Overview

Long before cryptographic proof-of-existence, institutions and individuals built durable, hard-to-forge records that pinned down who did something, when, and whether a record had been altered. Five techniques from this tradition stand out as rough functional analogues of a modern timestamp: the Stationers’ Register, Exchequer tally sticks, assay-office hallmarks with cyclical date letters, manuscript and early-print colophons, and steganographic concealment. Each attacks a piece of the same trust problem, establishing priority, provenance, authorship, integrity, or a timestamp, and each was an independent, institutionally diverse solution rather than a step toward any single successor. They are peers in one long lineage of trust-minimizing record-keeping.

How they worked

Each technique bound a fact to a record in a way that resisted forgery or later substitution.

• Registration. The Stationers’ Company of London was incorporated by royal charter granted 4 May 1557. Its Entry Book of Copies recorded, in chronological order, the title of a work and the member who held the right to print it. Paying a fee to “enter” a title created a dated, witnessed public record of priority, using the recurring formula “Entred for his copie…”. This “copy right” system later underpinned the Statute of Anne of 1710, the first modern copyright act, which shifted protection from printers to authors.

• Split-matching. An Exchequer tally stick recorded a debt or receipt as notches cut across a squared hazelwood stick, the notch widths encoding amounts. The stick was then split lengthwise into two unequal parts: the larger “stock” kept by the creditor or payer, and the smaller “foil” retained by the Exchequer. Verification required physically re-joining the two halves so that the notches and the unique, irreproducible longitudinal wood grain lined up; a forged or altered half would not match. This was a tamper-evident, two-party integrity check that needed no literacy and no trusted intermediary at audit time. Exchequer tallies were in use from around 1100 under Henry I until statutory abolition in 1826; the burning of the obsolete stock in 1834 overheated a flue and destroyed the old Palace of Westminster.

• Hallmarking. English silver and gold carried a set of stamped marks that together formed a certificate. A statute of Edward I in 1300 required sterling fineness, assay by guardians, and marking with a leopard’s head. To this were added a maker’s or sponsor’s mark, indicating authorship and provenance, and a “date letter”: a single alphabetic character in a distinct typeface and shield shape that advanced one letter per year and reset with a new font at the end of each roughly 20-year cycle. Because each year’s punch had a distinctive letterform and cartouche, the date letter encoded the year of assay. London cycles ran 20 letters, A to U, omitting J. The word “hallmark” derives from the marking done at Goldsmiths’ Hall. By some accounts the first London date letter dates to 1477 and the permanent assay office to 1478; sources differ on the exact inaugural year, so treat it as approximate. The leopard’s head was adopted specifically as the London Assay Office town mark in 1544.

• Colophons. A colophon is a closing note in which the maker records identity, place, and date, binding authorship, provenance, and a timestamp inside the artifact itself. The landmark case is the 1457 Mainz Psalter of Johann Fust and Peter Schoeffer, the first printed book to carry a printed date and colophon, and the first with a printer’s device.

• Steganographic concealment. Steganography hid technical content inside innocuous-looking cover text, letting an author fix a discovery in a stable written form while withholding its meaning until they chose to reveal the key. This is a manual ancestor of commit-then-reveal.

Notable examples

• The Stationers’ Register entry for Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, made by the printer Richard Field on 18 April 1593. The semi-diplomatic transcription (Liber B, after Arber, via the Folger’s Shakespeare Documented) reads: “Entred for his copie vnder the handes of the Archbisshop of Canterbury and mr warden Stirrop, a booke intituled / Venus and Adonis./ vjd S./”. The date is written “xviijo Aprilis”, the entrant’s name is spelled “Richard ffeild”, and the fee is “vjd” (sixpence). A marginal note records the copy’s assignment to John Harrison senior on 25 June 1594. The ledger’s chronological order and the entry date are what establish who held the right first.

