What is now called "foolscap paper" originally took its name from a paper-mark in the form of a fool's cap and bells, a device which was frequently used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Some of Caxton's books, printed in Westminster, bear many different paper-marks of Germany and Flanders, even in the same volume.
Paper was also made at an early date in Constantinople, through its intimate relationship with the East. Hence the Monk Theophilus, writing in the eleventh century, calls linen-paper "Greek vellum," pergamena Graeca; see I. 24.
This old paper is almost as stout, tough and durable as parchment—very unlike modern machine-made paper.
The size was made by boiling down shreds of vellum. Blotting-paper is paper that has not been sized. A coarse grey variety was used as early as the fifteenth century, though, as a rule, fine sand was used for this purpose till about the middle of the present century, especially on the Continent.