Hello again all! This spring brought a fresh discovery of some very old and very large materials. So large, in fact, that the one I’m going to show you wouldn’t fit on our scanner and I had to kneel on a chair to get an image of the full document! The box this found in, as well as another containing similar materials, are soon going to be donated to the West Yorkshire Archive Service - so I thought I'd give you all a peek here before they start off on their journey.
While the content of this ‘Assignment of Mortgage’ isn’t particularly riveting, the document itself is a wonderful piece of material history. It’s dated to 1797 (making it 226 years old!) and is written entirely in beautiful cursive. Unfortunately, the cursive makes it difficult to read – which is a little ironic considering it’s an important legal document – so I can only tell you the basics of its meaning.
The document is in remarkably good condition, which I put down to the fact it’s made from vellum. Vellum is writing material made from treated animal skin, usually cow or sheep. If preserved correctly, it can be more likely to outlast paper as it’s less susceptible to the ravages of damp and time. As the helpful stamp at the top of the document records, this piece of vellum was supplied by law stationer H. Cawood of York. It’s a beautiful artifact of the British legal system during the late 1700s, and I was delighted to discover it – even if it meant parsing through paragraphs of historic cursive legalese!
I found a surprising number of these large vellum legal documents, and unfortunately the Library archive doesn't have the resources to care for them properly at the moment. As such, as I mentioned above, we have decided to donate them to the much larger West Yorkshire Archive Services. This way, they can be enjoyed (or puzzled at) by generations of Leeds historians to come!
If you would like to see more from the Library's archive, or have any questions about its materials, please feel free to contact me at day-goughn@theleedslibrary.org.uk. The Leeds Library provides free access to our archive for researchers of all kinds, and I would be delighted to hear from you.
All images courtesy of The Leeds Library.