Lawyers used sheepskin as anti-fraud device for hundreds of years
phys.org
phys.org
In case you ever wondered why the word for an ownership share is the same word as "stick, trunk, block of wood, or post" (Germanic / Dutch / Old English), this is apparently it.
Second aside, 100s of years of such wooden stocks were stored in the British Houses of Parliament. They were ordered cleaned out, but, apparently the cleaners got over zealous, and the stocks caught on fire with disastrous results.
If we use a split stick to record how much money you owe me, and I simply add more marks to mine, to pretend you owe me more, it's obvious that I'm cheating. But if I simply split a brand-new stick and add marks on it, then our sticks won't match up at all. How will a court know which is the original?
Presumably they had some way to sign them? After all, that's why both parties sign both contracts today. If you go change yours, I still have your signature on mine.
Signing makes sense.
Both parties in a contract can have an incentive to lie.
I don’t think all contracts have an obvious both losing state though.
Think about two situations:
Firstly, if I lend you money, we split sticks, then I throw away my stick and get a new stick that says I lent you more money.
Secondly, if you lend me money, we split sticks, then I throw away my stick and get a new stick that says you lent me less money.
In both cases you're claiming my stick is clearly counterfeit because it doesn't match yours and I'm (falsely, but nobody knows that except the other party) claiming your stick is clearly counterfeit because it doesn't match mine.
What happens next? We're no better off than if we only had a verbal record and were disagreeing. So what is the point in the sticks?
Understand?
But if I simply throw away my half and make a new half, a court will have no way of knowing which was the original. (Unless each half was signed by both parties.)
Your new half would not match together in the "split" part of the stick, so one could tell that /someone/ made a new half, but not necessarily which party was the forger.
Presumably they would say that your stick is the one that is clearly counterfeit.
So how do you resolve that?
This video shows a number of examples of stocks (apparently few foils survive) and how they recorded debts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rxAYSXJ41Y .
It explains that they were used to record money that was deposited, essentially a receipt, by removing wood from the then original stick before it was split into the stock/foil. My guess (again not my area) is that it primarily functioned this way:
1. The removed wood representing the debt. I have no confirmation, but I would expect the stock/foil was created in view of the depositor who understood its markings.
2. The entity seeking repayment would not be able to fake their receipt, presumably to indicate they had deposited more money than they had (i.e., by removing wood from their foil). If they tried, the stock would still have that wood present, but the other grooves and grain of the stock/foil would align. The state would easily be able to tell that someone had subtracted wood from their foil.
3. The state could, of course, destroy the stock and claim its nonexistence, but information of that would, presumably, escape and others would be less likely to lend to the state. It appears there is writing on the stock/foil, so perhaps that served a secondary verification function (e.g., handwriting comparison or reference to a paper ledger)?
[EDIT: The process of making English tallies was laid out in the "The Dialogue Concerning the Exchequer. circa 1180" (https://avalon.law.yale.edu/medieval/excheq.asp. It describes making these tally sticks in the section "As to the Maker of Tallies." Unfortunately, I do not see the details of dispute resolution in that document. But, I only skimmed it.]
Having three people present is a way to protect against he said/she said.
This principle is used all over robust engineering, from Raft to best-of-three sensors.
3 is an enhancement for redundancy. Habit an odd number is a false confidence. Think about it: what happens if you have 4 witnesses? They could tie? How is that worse, as it adds more information that maybe 2 of the first 3 are lying or wrong?
So if they do not match the government simply does not give you your money.
If the government decided to say tomorrow that $100 bills with serial numbers AB1234567000-AB12334567999 were counterfeit and should not be accepted, what do you think would stop them?
You'd say things like "if it ever caught on in a big way, what's to stop banks or even governments issuing block-denominated securities, causing inflation? Would people put blocks in banks for safe-keeping, where they'd just end up recreating the fractional reserve system you claim these blocks avoid?".
And advocates would say "no, that won't happen, people would like to keep a hold of their own blocks, no-one would want an IOU from a bank if they could physically hold their very own block instead".
I now want Banksy to name my future endeavors.
"If you’re thinking of writing in to ask Banksy to paint your sitting room or design your company logo - please don’t."
