Introduction

English County Record Offices are ‘responsible for official and local authority records (both past and present) and also contain church and chapel records, the private records of businesses [and of individuals], local societies and political parties’ (Dewe 2002: 38). In this study I look at some of these records, which after about 1750 become plentiful for English written on all levels of ‘letteracy’ – minimally, partly, extensively and fully schooled.

I have restricted my research to England to avoid possible second-language interference, which could have occurred in partly schooled Welsh or Scottish English. The documents I look at are stored under three categories: (1) Church of England parish registers of baptism, marriage and burial; (2) bills written by and for artisans; (3) letters of application for relief, which members of the lower orders wrote (or got others to write) to parish overseers. Most documents were written between 1800 and 1835, but I also quote from others written earlier and later if I can connect them relevantly with those in the central period.

In these documents I look at certain classes of orthographic unit – that is, a group of graphs which a writer separated from other groups by two deliberate spaces. About 90 per cent of these groups are conventionally spaced words. I argue that how a writer wrote these units depended on their assumptions about the speaker and on how much and what type of schooling the writer had received.