Painstaking work has commenced to conserve and digitise one of the oldest paper documents still in existence on the island of Ireland. Dating back to the medieval period, the ecclesiastical register belonging to the former archbishop of Armagh Milo Sweteman is around 650 years old. Its delicate pages are being repaired by experts at the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) as part of an initiative to rejuvenate and preserve some of the island of Ireland’s most important historical texts.
One of the ecclesiastical registers being worked on at the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland (Liam McBurney/PA) PRONI is a core partner in the all-island initiative to widen access to seven centuries of history. Ecclesiastical registers contain copies or drafts of documents created by the archbishops’ administration work, including legal papers, official letters, correspondence, receipts and wills. The register belonging to Archbishop Sweteman dates to his time in the senior clerical role from 1361 to 1380.
Conservation work on the Register of Archbishop John Swayne, dated from 1418 to 1438, has already been completed and a digitised copy, along with a translated summary, are now available online. A composite volume of four books, the register contains Swayne’s first-hand accounts of his time as a legal expert at the Papal Curia in Rome where he witnessed the 1414 to 1418 Council of Constance – a gathering of clerical leaders that resolved the almost century-long .
