To prove a title to property it is now only requisite to show a twenty years’ possession of it. Papers forming the title deeds to farms or small holdings are seldom of any great age. The custom of depositing estate records in the care of the family lawyer has tended to preserve a few deeds; but, on the other hand, has resulted in much wholesale destruction of useless but curious documentary evidence.
Vast numbers of deeds have been and are being sold when a lawyer’s office has been broken up. These papers, having lain for years unclaimed until the ownership was lost or forgotten, finally were sold to some antiquarian bookseller or antiquary, or else the skin was cleansed and used again, parchment being a valuable substance. It is employed in many trades. From it size is prepared. Gold-beaters employ it largely, and also to the book-binder’s trade it is essential, besides having many other and varied uses.
Even now lawyers find great difficulty in preserving and storing the deeds entrusted to their charge. The dangers of fire and damp are conflicting, and to avoid the one may bring about greater risk from the other cause.
Parchment being an animal substance (usually made from the skin of sheep), if kept in a damp place, soon begins to decay and become offensive, mites readily attack it, dirt and dust accumulate rapidly on its external woolly surface—all these make a search among hoards of old deeds anything but a pleasant or a cleanly occupation.
The usual storehouse for such collections was some unused garret or stable-loft, where rats and mice ran riot and birds flew in and out as they liked. Forgotten, perhaps, for several generations, the old papers lay untouched till death or removal brought changes, and the deeds were either placed in safer keeping, or else—alas! the most usual course—were consigned to the flames as useless rubbish.
The quality of parchment varies much. That upon which early deeds—those about the thirteenth century—are written, is in small pieces, woolly in texture and of a dark brown shade. In the sixteenth century the sheets are larger, smoother, and yellow, becoming whiter in colour and more even as its preparation was better understood and practised.
Vellum was a finer sort of parchment prepared from the skins of very young or still-born animals. Of it the old manuscript books were made, adorned with illuminations and miniature paintings, which required a fine, smooth surface, and vellum was free from the flaws which frequently occur in the skins of mature animals.
With the history of paper-making we have nothing to do. Paper was known as early as the thirteenth century, but for law work in England it was seldom, if ever, employed before the fourteenth century. The earliest known examples are described as being made of silk manufactured abroad. On the Continent it was used for illuminated work in the place of vellum—at least, so Prou states, but does not tell us of any notable examples.
The history of English-made paper is somewhat obscure. Ordinary lesson-books, published for the enlightenment of the young, state that the first English paper-mill was erected at Dartford, in Kent, by Speilman, a German, in 1588. This, however, must be wrong, for in that popular educator of the past generation, the Saturday Magazine, a short account is given of early paper and its water-marks, and John Tate is named as having a mill at Hertford, his device being a star of five points enclosed within a double circle. John Tate the younger is here stated to have made the paper for the first book printed on English-made paper about the year 1496. It was written in Latin, and entitled ‘Bartholomeus de Proprietatibus Rerum.’ His mark upon it was a wheel. This mill existed for thirty-five years—1460 to 1496. This same account goes on to say that the paper used by the early printers bore great variety of marks: a bull, fifteenth century: the oxhead, with the star between the horns, late fifteenth century; the black letter
