Teach Yourself Palaeography E-Book

Claire Jarvis

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

This is the very first 'teach yourself' book on palaeography, covering all the skills that the genealogist needs to read any document that might be found at any date in English archives. Using a series of graded exercises in transcription, Teach Yourself Palaeography works backwards in time in easy stages from the modern handwriting of the nineteenth century to the court hands of the medieval period, focusing on records that are of particular interest to family and local historians. The book provides a unique, self-contained reference guide to palaeography, and to all the different letter forms, symbols and abbreviations that have ever been used in English records.

Leseprobe

First published 2022

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Claire Jarvis, 2022

The right of Claire Jarvis to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 8039 9127 6

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 The Nineteenth and Eighteenth Centuries

2 The Later Seventeenth Century

3 The Sixteenth Century: Records in English

4 The Sixteenth Century: Records in Latin

5 Court Hands

And Finally

Answers to Exercises

Appendix A: Glossary

A.1 Some General Terms

A.2 English Documentary Hands

A.3 Terms Used to Describe Handwriting

A.4 Descriptions of Different Letter Forms

Appendix B: Transcription Conventions

Appendix C: Typical Letter Forms

C.1 Secretary Hand Letter Forms

C.2 Court Hand Letter Forms

Appendix D: Marks of Abbreviation, Punctuation and Correction

D.1 Marks of Abbreviation: English

D.2 Marks of Abbreviation: Latin

D.3 Punctuation and Correction Marks

Appendix E: Numbers: Numerals, Money and Dates

Sources

Acknowledgements

My thanks are due to the following for their kind permission to reproduce the images in this book:

Derbyshire Record Office

Dorset History Centre

Essex Record Office

Gloucestershire Archives

London Metropolitan Archives

Surrey History Centre

The National Archives

Warwickshire County Record Office

West Yorkshire Archive Service

Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre

I owe an endless debt of gratitude to Adrian Spencer Jarvis (1966–2015), and this book is dedicated to his memory. Dis aliter visum.

Introduction

Have you ever searched a nineteenth-century census for a name you are sure must be there but is unaccountably missing? A simple thirty-second search stretches into an afternoon as you digitally search the streets, house by house, for your elusive ancestors, only to find that they have been mistranscribed in the online index used to search the records and appear under a different name altogether.

It shouldn’t happen: nineteenth-century handwriting is easy to read with a little practice. A transcription error for one of my own ancestors, of Heuman for Henman, shown in Figure 1, would have been avoided if the indexer had made a careful comparison of similar letter forms on the same page, and was perhaps familiar with common English surnames. (The online indexes referred to throughout are those provided by Ancestry; similar transcription errors occur in the indexes of all family history websites.)

Figure 1: Excerpt from 1861 Census, Abington, Northamptonshire.(The National Archives, ref: RG 9/933/30/25)

The writing in Figure 2, however, poses genuine difficulties. The letter forms are unfamiliar and may take more than one form even within a word, special marks are used to show that words have been abbreviated, and common English forenames have been written in Latin. Furthermore, the ink has bled through the paper from the following page in the original document, making the writing difficult to decipher. It is simply not possible to read this without some training. In this case, ‘William Ashewell, son of John Ashewell’ was transcribed in the online index as ‘Willms Atherwett son of Chois Atherwett’, and wrongly dated 1570 instead of 1544.

Transcription errors are not always a problem; the online search uses an algorithm to generate alternative spellings of names, and in the case of my Northamptonshire ancestor, Heuman was indeed matched as a possible alternative to Henman. Unsurprisingly, however, the name Atherwett does not appear as a possible match for Ashwell, and I might well have assumed that that this Surrey ancestor did not appear in the parish register. (In fact, at least half of all the entries in the Latin part of this sixteenth-century register are mistranscribed, making the online index almost useless. Many are serious errors that will not be matched as alternative spellings of names: for example, Sanrans for Laurans, Wyeahel for Nycholus, or Sanpyn for Turpyn.) It is possible to read sixteenth-century handwriting as easily as nineteenth-century handwriting with practice, and a quick scan of the register showed a number of Ashwells resident in sixteenth-century Kingston.

