I can scarcely believe that I can utter that dread word...

First!

But more to the point, this topic sent me straight to my library, and I found this:

"...the parchment for just one bible required the butchering of several hundred sheep...Charlemagne donated a forest with all the deer within it to the abbey of St-Denis, so that the skins could be used for binding the books in the monastic library." ("Charlemagne - Father of a Continent", Alessandro Barbero p. 237)

The blood of the lamb.

I dunno about haggis for tea, but there was haggis in my lunch ...

In my studies,* vellum is calfskin and parchment is sheepskin or goatskin, though it is stated that the terms are frequently misused. The author at Got Medieval did use the term parchment for sheepskin and goatskin, although it is odd that he neglected to mention vellum/calfskin. Anyway, I'm content to stick with that until I run into a professor who will mark me wrong for saying otherwise.

* Mediaeval and Celtic Studies at the University of Toronto. The only reason why I don't qualify for Book and Media Studies is because I'm not interested in taking the mandatory generic media studies course; apart from that, I have enough courses on books to do so.

Carol, 3: Mine too. (French lit with a concentration in medieval studies.) I can't tell vellum from parchment, but I can tell the hair side from the skin side!

Since I am a knitter, I have a somewhat different ending for "You take this sheep, see...." This got me wondering about the age at which a sheep is slaughtered to make parchment/vellum -- depending on the breed, it would seem to make sense to get a few years' worth of wool from the sheep first.

A Google search led me to an excerpt from what sounds like an overall fascinating book*, which claims that "vellum, a delicate variety of parchment, came from the skins of newly-born or stillborn lambs, calves or kids; today** five-pound calf skins are used."

So perhaps both lambs and older sheep were used? The sizes of the folios made from a lamb vs. an adult sheep would be quite different, I'd think.

* Living Crafts by George B. Hughes, Lutterworth Press, 1953.
** in the 1950's

Well, the OED derives "vellum" from "veal," so at least originally vellum was calfskin. I don't think the distinction between "vellum" and "parchment" matters that much any more, though. These days what is sold as "vellum" is plant-derived.

You take this sheep

...as your lawfully wedded ovine?

Serge @#7

You are a Baaaaaa -d man

Stephen Baxter (mediaeval historian, not sf writer) recently did a BBC docco called Domesday on the purpose of the Domesday book, which was made using 200 sheep and calf skins, apparently. During the progamme he visited a vellum maker (or maybe the only vellum maker) and went through the labour-intensive process of producing a writeable surface from a damp pile of calf skins.

Serge #7: Only after the reading of the Baanns.

Cadbury Moose:

Baaaaaa(1)          BSD General Commands Manual           Baaaaaa(1)

NAME
Baaaaaa -- express derogation

SYNOPSIS
Baaaaaa [-duv] [noun ... ]

DESCRIPTION

-- more --

There is a company in the US making vellum and parchment (working from cow, lamb and goat).

There was a segment of, "Dirty Jobs" on it a couple of years ago.

The writing materials were actually a sideline (might still be) from the making of leather for drumheads.

I still can't figure out the vegetarian haggis served in some Edinburgh pubs. a.) what is it made out of, and b.) what is it made in?? I'm guessing some kind of soy, but what do they make it in ... a recyclable plastic bag?!

Debbie @5 said: Since I am a knitter, I have a somewhat different ending for "You take this sheep, see...." This got me wondering about the age at which a sheep is slaughtered to make parchment/vellum -- depending on the breed, it would seem to make sense to get a few years' worth of wool from the sheep first.

Depends. There are wool breeds and meat breeds, and sometimes the wool on the meat breeds is nigh-useless (for anything but, say, stuffing or felt -- which isn't really useless at all, in period). Also, overwhelmingly most meat-breed sheep don't live to give a second crop of wool, and certainly not a third, unless they're breeding stock.

I don't doubt that the hides of even old wool-breed sheep (or milk cows, etc) got used for SOMEthing; waste not, want not, y'know, as the zookeeper said to Albert☂.

------

☂ In Les Barker's lovely sequel poem, not the differently lovely Marriot Edgar original, which is a favorite of my father-in-law☮. I need to take our Les Barker chapbooks and glean out the very most recitable-to-children ones★ to make an easy-access flip-throughable printed thing.

