Democratic Sentinel, Volume 7, Number 37, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 October 1883 — Witness My Hand and Seal. [ARTICLE]

Witness My Hand and Seal.

In the year 800 after Christ, the Goths, the Vandals, the Franks, the Huns, the Noremans, the Turks, and other barbarian hordes, had invaded and overthrown the Roman Empire, and had established various kingdoms on its rhins. In the then so-called Christian nations, there existed no science worthy of the name, no schools whatever. Beading, writing, and ciphering were separate and distinct trades. The masses, the nobility, the poor, and the rich were wholly unacquainted with the mysteries of the alphabet and the pen. A few men, known as clerk?, who generally belonged to the priesthoood, monopolized them as a special class of artists. They taught their business

only to their seminarists, apprentices; and beyond themselves and their few pupils no one knew how to read and write, nor was it expected of the generality, any more than it would be now-a-days that everybody should be a shoemaker or a lawyer. Kings did not even know how to sign their names, so that when they wanted to subscribe to a written contract, law, or treaty, which some clerk had drawn up for them, they would smear their right hand with ink and slap it down on the parchment, saying, “Witness my hand.” At a later day some genius devised the substitute of the seal, which was impressed instead of the hand, but oftener beside the hand. Every gentleman had a seal with a peculiar device thereon. Hence the. sacramental words now in use, “Witness my hand and seal, ” affixed to modern deeds, at least serve the purpose of reminding us of the ignorance of the Middle Ages.