It is remarkable that neither public nor private museums should furnish any specimens of these table-books, which seem to have been very common in the time of Shakspeare; nor does any attempt appear to have been made towards ascertaining exactly the materials of which they were composed. Certain it is, however, that they were sometimes made of slate in the form of a small portable book with leaves and clasps. Such a one is fortunately engraved in Gesner's treatise De rerum fossilium figuris, &c. Tigur. 1565, 12mo, which is not to be found in the folio collection of his works on natural history. The learned author thus describes it: "Pugillaris è laminis saxi nigri fissilis, cum stylo ex eodem." His figure of it is here copied.
To such a table-book the Archbishop of York seems thus to allude in The second part of King Henry IV., Act IV. Scene 1:
"And therefore will he wipe his tables clean
And keep no tell-tale to his memory——"
In the middle ages the leaves of these table-books were made of ivory. Montfaucon has engraved one of them in the third volume of his "Antiquities," plate cxciv., the subject of which clearly shows that the learned writer has committed an error in ascribing them to remoter times. In Chaucer's Sompnour's tale one of the friars is provided with
"A pair of tables all of ivory,
And a pointel ypolished fetishly,
And wrote alway the names, as he stood,
Of alle folk that yave hem any good."
The Roman practice of writing on wax tablets with a stile was continued also during the middle-ages. In several of the monastic libraries in France specimens of wooden tables filled with wax and constructed in the fourteenth century were preserved. Some of these contained the household expenses of the sovereigns, &c., and consisted of as many as twenty pages, formed into a book by means of parchment bands glued to the backs of the leaves. One remaining in the abbey of St. Germain des préz at Paris, recorded the expenses of Philip le Bel, during a journey that he made in the year 1307, on a visit to Pope Clement V. A single leaf of this table-book is exhibited in the Nouveau traité de diplomatique, tom. i. p. 468.
Scene 5. Page 85.
Ham. Swear by my sword.
In consequence of the practice of occasionally swearing by a sword, or rather by the cross or upper end of it, the name of Jesus was sometimes inscribed on the handle or some other part. Such an instance occurs on the monument of a crusader in the vestry of the church at Winchelsea. See likewise the tomb of John duke of Somerset engraved in Sandford's Genealogical history, p. 314, and Gough's Sepulchral monuments, Pref. ccxiii. Introd. cxlviii. vol. i. p. 171, vol. ii. p. 362.