Handbook · English secretary hand
Reading notes
Short notes on what else you’ll meet on the page: marks that aren’t letters, how editions print what they read, and the oldest parish registers.
Marks that aren't letters
Line-fillers, the virgule, the double hyphen, points around numbers, empty flourishes and the ways scribes corrected themselves: strokes to recognise, not to read as words.
ReadHow transcriptions are written
Editors agree on the aim but not on the signs: the same square brackets mean added letters in one edition and deleted ones in another.
ReadEarliest registers (1538–1560)
Parish registers begin in 1538, before the Elizabethan secretary hand had settled. What to expect in the first twenty years of entries.
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Historical context
What the documents take for granted: money, the calendar, measures, people and the records themselves
Money: pounds, shillings and pence
12 pence to the shilling, 20 shillings to the pound, and how an account adds up
ReadCoins named in documents
Groats, crowns, angels and unites: what the coins in wills and accounts were worth
ReadLine fillers and layout marks
Why legal documents leave no gaps, and the marks that lay out a page: fillers, braces, catchwords, dockets
ReadThe calendar: New Year, double dates and regnal years
Why a date between January and March can be a year out, Old Style and New Style, and years counted by reign
ReadDates by feast and term
Quarter days, saints' days, 'the morrow of' and 'the octave of', and the four law terms
ReadWeights and measures
Acres and roods, bushels and quarters, ells and hundredweights, and why they varied from place to place
ReadSpelling and letters
No fixed spelling, u and v and i and j as one letter each, y for th, capitals, the virgule and the point
ReadPeople and status words
gent., yeoman, husbandman; what Mr and Mrs meant; cousins, brothers and aliases
ReadWhich record, and why it exists
Parish registers, wills and inventories, manor courts, quarter sessions and church courts: who kept them and why
ReadSigning, sealing and witnessing
Marks, seals, witnesses, 'per me' and 'signed, sealed and delivered'
ReadPaper, parchment, quill and ink
What documents were written on and with, and why the ink fades or eats through the page
ReadWho wrote the documents
Clerks and scriveners; copybooks; who wrote secretary and who wrote italic
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