Look carefully at the words ‘Pass’ and ‘Repass’. In the printed example below (Mol 266), the bearer is permitted ‘to Pass and Repass’ at the Duchess of Kingston’s public trial in 1766. The long ‘s’ carried on being used in printing, even in the nineteenth century, and many people mis-read it as ‘f’ because they do not expect an ‘s’ to be formed in this way. ‘s’ and ‘f’ can be very confusing if you are not used to reading old scripts. In fact, you can see differences in the examples above between the ‘s’ in ‘presentes’ and the ‘f’ in ‘futuri’, if you look very closely.

The first letter ‘p’ is followed by a backwards loop which stands for ‘re’, and then by a long letter ‘s’ which looks in the first example a bit like a modern ‘l’, and in the others a bit like a ‘f’. The scribes never write out the letters ‘re’. Now look closely at the second word in each example. Instead, the scribes use an abbreviation mark, just as we often use an ampersand (&) for ‘and’.Īll of the scribes have abbreviated the word ‘presentes’, two of them have also abbreviated ‘futuri’, and three of them have abbreviated ‘quod’. The task is made a bit harder because the scribes liked to abbreviate long or common words.įor instance, the word ‘et’ (Latin for 'and') is never written out in full. The phrase is: ‘Sciant presentes et futuri quod.’ It means ‘Know all here present and to come, that.’Ĭan you make out the letters in these four examples, from 1230, 1317, 13? Here are four examples of exactly the same Latin phrase which commonly occurs in title deeds. If you want to know more, you can look at more comprehensive palaeography websites listed in the Further Reading page. On this page you will find lots of advice about unfamiliar letters, surprisingly-shaped letters, and abbreviations. This means they can actually be easier to tackle than a personal scrawl of the nineteenth or twentieth century, if you have learnt a few basic hints and tips. However, as we have seen, medieval scripts are usually written in a careful, regular hand. Reading old handwriting is a challenge for most people.

Letter abbreviations for words