Why Write With a Feather? The Shaft Is a Tube That Holds Ink

The shaft of a large flight feather is a hollow tube of keratin, which is hard enough to hold a cut edge, flexible enough to spring back under pressure, and light enough to handle for hours. The hollow holds a quantity of ink by capillary action, and a slit cut up from the tip draws that ink down to the writing point as the nib touches paper. Pressing the nib spreads the two halves of the slit apart and widens the line, which is what produces the thick and thin strokes of handwriting. No other readily available material combined those properties, which is why the feather displaced the reed pen across Europe from around the sixth century.

A raw feather is unusable and the preparation was routine:

• •Only the outer flight feathers of a large bird are stiff enough
• •Feathers from one wing curve away from a right-handed writer comfortably
• •The shaft is cured by heat and sand to harden it and remove membrane
• •Barbs are stripped from the lower shaft, which is held rather than admired
• •The tip is cut at a long angle, hollowed, slit up the centre and squared off
• •Recutting was needed every page or two, which is why a knife was kept beside it

The small blade used to cut and recut these pens was carried by every writer, and it gave the modern word for a folding pocket knife its name directly, since a penknife was literally the knife for the pen. That connection is the clearest surviving trace of how constant the maintenance was, since a nib softened and spread within a page or two of writing and had to be resharpened repeatedly through any long session. Scribes and clerks were judged partly on how well they cut one. The skill disappeared within a generation once steel nibs became cheap, and the word for the knife survived the disappearance of the thing it was for.

Nearly every surviving European manuscript and document from roughly the sixth to the nineteenth century was written with one, which is worth stating because the instrument shaped the writing. The flexible nib producing thick and thin strokes depending on direction is what gives medieval scripts their character, since the letterforms were designed around what a cut nib does naturally at a held angle. Changing the angle at which the nib is held changes the whole appearance of a script, which is how several historical hands are distinguished. Correcting required scraping the surface with a knife, which is why parchment was preferred for anything important. And the constant recutting means that no two pages of a long manuscript were written with quite the same instrument.

Metal nibs existed for centuries and were expensive until industrial production changed that. Steel nib manufacture developed in Birmingham from the 1820s, using presses to stamp, shape and slit nibs by the thousand, and prices fell enough within two decades that a steel nib cost a fraction of a penny. That ended the feather within a generation across Europe, although legal and ceremonial use continued and one is still placed at each counsel table in the United States Supreme Court by tradition. Fountain pens from the 1880s added an internal reservoir, removing the constant dipping. Ballpoints from the 1940s removed the need for controlled ink flow entirely and displaced everything else.

A large flight feather has a hollow shaft holding ink, hard enough to cut into a nib and flexible enough to spread under pressure, which produces the varying line of handwriting. Preparation required curing, cutting, hollowing and slitting, and recutting every page or two, which is why a small knife was carried and why a pocket knife is still called a penknife. Cheap steel nibs from the 1820s ended it within a generation.