Episode Transcript
Laura Edralin (00:03)
Welcome to the Life of Letters, a podcast where we explore the artistry, history and future of calligraphy, penmanship, handwriting and lettering. I'm your host, Laura Edrelin, a calligrapher based in London with a forgotten degree in archaeology and a curiosity for the stories behind the letters and beneath the ink. Through conversations with historians, artists, societies and stationary experts, I want to discover which of the forgotten letters
Who are those pioneers of the pen and journey the world to join the dots between tradition and modern creativity?
Whether you're a seasoned calligrapher, a lover of beautiful handwriting, or simply someone fascinated by the evolution of letters, type and the written word, it's great to have you with me. So grab a cuppa, perhaps your favourite pen, settle in And let's dive into the life of letters.
Laura Edralin (00:57)
No, don't tidy up. Don't tidy up. It's authentic, right? This is you in the archives. You're there. You're absorbing all that lovely archival
I am delighted to be speaking with Lucy Gibbon from the Orkney Library and Archives in today's episode.
To cover a little bit about Lucy originally from Dumfrieshire is that how you say it? Perfect in Scotland Lucy moved to Orkney a part of a small group of islands off the north coast of Scotland which I am slightly ashamed to say I had to google map it to just find out exactly where they were and she joined the Orkney archives in 2003. The archive gives access to a wealth of material preserving the history of Orkney.
Lucy Gibbon (01:20)
Yes, that's right.
Laura Edralin (01:42)
Lucy looks after and catalogues all the new archive collections and gives advice to help researchers find the right records. She also writes for the Archive Blog and hosts a fortnightly paleography group who help each other transcribe 17th century documents from the Orkney collections, which is an area of study that I'm particularly fascinated in and interested in talking to Lucy about today.
When I first started researching subjects relating to the study of writing, I hadn't really heard of paleography. And it wasn't until actually speaking with Lucy that I understood this is really around deciphering documents, kind of becoming detectives really, and enabling modern audiences to understand them. So Lucy, a huge welcome to the Life of Letters podcast. Thank you so much for being here.
Lucy Gibbon (02:31)
Thank you for having me.
Laura Edralin (02:32)
I'd love to start with how you got into archival work and in particular paleography. Can you tell me a bit about where this all began for you?
Lucy Gibbon (02:42)
I've been working in archives for over 20 years and when I first moved to Orkney to work in Orkney archive I started to do the Dundee course in archival studies and part of that course, apart from all the information about archives and looking after archives and taking care of them.
I also did a module on paleography because I'd always been interested in this script which seemed like a big mystery and some people who came into the archives knew how to read it and I didn't know how to read it so I felt a bit at a loss and I wanted to find out how to read it.
module as part of the course and that got me a beginner's guide to doing this reading this script.
Laura Edralin (03:40)
Incredible. And so I googled Orkney to try and get a sense of where you are based on the images that popped up, which were utterly stunning. And as I understand it, there's a sort of rich history going all the way back to the Mesolithic period. But the area of study that you work on is from the 17th century, right? Is that kind of the script that you were interested in, in understanding a bit more around?
Lucy Gibbon (04:06)
Yes, the records that we have hold here, but we've got about 500 years worth of records, close to 600 years worth of records here. The script, when you go back to early 1700s, it's more of an italic script, so it's more like the writing that we have now. It's a bit easier to read. But as you go further back, before the early 1700s into 1600s, then it becomes, it turns into secretory script. And we decided as a group to start at the end, if you see what I mean, starting the late 17th century and work our way back to the
15th, 14th century but we've never got there yet.
Laura Edralin (04:58)
still working out the others. Is that? So you have actually got earlier documents, but because you've got so many from the 17th century, there's almost too much to go through to get back any further, right?
Lucy Gibbon (05:00)
Yes, occasionally we dip back into sort of early 1600s, sort of 1630, 1620. But yes, we haven't gone further back in our group yet. Not yet, no. It does get harder because the script, again, changes a little bit more as you go back in time.
Laura Edralin (05:25)
Not yet.
Lucy Gibbon (05:38)
So I think we would have to get more lessons from professionals if we were going to go further back in time.
Laura Edralin (05:39)
Yeah.
And I guess so that the script actually just picking up on that, the script that you mentioned is called a secretary hand. Is that an insight into who the people were kind of writing these documents or is it a real mixture of people from all over the place?
Lucy Gibbon (05:49)
Yes.
The writing, I'm not sure if it's to do with who wrote it. A lot of the legal documents are written by professional scribes, writers, lawyer type legal people who write them. But then we've also got a mixture of just everyday folk writing letters or lists.
what have you as well. So there is a mixture but I don't know if that's got to do with the name of the hand. I think you need to ask somebody a bit more specialised than me.
