Fraudulent efforts to tweak legal documents in Great Britain may have been thwarted by the very parchment those documents were written on, a new study suggests.
Previous studies have shown that property deeds were written on a range of animal skins, such as goat, calf and sheep. But it turns out sheepskin was the parchment of choice, researchers report March 24 in Heritage Science. An analysis of proteins extracted from 645 samples from 477 British legal documents dating from the 16th to the 20th century shows that 622, or 96.4 percent, contained sheepskin.
That popularity may be tied to low cost compared with other parchments, like vellum made from
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