6. In a fragment of inscription from Greenwich Park at the British Museum, the letters were much compressed, and many of them were linked together (Fig. [127]).
Fig. 127.
It is difficult to draw out any general rules of form and spacing; generally o and c were very round in form, N of square proportion, and M wider than a square. The round letters were usually thickened, not where the curves would touch vertical tangents, but a little under and over, just as is natural in writing the letters. The loops of D and R do not become horizontal at top and bottom, but bend freely. A, N and M usually have square terminations at the upper angles. Initial letters are not larger than the rest.
Fig. 128.
Fig. 129.
One or two examples of rapid cursive writing have been preserved on bricks and tiles. Fig. [a]128] gives some letters of interesting form from a tile at the Guildhall. The A, G and M are on the way to be transformed into—a, g and m; apparently the hook of the “a” had its origin in the overlapping termination at the apex in the monumental inscriptions. Fig. [a]129] is from a still more rapid scribble; L, T and E here approach our modern handwriting forms. These examples are enough to show how the more cursive writing styles and our own handwriting have been developed from the Roman capitals.
Roman books and correspondence were written in such hands, and Dr. Haverfield has pointed out, as such scribblings on tiles were obviously in many cases by labourers in the brickfields, it follows that the common people in British towns had come to talk Latin. Dr. Haverfield went on to question whether town workmen even spoke Celtic. “Had they known Celtic well, it is hardly credible that they should not have sometimes written in that language. No such scrawl has been found in Britain. This total absence of Celtic cannot be mere accident” (Romanization). This argument overlooks a probability that Latin was a written language, while Celtic was not. We hardly realise our direct and full classical inheritance, and the fact that Londinium was a Roman city for three and a half centuries. Here the Latin Pantheon must have been completely absorbed into the common texture of traditional thought; here boys would have carried texts of Virgil in their satchels, and here, again, the story of the Gospel must have been brought in its first westward expansion.