The Digital Exeter Book Hand
The Exeter Book's hand is now digital
A facsimile font set drawn from the scribal hand of the 10th-century Exeter Book — and an interactive edition of the poems within.
The Project
A thousand-year-old hand, made to type with
EBH is an open-source digital revival of the calligraphic style of the Exeter Book scribe — a standard of English Square minuscule that 10th-century scribes aspired to emulate.
It comes in four styles — Facsimile, Alternates, Initials, and Runes — with 300+ glyphs covering Old English characters, historical ligatures, medieval punctuation, and more.
Type Specimen
Write in the scribal hand
Type anything below and see it rendered in EBH Facsimile — with historical ligatures and Old English letterforms applied automatically.
The Facsimile Edition
Read the Exeter Book
Selected poems from the manuscript, set in EBH Facsimile. Click any word for its definition, grammatical form, and corpus frequency — drawn from the Dictionary of Old English.
The Script
English Square minuscule
Written around AD 970, the Exeter Book scribe worked in a formal hand Sir E. M. Thompson described as a standard example of what 10th-century scribes aspired to emulate — elegant, upright, with long ascenders and a fine balance of light and heavy strokes.
a mycel Englisc boc be gehwilcum þingum on leoð-wisan geworht
— Leofric's donation list, Exeter Cathedral, before 1072
Free & Open Source
Download the EBH Font Collection
Released under the SIL Open Font License — free to use, modify, and redistribute.
Download fonts