• The 1457 Mainz Psalter colophon, dated 14 August 1457 (the vigil of the Assumption). As transcribed by A. W. Pollard in An Essay on Colophons, the Latin reads: “Presens spalmorum codex venustate capitalium decoratus Rubricationibusque sufficienter distinctus, Adinuentione artificiosa imprimendi ac caracterizandi absque calami vlla exaracione sic effigiatus, Et ad eusebiam dei industrie est consummatus, Per Johannem fust ciuem maguntinum, Et Petrum Schoffer de Gernszheim Anno domini Millesimo.cccc.lvij In vigilia Assumpcionis.” (The spelling “spalmorum” is a printed variant of “psalmorum”.) Pollard’s translation names the producers and the date: “has been thus fashioned by an ingenious invention of printing and stamping without any driving of the pen, And to the worship of God has been diligently brought to completion by Johann Fust, a citizen of Mainz, and Peter Schoffer of Gernsheim, in the year of the Lord 1457, on the vigil of the Feast of the Assumption.” The colophon thus attests authorship, place, and timestamp inside the work itself.

• Steganographia, composed around 1499 to 1500 by Johannes Trithemius (1462 to 1516) and printed in 1606. The book looks like a manual of angel-magic, but its “incantations” are encrypted cover-texts hiding ordinary messages; by its own account the demonology is a deliberate disguise. Jim Reeds, in “Solved: The Ciphers in Book III of Trithemius’s Steganographia” (Cryptologia, 1998), reproduces the canonical worked example. The cover incantation (Steganographia I, ch. 2) begins: “Padiel aporsy mesarpon omeuas peludyn malpreaxo. Condusen, vlearo thersephi bayl merphon, paroys gebuly mailthomyon ilthear tamarson acrimy lon peatha Casmy Chertiel, medony reabdo, lasonti iaciel mal arti bulomeon abry pathulmon theoma pathormyn.” Minor orthographic variants of this string appear across editions. The accompanying Clavis reveals the rule: take a special subsequence of the letters, here every other letter of every other word (“padiel aPoRsY mesarpon oMeUaS peludyn mAlPrEaXo …”). The literal extraction spells the medieval variant “prymus apex”, normalized to “primus”; the fuller recovered sentence is a self-describing acrostic instruction, “primus apex verbi primi, tercii et cetera doceat artem” (“the first character of the first word, of the third, etc., will teach you the art”). Book III resisted analysis until Thomas Ernst (1996) and, independently, Jim Reeds (1998) demonstrated hidden cryptograms in its planetary tables. A fixed written artifact registered the author’s work while withholding its content until the author chose to reveal the key.

Relevance to Truestamp

These techniques and modern cryptographic proof-of-existence sit together in one long lineage of trust-minimizing record-keeping, and Truestamp is a peer in that lineage rather than its culmination. A dated register entry, like a submission window proof, records that something existed and was claimed by a party no later than a given time, while a split tally and a steganographic concealment each hide-and-bind a fact the way a hash commitment does, proving a result existed without revealing it. What changes is the trust model: Truestamp rebuilds these ideas on mathematics, so a proof can be verified by anyone, offline, without trusting the institution that issued it.

Citations

1. Stationers’ Register history (Cornell Library guide). Background on the Register as a chronological ledger of publication rights.
2. Shakespeare Documented (Folger): Stationers’ Register entry for Venus and Adonis, 18 April 1593. Source of the exact transcription, entrant name, fee, and the 1594 assignment note.
3. Wikipedia: Tally stick. Stock and foil split, Exchequer use to 1826, and the 1834 fire.
4. Science Museum Group: Exchequer split tally and foil, 1822. A surviving split tally and its foil.
5. silvermakersmarks.co.uk: London date letters and hallmarking history. Date-letter cycles, omitted letters, and the 1477 or 1478 dating question.
6. silvercollection.it: London sterling silver hallmarks. The leopard’s head town mark, standard mark, date letter, and maker’s mark.
7. Wikipedia: Mainz Psalter. First printed dated colophon, 14 August 1457, Fust and Schoeffer.
8. A. W. Pollard, An Essay on Colophons (Project Gutenberg full text). Exact Latin and translation of the 1457 Psalter colophon.
9. Jim Reeds, “Solved: The Ciphers in Book III of Trithemius’s Steganographia”, Cryptologia 22:4 (1998), PDF. The worked cover-text and plaintext example.
10. Wikipedia: Steganographia. Dates, the Clavis, and the Ernst (1996) and Reeds (1998) solutions.