Sheepskin was used as an early anti-fraud device by medieval lawyers

[Documents analyzed as part of the study]

According to a new research, medieval and early modern lawyers preferred to write on sheepskin parchment because it helped prevent fraud. Experts have identified the animal species used in British legal documents from the 13th to the 20th centuries, and discovered that they were almost always written on sheepskin vellum rather than goatskin or calfskin vellum.

It's likely that this was due to the structure of sheepskin, which made any attempts to remove or alter the text obvious. Sheep store fat in the spaces between their skin's layers. The skin is immersed in lime during parchment production, which draws out the fat and leaves voids between the layers. Attempts to scrape off the ink would cause these layers to detach, resulting in a noticeable blemish that would illustrate any attempts to alter the writing.

[Documents analyzed as part of the study]

Sheepskin has a high fat content, ranging from 30-50%, compared to 3-10% in goatskin and just 2-3% in cattle. As a result, sheepskin has a much higher potential for scratching to detach these layers than other animals' hides. Sheepskin's continued use over goat or calfskin in later centuries was most likely due to their greater supply and lower cost.

[Structure of sheepskin and the layers typically present in parchment]

Academics from the University of Exeter, as well as the Universities of York and Cambridge, worked on the research project.

Sheepskin may have been used as an anti-fraud device, according to surviving texts. The text Dialogus de Scaccario, written in the 12th century by Richard FitzNeal, Lord Treasurer during the reigns of Henry II and Richard I, recommends using sheepskin for royal accounts because "they do not easily yield to erasure without the blemish being apparent."

When paper was popular in the 17th century, Chief Justice Sir Edward Coke wrote that legal documents must be written on parchment "because the writing upon these are least liable to alterations or corruption."

[All Information and images of this post are collected from the scientific research article published here]

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