English learned to forge documents before it learned to forge horseshoes — the counterfeiting sense is early fourteenth century, the smithing sense late. Old French forgier carried both: to shape metal, to falsify. But English reached for the lie first. Chaucer’s Parson knows: “They wol forge a long tale and peynten it with alle circumstaunces.” The verb for making a story was already the verb for faking one — and what makes the forgery is not the missing auctor, but the circumstaunces: the shimmer of detail that makes the guarantee unnecessary.