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554
MEDIEVAL ENGLAND
the royal chancery, the notaries, both papal and imperial, and
above all the Scriveners Company of London whose 'Com/
mon Paper' or entrance book survives from the year 1390. Into
this book for more than two centuries every member entered in
his own hand his name and his acceptance of the company's
rule a unique record of the development of professional yet
secular handwriting in its 'set* form. 1
As the middle ages advance the classification of handwriting
becomes increasingly difficult. Particularly well/written official
documents ofthe twelfth century are often said by cataloguers to
be written in 'charter hand*, and by the end ofthat century the
new cursive is already well developed. There was a growing
tendency to link letters together; and their forms were greatly
modified as the set hand taught to the apprentices became,
under pressure of time, a free hand. These developments pro/
foundly affected the development of book hand. The sudden
change to smaller writing in the thirteenth century, as we have
seen, reflects the influence of the new court hand, while the
chronicles, and the ever/growing mass of vernacular writing
(as English slowly came into its own) tend to be written more
and more in hybrid scripts half/way between book hand
proper and cursive. In this confusion of scripts we can, perhaps,
distinguish a standard court hand which reaches its height to/
wards the end of the thirteenth century. In the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries it slowly deteriorated, and at the same time
the spread of education and the appearance ofthe literate lay/
man* gave rise to a miscellaneous mass of documents as ill
written as those oftoday. None the less there was throughout our
period a body of highly trained professional scribes capable of
writing well the standard court hand. But this is not all: for
perhaps the most interesting feature oflater medieval writing, as
has been said above, is the emergence ofelaborate and artificial
set hands in the various departments ofthe 'civil service', which
soon became fixed and traditional, and lasted for centuries.
One of these, the new chancery hand of the late fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, is illustrated in PL 121 a. And there were
1 See H. Jenkinson, Late Court Hanls in England (Cambridge, 1927).