A good part of the reason for many of the vagaries and inconsistencies of English spelling has been attributed to the fact that words were fixed on the printed page before any orthographic consensus had emerged among teachers and writers. Printing also directly gave rise to another strange quirk: the word the had been written for centuries as �e, using the thorn character of Old English, but, as no runic characters were available on the European printing presses, the letter “y” was used instead (being closest to the handwritten thorn character of the period), resulting in the word ye, which should therefore technically still be pronounced as “the”. It is only since the archaic spelling was revived for store signs (e.g. Ye Olde Pubbe) that the "modern" pronunciation of ye has been used.