For a number of years now I have had in my possession photographs of two C17 military documents. Both were issued to John Hutchinson (of Memoirs fame) whilst governor of Nottingham, and the last time I saw the originals they were residing in what appeared to be an old shoe box, along with several other interesting titbits, in a back room of the Nottingham "Castle" Museum. [1]
The first of the two is a commission issued by Ferdinando Fairfax appointing Hutchinson "...Collonell of a Regimt of ffoote cosistinge of one thousand twoe hundred...". It is the better known document, having been reprinted in a number of places, for instance Ashley (1974), p75, and the wording is bound to be familiar to anyone who's had even a nodding acquaintance with a Roundhead Association commission; certainly it is the prettier of the two pieces. But for my money it is the second document which is the more interesting. This one, issued by Essex in 1644, authorises (encourages even) Hutchinson "...from Time to Time to use and exercize the discipline of Marshall Lawe for the well ordering and governing ..." of Nottingham.
The original motive behind deciphering Hutchinson's mail was calligraphic; I wanted an analysis of the style of lettering for other purposes. However, as the analysis proceeded a number of interesting aspects emerged which, it seemed to me, would be useful to other people trying to make sense of C17 handwritten pieces, quite apart from any intrinsic interest there may be in this aspect of C17 life.
Both pieces are written in a somewhat degenerate form of a style generally called Secretary hand, although I have also seen it referred to as Cleric hand. Martin Billingsley, in The Pens Excellencie (1618), describes it as "...the onely hand of England for dispatching of all manner of business" being speedier to write than the Chancery hands (italic) also in vogue (Fairbank, 1977: 20). Billingsley (op cit) gives one exemplar of the hand, and another may be found in a work by Jean de Beauchesne and John Baildon (1570), called A Booke Containing Divers Sortes of Hands lodged in the British Museum, The de Beauchesne and Baildon exemplar is also reprinted in Fairbank (1977) as plate 51. It is important to note that although these exemplars were presented as the form of an alphabet (the authors often dismissing contemptuously the forms given by others), in practice there were infinitely many variations of any given style current at the same time; each scribe modifying the basic letter forms to suit his or her own purposes and taste.
Fig 1 An Analysis of the alphabet used in the Hutchinson Documents (Large 95K)
Fig 1 An Analysis of the alphabet used in the Hutchinson Documents (Very Large 147K)
A close inspection of the letter forms in the Hutchinson documents reveals that they were written with a flexible pointed pen, probably a quill. [2] However the pointed pen was not invariably the tool used for writing in the C17, nor for producing Secretary hand. Thomson (1978) reprints an example of Secretary from Milan in 1461, which is clearly written with a broad edged pen (following much the same form as our so-called Italic pens of today), and there is evidence that such pens were in use in late C16 and early C17 Britain (see for example Wolpe, 1980). However, as Fairbank (op Cit) points out, with the development of the use of engraved copper plates to reproduce exemplars from 1574 onwards, in time:
- "...the engraver's needle, scoring the surface of the polished plate, tended to give to the pupil the letter—forms proper to the burin rather than to the quill, and to lead the writing masters to the use of a needle-pointed flexible pen." (p20)
Hence Copperplate writing. This leads to the supposition that the pointed pen was much in use during the C17; the thicks and thins of the letters being formed through variation in the pressure applied during writing.
Many of the letters Used in the two documents are of the same form used nowadays (for instance 
& 
), but there are some interesting variations — the kind that give you that slippery feeling where you know that you're reading English because it looks like English, even though it doesn't appear to make sense. Of particular note is the form of the letter 'c' used in both pieces; it has the singular property of looking for all the world like a modern letter 'i'. Consider also the form of the 'r', which gives the general impression of being two letters, and the form of 's' used at the end of words in the Fairfax sample, which looks like a modern 'b'. (Note also the variant used in the Essex document.) My favourite letter in these pieces is the 'e' which to modern eyes is constructed upside-down, 
. Much of the time it escapes scrutiny in this form 
, but occasionally departs substantially from what we consider to be a reasonable letter 'e', 
. Since I have given a (crude) rendering of the most frequent forms of the various letters found in the two pieces, I will move on to more interesting aspects of the writing.
Throughout both pieces the word 'you' is written with an elevated 'u' ('w' in Essex's case - presumably he was conscious of writing to a Midlander !) Coupled with the full point which invariably appears with it, this gives the impression of an abbreviation, 
. Since the same form appears in both cases it is unlikely to be simply a stylistic idiosyncracy of one scribe, hence presumably it has a specific function, but one I can't identify. The same sort of thing is encountered in the word 'your', which is written 
. The finial is presumably a representation of 'r' since it is also found in the words 'officers' and 'souldyers' in the Fairfax document: 
& 
respectively. Note, however, that these latter two words are rendered 
& 
in the Essex piece, so the forms aren't immutable. It is noteworthy also that both documents make use of the ligature 'ff' to denote the capital 'F', although given Fairfax's use of 'F' in his signature, this also is not invariant.
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