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.

"Stuff" in the Middle Ages

Most people reading this blog probably own way too much "stuff," a problem medieval people did not have.  Our many cheap and serviceable possessions are a product of the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution.

In an earlier post I discussed medieval clothing.  Most people in the Middle Ages (and for that matter up through the eighteenth century) would have had two outfits, one to wear and one to wash.  Washing of course was reserved until something was good and dirty; none of this tossing it into the washer after one wearing.  The overstuffed closets of many of us are only possible because of industrial looms, sewing machines, and cheap overseas labor.

One of the biggest causes of clutter in today's house (looking at my own office as I type) is too much paper.  We buy books, we get magazines and catalogues, we get mail, we print out interesting articles, we keep journals, we make notes, we get receipts.  This of course was not a problem for medieval people.

Paper didn't really exist; it first appears along the Mediterranean in the thirteenth century, but only became at all common in the fourteenth.  Without paper, everything was written on parchment, which requires starting with a sheep and doing a whole lot of processing.  Even medieval paper, being rag-based and made by hand, was far more expensive than modern paper, even if cheaper than parchment.

Everything was written by hand until the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, and even then most things were handwritten.  Books as a result were very expensive, plus you had to know how to read, which left out three-quarters of the population (or more).  A good-sized library might have a few dozen books, and this would not be a personal library but one belonging to a church.  A hundred books constituted a truly large library.  Most medieval books that survive look very well-thumbed, because they were read and re-read.  (Click here for more on medieval books.)

Besides clothing and paper, modern "stuff" includes kitchen ware (everything from pots and can openers to plates), furniture, appliances, linens (sheets and towels), decorative objects, cosmetics, window treatments, electronic paraphernalia (computers, phones, etc.), sound recordings, souvenirs, toys, sporting goods, and tools.  All of it is good and useful or at least seems like it should be, or could be again.  Much of it is imbued with happy memories.  We don't realize how much we have until we have to move or otherwise clear out a house.

It's no wonder that one of the biggest selling books right now is about how to make yourself throw away or give away your possessions.  Many wish (at least in the abstract) for a simpler set of possessions.  Medieval people would also give everything away, but normally only if they were going to go off and be a hermit or something.  And they would have had far less to deaccession.

Many a powerful lord's household in the Middle Ages would pack up pretty much everything they owned and take it with them when they traveled.  The bed frames would be disassembled, the trestle tables knocked down, the few chairs and cooking pots put on a wagon along with the bedding and the extra clothing, and off they would go.  In the late Middle Ages, when the well-to-do got glass for their windows, they would even travel with their glass--after all, you wouldn't want to sleep in a drafty room.

© C. Dale Brittain 2016