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From: Ross Clark <benlizro@ihug.co.nz>
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Magna Carta sealed (15-6-1215)
Date: Sun, 16 Jun 2024 11:22:47 +1200
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
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And the linguistic angle is...
"The original is written in medieval Latin, as was normal for official 
documents at the time..."
And this goes on to scribal abbreviations, which were also normal at the 
time:

"...in Magna Carta _and_* was written as a dash with a small tail, _per_ 
('of') could appear as a letter <p> with a crossbar on the descender, 
and _nostra_ ('our') was written <nra> with a horizontal line above."

*He should really have written: _et_ ('and').

(Something that came up quite recently in the excerpt from the Chronicle 
about the Danes sacking Lindisfarne):

"A symbol that looked like the numeral 7 was very frequent in 
Anglo-Saxon texts as a replacement for _and_: it derives from the symbol 
used in classical Latin for _et_ ('and') by Cicero's scribe, Marcus 
Tullius Tiro (and thus often called the 'Tironian _et_')."
As Aidan knew.