Until March 2019, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) entry for Hester Pulter (which was first published in 2004) cited the year of her birth as “1595/6.” That year has since been updated—with less apparent certainty, but greater accuracy—to read “1605?”1 The time has come to remove the question mark and end the debate about Pulter’s date of birth, since available evidence clearly indicates that Pulter was born in 1605, on the eighth of June. Pulter’s birthday has been up for debate since her manuscript first rose to scholarly notice in the final years of the twentieth century; however, thanks to the careful work of a variety of scholars—especially Alice Eardley, and, more recently, one canny undergraduate student, Kate Harkin—the debate may now be considered resolved. This Exploration reviews—and updates—this fast-changing historiography in order to highlight the challenges associated with identifying something as small, yet significant, as a person’s date of birth in an era before the issuing of official certificates.

Mark Robson (who was among the earliest to publish on Pulter’s manuscript, and who composed both her original ODNB entry and its recent revision) initially had only the evidence of her verse to rely on when it came to dating her birth. That evidence led him, in his first article on Pulter, published in the year 2000, to identify 1596 as the year of her birth—just like Peter Davidson, in the world’s first article on Pulter’s manuscript, which appeared only the year before.2 By the 2004 publication of his biography of Pulter, however, Robson had modified that slightly to “1595/6,” as mentioned above. The very next year, in a special issue of the journal Literature Compass devoted to Pulter, Sarah Ross tentatively identified Pulter’s birth year as “1607?”3 Ross, like Robson and Davidson, relied on evidence from Pulter’s own work, but selected a different poem as the basis of her decision. Ross’s dating would make Pulter a contemporary of Thomas Browne and John Milton, where Robson and Davidson’s postulated birthday, over a decade earlier, would put her in the same generation as Thomas Carew and Elizabeth Jocelin—a subtle but certain difference.

In different parts of the same issue of Literature Compass in which Ross suggested 1607 as Pulter’s birth year, Jayne Archer held out for 1596, while Elizabeth Clarke plumped for 1608.4 Evidently, the matter remained unsettled. Clarke was, however, considerably more circumspect in another publication which appeared in the same year, where she estimated Pulter’s birth sometime in “the 1590s or the first decade of the 1600s,” and Margaret Ezell in 2008 similarly referred to Pulter’s birth as “falling in the first decade of the seventeenth century.”5 Clarke neatly summarizes the poetic evidence that yielded such a variety of conflicting claims:

No record of her birth or baptism is known to survive, and the poetry itself appears to give conflicting testimony on this point. A poem on fol. 88v of her manuscript is entitled “Made when my spirits were sunk very low with sickness & sorrow. May 1667 I being seventy one years old,” thus suggesting a birth-date of 1596. However, another poem in Pulter’s manuscript dates her birth to 1607: “Made when I was sick in 1647” describes her soul’s “forty years acquaintance” with her flesh. A statement in the poem “Alitheas Pearl,” “Thus have I liv’d a sad and weary life / Thirteen a Mayd, and Thirtie three a Wife” (fol. 51r), fits best with the probable chronology of Pulter’s poems if a birth-date of 1607 is assumed. She represents herself in two poems as having been pregnant with her fifteenth child in 1648 (fols. 10v, 67r).6

In 1648, a 1596 birth date would have made Pulter fifty-two years old—an unlikely time of life for child-bearing. Clarke concludes that “it is most likely that Hester Pulter was born in 1607, and that perhaps the scribe mistook the date in the title of ‘Made when my spirits were sunk very low.’”7 Of course, this is only the most likely date if the poems are imagined to proffer clear and accurate facts, rather than as taking the kind of license that poems are usually allowed.

In 2008, Alice Eardley was confident enough to pinpoint a date: 1605.8 Two years later, Eardley published the rationale for her choice in Notes and Queries, a study since relied on by a number of other scholars that persuasively demonstrated that the year of Pulter’s birth was 1605 (although lingering doubts continued to be expressed elsewhere).9 Eardley’s determination was based on her reading of a manuscript known as The Declaracion of Ley, composed by Pulter’s father, James Ley. The Declaracion is bound by a medieval manuscript leaf featuring a musical score and Latin lyrics, at the top edge of which someone has written “Ley his pedigree”:

Image provided courtesy of Wiltshire & Swindon Archives

Image provided courtesy of Wiltshire & Swindon Archives

This manuscript had previously been noticed by Raymond Skinner, who first published on The Declaracion in 1992.10 The first eight pages of The Declaracion offer, in a seventeenth-century hand, clearly itemized details about the date and place of birth of James Ley’s children. Here is the first page:

