GRAFFITI IN ESSEX 5
and early eighteenth century tendency to give a central bar to the
capital I (or J, the same letter then) and also to the numeral 1.
This bar was at first a gracious and reasonable addition, grew
gradually larger, and by 1700 assumed an inartistic and monstrous
grossness, which doomed it to extinction before 1780.
An unreliable indication of date is the letter W with interlaced
sides—in fact, a V V writ more closely; this was still frequent in
the last century (indeed, I write my own capital W like this) so
that by itself it is little or no guide to the date of an inscription.
But I should say that both the barred I and the interlaced W coming
together in an inscription would indicate a probable date between
1640 and 1740.
Rather earlier, the figure 1 (one) and the letters I and J had
gracefully curved tails, and this normally betokens a sixteenth or
early seventeenth century date, but the style lingered on, more
often in professional inscriptions, until well into the eighteenth
century.
The bold, squat "face" of capital letters, particularly the very
round O, reflects the formality of the eighteenth century generally,
and may be assigned to all the Georges I to IV, from about 1720
to 1830. It should be noted that in graffiti we nearly always have
to do with capital letters and with what are called "block capitals"
at that. I have shown you one example of mid-eighteenth century
script (as opposed to block-lettering) on stone at Little Totham,
but such a form is very rare, because the curved strokes are so
much more difficult to manage on hard surfaces.
The shape of numerals is a valuable evidence of date; however,
as the numerals themselves usually form a date, this but serves to
check that whoever cut the date either did so in the year indicated,
or, what is extremely unlikely, took the trouble to make a nice for-
gery. There is also, of recent years, the cult of the antique, which
has been growing ever since the days of "Capability" Brown and
his artificial ruins, and often one sees very beautiful examples of
modern dates in the style of the sixteenth century lettering. For-
tunately, these skilled imitations do not yet extend to the dates
themselves.
Before 1500, the shape of Arabic numerals (then recently intro-
duced) was variable, differing from those of the present day,
chiefly in that the 4 was a looped cypher like a script e and the 9
was another looped cypher, like an Arabic 4 slightly rotated, hence
the date "1494" is tricky to decipher, as the date panel on Monken
Hadley (Herts.) Church tower will show. The sweeping tails of the
one, five, seven, and nine and the upright of the six are charac-
teristic of sixteenth century dates, and of the early seventeenth
century, but as I said before, the 1 and 7 tails persist much later
than the others. An O for zero, somewhat smaller than the other