Painstaking work to conserve Ireland’s oldest paper documents begins
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Delicate 650-year-old pages to be preserved are some of the island’s most important historical texts. Work has begun to conserve and digitise one of the oldest paper documents still in existence on the island of Ireland. The ecclesiastical register, which dates back to the medieval period, is about 650 years old. It belonged to the former archbishop of Armagh Milo Sweteman.
![[Rows of shelves containing archive boxes of records at the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) in Belfast]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/6dd642f86634123a05ce06cca178629475180540/0_138_4174_2506/master/4174.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
Its delicate pages are being repaired by experts at the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) as part of an initiative to rejuvenate and preserve some of the island of Ireland’s most important historical texts. Ecclesiastical registers contain copies or drafts of documents created by the archbishops’ administration work, including legal papers, official letters, correspondence, receipts and wills.
![[Sarah Graham working with a medieval ecclesiastical register from the Diocese of Armagh, in a conservation workroom]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/a3ae506bf782b2d1240fb22c82a68576418df7cc/0_147_4416_2650/master/4416.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
The register belonging to Sweteman dates to his time in the senior clerical role from 1361 to 1380. Conservation work on the register of archbishop John Swayne, dated from 1418 to 1438, has already been completed and a digitised copy, along with a translated summary, are now available online.
The conservation work on the Swayne books involved carefully detaching bindings dating from the 17th century, gently washing all the paper folios and then consolidating each piece of paper with a weak gelatine solution. Tears and losses in the paper were infilled with Japanese kozo paper before the books were rebound using 17th century binding material.
The work now under way on the Sweteman register involves the need to repair damage that resulted from previous conservation efforts dating back to the start of the 20th century when tracing paper was placed on the pages in an attempt to preserve them. The tracing paper was acidic and actually accelerated the corrosion of the ink and paper.
