This is the very first 'teach yourself' book on palaeography, covering all the skills that the genealogist needs to read any document that might be found at any date in English archives. Taking the form of a series of graded exercises in transcription, it works backwards in time from the modern handwriting of the nineteenth century in easy stages to the 'court hands' of the medieval period, focusing on records that are of particular interest to family and local historians. It also provides a unique, self-contained reference guide to palaeography, and to all the different letter forms, symbols and abbreviations that have ever been used in English records.