Can it tell secretary from italic within one document?

Yes, and it can report the change. Names, headings, Latin tags and signatures are commonly italic inside a secretary letter, and that contrast can be marked in the output rather than left for an editor to guess at.

How is yᵉ handled — is it the or ye?

It is recognised as the old thorn abbreviation rather than the letter y, and you choose the output: keep the superscript form, expand it to the, or expand it with the added letters marked. The same choice covers yᵗ, yᵘ and yʳ.

Will Roman numerals in accounts come out correctly?

They are read as numerals rather than letters, including the final j in xiij and the score notation with a superscript xx, and li, s, d and ob. are kept. Sums are not silently corrected: if a total does not add up, that is a fact about the account.

What happens to a mark instead of a signature?

A cross, an initial or a device drawn between the words the mark of is recorded as a mark and attributed to the named party rather than turned into letters. Seals and the position of witnesses at the foot can be noted in the same way.

Does dating by regnal year cause trouble?

The regnal year is transcribed as written — anno regni … Jacobi vicesimo primo — beside the year of grace where both are given. Nothing is converted unless you ask, because conversion depends on the reign and on the 25 March year-start.

English · c. 1500–1650

Read Tudor and Jacobean paperwork line by line

Between the Reformation and the Civil War an English clerk could write two alphabets in one sentence: a spiky secretary hand for the body of a letter and a rounded italic for the name at the end. Add superscript contractions, a long ſ that reads as f, and sums in Roman numerals with li, s and d, and a page a contemporary took in at a glance stops most modern eyes. Evidano works through the letters, bonds, accounts and registers of this period and shows what it expanded and where it hesitated.

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Sample pages

A closely written page of Henrician secretary hand, many lines ending in a long horizontal stroke, signed at the foot — Sample 1. A letter of 28 February 1539 from George Rolle of Stevenstone, Devon, to Honor Plantagenet, Viscountess Lisle, about a disputed estate in East Haggington. A fast, heavily abbreviated secretary hand, with long horizontal fillers running out to the right margin and the signature George Rolle at the foot.

Twenty-four lines of a clear sloped italic hand in Latin, with enlarged looped capitals and a royal signature at the foot — Sample 2. An autograph letter of Katherine Parr, queen of England, written from Hanworth on 20 September and signed Katherina Regina; London, British Library, Cotton MS Vespasian F III, f. 37. The Latin text concerns Francis Mallet’s translation of Erasmus, and the hand is the italic the Tudor court learned as a second script: separate letters, a straight-backed d, looped capitals.

Nine entries of an account, each with a heading on the left and a group of Roman numerals to the right, in a very cursive hand — Sample 3. Nine entries from the accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber to Queen Mary I, 1555, reproduced as plate XXX of Andrew Wright’s Court-hand Restored (1879). Payments to mariners, footmen and the officers of the Jewel House, each with its sum in minuscule Roman numerals followed by li, s, d and ob.; the capitals begin with a looped stroke that cuts across the line above.

A single sheet of vellum written in a fluent secretary hand, creased where it was folded, with a large drawn mark at the lower right — Sample 4. A bond of October 1623 binding Margaret Bonger to William Trigge in five pounds six shillings and eightpence. The obligation is in Latin down to the date by regnal year — anno regni domini nostri Jacobi — and the condition beneath it is in English; at the foot sit the seal, the mark Margarett Bonger drew between her written names, the mark of one witness and the signature of another.

A mould-spotted page of a parish register with burial entries in a seventeenth-century hand, several words obscured by dark blotches — Sample 5. Burials of November and December 1643 in the parish register of South Harting, Sussex, including the entry There wer three Souldiers buryed Novemb 24 : 1643. A plain seventeenth-century hand, read from microfilm, with damp staining across the right-hand third and mould spots sitting squarely on names and dates.

Secretary, italic and the hands in between

The English secretary hand is the ordinary writing of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, taught from copybooks such as Beauchesne and Baildon’s of 1570 and used for everything from a household letter to a Star Chamber deposition. Its signature letters are a two-stroke e like a reversed 3, a c barely distinguishable from that e, a looped h whose tail swings below the line, a horned w, a p with its bowl set to the left of a straight descender, and at least three shapes of r. Final letters trail off in flourishes that mean nothing at all. The italic hand, learned from Italian models and taught to gentlewomen and to grammar-school boys, sits beside it: upright, separate letters, single-compartment a, a straight-backed d. From about 1570 the two are used together — italic for names, headings and Latin, secretary for the rest — and by 1630 the mixed hand is the norm.

Spelling is not yet fixed, so a clerk doubles consonants almost at will — gett, ffrom, hadd — and writes capital F as ff. Abbreviation, by contrast, is systematic. A superscript letter after y stands for a whole word: yᵉ for the, yᵗ for that, yᵘ for you, yʳ for your, each a survival of thorn rather than a real y. A bar over a vowel supplies a missing m or n; per, par and pro keep the medieval crossed and curled p; a terminal flourish on s or n may be a suspension or may be nothing; and the Latin formulae of a bond are contracted so hard that only the shape of the phrase identifies them. Christian names arrive as Willm, Jno, Rich. and Eliz., and parties who could not write drew a cross between the words the mark of.

Layout follows the genre. A letter opens with a wide superscription — Right honourable and my singular good lady — dates itself at the foot, and carries an address and often a docket in another hand on the outside. A bond gives the obligation in Latin and the condition in English, with a seal and the marks of witnesses at the bottom. Accounts run in a narrow column of Roman numerals with li, s, d and ob. for the halfpenny. Parish registers, ordered in 1538 and copied onto parchment from 1598, set out christenings, weddings and burials year by year, with regnal dating beside the year of grace.

