can you read old handwriting and could you understand Old English if you only had a time machine and could go back and hear it well no need for a time machine when you have history calling because in this video we're going to answer those questions by working our way backwards from the 19th to the 11th centuries using documents including a request for a Christmas meal at a workhouse Jan Austin's will the records of a witchcraft accusation A desperate letter to her sister written by the future El
izabeth I arrangements for the funeral of a queen a sweet little note from Lady Margaret Boer to her son Henry viith and many more there truly is something for everyone [Music] here paleography is the study of old handwriting Andor the manuscripts that that handwriting is written on and it's one of the core skills of most historians unless perhaps they are studying very modern history you'll generally be good at paleography for a particular time period the one which you study so in my case my st
rength is in the handwriting of the mid 17th century onwards as I never really looked at anything earlier than that in my University or post doctoral studies this video will demonstrate how differently letters were constructed the further back in time we go and how drastically spelling grammar and word use has changed as we move from Modern English anything from about 1700 up to today to early modern English which covers roughly 1500 to 1700 then Middle English about 1150 to 1500 and finally Old
English which was spoken before the Norman conquest of 1066 then died out within about a century of that date the ranges I've given here are from the Oxford English diction and are just guidelines not hard and fast rules you'll see all four versions of English in this video for the rest of our time today I'm going to show you a manuscript or sometimes just part of it to save time and while I give you a little bit of background on it you're free to pause the video to see if you can read it I'm t
hen going to tell you what it says though I won't always give a complete transcript as it won't always be needed and I'll point out some of the writing and spelling quirks that are particular to that era if appropriate I'm not going to keep telling you to pause the video here as I think that would get annoying this is all just for fun of course and is not a full-blown paleography course if you do want to learn more about this topic however I've left a link to a free course from Cambridge Univers
ity in the description box below let's start with a nice easy one from the end of the 19th century this letter was written by Wilbur Wright one of the famous Wright brothers who are generally credited with building and flying the world's first airplan in North Carolina in 1903 he is writing to the Smithsonian institution 4 and a half years before that event on the 30th of May 1899 discussing his belief in the ability of humans to invent powered flight his handwriting is quite neat he uses cursiv
e script meaning joined up writing and the language he employs is a little more formal than we might hear today but still readily understood the grammar matches our own with the possible exception of the semicolon after dear S at the beginning as I think we would be more likely to use a comma so let's take the first three sentences and see how you did with it Wilbur writes dear S I have been interested in the problem of mechanical and human flight ever since as a boy I constructed a number of ba
ts of various sizes after the style of Kes and Pen's machines my observations since have only convinced me more firmly that human flight is possible and practicable it is only a question of knowledge and skill just as in all acrobatic fats I hope you did okay with that letter but there were things even in just those few sentences which gave me trouble the word problem has been badly written due to a slip of the pan on the r in it and you just have to try to work things like that out based on the
context of the sentence the word bats wasn't one I expected in this context either and the first letter doesn't really look like a lowercase b in those instances you need to look for the C letter appearing at the start of other words to help you figure out what it is and get you into the swing of reading a particular hand in this case we can see be's at the beginning of the words bean and boy as well so we learn from this that that is the way in which Wilber wrote that letter at the start of a
word finally the name penes was also tricky and in fact I got it from an online transcript because it's a proper neem and not something you would read in the normal course of life the way in which write constructs the an and the U is also so similar that you could be forgiven for thinking it was penan in these cases sometimes you have to just take your best guess and hope that your research into the writer or the event you're studying will reveal later on what that author was talking about okay
let's move on and jump back in time to it 1952 and to an English workhouse the dreaded place where only the most destitute would go in Victorian times and which was closer to a prison than anything else this letter is from a clerk of the workhouse to its Board of Governors and the author style of handwriting betrays I think the fact that he will have written a great many letters with a little patience it is legible but it's certainly not as clear as the previous example it is an italic script me
aning it Slants to one side and quite spiky this I find is typical of this era and it's simply the way he will have been taught to write at school as we go back in time you'll see handwriting change with each century and that is generally attributable to the different education Styles and standards of the day so what does our workhouse worker say well it's a letter from the 17th of December though the modern rule in Britain of putting the day first then the month was not yet in place here and it
