I wasn’t planning on doing any scrolls this reign, given how busy I currently am as reign herald for Donovan and Meghanta, but I saw the AoA for this recipient come up on the list of upcoming awards, and given that (a) it wasn’t assigned yet and (b) I absolutely adore this person, I cornered Kingdom Signet at an event and made grabby hands.
Given that level of busy, though, and the fact that I work a second job in December, I knew that my timeline on this would be pretty crunched, so I would need to continue using fairly simple exemplars that lean into my strengths, rather than work on expanding outside my comfort zone.
So! What do we know about the recipient? Their persona is early 15th century England, specifically a clerk or scribe, which also means they are very likely to appreciate an elegant hand, clean work, and the most excruciatingly period text I can come up with. They sew in addition to doing scribal work; they love helping out in basically any context; and they are one of the most unfailingly kind people I have met in the SCA.
Given 15th century English (and specifically early 15th century), my old friend the Rugby-de Brailes Bible is out, which is probably good anyway; I need practice working from other sources. I poked around a bit and found several options, from which I chose Lehigh Codex 07, which is fragments of leaves from an anonymous 15th-century copy of the Middle English Brut chronicle. I settled on this one because the hand is unspeakably gorgeous and I thought I would enjoy it immensely, and also because the illumination is simple and elegant, which would be manageable with my limited skills and time. It was only later that I realized the foliage in the illumination could be taken as an allusion to the recipient’s given name (Basil); a happy coincidence.
So we’ve got the exemplar for the document; where are we getting the words? I poked around in the Middle English Texts Series website, filtering on 15th century and prose, since I didn’t think I had enough time to really do a poetic text justice, and spent a little bit of time waffling between The Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers, which has a lovely section listing virtues that I felt I could easily adapt to a praise text, and The Game and Playe of the Chesse, which has a section describing craftspeople and the virtues they should have, which would be easy enough to adapt for a recipient known for their craft work.
Ultimately I landed on The Game and Playe of the Chesse, and lifted whole sections straight out of it with minimal substitutions. The final text:
Attende, Est! For so moche as noble persones cannot rewle ne governe without the servyse and werke of the people, than hit behoveth to devyse the offyces of the werkers.1 This one whiche is sette tofore the court ought to be fygured as a clerke.2 And hit is reson that they shold so be, that the kynge or quene have theyr notarye, by whom the process may be wreton. And they ought to be maad and figured in this manere. They must be made like a persone that holdeth in theyr right hand a payr of sheris, and in the lyfte hand a penne to wryte with, and on theyr gurdel a penner and an ynkhorn. And that been the instruments and the offyces that been maad and putte in wrytyng autentique. And on that other parte, hit aperteyneth to them to cutte clothe, shere, dyght, and dye. And that is signefyed by the sheris.3
And al suche crafty folk ought to do theyr craft and mestier, where as they ben duly ordeyned, curiously and trewly. Also, there ought to be among thyse crafty folke4 amyable companye and trewe, honest contenaunce, and trouthe in theyr wordes. And also ought they to rede, visite, and knowe the statutes, ordenaunces, and the lawes of the kyngdom where they dwelle and enhabite. And also, hit apperteyneth to them to entende to theyr labour and flee ydelnes.5
And Kynge Donovan and Padshah Begum Meghanta sayth in theyr court at the twelt nyght in the sixtithe yere that there is a scoler in thyse esterne londs that was named Basil Clarke6, who for al thyse thynges, hit is reson that they be made a noble persone, and bere armes, to wit:
And thys suffyseth.7
- This is from the introductory section to chapter 1 of book 3, the pawns.
- Here we begin the section taken from chapter 3 of book 3: the third pawn, which represents craftspeople. The changes I made here are pretty solely to take us from the context of chess and pawns to the context of court, and to cut down word count somewhat. I’ve mentioned previously that I aim for a word count of ~175 words, and this text came in at 289.
- Here I cut out references to several other crafts; to my knowledge Basil is known primarily as a scribe and secondarily as a sewist, and the text should reflect that.
- The original references “crafty men,” but Basil’s pronouns are they/them, so I wanted to keep the entire text as gender-neutral as possible; I made several changes along those lines.
- This sentence is from chapter 1 of book 3: the first pawn, which represents laborers. Basil is known for their hard work, and I wanted to reference that in this text as well, but the chapter about artisans doesn’t have much on that theme, so I dug around to find something that would suit.