Why ordinary OCR struggles here

Two scripts sharing one line

A secretary e and an italic e are drawn differently, and a document that switches between them mid-sentence — for a manor, a legal term or a signature — defeats a recogniser trained on one shape per letter. The switch is meaningful: what stands in italic is usually what the writer wanted picked out.

Superscripts that stand for words

yᵉ, yᵗ, yʳ, wᵗʰ and wᶜʰ are the ordinary shorthand of the period, and the raised letter is often no bigger than a speck. Read as literal y and w they produce nonsense; expanded silently they hide the fact that the writer contracted at all.

Money, dates and Roman numerals

Sums use minuscule Roman numerals with the last i drawn as j, so xiij is thirteen, and eighty is iiij with a superscript xx. Years may be regnal, and the legal year began on 25 March, so February 1602 in a register is 1603 to us. None of this survives a reading that treats figures as letters.

Damage, damp and rebinding

Register pages are damp-stained and mould-spotted, letters were folded, sealed and torn open, and much of this material is now read from microfilm rather than parchment. Ink shows through from the other side, and a whole name can sit under a blot no processing will lift.

Who works with this material

Family historians working before 1700

Christenings, weddings and burials, wills and inventories are where an English pedigree is built or broken. What is wanted is the name exactly as the clerk spelled it, the date as it stands, and a clear mark where damp has taken a word away.

Editors of early modern correspondence

Letter projects need the superscription, the date clause and the address panel kept apart from the body, and a consistent policy on expansions. Endorsements added by a secretary or a later archivist belong in the record too, since they show how the letter was filed.

Local record societies and archive volunteers

Churchwardens’ accounts, manor court rolls and quarter sessions files are transcribed by volunteers with uneven experience of the period. A first pass through the formulae and the figures leaves the group free to argue about the difficult names instead of retyping boilerplate.

Literary and theatre scholars

Play manuscripts, commonplace books and verse miscellanies of this period survive in mixed hands, often several in one volume. Distinguishing the hands, keeping deletions and interlineations, and marking where a stage direction is squeezed into the margin all matter more than a smooth reading text.

Getting the best transcription

Step 1

Say what to do with the superscripts

Decide whether yᵉ, yᵗ and wᶜʰ should stand as written, be expanded to the, that and which, or be expanded with the supplied letters bracketed. State the same rule for the crossed p and the bar that supplies m or n.

Step 2

Ask for money and dates to be left as they stand

Ask for Roman numerals in the form the clerk wrote them, with li, s, d and ob. kept rather than converted. If you also want a decimal equivalent, ask for it in a separate field so the reading and the arithmetic can be checked apart.

Step 3

Describe the shape of the document

Say whether this is a folded letter with an address panel, a bond with a Latin obligation and an English condition, or a ruled account, and where the endorsements sit. Naming the parts stops a docket written sideways from landing in the middle of the text.

Step 4

Test on a page you can already read

Start with a document you have transcribed yourself or one printed in a record society volume, compare it word for word, and tune the instructions until names, marks and figures come back the way your project records them.

Frequently asked questions

Can it tell secretary from italic within one document?: Yes, and it can report the change. Names, headings, Latin tags and signatures are commonly italic inside a secretary letter, and that contrast can be marked in the output rather than left for an editor to guess at.
How is yᵉ handled — is it the or ye?: It is recognised as the old thorn abbreviation rather than the letter y, and you choose the output: keep the superscript form, expand it to the, or expand it with the added letters marked. The same choice covers yᵗ, yᵘ and yʳ.
Will Roman numerals in accounts come out correctly?: They are read as numerals rather than letters, including the final j in xiij and the score notation with a superscript xx, and li, s, d and ob. are kept. Sums are not silently corrected: if a total does not add up, that is a fact about the account.
What happens to a mark instead of a signature?: A cross, an initial or a device drawn between the words the mark of is recorded as a mark and attributed to the named party rather than turned into letters. Seals and the position of witnesses at the foot can be noted in the same way.
Does dating by regnal year cause trouble?: The regnal year is transcribed as written — anno regni … Jacobi vicesimo primo — beside the year of grace where both are given. Nothing is converted unless you ask, because conversion depends on the reign and on the 25 March year-start.

Related scripts and pages

Later Middle English Manuscripts, c. 1250–1500The Anglicana and secretary book hands from which this writing descends.Round Hand and Georgian Administrative Records, c. 1650–1800What replaced the secretary hand in wills, registers and ledgers.French Renaissance Secretary and Humanistic HandsThe parallel mixture of cursive and italic across the Channel.All English hands and document typesEvery English domain from Insular minuscule to app screenshots.Image to TextSearch all supported languages, scripts and document types.

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Read Tudor and Jacobean paperwork line by line

Sample pages

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Secretary, italic and the hands in between

Why ordinary OCR struggles here

Two scripts sharing one line

Superscripts that stand for words

Money, dates and Roman numerals

Damage, damp and rebinding

Who works with this material

Family historians working before 1700

Editors of early modern correspondence

Local record societies and archive volunteers

Literary and theatre scholars

Getting the best transcription

Say what to do with the superscripts

Ask for money and dates to be left as they stand

Describe the shape of the document

Test on a page you can already read

Further reading on this hand

Frequently asked questions

Related scripts and pages

Transcribe your Tudor and Jacobean documents

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