requesting prayers for Lucia de Vere, Countess of Oxford, a pious lady, who died in 1199,—who had formed the house [or convent] of Henningham in Essex, and done many other acts of piety. This roll consists of many membranes or skins of parchment sewed together,—all of which, except the first, contain certificates from the different religious houses that the two monks had visited them, and that they had ordered prayers to be offered up for the Countess, and had entered her name on their bead-rolls. It is observable that time hath had very different effects on the various inks with which these certificates were written. Some are as fresh and black as if written yesterday; others are changed brown; and some are of a yellow hue. It may naturally be supposed that there is a great variety of handwritings upon this; but the fact is otherwise, for they may be reduced to three.
"It may be said in general, that black ink of the seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth centuries, at least among the Anglo-Saxons, preserves its original blackness [thereby meaning that its "form had not lost all its original brightness"] much better than that of succeeding ages,—not even excepting the sixteenth and seventeenth, in which it was frequently very bad. Pale ink very rarely
