VMs: Gallows as an embellished Cistercian number cipher....?

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

Here's yet another gallows-related hypothesis to throw onto the blazing 
fire of mailing-list conjecture. :-)

The single feature that connects all the gallows characters is their left 
vertical leg -- ie, you could quite reasonably describe them as a set of 
embellished left legs. This is also true of the "weirdo" gallows characters.

Now: David A. King's book "The Ciphers of The Monks" describes a number of 
ciphers which (he postulates) come from a mostly-lost Ancient Greek cipher, 
through the Basingstoke cipher and John of Tilbury, to various Cistercian 
ciphers (where they mostly faded out).

All these share a common feature of a straight line (either vertical or 
horizontal), with either two sets of end ornaments (for 1...99) or four 
sets (for 1...9999).

Could it simply be that the VMS' gallows are a stylised / simplified 
version of this general cipher?

If the gallows-as-suspended-crosses hypothesis is also correct, could the 
form chosen merely have been a reuse/appropriation of a very much older idea?

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.....