I came across the word ‘foolscap’ today and realized that all these years, I thought the long piece of paper was actually called ‘fullscap’.
Wondering where the word ‘foolscap’ came from, I took at look at our favourite Wikipedia site and found the following:
Foolscap was named after the fool’s cap and bells watermark commonly used from the fifteenth century onwards on paper measuring 17 × 13½ inches (432 × 343 mm) or a subdivision of this into halves, quarters and so on. The earliest example of such paper that is firmly dated was made in Germany in 1479.
Unsubstantiated anecdotes suggest that this watermark was introduced to England in 1580 by Sir John Spielmann, a German who established a papermill at Dartford, Kent. Apocryphally, the Rump Parliament substituted a fool’s cap for the royal arms as a watermark on the paper used for the journals of parliament.