Hi everyone. I'm Kathleen, and I'll be tutoring your group this semester. It's going to be fun!
Just to whet your appetite, here's a picture of a cool thing I saw in the National Archives in London
last year. It's a 14th century military wages pouch that belonged to
Thomas de Rokeby, keeper of the castles of Edinburgh and Stirling,
during the reign of Edward III. It contains his accounts for things like
paying his men between 1340-1342. [The Latin writing on the outside
tells us this]
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| 14th century military wages pouch (TNA, E101/23/1) |
The pouch and straps were made of lamb, calf or kid leather (from a young goat), known as vellum. I actually got the chance to handle this object, and I can tell you that it's still incredibly soft after 670 years!
4 comments:
good point!
Hi guys
If anyone is missing an Oroton umbrella - I have it.
Alright, first comment, I think I am writing them in the place I am supposed to and just commenting about general things in order to achieve the assessment mark?
I wonder how it is that a bag like that has managed to survive all these years?
They surely didn't think it something worth keeping for historical purposes at the time did they?
Perhaps continued using it, with it changing hands a few times ; but then that doesn't really explain the printed writing on it?
Fascinating how good a quality it is, still soft, and strong and potentially useable? Where can I get one?
Good questions about artefact survival. By the reign of Edward III, the English government already had a policy of archival preservation of official documents; this was partly because society was very litigious, and things were preserved as evidence. Once things entered storage, however, they were often simply forgotten, and in some ways this neglect is what preserved them into the present. It was in the 19th Century that the roomfulls of documents in the Tower of London that had been accumulating for centuries were rediscovered and the sorting began to create what is now The National Archives.
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