What Medieval Calligraphy Taught This Eagle River Lawyer

It's not called a quill, it's a pin. The core of calligraphy, the core of writing, was from a goose feather, which means every alphabet, every letter in the alphabet, in the English language and all the other European languages, is shaped the way it is because of the technical limitations of goose feathers. It's like a small movie. Feather pin, being able to make that, and make as much black ink as you need out of oak galls, laying it out, deciding what art is going to go where, the calligrapher essentially going in and actually putting the final words to the page. We tend to look back at the past with a certain amount of arrogance. I think a lot of people think that way. These people are very primitive. They're dummies, they're mucking, you know, wallowing around in filth. That wasn't the case at all. It's far more difficult to work with these than it is with modern pins. They were very knowledgeable, very skillful. Get on there, I'm not going to cut. And in some ways more skillful than we are now. Our group is called HRG, and we put on a late medieval living history village for Wren Fair every year. It's been going on for decades now. It's set in 1388. It does everything from fabrics to calligraphy to armored combat. And it's extraordinary that you'd find that in Alaska, but it's up here. I was brought into the living history group, and I was looking for something to do to help out. And they had mentioned they didn't have anyone doing medieval writing. So I thought I'd jump into that and it wouldn't be too complicated. And it's been, since 2015 I've been doing this, and I'm still trying to figure it out. When you want to be a late medieval scribe or clerk, it is incredibly complicated, very difficult, which is typical of any aspect of living history. Learning what I can from what's written down, prying out different things, creating horrible smelling concoctions. That's the kind of thing that's so exciting about this, because nobody is really a full-fledged expert in this in the world. A scribe would buy their parchment from someone, and I'd buy it from my source over in Turkey, which does a really great job, through the ancient spice road known as Etsy. You can see there's veins in this, and it is animal hide. You then use cuttlefish bone, you scrape it on the page, and then you rub it on there to make sure you're getting rid of any little grease spots. So once you've prepared that, you then lineate it. One, two, three, four. You don't buy parchment with lines on it. They didn't have lineated paper or parchment back then, so what you have to do is make your own lines. You'd actually take a little awl, like a pinprick, and put pricks in the parchment page, and then use those to put your straightedge over to make your lines. I looked at the check that was drafted to purchase Alaska, and sure enough, that has all the indications of having been filled out with U.S. government-certified iron gall ink. And I know the U.S. government had official recipes for iron gall ink for use with the government departments all the way through the 1930s. I have set up here black and red ink making. Making your own iron gall ink, and pigments, and Brazil ink, very difficult. You have really interesting chemical reactions involving oak galls, these weird little oak apples that fall off of oak trees that you have to turn into black ink through a complicated and sometimes pretty stinky chemical process. And then we take copperous, our other ingredient, which is green copperous. It is iron 2-sulfate in modern chemical terms. Don't ask me to explain that. You end up with an ink that is very faint. How do you get this ink dark enough? But if I make it by the simple medieval recipes, it comes out pretty gray. I've learned recently, one of my discoveries that I've done, is that the medieval recipes that call for what's called copporous, the answer may be alum. Alum is still used for a food additive today. You can find this in your food aisle. And those two combined, it's darkened it up nicely. All right, so that's my inks and main pigments. On the art style, this is typical for most of the Middle Ages, for most of Europe. It was very flat. My figure, very crude. My living history role is as an ordinary clerk, so I don't really do anything too fancy. This is my own horrible version, but it's also very TV. And the horses always look really funny. You know, medieval horses in medieval art are very goofy looking. Adding a little bit of green foliage in here. Happy little green trees, happy medieval green trees. For the style of calligraphy on this, they don't say fonts. There's styles and then there's individual scribes' hands. But the style on this is going to be Anglican. Very careful lines and diamonds, lines and diamonds. The parchment's worth a lot of money. You don't want to waste it, so they will compress that document down as tight as they can. Humorously, it's often said you can write M's and N's and I's and a number of other letters, and you can't tell them apart. They're all strung together so perfectly. And I like to joke as a lawyer that this was done so that only other lawyers would be able to read the thing. Talk about medieval wall, and I have some thoughts on this. The advantage of writing it down is that ideally, in good circumstances, it helps keep everybody honest. That making sure people were doing the deal squared away. That's why they have these wonderful devices I'll show you. I don't want to forget this. The chirographic contract, which was invented in this period in Europe, Western Europe, where they take a piece of parchment and in order to keep everybody honest, they'll write down multiple copies of it on the same document, and then cut it down the middle and give it teeth. So when a contract has teeth, this is what they're talking about. Why we live our lives under the rule of pieces of paper with ink on them. We do it so unthinkingly. We can't imagine simply saying we're not going to abide by these things anymore. I would hope someone 700 years from now would appreciate us. What advantage is there to looking back at a time like the 14th century? Because what a lot of people do in the 14th century in particular, is say, the low point of human existence in Western Europe. And I think I challenge that. And living history in the 14th century challenges that. Makes us understand how rich and interesting and advanced in its own way, the culture of the period was in real life. Pretty impressive for supposedly primitive, illiterate people. What I try to get to is the humanity that's always there. And that core of humanity doesn't really change. Thanks for watching this episode of Indie Alaska from Alaska Public Media. Our work is only made possible by the generous support of our viewers. Consider supporting Indie Alaska by making a financial donation at the link below. Thank you.