The Butcher's Hook and the Hot Cross Bun

Notes from the Writer's Diary: Part Ten

Gabriel Metsu - Elegant Lady Writing at her Desk 1662-1664

Work Notes

• Come and see me at York Literary festival on Tuesday 10th March, 6-8pm, where I’ll be talking about ‘the environment as stimuli for personal and creative research. it’s a free event but please book: Tickets

• Come and see me at Filey Literary festival on Wednesday 13th May, 7pm, where I’ll be giving a talk on the mysteries of the Wold Newton Triangle. Tickets

• Buy my memoir: The Ghost Lake

• Buy my poetry collection: Blackbird Singing at Dusk

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The Butcher’s Hook and the Hot Cross Bun

I get out out notebook from the stack of research notebooks in my bag, write the date and switch my camera on, smiling self consciously at myself and all the other people in the Practical Palaeography group. I am aware of my outsider status. The group is made up of, mostly, academics. I am not a historian, not a librarian, not a scholar. I am a writer.

What I want to get out of these sessions is a basic knowledge, enough to make the research I’m doing possible. When I introduce myself in the chat box I tell them I am writing a novel about a woman who wrote a diary in the late 16th and early seventeenth century; a real woman, a historical figure, and I need some basic skills to help me make sense of the secretarial hand in old letters. I want to be able to read the original diaries. Why is this important? After all, the scholars have all been here before me and transcribed the original manuscripts. All the information is there in easy to understand modern English. But there’s more to it than just understanding the context, understanding the words. What I am looking for in the original documents is something else - a person in the writing, a personality in the sweep of the words. I want to feel the press of Margaret’s quill, I want to sit at her shoulder and watch her form her letters as a way of understanding her.

The palaeography sessions are weekly, on zoom, from America. I have access to them through my fellowship with the Folger. They have become something I treasure: a quiet, thoughtful place of puzzle solving and companionship amongst my otherwise chaotic days of caring and freelancing and trying to write the book. I value the ritual of it. I value the feeling of joining the group and being welcomed. Usually we begin by going over the alphabet, looking at the way that secretary hand can be formed, always with the reminder that the scribes that wrote the documents are people, and each person has their own handwriting. We are reminded of context, that there is a world of difference between a son writing a letter home from university, and a letter from a spy in a royal house. Then we open a document that all the group can see and we transcribe it together, slowly moving along, a word at a time. We are shown how to enter the transcription for scholarly use and although this is not why I am here - I know I will never have the confidence or skill to transcribe anything in the archives - I enjoy the way that knowledge of how it is done brings me closer to the transcribers when I am roaming down the rabbit holes of archive work.

The stories of people are not just embedded in the text that is written. It’s in how it’s written. When we come across letters that are obviously more ornate than they should be, we can see that this is a throw back to an older medieval style and I can imagine someone who learned to write in a medieval hand passing down a habit of over exaggeration of majuscules through the family, the old ways being slowly rubbed away at the edges as each new generation learns to write. I am reminded of how I used to copy the way my mum wrote her capital Es in a double curled sweep, though I had never been taught to do that by my teachers.

Learning to read 16th and 17th century documents is so much more than learning the shape of the letters. Much of the spelling is phonetic, sometimes I think I can detect accent in the way that words are spelled. To learn the hand of a scribe you write the letters out, looking at the ink on the original page to follow the direction of the quill, getting a feel for the direction of the crosses, the way an ‘a’ merges into the minims of an n or an m, and this way you get a feel for their habits, their positioning, the way they might lean a quill on a knuckle joint, the way they get distracted and bunch a letter too close to the edge of a page, or miss a word out and have to go back and stick it in on a slant. A manuscript becomes a moment in a life, then, the dipping of a quill and the fattening of the letters with ink, the thin pale words at the end of a long line where the quill needs re dipping, the drip, the smudge where a sleeve has caught.

Later in the week I’m feeling brave enough to print out some of Margaret’s letters to test my skills. I light the fire and set my table up in front of it and quietly work my way through from start to finish, not checking the transcription until I reach the end. I feel like I’m cheating a bit. Her formal letters, and this is a formal letter to Robert Cecil, are written in a hand that is super neat and clear, each word has been slowly crafted. Her diary and her personal notes are very different: scratchy, quick and confident. This one feels almost innocent, almost a child’s hand, careful and full of gratitude and exaggerated love in the Elizabethan style. What a thrill to have worked it over myself. There are small smudges in places which feel like the pad of her wrist has pressed on the parchment. I press my hand in the same place on my own transcription and feel how she might be sitting, how her shoulders might be set while she writes. That image stays with me when I return to writing the book. It will find its way into the story, I will know her better because of it.

Even in the peace of the palaeography zoom room the world outside seeps in. One day the class meets just after the shooting of Renée Good has been all over the news, and the room is subdued and quiet. It is strange to be in England and looking into the portal of an America that is being affected by this. Even more so as the class, I believe, is held in Washington DC, not far from the White House. No one in this group has so far spoken about the political landscape because there is an unwritten rule that we are all here on common ground, the learning space that allows people to come together. But still, it is in the air. I want to say something but I’m not sure what. I want to offer condolences for what is happening, but I’m not sure how to say it. I know that the institution that runs these courses are also passionate about diversity and inclusivity and I wonder what they have felt watching, for example, the integrity of The Kennedy Centre being dismantled by someone who doesn’t read, doesn’t empathise and doesn't value art or exploration of what it means to be human. While I have been a fellow here I have seen so much art around the texts of Shakespeare and the early modern documents; explorations of how they relate to the stories of America that are not the white mainstream, how Shakespeare in particular is claimed by the world, not one faction of it. It makes me worried for the future of this sort of welcoming learning, for this sort of research. How long can they quietly do the work that needs to be done?

We gather quietly in the space and talk about the weather, but heads are bent, faces are paled and taut. I pull my notebook out and flick through to last week’s lesson notes, the scribbles I made trying to identify the different letters - butcher’s hook, hot cross bun, and I look at my face in the gallery of other faces, and I feel my world expand a little with the connection.

Until next time

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