I was given the privilege of doing one of the very personal end-of-reign scrolls for my dear husband, who dropped a lot of his own projects (including renovating our house) to make a new Order of Precedence database and interface. I had recently been gifted about a kilo of vellum scraps, so shortly after we moved house I sat down and went through all of them to find the biggest squares I could cut, and then picked the biggest one out of them. I wanted to do a diploma style writ, and my twin said if I finished it soon enough and sent it to her, she'd not only seal it with the kingdom seal, but also with her own personal seal as a witness. Seeing as Simon is a big fan of seals, I knew this was the route to go.
The basic format of the diploma was modeled after a 12th century papal letter.
The text was modelled after a couple of 12th C French documents from the abbey of Notre Dame in Paris. It reads, in Latin:
Willelmus rex et Isabetta regina drachenwaldenses notum fieri volumus universis tam presentibus quam futuris quod donamus Simoni Talbot, armigero, jus ostendere sigila nostris. Actum apud Polderslot, a. s. LIV. Ego Aria Bona scripsi.
Translation:
William king and Isabetta queen of Drachenwald will it be made known whether to present [people] or future that we give to Simon Talbot, armiger, the right to bear our sigils. Acted at Polderslot, in the year of the society fifty-four. I, Good Ary, enscribed [this].
I included as many abbreviations as I plausibly could.
I wasn't present at the court it was presented at (didn't get to site until a few hours after he did), but the first thing he did after I arrived and found him was squee about the seals. And he said the scroll made up for the fact that he'd spent the nights that I sat at my desk working on it (in his presence!) irritated that I was scribing instead of unpacking boxes.
© 2019, Sara L. Uckelman.
