Bale’s Court was a small courtyard off White Horse Alley.
Usually spelt with an apostrophe, it was named after Peter Bales - without an apostrophe, who was an Elizabethan-era calligrapher.
Bales lived nearby and was largely employed to transcribe public documents into books.
He was used by major public figures to decipher codes, forge letters and copy secret documents. He presented himself to the world as a ’writing schoolmaster’ who claimed "You may [...] learne to write as fast as a man speaketh, by the arte of Brachigraphie by him devised, writing but one letter for a word."
