I don't know who I'm writing this to. Myself, I suppose, though I suspect myself won't need the reminder. This is the kind of night you don't forget.

The imaging results came back this afternoon. I've been sitting with them for six hours and I still can't quite make myself believe what they say. The central passage of item 7 — the one we've been calling "the pig letter" in the lab, which is not a dignified name for a document that has been sitting in the dark for six hundred and thirty-five years — the central passage is now legible. Most of it. Enough.

She wasn't writing to her children. She wasn't writing to the village. She was writing to someone she couldn't name, someone she couldn't see, someone she was fairly sure would come eventually if she left enough of a trail. "Keep asking," she writes. "Tell them the name does not end here." She buried her father and her brothers in eleven weeks. She was thirty-seven years old. She knew she might be the last one who remembered what the land was called.

She wasn't the last one. That's the thing.

I called James Marsh-Hale at half past nine. He's seventy-eight years old, he lives alone in Bermondsey, and he has been compiling this archive for most of his adult life without quite knowing why. I told him what the letter says. There was a long pause. Then he said, very quietly, "I knew there was something in that box." He'd had the collection for forty years. He'd never been able to read it.

My name is Eleanor Voss. I have been working in the Bodleian for three years on medieval Worcestershire property records. I specialise in the 14th century. I had no idea that I was Matilda's great-great-great — I can't even count the generations — granddaughter. I had no idea that the box I've been working from for three years was her box. I had no idea that "keep asking" was addressed, in some impossible way, to me specifically.

I'm not sure what to do with that.

James and I are going to compile this properly. All of it. The whole archive, everything from Ranulf onwards. We'll publish it. We'll make it available. Matilda asked someone to keep asking, and the least I can do — the least either of us can do — is make sure it gets asked properly.

It has been waiting approximately six hundred and thirty-five years. It can wait a little longer while we do this right.