Lost documents

 We have now only a tiny fraction of the documents that existed during the Middle Ages.  Many of those losses took place during the medieval centuries, due to fires, mice (that will chew parchment), the disintegration of papyrus, the fading of ink so that even though the parchment survives the document becomes illegible, raids from Vikings or Muslim pirates, a gap in record preservation if a monastery lost its regularity for a while, or downright carelessness.

Early in the Middle Ages, up until the early eighth century, some cities still had municipal archives, in which all sorts of documents would be stored.  But these archives disappeared with the disappearance of notaries and, in probably most cases, the disintegration of the fragile papyrus on which most records would have been written.  Papyrus stopped reaching the West after the rise of Islam in the seventh century cut Europe off from Egypt, and it took a while to decide that parchment would do (especially since making it from sheep skin was a prolonged and expensive process).

In the next few centuries documents were rare.  Monasteries that were refounded in the ninth century, after the raids and the indifference (or even hostility) of the early Carolingians toward monasteries, to say nothing of the many occasions where a powerful layman took over a monastery, found they had very few documents.  They would assemble the best records they had, ask people with long memories what they might have heard, and ask kings or bishops to issue charters confirming everything that the monasteries had earlier acquired.

Most of the time, as near as we can tell, these lists of "property we used to have though the documents are lost" was fairly accurate, but of course it also provided an opportunity for creative embellishment.  Many monasteries, for example, claimed Clovis as their founder (though he actually founded zero monasteries) and had long lists of the property he had donated.  Sometimes the creativity was more plausible, and the monks really had owned the property, though perhaps it was someone less elevated than a king who had given it to them.

Kings and bishops liked to confirm monks in their property.  It showed their authority, as chief giver and determiner of who owned what.  Modern editions of monastic records will often include mentions of "lost charters," a summary of a donation or confirmation made, say, by the Merovingian King Childeric, because an authentic document of Emperor Louis the Pious said he was confirming this earlier grant.  This drives documentary historians crazy, because we have no idea if the "King Childeric" document ever really existed, yet there it is, with page number in the modern edition, document number, a date, and a summary as a "lost charter."

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the numbers of documents greatly increased.  Cartularies, collections of documents copied into a single volume, began to be produced in large numbers.  (A thirteenth-century cartulary from Auxerre is shown below.)

 

Once a cartulary had been produced, the big, messy pile of documents in the archives was much less significant.  Archivists worried less about preserving individual charters when they'd been organized and copied into a cartulary.

The messiness really was a problem.  One sad cartulary entry refers to a lost document that had been seen within living memory.  The scribe said he'd looked for it for over a year and couldn't find it, so although he could summarize it in a sentence or two, he couldn't copy it.

Then there were wars.  The wars of religion on the Continent in the sixteenth century burned many documents. In England, the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII at the same time led to documents just being tossed, as were the relics of saints.  The French Revolution of 1789, when France went officially atheistic for a while, led to the wholesale destruction and loss of monasteries and their archives.

One noted nineteenth-century French medievalist got his start when his family acquired a former monastery, complete with a pile of old documents.  Mom cut up the parchment to use to seal her jam jars, but the future medievalist started saving out documents from the pile and studying them.

Today we still have a certain number of cartularies where the original documents once copied into them have long since disappeared.  Some cartularies long assumed lost, such as the episcopal cartulary from Auxerre pictured above, emerged in private hands in the 1980s.  Many other documents are still in private hands, such as the ones cut up to made decorative images to sell.

No wonder medievalists have to be intrepid in figuring out pre-modern history.

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

For more on medieval documents, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

 

Papyrus and popes

Papyrus was considered the only proper writing material in late antiquity in the Mediterranean basin.  It was made from papyrus reeds, especially as grown along the Nile.  The reeds would be slit (they're sticky on the inside), spread out, and pressed together into several different layers.  When dried, they made a good writing surface.  Although parchment (made from animal skin) was known, it was considered inferior.  Saint Augustine apologized in one letter for writing on parchment, because he'd run out of papyrus.  I'm not trying to insult you or anything! (not his exact words, but his meaning).

The difficulty with papyrus is that it has to be kept dry.  If it gets damp, it can disintegrate back into pieces of reed.  This is a problem once you get into Europe's damper climate.  The other problem is access to the papyrus reeds themselves, as of course they won't grow in most of Europe.

