The Arts in the Middle Ages and at the Period of the Renaissance

by P. L. Jacob

Generally, the quality of parchment serves to determine the date of its manufacture. The vellum of manuscripts till the middle of the eleventh century is very white and thin; the parchment of the twelfth century is thick, rough, and brownish, which often shows it has been scraped or washed. The greater number of fine manuscripts are on

Fig. 330.—Seal of the University of Paris (Fourteenth Century), after one of the Dies preserved in the Collection of Medals in the Imperial Library, Paris.

virgin parchment, which from its nature was suited to the delicacies of calligraphy and illumination. Moreover, we see from a statute of the University of Paris, dated 1291, that the parchment trade had attained at that period to considerable development; so, as a protection against the frauds and deceptions which might result from the great competition of traders in it, and to insure a good article being furnished to students and artists, a special privilege was granted to the university, which, in the person of its rector, had not only the right of inspection, but also the refusal of all parchment bought in Paris, no matter whence it had come. Besides which, at the fair of Lendit, which was held every year at Saint-Denis, on the domains of the abbey (Fig. 329), and at the fair of Saint-Lazare, the rector likewise caused the parchment brought to them to be examined, and the merchants of Paris could not purchase any till the king’s agents, those of the Bishop of Paris, and the masters and scholars of the university, had provided themselves with what they required ([Fig. 330]). Let us add that the rector was paid a duty on all parchment sold, and the result of this tax was the only source of income attached to the rectorship in the seventeenth century.

Although white parchment seems to be the best suited for writing, the Middle Ages, following the example of antiquity, gave to the material various tints, especially purple and yellow. The purple was chiefly intended to receive characters of gold or silver. The Emperor Maximinius, the younger, inherited from his mother the works of Homer inscribed in gold on purple vellum; and parchment tinted in this way was, during the first centuries, one of the prerogatives reserved for princes and the great dignitaries of the Church. It is remarkable that the barbarism of the seventh and eighth centuries did not diminish the favour in which these luxurious manuscripts were held. Little by little, however, the custom (of writing the entire work in gold or colours) dwindled away. Scribes began by colouring a few pages only in each volume, then some margins or frontispieces; and lastly this decoration was restricted to the heads of chapters, or to words to which great prominence was to be given, or to capital letters. The rubricatores (literally, writers in red), workmen who performed this operation, came in time to be mere painters of letters or rubrics (so called because they were originally painted red), of whose assistance, however, the first printers availed themselves to rubric or colour the initials of missals, Bibles, and law books.

The dimensions or sizes of our books at the present day have their origin in the sizes of the parchment in olden times. The entire skin of the animal, cut square and folded in two, represented the “in-folio,” which, moreover, varied in length and breadth; and we have every reason to suppose that paper, from the day it was invented, followed the ordinary sizes of the folded parchment.

As to the dimensions of the parchment employed for diplomas, they varied according to the time, the brevity of the matter, or the nature of its employment. Among the ancients, who wrote only on one side of the parchment, the skins were cut in bands joined together so as to form volumes or rolls, which were unrolled as their contents were read. This custom was preserved for public and judicial acts for a long time after the invention of the square book (codex) had caused the opisthographic writing to be adopted, by which is to be understood writing on both sides of the page. In principle, only the final formulæ, or the signatures, were written on the back of the document. By degrees people adopted the practice of writing on the back as well as the front of the page; but it was not till the sixteenth century that this custom became general.

Fig. 331.—Seal of the King of La Basoche. (This title was suppressed, with all its prerogatives, by Henry III.)

Judicial acts, composed sometimes of many skins sewed together, came in time to form rolls of twenty feet in length; to such extreme proportions did they reach, though at first they were so small in size that their limited dimensions are truly incredible; for in 1233 and 1252 we find contracts of sales of two inches long by five inches wide, and in 1258 a will written on a piece of parchment of two inches by three and a half. It was by way of compensating for the great cost of parchment that opisthographic writing was adopted and rolls were put aside; and the name alone remains as applied to the rolls of procedure. The size that leaves should assume was also fixed, according to the different uses for which they were intended. For instance, the leaves of parliamentary documents were nine inches and a half long by seven and a half wide; those of the council, ten by eight; those of finance and of private contracts, twelve and a half by nine and a half; letters of pardon, under the king’s hand, were to be on entire skins squared, two feet two inches by one foot eight inches in diameter.