Roll unfurls its secrets
There aren’t many medieval European documents in the Southern Hemisphere, and scientists have used cuttingedge techniques to analyse a document dating from the 1420s that’s held by the University of Canterbury.
The Canterbury Roll is an illuminated genealogical scroll that’s about five metres long and 33 centimetres wide. It records family lineages from the biblical Noah to the last of the Plantagenet English kings.
Researchers led by historian Dr Chris Jones at Canterbury have confirmed that the roll was first written in the late 1420s and was edited at least three times over the following 55 years or so.
After that, it disappeared from history until it was sold to Canterbury College by Sybilla Maude, better known as Nurse Maude, for £50 in 1918.
All but a handful of the 8000 words on the roll are in Latin. The roll is made of parchment or sheep skin and rolls up like a paper towel.
Textual analysis after 1918 and since 2012 unlocked most of the roll’s content and English origins, but modern scientific analysis in recent years has revealed some hidden gems and lost words.
The University of Canterbury turned to the Nottingham Trent University, which operates an Imaging & Sensing for Archaeology, Art History & Conservation (Isaac) research group.
It has a mobile lab with spectrometry devices, including one called Prisms, which can image in ultraviolet, visible and infrared light. Another, called an X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) spectrometer, can identify inorganic pigments. The are non-invasive technologies that do not harm the object.
Analyses of the Canterbury Roll showed that a small painting of Noah’s Ark near the top of the roll had been painted over with a red rose before 1485.
A red rose is important because for 30 years in the middle of the 15th century, England was sundered by the War of the Roses, a civil war between the York and Lancaster families for the English throne.
The war ended in 1485 with Henry Tudor’s victory at the Battle of Bosworth Field. He became Henry VII and founded the Tudor dynasty that begat Henry VIII and Elizabeth I.
It’s about 1485 that the last revisions to the Canterbury Roll were made and the red rose indicates that it was almost certainly possessed for a time by the Lancastrian family, probably in northern England.
The Canterbury Roll is one of 15 surviving Noah rolls, says Dr Natasha Hodgson, a roll historian at Nottingham Trent University who visited Canterbury last week. Most genealogical rolls from the period start with the biblical Adam.
The Noah rolls were probably produced in the same workshop or by a closely connected group, she says. The Canterbury Roll is unique because it is the most heavily edited of those found so far.
The Isaac imagery also revealed words that have become faint due to water damage. Jones and colleagues want DNA analysis of the parchment and better conservation. At some point after 1918, the roll was mounted on canvas, a poor decision it’s now known. Both projects would be expensive.
Jones imagined the document being unrolled on a Lancastrian trestle table, young and old from the noble family gathered around as a Latin-speaker orated on their whakapapa and claim to be kings.
The red rose indicates that it was almost certainly possessed for a time by the Lancastrian family.