And here is the second:

The entry for Hester (the fourth in the image above) reads as follows—at least, this is how it reads in Skinner’s transcription:

Hester, the daughter of the said Sir James Ley and the Lady Mary, his wief, was borne at St. Thomas Court, neere Dublin, in the realme of Ireland, uppon Saturdaie beinge ye viiith daie of June in the yeare of the raigne of King James of England and Ireland the third, and of Scotland the xxxviiith [?] Anno dmi. 1608 [?], betwene the houres of six and seven of the clock in the morninge, and was baptized in the parish church of St. Katherins in Thomas Streete, neare Dublin, uppon Sondaie beinge the xix [?] daie of June then next followinge. The godfather Sir William Usher, Kt., Clerk of the Counsell there. The godmothers Hester, the wief of Sir Oliver Lambert, Kt., one of the Privye Counsell there, and Ann, the wief of Sir Henry Ffolliot, Kt., Govnor of Ballishanon. Baptized by Edward East parson of the parish of St. Katherins.11

The square brackets above are Skinner’s; he transcribes the year of Pulter’s birth as “1608 [?]”—thereby supporting, however hesitantly, one of Clarke’s later contentions.

A close-up of the section on Pulter might be clarifying:

Image provided courtesy of Wiltshire & Swindon Archives

My reading of The Declaracion—consulted both in the Wiltshire and Swindon Archives and in close-ups of digital photographs of the original—confirms Eardley’s later transcription of the same figure, Pulter’s birth year, as 1605. I arrived at this conclusion, as Eardley did (according to her remarks in footnote 13 of her 2010 article), by comparing all of the examples of the digits “5” and “8” as these appear in the rest of this part of the manuscript. The consistent scribal differences between these digits become stark when examples are magnified and multiplied. Eardley’s article was published without illustrations; for this reason, I array below selected close-ups of the figures that led me to support Eardley’s identification of 1605 as Hester Pulter’s year of birth.

Below is a magnification of the year of Hester Pulter’s birth, as recorded in The Declaracion of Ley:

Image provided courtesy of Wiltshire & Swindon Archives

Regarded on its own, it is hard to say with certainty whether the last digit above is a “5” or an “8.” A comparison with other examples of the same scribe’s “5”s and “8”s, however, is clarifying. Below, for instance, on the same page, is a magnification of the date “1599” (when Pulter’s brother, James, was born):

Image provided courtesy of Wiltshire & Swindon Archives

The figure “5,” above, looks much (if not exactly) like the final digit in the first date illustrated above (Pulter’s birth date). That is, both look quite like the modern letter “S.”

For further confirmation from the same document, on its first page, here is “1590,” with (again) an “S”-shaped “5”:

Image provided courtesy of Wiltshire & Swindon Archives

And here’s another “1590” from the next paragraph:

Image provided courtesy of Wiltshire & Swindon Archives

Here is “1593” from the next paragraph:

Image provided courtesy of Wiltshire & Swindon Archives

In contrast to those examples of the figure “5,” consider an example of “1608” from the margin of that same page:

Image provided courtesy of Wiltshire & Swindon Archives

Notice the distinctive horizontal line, like a flat cap, atop the “8” above, as with the one below, from the same page:

Image provided courtesy of Wiltshire & Swindon Archives

A third instance of that capped “8” appears right next to Hester’s own name, since she was the eighth child:

Image provided courtesy of Wiltshire & Swindon Archives

That telltale horizontal line is absent from the year of her birth. Further examples of these digits confirm what has been said and shown.

So much is a reasonable selection of the ocular evidence that Eardley describes verbally in her article. The Notes and Queries article is clear but not illustrated; we are thus asked to take on faith the evidence of another’s eyes. One of the affordances of the digital era is the generation and sharing of high-resolution, magnified images in a manner that is nowhere near as feasible on film or in print. Not long ago, a scholar working with a magnifying glass might enlarge a manuscript page for her own benefit, but she would rarely have had access to equipment that would create, store, and easily promulgate useful images of textual cruxes. Recent technological developments have thus been game-changing for many studies, including ones related to palaeography. As Steven W. May writes,

