Bench Gallows Writing Order

[Emma May Smith]

However, the observation that the crossbar usually aligns well with the second 'c'  and less with the first 'c' to me suggest that the crossbar and the second 'c' were written in one stroke.

That's my impression too. The crossbar-secondC combination looks like an upside-down 2, and I think it was usually written as a 2 in reverse order (staring with the horizontal line and adding the final curved C without lifting the pen from the page).

Isn't the crossbar a separate stroke from either of the two e shapes? I have always imagined benches being made of two e strokes, then a third stroke for the crossbar going from right to left. Quite different from what you've depicted.

That said...I'm left-handed, and so what I imagine in my head as the expected order might be rather odd because of that.

To me, looking at Marco's example, the most logical explanation for the length of the "bar" is that it was added before the gallows. Basically the order Marco suggests seems correct, but I'm not sure why the gallow wouldn't be added last.

Nice gif by the way, did you do that in photoshop by erasing the parts in reverse order?

Writing the gallow before the crossbar and the second c seems more practical to me: you don't have to estimate in advance the space needed for the gallow (i.e. the length of the crossbar).
Yes, that's how I made the gif (actually with Gimp, but you can do the same with Photoshop).

I think this is empirically testable! That is, if the scribe did have to estimate the length of crossbar without the gallows then he should have often gotten it wrong. Using the gap between the second gallows leg and the c stroke of kch as a standard, then the gap between the second leg of the gallows and the h stroke of ckh should show either 1) more variability as the scribe misguesses, or 2) a much bigger space as the scribe is overcautious.