Blog post written by Lucile Berset (9 April 2020)
A week before Easter 1769, an unsigned letter was written in Masbrough, in South Yorkshire, on behalf of Widow Owen. It is addressed to the parish of Hartill, c. 12 miles South, where Mrs Owen was officially registered and entitled to apply for relief under the Poor Law. The letter explains that the woman is “in a poor State of Health at preasent and Cannot Come over this Easter”. She is in need of financial support as she is “out of Shoos and Shifts and other Nessaryes”. The mention of a previous request for relief shows that it is not the first time Mrs Owen has applied for assistance from her parish. It is however the only letter of the whole corpus mentioning Mrs Owen, her fate remains unknown.
As is the case in most pauper letters, punctuation is absent and the use of uppercase characters at the start of words is random. In England, compulsory education was only introduced a hundred years after this letter was written with the 1870 Elementary Education Act. It is therefore likely that the author of the letter did not attend school but learnt to write in a mechanical way, which means that he was copying the characters and words rather than producing full sentences. This explains the lack of syntactic units as very little information about the beginning and the end of the sentences is provided. Most common words are spelt in a standard manner although interesting spelling variations are also found. “hernings” [earning] is an example of h-insertion, which can be interpreted as hypercorrection. As the letter was addressed to a socially higher placed individual or institution, the applicant or their writer would have sometimes over-compensated for their perceived ‘non-standard’ use of English. As a result, h’s that were likely dropped in the speech of the writer were added in their letter writing. For this reason, unnecessary h’s appear at the beginning of some words, as is the case in our example.
h-dropping and h-insertion are typical examples of specific linguistic features that can be studied and analysed in further detail as part of the LALP-research project. Once all the letters of the corpus have been digitised and normalised in a systematic way, searches and comparisons will be possible.