Many of the merchants’-marks of our own country, which so frequently appear on stained glass windows, monumental brasses, and tombstones in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, bear a considerable likeness to the ancient Runic monograms, from which it is not unlikely that they were originally derived. The English trader was accustomed to place his mark as his “sign” in his shop-front in the same manner as the Spaniard did his monogram: if he was a wool-stapler, he stamped it on his packs; or if a fish-curer, it was branded on the end of his casks. If he built himself a new house, his mark was frequently placed between his initials over the principal door-way, or over the fireplace of the hall; if he made a gift to a church or a chapel, his mark was emblazoned on the windows beside the knight’s or the nobleman’s shield of arms; and when he died, his mark was cut upon his tomb. Of the following merchants’-marks, the first is that of Adam de Walsokne, who died in 1349; the second that of Edmund Pepyr, who died in 1483; those two marks are from their tombs in St. Margaret’s, Lynn; and the third is from a window in the same church.[I-23] [Footnote I-23: The marks here given are copied from Mackarel’s History of King’s Lynn, 8vo. 1737. In the same book there are upwards of thirty more of a similar kind, from the middle of the fourteenth century to the latter end of the seventeenth. Perhaps no two counties in the kingdom afford so many examples of merchants’-marks and monumental brasses as Norfolk and Suffolk.] [Illustration] In Pierce Ploughman’s Creed, written after the death of Wickliffe, which happened in 1384, and consequently more modern than many of Chaucer’s poems, merchants’-marks are thus mentioned in the description of a window of a Dominican convent: “Wide windows y-wrought, y-written full thick, Shining with shapen shields, to shewen about, With _marks of merchants_, y-meddled between, Mo than twenty and two, twice y-numbered.[I-24]” [Footnote I-24: “_Y-meddled_ is mixed; the marks of merchants are put in opposition to the ‘shapen shields,’ because merchants had no coats of arms.”--Specimens of the Early English Poets, by George Ellis, Esq. vol. i. p. 163. Edit. 1811.]