WRITING. The earlier history of writing is dealt with in the articles ALPHABET, PALAEOGRAPHY, PICTOGRAPHY. The subject of the present article is handwriting in its common uses in Europe since the period when the invention of printing super seded its employment for the making of books.
Speaking broadly, the ordinary handwritings of modern Europe result from the competition and interaction of two contrasted forms of script which existed side by side in most countries for many generations, and which still maintain an independent exist ence in Germany. These are the Italian, or Roman, and the na tional, not very accurately called Gothic, current hands. In Eng land the most important type of native current hand was known in the 16th century as Secretary. The acute stage of the rivalry here may be said to last from about 148o till the reign of Charles I., whose own hand is not a bad example of the compromise which shows the resultant of the two forces. Endymion Porter's hand gives an even better specimen.
The great and singular achievement of the Italian renaissance in the matter of hand writing, the creation or revival of what is known as humanistic script (see art. PALAE OGRAPHY) might seem, since that hand was properly a book-hand, to lie outside our present subject. This, however, would not be altogether true. If the type used in this Encyclopaedia follows so closely the forms of letters evolved I 1 centuries ago that a Latin book printed in it would have been easily read by a scholar of Charlemagne's court, it is because the Caroline hand set up a standard of legibility and simplicity from which other beautiful scripts were felt to fall away. As cheapened and, as it were, stereotyped by its adoption for printing, it has retained the same compelling power in a higher degree. To make one's hand "as plain as print" has been and is an aim the effects of which recur again and again in the history of writing. Before, however, it could have any direct influence on ordinary handwriting the humanistic script had to submit to certain changes, the general tendency of which can be gathered by comparing the printers' Roman with the printers' Italic type. This more cursive type of Italian script is seen in the hand of Petrus Carmelianus, tutor to the children of Edward IV., which serves also to show that the script had made its way into England before 1483.
Its rapid -spread in England, perhaps, owed something to Royal patronage, for although Henry VIII. did not write it himself, he had it taught to his children, but through the 15th and first half of the 16th centuries a very large proportion of educated Eng lishmen both could and did write both in Italian and Secretary hand.
The different uses to which men put the two hands indicate that the superior legibility of the Italian was recognized, for in a letter or tract written mainly in Secretary it is common practice to write sub-headings, proper names, foreign words and the like in Italian script, in fact to use it much as we do italic print or leaded type.
Before we compare the merits and defects of the Italian current script with the fully-developed Secretary hand it is necessary to say something further concerning the scripts from which the latter had evolved.
A critical study of the develop ment of popular current script in England in the i4th–i5th cen tury is still a desideratum. Insufficient attention seems to have been paid to the needs which it rose to meet. Collections of specimens of writing from the beautiful book-hands of monastic scriptoria, or the workshops of artist-illuminators fail to illustrate it, and so, to a great degree, do collections of official writings from the administrative offices of State, written by clerks trained in their particular departments, a conservative class given to a pro fessional pride in writing unlike the general public. Secretary hand, it is true, is considerably influenced by a type of script used in the chancery for documents intended to be read by laymen, an example of which may be taken from a formulary of Henry IV. It was influenced likewise by a type of vernacular book-hand, of which a specimen may be taken from a mid-15th century ms. of Occleve's poems. And it was influenced also by a form of script the origin of which seems to be French or Flemish, though it was popular in England. An illustrative example is from a book which was written in France for presentation by the earl of Salisbury to Queen Margaret at or immediately after her marriage to Henry VI. in
This is apparently the script known to French writers of the time as "lettres bastardes," to indicate its intermediate position between the stiff precision of the "lettres de forme" of the most expensive mss. and informal current or court hand called "lettre de tour." In the main, however, "Secretary" derives from none of these styles so much as from the styleless writing of the ordinary man of the 14th century, and its first beginnings are to be seen as soon as the need for any large amount of writing by the or dinary man began to be felt. Many circumstances combine to fix this at about the 5o years 1260-1310. Great monasteries began late in Henry III.'s reign to keep elaborate court-rolls and account rolls of their manors. Changes in land tenure under Edward I. led to a vast output of deeds dealing with little bits of land. A little later allusions to the "paper of the market" show a new and cheap writing material fostering the growth of ephemeral business records. And lastly, legal documents were coming to be written in French and English, and by persons unskilled in the elaborate system of abbreviations which learned Latinists had devised to shorten their labour. In these conditions, the requirements for a popular hand were speed and simplicity rather than beauty, and even at the cost of a high degree of legibility.