6 THE ESSEX NATURALIST
figures, is consistent with an early sixteenth century date, but
sometimes occurs later.
I will not trouble you with the forms of letters now extinct, be-
cause it is extremely unlikely that you will find graffiti containing
the Saxon letters "thorn", "yogh", and the ancient forms of W
and R, which persisted up to and a little beyond the Black Death,
in the mid-fourteenth century. Although in written English you
will find "thorn" used in the words "the" and "that" up to
the end of the fifteenth century, I have never seen it in such late
graffiti.
Of course, the date of the wall, brick, stone, or woodwork
operated upon is a terminus a quo, except in the rare case of re-
used, inscribed brick or wood, or the not-quite-so-rare case of re-
used stone. Therefore you would not expect any of the initials
upon the obviously eighteenth century brick pillar at Dedham to
be other than Georgian, or nineteenth century; in fact, I do not see
any earlier than eighteenth century, or, indeed, later than mid-
nineteenth century. A reliably-dated graffito is, on the contrary, a
terminus ad quern for the material upon which it is inscribed—thus,
the ancient timber door in Colchester Castle Prison, which bears
the inscription "A H 1610", must clearly be at least of very early
seventeenth century date, and might safely be supposed to be of
the sixteenth century.
In the nineteenth century an interesting and perhaps debatable
change took place. Up to about 1850, the lettering of nineteenth
century amateur graffiti was usually good, but perhaps rather
narrower than the letter-forms used in eighteenth-century graffiti,
following the contemporary trend of handwriting. Then, more
widespread education led to an increase in the number of those
who could scribble, but very soon after the Education Acts of
1862, while illiteracy declined so also did the quality of such
writing as was produced. Concomitant with the decline in cali-
graphy, was an increasing weakness in the form of initials cut on
brick and stone, and this decline had progressed far by 1914. It
has gone a little farther (but had not much farther to go towards
complete illegibility) up to the present day: a fruitful source of
evidence for this decline are the initials and dates cut by soldiers
serving in the two wars. To offset this jeremiad, I should plead in
defence of the moderns that they rarely have the time, or perhaps
the boredom, which their eighteenth and seventeenth century pre-
decessors so obviously had, and to spare. But this spectacle of edu-
cation simultaneously widened and weakened is neither inspiring
nor very interesting and we will turn back to some of the quaint
and sometimes informing diagrams which are found as graffiti.
The sixteenth century ship at Rainham, I have already dis-
cussed. There is another ship, this time in full sail, to be seen in the