 |
| This is the beginning of the description of the elephant. the compressed text can be quite difficult to read and there are many abbreviations. There are punctuation marks in the form of simple dots, sometimes attached to the foot of the previous letter. New sentences begin with a capital letter and where words carry from one line to another they are hyphenated. |
| English Bestiary, 13th century (British Library, Harley 3244, f.39). All images by permission of the British Library. These images are made available by the British Library under a Creative Commons licence. |
|
| overview | image | text | alphabet | abbreviations | exercises | transcript | translation | |
| Click on each of the above to walk your way through the text. The transcript will appear in a separate window so that you can use it for reference at any time. These exercises are designed to guide you through the text, not test you, so you can cheat as much as you like. |
 |
 Script sample for this example |
|
Index
of Exercises |
|
Index
of Scripts |
|
If you are looking at this page without frames, there is more information about medieval writing to be found by going to the home page (framed) or the site map (no frames). |
 |
