Anglicana Script

I have been working on my Anglicana script lately. The term “Anglicana” actually describes a whole family of scripts that were in vogue in late medieval Britain. British scribes were looking for a script that was easy to write small and quickly, so by the fourteenth century they had developed a distinctly English script. It usually wasn’t used for really expensive and fancy books, but a formal version of Anglicana is very frequently found in medium-grade books, and there was also a cursive form that was used in cheap books, documentary records, and personal correspondence.

This script is definitely easier to write than Gothic, and has a nice flow to it. It does come out looking a little sloppy, but that’s part of the point of the script: it is meant to be written quickly. In fact, it was a challenge to learn the script because I needed to write very slowly to learn it, but a lot of the letter forms can only be written quickly, or they come out looking wrong.

Here is a small medieval example of Anglicana:

More can be found here. You can also browse images of the Ellesmere Chaucer, which I used extensively when I was learning the script.