100 sheets of stolen vellum

[Fabrizio Salani]

I had this thought experiment lately. Assuming that the VMS was not written in a scriptorium (i.e., not in an "official" place filled with dozens of professional scribes where one could easily notice that someone is writing a hundreds of pages of secret text in broad daylight), we could assume that it was written in a more secluded place, outside the scope of prying eyes. 

One way to do so could be to take the vellum from a scriptorium using theft, and then write the MS in a "safe place". After all, iron gall ink was not difficult to make "at home", so all that was needed for writing the VMS DYI-style was a lot of vellum.

So I wonder, how easy would it be to steal 100 sheets of vellum from a scriptorium, and whether such a theft would go unnoticed (are 100 sheets "a lot" or "a little" in the scope of a professional workshop)? Would such a theft be recorded in the inventory of a scriptorium?

I began researching the use of parchment over the centuries after the discovery of one of the most important pieces in my collection: the parchment print of Raphael's "Madonna of the Fish" (including mine; another example exists in the English collection of R.H. Keynes, with different coverings
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pages 18-19. Still on the same publication, I recommend reading from page 44 onwards the text by Theresa Fairbanks concerning the history of the creation of the parchment), engraved by Marcantonio Raimondi and/or his student in Rome, Marco Dente da Ravenna "il Ravennate."
From my research, parchment was readily available in Europe until the advent of paper and Swiss paper mills in the 16th-17th centuries, especially in Italy, France, Spain, England, and the Holy Roman Empire of Habsburg (Eastern Europe). Although expensive, there were many artisan workshops that prepared it and sold it to convents, religious copyists (in this case, almost always made in monasteries), artisan copyists, scholars, universities, lawyers, and private individuals who used it for their own purposes. Parchment had varying costs depending on the type of leather, the imperfections it contained (being an organic material), the shade, the thickness, and the quality and importance of the craftsman who crafted it. With the advent of paper, the use of "virgin" parchment was abandoned, becoming an even more valuable and rare material. Thus, the practice of reusing less valuable parchments, which were treated with various processes and reused for overwriting, became widespread.
There was also a black market for parchment.
However, availability at all levels was simply a question of price, not of lack of support.
This is just a short and simple summary because the discussion is much broader.

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