1. Structure of the Corpus

The Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC) has been compiled for the study of social variables in the history of English. To enable this, great attention has been paid to the authenticity of letters on the one hand and to the social representativeness of the writers on the other. The timespan covered is from 1417 to 1681, and the size of the whole corpus is 2.7 million words. Because of widespread illiteracy, however, only the highest ranks of society are well represented, and women’s letters form no more than one fifth of the full CEEC. For more information on the compilation principles see Nevalainen & Raumolin-Brunberg (eds.) (1996) and Keränen (1998).

The Corpus of Early English Correspondence Sampler (CEECS) represents the non-copyrighted materials included in the Corpus of Early English Correspondence. This means that the editors of the collections included here have died over 70 years ago. We have also included some material (re-)edited by us (see Henslowe and Marchall collections).

The sampler corpus (CEECS) reflects the structure of the full CEEC only in some respects. The time covered is nearly the same (1418-1680) and here too the bulk of the material is at the latter end of the time span. 23 letter collections have been included with altogether 194 informants. The size of the CEECS is 450,000 words. It has been divided into two parts for technical reasons. CEECS1 covers the 15th and 16th centuries, with the exception of the Hutton collection, which goes on to the 17th century. CEECS2 consists of 17th century material, only 3 letters in Original 3 are from the late 16th century.

The order of collections in the sampler has been decided on the first date of each collection (with the exception of Original 3) and is as follows:

 

Collection   Years   Word count
CEECS   1418-1680   450085
CEECS1   1418-1638   246055

Original 1

  1418-1529   23176

Stonor

  1424-1483   38006

Marchall

  1440-1476   4834

Shillingford

  1447-1448   13527

Plumpton

  1461-1550   36530

Rerum

  1483-1509   5915

Original 2

  1520-1586   16879

Hutton

  1566-1638   25319

Leycester

  1585-1586   67786

Royal 1

  1585-1596   14083

 

CEECS2

  1580-1680   204030

Original 3

  1580-1665   9948

Henslowe

  1600-1610   551

Royal 2

  1612-1614   227

Cornwallis

  1613-1644   61603

Cosin

  1617-1669   37853

Harley

  1625-1666   24915

WeSa

  1632-1642   4320

Charles

  1634-1678   2964

Wharton

  1642   8068

Hamilton

  1648-1650   1091

Jones

  1651-1660   33877

Basire

  1651-1666   7068

Tixall

  1656-1680   11545