The popes of late antiquity/the early Middle Ages wrote on papyrus (see more here on early medieval popes).  They really only became the heads of western Christendom in the sixth century, at least in their own minds (almost no one in Europe would have been able to tell you who was pope at any given time), and they got in a couple of crates of papyrus, to have plenty of writing material on hand.  With the rise of Islam in the seventh century, their access to Egypt and papyrus reeds was cut off, so it was a good thing they had stockpiled.

Over the next four centuries, through all sorts of upheavals, the Lateran palace in Rome maintained their papyrus stockpile.  There must have been a special room where it could be kept warm and dry, although we have no details.  Slowly they worked through it, writing letters to kings, to bishops, to monasteries.

The problem was that the people they wrote to didn't have nearly as good conditions for storing papyrus.  Charlemagne's grandfather, in the early eighth century, had a special volume drawn up, copying every missive the family had had from the pope copied onto parchment.  Most of the documents were less than fifty years old, but they were already disintegrating.  Bishops and monasteries too felt the need to copy their precious papal documents onto something more permanent than papyrus.

Very few early medieval papyrus documents survive.  We do know that through the seventh century most towns in the old Roman empire had municipal archives, where important documents were stored, but these all disappeared, and probably the fragility of papyrus had a lot to do with it.  A few monasteries managed to keep a handful of papyrus documents, such as Saint-Denis, which scraped off the ink, turned the papyrus over, and forged new and better papal confirmations on the back.  By the eighth century most of Europe switched to parchment.

But not the popes!  They hoarded their papyrus until it finally gave out in the eleventh century.  During this time they also continued to write their documents in what is known as late Roman cursive, big flowing and looping letters that must have been increasingly hard to read by anyone north of Italy.  The rest of Europe switched after the eighth century to what is known as Caroline miniscule, which looks a whole lot like modern printing, for the excellent reason that modern printing is derived from it.  What's this? many a bishop must have thought, getting a piece of papyrus with almost indecipherable writing on it from the pope.

German popes in the mid-eleventh century brought the papacy into European relevance with parchment and Caroline miniscule as well as assertions of being the top of the church hierarchy, but that's another story.  (And of course "papal infallibility" was first proclaimed in the nineteenth century.)

Our modern word paper is derived from the word papyrus.  First Arabs in the thirteenth century and then most of Europe in the fourteenth century figured out that paper, made from cotton, worked a whole lot better than papyrus reeds.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on the medieval church and medieval literacy, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

 

Memory and Forgetting

 Like modern people, medieval people worried about forgetting important things.  Such important things included wars, the deaths of kings, disease outbreaks, healings by saints, the foundation of monasteries, and pious gifts.  Like modern people, medieval people wanted important things written down.

Writing has a real advantage over stories and accounts passed orally in that it doesn't change, and people not yet born when you die may read something you wrote and know what you were thinking.  An important event in the past, one that people had stopped talking about, if recorded in writing can be remembered once again.  A written record from the time can also help resolve arguments in the future about whether something really happened.

Memory was especially important at monasteries, because they were officially undying bodies.  A gift of property made in the seventh century should still belong to the monks in the twelfth century.  Similarly, a particularly holy or at least effective abbot (or bishop) deserved to be remembered as a model for later generations to seek to emulate.  Thus it was important to get as many memories in writing as possible.

The problem of course was that these written records could be lost.  Before the eighth century those in the West preferred to write on papyrus, rather than on parchment (sheep skin), and papyrus disintegrates if not kept dry.  We have extremely few surviving original documents from the beginning of the Middle Ages, even though there is plenty of evidence of widespread literacy and record-keeping then, even notaries and public archives where important documents could be stored.  Most of what we know about these centuries from written evidence comes from copies made later, when delicate records were copied onto parchment.

Parchment however does not mean that a record is now preserved forever.  Since there was only the one copy, it could become lost, nibbled by mice, burned in a fire, have ink spilled on it, stolen, become too faded to read.  And this was during the Middle Ages.  The early modern and modern periods, from the sixteenth-century wars of religion to the upheavals of the French Revolution to the twentieth century's world wars, have destroyed far more.

And even copying was an issue.  Late Roman cursive, such as used in a lot of papyrus documents, was nothing like the Caroline book-hands used in the ninth through eleventh centuries, the great age of document copying.  Scribes must have looked at what was in front of them and made their best guesses as to what the words were.

Sometimes even when they could read what was written it still didn't make sense.  There were a lot of changes during the eighth century as Europe began recovering from the population loss of the sixth and seventh centuries (on which see more here), as new population centers started being established, often in different places than the late Roman ones, and as Latin was being replaced by the earliest versions of today's European languages.  Scribes of the ninth century and later could barely recognize their monastery in its earliest records, where places had different names, people lived in different places, and rules and customs were different.

