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Valentine's Day is named for two early Christian martyrs, neither of them a champion of romantic love. Their common feast day was February 14, which became known as a lover's holiday because of two historical coincidences:The ancient Roman festival of the Lupercalia, frequently marked by licentiousness, was celebrated on February 15, and a medieval folk tradition maintained that the spring-time mating of birds took place on St. Valentine's Day. This latter belief led, by the fourteenth century , to the custom of choosing by lot a valentine, or sweetheart for a day.
Messages of affection passed between these randomly chosen lovers were precursors of the modern valentine card.  

Credit for writing the first valentine verses is often given to Charles, Duke of Orleans, who as a prisoner of war in 1415 sent his wife romantic poems from an English cell. But this seems more a unique incident than the fount of a tradition. In tracing the development of the printed valentine, Frank Staff mentions the seventeenth- century custom of presenting one's lot- chosen valentine with love tokens or "prettily written letters , "but he assures us that the first real valentines per se-that is, greeting cards specially made for the holiday -- did not appear until the eighteenth century. By the 1780s printed cards were becoming common, especially in Germany, where they were called Freundschaftkarten, or "friendship cards."In England handwritten valentines were still common toward the close of the century, although standardiztion ws already setting in . Staff notes a typical contemporary handbook called The Complete British Valentine Writer,or the High Road to Love for Both Sexes, which gave literary advice and examples for amateur writers.

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