30 November 2010
As part of my learning medieval Latin, I’ve just started reading some legal depositions from thirteenth-century Venice. Now I’m used to Latin homiletics, hagiography, Biblical commentary, and poetry, but this was my first excursion into legal lingo. I was shocked at how modern it seemed. It could have come from a modern police blotter or out of the mouth of a police officer on the TV show Cops. Here’s an example from a deposition taken on 8 April 1290:
Florencius filius predicti Dominici, iuratus mandata domini potestatis et dicere veritatem et sacramento requisitus, dixit quod, die mercurii nunc elapso, ipse, cum uno alio qui vocatur Dainesius, laborabat audivit quemdam rumorem in curtivo dictarum dominarum; ad quem rumorem venit et vidit dictum Galvanum cum uno cultello a pane in manu euendo versus unam mulierem que est soror istius Florencii, ut dicit, et uxor ipsius Galvani. Quod cum videsset dictum Galvanum facientum insultum contra dictam suam sororem, ipse Florencius ivit versus dictum Galvanum et cepit ipsum, et ipse Galvanus ipsum Florencium et, sic tenendo se ad invicem, dictus Florencius percussit ipsum Galvanum cum pugno seu manu in faciem, taliter quod sanguis exivit. Interrogatus si aliqui alii precusserunt ipsum Galvanum, respondit non quod credat. De presentibus interrogatus, respondit quod plures fuerunt presentes, set non cognoscit eos. Aliud nescit.
Condempnatus in LX solidis et expensis curie. Solvit.
(Florencius, son of the aforementioned Dominicus, sworn as the mandates of the lord Podesta (civil magistrate) and to tell the truth and asked by oath, said that, on the Wednesday now passed, he, with one other named Dainesius, was working in the vineyard of the nuns of the aforesaid Saint Mary and, while they were working he heard certain shouting in the courtyard of the said nuns; he went to that shouting and he saw the aforesaid Galvanus with a bread knife in hand going toward a woman who is the sister of that Florencius, as he says, and the wife of that Galvanus. When he had seen the aforesaid Galvanus making an assault on his aforesaid sister, that Florencius went toward the aforesaid Galvanus and seized him, and that Galvanus seized that Florencius, thus holding each other, the aforesaid Florencius struck that Galvanus with his fist or hand in the face, such that blood discharged. Asked if some other struck that Galvanus, he responded that he believes not. Asked about the circumstances, he responded that many were present, but he did not know them. He knows nothing else.
Sentenced to sixty shillings and court expenses. He paid.)
I’m not the greatest at Latin, but this isn’t complex stuff, and it’s nearly a word-for-word translation. I haven’t massaged this at all to make it read like a modern deposition. Since our legal traditions are rooted in medieval Latin, it shouldn’t be a surprise that this legal mode of writing seems so normal to us some seven hundred years later. But I’ve never encountered anything this old that sounds so modern before.
(Edit: minor corrections to the translation)
