The Bressingham Roll

The Bressingham Roll (Norfolk Record Office call number PHI468,577X9) is a 14th century parchment roll which can no longer be unrolled due to fusion of several layers of the parchment.

The Bressingham Roll unolled as far as possible without causing further damage. The section to the right of the image is stuck together. The roll is unfit for production in the archives, with the inner portion becoming stuck together.

The ink used in the writing contains both iron and copper, and gives good contrast in X-Ray imaging.

The end-on single slice view of Bressingham roll shows both the parchment and evidence of ink very clearly.

The Roll was scanned at 30kV with a 200um Aluminium filter and post-processing with in-house developed beam hardening correction software.

The video below shows a software rendered view of the bressingham roll generated from our scan data. It shows clear detection of ink though out the roll and gives an indication of the roll’s structure.

After scanning, the roll was returned to the Norfolk Record Office and the scan data was passed over to Paul Rosin’s team at Cardiff University to perform the virtual unrolling. The results of this joint effort in scanning and unrolling were shown on the BBC Televion ‘One Show’, a copy of the segment is avaliable below.