The Cultural Lives of the Middling Sort in Early Modern Maritime London

This thesis uncovers the cultural lives of maritime London's middling sort, c. 1580-1640. Tracing middling identities and experiences across the region's turbulent Thameside communities, I outline who were included among maritime London's middling sort of people, what it was that made them middling, and how these individuals were able to attain and maintain social status within the mobile and changing worlds they inhabited.

Each chapter introduces questions that probe the nature of middling status, and the subsequent answers bring into clearer focus the outline of this underexplored social group. To answer the questions raised by this thesis, I engage with a diverse range of print and manuscript sources, from political treatises, letter-writing manuals, nautical textbooks and maps to personal journals, administrative accounts, probate documents, and court materials. My first chapter explores the important role that officeholding and administrative culture played in the production and management of middling status. Election to local office not only affirmed the social status of the officeholder but also afforded the elected individual access to influential means of local administration, which I examine through the vestry minute book of maritime Stepney. My second chapter traces the life of Richard Norwood, a middling nautical practitioner who used public and paper performances to cultivate a range of distinct social and professional identities. By examining the texts and models of identity that Norwood produced and consumed throughout his lifetime, this chapter explores how middling status was constituted through performance, collaborative practices, and demonstrations of skill. My third chapter brings together the institutional and the individual by focusing on middling identity and experience in the East India Company's yard at Blackwall. Using quantitative and qualitative methods, I map the immense multipurpose site of Blackwall Yard and locate middling individuals and activities within its spaces. Having located the lives of the middling sort within the turbulent Thameside communities of early modern maritime London, I conclude by drawing my arguments together to demonstrate the importance of engaging with the specific, the material, the located, and the local.