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HANDWRITING 547
land, lying on the outer fringe of Latin civilization, were
driven to this course by the dearth ofscribes who knew Latin.
We still have at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, a copy
of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle written at the end of the ninth
century (PL 1 1 5), and in the Bodleian Library a contemporary
manuscript of King Alfred's translation of Gregory's Pastoral
Care. It is not therefore surprising that in the tenth century, the
Old English insular script, with its
special
letters [p (w), lp
(tb\ 3 (/&), 3 (g&)] was able to hold its own, for all vernacular
manuscripts, against the competition of Caroline minuscule
which was henceforth reserved for Latin books. In the royal
charters ofthe tenth and eleventh centuries superb specimens
of calligraphy the two scripts appear together: the Latin text
written in Caroline, the Old English 'boundaries* ofthe pro'
perty granted, in the native minuscule. Thus for centuries to
come we have two streams ofpalaeographical development in
England; two distinct book hands depending on language;
and the strife of tongues was further complicated after the Nor'
man Conquest by the introduction ofNorman French, though
this, of course, followed the Latin tradition.
These English peculiarities, though of great historical in'
terest to us today, were not so important at the time, when the
Latin language reigned supreme. Vernacular manuscripts are
only a small fraction ofwhat has survived, and it is probable
that they were written as the only alternative to sheer illiteracy.
Latin manuscripts alone had much scholarly repute and for
these the Caroline minuscule reached the heyday ofits develop'
ment in the eleventh and early twelfth centuries. The specimen
given in PL 116, which was written in the first quarter of the
twelfth century, is taken from the Life and Miracles of St.
Augustine by Goscelin, a monk of St. Augustine's, Canter'
bury. By this time the minuscule was a faultless script
supremely legible, with the words at last carefully separated,
the sentences punctuated, and a still growing yet systematic
scheme of abbreviations. Punctuation was not, as with us,
grammatical but a guide to the reader who normally spoke
aloud or muttered to himselfas he read, while the abbreviations