So, why do so many old manuscripts make their S’s look like F’s?
Asking the big questions as ever, me.
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In a recent piece, I described an old manuscript as having “delightfully odd capitalisation and italicisation choices and S’s that look like F’s”. This was obviously just some offhand snark, but as so often happens when I engage in snark, offhandedly or otherwise, it got me wondering – why do old documents make one letter look like another?
You do, after all, find this phenomenon in some pretty notable places. In the first edition of the Dictionary of the English language, Samuel Johnson self-deprecatingly describes himself as a “harmleſs drudge”. One text of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII has Katherine of Aragon tell her husband, “I am ſorry.” Even the heading of the US Bill of rights seemingly refers to “Congrefs”. What is with that?
First thing’s first: those confusing Fs are not, in fact, Fs. You probably know that, not least because it’s in the headline, but if you look closely at the screenshot above you’ll be able to see that, while the letter “f” has a horizontal “cross-bar” extending to both sides, our rogue character generally only has one on the left-hand side. (Sometimes, just to mess with us, this isn’t true.) It’s actually a character known as the “long S”, to contrast with the more familiar “short”, “terminal” or “round” S.
Going into this I’d wondered if there might be a parallel with the signs reading things like “Ye Olde Tavern”, in which, as you also probably know, the “Y” isn’t a “Y” but an archaic way of writing “th”. But that doesn’t seem to be it either: that “Y” was a way of printing a letter, thorn, which older forms of English had but most European languages do not, and which at some point we just gave up on in favour of “th”. (The “Y” was the closest bit of type available.)
The Long S, by contrast, was never a different letter, with a different pronunciation: it’s just a different way of writing the one we’re all familiar with. It’s an example of something known as a swash letter, which basically means a fancy or decorative version. It seems to have its origin in something called the Roman cursive medial S – a form of S written in the middle of a Latin word that looks more like a diagonal line (slash) – or in the fact the Greek letter sigma has medial (σ) or terminal (ς) forms, depending on where it’s found in the word. Which of these it was, whether the Romans got it from the Greeks, or how this influence was transmitted to early modern Europe, I have thus far been unable to ascertain
I am a little clearer on the rules of when you were meant to use it, but only a little. The Long S seems to be used at the start or middle of a word, but never at the end. But some sources reckon you can use it twice running in the middle of a word (saſſy), others that it should only be the first one (saſsy). In practice, to quote a blog from the US National Archive, “the rules changed over time and from language to language, and weren’t always followed by the writer or printer”. Perhaps people followed the rules they could remember.1
One thing that does seem to have been consistent is that the Long S was only ever a lower case letter. Indeed, this – unlike the whole “ye olde” rabbit hole – might be a useful frame for understanding how this whole thing functioned. When you’re wondering why people bothered with something that seems a pain in the bum without especially adding to legibility, consider the fact the same could be said of capital letters: we still use those, in large part because we’re used to a world in which skipping them feels informal and wrong. Such was presumably also true of writing which didn’t bother with the Long S.
Or at least, it was in 1750. By 1850, continuing to use the Long S had come to seem an affectation, and what caused the shift, too, is a matter of some debate. Some sources, like the 1808 Printer’s Grammar, seem to think it began with printers – possibly with one specific printer, John Bell, who introduced a popular new typeface around 1790 that dispensed with the extra character. This would make sense, as the Long S was a pain in the arse for printers, requiring not one extra character, but several ligatures (that is, combinations of letters like ſh, ſt, and ſs), because properly spaced letters got too close together to be placed on separate bits of metal.
That said, the National Archive reckons it was already falling out of favour in handwriting, and that printers were just following a trend. Either way, by the mid 19th century, the Long S was something people might use in handwriting to show they were being ostentatiously formal – the likes of Wilkie Collins and Edward Lear were still using it as late as the 1880s – but in most communications it had been dropped.
In a few places, though, it continued to echo. The German double S symbol that looks a bit like a curved B (ß) is in fact an evolution of a long S followed by a short one. When merchants in pre-decimalisation Britain wrote the price as “2/6”, that’s because it had once been “2ſ6”, with the long-S standing for “shilling”. You can still see it in the integral symbol (∫) used in calculus, too: the long-S there stands for the Latin summa (“sum”).
And it continues to cause problems for Shakespeare scholars, too. Consider these lines from The Tempest2:
Let me live here ever!
So rare a wondered father and a wise
Makes this place paradise! (4.1.122–124)
Debate has long raged as to whether that “wise” should be “wife” because of an unclear bit of printing in the First Folio of 1623.
That genuine debate may be the cause of a more entertaining but less plausible one. To quote Jeremy Norman’s History of Information:
Though it would be amusing to do so, there seems to be no reason to accept the legend that Bell initiated the change in his edition of Shakespeare because of his dismay at the appearance of the long S in Ariel’s song in The Tempest: “Where the bee sucks, there suck I.”
Indeed.
Found that interesting? You know what to do.
Also, while I’ve got you here, a quick reminder that you can pre-order my new book, 31 Inventions That Built Our World – a history of the places where we live featuring sewers, streetcars and skyscrapers – here.
If you want even more rules – and why would you not – you can find an extremely long list of them here.
I once performed in that, you know, giving my Stefano the drunken Butler at the 2002 Edinburgh Fringe. Prospero was played by Sameer Rahim, who some of you might have encountered in his later work on the books desk of the Telegraph or Prospect.