reads my lords and gentlemen and then there's a small line like a hyphen rather than a comma so you're seeing some changes in grammar from what we're used to a subscription has been entered into in Mansfield to afford a treat of roast beef and Plum Pudding to the inmates of the workhouse on Christmas day next instead of the usual diet of the day according to article 107 of the general Consolidated order it was represented to the Guardians at their meeting yesterday that great inconvenience woul
d arise from the treat being given on the Christmas Day and I was instructed to request that you would be pleased to sanction it being given on a subsequent day Visa December 31st or January 1st I have the honor to be my lords and gentlemen your obedient servant there are a few additional things to note here which will become more common the further back we go first did you see the random inclusion of capital letters in places we wouldn't use them today in the 21st century they should only appea
r at the start of sentences and on proper NS but those rules weren't as well established at the time this gentleman will have learned to write and you'll see the use of capitals become more and more erratic as we move on second he does still use paragraph breaks again they become less frequent as we go back in time as the rules around writing which we are so used to today evaporate along with any standardized education system the clerk spelling is the as modern times but don't get comfortable wi
th that standardized spelling is a luxury we won't enjoy much longer as we head back towards the 18th century he also uses an ERS sand in place of the word and which I think we generally only see in typed documents now I was certainly never taught to use it in handwritten items though occasionally I might use a plus sign finally you'll note the abbreviations he uses at the end of the letter OB St not only were such abbreviations common place for people who wrote so many letters so too was this v
ery polite and formal way of ending such missives it's the Forerunner of our modern your sincerely or even best wishes Hardy I know it's short for obedient servant because that was such a common place phrase to end letters with in the past that once you've read enough of them you just get used to it to see how fast handwriting was changing we need only go back another 35 years to the last will in Testament of English author Jan Austin here we see that the italic hand writing ampersands and the r
andom use of capital letters are present but paragraph breaks are not there's something else I want to point out to you in Jan's handwriting though and that's the use of the long s you can see it only in words where two s's are next to each other in Cassandra which was her sister's name and possessed and it's just what sounds like it's the letter s but elongated so much that it looks like a lowercase f and in fact it's often misread as an F by people not used to older handwriting it's one of the
defining traits of early modern English hands and so as we move further back you'll see it used more and more and not always where there is a double s I'm not going to read out her whole will now but here's a transcript if you'd like to pause and look it over before we go back further if if you're enjoying this content please remember to give the video a thumbs up and subscribe to the Channel with the notification Bell on so that YouTube lets you know when I upload you can also find me on patre
on where I share perks including Early Access to adree videos and mini podcasts and on Amazon where I have a storefront which highlights some great history themed products both are linked in the description box below as is my Instagram account now let's jump back about a century to 1714 and to the death of Queen Anne last of the Stuart monarchs because no I'm not including the jacobites here we see a document outlining the arrangements for her funeral procession by showing the order in which peo
ple will process and how they will be arranged around the body which will be in the center as shown by the boxed in text in the middle of the page the Royal official who wrote this had gorgeous handwriting and they obviously received an excellent education during the later half of the 17th century so what do we need to think about when reading a document from this time period well first of all the rules of modern grammar are almost non-existent there are capital letters at the start of sentences
but they also appear anywhere else the author felt like using them and not always on the same word see the word purple in the center box which sometimes has a capital sometimes not commas exist and are used far more than in modern language because full stops and new sentences are so much less frequent again this is most notable in the center box which is one long run-on sentence reading the Royal body carried by 10 or 12 human of the Guard covered with a large pole of purple velvet and lined wi
th purple silk with a fine Holland sheet adorned with 10 large es scoin of the Imperial arms painted on satin under a canopy of purple velvet where we also seeing a lot more abbreviations here and elsewhere in the document than we would be used to today and more too than what we've seen in documents from later years in words like L which we spell with an E near the end this author instead uses an apostrophe with gets shortened on to a w with a th in superscript to indicate an abbreviation and in
other places Lord becomes LD and Archbishop loses some of its later letters with the p again put into superscript to indicate the shortening these are all classic signs of something written by someone who learned to write in the 18th century or earlier another Telltale sign is the phonetic spellings were starting to see creeping in such as in the words escuchan and satin but the author of the rules for an's burial may have been better educated than most and is starting to show early indications
