There are actualy very few abbreviations here. They can be divided into two kinds: ones used in accounting, and ordinary ones used for English though they began in Latin.

Accounting
		The most familiar ones are the s for shillings and d for pence. In fact they do not stand for this at all, but for the Roman monetary units denarii and solidi. There is no £ sign here: it is in fact a capital L with an abbreviation mark through it, and it stands for libra, the Latin for 'pound'.
		This stands for somma, 'sum'.
		This stands for Receptes, 'receipts, moneys received'.
		There are two major abbreviation marks here: (1) a formalised version of the R with a stroke through its tail which you can still see nowadays on doctor's prescriptions: it stands for recipe, 'take', as if the doctor were issuing instructions to the pharmacist for making up the drug; and (2) the sign for es or is, used for example in English plural nouns.
		Here is the word in full, apart from the es abbreviation at the end.
		This stands for videlicet, 'that is to say'. It heads a detailed list.

Abbreviations used in English :
	The superscript sign (too small to cut out by itself) stands for ur. Here the word is our.
	And here it is again in the word for 'Mayor'. It is effectively a '2-shaped' r.
	This is our abbreviation Mr. It stands for master. The superscript sign is again a stylised '2-shaped' r. By this time, readers know what the words are supposed to be, and the abbreviations are sometimes cursory.
	This stands for acion or even possibly acioun. It is an extremely common abbreviation in English.
	Here is the es/is abbreviation again, this time on the word offeringes. Warning: some dialects in late Middle and Early Modern English have plurals in -is. You will have to read through the rest of the document to find out which your particular author uses, and expand the abbreviation accordingly.

Return to Question Page.

Return to Index Page.

© MEG TWYCROSS 2000