All these are distinctively trade uses, but the astonishing thing is that, in Germany at any rate, marks were affixed, in conjunction with regular signatures, by ecclesiastical dignitaries and secular nobles, probably as an additional guarantee. They were also used on shields, and in England were frequently impaled with the owners' arms.
Marks, then, were in no sense the exclusive characteristic of the merchant class; and yet, owing to the fact that these devices were necessarily more used by traders, they may be considered on the whole as belonging to their domain. As we have seen, every baker in the City was obliged to stamp his loaves with his own proper mark; and in other branches of commerce men would value their mark as a means of advertisement. As persons engaged in commerce were commonly debarred from the privilege of armorial bearings, marks were freely employed not only in relation to special callings, but also for ornamentation or commemoration in any and every sphere in which merchants desired to leave the impress of their personality and interest. They were to be found on the fronts of houses, over the fireplace in halls, on seals, on sepulchral slabs and monumental brasses, and on painted windows. In his description of a Dominican convent--printed in full in Prof. Skeat's "Specimens of English Literature" (a.d. 1394-1579)--the author of "Peres the Ploughman's Crede" speaks as follows:
Than I munt me forth the minster to knowen And awayted a wone wonderly well y-built, With arches on every hall & belliche [beautifully] y-carven With crochets on corners, with knots of gold, Wide windows y-wrought, y-written full thick, Shyning with shapen shields to shewen about, With _marks of merchants_ y-meddled between, Mo than twenty and two, twice y-numbered; There is none herald that hath half such a roll, Right as a ragman hath reckoned them new.
Another circumstance has to be noted--namely, that merchants' marks were entirely distinct from shop signs, such as that of the Golden Fleece, which, though serving the same purpose of aiding or enlightening the unlearned, were more pictorial in character. Dr. Barrington, in his "Lectures on Heraldry," defines merchants' marks as "various fanciful forms, distorted representations of _initials of names_," which, he says, were "placed upon articles of merchandise, because armorial ensigns could not have been so placed without debasement."