The Vágabok
In the year 1282, an outcry is heard in Vágar. Baron Bjarne Erlingsson of Giske has just stood at the thing at Brurberget and said that the Vágabok must be taken out of use. Now it is the National Law that applies.
Middelalderdokument fra Nasjonalbibliotekets samling: Ms.4° 1, Ms.4° 317, Landsloven, kristenrett, retterbøter, 1300-tallet, Bergen, Island, Hamar, Hamar bispesete, Karl Schildener (1777–1843), Jacob Wallenius (1761–1819), Greifswald, Bernhard Rosenblad (1796–1855), Stockholm Foto: Gorm K. Gaare/Nasjonalbiblioteket
Creating a medieval manuscript, or codex, is a long process that takes place in several steps. The value of a manuscript was extremely high, and this was due to the time it took to produce it and the materials used for its production.
Preparing the hide
In the summer of 2024, the craftsman Elouan Vaillant has tanned sheepskins at Lofotr Viking Museum. Here he scrapes the fat from the leather, which is an important step also for parchment making.
From skin to manuscript
You can see how the British Library demonstrates the preparation of parchment and ink as well as miniatures and colours in the videos listed in this article.
Preparing the parchment
For a codex, animal skins were previously used. The most common animals to make parchment out of were sheep, cows, goats and fallow deer. The important thing when using the leather is to know that leather has different thicknesses, which depends on where the skin was on the animal. The skin is thicker round the neck and dorsal marrow, but thinner around the ribs. The thin leather is what was used for parchment, to make sure that the codex could be closed. Thicker skins would have made the codex difficult to close or ensured that it always opened itself.
The leather has two sides; one side with hair, and one side facing meat. The side with hair has better texture for writing on, while the side against meat has more wax and is smoother. Which makes it difficult for the pen to bite into the leather.
If there were any injuries or holes in the leather during the tanning, these were included in the codex. Holes could have been sewn together, but sometimes the monks wrote around the holes.
Before the parchment could be used, it had to be measured and marked first. There were strict guidelines on where lines started and ended, where the page started and ended, and whether to make room for larger initials and margins. Measuring could be done with a compass that had two metal tips instead of one tip with metal and one with lead.
writing with ink and quills
For quills, feathers were used by larger birds, such as geese and swans. The feather was cut to a length of 20-22cm, as the full length of a swan or goose feather gets in the way when writing.
The tip of the feather is then cut off, all the wax is scraped off, and the cut off tip is shaped into a tip that can hold the ink. In the center of the tip, a cut is made that holds the ink, so that it drains slowly off the pen.
Ink was primarily made from oak gall apple. The process was to crush the gall apple with a hammer, and then leave the remains in a jar/glass/container with rainwater. This mixture stood on its own for a couple of days, until the tannic acid had extracted from the gall apple residue. The tannic acid had a dark brown colour, and when mixed with gum arabic and iron vitrol, the tannic acid thickened and took on a deep black colour. That’s how the ink for medieval parchment was made.