As everyone knows, before we had pens, we used quills.
The word ‘quill’ is from the Early Middle Ages Low German word ‘quiele’. It was an all-purpose word that meant a writing instrument, a reed, and the hollow, rigid part of a bird’s feather.
If you didn’t have a quill then you used a reed pen. Quills could be hardened for use. But there is no way to harden a reed so they were a poor second to using a quill.
The word ‘pen’ comes from ‘penna’, the Latin word for feather. Even today we can see the two strands of culture, Latin and the Low German, that combined to make the English language.
Most quill pens were made from goose feathers because geese were common. But people used crow or swan feathers as well.
But quill or penna, using them assumes that people werer literate and could write. And paring it down a bit more, being able to read and being able to write are not the same skill.
So what was the literacy rate in the Early Middle Ages?
Who wrote? Who needed to write?
It’s hard to look back and see what people actually wrote in Britain. After all, writing existed and had existed for centuries before then. But actually writing – that was for legal documents, and admistrative tax such as public notices and tax collecting. For the bulk of the population the transmission of knowledge was oral, face to face.
I am imaging a literate man in a village reading out a notice to his fellow villagers. He was a kind of an agent of the public so he needed to be trustworthy. Otherwise, who knew what message he may be transmitting to his fellow villagers? On the other hand, the villagers were tightly bound in their everyday lives. So can we assume that an individual felt less of an individual than in today’s world? Can we assume he felt more loyalty to and identification with the community?
Why and how did that person learn to read, and perhaps to write? Did that very act distance him from his fellow villagers?
All these questions we can ponder, but we cannot know the truth.
The Rate Of Literacy
What is known is that probably less than 10% of the population was literate, and they were mostly the clergy and the nobility.
It was only after the 11th century and the Norman invasion that literacy rose with the establishment of more schools and the increasing use of written English for communication.
Making Quill Pens
A goose moults twice a year and has six useable quill feathers per wing per moult. So one goose could make about two dozen quills a year.
From the 11th century onwards, when more and more people in England became literate and had the means and the desire to write, how did quills and left versus right handedness play into demand for quills?
Quills from the right wing curve one way, and quills from the left wing curve the other way. Right-handed writers prefer feathers from the left wing because the quill curves away from the hand, which writers prefer.
And as there are more right-handed people, can we assume that there were a lot of right wing quills that didn’t have a market?
With the spread of literacy, the goose population could not keep up with the demand. We know this because records show than England imported quills from Europe.
Getting From Feather To Quill
The first step is dutching. That means putting the feather in hot sand. That makes it easier to strip off the inner and outer membrane that covers the stem of the feather.
Then dip the end of the quill in dilute nitric acid. That hardens the quill to make it last longer as a pen. The final step is to cut the end of the quill at angles to make a nib. The penman used a small knife that was known as a penknife. Now where have I heard that word before?
Coda
Moving on to the middle of the nineteenth century and we have the penny post, cheap paper, envelopes, and wide spread literacy. Follow this link to read about letters, stamps, and envelopes, in this article.
And now today, in this heyday of the written word, we have the writer Cyril Connolly warning that it is better to write for yourself and have no public than to write for the public and have no self. Here it is in one of our greeting cards, for the thinking person. Was Connolly at a party when he said this? Did the words escape his lips with a languid half-smile? Was he at the lectern addressing young up-and-coming writers?
Was he warning them from his position as a successful writer or as a critic for the prestigious Sunday Times who had seen countless writers prostitute themselves for that filthy lucre?
Well, we know that The Rock Pool, a novel he wrote in 1936, didn’t do as well as he had hoped for.
And two years later he wrote Enemies of Promise, in which he talks about how he didn’t produce the literary masterpiece that people who knew him believed he was capable of writing.
So maybe he is telling his audience exactly what it says – that it is better to be true to yourself than to choose the easy option.
Our Greeting Cards
We have a number of greeting cards that feature quills and feathers. First up is a Quill Valentine’s Day greeting card with a big feather. The accompanying text reads “‘Be my valentine and we’ll tickle each other happily ever after.”. Next up is an Inkwell Congratulations greeting card. Then we have a very classy feather greeting card for any occasion. This card features a dark brown and white feather on a dark brown background.
Following that is a clever card featuring an old fashioned Ink Pen that is in the midst of writing Happy Birthday. And finally there is the Write! greeting card mentioned above with the exhortation that it is better to write for yourself and have no public that to write for the public and have no self.