Open Access

Anita Auer, Tony Fairman

• The majority of language corpora available to date that cover the Late Modern English period (1700-1900) contain samples of writing by the classically educated layers of society. It is this kind of data that the Standard’ history of the English language has been based on. The labouring poor formed the greater part of the population (60-70%) during the Late Modern English period and, though many of them could not write (compulsory elementary schooling was only introduced in 1870), by about 1800 so many could write something that they formed the majority of those normally called ‘literate’. A unique insight into the language use of the labouring poor has been provided through the laws for poor relief, which gave paupers the opportunity to apply for relief from parish funds during the period 1795-1834. For the last 18 years Tony Fairman has collected poor relief application letters from archives of English County Record Offices. This paper describes the data and the compilation principles of the letter collection, as well as the challenges involved in the conversion of the letter collection into a searchable corpus.