13th-century English court hand transcription question #2

Latin Learning Latin
1

Hello all :slight_smile: Thank you for all the help with my last question. This next question is primarily about case endings and mostly does not require any knowledge of paleography. In the excerpt below the strange punctuation is because I copied exactly what the scribe wrote. Many of the words are abbreviated and almost none of them have any case endings given. I had written the letters that I filled in in italics, but the italics did not survive the copy/paste. Here is the text in question:

¶ Cirographum sub nominibus Ernisii de Nevil’ et dicti. Josceyi. et Leon’ filii Salomon’ de .xvi. libris. reddendis inde ad festum sancti Mychaelis. anno. regni. regis. [Henrici] xxiijo. iiij. libris et ad pascham proxime [sequentem] .iiij. libris. et ad festum sancti Johannis proxime [sequens] .iiij. libris et ad pascham proxime [sequentem] .iiij. libris. Aaron filii Samuel de Ebor’ Calumpniat inde .xij. m.

My main question surrounds the case endings of the “libris’s” that follow “reddendis inde.” The first “libris” (i.e. the one before the “reddendis inde”) should clearly be abl. because it is the object of “de.” However, the other “libris’s” are a different story. I have put them in the abl. to agree with "reddendis; however, I believe that a case can be made that they should be in the nom. (or even acc.?) because they are, in a way, the subject of the clause. I.e. “4 pounds that ought to be returned (from the above-mentioned 16 pounds) at the feast of St. Michael.” The same question goes for all the rest of the “libris’s.”
One final question revolvs around the word near the end: “calumpniat.” “calumpnia, calumpniae” is usally a noun that can mean accusation, charge, false charge, opprobrium, etc. My best guess is that the scribe has here turned it into a verb meaning to claim, but I am very not sure on this point. The original section can be found at https://postimg.org/image/idbzgl5ox/.

Thanks for the help!
All the best,
-Ethan

p.s. the lender’s name is given in the title of the document as “Joscey” - should the gen. be Josceyi?

2

Hello,

Here are some tentative answers to your questions:

  • Everything in the ablative might do. Maybe the sentence could be analyzed otherwise, something like “Cirographum (…) de 16 libris. Reddendae (sunt) inde ad festum (…) 4 librae”. But maybe that’s just me not being familiar enough with this kind of texts. Checking other documents from the same period might help determine what was the underlying grammar.
  • calumniari/calumniare is a common verb I think. See Niermeyer, p. 116, for examples of it meaning “to claim, to vindicate, to make pretensions to a thing”.
  • Joscey/Josceyi, I don’t know. Which form is used when the name is written in full?

And some additional remarks:

  • “proxime”. Maybe “proximum” and “proximam” are better here since there is no adjective following. I guess one should check if this is attested in documents from this period.
  • “pascham” or pascha"?
  • Unless I missed something, “regis” does not appear in the text.
  • On an related note, I find the way you transcribe the text to be quite misleading. I think it would be better to make it clear which parts of the words are actually written and which letters are supplied. Maybe something like “a(nno) r(egn)i H(enrici)”. Just a thought though.