The Notarial Culture

Christians had governmental scribes in their chanceries and bureaucracies (many apparently hired for ad hoc work), general public scribes for the population at large, and scribes with a monopoly on some public utility. Their training, examination, and procedures were strictly regulated by law, and their title of notary was proudly borne. The documents in their registers followed set legal and rhetorical formulas and enjoyed full validity as juridical items “in court and outside,” enforceable at law. Though there was no limitation on the number of notaries, their professional guild or college in effect tended to regulate their increase. Each municipality could certify or license its own, as could ecclesiastical corporations, but the crown could license notaries both for local and municipal regions or else for general jurisdiction. Jurisdiction granted might be general, regional, or local; it might attach to some place such as a monastery, to some administrative office such as that of judge or bailiff, or to some official business such as a saltworks or a royal galley. In an earlier period some jurisdictions had been offered by parish and lay or ecclesiastical seigniory. By the reign of Jaume the Conqueror at mid-thirteenth century, there was little or no difference in the realms between notariate and scribeship as licensed and publicly authoritative offices.^[15]

In many ways the urban-commercial society of the western Mediterranean world was built around these notaries. They were not university-trained jurists, but their function was not unlike that of many American lawyers, and they were nearly as ubiquitous. Though we still lack statistical studies of the profession for the realms of Aragon, the more complete records for thirteenth-century Italian cities reveal huge notarial populations. Genoa had some 200 in the late thirteenth century, a ratio of 1 to 500 residents. This compares to the current national average in the United States of one lawyer for every 319 citizens, as reported by the Census Bureau and the American Bar Association. Bologna had 2,000 notaries, Milan 1,500, Padua 500, and Pisa 230. So numerous were notaries that many must have also pursued an alternative occupation. They filled the growing municipal and other bureaucracies and helped staff guilds and the many corporations of church and state. In Italy, Daniel Waley notes, notaries held “a quite disproportionate share of offices,” had extensive influence in politics, and were among the readiest speakers in public affairs.

Notarial culture transformed Catalan lands at a much slower pace than in Italy, but it was in full flower in the second half of the thirteenth century. Stephen Bensch notes how the number of notaries in Catalonia “multiplied with breathtaking speed” in the reign of Jaume I, so that “by the 1280s more than forty public notaries were active in Barcelona.” The population of Barcelona at its maximum pre-plague growth some sixty years later was about 40,000 souls of both sexes and all ages (smaller than many university populations in the United States), and 35,000 might be a fairer conjecture for the 1280s. If one envisions some 10,000 of these, male and often enough female adults, as constituting the regular client pool in commerce, crafts, and corporations, the ratio of active notaries to potential clients would have been 1 to 250, or for the entire population 1 to 875.^[16]

The notaries’ combination of rhetorical skills and Roman law erudition, while as superficial as the technical knowledge of many modern American lawyers, was quite adequate to their mechanical or formulaic tasks and to their consultative positions. Their services were in demand for the most varied occasions, from marriage and dowry agreements to legal procuration, to partnerships, to contracts of every sort. Commercial transactions required their authoritative instruments—leases, loans, deeds, payments, sales, transfers, authentic copies, bills of lading aboard ship, or bills of exchange. In government notaries functioned at the several layers of tax collection and customs duties, for statutes, records of legal action, inventories, administrative minutiae, army lists, licenses, notices of appointment, treatises, and treaties. Last testaments constituted only one of myriad services, distinguished perhaps by the frequency with which the moribund condition of the testator called the notary away from his public shop to home or hospital. The notarial career and its products consequently constitute an essential element in the history of law, government, rhetoric, finance, urbanism, religion, and that ill-defined but comprehensive field called social history. The notary was omnipresent in this society, not only as one of its active creators but also as its product. He helped shape the merchant society and culture as he represented and mirrored it.

The crown organized and centralized this busy scribbling scene, insisting that only crown-authorized notaries could act validly. A decree to this effect went out on 29 January 1279 from Prince Alfons in separate charters to the royal vicariates of Barcelona, Berga, Cervera, Lérida, Manresa, Montblanch, Ribagorza, Pallars, Tarragona, Vich, and Villafranca del Panadés. The form letter for Barcelona, the model for the others, ordered the vicar “that you cause to be publicly heralded, through the entire vicariate you hold for Us, that no scribe may dare use the office of notary [tabellio], except for testaments and dowry charters, besides those who hold authority from the lord king Our father or from Us, under penalty of 100 morabatins.” After the public criers had so “heralded” the order abroad, any future documents by unauthorized notaries would automatically be “null and void.” The exception for wills and dowries is significant, since these were the least commercial of possible contracts and also may well have touched the lives of more persons than did the larger mass of commercial or real estate documents.^[17] In other notices to various communities the crown was careful not to inhibit the limited notarial activities of clerics and others in testamentary and matrimonial charters. As late as 1280 the king wrote that the rector of the church at Cambrils could continue to draft “wills and marriage documents” for those who asked, despite any royal documents seeming to forbid this.^[18]

