A hundred years ago, very few if any of the labourers could either read or write; even now, in out-of-the-way country places, there exist people ignorant of these (to us) necessary arts. The marriage registers of the eighteenth century prove to us the ignorance of the country folk; frequently neither the contracting parties nor their witnesses could write their names, using instead either some eccentric monogram bearing a faint resemblance to initials--a memory perhaps of a bygone and very slight amount of teaching--or oftener still we find in lieu of name the old Christian cross, which has been in use by the illiterate from Saxon times as a pledge of good faith and consent. Previous to the nineteenth century, education in country places was either altogether absent or provided out of the bounty of the squire or parson, the teacher being some old ignorant person prevented by age or bodily infirmity from pursuing active labour, and whose qualifications were merely a smattering of the ‘three R’s,’ which, with plain sewing, was the whole of his or her useful though scanty répertoire. Children then were sent out to work at the age of nine or ten years, and earlier if anybody could be found to employ them in service. When once placed out, they had no opportunities of gaining further book knowledge, and soon forgot the little they had learnt for want of practice or stimulation, nor had they sufficient mental capacity to study by themselves, except in very exceptional cases of natural genius. If this was the state of things within the memory of those still alive, we can well believe how very limited was the knowledge of handwriting some hundreds of years ago, and can more fully understand that the scribe was a very important personage, and took great pride in his work.