Illuminated manuscripts are books which have been written and decorated by hand some time between the fall of Rome, in the late 5th century AD, and the invention of the printing press, at the end of the 15th century. Often painted in a multitude of styles and formats, illuminated manuscripts flourished in ecclesiastical, monastic, devotional, courtly, legal, and academic contexts throughout the Middle Ages and early Renaissance. In the Middle Ages, manuscripts were written and painted on parchment (vellum) made from the skins of animals such as cattle, sheep or goats. The slight differences in color and texture indicate the smooth side (the flesh side of the skin), and the rough side, which was the dide where the animal's hair had been removed. The beautiful, handwritten texts were created by scribes (either professional individuals or monks) who learned to write in many different types of script. The most common black in "recipe" called for the preparation of wood from the hawthorn tree, collected in April or May, and some type of binder such as the resin of plum or cherry trees. The adornment of the book, or illumination, depended on the skill of the illuminator and the wealth of the person who commissioned the book. Individual pages could receive such decoration as: decorated initials, borders, line endings, drolleries (human or animal figures in the borders of a page, often fantastical) and miniatures (fine small paintings. The artist worked with natural substances, such as red clay, the woad plant, and Brazil wood. gold, silver, and lapis lazuli were also used. Gold was applied to the page in one of two ways, eithr burnished, the shiny form of gold, highly polished, or liquid, applied as a paint in suspension.