1897.] on Greek and Latin Palaeography. 389 



haiivi still inflaencecl the legal and diplomatic hand of Europe in the 

 middle ages, and that even in the modera engrossing hands of our 

 own law courts there yet remain traces of that influence. 



To find the script which, as I have said, was destined to 

 oust the national hands, more particularly for literary purposes, 

 we turn again to the early period of the majuscule writing, the 

 period of capitals and uncials. Bearing in mind that the natural 

 law of deterioration is always at work, that a literary hand 

 soon becomes an artificial hand, and that the natural hand is the 

 cursive hand of ordinary life, we shall be prepared to find, what 

 really took place, that cursive forms soon began to intrude among 

 the majuscule forms in those manuscripts which were not of the first 

 order ; in other words, the scribes would allow the minuscule cursive 

 forms which they wrote as their ordinary hand to slip in among the 

 more artificial literary letters. In fact, absolute purity of the script 

 would only be maintained in very carefully written books. Hence 

 arose a class of writing which has been called Half-uncial^ because it 

 is composed of a mixture of uncial and small letters. No doubt it 

 took some little time for this kind of writing to be reduced to a 

 system ; and we can see it in an incipient stage of development in 

 such technical works as law books where this incipient style may 

 have become traditional. In marginal notes too, the writing space 

 being limited, this mixed hand was often preferred to the ordinary 

 cursive writing, just as we write a half-printing style of letters 

 in the narrow margins of our books. But those stages must have 

 been also passed through in much earlier times than the periods of 

 the extant examples ; for the half-uncial hand had become a recognised 

 form of literary handwriting, at least by the beginning of the sixth 

 century. A manuscript of St. Hilary, now in the archives of St. 

 Peter's at Eome, is written in this character and bears a date of 

 revision in the year 509-510.* 



Judging from extant examples, the literary half-uncial hand appears 

 to have been specially in favour in Southern France and Italy ; and 

 eventually it has had the largest career of any form of Western writing. 

 We can here only mention the fact that it was the hand on which the 

 Irish scribes of the seventh century modelled their national writing, 

 which became the parent of our own Anglo-Saxon character. When, 

 under the fostering care of Charlemagne, the school of writing in the 

 Abbey of Tours, presided over by the English Abbot Alcuin, was 

 developing the script which was to supersede the degenerate scrawls 

 of the national Merovingian hand, the literary half-uncial was chosen 

 as a model, and a beautiful form of writing, such as is seen in the 

 Gospels of the Emperor Lothaire of the middle of the ninth century, 

 was the result. This hand, somewhat simplified, became the Carlo- 

 vingian minuscule which was gradually adopted as the basis of the 

 mediasval literary hands of Western Europe. But when those new 



* Pal. Soc, 1.136. 

 Vol. XV. (No. 91.) 2 d 



