News today that Prince William’s wedding certificate is going to be written on vellum, and that the happy couple are buying British. William Cowley of Newport Pagnall (est. 1860) are going to be soaking, stretching and scratching the skins until they are white and smooth. On this medium, the evidence of the match may last as long as the Magna Carta and the Domesday Book. The rest of us will have to make do with a mug or a mousemat.

Cowley is a company that regularly hits the news–as in 1999, when the Commons voted to carry on recording Parliamentary Acts on vellum, and in 2006, when the BBC’s royal charter, guaranteeing its funding for the next ten years, was approved. We are perpetuating some very timeworn techniques in our efforts to create what Horace called the monumentum aere perennius (a monument more lasting than bronze). Though he, of course, thought the really lasting medium was poetry–his own…