeavoured to hinder it in its first growing. In the bargain

"I have kept a whole quarter of a year out of her company.

"I've endeavoured to call to mind the weakness of most women,

"their pride, their dissimulation, their uncertainty."

HE SIGHS

Harry soon married Kate and, from that moment on,

his finances were not looking pretty. Oh, no!

Harry had fallen into debt and had to spend an increasing

amount of time in London, away from the girl he loved.

Daily life in the capital was full of drama.

His cousin Henry described the turmoil.

"Soldiers were on the streets of London

"and cannon drawn up outside the Palace of the Archbishop at Lambeth.

"Crowds surged along the embankment and quays by the Thames."

As Parliament grew stronger, the king fled to Nottingham

and raised an army.

The two sides slugged it out in a bitter and bloody war.

In the end, the Royalists were defeated and in 1649,

Charles I was beheaded.

For Harry, married to a farmer's daughter and with no money,

his social network collapsed.

He dropped out of the gentry class.

The letter writers of East Kent now ignored him.

The network he'd created and that had supported him slipped away.

When Harry was away in London, the only contact the couple had

were their letters, and they wrote to each other all the time.

He says, "I sent thee a letter by the Friday post last

"and another by the Tuesday post."

And he'd just had a letter from her that Wednesday evening.

But the very intriguing thing about these letters is that

a lot of them, scattered all through them, are little pieces of code.

Code would keep these letters private from the couriers.

In the 17th century, letters weren't sealed up.

Anyone carrying them could read them.

And when Oxenden is getting very private with the girl he loves,

private about how she is, how he is, about their money,

about their desperate affairs, he doesn't want anyone to know.

Now, the trouble is, I can't read a word of it.

And I need to because the key phrases are the ones

that can't be read.

When few people could read or write, writing itself was a kind of code,

indecipherable to the mass of the population.

But as literacy spread,

those secrets started to become accessible.

Suddenly, you had to take precautions.

How could you guarantee the wrong people didn't read

and capture the very thoughts which your own literacy

had allowed you to express on paper?

It's a pretty simple cipher that we come across all over the place

in correspondence in the period. This is a nice one.

It's a pretty simple one.

At first glance, as you yourself experienced, it throws you.

You can't quite get the key things.

So he'll basically take names out, personal names,

anything sensitive, in this case not surprisingly, about money.

Things about money tend to go into code.

So it's a straight substitution for one of his symbols

-for a letter of the alphabet?

-Exactly. So a substitution cipher

where every single time the letter A appears,

its equivalent in code will appear.

At first, it takes a while.

It's amazing how quickly the mind remembers.

It's like learning, you know, a new alphabet all over again,

but it happens very quickly.

So it's actually M-O-N...

-E-Y.

-Is it?

-Is that money? Money?

-I think it is.

You start to make your way through and pretty quickly, like,

-"for, without money..."

-Yes, money.

"..nothing is to be had of the best friends.

"And that is a certain truth as any I know."

So, that's his world falling apart.

People he could previously have relied on, his neighbours,

and relations, are not standing by him in his hour of need.

Now, how common was code in the 17th century?

How usual was that for someone to be doing something like that?

There were lots of reasons

why people would want to keep things secret from other people.

Say they wanted to express their love, and that love was something

they either wanted to keep between them and the beloved

or it was a love that wasn't supposed to be shared,

it wasn't suppose to be known, it was the illicit.

Another thing, of course,

is let's think they wanted to express a religious belief.

Let's say it was a Catholic belief

and they were living in a Protestant country.

Probably the most widespread use of ciphers and codes,

which is a political secret, a plot, a plot against a ruler,

and you and your fellow plotters want to communicate with each other

without being found out. They start really simple.

Maybe the easiest is if you know a foreign language

and those around you don't, or probably don't,

just throw the odd French word in, throw the odd Greek word in.

-Pepys does that, doesn't he?

-Pepys does that all the time.

