6 - English vernacular script

Summary

In Tudor England access to the written word was constrained not simply by an individual’s acquisition of letters, by his (or her) linguistic knowledge, but by mastery of script and print types. Those who could read print could not necessarily construe script, while black-letter literacy ‘was a more basic skill than roman-type literacy’. When readers in eleventh-century England were faced with a similar visual distinction in the presentation of the written word, their levels of literacy were tested more absolutely. Caroline Minuscule, the script of Charlemagne’s court and of the universalising aspirations of the reformed church on the Continent, conveyed Latin text; Insular Minuscule, the indigenous product practised only by the English, which employed letter-forms in use in Britain and Ireland for at least three centuries, served as the medium for the vernacular. The visual separation of languages in the three generations before the Norman Conquest constitutes a central and immovable fact in early English cultural history. By 1000, the foreign script, with its imported letter-forms and technical challenges for writers and, no doubt, novice readers, signalled the presence of Latin. English, meanwhile, remained within a familiar and instantly recognisable domestic tradition: the language written by scribes and scholars in their ordinary script. Insular Minuscule proliferated as writing in the vernacular took off on a scale unprecedented within the limits of former Roman Europe.