I guess you are out of luck here, but if you don't mind aiding and abetting the commission of a trespass - maybe you can trade in.
"If you’re thinking of writing in because you have privileged access to a secure facility that needs vandalising - please do."
Quotes from https://pestcontroloffice.com/faq.asp
LEGAL WORDS THAT HAVE TO APPEAR AT THE BOTTOM OF A SUBMISSION
- drawing the short stick (where you hold five sticks / matches, in your hand one of which is cut short but no one can tell cos they are held in someone's hand)
- Grabbing the shitty end of the stick. Which seems fairly obvious if a stick was used for any clearing out style work.
(there seems to be no obvious "short end" of a stick)
I like the horse answer at https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/67813/origin-of-... whether it is true or not.
the stocks caught on fire
Each solider would write his name on the stick, break it in half, toss one half into a basket and tie the other stick to themselves.
At the end of the battle, any stick still in the basket that wasn't claimed was clearly a "casualty". The sticks tied to the individuals could also be used for identification.
Later when a messenger wanted to bring a message past a guard station, the messenger would prove their authenticity by presenting a segment of bamboo, which could then be matched up with a corresponding segment held by the guard station.
Apparently this practice and specifically the splitting of the bamboo into two pieces for this purpose is mentioned in the ancient Chinese dictionary, the Shuowen (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuowen_Jiezi).
Source: Lao Kan, Chü-yen Han-chien k'ao-shih (居延漢簡考釋) (Decipherment and Critical Studies of the Inscriptions on the Wooden Tablets from Chü-yen). Chungking: Academia Sinica, 1943-44. Ts'e 1-4, shih-wen, I, 81b-82b; ts'e 5-6, k'ao-cheng, I, 32a-34a, cited in Written on Bamboo and Silk: The Beginnings of Chinese Books and Inscriptions, by Tsuen-Hsuin Tsien, University of Chicago Press, 1962; in particular see pages 106 and 110.
Apparently we've been doing notched sticks since the Paleolithic age.
The blaze was caused by the burning of small wooden tally sticks which had been used as part of the accounting procedures of the Exchequer until 1826. The sticks were disposed of carelessly in the two furnaces under the House of Lords, which caused a chimney fire in the two flues that ran under the floor of the Lords' chamber and up through the walls."
Since medieval times the Exchequer had used tally sticks, pieces of carved, notched wood, normally willow, as part of their accounting procedures.
The parliamentary historian Caroline Shenton has described the tally sticks as "roughly as long as the span of an index finger and thumb".
These sticks were split in two so that the two sides to an agreement had a record of the situation. Once the purpose of each tally had come to an end, they were routinely destroyed.By the end of the eighteenth century the usefulness of the tally system had likewise come to an end, and a 1782 Act of Parliament stated that all records should be on paper, not tallies.
The novelist Charles Dickens, in a speech to the Administrative Reform Association, described the retention of the tallies for so long as an "obstinate adherence to an obsolete custom"; he also mocked the bureaucratic steps needed to implement change from wood to paper. He said that "all the red tape in the country grew redder at the bare mention of this bold and original conception."
By the time the replacement process had finished there were two cart-loads of old tally sticks awaiting disposal"
Burning of Parliament
https://heritagesciencejournal.springeropen.com/articles/10....
"Scratching the surface: the use of sheepskin parchment to deter textual erasure in early modern legal deeds"
by Sean Paul Doherty, Stuart Henderson, Sarah Fiddyment, Jonathan Finch & Matthew J. Collins
Heritage Science volume 9, Article number: 29 (2021)
edit: this may have been changed just as of a few years ago, on the argument that good quality archival paper practically lasts as long as parchment/vellum, and is much cheaper...
Mind you, the article's title is not warranted even by its own findings. It states that another possibly more important reason was cost and availability.
Human advancement and civilization is brought forward by probably less than 10% of the population at any given time, the other 90% are either just going along for the ride or actively trying to destroy that advancement...
The explosion of science in the late 1800s was largely the work of a over moneyed and underworked class of second sons and landowning clergy. They had lots of free time, education and wealth to explore their ideas.
2. a plan, method, or trick with a particular aim.
Words often have more than one meaning.