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| Parchment | ||||
| The usual material for writing on in medieval books or documents was parchment or vellum. This was made from the skin of sheep, goats or calves. The skin was not tanned in the manner of leather as used in shoes or belts or bags, a process which in the medieval period utilised an extraordinary concoction of noxious substances, but received a particular form of extended treatment to make it fine, supple, flat and white. | ||||
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The skin was soaked in a caustic solution which dissolved out fat and helped clean away adhering tissue. It was then laced to a wooden frame. | |||
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The lacings were progressively tightened to stretch the skin, while the hide was repeatedly scraped with a knife, not only to remove any extraneous matter, but also to keep the skin supple as it stretched and dried. As anybody who has wandered over a sheep paddock knows, a skin which dries out without this suppling treatment becomes as hard as a board. | |||
| When the treatment was complete, the hair side of the skin could be distinguished from the flesh side by colour, texture and by the fact that the hair side tended to become slightly concave. Now before you protest that this would mean that the animal had been inside out, this occurs because the fibres in the skin are tougher and less inclined to stretch than those of the flesh side, so that the pummelling that the skin received during its treatment tended to cause it to bulge the other way than when it was wrapped around the animal. The designation of the hair side and the flesh side is sometimes made in codicological descriptions. | ||||
| Sometimes the hide was scrubbed with pumice stone to smooth it and cause it to stretch out thinner. This tended to obliterate the difference between the skin and hair sides. The skin could also have chalk rubbed into it while it was on the frame to whiten it. Thick skins, like calf, could sometimes be split into two layers; a skilled and exceedingly tricky procedure, I imagine. | ||||
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A sample of vellum in a book of hours (National Library of Australia, MS 1097/9, f.72r), by permission of the National Library of Australia. | |||
| The above example might not look very exciting as it is a picture of a blank section of page, but what you can see is a bit of rubric lettering and part of a miniature on the following recto page, not the verso of this page, the vellum having been worked so fine as to be translucent. | ||||
| There is some confusion in relation to the use of the terms parchment and vellum. Some authorities claim that parchment is derived from the skin of sheep or goats while vellum comes from calves. The term vellum is also used specifically for skin which has been abraded with pumice, a procedure more likely to have been used on the thicker calf skin to stretch and soften it further. However, the terms are also used interchangeably and some libraries use the term parchment in their catalogues for all their skin based writing membranes; others use vellum. In the light of a general lack of agreement, you may please yourself. | ||||
| Turning the prepared skins into pages would be much easier and more efficient if sheep and cows were rectangular, but they are not. An appropriate sized rectangle had to be cut out, then progressively folded and cut to form the quires or gatherings for a codex. Rectangles folded up at the bottom were used for single sheet documents with seals attached. Rectangles were sewn together in linear fashion to make rolls. Presumably some of the leftover bits could be used as strips for attaching seals, tying up documents or a myriad of handy little purposes. | ||||
| Because of the numbers of animals required to produce the membranes, parchment was expensive. I'm sure that someone with a mathematical bent has worked out how many sheep it took to make a large 12th century Bible, but it would have been a flock. There is evidence for this, especially in the early medieval period, in relation to the re-use of parchment. Some early monastic libraries, most particularly the monasteries of Bobbio and Luxueil, have numerous palimpsests in their collection. These are manuscripts which have been scraped down and rewritten, but the underlying writing can be detected beneath. As some of these obliterated texts were heretical writings which had been banned by the church, this paleographical archaeology can be used to study the development of authority in the early church. They also contain texts in Greek, Hebrew and the language of the Goths. | ||||
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| A sample from a palimpsest (Rome, Biblioteca Vaticana, Vat. Lat. 5757, p.86). The large script is a 4th century version of Cicero's De Re Republica, while the overlying smaller script is a 7th or 8th century version of a commentary of St Augustine on the Psalms. It formerly belonged to Bobbio. (From Steffens 1929) | ||||
| Sometimes damaged skins had to be used, and the writing may meander around a flaw or hole, which may even be embellished in some way with a bit of penwork decoration. | ||||
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In this example a hole in the parchment has been stitched. As the ink goes over the stitching, this has occurred before the sheet was written on. | |||
| Detail from a document of 1474, formerly in the private collection of Rob Schäfer. (Photograph © Rob Schäfer) | ||||
| Parchment was always valuable and it is found re-used and conserved in various ways; in bookbindings and pastedowns, as wrappers for documents or sliced up to provide the attachment for seals. | ||||
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A sheet of parchment with 12th century writing has been used as a pastedown in a 15th century volume of the works of Cicero, by permission of the University of Tasmania Library. | |||
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Writing on a seal tag from an indenture of 1426. The tag has been made from an earlier document. From a private collection. | |||
| In the later middle ages when book production was a commercial enterprise, so was the production of parchment. The parchmenters were a trade with their own guild, one assumes working together with the butchers and tanners. Like other trades, their operation could be localised in the town and street names like Parmentergate as found in Lincoln for example, indicated where they plied their trade. | ||||
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