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This small collection contains legal documents of the abbey of Saint Gall associated with Notker: deeds of gift (traditiones), precarial grants, by which donors received back land for life in return for a rent, and an exchange of property. They date from the abbacy of Grimald and name donors such as Williheri, Hiltibert, Landeloh and Williold, list witnesses, and in one case end with the scribe’s note that Notker wrote and subscribed in place of another, giving the date by the regnal year of King Louis. One donor asks for clothing and support from the monastery in return for his small property.
Charters of this kind are among the most important sources for the social and economic history of the Carolingian east, recording landholding, family names, local officials and the relationship between a great abbey and its benefactors. Saint Gall’s archive is exceptionally rich, and these pieces show the routine work of its scribes, Notker among them. They are also useful examples of the formulas of early medieval documentary Latin.
About this edition. The Latin text comes from Corpus Corporum, the Latin text repository of the University of Zurich (edition: Jacques-Paul Migne, Patrologia Latina, vol. 131, Parisiis 1853), reused with attribution for non-commercial purposes (CC BY-NC-SA). Every word has been analyzed with LatinCy, a neural language model for Latin — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from Lewis & Short’s A Latin Dictionary.