Blog #8 --Forgery--Jessica Moore

From my reading in the Walter Ong book, I was able to learn a lot about the onset of literacy. One thing that was talked about was how common forgery was back then. Forgery was pretty easy because charters and other important documents were made official, not by a signature, but by a symbolic object, like sword or knife. These objects were easy to identify and duplicate. What was shocking to me was the example they had in the book about Edward the Confessor. Of his 164 charters, 44 were certainly forged, 64 were certainly authentic, and the rest were uncertain. That amount of forged charters is crazy to me. How long was it before people found out that the forged charters were forged?