In origin this is very probably an Italian script, descended from Gothic cursiva, though it came into late-fourteenth-century England from France. A script analogous to the later English Secretary was in use in Italy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and at the papal court in Avignon in the fourteenth century, at the French royal chancery in the first half of the fourteenth century, and spread through northern Europe by the end of the fourteenth century. It seems likely that the script adopted c. 1372 by the Office of the Privy Seal came directly from France. It caught on quickly as the main business script, being quicker to write than Anglicana, and gradually came into more general use, although initial training must more often than not have continued for some time in Anglicana. From about the middle of the sixteenth century scholars and gentlemen took increasingly to humanistic cursive, that is the ‘Italic’ (or Italian, or as some then called it, ‘Roman’) script. Many law clerks were still more likely to be using their old ‘court’ hand, essentially an Anglicana script, both in cursive and set hands. Confusingly, the description ‘secretary hand’ (or sometimes English Secretary) was given early in the seventeenth century to the script then most generally is use, which had inherited significant Anglicana features.

Secretary script is rather more angular than Anglicana, and its thick and thin strokes are well contrasted. Many strokes are broken, and horns may be found on the heads or sides of letters. The descenders taper. There are three phases of this script, in succession heavy, splayed, and lastly tall and narrow. The distinctive letter-forms that mark it out from Anglicana are: the neat pointed single-compartment a; both the e with a bow, which may have a horn to the left, and the simple two-stroke alternative; the g with its head closed by a separate line and its open tail curling to the left; r, footed and sitting on the script line, and often made with a central well when current (sometimes described as the ‘v’-shaped r); the use of the distinctive tight kidney-shaped form of s at the end of words; the three strokes of w producing an open form that is to-day instantly recognizable; and x cursively written in a single stroke. Table 4 compares the terms used by Julian Brown and Malcolm Parkes.