Frequently Asked Questions
Below are the answers to a few “frequent” questions – I expect this to expand as more questions are asked.
It may end up in some kind of colloquy format.
Why isn’t the vellum/parchment/paper-stuff yellower: isn’t that what it was like back then?
The mediaeval manuscripts you might’ve seen in museums or on television are hundreds of years old, some over a thousand! They weren’t originally like that, it’s the effect of age. In fact, a lot of manuscripts still look creamy and fresh… so you probably don’t think of them at once as particularly old, because they don’t look it!
I can’t make a thousand-year-old book overnight – if anything I’ve made lasts a millenium, it’ll probably look about the same by then though. But of course the ones that are old now will have become even older by then…
Ok, so why doesn’t the ink look darker, and why’s it so inconsistent?
Short answer? Same reason. Okay, not entirely… Darkness it to do with three things. The amount of ink, its composition and how old it is. If there’s more ink in one particular place, it’ll look darker. As the mixture isn’t entirely even, that’s going to have an effect too.
Remember, this is mediaeval recipe ink flowing from a hand-cut quill, not scientifically factory-produced sterile cartridges excreting through a precision machined metal nib. And I’m certainly not applying it to the paper perfectly! But this does even out over time: iron gall ink darkens as it gets older. Nothing I write looks as black as the writing in an 8th century copy of Bede’s Historia ecclesiasticae gentis Anglorum I once saw, so again age makes a difference.