But Pepys is a good example because Pepys also, particularly

when he's talking about sex - it's money for Oxenden,

it's sex for Pepys - he uses a similar code where he will say,

you know, "I invited the neighbour girl over and asked her to...

"XYZ, 6, 7, 12," etc.

And he knows what he asked her to do. But the prying eyes would not know.

I think that's one of the ways in which you can see

17th-century communication as the beginning of modern communication.

We talk about it as a period with a communications revolution.

And I think that's clearly the case.

This all comes after the invention of printing.

You get more and more literacy.

That, in a way, is a great development

and but it also makes for less privacy.

I think people had to assume by the 17th century that

all of their written documents were probably being read by others,

or capable of being read by others.

And there's very little they could do about that except turn to

secret communication and to code.

Harry Oxenden used writing to promote his social connections.

But his own private world of Kentish friends

and relations eventually abandoned him.

As his money ran out, his social status fell,

and the letters stopped coming.

The life of my fourth character, Thomas Tryon,

followed a very different track.

As Oxenden went down the scale, Tryon was about to go up it.

A simple country boy, he had the nous to see

that for poor people like him,

writing could be an escape route to a better life.

Writing could push you up the social scale.

Thomas Tryon was a shepherd who was born in Gloucestershire

in about 1643.

He was the son of a plasterer...

and tiler.

But...he became a more successful shepherd than me.

He'd been to school very briefly when he was about five

but he soon realised when he was a shepherd that

if he was going to get anywhere,

he had to teach himself to read and write.

Here he said, "When I was 13 years old, I couldn't read,

"then thinking of the vast usefulness of reading,

"I bought me a primer

"and got now one and then another to teach me to spell.

"And having by this time got two sheep of my own,

"I applied myself to him and agreed with him to give him

"one of my sheep to teach me to make the letters and join them together."

So, here is a young shepherd boy trading in one of his sheep

for the skills of literacy.

It's an extraordinary and classic 17th-century bargain.

A sheep for the ability to read and write.

By the time he was 18, his skill in writing

and reading set his ambitions higher.

He sold his flock for £3, said goodbye to Bibury,

and used the proceeds to go to London,

and apprenticed himself to a hatter near Fleet Street.

Thomas Tryon was a total self-starter and self-improver.

And reading and writing were completely central to that ambition.

His writing allowed him to rise in society

and it was as a gentleman that he had his portrait painted.

He had arrived.

Writing in itself has no moral colour. It can be pious,

ribald, vulgar, refined, aggressive, private, loving,

pompous, but that is also its great quality.

Writing can be anything you want it to be.

Writing is the great liberty train, the road to possibility on which

increasing numbers of people in this country had decided to climb.

This is a copy of Charles Soosby's copybook, which is

in the Derbyshire Record Office.

The Soosbys were a yeoman farmer family,

and they've left an amazing archive of things like this,

copybooks, where they have inscribed material.

And, as you can see, it's a rather scrubby italic hand,

but it's pretty clear. And this is from 1678.

Can you read it?

"Charles Soosby, his book, God give grace thereon to look

"but not to look but understand,

"for learning is better than either house or land."

So this is the son of a yeoman farmer really bettering himself,

or being bettered by his parents.

What's wonderful about it is they have inscribed all

kinds of little doodles and writing couplets all over the book.

Where are the doodles?

Here, look, we have "Rolande, a man."

We've got more here.

And a little "f" over there.

And then as you go through...

Oh, yes, look at that.

..you see that they've written...

They're just scribbling all over, really.

Do you see here, it says, "to make".

And he's written "to make" just there, hasn't he?

As a practice, to learn to write.

So, how do you turn that into a pen?

-Right, take your knife.

-Yes, I have a knife.

-I'll have a go as well.

What you need to do is make an incision

through the middle of the quill.

THEY LAUGH

Well, weirdly enough, the effect isn't too disastrous.

-But shall we... I think...

-Shall I start again? It is disastrous!

We've got lots of spares!

OK, so I start about here... and go down.

