Foolscap: the paper size named after a jester's hat

Foolscap was the paper British offices used before A4: a sheet 8 × 13 inches, a little narrower than A4 and quite a bit longer. It takes its name from a watermark, and if you hold an old enough sheet up to the light, you may find him looking back at you, a jester's head complete with cap and bells.

How he got there is one of those stories everybody seems to know. Unfortunately it isn't true, but the real history goes back much further, and somewhere along the way a jester pops out of the roof of a Dutch house.

The story that isn't true

The version you'll usually hear goes like this. In 1648, the Rump Parliament ordered the royal arms to be taken out of the watermark on the paper for its journals, and a fool's cap put in their place. Out went the King, in came the jester, and the name stuck.

It's a neat tale, and it was already a "familiar story" by 1911, when the Encyclopaedia Britannica, citing the dictionary that became the Oxford English Dictionary, said there was "no truth" in it. The problem is the dates. A German sheet of paper with a fool's cap watermark, dating from 1479, was put on show at the Caxton Exhibition in 1877, which means the jester was in paper nearly 170 years before the Rump Parliament ever sat. Merriam-Webster still says explanations like this one "remain unsupported by historical evidence".

How a picture became a size

What the jester really did was give his name to a size of paper. By 1674, "foolscap" meant a sheet of a particular size, whatever its watermark actually showed, and paper was bought and sold by that name. You can see the name doing that job in the 1680s, when a lot of the paper used in England came from the Netherlands, packed in bundles whose wrappers were stamped with the maker, the size and the quality. Those wrappers were usually thrown away, which is why Exeter Cathedral's archivist called it "a real treat" when some of the stamps turned up on the loose covers of the cathedral's old court books. And there he is: on one of them, a jester pops out of the roof of a Dutch house, with the words "Gemeen Veuws Narrekap": common fool's cap.

By then the word was so ordinary that when a dictionary of criminal slang included it in 1699, it barely needed defining: "a sort of Paper so called". The name no longer needed the picture, so when English paper swapped the jester for Britannia during the 1700s, it stayed put. Folded in half, foolscap became, among other things, the paper official documents were written on. Dickens, for one, thought government got through far too much of it. In Little Dorrit, a minister proudly tells Parliament that in half a year the Circumlocution Office has used enough foolscap to "pave the footways on both sides of Oxford Street from end to end, and leave nearly a quarter of a mile to spare for the park".

How big is foolscap?

The 8 × 13 inches at the top of this page is only part of the answer, because foolscap was never just one size, and even the British Association of Paper Historians calls its own table of old sizes "a guide only". The full sheet sold for writing was 13¼ × 16½ inches, and folding and trimming it gave foolscap folio, 8 × 13 inches, which is what offices meant when they said "foolscap". David Lister, a solicitor, remembered that his office wrote business letters on quarto and used foolscap "for larger sizes".

On this site you'll find foolscap folio in our Traditional British series, at 203 × 330 mm, and the larger full sheets under Imperial. Side by side with A4, foolscap folio is 7 mm narrower and 33 mm longer, which is just enough to matter when it comes to filing.

The arrival of A4

A4 arrived in Britain some time before many offices were ready for it. The British Standards Institution published the A sizes as a British Standard in 1959, and that summer the Postmaster-General told the House of Commons that Post Office notepaper would "shortly be produced in the international 'A' sizes only". When an MP asked whether other government departments would follow his example, he replied: "I cannot reply for other Government Departments, but if they do not change it will not be my fault."

They weren't in any great hurry. The following spring, most departments were "adopting the new sizes as they use up existing stocks", which in practice meant switching whenever the cupboard ran out of foolscap. Private offices took their time too. David Lister didn't change his until around 1970, but once the change came, he found that "it was surprising how quickly the old sizes were left behind".

Where foolscap lives on

Foolscap never entirely disappeared. In America, a sheet of 8½ × 13 inches survives as Government Legal, which Lister knew as "American Foolscap". Cecil Adams, of the American newspaper column The Straight Dope, thought the longer US Legal might have come from foolscap too. Admitting it was "something of a stab", he guessed that "somebody just started cutting foolscap pages in half and selling them to lawyers, who'd buy anything".

Its surest survivor is in the filing cabinet. British shops still sell foolscap suspension files, which are "slightly larger than A4 suspension files" and so take both. Foolscap lost the office to A4, and ended up holding its files.