Cipher or unknown language - historical perspective

[oshfdk]

You all seem to count direction-changes and stops as different strokes.

No, I count a stroke each time the quill is lifted off the vellum and moved to start writing elsewhere. With my somewhat limited (but nonzero) experience with the quill, the below seems to me to be the most likely way the letters in my image above were penned (quilled?):

   

This is the way I would write them with a quill and the way the strokes taper and the flicks (serifs) appear at the bottom of the straights lines suggests to me that this is indeed the way it was written. From my experience when writing with a quill you have the range of about 120 degrees of possible direction of movement before you have to rotate your hand in an uncomfortable way to keep the quill from splitting, or just limit yourself to a hair thin line with the very tip of the quill. All the strokes above vary in width and appear executed with some gentle pressure, so I would expect all of them to go roughly in the same direction.

The above is according to my amateur experience, maybe professional calligraphers will disagree, I don't know.