Digital photography allows us to make detailed comparisons of even minute elements of handwriting beyond anything that was practical for most of our predecessors. Many paleographic studies have relied on drawings or tracings of words and letters. Otherwise, using ordinary photography, analysts of letterforms ordinarily referred readers to the locations of the graphs in question on full pages of handwriting and left them to draw their own conclusions. With digital images we can isolate corresponding words or graphs from two or more documents, place them side by side, then enlarge and otherwise clarify their appearance to permit extremely meticulous comparisons. The ability to juxtapose exact and enlarged images of the penmanship in different manuscripts can make the case more emphatically than even the most thorough written analysis of similarities and differences.12

Although she did not have the benefit of supplying ocular evidence to her readers, Eardley usefully supplements and thus corroborates her analysis of the distinctions between the figures “5” and “8” in The Declaracion with further evidence in support of reading of Pulter’s birth year as 1605. For one, she looks at the years of King James’s reigns in Scotland and Ireland as these are provided in The Declaracion’s entry for Hester Pulter. Eardley and I both read the relevant passage thus: “of England and Ireland the third, and of Scotland the xxxviiith Anno dmi.” (Skinner suggests the same Roman number, though more tentatively.) As Eardley goes on to say: “The third year of James’s rule in England and Ireland, begun in March 1603, was 1605–6 and the 38th year of James’s rule in Scotland, begun in July 1567, was 1604–5. Pulter’s birthday in June falls towards the beginning of the third year of James’s reign in England and near to end of his 38th year of rule in Scotland.” Below is a photograph of the figures relevant to the analysis above:

Image provided courtesy of Wiltshire & Swindon Archives

The Arabic “3” on the left, above, appears quite unambiguous; the Roman “xxxviii” is less so, but it certainly could not be said to read “xl” or “xli,” which is what it would have to be if Pulter were indeed born in the fortieth or forty-first year of James’s reign in Scotland (1608). This evidence and Eardley’s analysis of it thus offer useful internal confirmation of the handwriting analysis.

One might seek external evidence as well; however, the most likely source of baptismal details—the parish records from St. Catherine’s church in Thomas Street, Dublin (described in The Declaracion as the site of Pulter’s baptism)—appears to have been lost, since the relevant index shows no records from before the late seventeenth century to have been preserved.13 The church itself, which was rebuilt in the eighteenth century, may be located at number 57 on the following map, which was originally made by John Speed around the time of Pulter’s birth:

Dublin, as published by John Speed, 1610 and reproduced in Remains of St. Mary’s Abbey, Dublin. Their explorations and researches, AD 1886 (Dublin, Forster & Co, 1887; rpt. 1896), p. 10. The British Library/ Public Domain.

A birthday happens in time, but also in space. The spatial coordinates of Pulter’s birth are depicted here in a way that might help us, even if only a little, visualize something of the historical and material circumstances of Pulter’s earthly existence in the days that followed June 8, 1605.

With the year of Pulter’s birth established by Eardley’s 2010 article and confirmed by ocular evidence, the matter of Pulter’s birthday remains to be considered. Although of less import than knowing which century she was born in, Pulter scholars would still enjoy knowing exactly when to celebrate; moreover, the lingering contradiction about the day of her birth may well have led scholars also to interpret her birth year more tentatively than is necessary.

In the same article in which she establishes 1605 as the year of Pulter’s birth, Eardley writes that the manuscript “suggests she was born on Saturday 8 June.”14 Her reading matches Skinner’s tentative take, and my reading concurs with theirs. Eardley goes on, though, to write that “a comparison with a contemporary calendar reveals that in 1605, the 8th of June did not fall on a Saturday.” Eardley posits scribal error, with the number eight being written instead of eighteen, and with the latter being the date she posits as Pulter’s actual birthday, based on relevant numbers available on the calendar.

Although no citation was provided for that calendar, for a number of years I took it on faith that no Saturday, June 8 was available for anyone’s birthday in 1605. In a 2020 undergraduate class on Pulter’s poetry, however, I was schooled by a student, Kate Harkin, when I read the following in her weekly research write-up, which treated Eardley’s article on Pulter’s date of birth:

In 1605, the British were still using the Julian calendar, which is different from our modern Gregorian Calendar. The Gregorian calendar was not used in England until around 1751, roughly 150 years after the recorded date of birth of Hester Pulter in 1605. When consulting a Julian calendar, the dates do in fact match up; June 8th is on a Saturday in 1605.15

It is therefore reasonable to conclude quite definitively—thanks to the careful research of an undergraduate—that Hester Pulter’s birthday was June 8, 1605. It will remain, however, somewhat melancholically ironic that, for a woman who spent about a quarter of a century birthing so many children of her own, her own birth date should have proven elusive for so long.