Figure 2: Excerpt from parish register, All Saints, Kingston upon Thames, Surrey, 16 October 1544. (Surrey History Centre, ref: P33/1/1)

Transcription:

Willi[elm]us ashewell filius Jho[ann]is ashewell

fuit Baptizatus xvi die me[n]sis octobris

Translation:

William Ashwell son of John Ashwell

was baptised on the sixteenth day of the month of October

Many records in local archives, however, ranging from nineteenth-century poor law records to seventeenth-century quarter sessions records, and from sixteenth-century manor court rolls to twelfth-century charters, and an ever-increasing volume of digital images, are not indexed at all. If you want to read them, you’ll have to do it yourself.

I had two aims in mind when I started this book. The first was to provide the sort of guide that I needed when I started researching population history at Cambridge University as a post-graduate many years ago. I found that it was easy enough with a little practice to read eighteenth-century parish registers, but I quickly ran into difficulties with court records from the same date, which were sometimes in Latin, and often written in a bewilderingly difficult script. I could pick my way through a neat fourteenth-century deed, but found manor court rolls of the same date, with their abundance of impenetrable abbreviations, completely inaccessible.

This, then, is the ‘teach yourself’ book that would have been useful to me, a manual for learning to read old handwriting. If you follow it from beginning to end, you should be able to tackle any record that might be found at any date in English archives. It should be useful, both for the beginner starting out on original documents for the first time, and for the more experienced researcher who, having painstakingly constructed a family tree, now wishes to get to grips with the abundance of records that add context to their personal histories.

My second aim is to provide a one-stop reference guide to all the different letter forms, symbols and abbreviations that have been used in English records over time. This pulls together information from the wide range of publications that I have acquired over the years, many out of print, each covering one particular aspect of old handwriting, such as Tudor secretary hand, medieval court hands, or Latin abbreviations and symbols, and has been informed by years of experience transcribing and translating a wide variety of historical records.

It is important to also say what this book is not. It is not a course in Latin; most records from the early eighteenth century, and many interesting records from earlier centuries, were written in English, and it is possible to undertake a good deal of useful research without any Latin at all. Much of the book is concerned with records written in English, and the Latin documents can be passed over if they are not of interest.

However, the serious genealogist will undoubtedly wish at some time to make use of documents written in Latin. Some records, such as parish registers and the probate clauses of wills, are accessible with a rudimentary knowledge of Latin, but others – in particular, the records of the various courts of law – require a good working knowledge of the language. It will be sufficient to work through the indispensable Latin for Local History by Eileen A. Gooder before attempting to read the documents in Latin in this book.

This book is also not, despite the title, concerned with the academic discipline of palaeography, which covers all aspects of the reading, dating, development and classification of handwriting in documents and manuscripts. This book is for the researcher who has a practical need to read old handwriting, with the sole aim of accessing the textual content of records.

Genealogists by necessity generally work backwards in time from known events, and this book works in the same way, taking you from the nineteenth century in easy stages to the medieval period, focusing on records that are of particular interest to the family historian. The five chapters of the book work backwards in time, from the modern, legible handwriting of the past 250 years, back through the round and italic hands of the seventeenth century, to the mixed and secretary hands of the sixteenth century, and the medieval set and other court hands used in public and legal records.

There are some disadvantages to working backwards in time to examine handwriting. Letter forms from earlier times persist in handwriting long after new scripts are generally current, meaning that a knowledge of earlier letter forms is always necessary. Indeed, according to the archivist Hilary Jenkinson, students proposing to work on sixteenth-century writings should start their preparation at a development no later than Domesday, and preferably with the Caroline minuscule!

