in the course of the preceding chapter reference was made to the illiteracy of our ancestors in its bearing upon trade usages. in the present chapter we propose to supplement this allusion by drawing attention to a feature of commercial life which was certainly influenced by, if not actually due to, the prevailing lack of education. the combination "merchants' marks" is so familiar as to suggest that such marks were used by merchants alone. this was by no means the case. farmers also had their marks. "when a yeoman," says mr. williams, "affixed a mark to a deed, he drew a signum by which his land, cattle, etc., were identified"; and in sussex, we are informed, the post-mortem inquisitions from the time of henry vii. to that of charles ii. exhibit a large number of yeomen's marks—"other than crosses"—which were employed as signatures. masons' and printers' marks are further varieties of the same mode of identification.

all these are distinctively trade uses, but the astonishing thing is that, in germany at any rate, marks were affixed, in conjunction with regular signatures, by ecclesiastical dignitaries and secular nobles, probably as an additional guarantee. they were also used on shields, and in england were frequently impaled with the owners' arms.

marks, then, were in no sense the exclusive characteristic of the merchant class; and yet, owing to the fact that these devices were necessarily more used by traders, they may be considered on the whole as belonging to their domain. as we have seen, every baker in the city was obliged to stamp his loaves with his own proper mark; and in other branches of commerce men would value their mark as a means of advertisement. as persons engaged in commerce were commonly debarred from the privilege of armorial bearings, marks were freely employed not only in relation to special callings, but also for ornamentation or commemoration in any and every sphere in which merchants desired to leave the impress of their personality and interest. they were to be found on the fronts of houses, over the fireplace in halls, on seals, on sepulchral slabs and monumental brasses, and on painted windows. in his description of a dominican convent—printed in full in prof. skeat's "specimens of english literature" (a.d. 1394-1579)—the author of "peres the ploughman's crede" speaks as follows:

than i munt me forth the minster to knowen

and awayted a wone wonderly well y-built,

with arches on every hall & belliche [beautifully] y-carven

with crochets on corners, with knots of gold,

wide windows y-wrought, y-written full thick,

shyning with shapen shields to shewen about,

with marks of merchants y-meddled between,

mo than twenty and two, twice y-numbered;

there is none herald that hath half such a roll,

right as a ragman hath reckoned them new.

another circumstance has to be noted—namely, that merchants' marks were entirely distinct from shop signs, such as that of the golden fleece, which, though serving the same purpose of aiding or enlightening the unlearned, were more pictorial in character. dr. barrington, in his "lectures on heraldry," defines merchants' marks as "various fanciful forms, distorted representations of initials of names," which, he says, were "placed upon articles of merchandise, because armorial ensigns could not have been so placed without debasement."

to those merchants who had no arms—and they were doubtless the vast majority—the mark served as a substitute, and was regarded with the same feelings of pride and attachment as the ensigns of the nobility and gentry. but unquestionably its chief value was strictly commercial, as is proved by an instance of litigation in the twenty-second year of queen elizabeth's reign, which is thus narrated by mr. justice doddridge: "an action was brought upon the case in common pleas by a clothier, that, whereas he had gained reputation by the making of his cloth, by reason whereof he had great utterance to his great benefit and profit, and that he used to set his mark to his cloth, another clothier, perceiving it, used the same mark to his ill-made cloth on purpose to deceive him, and it was resolved that an action did lie."

merchants' marks appear to have been especially common in towns depending on the manufacture of wool. it so happens that one of those towns was that in the immediate neighbourhood of which these chapters were written; and, agreeably to what has been stated, the church of st. peter, tiverton, which owed much to the munificence of the old merchants, carries a number of such marks. east anglia is particularly rich in such marks, as is shown by mr. w. c. ewing's papers in the "transactions of the norfolk and norwich arch?ological society" (vol. iii.). mr. dawson turner, in his historical introduction to colman's "engravings of sepulchral brasses in norfolk and suffolk," after stating that merchants or burgesses were probably the only classes except the military that were represented on monuments, goes on to observe that "these are chiefly to be found in borough towns or the parochial churches of large commercial counties where the woollen manufacture flourished." and, as we have pointed out, the merchant's mark very often accompanied him to his grave.

we have now reached the borderland, where from urban customs we pass to those of the country; and it will form a natural transition if we conclude the chapter and the section with some remarks on the rural use of marks, which is still common in regard to stock. in this connexion they are generally styled yeomen's marks; and, from the circumstances of the case, it seems certain that the adoption of such symbols took place on the farm long before they were employed on the mart. the point has been raised whether so-called "pictorial marks" are, and have always been, nothing more than rude drawings of familiar objects. mr. j. h. scott has dealt with this problem in an examination of homeyer's theory that marks were originally runic forms, and he expresses the opinion that, assuming this to be true of certain types of marks, "they lost their character at an early period and were regarded merely as signs or symbols not as letters of an alphabet." as regards "pictorial marks," he holds that the similarity to various objects is accidental. if so, this is rather in favour of homeyer's derivation of marks from runes, the forms in some cases being identical. moreover, as homeyer notes, "signa" for identifying cattle, horses, trees, clothes, and as boundary marks, are referred to in the lex salica, the edictum rotharis, and the anglo-saxon laws, so that we have here something like a pedigree of the custom.