From: benlizro@ihug.co.nz   
      
   And the linguistic angle is...   
   "The original is written in medieval Latin, as was normal for official   
   documents at the time..."   
   And this goes on to scribal abbreviations, which were also normal at the   
   time:   
      
   "...in Magna Carta _and_* was written as a dash with a small tail, _per_   
   ('of') could appear as a letter 
 with a crossbar on the descender,   
   and _nostra_ ('our') was written  with a horizontal line above."   
      
   *He should really have written: _et_ ('and').   
      
   (Something that came up quite recently in the excerpt from the Chronicle   
   about the Danes sacking Lindisfarne):   
      
   "A symbol that looked like the numeral 7 was very frequent in   
   Anglo-Saxon texts as a replacement for _and_: it derives from the symbol   
   used in classical Latin for _et_ ('and') by Cicero's scribe, Marcus   
   Tullius Tiro (and thus often called the 'Tironian _et_')."   
   As Aidan knew.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)