1. A cap of fantastic shape, usually garnished with bells, formerly worn by fools or jesters.
1632. Massinger, City Madam, IV. iv.
| Mill. A French hood too, | |
| Now ’tis out of fashion! a fool’s cap would show better. |
1680. R. Mansel, Narr. Popish Plot, Addr. C ij. Some or other will take the Foolscap off from their heads, and put it upon ours.
1789. Wolcott (P. Pindar), Ode, xiv. Wks. 1812, II. 247.
| But should they act with meanness, or like Fools, | |
| The Muse shall place a Fool’s-cap on their sculls. |
1839. Longf., Beware, v.
| She gives thee a garland woven fair, | |
| Take care! | |
| It is a fool’s-cap for thee to wear. |
b. A dunce’s cap.
1831. Blackw. Mag., XXIX. Feb., 408–9. Mr. Sadler crowns our prodigy on the spot—ere he has ceased to wonder at the miracle he has wrought—with a paper fool’s cap.
1876. J. Grant, History of the Burgh Schools of Scotland, II. v. 207. Smart castigation is, in our opinion, much preferable to fool’s cap, imprisonment, and mental degradation caused by being made the subject of ridicule and satire.
Comb.
1831. Blackw. Mag., XXIX. Feb., 410/1. Let us now exhibit our fool’s-cap-crowned Reviewer in another light.
1823. Byron, Juan, XI. lxxxii.
| A huge, dun cupola, like a foolscap crown | |
| On a fool’s head,—and there is London Town! |
2. The device of a ‘fool’s cap’ used as a watermark for paper.
It has been asserted that the fool’s cap mark was introduced by Sir John Spielmann or Spilman, a German who built a paper-mill at Dartford in 1580; but we have failed to find any trustworthy authority for this statement. The Brit. Mus. copy of Rushworth’s Hist. Coll. (1659) is marked with this device. The watermark called by Sotheby (Princ., III.) a ‘fool’s cap,’ and said by him to occur in some copies of Caxton’s Golden Legend, seems not to be correctly so called. The catalogue of the Caxton Exhibition (1877) states that examples of the fool’s cap, dating from 1479, are found in a German collection there exhibited. There is no foundation for the often-repeated story that the Rump Parliament ordered a fool’s cap to be substituted for the royal arms in the watermark of the paper used for the journals of the House.
1795. Denne, in Archæologia, XII. 121. The Fool’s cap is not in either the Paston Letters or Mr. Ord’s Plates. The date of that device in Mr. Fisher’s is as late as 1661.
3. A long folio writing- or printing-paper, varying in size (see quots. 1871, 1888).
A document of 1714, shown to us by Mr. R. B. Prosser, is written on paper bearing the fool’s cap watermark, and measuring 161/4×13 in. In 1795 the mark was obsolete; see quot. in b.
a. 1700. B. E., Dict. Cant. Crew, Fool’s-Cap, a sort of Paper so called.
1711. Act 10 Anne, c. 18 § 37. For all Paper called … Fine Fools Cap.
1843. Lefevre, Life Trav. Phys., I. I. ii. 28. Being the junior physician, I had to write the prescription. I thought it would never end: it occupied one side of a sheet of foolscap.
1871. Amer. Encycl. Print., Foolscap.—A folded writing-paper, usually 12 by 15 inches, or 121/2 by 16.
1888. Jacobi, Printer’s Vocab., Foolscap.—A size of printing paper 17 × 131/2 inches; writing paper, 163/4 × 131/2 inches.
b. attrib. as foolscap paper, sheet, etc.; also, foolscap folio, octavo, quarto, said of a volume consisting of sheets of foolscap size folded in the manner specified.
1795. Denne, in Archæologia, XII. 121. The Fool’s cap paper has for its mark Britannia, or the Rampant Lion supporting the Cap of Liberty on a pole.
1818. Byron, Beppo, lxxv.
| One hates an author that’s all author, fellows | |
| In foolscap uniforms turn’d up with ink, | |
| So very anxious, clever, fine, and jealous, | |
| One don’t know what to say to them, or think. |
1820. Southey, Lett. (1856), III. 177. As much promise as any of those verses which I used to send you by the foolscapsheetful to Eton.
1886. Ruskin, Præterita, I. xii. 409. We disputed on the relative dignities of music and painting; and I wrote an essay nine foolscap pages long, proposing the entire establishment of my own opinions, and the total discomfiture and overthrow of hers, according to my usual manner of paying court to my mistresses.
1887. Times, 27 Aug., 11/4. In a foolscap volume of 260 pages.
