, and messages attributed to various men and women
suggesting their sexual availability and proficiency. And if the
political targets have changed over the years, many of the political
attitudes have remained consistent. Graffiti is an irreverent form, with
strong popular and anti-establishment elements. As actions common to all
classes, eating, drinking, defecation, and fornication find their lowly
record in graffiti-like form.

[Footnote 3: See, for example, Elizabeth Wales and Barbara Brewer,
"Graffiti in the 1970's," _Journal of Social Psychology_ 99 (1976):
115-23.]

On the most basic level, a writer will observe that the excrement of
the rich differs in no way from that of the poor. Thus one poem, taken
supposedly from a "Person of Quality's Boghouse," has the following
sentiment:

Good Lord! who could think,
That such fine Folks should stink?
(Pt. 2, p. 25)

There is nothing very polite about such observations, and no pretension
to art. These verses belong strictly to folklore and the sociology of
literature, but they suggest some continuing rumbles of discontent
against the class system, the existence among the lower orders of some
of the egalitarian attitudes that survived the passing of the Lollards
and the Levellers. Who were the writers of these pieces? Were they
indeed laborers? Or were they from the lower part of what was called the
"middle orders"? Is there some evidence to be found in the very fact
that they could write?

Graffiti may, indeed, tell us something about degrees of literacy. One
wit remarked that whatever the ability to read or write may have been at
the time, almost everyone seemed to have been literate when presented
with a bog-house wall: "Since all who come to Bog-house write" (pt. 2,
p. 26). The traditional connection between defecation and writing was
another comparison apparent to the commentators. One wrote:

There's Nothing foul that we commit,
But what we write, and what we sh - - t.
(Pt. 2, p. 13)

And the lack of some paper or material to clean the rear end provoked
the following sentiment in the form of a litany:

From costive Stools, and hide-bound Wit,
From Bawdy Rhymes, and Hole besh - - t.
From Walls besmear'd with stinking Ordure,
By Swine who nee'r provide Bumfodder
_Libera Nos_----
(Pt. 4, p. 7)

Other