Laura Edralin (06:36)
Mmm.
I feel like sometimes names of scripts come out of absolutely nowhere or maybe there are sort of lovely stories behind them that we may never know. Okay so the work that you do is all around deciphering the documents but it's all entirely voluntary so you've got a team that come together. Can you tell us a little bit more about what the Palliography Group is and does?
Lucy Gibbon (07:07)
It was just a group of people who all have some connection to the archive. There's staff who work here and people who research here and people who volunteer here. and all of them have at some point worked with 17th century records and been unable to decipher them.
And they've all gone off and learnt a little bit about it, a little bit about how to read the script. And then we've all come together, we've all started to meet together to transcribe the documents as a group all together.
Laura Edralin (07:47)
And does that help? is it a bit like having a hive mind, rather than trying to work it out on your own? You've now got a group of you with all of you seeing slightly different elements and slightly different words popping out.
Lucy Gibbon (08:00)
Yeah, it's just brilliant. It's such a lovely experience because if you're doing it by yourself, it's very easy to get stuck and then downhearted that you can't figure it out. If you're sitting there trying to work it out and you've got three or four people shouting words at you that it could possibly be or working through the letters one by one and saying, well, that's definitely an E and that's definitely an I.
So what could that word possibly be? Then it's a real help, it's real bonus. And it just keeps you going. Sometimes you look at a document and you think, I'm never going to get that. It just looks horrible. And then somebody just has to get their eye in and start you going. And then you get the next one and the next one and the next one. And it's really cool.
Laura Edralin (08:34)
Yeah.
It sounds like me with crosswords. I give up very quickly, but if you had a tea.
Lucy Gibbon (08:55)
Yes,
It's very similar with crosswords. I do lot of crosswords with my dad and whenever I go and visit he's got something he's stuck on and between the two of us we'll get it.
Laura Edralin (09:09)
That's amazing.
Yeah. I love that. I love that. Words at work and with family. You can't you can't avoid them. So can you tell us a little bit about some of the discoveries that you've been a part of? Any any exciting sort of stories that you've unearthed from from studying the script?
Lucy Gibbon (09:15)
Thank
Well, there's been a few really lovely pieces that were found. There was a letter, we discovered a letter that was written to a man who staying in Pudding Lane in 1661. And he was staying in the hotel that was right next door to the Bakers.
and Pudding Lane five years before the Great Fire of London. So we're quite...
Laura Edralin (10:00)
Dun dun dun.
wow. And what
was he, do you remember the content of what he was saying?
Lucy Gibbon (10:11)
he'd had an unsuccessful voyage and unsuccessful trade during that voyage and the person who was writing to him had called him a loser, which we all thought was hilarious. But in context, was just that he'd lost money in that voyage. but a loser of money, yes.
Laura Edralin (10:24)
Ha ha ha!
literally a loser of money, I see.
Lucy Gibbon (10:38)
still quite funny at the same time. We do like it when sort of present day things jump out at us and it's not really relevant at all but it's funny.
Laura Edralin (10:40)
You
That's brilliant. And any others? I know you were involved in a big project a few years ago. I want to say looking in from the edge. Is that right?
Lucy Gibbon (11:02)
That's right, yes. we had a paleography group a few years ago, for whatever reason, it got stopped. And then we brought it back for this project.
it was a project to discover if Orkneys had any trade or benefited from the trade of the Hanseatic League who traded around the North Sea from Shetland to Norway to Germany and all that area in between.
Laura Edralin (11:38)
was that in the 17th century as well so is this the same sort of yeah yeah okay
Lucy Gibbon (11:40)
Yes. Yes. So,
mean, there's always been Shetland as mentioned, but Orkney has never had a mention in that history before. So it was just to find if Orkney had connections or benefited from the trade that Shetland or any of the other countries had had.
Laura Edralin (12:03)
Did you discover any answers?
Lucy Gibbon (12:04)
Yes? We did. We discovered lots, lots and lots.
Laura Edralin (12:08)
Amazing.
Laura Edralin (12:10)
anything else that you have discovered?
Lucy Gibbon (12:12)
One of the larger documents we've done, normally we do little small letters and things, but we did discover a very long document which was a marriage contract. It was 1.65 metres long. We jokingly said that that's what we were using for social distancing purposes during lockdown.
when we transcribed it, it's 371 lines long, We put the whole thing on the blog, so you can have a look at it. It took us about four weeks to do it, so we were so pleased we had to publish it.
Laura Edralin (12:41)
Wow, yeah, fantastic, that's brilliant.