of standardized spelling because it's still very close to Modern usage many others living at this time did not display this treit here is a piece of a letter written in 1722 for instance from Queen an's maternal Aunt lady Francis katley to her daughter Catherine O'Brien who was then living in Ireland as you can see from the transcript they are discussing the possible marriage of Catherine's son sir Edward O'Brien's second baronet to Miss Mary Hickman and Lady francis's spelling is very ftic in
places just a few of which are highlighted here back to the Royal funeral arrangements the big thing to note in this document is a tiny little word which appears several times it's Y and it means the but the thing to know is that when you see words like this the letter Y followed by one other letter often in superscript the Y is standing in for the letters t so ye becomes the ym becomes them YT means that and so on and so forth it doesn't mean that the word the or any of the others just mentione
d weren't used as well you can see the on this document too it's just that you had other options as well if you wanted to ail of them we can see handwriting Styles changing too look at the lower case RS sometimes they look like s's or Zeds sometimes they look like modern RS there aren't any long s's here but they were common place at this time so don't forget about them now let's go even earlier this document is from 1634 and provides details of an accusation of Witchcraft we now have minimal gr
ammar compared to nowadays although being a legal document this is better than a lot of what you might see it has paragraphs for instance whereas in private letters people would be less likely to bother either because they simply hadn't been taught to use paragraphs or to save paper the handwriting is still a little bit slanted but the way in which some of the letters are formed and the spelling are starting to become quite foreign to us on top of long s's we see double FS where we would never u
se them and the letter each looks more like a capital e as we've now moved into early modern English we're also starting to see some words which we don't use anymore or at least they don't have the same meaning nowadays if we look near the bottom of the document we get an example of this in a sentence which says and that she is in her conscience persuaded that Wilkinson and his wife no in prison are not witches nor many others who stand now condemned for witchcraft because he deily prays and rea
ds and seems to her to be a Godly Man as do diverse of the rest not in this case I think that although we read the word diverse at the end of this sentence what the writer is actually going for is divers and they've just put an e on the end because there was no standardized spelling at this point divers didn't mean people who swim underwater though but rather many or an Associated group so for example I have diverse YouTube followers who live in diverse parts of the world its meaning can overlap
with the word diverse but it's a little more complicated than that given how long this document is I'm not going to read out the whole thing but here is the full transcript with the spelling modernized if you'd like to have a look as you'll see I think if you were confronted with these people today you would still be able to communicate with them verbally very easily no doubt you'd find some of their sentence constructions a bit strange and vice versa but it wouldn't be a huge problem early mod
ern English isn't too far away from Modern at least when you hear it spoken from here on out things get pretty tough for a non-m medievalist like me but it does depend a bit on the quality of the writer's handwriting here's a snippet of a famous letter the future Elizabeth I wrote to her sister Mary while Mary had the 20-year-old locked up in March 1554 on suspicion of treason and was about to have her removed to the Tower of London Elizabeth was pleading her innocence and the letter is called t
he tide letter because the tide in the river Tams changed while she was writing it which meant that she couldn't be shipped off to the tower just yet though she only bought herself a few hours despite the great pressure she was under Elizabeth had been taught how to write in the most beautiful italic script and it really shows here in spite of the non-standardized spellings which include putting the letter e on the ends of words where we would no longer use it plus the long S's random capitals a
nd the abbreviations note the M missing from the word from which has been replaced by a little Dash over the O this is to me at least very easy to read it's the end of the letter and says I humbly C but only one word of answer from yourself your highness's most faithful subject that hath been from the beginning and will be to my end Elizabeth Elizabeth's mother was of course an Lyn and like her daughter she is fed for her great intelligence and education when it comes to handwriting though her d
aughter had her beit for an's penmanship which she will have learned in the early 1500s and perfected during her later childhood and early adulthood in modern-day Belgium and France wasn't a patch on her girls though I suppose we must say that Elizabeth's did deteriorate in later life she didn't always have that gorgeous italic script if you think that the problem was just that an's lettering got worse in later life too though then take a look at this letter written in very bad French when she w
as about 13 her French by the way would later become excellent but she was only learning it at this stage we can see that the way in which she formed her letters was tough for us to read even when she was a Youngster and she was evidently taught quite a different style to her daughter I'm not going to get into the details of this letter here as it isn't in English but if you see my video on when an was born I do go into it in depth there as this letter is really the key to understanding her age
