If you’ve been following podictionary for a while you’ll already know that the sources we have for Old English words, and even Middle English words are old documents, also that these old documents were not generally made of paper.

This is a good thing not only for trees but for researchers too since paper that is 600 or 1200 years old is usually not paper anymore but dust.

This was not such a good thing for barnyard animals though because instead of using paper the scribes of the day used parchment and vellum. These materials protected old documents so well because they had earlier been designed to protect animals—as their skin.

So it will come as no surprise to you that the word vellum comes to us from Old French and came right alongside another word, veal. So vellum was the skin from a young calf.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary Chaucer was the first author that we know of to use the word veal back in 1386.

Although they were writing on it, the word vellum didn’t seem to get written down until about 40 years later as an English word.

Both these words of course trace back to Latin where vitulus was a “calf.”

The American Heritage Dictionary links the Latin word back to Indo-European to a word wet that seems to be what the Indo-Europeans called a year. The idea here is that a calf or veal is a young animal, a yearling.

Although turning a tree into pulp and then spreading that pulp out into a thin sheet to make paper is quite an operation, it has the advantage that you can get a machine to do it and the result is a roll of paper hundreds of feet long.

Animal skins are not quite that long and the process of production isn’t exactly easy either.

• After the animal was slaughtered and the skin removed it was soaked in a lime solution until the hair fell off.
• Then each skin was stretched out on a rack and scraped smooth with a special knife.
• If the animal had gotten caught on a fence or been bitten by a bug the skin might have flaws that needed repair.
• Dry and shaved, the skin was again soaked to get the lime out then dried a second time.
• Finally it was rubbed with a pumice stone to really make it smooth for the scribes to write on before being cut into the shape of a page.

Pumice stones are a kind of foamy stone produced by volcanoes and they crumble a bit as they are used so that both the dust sanded off the animal skin and the dust breaking off the pumice mixed and acted to absorb any leftover oils on the vellum.

The result was a laboriously produced creamy white and long lasting surface upon which scribes could doodle for the benefit of future generations.