Those cursed letters....

If you knew this then you are a right old clever clogs. My friend Talpa The Elder, didn't know it so I thought it worth spreading the word. This is from a piece in the DT about resignation letters, as in "I quit" not "I'm so depressed, I can't go on like this!"

an heir to the original ‘round-robin letter’ (from seventeenth-century French rubin-rond, or round ribbon). The letters were circular-cut documents, in which signatories to a petition of protest against the Crown could add their names around the edge, in a non-hierarchical fashion, so as to conceal who had started the petition and who had simply joined its signatories late on

"Orft wiv their 'eads M'Lud."