Learning to read

Beautiful and evocative they may be, but old documents are often very difficult to read. Scripts have changed markedly over the years, from the clear elegant capitals of the Romans, to Carolingian miniscule, Blackletter, uncial and so on; eventually arriving at today's seemingly universal scrawl. On top of these changes, clerks used various abbreviations and short-hand forms and of course, many documents are written in medieval latin or french.

An excellent guide to reading such difficult documents is "The Handwriting of English Documents" by L.G. Hector