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How the documents survived
Lübeck Letter
Ayr Manuscript
Declaration of Arbroath
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Lübeck Letter
Little is known about the survival of the Lübeck letter
until the outbreak of the Second World War. In 1942, Lübeck,
on the Baltic coast of Germany, was attacked by Allied aircraft.
As a result, the town's archives, including the letter, were
moved to a saltmine for safety. At the end of the war, the
Soviet army took the papers east. The archives were later
handed over to the archive administration of East Germany,
but the medieval documents were not among the records. It
was assumed that they had been lost. In the 1970s Lübeck
documents were found in the archives of the USSR. In 1990,
after some negotiation, the town's medieval records, including
Wallace and Murray's letter, were returned to Lübeck
where they remain today.
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Ayr
Manuscript
The Ayr Manuscript appears to have belonged to the Burgh of
Ayr in the 1400s but no record of its ownership exist for the
next few hundred years. In 1824, it somehow appeared on a bookstall
in Ayr where it was bought by Ebenezer Thomson, one of the masters
at Ayr Academy. It was then passed into the care of the National
Archives of Scotland where it remains today. |
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Declaration of
Arbroath
The document in the National Archives of Scotland is the only
surviving copy of the Declaration. The Pope's copy in Avignon
has not survived.
The Declaration was kept with the rest of
the national archives in Edinburgh Castle until the early
17th century. When repair work was being carried out on the
castle, the Declaration was taken into safekeeping at Tyninghame,
the home of the Earl of Haddington. At some time during the
18th century the document suffered serious damage from damp
so that today it shows some ragged gaps in which portions
of text have vanished. Luckily, the full text of the document
has survived from an earlier engraving.
In 1812, the 8th Earl of Haddington gave
permission for copies of the seals to be made for an official
publication. At this time, only 21 of the original 46 seals
remained. Today only 19 survive. In August 1829, the 9th Earl
of Haddington, following the wishes of his late father, passed
the document to the National Archives of Scotland where it
remains today.
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As the Declaration of Arbroath is one of the most
important surviving documents, it is kept in a specially designed
case to ensure its long term preservation. The case was designed
by the Getty Conservation Institute in America and built in 2005
by Professor R L Reuben and his colleagues from the Department of
Mechanical and Chemical Engineering at Heriot-Watt University in
Edinburgh.
The Declaration of Arbroath, like the Dead
Sea Scrolls and America's Declaration of Independence, is now secured
in a hermetically sealed display and storage system which is filled
with inert gas to reduce oxygen levels. This slows down the rate
of chemical, physical and biological deterioration of the document
itself. Storage within this special case will help preserve this
special manuscript for future generations.
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