Archaionomia

Archaionomia is the name of a legal treatise – a collection of Saxon laws published in Britain during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. Archaionomia was recently in news with a signature of William Shakespeare. William Shakespeare (baptised 26 April 1564; died 23 April 1616) was a contemporary of Queen Elizabeth I. There are six surviving signatures written by Shakespeare himself, all attached to four legal documents. In the late 1930s a putative seventh Shakespeare signature was found in the Folger Library copy of William Lambarde’s Archaionomia (1568), a collection of Anglo-Saxon laws. Recently, using an advanced photographic technique, researchers have reconstructed a signature which they believe could be that of William Shakespeare — or the work of a clever forger.