Also, counter-intuitively, it is often the case that earlier records are easier to read than their later counterparts. We shall see in Chapter 4 that Elizabethan handwriting is often more difficult to read than early Tudor and late medieval handwriting. We shall also see, in Chapter 5, that the highly stylised court handwriting of the early eighteenth century means that public records from that date are considerably harder to read than those of the fifteenth century and before. Accordingly, early letter forms are introduced where necessary, so by the end of the book you should not only be able to work backwards to read the documents of any chosen date, but also have a basic understanding of the development of English documentary handwriting over five centuries.

There is nothing inherently difficult about reading old handwriting. As the palaeographer L.C. Hector pointed out, the reading of manuscripts is not so much about the application of theoretical knowledge, but the exercise of a skill requiring effort on the part of the learner, and a good deal of patient practice. This is not always easy to do, as transcripts of original documents are necessary for checking the accuracy of practice work.

This book provides a series of exercises in transcription with model answers; and further practice is suggested from the huge variety of documents available online, at local record offices, or at The National Archives. Each chapter ends with a selection of excerpts from documents of particular interest to genealogists, exemplifying the key features of the handwriting of the period.

Before you start, it might be useful to read through Appendix A, which provides a glossary of terms used in the book, notes on documentary hands and introduces some commonly used handwriting terminology.

Model transcriptions for all exercises are given towards the end of the book after the final chapter.

1. The Nineteenth and Eighteenth Centuries

• Introduction to transcription

• Letters that take more than one form

• Abbreviations used in documents written in English

• Unfamiliar words and idiosyncratic spellings

This chapter covers handwriting from the late nineteenth century back to the mid-eighteenth century. In 1733, Acts of Parliament came into force that made English rather than Latin the language of the written records of the courts of England. This put an end to the use of highly abbreviated Latin, and the handwriting commonly called ‘court hand’. From this date, letter forms are recognisably modern, and can mostly be read with a knowledge of modern scripts alone.

EXERCISE 1.1

The later nineteenth-century censuses are a good starting point for learning to read eighteenth and nineteenth-century hands with ease. Local archives and local studies libraries generally provide free access to the family history websites Ancestry and Findmypast, which both include all the available British census records in their record sets. Browse the 1891 England census online, select an enumeration district for any civil parish of interest, and begin by copying out the description of the district written by the enumerator. This will give practice reading continuous prose, with the added advantage that the descriptions will also contain several initial capital letters used for proper names.

Move on to the first page of the enumeration book, and, with the online index hidden, copy out a whole page. If there are any difficulties with a name or occupation, check each letter carefully against letters in other names or words on the page that you are sure about.

Repeat the exercise for earlier censuses and other enumeration districts, ending with a page from one of the civil parishes in the Middlesex census of 1841, such as St Andrew Holborn or St Mary Whitechapel, which contain a wide variety of occupations and foreign names.

EXERCISE 1.2

Read Appendix B, Transcription Conventions, and, following the guidelines for semi-diplomatic transcription, transcribe the enumerator’s description shown in Figure 1.1. Census Enumerators’ Books are only available to view online, and the quality of the image may be poor, as it is here, adding to difficulties with legibility. Note that the small letter ‘r’ takes two different forms; and there is a rather idiosyncratic capital letter ‘W’.

Figure 1.1: Census enumerator’s description, Enumeration District 3a, Teddington, Middlesex, 1851 Census. (The National Archives, ref: HO 107/1604/355)

EXERCISE 1.3

Browse any enumeration district of interest and, with the online index shown, select unfamiliar and unlikely names for checking and correcting. For example, the name in the last line of Figure 1.2 was mistranscribed in the online index to the 1871 census as Stephen Sicense. Checking the first letter of the surname against the forename and occupation shows that this writer joined his capital ‘L’ to the next letter but did not do so with a capital ‘S’. The name, correctly transcribed, is Stephen License.

The name in the first line of Figure 1.2 was also mistranscribed. Again, a quick check of capital letters elsewhere on the page shows that Benjamin Sirman should in fact be Benjamin Firman.

