Social ordering or social action in early-modern England

"The fundamental way in which people interact socially is how they address each other (or, when not in face-to-face situations, refer to each other). In their interaction – circumscribed and influenced by emotional responses and (the avoidance of) embarrassment – social actors employ a variety of forms of address: names, nicknames, social titles, which impute familiarity and closeness; distance and respect; courtesy; or dismissiveness. Many of those responses are dispersed through the deposition in the archdeaconry court of Oxford above. Reported social address can thus furnish an insight into the praxis of social relationships with an elemental poignancy. Quotidian social interaction through the ‘speech community’s’ language use in addressing individuals, when considered in its totality, moreover, can take us further than the relationships between individuals. The accumulation of this social interaction can reveal something about the ordering of local society. Two perceptions of early-modern social ordering – through ‘national’ and local lenses – though not necessarily antithetical, have been suggested, the one established on a social language of ‘sorts’ and the other of ‘chief inhabitants’, ‘core’ or ‘focal’ families. The language of address and naming informs that consideration of the ordering of society, but perhaps avoids two principal issues. First, although all language use consists of rhetoric, the self-acclamation of ‘chief inhabitants’ persuasively projected a self-representation of a particular group. Secondly, those social categories hitherto formulated were problematically and resolutely male-centred. Now, although local society’s use of names and forms of address was no less imbued with rhetorical overtones, it allows some penetration into the world of quotidian exchange and how female actors were incorporated into local social ordering – all at an elemental, fundamental social level."