Spanish · c. 1500–1650
Read the chained hand of Spanish notaries and courts
In procesal the pen almost never leaves the paper: c, e, r, s and t shrink to the same short stroke, capitals become loops the height of three lines, and a clause can run for a whole line without one visible break between words. Evidano works through protocol books, probanzas, tithe accounts and wills in this hand, holds the marginal headings and correction clauses apart from the text, and marks the readings it is unsure of instead of inventing a plausible name.
Sample pages
Real pages from public collections, shown beside their transcriptions. Pages whose transcription is still being checked are marked.
Real Biblioteca del Monasterio de El Escorial, 1565–1575 · Source · CC0 1.0 · Photograph by Laci3, Wikimedia Commons, CC0
Transcription
The passage shown in the photograph, given in the modernised text of the 1927 Espasa-Calpe edition on Spanish Wikisource (chapter XIX of the Life). That edition adds accents and punctuation and regularises the saint’s spelling, where the autograph writes without accents and abbreviates freely; an obvious typographical slip in the digitised text (maestró) has been corrected. The close-up cuts the first and last words of most lines, so the printed text runs slightly beyond both edges of the image, and it stops where the last legible line does.
Esto fué lo que a mí me destruyó; y para esto y para todo hay gran necesidad de maestro, y trato con personas espirituales. Bien creo, que alma que llega Dios este estado, si muy del todo no deja á su Majestad, que no la dejará de favorecer ni la dejará perder; mas cuando, como he dicho, cayere, mire, mire por amor del Señor, no la engañe en que deje la oracion, como hacia á mí con humildad falsa, como ya lo he dicho y muchas veces lo querría decir. Fie de la bondad de Dios, que es mayor que todos los males que podemos hacer, y no se acuerda de nuestra ingratitud, cuando nosotros, conociéndonos, queremos tornar a su amistad, ni de las mercedes que nos ha hecho para castigarnos por ellas; antes ayudan á perdonarnos mas presto.
Transcription from Santa Teresa de Jesús, Su vida, chapter XIX (Espasa-Calpe, Madrid, 1927), via Wikisource (Spanish) (Public domain).
Palacio de los Olvidados, Granada, Sixteenth century · Source · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Photograph by Dorieo, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
Transcription being verified
The sheet is exhibited without a published transcription; its wording follows the standard petition formulae used before the tribunal’s receptor and fiscal.
What the model is told to watch for: Expect Procesal and Procesal encadenada with long chains of continuously connected writing, compressed internal spacing, and large loops extending above or below the line. Determine boundaries from syntax and repeated formulae when several words appear graphically fused, and distinguish c, e, r, s, t, and looped capitals from joining strokes. Watch for dense legal abbreviations, superscript endings, nasal marks, numerals embedded in flourishes, and rúbricas that may resemble text.
Transcription being verified
An unpublished notarial instrument; the printed clauses can be matched against other surviving copies of the same form, but the handwritten insertions exist only here.
What the model is told to watch for: Expect Procesal and Procesal encadenada with long chains of continuously connected writing, compressed internal spacing, and large loops extending above or below the line. Determine boundaries from syntax and repeated formulae when several words appear graphically fused, and distinguish c, e, r, s, t, and looped capitals from joining strokes. Watch for dense legal abbreviations, superscript endings, nasal marks, numerals embedded in flourishes, and rúbricas that may resemble text.
Transcription being verified
Parish tithe accounts of this kind are rarely edited; the totals at the foot of the page are the usual way of checking a transcription of the columns.
What the model is told to watch for: Expect Procesal and Procesal encadenada with long chains of continuously connected writing, compressed internal spacing, and large loops extending above or below the line. Determine boundaries from syntax and repeated formulae when several words appear graphically fused, and distinguish c, e, r, s, t, and looped capitals from joining strokes. Watch for dense legal abbreviations, superscript endings, nasal marks, numerals embedded in flourishes, and rúbricas that may resemble text.
Transcription being verified
One instrument in a notarial protocol book; no edition exists, and the folio number 446 in the upper corner is the only reference by which it can be cited.
What the model is told to watch for: Expect Procesal and Procesal encadenada with long chains of continuously connected writing, compressed internal spacing, and large loops extending above or below the line. Determine boundaries from syntax and repeated formulae when several words appear graphically fused, and distinguish c, e, r, s, t, and looped capitals from joining strokes. Watch for dense legal abbreviations, superscript endings, nasal marks, numerals embedded in flourishes, and rúbricas that may resemble text.
Procesal, and why it became unreadable
Procesal grows out of cortesana around 1500 and dominates Spanish paperwork for a century and a half: notarial protocols, court files, Inquisition processes, town council books, tithe and parish registers. Scribes were paid by the sheet, so writing spread out; joins lengthened, letters flattened, and by the middle of the sixteenth century the extreme variety known as procesal encadenada could carry a line of text as one continuous chain. Royal legislation repeatedly ordered scriveners to put a set number of words in every line and to write clearly, which is the best evidence of how bad it had become. The hand fades after about 1650, as the round Italian-influenced letters spread through the offices, but it never disappears from the formularies.
What survives of the alphabet is mostly rhythm. Minim-like strokes stand for c, e, i, n, r, s, t and u alike, and only their joins and their height distinguish them; b, l, h and d carry tall looped ascenders that cross the line above, while g, j, q and the long ſ throw loops into the line below. Capitals are drawn as flourishes, so a word may begin with a shape three lines tall. Because word division disappears, the reader works from the formulae: en el nombre de la santísima Trinidad, sepan quantos esta carta vieren, ante mí el escrivano, doy fe. Contractions are those of legal Castilian — dho, dha, dhos for dicho and its forms, Vmd for vuestra merced, ss. for su señoría, escriv.º, test.º, mrs, rs for reales — and are usually written above the line with a curl.