Go down through the middle. FEATHER SNAPS

Have I trashed it?

OK, but the actual tip now looks pretty well like a car crash.

It's OK, that's going to come off.

Hang on, let's have another go.

HE SQUEAKS

-There we go, that's brilliant.

-Is that brilliant?

-Yeah.

Now what you need to do is make two half-moon cuts

-on either side of this to bring the nib down.

-Two half-moon cuts?!

-Get real!

-This is actually the difficult bit.

-That's really good.

-Ta-da!

Fantastic. That looks like a nib.

So how long would that last us, then?

If I was spending a day writing, would that last me a day?

I should think it would last you a day.

So, over a year, a professional would get through hundreds.

Yeah - in the Court of Chancery in the 17th century,

each scribe is given an allowance of 300 quills a year.

So, it's a complete palaver, isn't it?

You have to get your paper from France or Italy,

you have to go shoot your goose, you have to get its wing off,

find the right feather - we're not just banging off e-mails and texts.

This is a huge, elaborate process.

-So I dip in...

-Yep.

-And it holds some in there.

Beautiful.

-This... Lovely. It really looks like 17th-century writing.

-It does.

Absolutely phenomenal.

'My fifth and final character is a shape shifter.

'Leonard Wheatcroft lived in Derbyshire

'and was one of the first working men to write his autobiography.

'The literacy revolution gave people like Leonard the chance to write

'themselves new roles,

'step into those characters and live those lives.'

"Who am I?" had become an open question.

And self-invention the essence of the future.

He was a young man in love with writing in his late teens

during the first civil war.

A likely lad, one for the girls, naughty, curious, feckless,

full of wit and charm, bad with money.

'A tailor, an orchard planter, virginals tuner.

'A soldier, a waterworks maker, a schoolteacher.

'Taking a zigzag path through the lower end of society.'

Leonard Wheatcroft was a village craftsmen.

One of the personas he created for himself was Leonard the Bard.

So this is one of his slightly naughty poems about seducing

a girl, and he begins by addressing the girl himself.

Thou hast a pretty hand and foot A leg of comely measure

And another thing belonging to it In which I take most pleasure

When she had heard herself thus praised

The lass seemed somewhat willing

The young man's fortunes being raised

They straightway fell to billing

"Sweetheart," quoth she, "I pray tell to me

"When we two shall be married?"

"Faith, not at all", he answered her,

"Since this thou has miscarried."

And it doesn't end well -

When she had heard the words he said, she woefully lamented

That she had lost her maidenhead She then too late repented.

Well, it's not really much better than doggerel as poetry,

but he called this book Here Is Mirth And Melody, and maybe

these are just intended as the words for a song, to be sung in a pub.

It also reveals him to be entirely typical of your average

17th-century male, happily abusing young, innocent girls

and having sex with them

when all they were really interested in was marriage.

I don't think this was a world of equal opportunity.

Of course, he was hopeless at managing his money.

He soon fell into terrible debt.

There was one point where he said he had two brass pennies left

to his name. But reduced to penury, what did this marvellous man do?

He wrote a great song, The Beggar's Delight.

# Beggar, beggar, beggar I'll be

# None lived a life so merry as he

# Beggar I was, and a beggar I am... #

'Wheatcroft's creativity poured onto the page.

'It was a fiesta of self-expression,

'all meant for public consumption.'

OK, everybody, as a follow on from the marvellous Wheatcroft song,

we now have the Leonard Wheatcroft Pub Quiz.

Why does a dog hold up one leg when he pisses?

-Any answers?

-Because if he held any more up, he'd fall over.

Ha-ha! It's a very good answer! What else have we got here?

Hmm. Why have men beards and women none?

Not round here they haven't!

LAUGHTER

-No!

-OK...

You really don't want to know the answer to that.

So, Maureen, what kind of man do you think he was?

He seems kind of...chaotic, in a way.

I think he was good company.

Definitely good company.

Well, as you said, he was a bad lad, so he was not all that

reliable, as far as his wife and children were concerned.

