From late in the twelfth century Caroline minuscule moves towards the virtual exclusion of curves, foreshadowing the emergence of the more compressed and upright Gothic book script (or littera textualis). The writing of script in England in the tenth and eleventh centuries is important for the development of Gothic scripts, and English influence is seen particularly in the treatment of the feet of minims. Although manuscripts that are neither prototypically one nor the other can be called late Caroline or early Gothic, there are good grounds for recognizing a transitional script, its origins traceable to Norman England and Norman and Angevin France in the latter part of the eleventh century and the first half of the twelfth. The term most widely used of this transitional script is Protogothic; alternative terms, whose elements can be mixed and matched, are Primitive Gothic, praegothica and littera minuscula protogothica, the last of these a salutary reminder that all Gothic scripts are minuscules. The elaborate forms of capital letters typical of the Gothic period, not all of them merely enlarged forms of minuscule shapes, are beginning to develop. So far as English scripts are concerned, from the first half of the twelfth century English Caroline minuscule was transmuting into its Protogothic phase, a change common to the writing both of Latin and of the vernaculars English and Anglo-Norman French. The dates for the use of Protogothic in England are from the first half of the twelfth century (particularly in documents) to the early thirteenth century.

Protogothic minuscule is to be distinguished from those scripts that immediately precede it by its pronounced angularity. Typically its letters are pointed ovals in form. In addition, virtually every stroke possible has a foot. The beginnings of ‘biting’ can be glimpsed, that is fusions between two adjacent curved letters. This generally appears between d and a following e first of all: in the first hand of the Peterborough Chronicle (pl. 23) d and e sometimes touch one another (e.g. ‘scolde’, l. 4); with the greater compression of the second hand, biting is emergent (e.g. ‘sende’, l. 12).