Figure 1.2: Census Enumerator’s Book, Palgrave, Suffolk, 1871 Census. (The National Archives, ref: RG 10/1736/68/15)

Not all unlikely or unfamiliar names will be incorrect in the online indexes, but most will be. In a quick survey of the online index for a couple of pages of the 1871 Teddington, Middlesex, census, for example, I found Conseline for Cornelius, Remp for Kemp, Lu James for Sir James, and Mbrook for Fullbrook.

EXERCISE 1.4

Transcribe the following excerpt from a contemporary transcript of a baptism register, which introduces the long form ‘s’, which is often mistaken for an ‘f’, and one possibly unfamiliar term. This exercise also introduces some very common abbreviations that are still used today: a raised final letter, indicating that earlier letters have been omitted; a point or comma, indicating that the word has been abbreviated; and the use of the ampersand representing the word ‘and’.

Figure 1.3: Baptisms, Bishop’s Transcript, All Saints, Kingston upon Thames, Surrey, 1800. (London Metropolitan Archives, City of London, ref: DW/T/6093. Reproduced by kind permission of the Diocese of Winchester)

EXERCISE 1.5

Transcribe the following lines from a mid-eighteenth-century Gloucestershire probate inventory. Note the use of the reverse ‘e’, the only letter form that is not italic; both the long and short form of the small letter ‘s’; and the Saxon ‘thorn’, which was frequently used to represent the letters ‘th’ and is indistinguishable here from the letter ‘y’, that appears in line 2 (see Appendix D: Marks of Abbreviation in English).

The only difficulties likely to arise are those caused by phonetic spelling (‘imnetary’ for ‘inventory’ in line 1, and ‘acer’ for ‘acre’ in line 8), and the use of unfamiliar words (the sixth word of line 7), or of words that have different meanings today (‘praised’ in line 9).

Figure 1.4: Probate Inventory, Bitton, Gloucestershire, 1752. (Gloucestershire Archives, ref: GDR/Inv/1752/34 ILES William)

EXERCISE 1.6

Before attempting the following exercise, spend some time transcribing some of the Poor Law Removal and Settlement records available online, which will provide practice reading both lists of names (for example, Orders of Removal and Birth Books), and pages of continuous text (Settlement Papers). The records in the Shoreditch Union Book of Examinations in Ancestry’s London Poor Law Removal and Settlement Records, 1698–1930, are particularly useful. Although the letter forms are italic, and therefore easily recognisable, the entries are not particularly easy to read, with several words abbreviated with a point and a raised final letter (which may or may not be the final letter of the word):

Figure 1.5: Excerpts from eighteenth-century settlement examinations.

a. Conveyance Order, Midgley, West Yorkshire, 1718. (West Yorkshire Archive Service, ref: MISC 5/96a/23)

b. Settlement Examination, Melbury Osmond, Dorset, 1752. (Dorset History Centre, ref: PE/MBO: OV 4/2/2)

Final Selections: Excerpts from Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Records

EXERCISE 1.7

The letter forms in the first excerpt in the final selection of eighteenth and nineteenth-century records are mostly recognisably modern, apart from the long-form ‘s’, reverse ‘e’, and a new letter form, the right-angle ‘c’.

The census enumerator’s description (excerpt b) from a century later, however, is much more difficult to read: note that the ‘a’ is open-top, and identical to ‘u’, and that the ‘v’ is similar to the ‘r’. The original will (excerpt d) introduces the three-form superior ‘r’.

Spelling in the final probate inventory (excerpt f) is highly phonetic but should not cause problems; note, in particular, a phrase commonly used in inventories, ‘wearing apparel and money in purse’.

Figure 1.6: Excerpts from eighteenth and nineteenth-century records.

a. Inquisition, Ugley, Essex, 1762. (Norfolk and Home Circuits Assizes Indictment File, The National Archives, ref: ASSI 94/959)

b. Census Enumerator’s Description, Enumeration District 21, Kingston Upon Thames, Surrey, 1881 Census. (The National Archives, ref: RG 11/836/79)

c. Baptisms, Parish Register, Bream, Gloucestershire, 1785. (Gloucestershire Archives, ref: P57/IN/1/1)