 I've only ever seen one other example of this. It's a fascinating and very rare type of artifact. It's rare now, once upon a time, they were very common. These were your calendar, your diary, the medieval equivalent of everybody's mobile phone to give you practical information. But precisely because they were used on a day-to-day basis, one that survives in pretty good condition is all the more valuable. The owner of this book wanted something that was functional, that was practical, but didn't want something luxurious. It was probably for a layperson, perhaps a gentleman farmer, who needed practical information about the time and the seasons. So we see for each month there is a labour of the month and a zodiac symbol. The other side of it gives us complicated information about how to calculate Easter. That's fairly unlikely that the type of user we've hypothesised would ever have used that. It's the same again as a modern mobile phone, which has many apps that you probably don't use, but they're standard, so they're there too. Right, Max Page please. What we're looking at here are the pigments in the manuscript, and we want to identify these without damaging the manuscript and without contacting the manuscript. In Raman's spectroscopy we're looking at the vibrational fingerprint of the molecules on the page. To measure that we shine a laser, a very low power laser I should add, onto the page. Most of the light gets scattered with the same wavelength as goes in. A tiny amount comes off with a slightly different wavelength, a different colour. We measure the difference between what goes in and what comes out, and that gives us that fingerprint for the materials on the page. Okay, so let's have a look at this page here. This is particularly interesting because this page represents pretty much all the pigments we've found in the book. What we find the red here, as we expected, is mercury sulfide, which is this pigment called vermilion. It may well be synthetic in this period. The dark blue of the tunic, or greeny blue, is indigo extracted from the woad plant or potentially imported in this period. What's really exciting about this is the club. You can see here one of the Gemini twins is holding up a club in his hand. Looks quite an unexciting yellow colour. Well, it's a very dull colour, but we've found in there, opiment, arsenic-3 sulfide, which is quite an unusual find in books of this period. It's not common to find opiment in this book. Of course, it's a highly toxic material as well, so it really is quite a dangerous club he's holding there. Wah, opiment! Yeah, the club is opiment. That's a pretty good spectrum, even though I say so myself. The content of the calendar lets us work out that it's either at the end of the 14th century or at the beginning of the 15th century. Now, the yellow or the brown yellow in here we know is opiment, a poisonous pigment. It's fairly rare in the later Middle Ages, and around 1400, a beautiful new yellow is widely available in England, lead-tin yellow. And it pushes all other yellows out. Here, opiment is still being used, not lead-tin yellow. And that, therefore, suggests it's more likely to be the end of the 14th century than the beginning of the 15th century. We can see looking at this almanac that you're going to take away and conserve in your studio. It's got some damage, it's been well used. What can you say about its past life based on looking at its condition? We can see those modern statues here, but we can see these are replacements of old original lupers, which we can see along here. So it's been torn and repaired at different times throughout its history, and we can see the different threads. Yes, and it just tells us that the object was really loved and cared for. Now, looking at these threads, this is the replacement of original repairs, which is carried out much longer ago. And we think this is quite a modern repair, and we think this can be improved by replacing with Japanese paper repair. The fact it was handled quite heavily is what makes this object quite rare. At the moment, it is too difficult to handle by anyone, and there is some damages which can get worse by wrong handling. So we're trying to keep all the evidence of the history there, but trying to make it accessible by public. We're not trying to clean, or we're not trying to transform the appearance of the object. So what is remarkable about this is that it's very clearly been used and over a considerable period of time, but it still survives. We know from documentary records that these were widespread timekeeping devices, but because they were used on a day-to-day basis, they fell apart, they were discarded, and only a small number of them survived, about 30 worldwide. To have in near perfect condition such a well-loved, well-used, rare class of book, now rare class of book, is a miracle in itself.