The page is as formulaic as the sentence. A protocol book is foliated and carries a short heading in the margin for each instrument — Poder, Testamento, Venta, Obligación, Censo — with the notary’s rúbrica after every entry and, at the end of each act, the clause that validates crossings-out and interlineations: va enmendado, entre renglones, vala. Registers of tithes, taxes and parishioners are ruled into columns, with the payer on the left and quantities on the right, Roman numerals mixed with abbreviations for fanegas, celemines and reales, and sums added at the foot. Printed forms with blank spaces come into use for powers of attorney and other routine instruments, so one sheet can hold Gothic type and the loosest cursive at once.
Why ordinary OCR struggles here
A line with no gaps in it
When the pen never lifts, there is nothing for a recogniser to segment on. Word boundaries have to be inferred from formulae and grammar, which is exactly what character-level OCR cannot do; the output becomes an unbroken string of plausible letters that no one can search or check.
Formulae that carry no information
Nine tenths of a notarial act is boilerplate, and a model that has learned the boilerplate can reel it off. The names, places, dates and sums are the tenth that matters, and they are the parts a fluent guess is most likely to smooth over without any sign that something is wrong.
Quantities hidden in flourishes
Accounts mix Roman numerals, the U that marks thousands, and one-letter abbreviations for fanegas, celemines, reales and maravedís, all written into the same loops as the words. In a tazmía or a padrón the numbers are the record, so a misread column is not a typographical slip but a false result.
Everything that is not the main text
Marginal headings, interlineations, crossings-out with their validating clause, later archival foliation, and ink showing through thin paper from the other side all compete with the writing. A transcription that silently merges them loses the notary’s own record of what was corrected and when.
Who works with this material
Genealogists in notarial archives
Wills, dowries and powers of attorney name whole families, their neighbours and the priest who witnessed the act. What a researcher needs is every name caught in the spelling the notary used, with the folio and the date attached, so that one household can be followed through a run of protocol books.
Local and economic historians
Tithe accounts, padrones and repartimientos hold the harvests, the households and the tax burden of a village year by year. Only a transcription that keeps the columns intact turns them into a series that can be added up and compared.
Historians of law and of the Inquisition
Trial records and probanzas are built of questions, depositions and marginal rulings. Reading them means knowing who is speaking in each block, so the layout has to survive the transcription as clearly as the words do.
Teachers of early modern palaeography
Procesal is where most students give up. A transcription set beside a good photograph lets a class work out the formulae first, then the letters, and see how one scribe’s loops differ from another’s across a single protocol book.
Getting the best transcription
Give the document class and its formulae
Say that the page is a will, a power, a tithe account or a deposition, and list any local usages you know. The formulae are the only reliable frame for cutting the chain into words, so a model told what to expect gets the boundaries right far more often.
Ask for the margins and the correction clause separately
Marginal headings, interlineations, deletions and the closing va enmendado … vala should come back as their own labelled blocks. That keeps the notary’s corrections visible and stops a heading from being read as the first words of the act.
Set a rule for numbers before anything else
Ask for quantities exactly as written, Roman numerals and the abbreviations for fanegas, celemines and reales included, with a modern figure supplied beside them. Then check any column against the total, which the scribe himself has already computed for you.
Build a name list and feed it back
Transcribe two or three folios, collect the surnames, place names and the notary’s own signature forms, and pass that list back as context for the rest of the book. Recurring names are the fastest way to steady a hand that has almost no letter shapes left.
Further reading on this hand
The palaeography guides the in-app selector points to for this domain, if you want to check a transcription against the standard references.
- Spanish Handwriting History
This Brigham Young University guide describes Procesal as a Spanish documentary hand used from the late medieval into the early modern period. It distinguishes Procesal from Cortesana and notes the extreme connectedness associated with its encadenada form. The broader site provides alphabet charts and reading tools for comparing variant letters and recurrent record vocabulary. This material is especially useful for legal documents whose word boundaries are obscured by continuous chains of pen strokes.
Frequently asked questions
- What exactly is procesal encadenada?
- It is the extreme form of procesal in which the joins between letters become as long as the letters themselves, so a whole line is written as a single unbroken chain. Words are not separated at all, and the reader recovers them from the legal formula rather than from anything visible on the paper.
- Can words that were never separated be split?
- Yes, and that is most of the work. Division follows the formulae and the grammar of notarial Castilian, and the transcription can mark where a boundary is an editor’s judgement. If you prefer, the text can be returned exactly as written, with no spaces added.
- What happens with the printed forms that have handwritten gaps?
- The printed clauses and the handwritten insertions are transcribed as separate layers and then shown in reading order, so it is clear which words came from the press and which the notary added. That distinction matters, because only the insertions are specific to the act.
- Are the legal abbreviations expanded?
- By default dho, dha, Vmd, escriv.º, mrs and the rest are expanded and the supplied letters are marked, which makes the text searchable. For a diplomatic edition ask for them to stand as written; either rule is applied consistently across the whole run.
- How do I keep names consistent across a whole protocol book?
- Fix the spellings on the first folios, then supply that list with each batch. Names are the readings most often varied by a page or two of different ink, and giving the model the forms already agreed keeps one person from becoming three in the index.
Related scripts and pages
Transcribe your procesal protocols and court papers
Upload a protocol book, a probanza or a tithe register, choose Procesal and Procesal Encadenada Records, and settle the names and the numbers on the first folios.