Well, David, what did the letter say?
We were obviously hoping for some sensational discovery, but it’s a very mundane letter, sent by a man called Jacques Sennacques from Lille. In 1697 he wrote a letter to his cousin in The Hague, a French merchant named Pierre le Pers, asking for an authenticated copy of the death certificate of the latter’s family member Daniel le Pers. We don’t know why Sennacques needed this certificate – perhaps it had something to do with an inheritance.
Even so, the letter is interesting for historians, as it offers a rare glimpse into the life of ordinary people. Most seventeenth-century letter collections were preserved by the elite, but here we hear the voices of ordinary people. Also, throughout the late seventeenth century the Dutch Republic was waging an almost continuous war with France. This letter shows that in times of crisis family members remained in touch, even across long distances.
How did you come across this letter collection?
Completely accidentally, as is often the case with such discoveries. In 2012 I was completing my PhD thesis on the Huguenots, French Protestant refugees who fled to the Dutch Republic to escape religious persecution at the hands of the Catholic King Louis XIV. My PhD supervisor attended a presentation by Simone Felten, who was researching a collection of letters. Since most of these letters had been sent from France in the late seventeenth century, the collection was potentially also of interest to me. Around the same time my colleague Rebekah Ahrendt read an obscure article that mentioned some French letters at the National Postal Museum. It soon became clear that it was the same collection, so we contacted the then curator Koos Havelaar. After Simone passed away quite suddenly in 2013, Rebekah and I decided to carry forward her research on the letters.
A seventeenth-century trunk with letters that belonged to postmaster Simon de Brienne (Courtesy of the Unlocking History Research Group archive).
What makes these sealed letters so special?
First of all, they were never delivered. In the seventeenth century post stamps still had to be invented, so postal costs had to be paid by the recipient. But if someone refused to pay, had passed away or simply could not be found, the postmaster was stuck with an undelivered letter. This also happened to The Hague postmaster Simon de Brienne, who was responsible for all post to and from France. Officially, he was obliged to send the letters back, but Brienne decided to hold on to them in the hope that the recipients would collect them at some future point – and he could cash in the postal charges. Luckily for us, in many cases this didn’t happen, so that we now have a more or less random collection of letters.
Another unique feature of the Brienne Collection is that all the letters have been preserved in their folded state, and that 575 out of the more than 2600 letters have never been opened. In nearly all archive collections historical letters are flattened out and sealed letters are immediately opened by the curator. This is understandable, since historians are mostly interested in the contents. Yet letters are also material objects that were secured in ingenious ways. We call this letterlocking: the folding and securing of a writing substrate (suchbas paper) to function as its own envelope. The fact that the Brienne Collection letters were preserved in their folded and often sealed state is precisely what makes it possible for us to study these security mechanisms. Our research project is therefore also a plea for a different approach to paper heritage.
Computer-generated unfolding animation of sealed letter DB-1538. “Virtual unfolding” was used to read the contents of sealed letterpackets from 17th-century Europe without physically opening them.
What was your role in the project?
Together with my colleagues Rebekah Ahrendt and Nadine Akkerman I transcribed and translated the digitally unfolded letter. This was not an easy task. After scanning the letter we ended up with thousands of images that the algorithm was supposed to combine into a legible letter. The first attempts were not a great success – the computer cannot read seventeenth-century French and made lots of mistakes. I can still remember the first scan I got. It was a bit like a Swiss cheese: full of holes bits of sentences strewn across the page. Still, our ability to decipher these bits and pieces meant we could help improve the algorithm, a process we repeated until we had a legible scan. Another challenge was the fact that in those days French was not yet a standardised language, and many letter-writers were barely literate. Some of the letters are incomprehensible due to spelling mistakes and lack of punctuation. But thanks to our extensive experience in reading old script we managed to decipher this letter in the end!
Now on to the other 600 sealed letters?
Absolutely. Our plan is to raise more funds so that we can scan, digitally unfold, and read the remaining sealed letters. I cannot wait to reveal the hidden stories in this collection. I think the real historical scoop is still lurking somewhere in these sealed letters.