Will Polish names keep their medieval spelling?

Yes, when you ask for it, and it is worth asking explicitly. The default for this material is to reproduce name forms as written — Kalis, Crezouicz, Sorcow — rather than resolving them to the modern place name. A modern identification can be added in a separate column or note so the attested form and the identification never get confused.

How are suspension bars, superscripts and the Tironian sign handled?

They are read as abbreviation marks rather than as accents or stray ink. You choose whether they are expanded silently, expanded with the added letters in brackets, or left as the sign itself. Whichever you choose is applied consistently across a whole box of charters, which is what makes the output comparable.

Can it separate the charter from later archival notes?

A charter usually carries a modern shelfmark, an added date, a dorsal summary and sometimes pencil numbering. These can be transcribed into a separate block, labelled by hand and position, so the medieval text stays clean while nothing on the sheet is thrown away.

Does it convert the dating clause into a modern date?

Only if you ask. The safer default is to transcribe the clause as it stands, Roman numerals and feast day included, and to give the modern equivalent as a note. Polish charters date by the Roman calendar and by saints’ days, and both conversions carry assumptions an editor may want to check.

What about papal privileges with a rota and cardinal subscriptions?

The body of the privilege, the rota motto, the BENE VALETE monogram and the column of Ego subscriptions can each be transcribed as its own element and labelled, so the layout of the bull is recoverable from the text file rather than flattened into one paragraph.

Polish · c. 1100–1400

Charters in Latin, names in Polish

A Piast charter is Latin written by a scribe with no settled way of spelling Polish. One village can be Crezouicz on the parchment, Cresouici in the cartulary copy and Krzeszowice in the index, and the letters that carry the difference — c, z, s, ch — are the ones a Gothic documentary hand crushes hardest. Evidano treats the formula and the vernacular names as two separate reading problems and shows the line on the parchment beside each one.

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Sample pages

Upper half of a papal privilege of 1155 on parchment, wide-spaced late Caroline minuscule with abbreviation strokes and a line of tall display letters at the top — Sample 1. Privilege of Pope Adrian IV taking the house of canons regular at Czerwińsk under papal protection, 18 April 1155. Warsaw, Archiwum Główne Akt Dawnych, Zbiór Dokumentów Pergaminowych 6418. A Roman curial hand in late Caroline minuscule; the list of holdings names Płock, Czerwińsk, Nasielsk and other Mazovian settlements in Latinised forms.

Thirteenth-century ducal charter on parchment, eighteen lines of Gothic documentary script with a large decorated opening initial and a dating clause in Roman numerals — Sample 2. Bolesław V the Chaste sells the town of Kalisz ten mansi of pasture, 14 November 1268. Warsaw, Archiwum Główne Akt Dawnych, Zbiór Dokumentów Pergaminowych 3371. An early Gothic documentary hand; the text places the pastures beside the road to Toruń and adds that in the vernacular they are called Megwade — a Polish name embedded in a Latin sentence.

First page of a thirteenth-century monastic register, Gothic book script in a single column with a large red initial, red rubrics and a later cursive heading above the text — Sample 3. Opening page of the Liber fundationis claustri sanctae Mariae virginis in Heinrichow — the Book of Henryków — written at the Cistercian abbey of Henryków in Silesia from about 1268. A formal Gothic textualis with rubricated headings; the later cursive note at the head of the page was added by an archivist. The same volume records the sentence usually cited as the first written in Polish.

Fourteenth-century episcopal charter with a first line of very tall looping display letters above fifteen lines of compressed Gothic cursive — Sample 4. Bodzanta, bishop of Kraków, exchanges the tithe of Rzeplin for the office of village headman at Krzeszowice, 30 September 1364. Warsaw, Archiwum Główne Akt Dawnych, Zbiór Dokumentów Pergaminowych 2880. The cathedral chancery hand at its most typical: littera elongata across the first line, then a fast Gothic cursive dense with suspensions.

