TOY

An complete but damaged lead-alloy hornbook dating from the post-medieval period, probably the 17th century AD.

The hornbook is rectangular in plan and section, with rounded knops on each corner. It bears raised text on the obverse and moulded hatched geometrical decoration on the reverse. It has a small handle at the bottom, shaped like a female head with a bonnet, resembling the heads of small post-medieval toy folls or figurines. The obverse of the hornbook is decorated with a framed border and six moulded lines within which are the letters of the alphabet arranged in four lines of text separated with horizontal lines: ABCDEFG//HIJKLM//NOPQRS//TVWXYZ. The letter U are missing which is a common feature of this object type - however, the letter J which is also usually missing appears to be present here. The reverse is decorated with moulded geometrical decoration.

Hornbooks proper were used as learning aids and were fairly large tablets printed with the text to be learnt - usually the Lord's Prayer or the alphabet. They were commonly made of wood onto which the printed paper would have been mounted, and then covered with a thin sheet of transparent horn for protection. Smaller, portable tablets of lead-alloy are generally thought to be mass produced versions of hornbooks proper and while still referred to as "hornbooks the term is, in these instances, slightly misleading.

Michael Lewis suggests that mistakes and inconsistencies on lead-alloy examples would be ineffective as learning tools and may therefore have been made as toys for children in low-literacy families or perhaps even toys which mimic the hornbook proper and were "owned" by children's dolls.