About this Hand

 

Bibliographical Information

A note on Royston (extract from Rastell's Abridgement)
Gonville and Caius College MS 170/91, p. 157

 

Description and Dating

An example of a neat mid-Tudor secretary hand. The regular lineation, elegant shading (variation in thickness of strokes according to angle of nib), swashing majuscules (see esp. ll. 1-2), and the ruled page all suggest that this is a scribal hand. There are frequent tildes to indicate scribal contractions, and one otiose tilde in line 13 ('Parsons'). Notable letter forms are the spurred initial a (compare medial a), three forms of h (broken-backed, simple, and figure-of-eight - see e.g. 'Parish churche', l. 6), the variation on a z form of r, and the long descenders on the long s, the f, and the g, which go down through the line below. The writer uses only the reverse e, both closed and open (the latter not exclusively in terminal position). Other notable features are the grand flourishes on certain letters and brevigraphs, such as ampersand and terminal n. The text ends with a paraph (terminal flourish), which has not been transcribed, indicating that the particular section of the document has come to an end.