388 Sir Edward Maunde Thompson [March 19, 



string or wire was passed through them and was secured on the back 

 of the second leaf, that is, on page 4, by the seals of the witnesses ; 

 and on the same page the deed is repeated, in accordance with the 

 legal practice of the Eomans. Had waxen tablets been the principal 

 writing material of the Eoman world and continued to be so through 

 the middle ages, we should at this day be writing a script quite dif- 

 ferent from the one which we actually employ. The character of 

 the writing material has necessarily had at all times an important 

 influence on the character of the handwriting; a most notable 

 example being the development of the cuneiform writing in Babylonia 

 and Assyria, where clay was the writing material in general use. On 

 such a surface as moist clay the letters could be more easily formed 

 by punctures than by strokes ; and so it would have been with a 

 prevalent use of waxed surfaces. We have seen the disjointed 

 character that the Roman writing assumed in the tablets ; confined to 

 the same material it would have broken up still more, links and curves 

 would gradually have disappeared, and in the end the alphabet would 

 have consisted of a series of straight strokes and angles. But waxen 

 tablets did not constitute the only, or even the principal, writing 

 material of the Eomans ; and a connected current hand, gradually 

 changing from capital forms to minuscule forms, was developing on 

 papyrus and vellum, alongside the disjointed cursive letters of the 

 waxen tablets. Unfortunately scarcely any specimens of this current 

 hand of early date have been found — nothing more, in fact, than a few 

 subscriptions of witnesses ; we can only hope that some fortunate 

 discovery in Egypt may put us in possession of documents to supply 

 the links missing in the chain. Coming down, however, to the fifth 

 and sixth centuries we find ourselves again uj^on firm ground with the 

 papyrus documents of Eavenna and Naples and other places in Italy, 

 in which we see the cursive Eoman hand developed into a bold, rather 

 straggling character. As an example we may select a Eavenna deed 

 of the year 572, w^hich is a good typical specimen, and, to analyse it 

 the better, we may add a table of the forms of the letters, which fre- 

 quently changed their shape when in combination with others.* 



To follow the history of this hand, I should have to trace its course 

 in the early middle ages through the national handwritings of Italy 

 and of the Frankish empire and of Spain, of which it was the parent. 

 Each of those national hands, the Lombardic, the Merovingian, and 

 the Visigothic, as they have been termed, succeeded also in develop- 

 ing a literary form of writing of its own, not inelegant, but still, even 

 at its best, rather intricate. In their cursive forms they became more 

 and more involved and illegible ; and, to the lasting advantage of 

 Western European handwriting, they were swept away by the new 

 hand which grew up in the reign of Charlemagne. It is, however, 

 not without interest to know that the genius of the Eoman cursive 



* Pal. Soc, i. 2 ; and table of Latin cursive alphabets in my * Handbook of 

 Greek and Latin Palseogvaphy.' 



