Before any treatment commenced, it was important that the Antiphonal was thoroughly examined so that its condition could be assessed and so that the evidence of its physical history could be recorded.

An interesting picture of the binding history of the book emerged during the examination. The binding is definitely not original - apart from anything else, the pre-treatment binding was not a 13th century binding.

Having examined the evidence within the book, we are able to say with some confidence that the book has been rebound about three times since the original binding was removed. This evidence included:

• multiple sewing stations and fragments of different sewing threads, indicating that the book had been sewn a number of times,
• layers of different leathers on the spine of the book,
• repairs to the backfolds of the all the folios.

It is also very clear that one of the binders trimmed the book down from a larger size, cutting text on the foredge margin in half.

In addition, a number of different styles of repair were found within the textblock. A sample of each was retained so that this information is still available to future generations.

When the Antiphonal conservation project commenced, the book had a number of problems that threatened its future survival:

• the spine leather had split, leaving the boards loose and unable to adequately protect the vellum leaves. This also made the book - which is quite heavy - very awkward to handle
• the sewing had failed, becoming very loose in some places and allowing vellum leaves to protrude beyond the rest of the textblock. These leaves were very vulnerable to "wear and tear".
• the black musical notation in the book was beginning to crumble, leaving small deposits of pigment in the spine gutter margins. Movement in the textblock, caused by the loose sewing and loose boards, led to abrasion of the text as the leaves moved over one another. If this was allowed to continue the text would have worn away. The rate of pigment loss would have been closely related to the amount of use the book received.
• many of the old repairs were stiff, over-glued and restricted the flexibility of the vellum. Some had to be removed so that the original vellum did not split along the edge of the repair.
• many of the vellum leaves were cockled and distorted. Some distortions were due to poor repair techniques, others resulted from vellum's extreme sensitivity to fluctuations in relative humidity. All were quite "set" into the vellum and affected adjacent leaves.

Following this detailed examination, a treatment proposal was drawn up for the Antiphonal. It was vital that the treatment rectified the major problems, without compromising the integrity of the book and without creating new problems.

As each treatment step was completed it was necessary to assess its effects and to determine whether any changes needed to be made to the treatment proposal.