Alphabet Soup

For the final year of my undergraduate degree in Classical, Medieval, Renaissance Studies I am working on a thesis project which is a required course for honours students of this degree. My topic of interest is the lives and ongoings of English country-folk in the Middle Ages as they happened in established manor communities which scholars primarily examine via records that we would recognize as minutes called manor court rolls. These records provide by no means a colourful, detailed view into the lives of medieval peasants- the "unwashed masses", the nebulous et cetera, the 90% comprising the rest of England's medieval population after the upper classes of nobility and royalty- but they have left traceable hints and narrow rabbit-trails for us to follow.

Right now I am working on transcribing some of these documents; court rolls from Wakefield manor in fourteenth-century Yorkshire. I have discovered that trying to read the dirty, smudged, faded medieval latin ink-scrawls of English chancery-hand written by a man who lived in 1346 is comparable to self-flagellation of the brain. I have also discovered that I LOVE IT. 

One of the most pestilential qualities of manor court rolls is that many of the legal terms deployed are obsolete, and therefore demand glossary consultation. They are highly abbreviated, which therefore demands a more specialized knowledge of standardized chancery hand abbreviations. Familiarity with the hand of the scribe is also an issue which involves muffled cursing and swelling incredulity at how the *$%&! this smudge of ink could possible say 'ideo'... 

It occurred to me that these abbreviations, which are a language to be learned in and of themselves, are not unlike our modern acronyms that we use when we are texting or sending quick emails. Granted these are highly informal and I would say their usage serves the ignoble purpose of bastardizing the English language and the gradual deterioration of grammatical understanding in our youth...but I digress....  I remember when I was in high school, before every child over the age of six had a cell phone such as it seems nowadays, MSN messenger was all the rage. Brb was "be right back" (after I make myself some macaroni and cheese or grab a spoon and the jar of nutella). G2g was "got to go" (because my parents told me to get off the computer UGH they just don't understand me and treat me like such a child *rolls eyes dramatically*). Among others were lol, lmfao, ttyl, rofl and our grandparents would look at us and express the same confusion I express when trying to confirm whether "tra. sa." really means traxit sanguinem. 

A few weeks ago, I just had one of these moments with my Grandma Alice, who is interested and quite good at keeping up with social media and makes regular use of her iPhone and iPad. I had confused her, however, in some of our textual correspondences by ending my missives with '<3 '. 

When I finally explained to her what it meant and the picture that it makes, she was very amused and now regularly uses it to end her notes to me! 

Similarly, when I am hastily taking down notes for a lecture and haven't the time to wind over the curvatures of the word "with", I will happily use the medieval scribe's cum denoted by 'c' with a single stroke above it.