despite the differences in how they were taught to write we still see a lot of the C treats in the two women's writing showing that there wasn't too much of a change from one generation to the next at this point to demonstrate what I mean let's now turn to a letter written by an in the late 1520s when she would have been in her late 20s and she recipient was possibly Thomas cranmer there is no grammar here unlike Elizabeth she doesn't even put capital letters on her own name or the names of othe
r people or places there are no full stops or paragraph breaks either and we have abbreviations long s's seemingly backwards RS and as you may have noticed in Elizabeth's Letter 2 many of the places where we would put the letter I have the letter Y instead dead like in this little phrase at the start which says gift of this the spelling is highly Phanatic in other ways too like her daughter we see Ease on the ends of words we wouldn't use it on anymore like effect self and bind which also has a
w in place of the U meanwhile were is spelled as we would spell War while ways looks like wise like Elizabeth she omits the letter m sometimes as in the word humble and indicates that it has been cut by a little Dash over the letter U you're seeing this type of abbreviation in both letters written decades apart because it was such a common thing to do in the 1500s but of course we don't do it anymore you might notice something similar in other words too like Ure which is spelled yo with a little
superscript r above it and no indication of the U perhaps because an just didn't spell it with a u even at the best of times we've already seen some n extinct words in the 17th century witchcraft allegations I showed you but as we get further back in time that issue only becomes more pronounced and an's letter is a good example of this this once and future Queen uses multiple words which we would never hear no some are easy for us to understand because they are so similar to their still popular
modern equivalents like hit hath and standeth others are positively archaic such as vien which basically means Church patronage and according to the Oxford English Dictionary quote is last recorded around the late 1500s nevertheless if I read this letter out to you I think you'll realize that we could still understand an if she was talking to us and probably albeit with some difficulty make ourselves understood verbally as well here's what she says and while I can't put little dashes over lette
rs this transcript is otherwise correct my Lord in my most humble ways I thank your gas for the gift of this benefit for master Baro how be it this standeth to non effect for it is made for tonbridge and I would have it if your pleasure were so for sonbridge for tumbridge is in my Lord my father's gift B that should probably be read as by in Modern English a vion that he hath and is not yet void I do trust that your grias will grant him sndri and considering the P that he hath taken I do think t
hat it shall be very well bestowed and in so doing I reckon myself much bind to your grace for all those that hath taken pain in the king's matter that's a little reference to his attempt to anull his marriage to Catherine of Aragon it shall be my daily study to imagine all the ways that I can devise to do them service and pleasure and thus I make an End sending you again the letter that you sent me thanking your grace most humbly for the Ping that you take for to write to me assuring you that n
ext the king's letter there is nothing that can Rejoice me so much with the hand of her that is most bound to be your most humble and obedient servant an bin and then she adds a little postcript my Lord I beseech your Gus with all my heart to Remember The Parson of Honey lean for my sake shortly hopefully now that you've heard it spoken you agree with me that it's not too difficult to understand an's meaning but you can let me know below if you still think that the English of the early 1500s is
too far away from our modern usage to be easily followed something we don't see in this particular letter but which was also common enough at the time was to use the letter V instead of U and vice versa and to swap over V and W if I show you this letter written by an's sister-in-law Margaret shter Queen of Scotland to Thomas wisey in 1517 you can see what I mean Margaret uses V in place of w many times here including in the opening line when she says my Lord Cardinal in my most hearty ways I rec
ommend me to you and would be glad to hear from you here we see VI instead of wise which we would substitute for ways and vo instead of wood I'm not going to go through the rest of the letter as this little section is all I need to make this point but please do also note the lack of commas and full stops time to push back into the 15th century and here I have two letters to show you the first is from Lady Margaret bouer to her son Henry viith on the 14th of January at some point during his rein
so it dates to between 1486 and 1509 it includes quite a sweet little note at the very beginning to her son who she calls my own sweet and most dear King and all my worldly Joy at this point we're looking at someone taught to write in about the 1450s and her handwriting spelling and sometimes her word choice make her letter almost indecipherable to anyone not trained in medieval paleography she does display a little grammatical treit which is useful though which is that she puts vertical lines i
n places where we would not have commas or full stops this was not a universal practice even within the royal family Margaret's granddaughter Margaret shter didn't employ it for instance but it is something I also noted in our second letter from this period this was written on the 12th of October 1483 and was from Richard III to John Russell Chancellor of England the first part of it was written by a secretary but where you see the handwriting change that's where Richard himself comes in as you
