English Work in the Fourteenth Century

       The cursive hand in England, as used between 1250 and 1550 for all purposes, and in legal documents for a long time afterwards, seems to have grown up in the early part of the thirteenth century. It is quite unlike the earlier charter hand, although it must have been derived from it. For the first century or more of its use, it is remarkable by reason of the long strokes which are broad and heavy above, but taper into' thin lines below, those heavy heads being bifurcated in the earlier times and looped in the later. During the thirteenth and a great part of the fourteenth century it looked handsome, and could be read without difficulty ; from the late part of the fourteenth century onwards it deteriorated both in aspect and in clearness. Nothing resembling this English hand was used on the continent, except (in a slight degree) in the notes written sometimes on the margins of philosophical and legal books, by means of a hard leaden stylus. Another cursive was also employed, which was merely the rapid writing of the gothic minuscule, like that of Germany ; but this appeared rather on the continent.

       It has been remarked that the Norman conquest introduced a new fashion in writing; but the observation is too strong. That event led gradually to the disuse of writing in the angular Anglo-Saxon letters, but had little influence on the fashion of the script used for writing Latin, which had become round and clear since the tenth century. The Carolingian reformation had failed to supersede the Anglo-Irish hand, but its influence extended far enough to improve the shape even of the purely English letters. In Ireland, the angular character had fixed its type which has not since varied.

       At the beginning of the fourteenth century, the English, as has been said above, began to relinquish the lead in calligraphy and ornamentation, which they had held since the twelfth. The Latin Bibles which had been produced towards the end of the twelfth century were usually folios of good size, written in a large and fine hand, and decorated with miniatures of the type seen in the Huntingfield Psalter. The fashion of the thirteenth century inclined to work of smaller dimensions, and the Bibles came out in small octavo or duodecimo size until the end of the century approached, when there was a tendency to revert to small folios. In the fourteenth century, a favorite size was quarto or small quarto. The illustrations in MSS. of both twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and of the beginning of the fourteenth, were similar in style, but varying in appearance according to the space allowed the artist.

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