Middle English often replaced “S” with “F”.
Yes, look at our founding documents and you will see the long F as an S.
Yes, it’s called a “long S”:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s
1608 was past the time of Middle English, though, and during the period of Early Modern English.
The earliest Caslon typeface has cool long S’s — and it comes with Adobe Caslon Pro, which is fun. (Sorry, I’m a font geek, and Caslon is one of my favorite fonts. You guys might like it better after learning Caslon was also a gunsmith!)
‘Middle English often replaced “S” with “F”.’
what is called Middle English by Shakespeare’s time had developed into what we know today as Modern English through morphological changes such as the Great Vowel Shift and other linguistic issues...early ModE often used the marker resembling a small ‘f’ within words containing ‘s’...this can be seen in some colonial printings...