4 THE ESSEX NATURALIST
1581. It reads, "wiliam [sic] bvrnel 1581 cvrate of Stanford".
(Fig. 1).
Another interesting East Anglian graffito of Tudor times, is the
name and date "harrye cocke 1584". This was cut in a floor-
board of the bell-loft of Southwold Church, in Suffolk, by a
"Home Guard" of the period, on duty during the danger of Span-
ish invasion; no doubt he was as bored as most men on watch, and
relieved the tedium in this way.
Now we come to the more-frequently encountered initials and
dates of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A brick pillar
of the old grammar school at Dedham may serve to show how
large a collection can accumulate over a century or two. It is
graffiti of these centuries and of the next two up to our own times
that you are most likely to find, and a comparison of typical
examples with the ordinary hand-writing of the periods may be of
interest. I want to emphasise that the same kind of ordinary
people who cut their initials as boys or (more rarely) as girls, also
wrote the letters exhibited for comparison. Neither the professional
stone-cutter nor the formal engrosser of deeds is here in evidence.
I will try to indicate to you some of the characteristics of the
lettering and numerals of the various periods, so that you can give
approximate dates to the undated graffiti which you may subse-
quently encounter. I show several illustrations of graffiti of
different periods, mostly from Essex, and interspersed among
them are examples of handwriting of comparable periods.
In a previous example (see Fig. 1), you will have noticed that
the A of William Burnall's name has a long bar across the top;
this top bar to the A is characteristic of fifteenth, and to a lessen-
ing extent, of sixteenth century lettering.
Again, I will ask you to notice the late sixteenth, seventeenth,