«Es tan ancha como la carta fasta’l perágrafio»: Lexical Uses Related to Writing in Early Notarial Documentation

Abstract

Those who drafted and preserved medieval notarial documents took particular care to ensure their validity and authenticity but paid less attention to the language they used. Added to this is the lack of information that has survived to the present day regarding how the drafting process was carried out, its exact chronological dating, the transmission and preservation of the documents or the origin and education of those who wrote them; we therefore face a serious obstacle when attempting to draw linguistic conclusions from these texts, particularly the earliest ones. Hence, we are compelled to rely on the scarce and imprecise data provided by the material constituents of the writing and its validation elements, such as witnesses or confirmers, in order to attempt to reconstruct the process of drafting the text and the possible phases or layers in its creation, as well as to determine, as far as possible, the time and place of its composition.  The aim of this task is to situate more precisely within historical dialectology the material provided to us, in our case, by the oldest private notarial documents in Northern Castilian Spanish included in the CORHEN corpus (Corpus Histórico del Español Norteño). In spite of everything, it is worth noting that the fact that different strata, phases or various vicissitudes can be inferred in the production of a text should always raise doubts about the language or linguistic state to which it corresponds, prompting us to exercise caution in our attempt to reconstruct the history of the spoken language through written texts.

Given that a single document can sometimes provide us with a wealth of information or, rather, raise many questions —often difficult to resolve— regarding medieval writing practices, this study begins with an analysis of an interesting lease agreement from Palencia dating from 1245 —actually the lower part of a chirograph— which measures the millstones of a watermill using the parchment itself as a reference. The elements validating the document —the chirographic system itself, the witnesses or the seals— will be detailed, as will its precise description of the leased rights and properties, in particular the meticulous list of the parts of one watermill and their valuation, since the thickness of its millstones is measured against the parchment itself to ensure that they will be returned after the lease in the same condition in which they were leased. This curious measurement and the difficulty of pinpointing the meaning of the term perágrafio, used as a point of reference for the measurement on the parchment itself, serve as a pretext for reflecting on the possible process and stages of the charter’s drafting. Finally, we will focus on the term pesquisa in the chirograph and on synonyms such as teste or testigo that appear in other documents within the corpus, with a view to examining the information they provide, in order to reconstruct the writing process and the dating of these medieval texts.