Why the letters refuse to behave

If you have ever squinted at a parish register entry and found something that looks like “William ffarmor” when the man was plainly a farmer, you have met the first great truth of palaeography: the alphabet you were taught is not the alphabet your ancestors used. English handwriting between roughly 1500 and 1800 belongs to several distinct traditions, and each one plays by its own rules.

From the mid-Tudor period to the Civil War, most documents were written in secretary hand, a busy, angular script full of loops and compressed strokes. Alongside it, educated writers used italic for personal letters and literary work. As the seventeenth century wore on, secretary hand gave way to the flowing round hand, or copperplate, which dominated from about 1700. A hundred years later you may still meet a clerk whose hand is a tangle of all three, especially in court records where one scribe copied another's work.

Build your own alphabet sheet

Rather than memorising a chart from a book, make your own. Take one document you can read with confidence — a nineteenth-century will, say — and copy out every letter shape you find, upper and lower case, beside the modern equivalents. Your sheet will reflect the hands you actually meet.

Certain letters cause disproportionate trouble, and they are worth extra attention:

• Long s (ſ) resembles an f without its crossbar. So “ſon” is son, “poſſeſſion” is possession, and “ſaid” is simply said. The crossbar is your clue: an f has one, a long s usually does not.
• Minims — the downstrokes in i, m, n, u, v and w — run together in secretary hand. The word “common” can become a fence of identical strokes. Count the minims and use the sentence's sense to separate them.
• e, c and r often look alike, particularly in haste. Compare the same word elsewhere in the document; scribes are creatures of habit.
• Thorn survives in forms like “ye” and “yt”. These are not y-words: they are the and that, with the y-shaped thorn standing in for the old letters.

Crack the abbreviations

Our ancestors were economical. They shortened personal names, omitted letters under a tilde or a flourish, and used a shorthand of Latin and legal terms that recur endlessly. Once you learn a dozen, whole paragraphs unlock.

• Names: Xpofer or Xpher for Christopher, Willm for William, Robt for Robert, Tho for Thomas, Jno for John, Eliz for Elizabeth.
• A tilde or line above a letter signals missing letters: p̃ is per or par, Mat̃ is Matthew, Xp̃ian is Christian.
• Parish and probate vocabulary: ob or obiit (died), æt (aged), s.p. (without issue), Gent., Esq., do (ditto), junr and senr.
• Months hide behind numerals: 7ber is September, 8ber October, 9ber November, 10ber December.

Numbers, dates and money

Roman numerals went further than you might expect, and the final i was often written as j: viij is eight, iiij is four, xix is nineteen. In inventories you will meet money as li, s and d — pounds, shillings and pence — frequently jumbled with the figures in the same line.

Dates need particular care. Until 1752 the legal year began on 25 March, so a January entry dated 1730 may actually belong to 1731 as we count it; you will often see the scribe's own compromise, written as 1730/1. In September 1752 eleven days vanished from the calendar, so an entry “missing” from the register is not always a lost page. Regnal years add another layer: a document dated “in the third year of the reign of…” requires a conversion table, not guesswork.

Read with context, not letter by letter

Beginners decode; experienced readers anticipate. Most documents follow a formula, and knowing the formula tells you what should be there before you look. A will opens “In the name of God, Amen”, names the testator, commends the soul, disposes of the body and the goods, then names executors and witnesses. A burial register entry gives a name, sometimes a relationship, and an occupation. Once you know the shape of the entry, an illegible word is often obvious from its place in the sentence.

Use the same trick for surnames and place names. A farmer's will mentioning fields in a village three miles away will not name a street in London. Mentioned names repeat, so hunt for a second, clearer appearance of the word before you commit.

A practice routine that actually works

Twenty minutes a day beats an occasional heroic session. Start with parish registers, which are short, repetitive and well indexed, so you can check your reading against someone else's. Work from a photograph or high-resolution scan, enlarge it, and adjust contrast until the ink stands out from the paper.

• Transcribe a full page before checking a printed calendar or transcript, then mark every error and ask why it happened.
• Keep a notebook of letter shapes and abbreviations that fooled you, with the correct reading beside them.
• Read aloud. Nonsense that sounds like nothing is probably misread; a phrase that resolves into ordinary English usually is right.
• Take breaks. Fatigue causes more mistakes than difficult script ever does.
• Join a local family history society or an evening palaeography class — county record offices and local studies libraries often run friendly introductory sessions, and reading alongside others is the fastest way to improve.

Nobody is born able to read a 1620 inventory. It is a skill, learned the same way our ancestors learned to write it: slowly, by hand, one word at a time.