A Register Without an Owner
~ Monday, July 19, 2021 ~
Sometime in the seventeenth century, someone wrote a short note on a piece of vellum, folded it once, and placed it with a collection of documents it did not belong to. The note has been in the Moravian Land Archive in Brno since at least the nineteenth century. Nobody has identified who wrote it, where, or why.
The Moravian Land Archive holds more than a century and a half of accumulated material from the ecclesiastical and administrative life of Moravia. Its Group E fonds cover records from religious orders, chapters, and bishoprics; its Cerroni Collection runs to 528 manuscripts spanning the thirteenth century to the 1840s. The archive has been doing the work of systematic description for decades, and it is still not finished. This is not a criticism. It is the normal condition of any institution charged with preserving the documentary residue of a region across several centuries.
Markus was in Brno in July 2021 working through a bound collection of miscellaneous vellum documents held in one of the Group E fonds — material aggregated from several ecclesiastical sources in the nineteenth century and not fully described. The collection had been indexed in outline in an old protokol, but several items within it had been flagged with the notation cont. incl. — content unclear — and left for later attention. Markus was not the first researcher to look at it. He was, as far as he could determine from the reading room register, the first to examine it in the current decade.
The bound collection
The volume is a limp vellum binding, unlabelled on the spine, containing roughly forty documents of varying size and period. Most are legible: estate boundary records, a confirmation of a land grant, several fragments of parish correspondence. The majority are written in the standard hands of seventeenth-century Moravia, in German and Latin. The nineteenth-century archivist who bundled them together and wrote the protokol entry noted the range of dates and the absence of any clear thematic unity. He assigned the collection a provisional shelf signature and moved on.
The document Markus wants to discuss is not the most interesting item in the collection by conventional archival standards. It is a single sheet of vellum, cut rather than torn, folded once to folio size. The dorse carries a notation in what appears to be a nineteenth-century hand: perg. frag., cont. incl.? This notation is the archivist’s acknowledgement that he did not know what to make of it either.
The text
The document is written in a hand that does not match any other item in the collection. The script is a late humanist cursive, consistent with the seventeenth century, but without the administrative regularities that characterize most contemporary chancery production. It reads less like a document issued by an institution than like a note written by a single person for their own reference, or for the reference of one other person.
The text is short enough to transcribe in full:
Locus sepulturae incertae. Extra muros. Ad fontem sub monte silvestri. Signo XIII notatum. Nomen ignotum.
Markus’s working translation: Burial site uncertain. Outside the walls. At the spring beneath the wooded hill. Marked with the sign XIII. Name unknown.
That is the complete text. There is no date. There is no place name. There is no issuing authority, no signature, no seal impression or traces of one. The topographic locators — a spring, a wooded hill, an extramural position — do not correspond to any settlement or feature Markus has been able to match against the archive’s finding aids for this region of Moravia.
What can and cannot be established
Markus can establish the following: the vellum is consistent with seventeenth-century Central European production; the ink is iron gall; the hand is of a period; the document has been in this collection since at least the mid-nineteenth century, when the protokol was written. The choice of Latin rather than German or Czech for so brief and apparently informal a text is slightly unusual for the period, but not without parallel in ecclesiastical contexts where Latin retained a documentary authority that vernacular languages had not yet displaced.
He cannot establish: who wrote this, for whom, from where, or about whom. The phrase nomen ignotum — name unknown — suggests the writer was themselves recording a burial whose subject they could not identify rather than protecting a name they knew. Whether the XIII is a reference to a numerical designation, a property marker, or something else remains entirely open.
The document belongs to the archive’s record. Markus is publishing a transcription here because it belongs to the scholarly record as well, such as it is. If anyone has encountered this text elsewhere, or can identify the hand against other dated examples, he would be glad to hear from them.
Sources
- Moravský zemský archiv v Brně (Moravian Land Archive, Brno). Group E fonds: ecclesiastical records, religious orders and bishoprics. Access: mza.cz. Reading room registration required.
- EHRI Portal — Moravský zemský archiv v Brně: portal.ehri-project.eu/institutions/cz-002230
- FamilySearch — Brno Moravian Provincial Archives: familysearch.org (parchment document collection description)
Friday, July 23, 2021
The cont. incl. notation is familiar from work in several other regional collections — it’s effectively an archivist’s acknowledgement that the item defied their normal descriptive vocabulary. Whether that means the content is genuinely unusual or simply that the cataloguer was working in a different language register from the document is worth distinguishing. In your case the Latin among vernacular material would fit the second explanation as easily as the first. Latin retained documentary prestige in ecclesiastical contexts well into the eighteenth century; a brief Latin note in a bound vernacular collection is not necessarily anomalous.