Like most people I find the whole Leveson debate about as exciting as Slough, but when the government published its draft royal charter last week my interest was aroused by its opening declaration:
TO ALL TO WHOM THESE PRESENTS SHALL COME, GREETING!
Isn't that terrific? I'm thinking of introducing all my emails like this, e.g:
TO ALL TO WHOM THESE PRESENTS SHALL COME, GREETING!
Shall I get something for dinner tonight?
Of course, the whole idea of a Royal Charter is jarringly anachronistic, which is why I like it (this works as a rough summary of my view on the survival of the monarchy) but even putting aside what we might call the macro-anachro, that ringing phrase is really something. It takes us right back to the Middle Ages, to a time when the very act of writing things down felt new and strange.
In the twelfth century, when literacy was an arcane skill, a secretary to the Archbishop of Canterbury called John of Salisbury attempted to explain what writing was for: "Fundamentally letters are shapes indicating voices...Frequently they speak voicelessly the utterances of the absent."
As James Gleick puts it (in his excellent book, The Information), at that time "the idea of writing was still entangled with the idea of speaking." It was disorienting and confusing to think that words, meaning, and ideas could leap free of temporal constraints; that there could be such a thing as utterances of the absent.
When we're adapting to new technologies we use the habits of the practices they're replacing or modifying as comfort blankets (it's why we still click on images of paper on a "desktop"). So it was with writing, the medium through which more and more legal and governmental business was being conducted when John was alive. Those composing formal documents like charters or deeds felt the need to address an invisible audience as if they were there, in the room. Hence phrases like "Oh! All ye who shall have heard this and shall have seen!" and, of course, the one above, whose resemblance to a town crier's call is enhanced by the use of capital letters and an exclamation mark. The words "these presents" refer, not to gifts, but to the physical presence of the document in which the words being read are contained. Many charters even ended with the word "Goodbye" - a convention that the government's Royal Charter doesn't follow, sadly.
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