Absolutely, and share it with people. Discovering these things and kind of deciphering them is one thing, but being able to celebrate it and share it with everybody else is the next level. Yeah, that's great.
Laura Edralin (13:01)
So you're unearthing lots of kind of evidence which without your group really would lay unseen, unknown and incredibly you've now been able to kind of change the course of our understanding of history by deciphering a lot of these scripts and being able to connect some of these dots which is which is very very exciting.
Lucy Gibbon (13:27)
We've just been a very tiny cog in the LIFTE project, but we have helped quite a lot, yes.
Laura Edralin (13:33)
Yeah, I was going to say that. think that's very modest of you. Any other stories from the archives that you can think of?
Lucy Gibbon (13:42)
Occasionally you'll get some handwriting that gives away the accent of the day. So you'll not just get language but you'll get sound as well. There was one where it was a cargo of grain and the people were saying that they were hating the grain. We couldn't understand why they were hating grain.
And so one of our members who is from Orkney and knows the dialect really well said that, that's how we pronounce heating. So that we're heating the grain.
Laura Edralin (14:16)
heating the grain of course.
Lucy Gibbon (14:19)
but they pronounced it heathen, so you get some of the Arcadian dialect coming through, which is really nice.
Laura Edralin (14:26)
That's really nice and lovely. I mean, thankfully he was there or they were there to explain that, I guess. But yeah, I bet accents come into it quite a lot and different spellings and things which have evolved over the years. Do you see that in documents even within the kind of same century as well?
Lucy Gibbon (14:34)
Yes.
You'll get a different spelling of someone's name three times in the same document. Yes. Yes, yes.
Laura Edralin (14:54)
really? Very inconsistent. Almost like they're trying to make it hard for you.
wow, okay.
Lucy Gibbon (15:03)
find out quite a lot about the personality of the writer. You build up a sort of picture of them just by the way that they cross their t's or don't cross their t's. So you get annoyed with them because they haven't crossed their t's and then you work out how they've done a loop for a certain letter and then you can find other points throughout the document where they've done that look so you know what they've done. But yeah, you do get a sense of personality and if you come across another document, we know almost instantly that it's the same one and then we look at the bottom and see their signature at bottom.
Laura Edralin (15:43)
Yeah, so you've really getting to know the writer. That's lovely. And do you actually see the original piece, how fragile are these documents that you're looking at? are they, obviously when you're studying them, I guess you can study from reproductions, but do you get kind of hands on...
Lucy Gibbon (15:46)
Yeah.
We work off original documents, so all the original documents are here in the archive. Mostly, occasionally we'll get requests from people who've found Orcadian documents on other sites. We'll have a go at those sometimes, but it is much easier to work from copies of the original. And if we get stuck sometimes in the right earfold in the page and when you copy it...
Laura Edralin (16:07)
Okay.
Mm.
Lucy Gibbon (16:30)
...that fold doesn't unfold. So you lose some lettering within the fold. you can just, I can just go and get the original out and just pry apart the fold, see what the letters are. So it's really, it's really good to have the originals here.
Laura Edralin (16:47)
Yeah, yeah. And, and are they mostly intact, would you say, or are they kind of dug up from, as a, as a very old kind of many moons ago, archaeologists, my knowledge of kind of digging up documents is so rare, because they're not well preserved, right. So I guess documents that you would have found would have survived in some, in some way, probably not from the ground.
Lucy Gibbon (17:13)
No, usually they're not dug up, they're usually kept, if they're being kept, they're usually being kept in chests, wooden chests or metal chests, and kept in people's houses. So they're usually fairly okay. So a lot of them are in a lot of good condition. And some of the really early ones, early 17s going into the 16th 15th century records.
got are written on vellum, which is calfskin, and it's very tough. And it's going to outlast all of our paper, think. It's incredibly tough. also, it also makes it quite difficult to read what's on them because it gets quite dark and the writing, the ink is dark as well. So sometimes it can be quite difficult to read the letters.
Laura Edralin (18:12)
Wow, okay. And do you find that they're all dated? Sorry, that's just sprung to my mind. I was like, have they been really helpful and put the year in the date and stuff? Or do you have to kind of carbon date them or have them sent off somewhere? Or is it a mixture?
Lucy Gibbon (18:25)
It's a mixed year. Most of them are dated. If they're not, you can almost tell by the type of script, at least the century, sometimes the half century. So you can tell they're sort of late 16th, late 17th century. We're very used to them, to late 17th century writing now. I have to say that this is only in Scotland, the script.
You get different script for documents in England, so sometimes I'll see an English document that's the same period and I can't read it because I'm not used to it, not used to those types of letter forms. it is. The records we have in our collection are mostly written in Scots, so they're not even written in English.
