. . . Fall 2002 A London Provisioner's Day Book: 1550-1563 By Jared Wadley University News Service " It' s almost like, ' If we build it, they will come,' " says English Prof. Richard W. Bailey, alluding to the baseball fantasy movie Field of Dreams. But he and his graduate students aren' t building a baseball field but an electronic reconstruction, or hypertext, of a badly burned journal that offers a rare glimpse at everyday life in 16th century London.
Henry Machyn, a furnisher of funeral trappings, or " provisioner," kept a journal from 1550, three years after the death of Henry VIII, to 1563, five years into Elizabeth I' s reign. The manuscript offers details on many topics such as sex, death, social practices, politics and religion, Bailey notes. Its significance, he explains, is not that it provides previously unknown information but that it provides much more detailed data, perhaps because Machyn was accustomed to keeping precise business records. " The book is like a Webcam in the middle of London in the mid 1500s,' ' says Bailey, the Fred Newton Scott Collegiate Professor of English, who has written extensively on the history of the English language. The Web site is under construction at http://www.umich.edu/%7Emachyn/demo.html, where visitors can already sample a few day book pages. Once a publisher takes up the project, readers will have access to the original diary, a version with modern spelling and an explanatory commentary, Bailey says. Machyn seems to have kept the information for his own pleasure, says PhD candidate Colette Moore, who has been working on the project since 1999. " His diary is one expression of the increased large-scale migration from the North of England to London,' ' she says. " and also the increased commercial and social contact of Northerners and Londoners. These movements of population affected the evolution of English." Machyn' s day book also reveals how thoroughly integrated government and the church were during this period of English history. A fascinating example occurs in the entry for November 5, 1557, when a man who had lent his wife out to other men for money was punished by being made to ride a horse backwards throughout London, led by his wife, while both he and she wore paper signs on their heads declaring their whoredom. An antiquarian, Robert Cotton, kept the diary in the same bookcase that held his Beowulf manuscript. In the early 18th century, a fire damaged the library, charring or burning the outside margins and top of the 162-page text. Fortunately, before the fire, historian John Strype had published extensive selections, making it possible for someone to supply much of the missing 15 percent or so of the diary by consulting his works. Something was missing from every page, Bailey says, " so reconstructing it presented difficulties that we have solved in a way that makes the electronic text more powerful than the print text. You can search all of it or just the transcribed part from the manuscript." The Strype manuscript was " inaccurate in things large and small— respelling words, rearranging the narrative," Bailey says, " so our job is to locate where Strype quoted the diary, which is scattered in two books that contain other copied documents as well." As the students locate the missing bits, they transfer them to the diary and display the restored text in red in the hypertext. The diary is an entry into a fascinating period of history, Bailey says, " as one can see by the popularity of films about Elizabeth I, for example Shakespeare in Love. Here we have a reporter on the spot describing pretty colorful details. And we' re giving ' ordinary people' the tools to read the text without knowing much of anything about the language of the day— for instance that plasse is a way to spell " palace." The Machyn project originated during Bailey' s 1995 graduate class on Elizabethan English, which focused in part on the language of daily life and how it sounded. Trial testimonies, which documented as exactly as possible what people said, yielded excellent samples of daily speech. Early diaries, though few, were another good source. Bailey assembled a team of graduate students who learned to read Machyn' s idiosyncratic spellings from photographs of the text made during World War II. The University is one of the few repositories with a complete set of these films; they were taken, Bailey adds, at the British Library in the 1940s as part of the British Manuscripts Project, an effort to preserve British written culture from obliteration. Former U-M Regent Eugene B. Power directed the project. Machyn' s text presented many transcription headaches, says Moore, whose job included the exacting proofreading of the original and reconstructed manuscripts. The handwriting, as the examples on this page show, is very confusing— letters like ' ff' and ' ss' look similar in Machyn' s handwriting, as do ' e' and ' o' . These seemingly minor differences become important when transcribing the text, because small variations in spelling can provide clues to regional pronunciation and dialect.
Elon Lang ' 02, research assistant and project Web master, worked on the technical aspects with Brian Rosenblum, electronic publishing specialist in the U-M Scholarly Publishing Office. Lang' s job was to match the data entry with Strype or, in other words,
to fill in the blanks. " This is a step in unifying the historical past
with the information age," he says. " Knowing English history provides
an understanding of North American history before the pilgrims came
to this country." He hopes the online text will one day enrich high
school and college history classes. |
