​Painstaking work to conserve and digitise one of the oldest paper documents still in existence on the island of Ireland begins

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.

As well as reflections on events of world significance, the documents also include plenty of more anodyne observations about life in Armagh, including the archbishop’s strong dislike of women wearing pointy hats, a fashionable item of the period that he referred to as women’s horns.

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.

The registers are still owned by the Diocese of Armagh, which has given permission for the conservation work.

Sarah Graham, head of conservation at PRONI, explained that paper was extremely rare on the island of Ireland when the registers were compiled.

It was a period that just predated the invention of the printing press when parchment from animal skins was the still the preferred writing material.

“Paper that pre-dates 1450 is particularly rare, it didn’t occur in Ireland for a couple of centuries after the register of Milo Sweteman or the register of John Swayne were completed,” said Ms Graham.

“We’ve done some research into the watermarks and know that the paper came from Italy and from Spain.”

Ms Graham said it was likely the archbishops imported the paper to Ireland during their travels around Europe.