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.