The fourteenth of February became a special day for bachelors, because people believed that a man would marry the first single women he encountered that day. The practice of sending messages of love is known to date back at least to the fifteenth century. The Duke of Orleans, captured at the Battle of Agincourt, sent his wife a rhymed love letter from his cell in the Tower of London in 1415. Eighteenth and nineteenth century shops sold books with romantic verses people could copy. Those who could not write sent a gift to the person of their affection.
Commercial valentines date back from the nineteenth century.
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