The OED defines black letter as a “name (which came into use about 1600) for the form of type used by the early printers, as distinguished from the ‘Roman’ type, which subsequently prevailed. A form of it is still in regular use in Germany, and in occasional use (under the name of ‘Gothic’ or ‘Old English’) for fancy printing in England” (OED). As the OED’s definition suggests, black letter has come generically to identify “fancy printing in England,” but its evolution and use are more complex than this definition indicates. The generic “black letter” comprises a group of typefaces used in early printing in France, Germany, and England, and, as the OED definition states, these fonts are usually defined in contrast to the “roman” typeface that is now the dominant form of English and western European print. Since black letter was the dominant typeface in early English printing, it is not remarkable that it appears on so many early broadside ballads, and commentators on the ballad usually refer to the presence of black letter only in passing. Tessa Watt refers to the presence of black letter text in friezes in alehouses and cottages, commenting that the “evidence suggests that . . . even the ‘illiterate’ would have had contact with large black-letter texts on the walls, not only in church, but also in some drinking places, neighbors’ dwellings, and even their own” (220).

Watt also notes that “[b]oth the typographical font and the painted scripts were based on hand-written forms from the manuscript period” (220), and cites Philip Gaskell to add that the “English ‘black-letter’ type face developed from a late fifteenth-century French ‘textura’ script” (220). Leo Olschki expands upon this relationship of early print to hand-written manuscripts: “‘The discovery of typographic printing did not all at once produce . . . a radical change in the aspect of the book. The first works which left the hands of the printers were astonishingly like the manuscripts of the same period. . . . The letters of the printed text present the same characters as those which were written by the calligraphers’” (qtd. in Updike, 39).

The black-letter and roman typefaces are both descendants of the Carolingian minuscule, the style of writing that Charlemagne decreed be used in all church books in 780. Daniel Updike writes that Charlemagne “desired that the form of letter adhered to as a model by scribes should be the most beautiful that could be found. This was effected by a partial return to the letters of the Roman manuscripts” (48). The Carolingian minuscule “spread throughout France, had a profound influence in Italy, Spain, and England, [and] became the dominant handwriting of western Europe” (Updike 50). Over time, however, scribal styles began to diverge, and variations upon what we call black-letter script began to emerge in England, France, and Germany. Stanley Morison describes the impetus for this scribal change as practical and economic: because scribes needed to write quickly and to condense letters to save parchment or paper, they began to use a “frankly hurried version of the minuscule” (10), one in which “[c]ondensation becomes obvious” (11). The imperative to write quickly and in as little space as possible results in a “thickening of the strokes . . . with consequent deepening blackness of aspect in the page” (Morison 13). Morison describes these practices of expediency as spreading among the scribes in writing centers in northern Europe, and eventually becoming formalized in the textus precissus and textus quadratus scribal styles widely used for liturgical purposes in England and France. Both textus precissus and textus quadratus are forms of black letter, and textus quadratus was “steadily rendered more and more familiar all over northern Europe” (Morison 27) through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This “transition from the extravagantly spacious Carolingian minuscule to the efficiently bold and condensed type of script occupied some four hundred years” (Morison 17). According to Morison, Gutenberg’s engravers cut their letters in textus quadratus, and the first English printing houses imported French versions of the same typeface. The widespread liturgical use of textus precissus and textus quadratus in England confirms Watt’s statement that versions of black letter would have been familiar to English readers and church-goers for centuries. During the same period that black letter was becoming dominant in northern Europe, the Carolingian minuscule was being revived in southern Europe, particularly in Italy. This script was variously referred to as Antiqua, Humanist, and Renaissance, and “versions of it furnished the basis of our roman type today” (Morison 53).

Black-letter and roman type coexisted in England almost from the beginnings of print. Although black letter “was commonly employed throughout the sixteenth century, and until the end of the seventeenth century” (Updike 88), the first books printed entirely in roman type appeared as early as 1518 in England. As we see in some broadside ballads, both types were often used in the same works. The first version of the King James Bible, published in 1611, uses black letter for scriptural text and roman for glosses and ancillary text. In the eighteenth century black letter “was still used for law-books, proclamations, licenses, etc.” (Updike 88), but rarely for body text in popular, secular works. Readers increasingly accustomed to roman type apparently found the black letter difficult to read. In 1775, the poet Gray famously complained in a letter to a friend, “‘Had the Gothic character . . . no ill effect upon your eye?’” (qtd. in Updike 88). By the nineteenth century, black letter had become an anachronism, used only sparingly and for antiquary effect. The varied use of black-letter and roman typefaces in broadside ballads seems to reflect this gradual shift in the conventions of reading in England. For those early sixteenth-century printers of broadside ballads who possessed both the black-letter and roman typefaces, black letter might have seemed the appropriate choice for the text of the ballad itself, one that communicated to a reading audience accustomed to seeing black letter in religious and legal settings the ballad text’s legitimacy and authority. To later printers, composing broadsides for an audience that had come to prefer roman type, black letter might seem effective only when minimized to a type of ornamentation appropriate only for short titles and headings.

Histories of material production processes tend to enshrine the products of “high” culture that are the outputs of those processes. The conventional histories of typography describe the evolution of type as a process that occurs in the sacred and classical texts of high culture. In an almost fetishistic manner, these histories regard the typeface itself as an aesthetic object, an object that can be contemplated in isolation from its cultural and historical context. The broadside is invisible in histories such as these, and a comprehensive analysis of the use of black-letter and roman typefaces in broadside ballads is yet to be written.

~ Gerald Egan

Works Cited

Febvre, Lucien and Martin, Henri-Jean. The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450 - 1800. Trans. David Gerard. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities, 1976.

Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford University Press, 2004 <http://dictionary.oed.com/>

Morison, Stanley. 'Black-Letter' Text. Cambridge [ England]: Cambridge UP, 1942.

Updike, Daniel Berkeley. Printing Types, Their History, Forms, and Use: A Study in Survivals . Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1962.

Watt, Tessa. Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550 - 1640 . Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991.