★ Like "I can't find my camouflage net," and "I have an occasional table," neither of which will get us into trouble if she spontaneously recites them at preschool ... UNlike his equally lovely but sort of NSFK(indergarten) "Dachshunds with erections can't climb stairs."

☮ I think my father-in-law's version is much superior to the video I linked, but that's because my (British) father-in-law does an absolutely marvelous Northern accent while doing so, which makes it clear (via the rhymes, assonance, etc) that that's precisely how Edgar intended it to be recited. Also, my father-in-law✿ camps up lines like, "Eeee, I AM vexed!" in ways that only add to the hilarity. Of course, he spent far too many childhood family vacations stuck in train carriages with families very like Albert's, so he has life observation to draw upon.

✿ Who has also memorized and can recite end-to-end 'La Cage Aux Folles' and used to do the birthday schtick, complete with feather-boa, at all family birthdays. Have I mentioned how much I adore my father-in-law? AND he gives heavy thick nonfiction for Christmas when it's on my wishlist➼! My own blood relatives tend to look at things like that and decide they'd rather give me yet another Bed Bath and Beyond or Old Navy gift certificate. :-/

➼ I can't be the only Fluorospherian with hefty nonfiction brick-tomes on their wishlist. I do hope this set of nested digressions doesn't count as a thread-hijack, though! :->

meredith, I tried the haggis at the breakfast buffet at our hotel in York, and thought it was okay. Next day I went to have another serving and saw that there was regular haggis and vegetarian haggis, and I couldn't tell which one was which, or which one I'd had the day before.

I should have had some of each at that point, but I was demoralized and gave up on it, so I guess I've had Schrödinger's Haggis now.

ps: I can't comment on the next two posts. And for once, I had something to say.

And Kip W is not the only one who cannot post on the next two threads (King Tut tissue box and Google search strings), which I find odd because I'd already commented on the tissue box one.

And pertinent to this post, I'm afraid that while I inferred a difference between vellum and parchment, or else why were there two words?, I was never sure of the distinction. Apparently, I'm not alone, if even experts interchange the terms.

Having read about haggis, I am not inspired to try it, but may all who enjoy it continue to do so for long years to come! (Somehow, I doubt that's going to become a standard blessing any time soon...)

somehow i thought vellum was a variant of the word film

Billy Collins wrote a poem about using sheepskins to make the Gutenberg bible, and speculating about whether the sheep would understand the part about 'the lord is my shepherd'

Kip and Sid: As generally a lurker, I probably wasn't going to comment on the next two posts anyway, but it would be nice to have the opportunity...

Would vellum made from cattle raised on pre-Civil War Southern plantations be called Antebellum vellum?

Kip, Syd,

You can comment on the Open Thread. Those two posts are wandering Particles that got stuck to the front page like cat hairs.

abi @22: Hmmm. How odd (Bensonmum). Not that I had anything particularly earth-shattering to say about either topic, it just seemed unusual. Thank you for the explanation. (And the apt comparison. I carry a lint-removal roller in the car for meat-space cat hair...I wonder what the electronic version would be?)

Cow is common in Ireland for mss. There are now several mss. DNA projects, one in Ireland that began with LU, the Book of the Dun Cow, and then Michael Drout's sheepskin DNA project (http://wormtalk.blogspot.com/2010/03/prototype-of-manuscript-dna-extractor.html) and another guy who is doing a similar one to Drout's.

I was taught by Michelle Brown to think of parchment as made from split skin, and vellum from young skin (with the veal cognate as a reminder).

Elliott Mason @14 — You can find the Les Barker Waste Not Want Not^☄ at monologues.co.uk . Thank goodness for Google, or I'd never have gotten the end of the punch line.

^☄Plus much more Albert, much more Les Barer, and much, much more.

So you take ~1000 pages for a bible, in 16-fold mode, or 32 page sides per skin. That's 32 sheep, not "several hundred". That you were probably going to eat anyhow.
I loathe innumerate writing.

Paul Lalonde@26: Possibly they were thinking about folio size bibles, which would only get 4 pages per sheep.

