Work begins to conserve one of the oldest paper documents on island of Ireland
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Painstaking work has commenced to conserve and digitise one of the oldest paper documents still in existence on the island of Ireland. Dating back to the medieval period, the ecclesiastical register belonging to the former archbishop of Armagh Milo Sweteman is around 650 years old.
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. The Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland is a research partnership that is working to create a digital treasure trove that will enable people around the world to view documents that have been preserved in climate-controlled specialist storage archives due to their fragility.
PRONI is a core partner in the all-island initiative to widen access to seven centuries of history. Ecclesiastical registers contain copies or drafts of documents created by the archbishops’ administration work, including legal papers, official letters, correspondence, receipts and wills.
The register belonging to Archbishop 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.
A composite volume of four books, the register contains Swayne’s first-hand accounts of his time as a legal expert at the Papal Curia in Rome where he witnessed the 1414 to 1418 Council of Constance – a gathering of clerical leaders that resolved the almost century-long Great Schism within the Catholic Church.