- Every section in this source starts with a description of the class of people it’s referencing, and then goes into anecdotes about that sort of person from history, literature, and myth; this seemed a perfect way to transition into the bestowal section of a standard scroll structure. I do generally otherwise prefer to have the “we, [royals], have good stuff to say about [recipient], and here we go” section at the top, but it felt appropriate to stay true to the structure of the source for this one.
- I hate when scrolls end with the recipient’s arms, doubly so when the recipient doesn’t have registered arms yet - the herald ends up trailing off, and it feels unfinished. Fortunately, this source ends (almost) every section with a variant on “and thys suffyseth,” so it felt like a good way to close the scroll text out as well.
- I originally didn’t have a call to attend at the start, but I looked at my text and the exemplar for the document and realized I had meant to start my text with an A so I could copy directly, and went “oops.” So, “Attend!”
- This being a Middle English text means that not only did I have to take care in the sections I composed myself (instead of lifting them directly) to keep the feel of the original, but also to make sure I spelled them in a way that followed any of the several ways they may have been spelled in period. The Middle English Dictionary was invaluable for this!
- I came this close to avoiding having the letter x in my text, which would have been nice because I hadn’t found any in my exemplar, but I belatedly realized that I needed to include the AS year, and whether I did that written out (as I chose to do) or as a roman numeral (as is otherwise common), it includes an x. Ah well.
I continue to not know the correct words for classifying different hands; the info on the manuscript digitization describes it as an anglicana hand, so there you go. Specific things I noted in this hand:
- half-r in its usual places (including across line boundaries which I find hilarious), including on the d, so I guess that counts as round enough for it
- yogh in several places, though my source text doesn’t use it and I’m not skilled enough to sub it in
- abbreviations: “that” and “and” most but not all of the time, and they often use thorn instead of /th/; occasionally lines over words to signify elided letters
- long-s in the beginning and middle of words, short s at the end
- capitals for proper nouns are roughly the same height as other letters, just fancier
- small dash into the margin when words are split across lines
- no bow-biting to speak of except when you’re about to go into the margin
- spacing what spacing - this scribe didn’t worry about consistent spacing between words so I won’t either
- fun letters: d, w
Gonna pause here and specifically shout out Master Alexandre Saint Pierre, because in digging through some of my older scribal materials, I found a handout he made with a conversion table to convert the standard Ames letter guide settings from their default 32nds of inches to millimeters, which is much more convenient for the rulers I use or if you happen to know that the nib you’re using is 1mm wide!
So using that conversion table and some math for how big my paper was, I settled on a Mitchell 3.5 nib and the 5/32 setting on my letter guide, equal spacing. My practice sheet to see how many lines I’d need for the text told me that I should be okay even with leaving space for the decorated initials to cut into several lines, but that I might not be able to leave much blank space for Basil’s eventual blazon. Turns out it was okay, but I was a little stressed about it!
I felt pretty good about most of how I executed on the calligraphy. I’ve finally swapped from hot-press watercolor paper to Bristol, and would like to swap to perg but haven’t gotten around to it yet; I also swapped to Pelikan 4001 black ink from the Noodler’s Black I had been using, and those two changes meant this is the first scroll I’ve done where I didn’t feel like I was fighting my tools the entire way. It made a huge difference, both in how much time it took and in how the finished product came out.
I’m always a little worried about the /a/ in any hand, because it’s the letter I am consistently worst at, but I found one in the exemplar that made it clear to me how the original scribe had formed it (stroke order, etc), which made it much easier. I didn’t love the letter /y/ and how I went about it, and could maybe have used even more practice on that (especially given how common it is in Middle English!), but it was acceptable. It took me most of the piece, but I think I finally got the hang of the angle of the flag off the ascender on the /h/ in particular. I still need more work getting consistency of angle and spacing on /n/ and /m/, but there are some good ones here, so okay. By far and away my favorite word in this text to do in this hand was wordes - the two most fun letters (d and w) and half-r, all in one place!
I was particularly pleased to find examples of all the capital letters I needed for the proper nouns in my text, since that’s always the hard part - I very nearly didn’t find either a P or an M and was working on extrapolating them from the rest of the letters, but one last pass through the exemplar did the trick. I’m very pleased at how well all the names came out - I don’t always succeed in making the names of the recipient or Their Majesties look as beautiful as they should, and I’m particularly grateful to Basil for having an extremely period name that combines letters in very common ways for the era - it made it easy for it to be beautiful!
