The diptychs of the middle ages for public and private devotion have been already spoken of. But besides these, two leaves occur not unfrequently which are strictly diptychs and were used for the same purpose as the pugillares in the old days of imperial Rome. Single plaques are very common, and not only are they usually small in size but may almost always be distinguished from diptychs of the religious class by the form of the reverse or inside page of each leaf. This has been hollowed out to a slight depth, leaving a narrow raised rim or border; and wax was spread over the depressed portion, for writing upon with a pointel or stylus; the other end of which was flattened to erase with. We thus find brought down through fifteen hundred years the practice of the days of Ovid:
“Et meditata manu componit verba trementi; Dextra tenet ferrum, vacuam tenet altera ceram. Incipit, et dubitat: scribit, damnatque tabellas: Et notat, et delet, etc.”
The subjects sculptured on the outside of diptychs of this kind generally also give another and a sufficient distinction, being perhaps some domestic scene or a story from a romance, as upon combs or mirror cases. But this is not always so: for writing-tablets occasionally are found with subjects taken from the Holy Scriptures.
A few examples of these writing-tablets have been preserved which have several leaves of ivory inside; although in most instances the plain leaves have been lost and the covers alone remain. A very fine and complete set, of the fourteenth century, with four inner leaves is engraved by Montfaucon (in his great work L’Antiquité expliquée) from his own collection, which had scenes carved on it from the romance of Alexander. Montfaucon describes them carefully: “Notre cabinet en a de cette dernière matière (d’ivoire), dont les deux couvertures out des bas-reliefs d’un goût barbare. Les bords des tabletes sont relevez de tous les côtez: ces bords relevez laissent un petit creux pour y placer une cire préparée, laquelle élevant un peu le page rendoit une face unie et de niveau avec les bords; on appelloit ces tabletes tabellæ ceratæ. On gravoit sur cette cire préparée ce qu’on vouloit écrire, et l’on effaçoit ce qu’on avoit ecrit, ou en y passant fortement dessus l’autre côté du style, quand la matière étoit plus gluante. C’est ce que les anciens appelloient stylum vertere, etc.” Judging from the engraving in Montfaucon’s own book, it would seem that these tablets were the work of a good artist and of the best time of that particular style; and that it was hard to speak of them as “d’un goût barbare.”
Ivory writing-tablets were used in the middle ages in England by people of all ranks, and are mentioned in inventories and wills. Chaucer tells us of the preaching friar’s companion:
“His felaw had a staff tipped with horn, A pair of tables all of ivory, And a pointel ypolished fetishly, And wrote alway the names, as he stood Of alle folk that gaue hem any good— —Or geve us of your braun, if ye have any, A dagon of your blanket, leve dame, Our suster dere, lo here I write your name.”
A characteristic illustration occurs in Shakespeare, in the second part of King Henry the fourth. The archbishop of York says:
“ ... the king is weary Of dainty and such picking grievances; And therefore will he wipe his tables clean, And keep no tell-tale to his memory.”
It is to be observed that in these quotations both Chaucer and Shakespeare call these diptychs by the name “tables,” a word which had several meanings formerly in England. We have seen already that the game of draughts was so called, and it was also frequently applied in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to carvings in alabaster or to paintings on boards in churches. In 1458 money was bequeathed to the church of Dunwich in Suffolk, “ad novam tabulam de alabastro de historia sanctæ Margaretæ,” and a “table of St. Thomas of Ynde” was left in 1510 by Robert Clerk to Batfield church, in Norfolk.
An interesting paper in the Archæologia, read before the Society of antiquaries in 1843 by Mr. Albert Way, on the famous golden Tabula of Basle may also be referred to. The writer concludes by expressing his wish that such a monument, then in private hands, “could be deposited in a national collection,” and he complains that “England alone, of all the countries of western Europe, possesses no national collection which exhibits a series of specimens illustrative of the character and progress of the arts of the middle ages, and of the taste and usages of our ancestors.” Happily, this is a complaint which cannot be made now.