… Although others may find it interesting too.
NK commented on the look of the Latin addition to one of the petitions I posted earlier. Well, this is an image from what are known as the Chester Crown Books, which list the people who were brought before the Cheshire Great Sessions (prisoners from the gaol, those bound over to appear, presented by juries, etc). This will be early 17th century (I could check the date but want to get this posted), and it’s from the section listing prisoners being tried for felony. The list would have been drawn up at the beginning of the session of the court, and then as they went through the session the notes in the left-hand margins were added to record the prisoners’ fates.*
If you look again at the English language documents I linked in the earlier post you’ll see that the hand being used here is quite different - and I’d think of it, I suppose, as more ‘medieval’. (The entries in the Crown Books aren’t all entirely in Latin, but they do tend to use this hand even when writing in English.)
…………
* If you look next to the first prisoner’s entry you can see ‘Judm’ (I’ve forgotten the exact Latin, but it means ‘judgement’) and a strange looking-symbol starting with a squiqqle (which is actually - trust me - ‘Sur’). What those mean is that the prisoner was sentenced to death (squiggly-’Sur’ is a contracted form of ‘Suspendatur’: ‘to be hanged’).
6 comments on “This is specially for the New Kid”
Thanks! That’s very cool. Yes, it does look a lot more “medieval” (a lot of the stuff I look at is very late 15th c, but I don’t notice a vast difference between those hands and the late 14th c. hands). The Middle English of my petitions (to Chancery) is in the same kind of hand, too. It makes sense that scribes in different contexts would follow different practices, but it’s still interesting. (I want to call this English secretary hand, but I may have that wrong - my paleographic training has been rather unsystematic…)
Mine too, which is why I haven’t tried to name it either! (I can never remember the names for them: secretary hand, court hand, whatever.) Where you find it, not only is it Latin but it’s often - not always - the work of the professionally-trained clerks (and judges) as opposed to the ‘amateur’ magistrates.
It’s reminiscent of some of the sixteenth century hands I’ve seen. I agree with you that it is much more in the line of the professional clerks. Many of the scholars I study were humanists trained at Cambridge, some also abroad at Padua, etc.
I’m going to bring my student to this site — we’re starting a unit about the history of crime and I think it would be great for them to see some of the pre-18th century sources for this topic.
Talking of paleographic training, do you know about Dave Postles’ online course in EM paleography here:
http://paleo.anglo-norman.org/empfram.html
?
Ooh, yes, and there’s a separate one for medieval palaeography too: http://paleo.anglo-norman.org/medfram.html …
Ancarett, I will be trying to put up some more pictures this week. (And there will be further transcripts and stuff like that.) I think it’s useful for them to see the ‘real thing’, including the problems of decipherment and different types of handwriting. And I might include some of the pictures of damaged and only partially legible documents that are lurking in my collection, because that’s part of the real thing too. (My only worry is the risk of putting them off this sort of research in the future… Ah well.)