Elizabethan handwriting – the ‘decoding’ thereof’ – isn’t something I’m exactly expert at. But that does mean my ‘beginner’s guide’ is written from experience as a beginner, so hopefully useful to others.

1500s and 1600s handwriting

Delve far enough back into archive records and you will hit the shock of ‘I can’t read a word of that!’.

For the handwriting we use today (not that we DO write much by hand today) is very different from that used in the times of the Tudors and early Stuarts (and their predecessors).

What makes it even harder is that some records, even that ‘late’ are written in what I call ‘legal Latin’. The Latin used by clerks and by clerics that bears only passing relation to classical Latin – at least when you try to run a phrase through a translator.

Until this summer, I hadn’t attempted to get to grips with Elizabethan handwriting (note: I’m using ‘Elizabethan’ as ‘Elizabethan and Jacobean’ would get clunky, but this does cover Jacobean handwriting as well). 

But then I copied chunks of records from that era at Carlisle Archives, which rather forced the issue!

Elizabethan handwriting – Where to start

A few weeks teaching myself Elizabethen handwriting hardly makes me an expert. I started with some examples of alphabets I found online. But there are flaws to that.

When you are looking at a word in a document, it’s pain to have to look through an A-Z of examples for something similar. (Old-style to modern is a better way to list them). And single letters as examples don’t always help whole words, where the writer runs letters together.

Oh, and of course, handwriting was as individual then as now. 

lll and all that

The worst ‘running together’ issue is letters like ‘u’, ’n’ and ‘m’. Which can look like a chunk of ‘uuuu’s. That’s hard to illustrate in type. But an example is that in a sans serif font, you can’t start a headline with a work beginning ‘ill’ (eg ‘illegal) as it comes out as ‘lll’ (‘lllegal’).

I found it easier to start with a rent roll. A literal roll of parchment, with line after line of names. There were going to be lots of Johns, Thomases, Williams, Roberts. And lots of Cumbrian surnames: Musgrave, Lowther, Wilson, Gibson, Robinson, Hutton, Armstrong…

Cracking those gave me something to compare other words to. 

Secret code meets Magic Eye

If you like code word puzzles, you know to look out for common endings: 2 7 24 repeated may well be either ‘ing’ or ‘ion’. If a lot of words end in 17, that could be s. Etc.

In Elizabeth handwriting (as today’s), words like ‘the,’ ‘and,’ ‘his’ are going to crop up a lot. And when you’ve cracked those, they help you with others. Like, er, ‘others’.

And I’ve found sometimes, coming back to a line I couldn’t make out before, there is that Magic Eye moment – remember those? The moment when you are staring at a colourful pattern of fish and can suddenly see the hidden ‘3D’ image of a whale.

Here’s a list of names I use as a starting point: