Reading Secretary Hand
To understand the documents, we learned to read them. First, we had to learn the 17th century alphabet, which is close to today’s 26-letter English alphabet, but not identical.
‘s’ to start/end | double ‘s’ mid word | double ‘s’ at the end
The “minims” – i, m, n, and u – can sometimes be hard to tell apart, especially when they are next to each other.
Thorny Reading
Even more confusing, some common seventeenth century letters do not exist today, including the thorn⟨Þ or Ȝ⟩, which can look like a letter ‘y’ but is pronounced ‘th.’ Misreading the thorn led to the development of the pseudo–Early Modern English phrase “ye olde”. Today’s signs that say “ye olde” (like for a London cheese store) are based on misreading the thorn. No one ever said “ye olde!” Plus, some clerks used the same sign for ‘y’ and ‘thorn,’ making for complicated reading.
said → sd (5)
pairts → pts
instrts →instruments
Spelling
In the 1600s, familiar words sometimes were spelled differently than today, making them hard to recognize. So:
heires & assignes = heirs and assigns (2)
laufull = lawful (3)
possest = possessed (4)
You may be stumped by what appears to be “jajvjct” (1) in the Scottish sasine. This strange word mixes Latin and longhand numbers to show “1600”:
jaj → corrupted or misread form of “im”
Latin for one thousand (1000)
vj → the Latin numeral for 6 (v → 5, i/j → 1)
ct → short for the Latin “centus,” 100.
Similarly “umqll” (6) is short for the Old Scots “umquhile” (after a while), meaning deceased.
What about symbols?
What looks like a backwards comma is an ampersand (&) (2) What looks like the “@” symbol abbreviated the word “annual.” In a different Scottish indenture, the word “@rent” (7) abbreviates “annual rent”, the amount a tenant pays a landlord each year.
Learn more about reading Scottish secretary hand at the Scottish Handwriting website, www.scottishhandwriting.com.
Check out some of the peculiarities of seventeenth-century Scottish vocabulary at the online Dictionaries of the Scots Language which continues work started in the early 20th century to research the Scots language.
