Conserving the Swinburne Collections – Early Deeds and Charters of the Swinburne Family

This guest blog is written by Lindsey Gibson, Archive Conservator at Durham County Record Office, who with fellow conservator Zoe Ross carried out the conservation work.

This project involved the conservation of an interesting and significant collection of 758 early deeds, charters and papers of the Swinburne family of Capheaton covering the period, 1172-1714. The documents had been bound into seven volumes in the 19^th century.  Earlier posts on this blog have given an insight into the context of the collection, this blog will discuss the conservation of the collection.

The decision was taken to treat this collection after a conservation survey identified it as high priority for conservation. This was due to the historical importance and poor physical condition of some of the documents and the degree of interest in them. 

The purpose of conservation treatment was to physically stabilise the documents so that they can be  digitised and made more readily available without the need for repeated handling of the originals. Bespoke archival housing was also to be provided to protect the documents whilst in storage.  

Conservation treatment 

Prior to being bound the documents must have had a varied history; many had been damaged by mould growth, insect and rodent activity, and had been stained by rust, wax, oil and  water amongst other things.

Whilst the bound format had kept the collection together and protected the paper and parchment documents, the seals attached to many of the documents had been damaged and were at risk of further damage while they were in (or protruding from) the volumes. Many of the seals were already very fragile and crumbling due to deterioration of the very old wax.

We also suspected that there was text on the back of a number of the documents that could not be read because the parchment was stuck to the pages of the volumes. As many of the paper documents were sewn into the binding much of the text at the gutter edge was also obscured.

My colleague Zoe Ross and I in the conservation department at Durham County Record Office, in consultation with Sue Wood, the Head of Collections  at Northumberland Archives, agreed on a Conservation treatment plan for the collection. The treatment we agreed upon included disbinding the volumes in order to address the issues caused by the bound format.

Our treatment also included surface cleaning the documents using a soft brush and museum vacuum to remove the surface dirt and mould, and removing the discoloured, acidic adhesive residues from the paper and parchment.

Losses, tears and areas of extreme weakness had resulted from the action of mould, rodents and insects. These were repaired where necessary, to prevent further damage or loss and to allow the documents to be read and digitised. We try to use similar materials for repair: parchment and paper for the damaged documents and new beeswax to repair the cracked and fragmented seals.

Some of the ink on the parchment documents was powdery or flaking  and required the introduction of gentle humidity to help re-adhere the ink to the parchment.

After the documents had been flattened out using magnets to ease out the folds and creases, they were rehoused in folders and boxes padded with an archival foam which was cut to fit around the seals.

Challenges!

Conserving the Swinburne collections proved to be both challenging and very rewarding.

Estimating how long it would take to complete complex treatment of such a large collection was difficult, particularly as this was the largest collection that we have worked on to date. Some of the parchment was severely damaged and removal of some of the documents from the cumbersome volumes proved difficult in itself.

However the challenging nature of the project also gave rise to opportunities and we were able to undertake training in repairing wax seals and parchment. We  have since been able to share our new skills and experience with conservation students doing work placements at DCRO.

In addition to the excellent training, we also learned about medieval deeds and charters, for example: Some of the documents exhibited herringbone cuts to the parchment or appeared to have had the seals cut from the tags. When we researched this we discovered that these alterations were made to void the documents. Understanding why a document has been created or altered in a particular way affects our conservation treatment decision making. For example, many of the parchment documents have a long thin ‘tongue’ of parchment at the bottom of the document, these were invariably tightly curled and folded. We discovered that these thin strips of parchment were used to tie around the rolled or folded documents so did not attempt to flatten them as they provided evidence of how the document would have been secured.

Similarly several of the documents had historic repairs, unless these were obscuring text, or causing damage to the document we would not remove them as they show evidence of the document’s history. 

Overall working on the Swinburne collections was a very rewarding challenge and Zoe and I both learned a lot from it. We have also had the satisfaction of seeing the fragile documents stabilised, made safe for handling and digitisation; the text on the back of many of the documents has been revealed; and  the documents are now housed in protective archival packaging to ensure that they are preserved for the future.