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HANDWRITING 555
many others in the various departments of the exchequer and
the courts of law, which survive literally by the ton in the
Public Record Office. This official writing was done, gener/
ally speaking, not in books, but on great parchment rolls, the
membranes being either gathered at the head, or sewn end to
end, and then rolled up. In England the roll was as normal for
government records as the 'book* for literary manuscripts.
For more than four centuries handwriting has fought a losing
battle against the printing press; to which, we must now add,
the typewriter. Yet in the general degradation one of its oldest
functions remains in full force, and even grows in importance.
For however much we print or type our documents they have
still to be authenticated, and guarded against forgery. This is
done by the signature, which is not merely a name, but a name
written in an individual and personal way that carries convic^
don at sight. As such, it goes right back to the ancient world,
and the notion of signatures was never entirely lost in the
medieval world: indeed in the twelfth century the most solemn
'privileges' of the papal chancery were signed (or supposed to
be signed) personally by the cardinals. But signatures were,
after all, only intelligible to clerks while the written commands
of kings and princes had to be recognized at a glance by their
illiterate subjects. Thus, the conditions ofthe time were against
the use of signatures at any rate in the earlier part ofour period,
when lay magnates -pro ignorantia Utterarum never aspired to
do more than to add the sign of the cross (+) at the foot of a
charter and even this seems to have been done more often
than not by the scribe. Feudal Europe therefore fell back upon
another device, also classical in origin the use ofseals. By the
sixth century the popes were sealing their letters with a two^
name and
faced leaden *bulla*, bearing on one side the pope's
number and on the other the heads of St. Peter and St. Paul. A
little later we find the Merovingian and Carolingian kings
impressing on the face oftheir charters a wax seal, which, how
ever, involved cutting the parchment to give it a grip and was in
any case too easily removed. At last in the eleventh century the
chancery of King Edward the Confessor evolved the pendent,