The Magna Carta is considered by many to be the most significant document in western history.
Magna Carta means the Great Charter and what it really does is it provides the basic rights
that we have as citizens in the Western world. The right to trial by jury, punishment that
is proportionate to the crime, no taxation without representation, habeas corpus and
so forth. We decided to proceed using a lot of expertise we gained working on the re-encasement
of the Constitution, the Declaration. Probably fewer than two dozen documents around the
world have been sealed in an airtight environment. What’s important now that it’s just come
off exhibit, is that we want to document its current condition. And we’re working with
a report that we wrote in 2008 that will give us a nice baseline for comparison. There are
17 copies of the Magna Carta. Fifteen are in British institutions. One is in the Australian
Parliament and one is in private hands. Yeah, let’s pack it up! I had heard it was for
sale, I went to see it the night before the sale occurred and I heard from the curator
that it was very likely that it was going to be bought by somebody who lived outside
the United States. So I decided that I would go back the next day and try to buy it and
really provide it as a gift to the National Archives so that the American people could
see it. With things that are reactive to changes in humidity such as parchment, also paintings,
those two particular types of artifacts always need time to acclimate to the surroundings.
We worked for a number of weeks making sure that the temperature and humidity were kept
constant in the workspace. When we opened the encasement the first thing that we wanted
to focus on was whether or not the change in humidity visibly affected the parchment.
It did not. Not wearing gloves is the first thing that most people notice. See, I feel
like it’s pretty strong. It’s phenomenal condition for its age. And what we tell them
is that when you wear gloves it reduces the tactile sense. So if you have something that’s
very fragile it’s the safest method of handling. The parchment is so susceptible or vulnerable
to changes in the relative humidity and temperature. When it’s on the animal, you know, it’s
aligned and it’s under tension. And then it comes off and it gets prepared or treated.
Because that’s not a natural alignment they, when it gets exposed to moisture the collagen
fibers, they have some memory that they want to realign. When we talk about mapping the
document we’re basically outlining specific features. Because when we do the treatment,
and it’s such a living document, it will change a little bit. There was a lot of distortion.
If that was tension caused by the mends we wanted to release it, and the only way we
could figure that out was by removing the mends. There were nine old repairs on the
document. Sometimes you discover things trapped in the adhesive. Looks like someone was wearing
a black sweater one day! What we wanted to do was to remove all of them so that we could
flatten the parchment evenly and also get rid of old adhesive residues that had been
left over from a previous campaign. Minimal moisture is critical, so we used a mild enzymatic
solution to soften the adhesive. It’s a trace amount that’s actually in contact
with the document. We take adhesive samples to go and have them analytically tested, so
that we know exactly what we’re dealing with. Removing the old repairs can be very
difficult, it’s very time consuming. We do it very carefully under the microscope
and use minimal moisture. That was not easy! When you look at the Magna Carta there’s
some drip marks on the right side. And you can’t read anything. Using a special camera
that can focus the ultraviolet radiation we were able to actually see what inked letters
had been present in those areas. So kind of magically, what was lost suddenly is visible
again. When we choose the paper, we’re looking for characteristics that are compatible with
the material that we’re mending or repairing. I outline the shape of the loss and I made
my repair paper slightly larger. And then that edge got thinned and that’s what gets
attached to the document with adhesive. There was a pretty significant loss here and so
to stabilize it we put the fill in. The effect that I was trying to achieve was to just make
it look similar to the surrounding parchment. Which with these watercolors is fairly easy
to do. None of the inpainting comes in contact with the document, it’s confined only to
the fill. And then to kind of, to reintegrate the loss so that it’s not the first thing
that you see when you look at the record, we just lightly tone with watercolor. It’s
still very visible that it’s there, but when you, it’s like camouflage. Conservation’s
art, science and history all rolled into one. The final step was humidification and flattening
of the parchment. And then we’re going to leave it for, under restraints in this, for
three months or so. After three months we’ll take the weight off. Our anticipation is that
it will remain in the, pretty much the same configuration.