I've always (well, since taking an interest in the subject, 65+ years ago) defined vellum as "a thin & smooth material for writing or painting on, or binding with, made from the skins of unborn or new-born animals (usually lambs, sometimes kids or calves).

Parchment, on the other hand, is thicker, not as smooth-surfaced or quite as light colored, can be found in larger sheets, and usually comes from mature sheep or goats (cow/kine skin can be used, but apparently often requires shaving or abrading to make it thin enough for practical use).

Note that neither of these is tanned -- the skin is just stretched tightly, scraped to remove all traces of flesh and fat from the inside and hair from the outside, and dried. (I think it may then be smoothed & perhaps reduced in thickness with pumice-stone, and possibly treated with talc, but I'm unsure about this finishing stage. Also note that there appears to be no agreed-upon thickness or other quality that distinguishes precisely between the two... and that standards/terminology varied widely by place and time during the era when it was the commonly-used writing material.)

Debra Doyle@27: How much larger is the script in a folio-sized bible than in its more compact counterparts? If you still need 1000 pages, folio-sized, I'll grant 250 sheep and retract myself!

Which reminds me to call up the butcher and order a lamb for (Canadian) Thanksgiving.

TexAnne, #4: So do you put the skin side inside?

Elliott Mason @ #14:

Around these parts, Stanley Holloway is generally accounted the definitive interpreter of Marriott Edgar monologues. YouTube has Holloway reciting "Albert and the Lion" and also Holloway reciting Edgar's own sequel.

Paul, 29: Yes, you need much better script. The not-folded-cow size books were for many people to share, so they were held up some distance away. (Pretend it's a Powerpoint.)

Lee, 30: No, it's all folded up anyway. It doesn't make much difference, it's just a neat thing to know.

Elliot Mason @ 14: This one by Les Barker makes me laugh until I cry.

Lee 30: TexAnne, #4: So do you put the skin side inside?

Hiawatha he went hunting went to hunt a BUNNY RABBIT!

"Hi, I'm your bunny for the evening, Tommy."

And to make a pair of mittens from the bunny RABBIT'S FURRRRRRRR!

And here I give you Hiawatha vs Bugs Bunny

May I introduce my friend the ritual scribe? She spends much of her professional life writing on parchment. She has some very interesting technical details and pictures and contributes to the discussion of "just how many animals need to die for your manuscript". Also speculation about using giraffe skin for writing sacred texts.

Paul Lalonde@29: How much larger is the script in a folio-sized bible than in its more compact counterparts?

Would you accept, "it varies"? It wasn't a world in which standardization and interchangeability were ideals, or even really concepts yet. Different scripts in different centuries, different scribes in different scriptoria, different purposes in different places.^†

Script size would also vary depending upon whether a text was being maximized for beauty and readability (as in the case of illuminated Gospels), or whether the primary concern was getting as much text onto the page as possible (at which point you got small cramped scribal hands and a reliance upon abbreviations which - for latter-day readers -- can make processing the text less a matter of reading it than of decoding it.)

^†But if you take the Gutenberg Bible as a standard (it was a printed text, but its style and layout were still those of a manuscript produced by hand), 318 sheep-equivalent folio sheets were required to produce 1272 pages.

Thanks Debra - that's a lot of sheepskin! I stand fully corrected.

Paul Lalonde #38: I misread that for a moment as "that's a lot of sheepshit". Which would also be the case.

Happilly returning to this thread during the interval between the feeding and the shrieking (brand new baby.) - The production of the "giant bibles" was a truly epic endeavor. The Giant Bible of Mainz (currently in the Library of Congress) is IMHO the literary equivalent of Köln Cathedral.

I know I'm joing this party far late; however, I wanted to share two links that help to illuminate this subject vastly--just copy and paste into your browser
(Parchment making in Havant England at turn of century)
http://www3.hants.gov.uk/museum/community-history/parchment.htm

(History of Parchment)
http://www.sca.org.au/scribe/articles/parchment.htm

Cool! Not that I'm going to rush out and skin a sheep anytime soon, mind you.

The parties around here sometimes go on forever with long lulls as we catch our breath or visit other parties for a while. You're not late at all.