Theoretically neither a cleric nor a Jew could be a notary, and a “testament before a priest” was authentic but non-notarial. Real life proved more variable. A pertinent example of the special notariate was the post awarded in 1264 to “Astruc Azarel, a Jew of Lérida,” for life in the scribania of Lérida’s municipal office of weights.^[19] The unusual assignment of a Jew suggests that Arabic/Latin bilingual skills were needed there. A pool of such bilingual Jews supplied the Arabic section of the crown chancery as well as envoys to Muslim powers and translators for the king’s surrender negotiations and for rendering Arabic scientific treatises into Latin or Romance. Another example of a Jewish scribe in a general public office was the appointment of “Mossé el Neyto, a Jew of Jaca,” in 1272 for life, to “the secretariat of the public granary of the town of Jaca and the office of measuring at the same granary.” Mossé’s identification here seems to be either as grandchild (Aragonese net, Catalan nét, Castilian nieto) or as clean and pure (Aragonese neto, Catalan net, Castilian neto), the Arago- Castilian suggestions posed because of his identity as from Jaca in Aragon.^[20]

A special and very profitable notariate went to Jahudà, the son of the Barcelona patrician and courtier Astruc Bonsenyor. Acknowledging that Jahudà was “suitable and competent at understanding and drafting debt-documents done in Arabic by Saracens, namely, for those who go abroad to Saracen lands, or who obligate themselves to pay certain amounts to some persons in those lands, and that those documents will be better written and understood among the said Saracens if they were written in Arabic rather than in Latin,” Jaume II conferred on Jahudà a monopoly “of such debt documents done in Arabic in the city of Barcelona and its territory,” documents that thus “gain validity as done by public authority” as long as they are “written by your hand and you have put your signature to them.”^[21] This last proviso was diametrically opposed to the common permission, or sometimes understanding, that a notarial post could be subfranchised by the holder or that assistants could expand its activity. Doubtless the need for exactness here, and the danger of assistants less able, prevailed.^[22]

A common form of special notariate was a local monopoly on Latin charters involving Jews with Christians; these appear in a number of appointments and account for the Liber Iudeorum often found in municipal archives.^[23] Like all monopolies, this one was resented, challenged, and often forced back into the general competition. In 1257 King Jaume had to reassure the Jews of the Catalan tax collectory of Barcelona-Tarragona that “all your documents made or to be made at the hands of priests or any other ecclesiastical persons licensed for the office of scribe” would have “full validity in every respect whether in law or outside law, as though they were made at the hands of public notaries [tabelliones] in our courts of jurates.”^[24] Eight months later he specifically revoked the monopoly appointment “of a special Jewish notariate to Pere de Colomer.” Described elsewhere as “a scribe of the lord king,” Pere had apparently won this monopoly as a perquisite of royal service. From now on, as part of its “pristine liberties,” the Barcelona “community of Christians and Jews” could “freely draft charters and whatever other writing you want with whatever scriveners or notaries of Barcelona you want, despite any concession of a special notariate made by Us to anyone.” The linking of Colomer’s revocation with the “pristine liberties” of the wider community marks this document as concerning business between Jews and Christians. The king further revoked “any other grant We made of a special notariate at Barcelona for charters or other writings of Christians or also Jews, firmly decreeing that We or Our successors may never confer or concede to anyone a special notariate in Barcelona.”^[25]

The privilege was not general in the realms. In mid-1260 King Jaume presented a charter to the Aragonese Pero, son of Poncio Guillermo of Jaca, “that he is the notary public of the Jews of Jaca.”^[26] At Egea in December 1263 the king gave Simó (Aragonese Simón) Gil of Egea “the notariate of the Jews of Egea all the days of your life, in such wise that you or your delegate may draft and make all instruments of debt and other contracts which will be made or drafted between Christians both of Egea and other places and the Jews of Egea.” The monopoly warned that “no one besides you or your delegate may dare from now on to make or draft the said documents, which if drafted have no validity.” The crown fee was 20 sous annually, half on the feast of John the Baptist and half at Easter; the fee for his clients was set at “whatever other notaries are accustomed to receive and have.” Christians and Jews, present and future, had to respect this monopoly.^[27]

The arrangement lasted over ten years. Then in 1275 Jaume granted “to each and every notary of the town of Egea, present and future, that the Jews of Egea present and future can draft their charters of debt, and whatsoever other charters they shall make with any person, with whatever public notary of Egea they wish.” This was repeated in negative form: no one could compel these Jews to work “with one notary alone or with whatsoever public notary or notaries of the town,” despite any contrary grant. The notaries themselves seem to have sought this antimonopolistic privilege, and as a body they now had to pay the crown annually on the feast of Saint Michael 30 sueldos of Jaca.^[28]

Special notariates for Jewish-Christian business continued to function in other towns, however, and it is hard to say which pattern prevailed in Jaume’s reign. Barbastro had its own pattern, as small towns probably did. In 1272 the king appointed one man only, Bartolomé Tomàs, to “the notariate of the town of Barbastro, both of Christians and Jews, in such wise that you or whoever you want in your place may draft and write acts, testaments, and any other public instruments that Christians or Jews will have to make in the town of Barbastro.” He and he alone is to be accepted as the town’s public scribe, paying the crown a fee of 4 gold Alfonsine morabatins every Christmas. As indicated, the notary could hire or train his staff of subnotaries.^[29]