First, Create a Basic Document Description:

• Height and width,

•  lines per page, non-text features (seals, stamps, tags),
  

• varieties of capitals and minuscules, signatures and initials and marks,
  

• docketing on the "verso" (dates and places and persons who witnessed the document's various stages of activity, and  the principal people it concerns [they sign in their own hands, if literate, which can be a big help if you cannot read the way the scribe wrote their names on the recto side!])

Stages in learning the scribe's hand:

•  Recognizing capital letters (more decorative, individuated).  [Find representative “A,” “B,” etc. wherever possible--look them up in Emma Thoyts!]

•  Recognizing the letter forms contained by most common parts of English: articles (a, an, the); conjunctions (and, but, or, yet), prepositions (at, from, to, by, about, beneath, beside, upon, etc..  [= a, b, d, e, f, h, i, m, n, o, p, t, u/v, y]

•  Recognizing abbreviations, esp. &, which can appear as ﹠, ∧, ۽, ⅋, ＆, et, 🙰, 🙱, 🙲, 🙳, 🙴, 🙵, Ɛ̸,
  

•  Recognizing scribal "suspension marks" which represent phoneme groups (“ing” and “tion/cion”) which the scribe treats as abbreviations—look above the vowels and after the consonants for repeating shapes that are not “letters.”

Internal Aids:

 Repetition of legal formulae gives more than one opportunity to recognize the word or letter forms.   Look up legal terms in the O.E.D., place or action or thing names online (trying variant spelling--this is before Dr. Johnson's dictionary in 1757 so spelling is not yet standardized), and try maps of England for places, looking nearby the main place name for places identifying witnesses--they're likely neighbors.
Internal recto--

• Top lines give the date by reignal year of the current sovereign, and sometimes the date by the Christian calendar—look up who was king/queen when to verify using this list of monarchs with their dates and years of reign: http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng211/reignal.htm
  
• next section names the parties to the indenture (who usually also are named in the last lines and on the verso docketing) and the places and things or amounts of money about which they are agreeing—look up person and place names in Dictionary of National Biography and using Google—watch life dates because family names repeat over many generations!; you can put the document's money amounts in modern terms by using one or more of the conversion tables available at Measuring Worth, a collaborative database run by university economists from the U.S. and the U.K.  [The result will be a rather large spread of possible equivalent values, but will give you a way to estimate whether the value is small, middling, big, or enormous.]
• the next section stipulates conditions controlling or cancelling the agreement, as well as names of witnesses who attest to the truth of the agreement, descriptions of property as surveyed including boundary markers and objects if it’s about land--identifying the witnesses as associates of the parties to the agreement adds certainty to the parties' indentification and can clarify friendships, parentage, marital ties, etc.;
• and the final section often repeats the date and the names of the parties to the indenture, very rarely naming the scribe—cross check names with top lines.

External verso—

• Docketing includes numbered dates by Christian calendar day/month/year, names of witnesses and names of main parties to the indenture—cross-check against recto names and dates.
• Later docketing/endorsements may modify or attest to the completion of stages in the original recto agreement.  Think of them as the "history" of the agreement.  Because they will be signed by some of the "principals" and witnesses named in the scribe's indenture, they may be more legible for your eyes than the scribe's script!  Ordinary people in the Early Modern era often intentionally wrote their signatures clearly, intending them to be read by all, as opposed to the bizarre and hurried "glyphs" created by famous or over-worked people.