Pen and Ink
Pens
The pens pictured in in the right hand column throughout most of this website are the tools that make scribing possible. They start out as the innermost flight feathers on the back of a swan’s wing, as pictured at the top of each page. Having been removed from the bird, they are hardened by aging, being left to gather dust on a shelf for months on end, before being hand cut into the nib shape familiar to anyone who uses a fountain pen. However, rather than splitting them right through to make a single wide channel as you would find in a metal nib, a series of channels are scratched into the reverse side to help the ink flow onto the page. By cutting them to different widths, and choosing how squarely to cut the end off the point, different pens can be made to achieve different effects and to better suit different sizes of writing. I usually strip most of the “feather” off the spine of the quill, as it makes it easier to write.
This is the knife I use, with a sharp edge for cutting quills into pens, a point for pricking measurements into the surface of parchment, and an angled reverse edge for scoring lines to write between.
Iron Gall Ink
Unless colours are required, I write in Iron Gall Ink made to a mediæval recipe. I buy this ready-made, but unsurprisingly it is concocted from oak galls, iron and various other ingredients. According to one member of the clergy I have spoken to, priests recording baptisms, mariages and funerals still use ink of this type because it is longer lasting than than modern types.
While many inks fade with age, in good library conditions Iron Gall Ink darkens, and because it is mildly acidic it “burns” an imprint into the writing surface so even if the ink is removed an impression remains. As a result it is sometimes possible to recover erased or altered text – sometime revealing embarassing
mistakes, sometimes editorial policies.