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 ar............