12 Rev. J. H. Topp on some Fragments of 
without wax, to serve as covers; and as each page held eight verses, the whole 
book, as he says expressly, was capable of containing 112: 
“Sic bis sex capiunt, capiunt et carmina centum.” 
Thus it appears that these ancient tables were in size and form very similar 
to ours; and therefore, as far as form, size, and material can be considered a 
criterion, our tablets may be as old as the eleventh century. 
But this is, in truth, no certain criterion; for M. Le Beuf, in the memoir 
already alluded to, has given instances of the use of this kind of tablets in every 
century, from the sixth to the beginning of the eighteenth. I shall not detain the 
Academy by repeating here these examples; it must suffice to mention that in the 
seventeenth century tables of wax remained in many churches, and were in use for 
writing and posting up in the choir the names of the officers or ecclesiastics on 
duty for the week. M. Le Beuf cites the testimony of the Abbé Chastelain, of 
Notre-Dame, in Paris, for the fact, that in the year 1692 there were tables of 
green wax in use in the choir of St. Martin de Savigni, in the diocese of Lyons, 
an ancient religious house of the order of Cluny, and that these tablets were then 
written on with a silver style. About the same period, Sieur Le Brun des 
Marettes, author of the Voyage Liturgique, printed in 1718, states that waxed 
tablets were in use in the Cathedral of Rouen, and the names of the officers of 
the church were written on them with a pin. M. Le Beuf himself saw them there 
in actual use in the year 1722; and it is not at all improbable that the custom 
may be kept up there or elsewhere to the present day. 
Nor is their being of a portable size a criterion of age; for portable tablets 
were certainly in common use in England in the fifteenth century, and are thus 
spoken of by Chaucer : 
‘* His fellow had a staffe tipped with horne, 
A pair of tables all of iverie, 
And a pointell polished fetouslie, 
And wrote alwaie the names, as he stood, 
Of al folke, that gave him any good.”(a) 
And they are alluded to, also, more than once by Shakspeare, which brings down 
(a) Sampson’s Tale. 
