Many 18th century texts between 1735 and 1800 were printed using the font Caslon designed by William Caslon (1692-1766), sometime around 1722. Texts can be difficult for modern readers not least for the common use of the long s:

The long s looks like a letter "f" but without the right side crossbar i.e. ſ

You will also find the following ligatures.

Spelling is often wrong and can vary many times in the same document, especially with personal and place names. I have seen MacDonald spelled five different ways in one paragraph. Dictionaries were not commonly used until Samuel Johnson published his in 1755 (Johnson's Dictionary, 6th Edition, Volume 1 and Volume 2). Also useful might be An etymological dictionary of the Scottish language Volumes One, Two, and Four.

The AE dipthong (ligature) Æ is also commonly used as in the name Æneas. Similarly the lower case oe (œ), and ae (æ) dipthong. For a reference on how to put these in HTML documents see:

Additional named entities for HTML W3C Working Draft 25-Nov-96

<!ENTITY AElig  CDATA "&#198;" -- capital AE diphthong (ligature) --> Æ
<!ENTITY oelig  CDATA "&#339;" -- latin small ligature oe, U0153 ISOlat2 --> œ
<!ENTITY aelig  CDATA "&#230;" -- small ae diphthong (ligature) --> æ

To insert the character in MS Word, if the font supports it, you will find long s in the Latin Extended-A part of the font set:

This can be inserted manually using the key combination 017F followed by Alt+X (if you use it regularly, you will probably assign it a shortcut key combination such as Alt+Ctrl+S). In the transcriptions, I have replaced all of the long s characters as it's just too confusing.

A free version of the Caslon font is Wyld which includes Word macros to create ligatures. The MUFI Andron font contains ligatures in its Private Use Area for , st, and many others.

Please note Unicode does not have a ct ligature defined but does have others such as st,ff,fi,fl,ffi,ffl, and ſt. You can make the  ligature using the Andron Scriptor Web font.

Other confusing words are the old English forms for,

the = y^e (not to be confused with the Middle English pronoun ye which meant you.)
that = y^t
then = yⁿ
what = w^t
which = w^ch
with = w^h
where = q^r
whereby = qrby or qr^by
wherein = qrin or qrⁱⁿ
whereof = qrof or qr^of
other = oy^r

There are also many superscripted titles such as Lord (L^d), M^r, Gen^l, Cap^t, and the always confusing abbreviation for John which is J^no. Finally, the £ Pound sterling is often shown as the letter "l." i.e. 500l. meaning £500.

Old English or Blackletter fonts are commonly used in texts of this period i.e. in The London Gazette where it is:

Published by Authority

This should look like the image below

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In transcribing these texts I have tried not to mess too much with the original spellings except in the case where this is an obvious misprint or it results in confusion for the reader. For placenames I have added links to the actual places in Google Maps using my map of the Jacobite Rebellion. These links are automatically populated by my Historical Timeline software. For an example see Itinerary of Prince Charles Edward Stuart from his landing in Scotland July 1745 to his departure in September 1746. By Robert Forbes, Walter Biggar Blaikie (WBB).

Also see 18th Century Units of Measure for a description of commonly used Scottish and English measures.

Searching My library

Over the years I have collected a Google Books reference library related to the Jacobite cause. Instead of searching all of Google Books for a word or phrase, you will get very high quality search results by just searching this library. For example this will search My Library for any book containing the word "Clifton".