Similarly, holy figures of late antiquity behaved differently than their successors half a millennium later.  Tenth- and eleventh-century monks and cathedral priests were shocked to find an abbot or bishop who had been married, or whose version of  proper behavior included dressing in rags and going barefoot.  The "life" of an early holy bishop might have to be rewritten so that the wife who appeared with him was actually a "bride of Christ" or perhaps someone to whom he had been unwillingly betrothed by his parents before entering the church.

If something was just too weird it could be deliberately forgotten.  All it took was an early, disintegrating document not to be copied for it to be lost forever.  But the past itself could not be dismissed.  After all, tradition legitimates.  "We have always done this" or "We have always been here" are still powerful.  Thus past events could not all be swept away.  Rather they had to be reconfigured into what historians call a "useful past," one which gave legitimacy to the present.  Medieval scribes explained that the past valued the same things they valued, even while hoping that no one would change the memory of the great deeds and people they recorded for their own posterity.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

For more on the early Middle Ages and medieval records, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

Paper

 We take paper for granted.  It's all around us, piling up on the desk or table (or chairs or floor...) in the form of memos, magazines, books, and random jottings.  We also use paper for cleaning, that is paper towels and bathroom tissue, to say nothing of cardboard boxes.  Remember when computers promised we would soon have a "paperless office"?  Yeah, like that's going to happen.  But medieval people did not have paper before the thirteenth century.

The word paper derives from papyrus, but it's actually quite different.  Papyrus, used in the ancient Roman empire, is made from papyrus reeds, which are sticky on the inside, slit and pressed together.  The reeds grow along the Nile.  With the breakdown of Roman trade routes and the rise of Islam (sixth-seventh centuries), the West stopped having easy access to papyrus and went over exclusively to parchment, except for the popes, who kept using their carefully hoarded store of papyrus until the eleventh century.  Parchment is made from thin, carefully prepared animal skins (generally sheep).  Parchment had been around for centuries but had not been used for letters or records for the most part, really only being used if something had to be rolled (like a scroll).  It was more expansive than papyrus had been and was considered less elegant.  But parchment survives much better in Europe's damp climate than does papyrus, which can disintegrate when wet.

Parchment remained expensive in the Middle Ages, but its durability means that medieval books and legal documents written on it still exist, unless burned or chewed by rats or otherwise destroyed.

For quick jottings and for writing rough drafts, medieval people used wax tablets and a stylus.  Because parchment was expensive, and all books had to be copied by hand, only the wealthy (including churches) could afford them.  It wasn't worth learning to read for most of the population.

Enter paper.  Paper is made from cellulose fibers, from wood or rags (cotton or linen especially).  The fibers are boiled out (with chemicals), drained across a mesh, then pressed together and dried.  The process was invented in China in the second century AD and spread to the Muslim world in the eighth or ninth century.  Western Europe learned it from the Arabs in the thirteenth century, and by the fourteenth century the use of paper, made from linen or cotton fibers, was widespread.

Because paper was so much cheaper than parchment, books became substantially less expensive.  It became worth it to be literate, because it was easier to own something worth reading.  This especially was true with the fifteenth-century invention of the printing press.  Those writing on paper tended to be much sloppier than their predecessors writing on parchment, when they carefully wrote each letter.  The high rag paper of the late Middle Ages has stood up very well over the centuries, but sometimes the handwriting has one scratching one's head, unlike the neat eleventh- and twelfth-century hands.

The production of rag paper became industrialized fairly quickly.  It stayed essentially the same until the nineteenth century, when wood pulp began to be used for paper.  It was even cheaper than rag paper and was cranked out in paper mills all over the country.  Unfortunately, the nineteenth-century process of making wood pulp paper was very acidic, and over the decades the paper started to disintegrate.  An old paperback you might find at the back of a shelf is probably more likely to fall apart than a fourteenth-century account book.  (In recent decades lower acid ways of making paper have been developed.)

With the advent of wood pulp paper, meanwhile, paper became so cheap that it could be used for throwaways, tissue, paper towels, sanitary products, and the like.  For these medieval people used rags (or handkerchiefs) which would then have to be washed.

Paper mills today recycle a lot of paper, which means fewer pine trees have to be cut down, but they understandably don't want used tissue.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

For more on medieval life, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.