Beware what lurks
This isn't strictly archaeology and it doesn't even involve the Middle East, but the tale of how moving the furniture revealed a treasure tickled my fancy and I hope it will intrigue you too.
It seems that David Sharron, archivist for Brock University in St Catherines, Ontario, was running out of space in his office. He normally handles documents dealing with Niagra Falls, which is just ten miles away. Given that Europeans only discovered the Falls around two centuries ago, that means that the stuff he usually deals with is no more than two hundred years old - newspaper clippings, old drawings or photographs, that sort of thing.
Nevertheless, as a diligent archivist, Mr Sharron keeps the more interesting items and records the rest on microfilm. Microfilm is small, but it is not infinitely small and an ever-growing collection of microfilm spools requires an ever larger space in which to store them - and as the parsimonious university authorities declined to give Mr Sharron a larger office, he and his co-workers recently engaged in a major reorganisation of the furniture in the office in an attempt to fit a quart of microfilm into the pint-pot office.
One of the ideas they came up with was to empty a filing cabinet and put microfilm in it and Ms Edie Williams got the job of removing the files - what was going to happen to them is not clear. Down at the bottom of the drawer she came across a plastic wallet in which was a small rectangle of stiff paper on which was a lump of green material. She turned it over and discovered a hand-written note saying that it probably dated to the 15th century and was given to the university in 1976.
It made a pleasant break from the task in hand and everyone looked at it before it was popped into a box and work continued on the office reorganisation. It might well have been forgotten for another thirty years had it not been for a chance meeting with Dr Andrew McDonald, the university's resident mediaeval historian. McDonald and Sharron chatted of this and that and in the course of their conversation McDonald lamented that while Brock University was stuffed to the gills with Niagra memorabilia, there was little or nothing in his line of work.
That triggered David Sharron's memory and when he got back to his office he hunted up the plastic wallet, opened it, took a photograph of its contents and e-mailed it to McDonald. Because the document appeared to be written in Latin, he sent a copy to Andre Basson, the university Latin expert, as well.
Like many people I know, university boffins are not as prompt in dealing with their e-mail as they should be and it wasn't until the following day that the two recipients checked their in-boxes. When they did, they stared goggle-eyed at the picture of a mediaeval parchment, complete with green wax seal. As soon as their teaching commitments allowed, the two men headed for the university archive: "They were like kids at Christmas," Mr Sharron relates.
It turns out to be a charter by which a mediaeval noble, Robert de Clopton, grants a plot of land to his son William, along with all its "appurtenances", which meant everything on the land - buildings, peasants and villages. The writer identifies himself as "Nicholas the Clerk", who was probably a member of a religious order, to judge by his expertise in Latin.
The Brock duo are having problems coping with some of the mediaeval Latin as well as problems reading the document - presumably they are trying to do so without breaking the seal - so they have not yet found the date of the charter. However consultations with British archives (probably the British Library in London) have turned up other charters by Robert de Clopton, which place him in the reign of Henry III, 1216-1272.
In the great scheme of things, Robert de Clopton's little land dealings don't rate very highly and his charter is not of earth-shattering importance. For someone used to dealing with things no more than 200 years old, however, a document 800 years old is really exciting and Andrew McDonald loses no opportunity to show off the university's treasure to his students.
Mind you, along with trying to read the Latin and work out the details of the land deal, McDonald, Sharron and Basson are still trying to work out how the parchment came to be at Brock. Who gave it to them? When and why? And why did it end up in a forgotten drawer of a filing cabinet instead of on display in the university's museum? They still don't know.
© Kendall K. Down 2009
