Script and appearance of BDL

In writing their material, the BDL scribes employed what is known as secretary hand. This form of handwriting was employed by literati in England and Scotland from the late fifteenth century, and by the mid-sixteenth century it functioned as the normal business hand of both countries. In Lowland Scotland, its range of uses – legal, ecclesiastical, personal and literary – is attested by a wealth of material, much of it written in Scots and Latin. The use of this hand connects BDL with the wider literary world of Lowland Scotland and England, and sets it apart from Gaelic convention, both in Scotland and Ireland. In the Gaelic west, scribes generally used the script known as corra-litir (literally ‘peaked-letter’), a development of medieval insular book-hand. The Gaelic hand was highly ornate, and could be richly elaborated by means of decorated initials and such devices as rubrication.   Compared with medieval Gaelic manuscripts in conventional Gaelic script, BDL looks dull and even amateurish, but it is similar in style to Lowland Scots compilations, such as the Asloan Manuscript.  Only occasionally do its scribes attempt to provide a decorated initial, and such decoration is decidedly plain.  It corresponds to the type of decoration sometimes found on contemporary notarial instruments. This is what one would expect, since the scribes were schooled in the tradition of the Lowland Scots notary public. It is difficult to know whether they had any practice in the writing of Gaelic script, although it is highly probable that they could read manuscripts written in that script. The BDL scribes were capable of using different forms of secretary hand. For their poems, they employed a ‘set’ form of the hand, in which letters stand unconnected. For occasional jottings they often use a ‘free’ form of the hand with a more prominent cursive element.