The Roman-letter inscriptions on stone from early medieval Britain and Ireland are surprisingly diverse in content and form, a reflection no doubt of the diverse cultural contexts in which they were made. Latin is the preferred language in the British West and the vernacular in Ireland, whereas both are widely used in England, sometimes on the same monument. The inscriptions have tended to be studied for their textual information, as a source of linguistic evidence and, sometimes, for their letter-forms. Less attention has been paid to their design. My aim in this paper is to investigate some of the ways in which the physical form, or at least the layout, of inscribed texts could enhance the message and perhaps complement the ostensible meaning of the words.

In a series of recent publications, and in particular in his Christian Celts: Messages and Images, Charles Thomas (1998) has argued eloquently that a number of early medieval Christian inscriptions in Wales, south-west Scotland and Cornwall should be seen as highly complex literary productions with layers of encoded messages behind their surface texts. He sees their texts as examples of the ‘biblical style’ expounded in many publications by David Howlett. Charles Thomas’ principal method with early medieval British inscriptions has been to subject them to numerical analysis based on totals of words, syllables and letters, on the use of letters as numerals, and on the identification of embedded Roman numerals. Other devices that he employs are the subdivision of texts in accordance with numerical approximations to the golden section, and the rearrangement of whole texts or of sections of text on geometrical grids. Through such means he identifies patterns that he sees as revealing intentional number symbolism and concealed messages such as the name of the author of the text. He maintains that these messages were there to be decoded by other members of the same small literate élite as the authors with the use of the same sets of rules by which they were composed – and, presumably, with the aid of a wax-tablet.