Script Type : minuscule
Script Family : Gothic bastarda
Date : 15th century
Location : England
Function : Document hand or charter hand
Distinctive letters : This 15th century chancery hand is similar to the others in this example set, even though the language being written is French. It represents the very neat but not particularly extravagant bastarda script used for documents of relatively simple type. Ascenders of letters like b and l are curled at the top. The tall version of s and f both have a sort of broken backed appearance. There are two versions of r and two of s, and while v is sometimes identical to u, in other places it is different, particularly at the beginnings of words.
There are no examples of j, k or q, but z makes an appearance, being a more common letter in medieval French. The letter w only appears as a capital in an English place name so is not included.
There are few calligraphic flourishes apart from some rather randomly applied capital letters, but numerous abbreviations. Pass the cursor along the lines of text to pick up some words. Because this is from one end of a long narrow document, the text is not continuous. To look at it in more detail, go on to the paleography exercises.
The image of the document displayed here has been upgraded from a scan of an old photocopy to a colour image derived from a National Archives download.
Script Index Paleography exercises using Flash
These require at least the Flash 5 plugin
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