Every family historian in Scotland eventually meets the same wall: a beautifully preserved document you cannot read a word of. The letters loop where you expect them to stand upright, the spelling is strange, and half the words seem to be missing their endings. Take heart. Secretary hand, the scrivener's script of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Scotland, is a puzzle with a finite number of pieces, and every piece you learn unlocks thousands of documents.

Why Scottish Hands Look So Foreign

Until the eighteenth century, most legal and church records were written in secretary hand, a style imported from continental Europe and used by clerks across Britain. It is not the italic copperplate of Jane Austen novels. Secretary hand is compact, angular and full of shortcuts, designed for speed with a quill on expensive paper.

Several letterforms trip up beginners again and again:

• A single downstroke like a backwards 'c' is usually e, not 'c' or 'o'.
• A looping descender that resembles 'y' is often a or the prefix th.
• The letters u, v, n and m are built from identical strokes, distinguished only by how many humps they carry.
• c and t can look almost identical; context is your referee.
• s at the end of a word often appears as a flourish resembling a modern '6' or 'e'.

Add unfamiliar spelling, and 'the said umquhile Johnne' suddenly makes sense: umquhile simply means 'deceased'. Read aloud, and many apparent gibberish words resolve into familiar Scots.

Wills and Testaments: The Best Place to Begin

Commissary court testaments are ideal practice. They follow a predictable formula, so once you have deciphered one, you have effectively deciphered hundreds. Look for the standard opening: I, [name], being in good health of body and perfect memory, followed by the legacy section listing bequests, then the inventory of goods with their values in pounds, shillings and pence.

Useful vocabulary to watch for includes testament dative (where no will was left and the court appointed an executor), confirmit (confirmed), and guidis or geir (goods). Money appears as lib. for pounds, s. for shillings and d. for pence, from the Latin librae, solidi, denarii.

Because testaments name spouses, children and neighbours, they repay the effort twice over: you build reading skill and your family tree at the same time.

Sasines and Legal Deeds: Where Abbreviations Bite

Sasines are the records of land transfer, and they are dense with contractions. Clerks saved parchment by lopping off word endings and marking the omission with a tilde or a small stroke. Common examples:

• Wm for William, Robt for Robert, Alexr for Alexander
• Ld for lord, Ldship for lordship, her or hes for heirs
• p for per or pro, pnt for present, sd for said
• ane for one, twa for two, thrie for three
• mercat for market, burgh for town, tenement for a building plot

Sasines often begin with the phrase In the name of God, Amen or refer to the feu (a perpetual lease) and the superior (the landowner above you in the chain). Dates are frequently written with Roman numerals, so xvj is 16, and the regnal year may be given instead of the calendar year, as in 'in the fyft yeir of our soverane lord'.

Kirk Session Minutes: Gossip in Difficult Script

Kirk session minutes are the richest social records in Scotland. They deal with fornication, sabbath-breaking, drunkenness and poor relief, and they are written in a looser hand than legal documents, often by a schoolmaster rather than a professional clerk. Expect:

• Delated or dilated: reported to the session for discipline
• Compeared: appeared before the minister and elders
• Admonished, rebuked or absolved: the outcome of the case
• Stool of repentance: the public seat where offenders sat during services
• Poors roll or poor's box: lists of those receiving relief

Names of farms, crofts and neighbours appear constantly, which makes these minutes a secret weapon for placing your ancestors in a precise parish landscape.

Practical Techniques That Actually Work

Transcribe line by line, not word by word. Reading for meaning first and letters second stops you obsessing over one stubborn shape. Keep a notebook of letterforms and contractions you meet, and revisit it before each new document.

Always note the date, place and scribe in your transcription. Hands vary enormously between clerks, so what defeated you in one volume may melt away in the next. Compare unknown words with known ones on the same page: a clerk will form the same letter consistently.

Read the document aloud. Scots spelling is phonetic, and hearing 'chairge' as 'charge' or 'frie' as 'free' shortcuts hours of struggle. If you can, work from a clear digital image and enlarge it, rather than straining over a faint microfilm print.

Finally, accept that some words will always be guesses. Mark them in square brackets and move on. Fluency in secretary hand arrives the way it does in any language: through steady, unglamorous practice with documents that genuinely interest you.