ABSTRACT
The study of literacy in the past is a responsibility of historical sociology and here there is a substantial achievement to record. Only the fully literate, we shall claim, were likely to be actively or potentially engaged in political activity in the traditional social structure. By full literacy is meant being able to read and to write and being in the habit of doing both in the course of daily life, using written, even printed records and owning books. We now know the largest possible size of that minority of the population which was fully literate in this sense from dates as early as the outset of the seventeenth century.