can see his writing is much bigger and less neatly formed than the secretaries the secretary though uses little lines just as Margaret did as a form of grammar this is a professional writer who obviously had a good education and nerd that I am I just find it fascinating that there clearly was an appreciation for the need for grammar at this time yet with no standardized education system you only see some people like Margaret and this secretary actually employing it Richard doesn't do it for inst
ance his addition to the letter is just one big run-on sentence other than this grammar note there's nothing really new to point out to you here the way in which the letters are formed is increasingly different to Modern traits and the spelling is more and more phonetic giving a little insight into people's accents the third word for instance is Father spelled f a d r e time though to move on We Now find ourselves with a document written between about 1400 and 1410 so very much in Middle English
this is an extract of one of Jeffrey chers canterberry teals specifically the nights teal this beautiful illuminated manuscript will have been written by a professional so the handwriting you see here is the best of the best for the time period as we now expect there are no spelling or grammar rules but a lot of what we've seen in later generations was in place already here like the preference for the letter Y over I and the very different ways of forming letters which is especially noticeable
to me at least on the letter R the handwriting is also much spikier than we would have nowadays and I think we have to consider that this is because straight lines and spikes were easier to accomplish with a quill then rounded shapes we also see the beautiful italic script that was still popular a century and a half later when Elizabeth the was learning to write and which was really the mark of a topnotch education but again also easier to achieve with a quill we simply couldn't do it nowadays w
ith a biru as it requires a slanted nib could we understand this if it was spoken to us though well most of it I think but if we went back in that time machine Ma I suspect even verbal communication would be getting pretty challenging by this point as there are a lot of words and pronunciations that are long since extinct in the English language the title and the first six lines of the manuscript say here beginneth the knight's teal wilham which means once as old stories telling us there was a J
uke that height meaning was called Theus of Athens he was Lord and governor and in his time switch meaning such a conqueror that greater was there none Under the Sun full many a rich country had he won this is written in rhyming couplets by the way which you possibly didn't get as I had to keep stopping to translate the obsolete words into Modern English but if you look at the transcript you should be able to pick up on the fact that each set of two lines rhyme with one another so we're now over
600 years in the past written English is barely recognizable to us thanks to vast differences in handwriting Styles spelling and grammar and even verbal communication would be very hard given the different accents and the use of words we no longer have in our vocabulary to try to take you back further in the manuscript record is very tough as there are fewer and fewer such documents available and very few of those which we do have are written in English things like the Dooms book which you may
have heard of tend to be in Latin or French as those were the languages of governance at this point furthermore of the few which are in English I struggle to get copyright free or Creative Commons images of them so for our next example I'm going to have to show you a later printed version of this item which is an excerpt from Robert of gloucester's Chronicle written in the late 13th century I.E the 1200s even without seeing the handwritten version this gives you a flavor of how the English langu
age continues to change as we go backwards for we are at this stage even deeper into the middle English Fe it's now very hard to follow what's being said and even the alphabet is changing for some of the letters Robert will have been familiar with are no longer used by US in particular you can see one called a thorn which looks a bit like a pee and which has long since been replaced in English by T though I believe it still exists in the Icelandic language I can't imagine I'd be able to carry on
a conversation with an English person at this stage though I might pick up some of the words they were saying to finish up I'm going to show you just one more document to demonstrate how completely the language has changed over the past thousand years this is a pH from the epic poem be Wolf the manuscript was written between 975 and 1025 ad and so it predates the Norman Conquest this is very much Old English and although written up by a professional who has composed their letters very clearly a
nd included good gaps between lines I don't think any lay person would associate this with what we call English today only a specialist would know what they are looking at I'm not even going to attempt to read it to you because I can't I don't know how to pronounce what I'm seeing and if wouldn't mean anything to me and probably not anything to most if not all of you however here is the transcript for you to look at if you so desire so how did you do with this video were you able to read any of
the documents or was it all double dutch to you let me know in the comments below at what point you felt the increasingly Antiquated English I've showed you today became too difficult to manage or if you sealed through the whole thing and think that people who can't read the original B wolf are wimps who just aren't trying hard enough I look forward to hearing your thoughts and if you want to learn more about some of the people discuss today try one of these videos next whatever you choose pleas
e enjoy and until next time keep learning
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