Round hand and the hands before it: secretary to engrossing, 1600s–1700s

The English writers of the 1600s did not write the round hand of the copybooks. Their hand was older. Samuel A. Tannenbaum's 1930 handbook dates its rise to the years when the English first met the printers' roman type: a small set hand known as the Secretary Hand was then becoming prominent in England.^[1] Hilary Jenkinson's 1927 survey of the English hands traces the line that follows. The ordinary secretary hands of the 1500s mixed gradually with the imported Italian hands to produce the modern round hand.^[2] The change was slow, and the plain secretary lasted on in some places well into the 1700s.^[3]

William Massey's 1763 history of writing quotes the engraver George Bickham^[4] on how far the change had come. A few generations back, Bickham wrote, people had practised a small running secretary hand,^[5] and the round hand was now universally received.^[6] The last hand on this page is the engrosser's, the formal fair copy. Timothy Matlack was probably the engrosser of the Declaration,^[7] and the Constitution was engrossed by Jacob Shallus, then assistant clerk of the Pennsylvania State Assembly.^[8] The page follows the hands in order, secretary, italic, round hand and the engrosser's, and what each one does to a reader.

Tannenbaum explains the name. In the Middle Ages a secretary meant a confidential servant who attended to his master's or mistress's private correspondence.^[9] The hand named after that servant was seen in all the countries of Europe and in all kinds of documents, and it followed the letter forms of the large bastard hand,^[10] the late Gothic hand of the clerks. Tannenbaum calls it the direct ancestor of the Gothic script still current in Germany in his day.^[11] A reader who knows German Kurrent will find some secretary letters familiar, and a reader who knows only modern cursive will find most of them strange.

As more people wrote, Tannenbaum observes, the quality of the writing deteriorated, and speed necessarily produces this effect.^[12] A busy clerk's secretary is harder to read than a writing book's. Two marks set the hand apart from the italic beside it. The acute angle was a more constant characteristic of the secretary,^[13] and short horizontal bars occurred in the small c, f and g, and sometimes even in the a.^[14] A page of sharp angles, with small crossbars on letters that carry none today, is secretary. Its letters have to be learned, not guessed.

Some secretary letters sit in different places from their modern forms. Tannenbaum sorts letters by the line they stand on, and the ones he calls infralinear go a considerable distance, about a quarter of an inch, below it.^[15] In the secretary hand those included g, h and i.^[16] An h that drops below the line, which no modern h does, is still an h. Read it from its place in the word, not from its shape alone.

The secretary e is the commonest stumbling block. It often looks like a Greek epsilon, but it always links with the following letter from above, not from the lower end of the stem.^[17] The secretary r can be worse: most of the time, Tannenbaum writes, it is indistinguishable from an Arabic 2 and a modern lower-case z.^[18] A 2 or a z in the middle of an English word is almost always an r. Looped c's are easily mistaken for l's,^[19] and undotted i's for c's and for minims,^[20] the short downstrokes that make up n, m and u. Counting the minims in a word and checking the count against a word that makes sense is the reader's best tool.

The s had several forms. The long s is the same letter as the small round s, but very much elongated.^[21] Another s, written almost only at the end of a word, is almost unknown in the middle of one and has no fixed value,^[22] so the word around it has to decide which letters it stands for.

The italic came from Italy. In the 1400s, Tannenbaum writes, Italian scholars, dissatisfied with the ungainly and almost illegible Gothic script, resurrected the Caroline minuscule^[23] of the early Middle Ages, gave it a slope, and joined its letters. In England, where it is said to have been introduced by Petrus Carmelianus, Latin Secretary to King Henry VII, its adoption was very slow.^[24] By the middle of the 1500s it was enough in fashion for professional scriveners and the well-educated to learn it, even if only for ceremonious letters.^[25]

For a long time the two hands shared a page. Men like Sir Francis Bacon and their clerks were still writing their letters in secretary but their signatures in italic,^[26] and Tannenbaum reports Jenkinson's date for the first italic signatures in England, 1554.^[27] An easy signature under a hard letter is this pattern, not two writers. The italic was the hand of the educated, and William Massey's 1763 history records that King Charles I wrote a fair open Italian hand.^[28] Italic letters are close to modern ones, so a reader who meets an italic passage inside a secretary document can read it first and use its words as a key to the rest.

After about 1600 the line between the two hands blurs. Penmen used the italic more and more, Tannenbaum writes, usually in combination with the secretary, the letters of the two hands being mingled in various proportions.^[29] A single page may hold a secretary e beside an italic e, from the same writer in the same line. Read each letter on its own terms instead of deciding first which hand the page is in.

Through the rest of the 1600s the Gothic secretary was gradually being abandoned.^[30] It was still wanted for a while: Jenkinson notes that it was apparently worth while to reprint Davies' secretary plates in 1663.^[31] But the mixed or round hands, having arrived, achieved soon an enormous popularity,^[32] each with its little individual reminiscences of the style or form of the secretary.^[33] Those reminiscences are the reader's warning. A hand from the late 1600s that looks modern can still hide a secretary e or r. Jenkinson adds that the mixed hands are particularly common and long-lived in legal series,^[34] so deeds and court papers keep the old letters longest.

By the 1700s the mixture had settled into the round hand of the English copybooks, the joined, sloped and shaded hand whose letters this site reads on the copperplate page. Massey's notes on the English sovereigns' hands end with Queen Anne, who wrote a fair round hand.^[35] A document in round hand reads with the copybook's rules: count the full strokes, trust the spacing over the pen-lifts, and expect capitals on nouns. A document from before it may need the secretary letters above, and a document from the years between usually needs both.

The abbreviations of the secretary years outlived the hand and turn up in round hand too. English writers had long made a habit of indicating the omission of one or more letters within a word by writing the last letter or letters of the word slightly above the line,^[36] so a raised letter at the end of a word usually means letters are missing before it. Read a raised ch after w as which, and a raised th after w as with. But superior letters did not always mean abbreviation,^[37] and some writers raised a letter only for ornament.

Contraction was indicated by some kind of flourish, most often probably by a shorter or longer horizontal stroke^[38] over the word. A line over a word means the word is shorter than it should be, and the reader supplies the letters. Titles were shortened then as now, Master to Mr. and Mistress to Mrs.^[39] The ye of old documents belongs here too. The English y was first used, about 1200, as a substitute for the runic thorn,^[40] the letter for th, so ye is the word the, not a different word.

To engross was to write out the final, formal copy. The National Archives explains why Congress ordered one of the Declaration after the printed broadside: the preparation of the document in a large, clear hand denoted that this version was the official copy, the one that would bear the delegates' signatures.^[41] The scribe was Timothy Matlack, an assistant to the Secretary of the Second Continental Congress,^[42] who set to work with pen, ink, parchment, and practiced hand.^[43] John Hancock, the President of the Congress, was the first to sign the sheet.^[44]

That gives the rule for reading any engrossed document. The text is the clerk's hand, and only the signatures are the signers' own. The anonymity was part of the point: the signers' names were kept secret until 1777.^[45] The Constitution's engrosser was not identified until 1937, on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the Constitution,^[46] when his identity was determined after a long and careful search of collateral public documents.^[47] A famous document in a beautiful hand is very often a clerk's work, and a page on a person's handwriting has to say whose hand it shows.

The formal hand mattered for its own sake. The National Archives notes that in official papers fine letter formation instilled trust and so carried an importance equal to what the words actually said,^[48] while among early Americans merchants employed a thin, loopy script that was both quick and assured.^[49] An engrossed charter and a merchant's letter from the same year can look like two alphabets. Read the charter with the copybook's set rules and the letter with its running ones.