Writing in the Middle Ages

We take writing for granted.  Starting in kindergarten, children are taught to write the letters of the alphabet, including their own names.  In the Middle Ages, however, writing was a relatively rare skill, rarer for example than reading.  For us, reading and writing go together, but if you think about it there's no necessary reason that they should.

Charlemagne famously was well educated, able to speak both Old French and Old German fluently, able to read Latin and, he claimed, at least a little Greek, but he couldn't write.  He had never developed that fine motor control of his fingers (why we start kids in kindergarten), and a lifetime with a sword or a horse's reins in his hands had further coarsened them.  He used to keep a wax tablet and stylus by his bed and practice if he woke up in the night.

Writing was rarer than reading because it was highly technical.  Until the late Middle Ages, any permanent writing was done on parchment, sheepskin carefully prepared, which of course was far more expensive than paper.  This is why rough drafts and quick notes were done on a wax tablet, that could easily be wiped clean and reused.

Writing was done with a quill pen--which in fact continued to be the case until the nineteenth century.  So you needed a goose to produce the feather to use as a pen.  (Our word indeed comes from the Latin penna, meaning feather.)  If you were right-handed, you needed a feather from the goose's left wing, so it would curve away from your face as you wrote.  The right wing feathers were understandably cheaper.  This was not quite as big a deal as you might suppose, however, because the feather would be cut down to maybe eight inches long before use (not the enormous feathery pens you may see in movies).

A feather, being hollow, will draw up ink, but the scribe still needed frequent dipping.  As the scribe wrote, the quill would wear down, so it constantly needed trimming with a pen knife.  The knife was also used to split the quill, forming the nib, and to erase mistakes.  Without modern erasers (or the backspace key), medieval scribes had to carefully scrape incorrect words off the parchment.  Depictions of scribes at work, generally writing on a slanted lectern (as in the image above), often showed them with a quill pen in their right hand and a pen knife in the left.

The ink itself was usually made of soot, lampblack or charcoal, mixed with a binder.  The sap of plum or cherry trees was considered to make a good binder.  Some advocated boiling up hawthorne branches to make a thick, dark ink.  Whatever the ink was made from, it would have to be thinned before use, generally with vinegar (that wine that went bad still had a use!).  The prepared ink would be put in a horn for use (in images it appears to be the tip of a cow's horn).  Most "black" ink was actually dark brown, although Italian scribes prided themselves on really black ink.

Charters would be written in black (or brown) ink, but books usually had rubrics, that is red initials and/or headers to individual sections.  Someone copying a book would thus need to have both red ink and black ink handy.

Although we think of handwriting as very personal, in the Middle Ages different scribes at the same place were expected to write a very similar hand (although there was still some variation).  One can indeed give documents a place and rough date just by the style of the writing.

© C. Dale Brittain 2017

For more on medieval literacy, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Xmas

Medieval scribes always abbreviated.  When one is using a feather pen, dipped in ink laboriously made from oak gall and lamp black, writing on parchment that had to be carefully prepared from sheep skin, it's a slow process.  One of the ways to pick up the pace was to abbreviate.

A number of abbreviations were standard from the ninth century on.  For example, a short horizontal line drawn over a vowel meant that there was a following -m- or -n-.  Hence, to write cu with a short horizontal over the -u- was to write the common Latin word cum (meaning with), without having to devote energy to all those little vertical lines (called minims) that go into the letter -m-.

Similarly, the letter -p- with a short horizontal through the lower leg (the descender) meant per, a word that came up a lot in medieval Latin.  It could also be found in the middle of a word, so that imperator (emperor) would be written as impator with a short horizontal through the lower leg of the -p-.

One could even write episcopus (bishop) as epc, because, after all, what other word could it possibly be?

A very common abbreviation was of the word Christos.  This is of course Greek, meaning "the anointed one" or "the Messiah," Christus in Latin, Christ in modern English.  (The New Testament was written in Greek, though medieval writers used the so-called Vulgate, the Latin translation.)  Because Christos is a Greek word, which medieval scribes recognized as such, they abbreviated it using Greek letters, even though very few of them knew much Greek at all.

The first letter of the word in Greek is "chi," what we would call a K-sound, written as X.  Thus a capital X stood for Christ.  Sometimes the scribes would add the second letter, the "rho," the R-sound, written as P.  One will see on sarcophagi and altars the letters X and P superimposed on each other.  This is the "chi-rho" (pronounced Cairo), meaning Christ.

So a scribe referring to Christians might write Xiani.  Christmas was Xmissa (missa is Latin for mass).

This abbreviation system has continued in the modern Xmas.  Some people find the abbreviation deeply disturbing, the reduction of Christ to a cipher, to an unknown.  But this is not the case at all.  (One does wonder if the mention of "the unknown" is a leftover from modern high school algebra.)

Medieval monks could never be mistaken for secularists, and they found the abbreviation very reverent.  Indeed, there may have been some holdover of the ancient Hebrew idea that you should not actually say or write in too explicit a way (or at any rate write on something that might be discarded) the sacred name of God.

So if someone today loudly pronounces they do not believe in Christianity and will therefore refer only to Xmas, that's one thing.  But you cannot read an anti-religion sentiment into the simple abbreviation.  It does, after all, go back to the earliest existing western Bibles.

For more on the history of Christmas, see my essay "Contested Christmas," available as an ebook from Amazon and other ebook platforms.

© C. Dale Brittain 2015