Charter of Gervaise Payne to the nuns of Nuneaton, late 12th century (British Library, add. charter 47424). All images by permission of the British Library.
If you have managed this much, you are probably ready to try a full transcript. Work through the text pages. Use a pen and paper. Check your transcript against ours. Once you have completed that, you should have a pretty good handle on the form of a 12th century English charter.

| overview | seal | text | alphabet | abbreviations | structure | exercises |

| transcript | translation |

Click on each of the above to walk your way through the text. The transcript will appear in a separate window so that you can use it for reference at any time. These exercises are designed to guide you through the text, not test you, so you can cheat as much as you like.
Medieval Writing
Script sample for this example
Index of Exercises
Index of Scripts

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This site is created and maintained by Dr Dianne Tillotson, freelance researcher and compulsive multimedia and web author. Comments are welcome. Material on this web site is copyright, but some parts more so than others. Please check here for copyright status and usage before you start making free with it. This page last modified 1/5/2005.