-But...

-What was he after in life?

I think he was a proud man, actually,

and I think when he got into trouble and into debt, that shook him,

and so although he carried on liking ale and liking singing

and liking all those kind of competitive parish sports,

he did settle down and do rather more serious work.

What do you think of him as a writer?

He's not entirely original,

but he's actually quite vigorous, quite engaging.

Full of local incident, local detail, local people's names,

so as a document of social history, his book is full of really

great information that you wouldn't get anywhere else.

So what kind of role do you think he played in the village?

Probably he was the person you went to

if you needed something read, or if you needed something written.

He was the words man.

I think so, and he'll do you a Valentine, he'll do you, you know...

You've got somebody you're trying to woo, he will write you a letter

that might work.

So if we think of 17th-century Ashover, how big a part do you think

words played in the life of the people living here then?

Increasingly, people are aware of and meeting up with printed words -

when they go to fairs,

there are ballad singers selling the words.

For legal purposes and for official things,

the midwife's oath is written down and you have to either read it

or follow somebody reading it and read it back to them.

Increasingly, reading was more and more of an asset.

-Do you love Leonard?

-I think he's terrific.

I can see it in your eyes, you're in love with him. Shocking.

'In 1660, the republic was abolished and the monarchy restored,

'though with much reduced powers.

'But Wheatcroft remained as keen as ever on self-promotion.

'When he was 68,

'he created yet another persona -

'this time, it was Leonard the Hero.

'He built a monument celebrating the arts

'and himself as a champion of them.'

And a neighbouring poet in a village just over there,

a Mr Oldham, heard about this and wrote some verses in derision.

And so some local gentlemen heard about this rivalry

between the two of them and said, "Why don't you have a contest?"

Like a sort of cockfight, almost, as the local poets.

And the place to have it would be up here, on top of the hill.

Leonard wrote a typically self-promoting account of it

in his autobiography, and I've got a page of it here.

This is what he says.

"There did I challenge him to walk with me on to Parnassus Hill,

"but we both missing our way we chanced to light on an alehouse,

"and after we had drunk a while, we fell into discourse

"concerning the nine muses, which he could not name, neither could he

"tell from whence they came, or what they'd done, or what they might do.

"So I, in the audience of all the company, gave them their right

"names and all their right titles, whereupon they decked my head

"round with laurel branches,

"to the great vexation of my antagonist, Oldham."

'At the back of his book,

'he illustrates how the world really was turned upside down at this time.

'Leonard Wheatcroft, yeomen craftsman,

'drew himself an aristocratic coat of arms.

'It describes all his shape changing, with images for each role

'he took on in his life.'

"My coat of arms," he says.

And this is all part of - I can't see a damn thing in this -

this is all part of him trying to be a gentleman,

making himself have a coat of arms as a gentleman would.

But there is some irony in it, because instead of swords,

helmets and all those martial things that a real gent would have had,

he puts the tools of his own trade in here,

his tailor's shears, his measuring stick for laying out gardens,

his bodkin from his tailor, and his thimble there,

his golden thimble. And so this, really, is Leonard saying,

almost at the end of his life,

I have lived as good a life as I possibly could.

I have lived a writing life.

I have used writing to become the sort of man I wanted to be.

And I, in some way, feel myself released

into a kind of new liberty by that.

That's what this writing revolution is all about.

It's about the release of the person into new possibility.

'Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief.

'Whoever you were, writing could now change your life.

'Enlarging it, extending it, enlightening it.'

The 1600s was a century of liberties,

none more important or lasting than the one conferred by literacy.

Reading and writing allowed the people of Britain

a vision of themselves that was essentially unconstrained, a life

in which they could hope to read the truth and write their own futures.

As a country and as a culture,

Britain was moving into the modern, self-realising world.

'In the next programme, I'm going to look at the way in which

'this new world of the written

'turned its gaze to man's understanding of the universe,

'of God, nature and the structure of reality.'

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