ABSTRACT
The physical evidence of manual labor, "hard-handedness" is a somatic mark that naturalizes, and thus racializes, the exclusion of a working-class group. Hardness signifies a lack of social mobility, indicating a natural deficit of capacity to imagine and thus to be better by knowing better. Hard-handedness is understood to appear on the body sometime after birth as the result of manual labor, yet the mark portends as well, predicting or indicating a hardness that is innate, a hardness of the mind. The mechanicals' attempts at high culture are frequently lampooned and the denigrating remarks couched in terms of hardness, roughness, or thickness that has deadened sensitivity in both body and mind. Manwood, who had also served as a gamekeeper, justifies royal prerogative for exclusive access to hunting grounds by citing the weight of history, the lineage of kings, as well as the extremely "laboursome toyle" that such exalted figures must bear.
