Historical context
Paper, parchment, quill and ink
Most documents in this course were written with a quill in iron-gall ink, on paper or on parchment. The materials explain a lot about how the page looks now.
What they wrote on
- Parchment
- Animal skin, scraped and dried. Kept for deeds, sealed documents and records with a long tradition.Petti p. 4; Hector pp. 16–17
- Paper
- Made from linen rags, and mostly imported from France and Italy. Used for letters, accounts and most newer kinds of record.Petti p. 5; Hector pp. 16–17; D&K-S p. 6
- Watermarks
- Held up to the light, paper shows the maker's mark and the lines of the mouldPetti p. 5
Pen and ink
- The quill
- Usually a goose feather. For secretary hand it was cut to an angled edge, which gives thick and thin strokes.Petti p. 7; Hector p. 18
- Iron-gall ink
- Made from oak galls, iron sulphate and gum. It bites into the page, so it was the ink for documents that had to last.Petti pp. 7–8
- Fading
- The ink darkens at first, then can fade to a light brownPetti p. 8
- Burn-through
- Its acid can eat into thin paper, leaving holes where the strokes werePetti p. 8
Ruling and folding
- Ruling
- Books and formal pages might be ruled first, with lead or a dry point; many documents were not ruled at allPetti p. 6
- Folding
- Letters and deeds were kept folded. The outside carried an address, or an endorsement saying what was inside.Hector pp. 16–17
Sources
- Petti: A. G. Petti, English Literary Hands from Chaucer to Dryden (1977)
- D&K-S: G. E. Dawson and L. Kennedy-Skipton, Elizabethan Handwriting 1500–1650 (1966)
- Hector: L. C. Hector, The Handwriting of English Documents (1958)
Facts from these sources, in our own words. Page numbers are the printed pages.