Nine lines of late fourteenth-century chancery cursive on a narrow strip of parchment, faded brown ink with a heavy dating clause at the end — Sample 5. Gniewosz of Dalewice renews his oath of loyalty to King Władysław Jagiełło, 24 June 1394. Warsaw, Archiwum Główne Akt Dawnych, Zbiór Dokumentów Pergaminowych 592. A short private act in a late fourteenth-century cursive, dated by the feast of the Nativity of St John the Baptist rather than by a day of the month.

What a Piast charter looks like

The oldest originals surviving in Polish archives date from the twelfth century and are written in a late Caroline minuscule, round and widely spaced, often by a scribe trained in Rome, Bamberg or Prague rather than in Poland. Across the thirteenth century the ducal chanceries of Kraków, Poznań, Płock and Wrocław move through a proto-Gothic phase into a fully Gothic documentary hand: letters compressed laterally, feet broken at an angle, ascenders shortened. By the middle of the fourteenth century a royal or episcopal office writes a practised chancery cursive whose first line is drawn in exaggerated tall letters — littera elongata — announcing the invocation before the reader has parsed a word of it.

The document is formulaic, which helps. Most open with a cross or a decorated invocation such as In nomine domini amen, move to a notification (Notum facimus universis quibus expedit), state the grant, add a corroboration naming the seal, and close with a dating clause built from Roman numerals and the Roman calendar: Datum Kalis anno domini M CC LX VIII, XVIII kalendas decembris. Papal privileges add their own furniture — the wheel-shaped rota, the BENE VALETE monogram, and a column of cardinal subscriptions each beginning Ego. Witness lists, notarial signs, pendant seals on cords and later archival endorsements crowd the same skin.

Abbreviation is constant rather than occasional. A bar marks a lost m or n or a contracted word (dns for dominus); p with a crossed descender is per, with a looped one pro; the 9-shaped sign is con- at the start of a word and -us at the end; the Tironian sign for et looks like a 7. Into this system the scribe drops Polish names that Latin has no letters for: the sound now written cz appears as c, cz, ch or z; ł is simply l; the nasal vowels are a, e, an or en. Vernacular forms are sometimes flagged — vulgariter, wlgari nomine — and sometimes not.

Why ordinary OCR struggles here

One village, six spellings

Polish names are outside every Latin word list an ordinary OCR engine relies on, so the engine quietly rewrites them into something Latin-shaped: Sorcow becomes Sortou, Rzeplin becomes Reptin. Because the whole value of these documents for local and family history lies in the name forms, a transcription that tidies them is worse than none.

Marks that are not punctuation

Bars, superscript vowels, hooks and the Tironian sign are grammar, not decoration. Read as accents or stray strokes they turn a legible sentence into a string of fragments; expanded silently and inconsistently they hide what the scribe actually wrote. Both failures are common on the same page.

Minim thickets and r rotunda

In a compressed Gothic charter hand, i, m, n and u are the same stroke repeated, and the dot on the i is absent or displaced. The r rotunda used after o, b and p is easily taken for a 2 or a z — which matters, because z is precisely the letter that carries Polish sibilants.

Everything added later

A charter carries archival numbers in ink and pencil, a nineteenth-century date in the margin, folds, seal cords and sometimes a dorsal summary in a much later hand. All of it sits in the same image as the medieval text and has to be kept out of the transcription rather than merged into it.

Who works with this material

Editors of diplomatic codices

The Kodeks dyplomatyczny series and its regional successors are still being extended. An editor wants a semi-diplomatic first pass that keeps the line breaks of the parchment, marks every expansion, and flags the readings that need a second eye, so the apparatus can be built from the transcription rather than from scratch.

Place-name and onomastic projects

Historical-geographical dictionaries are assembled by collecting every attested form of a settlement or a personal name with its date. That work fails if the transcription silently regularises Zvichov to Zwichów. What it needs is the graph exactly as written, with the surrounding clause for context.

Cathedral, monastic and municipal archives

Chapter and abbey collections hold thousands of single-sheet parchments described only by a one-line summary. A full text attached to each scan turns a shelf list into something a researcher can search by field name, tithe, mill or witness.

