What is Secretary Hand?

Secretary Hand  ·  Getting Started  ·  June 2026

If you have ever opened an old English document and found yourself staring at something that looks more like barbed wire than writing, you have almost certainly encountered secretary hand. It is the dominant script of British legal and administrative life from roughly 1550 to 1750, and it is unlike anything taught in schools today.

Where Did It Come From?

Secretary hand developed in England during the fifteenth century, adapted from earlier continental cursive scripts used by professional clerks and government officials. By the reign of Henry VIII it had become the standard script for legal, administrative, and business writing across England and Wales. It remained in common use until the early eighteenth century, when it was gradually replaced by the rounder, more familiar italic hand.

The name comes from its association with secretaries and clerks — the professional writers of their age. These were trained men who wrote quickly and fluently in a script optimised for speed, not legibility to outsiders. The result is a hand that rewards expertise and defeats casual reading.

Why Does It Look So Strange?

The core problem is that several letters in secretary hand look nothing like their modern equivalents. A few are merely unfamiliar; others look so different that even experienced researchers can misread them. The letters that cause the most confusion are:

• e — often written as a small loop or hook, easily mistaken for an i, l, or even an o
• r — frequently written as a short, angular mark above the line, looking nothing like a modern r
• s — appears in two forms: a long descending form (like an f without the crossbar) at the start and middle of words, and a small curved form at the end
• f — easily confused with the long s, since both have a similar descending stroke
• c — often barely distinguishable from an e
• h — its descending loop frequently causes it to be misread as a b or a y
• p and y — both have descenders and can look almost identical in some hands
• u and n — in secretary hand these can be nearly indistinguishable, as both are written as a series of similar minim strokes

Contractions and Abbreviations

Secretary hand documents are full of contractions — words deliberately shortened to save time and space. Clerks used a standard set of marks to indicate omitted letters, and recognising these is essential to accurate reading.

Legal documents also use Latin abbreviations, particularly in probate and court records. The preambles of wills are frequently in Latin until the mid-seventeenth century, and court records retain Latin terminology much longer. Recognising standard phrases — anno domini, in nomine dei amen, probatum fuit — helps anchor the reader in the text.

Which Documents Use Secretary Hand?

If your document dates from between approximately 1550 and 1750 and was produced in an official or legal context, it is almost certainly in secretary hand or a close variant. The main document types include:

• Wills and probate inventories
• Parish registers (baptisms, marriages, burials)
• Manor court rolls and survey books
• Quarter Sessions records
• Chancery and other court depositions
• Deeds, leases, and conveyances
• Settlement examinations and poor law records
• Apprenticeship indentures
• Personal letters and household accounts

After about 1700, mixed hands become common — some writers using secretary forms for certain letters while adopting the newer italic for others. By 1750 most documents are in a recognisably modern hand, though secretary influences linger in legal writing into the nineteenth century.

Can You Learn to Read It Yourself?

Yes — with time and practice. The National Archives offers a free online tutorial on secretary hand with practice documents, and several universities have produced palaeography courses available without charge. The key is to work from transcribed examples: read the transcription, then look at the original, then try to identify individual letters.

Progress is typically slow at first and then suddenly rapid. Most people find that once they have internalised the unfamiliar letterforms, reading becomes significantly easier — even in hands they have never seen before. The vocabulary of the documents helps too: legal formulae repeat, standard phrases recur, and the structure of a will or a settlement examination is largely predictable once you know what to expect.

That said, some documents will defeat even experienced readers: compressed hands, damaged documents, idiosyncratic scribes, or a combination of all three can make a document genuinely impenetrable without specialist training. If you have reached that point, professional transcription is the practical answer.