As mentioned above, the original scribe clearly did not pay basically any attention whatsoever to consistent spacing between words, so I mostly didn’t either, and it came out remarkably well. I enjoyed making a mostly vibes-based decision every time I hit the words “that” or “and” as to whether to abbreviate them/use thorn instead of /th/, and while I probably should have practiced the thorn more, and definitely should have practiced the superscript /t/ in “that” more (I consistently made it smaller than in the exemplar), I felt good about how they came out.
I continue to need to reevaluate and redesign my working space; because of the setup I have, the words on the far right side of the page (and sometimes also towards the bottom of the page, though I’ve mostly mitigated that one) get sloppier because my hand is falling off the edge of my working surface and I can’t control the pen as well. I think it’s probably not noticeable to most folks who aren’t scrutinizing the work closely, but I notice it, and would like to not have that issue.
Because the decorative elements of this piece were so relatively simple, I didn’t feel that I needed as much time to make decisions about them as the rest of it. The primary thing that I had to make decisions about was the opening initial - in the exemplar, it’s a drawing of a king, with the split between wall and floor as the crossbar of the A, but I am no good at drawing people and needed a place to put an escutcheon (since this is an AoA!), so I swapped that out. However, I didn’t really want to keep the original background colors, and my default for a background on this sort of initial would be red and blue - but with a blue letter, I couldn’t do that. I’ve seen Basil wearing red and yellow, and figured doing a simple per-fess red and yellow background would be fine. I didn’t super love how the yellow ochre paint and the shell gold looked near each other at first, but as I finished painting the rest of it, it grew on me and I’m not displeased with it. I debated doing diapering of some kind on both sections, as would be common, but I wasn’t sufficiently confident in my ability to not fuck it up, so I left it blank; if the scribe who eventually fills in Basil’s arms in the escutcheon wants to add diapering in the background, they should do so with my blessing.
It took me so many tries of pencilling the leaves in and erasing them and trying again to make those branches of foliage look correct, and I finally got it by looking not at the angle of the stems, but at where the leaves themselves stacked up, and drawing in the leaves first and connecting them after. In looking at the exemplar, it looked to me like the leaves were drawn in using a pen instead of a brush, but that may have been my own bias talking. Regardless, my own skill level meant that I opted to draw them in with a very fine nib instead of a brush, using the same Pelikan 4001 black ink that I used for the text. I also used this as my method for outlining all of the art in black ink; this is my first time attempting that (previously I’ve looked at using a brush for it and gone “lawl no, I will ruin everything I’ve got so far if I try that” and just not done the black outlines on the finer elements) and I wasn’t prepared for the change in texture of drawing on paint, so some of those outlines (particularly on the primary initial’s background) are a little blobbier than I’d have liked.
I’m incredibly proud of the whitework on this piece. I have historically not been great at whitework, and this past Pennsic I saw there was a class in it and took that opportunity; I found it to be very helpful (thank you, Owen Tegg of Aethelmearc!), and was able to put a lot of what I learned into practice on this scroll. I think my only criticisms on that are that the u-shaped indentations in the whitework on the legs of the primary initial should have been proportionally deeper/bigger, and I could have done slightly less in the upper box of the smaller initial.
The gold in this should have been proper gilding, but I’ve never done that and I wasn’t going to use this piece to learn it, so I did as even a coat of shell gold as I could manage, which in some spots meant two or more coats to even things out. The shell gold is Guild Mirandola’s; the rest of the paint is by Archangel Arts: malachite, ultramarine, venetian red, yellow ochre, and titanium white. As always, I continue to hew to the doctrine of the One True Brush (a good-quality round #1 - Princeton Velvetouch for everything other than the whitework, and the brand-unknown one I got in the Pennsic whitework class specifically and solely for whitework) for all of the painting on this.
I do need to be more patient and careful in erasing my guidelines (or embrace the medieval aesthetic and draw my guidelines very finely in ink), because there are a couple very small smears where a droplet of moisture got onto the page while I was brushing away the eraser leavings, and I accidentally overenthusiastically erased the guidelines in the blank section for the blazon, which meant I had to go back and re-draw those after the fact. Ah, well.
While I still always have criticisms of my work (a good thing, as it means things to improve on in future), I’m genuinely very pleased with how this one came out, and it was really delightful to hear that the recipient loves it as much as I hoped they would.
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