Teachers of Latin palaeography

Courses work from charters precisely because they combine a fixed formula with unpredictable vernacular. Setting a machine reading beside a student reading shows at once whether a mistake came from the letterforms or from the abbreviation system.

Getting the best transcription

Step 1

Tell it which formula to expect

Say whether the document is a papal privilege, a ducal grant or a private act. Knowing that a corroboration clause and a dating clause are coming lets a damaged abbreviation be resolved from context instead of guessed at letter by letter.

Step 2

Separate expansion policy from name policy

Ask for Latin abbreviations to be expanded with the supplied letters in brackets, and in the same instruction ask for personal and place names to be left exactly as written, unexpanded and unmodernised. Without the second half of that rule the names are quietly repaired.

Step 3

Pull the dating clause and witness list out separately

Request the dating clause verbatim, with its Roman numerals and its kalendae or feast day untranslated, and the witness subscriptions as a list. Both are where indexing value sits, and both are where a continuous prose transcription blurs the structure.

Step 4

Calibrate on a charter that is already edited

Start with a document printed in one of the diplomatic codices. Comparing the output with a known edition shows how r rotunda, suspension bars and vernacular clusters are being handled before you turn to the unpublished sheets in the same box.

Frequently asked questions

Will Polish names keep their medieval spelling?: Yes, when you ask for it, and it is worth asking explicitly. The default for this material is to reproduce name forms as written — Kalis, Crezouicz, Sorcow — rather than resolving them to the modern place name. A modern identification can be added in a separate column or note so the attested form and the identification never get confused.
How are suspension bars, superscripts and the Tironian sign handled?: They are read as abbreviation marks rather than as accents or stray ink. You choose whether they are expanded silently, expanded with the added letters in brackets, or left as the sign itself. Whichever you choose is applied consistently across a whole box of charters, which is what makes the output comparable.
Can it separate the charter from later archival notes?: A charter usually carries a modern shelfmark, an added date, a dorsal summary and sometimes pencil numbering. These can be transcribed into a separate block, labelled by hand and position, so the medieval text stays clean while nothing on the sheet is thrown away.
Does it convert the dating clause into a modern date?: Only if you ask. The safer default is to transcribe the clause as it stands, Roman numerals and feast day included, and to give the modern equivalent as a note. Polish charters date by the Roman calendar and by saints’ days, and both conversions carry assumptions an editor may want to check.
What about papal privileges with a rota and cardinal subscriptions?: The body of the privilege, the rota motto, the BENE VALETE monogram and the column of Ego subscriptions can each be transcribed as its own element and labelled, so the layout of the bull is recoverable from the text file rather than flattened into one paragraph.

Related scripts and pages

Old Polish Gothic and Bastarda Manuscripts, c. 1350–1550The same Gothic tradition once Polish itself starts to be written at length, in sermons, psalters and court records.Carolingian and Romanesque Minuscule, c. 750–1150The book hand behind the earliest charters that reached Poland from Rome and the Empire.Medieval Bohemian Latin Caroline and Gothic Records, c. 1000–1300Neighbouring chanceries writing the same Latin formulas around Slavonic names.All Polish hands and record typesEvery Polish domain from twelfth-century charters to partition-era civil registers.Image to TextSearch all supported languages, scripts and document types.

Transcribe your medieval charters

Upload a parchment scan, choose Medieval Latin Charters with Polish Names, and test the expansion rules on a document you already have an edition for.

Charters in Latin, names in Polish

Sample pages

Evidano Transcription

Evidano Transcription

Evidano Transcription

Evidano Transcription

Evidano Transcription

What a Piast charter looks like

Why ordinary OCR struggles here

One village, six spellings

Marks that are not punctuation

Minim thickets and r rotunda

Everything added later

Who works with this material

Editors of diplomatic codices

Place-name and onomastic projects

Cathedral, monastic and municipal archives

Teachers of Latin palaeography

Getting the best transcription

Tell it which formula to expect

Separate expansion policy from name policy

Pull the dating clause and witness list out separately

Calibrate on a charter that is already edited

Further reading on this hand

Frequently asked questions

Related scripts and pages

Transcribe your medieval charters

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