Criss-cross

We need to thank the illiteracy of medieval English peasants for the expression ‘criss-cross’.

It’s a stock scene in historical costume dramas that, when an uneducated characters need to sign something, they resort to ‘making their mark’, that is, signing with a cross. This is usually shown as being done with an x. In reality, people who couldn’t write their name would have signed with a character more like a plus +.

This is recorded in 1440 in the Middle English text Memorials St. Edmund’s Abbey:

This privilege conferme in al thyng, and with myn hond make a subscripcioun of Cristes cros ✠ for confirmacioun.

The Italians also used the ✠ character, called by them a letterina, as recorded in John Florio’s, A Worlde of Wordes… Dictionarie in Italian and English, 1598:

Lettérina, a little letter, scrole, writing, bill or epistle, a little letter of the crisse-crosse rowe.

Criss-cross, with various spellings, continued to be used as the name of the character in English but from the 17th century onward it was also used as a generic term for any crossing lines. That’s recorded in Thomas Freeman’s book of epigrams Rubbe, and a Great Cast, 1614:

As when she was but sixteene, and no more,
That in her Chamber hangs to open view;
To all that come, that portrature she showes,
And sighs she is not what she was whilere,
This surrow’d face so full of Cris. crosse rowes,
Was once (quoth she) such as you see it there