Laura Edralin (19:05)
Yeah, it's like a different language. Yeah.
Lucy Gibbon (19:20)
as we use the dictionary of the Scots language quite a lot because we're trying to figure out what the word is and it might not be in everyday speech anymore. So it is a different language, yes.
Laura Edralin (19:30)
Yeah, incredible.
And are you still discovering documents? Has it kind of reached a point where you've got probably all there is? I mean, that's hard to say, right? But are you still getting sent or, you know, things arriving at the archives?
Lucy Gibbon (19:46)
Yes, there's a lot that people are still finding in attics. Attics seem to be an endless supply. But also there's a lot in private hands and then they get inherited or passed down and the new people don't want them so they'll bring them into the archive. Yes, it's still an amazing amount out there.
Laura Edralin (19:53)
Yeah
Yeah.
Lucy Gibbon (20:07)
And there's also quite a lot of collections in other archives that are connected to Orkney as well. So there's still a lot to explore.
Laura Edralin (20:16)
They wrote a lot, right? So I guess that's their form of communication that, you know, today, can you imagine trying to work out or discover all the texts and emails that were ever written? It would be an endless search or an endless project to work on. talking of which, where would you suggest someone starts if they were interested in finding out more about paleography?
Lucy Gibbon (20:27)
Yes.
If somebody comes to me and wants to join the group, I usually direct them to the Scottish handwriting website, which is the Scottish Government website. It gives you tutorials on how to read the letters and little pauses to try and figure out different documents so that you can practice every week with the different puzzles.
There are other courses online that you can do as well.
Laura Edralin (21:07)
Incredible, that's great. That's great. So you can almost start off with it just being a little bit of fun and games just online. Yeah.
Lucy Gibbon (21:16)
Yeah, we do recommend that somebody do at least a tiny bit of training, a little bit, a course like going on the Scottish handwriting website or a course like the one I did before they come to the group so they've got some understanding of what we're doing. Otherwise, it just sounds like gobbledygook or reads gobbledygook.
Laura Edralin (21:34)
Yeah.
And it's evolved slightly from over lockdown, right? So you've got virtual people participating and people closer to you.
Lucy Gibbon (21:48)
Yeah.
We started in 2019. So we had a group that met round a table with bits of paper. And then during 2020, we were allowed to meet again. We started doing it on Zoom, meeting on Zoom.
Obviously you can share the document online so it actually works really well for that. then when we came back to work and the LIFTY project started, the LIFTY group had their own paleography group from volunteers around the world and they used Zoom as well for their one. And then when the LIFTY group finished, the two groups merged and so my group now is a hybrid group of people who come into the room on the night and also tune in from lots of different places.
And so there's people from London and Glasgow. There's a lady from New York State who tunes in. I have got a member who's in Australia but he's not tuned in yet because he said he'd have to get up at half past four in the morning.
Laura Edralin (22:48)
Amazing.
Yeah, yeah, the global time zones don't help with that, they? Yeah, that's tough.
Lucy Gibbon (22:58)
Yeah, no,
but it's also great because we're an island group, it means that people from other islands to the mainland, we're on the mainland of Orkney here, but we've got people from Sandy, people from Papua West Street who also tune in. And just people who are on the mainland, but it might just be a terrible night and they don't want to drive in, so they can tune in on Zoom as well.
Laura Edralin (23:28)
Brilliant, brilliant. It makes it so much so accessible, right, to many more people. So that's that's great. so the LIFTY project is looking in from the edge so people could look that up if they wanted to find out more. But I just want to say a very big thank you, Lucy, for talking to me today, answering all my questions. And a visit to Orkney is now officially on my bucket list. I think it'd be absolutely fascinating to come and see the space but also visit the archives as well. Lovely, thank you. So to find out more about the Orkney Archives and Library you can visit orkneyarchive.blogspot.com there's also orkneylibrary.org.uk or you can connect with Lucy and her team on archives at orkney.gov.uk and I will pop all the details in the show notes.
Lucy Gibbon (23:55)
You'd be very welcome.
Laura Edralin (24:19)
Thank you so much for joining me and I will look forward to finding out all about the next discovery from you and your team. Thanks, Lucy. Bye.
Lucy Gibbon (24:26)
Thank you. Bye.
Laura Edralin (24:30)
That's it for this episode of the Life of Letters. Thank you so much for listening and joining me on this exploration of the written word. Please subscribe, leave a review or share it with a fellow lettering enthusiast. And for all the details to connect with us on Instagram or drop us an email, check out the show notes. A huge thank you to my producer, Heidi Cullop, for ensuring this podcast reached your ears. And finally, to all the guests featured in this series. Go check them out.
