Parchment

To think of parchment in the twenty-first century is to think of a relic: ancient, revered, and remote. Parchment is the material of law-making, from the Magna Carta onwards. Even today, the UK continues to inscribe all new Acts of Parliament on vellum. Whether you find it comforting or queasy to imagine Brexit being inscribed on roll after roll of calfskin, it is testament to an ancient and close relationship. But this affiliation has not always been a harmonious one. In Shakespeare’s 2 King Henry VI (1591), Dick the butcher famously declares ‘the first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers’. Yet the raucous mood of the rabble turns quiet, as Cade replies:

Nay, that I mean to do. Is this not a lamentable thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment? That parchment, being scribbled o’er, should undo a man? Some say the bee stings, but I say, ‘tis the bee’s wax; for I did but seal once to a thing, and I was never mine own man since. (IV.ii.76-83)

Tangling together ‘an innocent lamb’, careless scribbles, and men’s undoing, Cade asks us to consider a legal system that turns living animals into texts, and men into ruins. Far from being a static object, early modern parchment is shown to be intimately connected with living beings both animal and human — and an agent of unfair violence towards both. The transformation of a sheep into a binding legal document becomes a compelling metaphor for the law’s viciousness.

The presence of past life always hovers, spectre-like, over parchment. Parchment (from Latin Pergamēna, after the ancient city Pergamon where it was claimed to have originated, via Anglo Norman parchemin) is an animal skin prepared for writing. In pre-modern Europe, sheep and goat were the most common forms, with calfskin or kidskin (‘vellum’) especially prized. To produce it, animal skins would be washed and limed in vats, stretched on frames, and scraped with a curved blade known as a lunellum, before being rubbed with pumice and then whitened with chalk (known as ‘pounce’).

Jost Amman. ‘Membranarius. Der Bermenter [The Parchment Maker]’. (Frankfurt, 1568). Woodcut. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

This time-consuming process meant unlike leather, which was tanned or tawed and vulnerable to rot, parchment could last millennia. Treasured, recycled, and re-used, parchment was everywhere in early modern Europe: it covered drums and panelled lutes; enfolded papers and reinforced books; decorated clothing; and even lined masks.

It was, however, always primarily a surface for writing or painting. Over the sixteenth century, parchment became especially associated with legal texts. During this period, English common law began to rely more on formal written contracts, partly prompted by the Statutes of Uses (1535) and Statutes of Wills (1540). This led to a broader section of an increasingly ‘law-minded’ society encountering, using, and creating legal documents, which negotiated rights to property, privileges, or obligations.

This 1530 portrait of a man from the Low Countries surrounded by writing materials exemplifies the burgeoning of parchment documents in everyday life across the continent:

Jan Gossaert, Portrait of a Man, possibly Jan Snoeck. c. 1530. National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Figures like this man (variously identified as a banker, toll-collector, and a merchant) relied on accurate records of agreements made. Even in a time of paper’s ascendancy, attention to the archive shows that sheepskin was the material of choice for legal documents. Recent research has explained this: unlike other parchments, sheepskin does not delaminate when scraped, rendering it tamper-proof. This made it an ideal material for the lawyers, money-lenders, creditors, brokers, and their legal clerks, called scriveners, who were composing official documents in early modern England.

But as these figures became increasingly powerful towards the end of the sixteenth-century, so too did popular dissatisfaction with them, especially after the controversial practice of usury (charging interest) was legalised in 1571. In the early seventeenth-century, the water-poet John Taylor imagines a ‘ship of surety’ (a contractual agreement):

Her Armes are a Goose quill or pen couchant in a sheepe-skin field… the Motto above Noverint universi, the supporters a Usurer and a Scrivener, the crest a Wood-cocke the Mantles red wax, with this other Motto beneath Seald and deliver'd, this Ship hath the Arte to make parchement the deerest stuffe in the world: For I have seene a piece little bigger than my two hands, that hath cost a man a thousand pound.

‘Noverint universi’, meaning ‘known by all men’, began all legal bonds. Taylor, like Cade, juxtaposes parchment’s slight form (‘little bigger than my two hands’) and financial cost (‘a thousand pound’) to question its legal freight. But that freight had more than just financial repercussions. ‘Besides all this’, Taylor goes on to write of the ship of surety, ‘she is plentifully stored with want, hunger cold, poverty, and nakednesse’.

How parchment might ‘undo a man’ is rhetorical in both these literary examples. But this rhetoric only works because of real lives, real money, and real bodies that were thrown into disarray in early modern England — not by some natural disaster, or capricious king, but by the scribbled skin of a sheep. It was the impact of these parchments on real people — real ‘poverty and nakednesse’ — that made its past animal life so important in early modern writing. Tracing these references to sheepskin reveals how parchment’s blank expanse became a politically fraught field, one that mingled rustic and urban spaces, illiteracy and education, and poverty and privilege. In doing so, it demonstrates how early modern England remained a world of not only paper, but parchment.

Lily Freeman-Jones is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English at Queen Mary University of London.

Selected Bibliography.

Shakespeare, William. 2 King Henry VI [1591] in G. Blakemore Evans and J. J. M. Tobin (eds) The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).
John Taylor, All the Vvorkes of Iohn Taylor the Water-Poet (London: I[ohn] B[eale, Elizabeth Allde, Bernard Alsop, and Thomas Fawcet] for Iames Boler, 1630).

6 May 2022.