26-10-2018, 11:40 AM
It was a custom in the early medieval period to add a second line to a major descending stroke to "embellish" the character.
Most of the time it was done in another color, although not always. I'm pretty certain the VMS author was trying to imitate this, but because the text is small and it was done in the same color, the result is a bit messy and muddy and they appear to have abandoned the attempt after doing a few.
It's useless to look at close-ups of one or two letters with this extra line, you have to look at where the scribe started doing this and where it ended and then you can see the pattern on the page. It really looks like an attempt at making it "fancy" that didn't work and thus wasn't continued for very long.
Most of the time it was done in another color, although not always. I'm pretty certain the VMS author was trying to imitate this, but because the text is small and it was done in the same color, the result is a bit messy and muddy and they appear to have abandoned the attempt after doing a few.
It's useless to look at close-ups of one or two letters with this extra line, you have to look at where the scribe started doing this and where it ended and then you can see the pattern on the page. It really looks like an attempt at making it "fancy" that didn't work and thus wasn't continued for very long.