A Question With a Yes or No Answer
Some Freedom of Information requests ask for a document. Request CAS-318518, filed with The National Archives at Kew, asked something narrower: a yes or no. Had any part of the parchment roll catalogued as C 53/102 ever been cut, trimmed, or excised? Did any conservation record or photograph show such a thing happening? The requester framed it as what they called an objective, physical question, one that did not depend on reading the document’s content or knowing its date. The Archives’ own log shows the request resolved on March 3, 2026, with the outcome recorded as “some information provided.” What follows is what that information actually was, and what it did not settle.
Where the Report Came From
The Archives did not commission new work to answer CAS-318518. Instead it located an existing conservation report on C 53/102 and released it. That report was written years earlier, for a different purpose entirely: preparing the charter for public display at “Charter 700,” an exhibition held at Tring Local History Museum, in Hertfordshire, from November 25 to December 7, 2015. A condition report written to get an object safely onto an exhibit stand is not the same kind of document as one written to investigate a specific act of alteration. The Archives treated it as the closest relevant material it held. Nothing in the response claims it was written to answer this question, because it wasn’t.
What the Report Describes
The report is precise about condition, in the flat vocabulary of conservation work. The ink is presumed to be iron gall ink, based on its color, age, and pattern of deterioration; graphite is also noted as present. There are multiple small tears along the edges of the parchment, the worst of them already repaired. Horizontal and vertical creases run through the membrane, including one large vertical crease at the center that has gathered ingrained dirt over time. The parchment shows significant planar distortion, meaning it no longer lies flat. Abrasion appears along the ridges of the creases. Small sewing holes survive in a stitched section at the top of the membrane. And the report records that corrections to the text were made “by scraping away ink and top layer of parchment,” with dirt worked into the scraped patches. Overall media condition is classified as stable.
What “Resolved” Actually Means Here
The Archives stated that confirming or ruling out deliberate cutting, trimming, or removal of parchment would require a fresh physical analysis of C 53/102, and that producing new analysis is not something the FOI Act obliges a public authority to do. Under that legislation, a request is answered with recorded information already held, not with new work commissioned to satisfy it. On that basis CAS-318518 was closed on March 3, 2026. This is a finding about the limits of the process, not about the parchment. The Archives did not conclude the roll was untouched. It concluded that answering the question was outside what the request could compel.
The Ordinary Reading
Scraping a charter to correct it was routine practice for medieval clerks. Erasing text by removing the surface layer of the parchment and writing over it is one of the most common features of enrolled charters in this period, and dirt worked into old scraped patches is consistent with age, not concealment. If the scraping recorded in this report is the whole of what prompted the original suspicion, there may be nothing here beyond an ordinary scribal correction. The report itself gives no indication either way. It records the scraping as a fact of the object’s surface and moves on.
What the Report Never Addresses
Nowhere does the report state whether the scraped correction has any connection to a separate act of cutting or excision, or whether the two are unrelated entirely. It does not describe the roll’s edges, its membrane joins, or its stitch points as things that were examined for signs of removal. The response mentions a photo image and an overlay diagram used for checking condition generally, but no photograph of an edge, join, or stitch point is cited or described. That is a gap in what was written down, not evidence of what a missing photograph might have shown.
Whose Suspicion This Is
The premise driving CAS-318518, that a section of parchment might have been physically removed from C 53/102 at some point after it was enrolled, comes from the requester. No conservator’s note raises it. No historian is on record making the same claim. It exists in the file as a question asked, not as a finding reached, and it should stay labeled that way.
Where the Record Leaves It
CAS-318518 was closed on March 3, 2026, because the Archives decided the question fell outside what FOI law requires it to answer, not because the question was answered. Whether any part of C 53/102’s parchment was ever cut away remains, on the paperwork released so far, genuinely open. The 2015 conservation report is still the only condition assessment on file, written for a local museum display more than a decade before anyone asked it a question about deliberate excision. It was never built to answer that question, and it doesn’t.