Sao ko kelle terre

Luigi Speranza

The "Placiti cassinesi", also known as the "Placiti campani", are a collection of tenth-century juridical documents preserved in the archives of the abbey of Monte Cassino and still in the possession of the abbey.

The "Placiti cassinesi" are generally said to contain the first extant manifestations of intentional writing in Italian on the Italian peninsula.

Each document consists of a body of text in Latin, with single sentences of a formulaic nature, in what appears to be a rather faithful rendering of the language of the time and place.

The purpose of the documents is to establish disputed ownership of lands.

The earliest document was drawn up in Capua in March

960

and is thus widely known as the

placito capuano, or alternatively as
the placito d’Arechisi

-- after the judge in charge of the proceedings.

The case pits the Abbot of Monte Cassino against a private citizen named

Rodelgrimo

who claims to have inherited lands that the abbot claims have been the property of Monte Cassino for 30 years.

With neither side in possession of documentation of ownership, the judge orders the abbot to produce 3 witnesses, each of whom then repeats the words:

"Sao ko kelle terre
per kelle fini
que ki contene
30 anni
le possette parte Sancti Benedicti"


and swears that this is true.

The placito of Sessa, from March

963

reports a similar case between the abbot of the monastery of San Salvatore and a citizen named

Gualfrid.

Here, however, the abbot is able to produce documentation showing that the land was in part purchased, in part received as a donation, from a certain

Pergoaldo.

Three witnesses are then called on to testify that this previous owner had been in legitimate possession, which they do by reciting

"Sao cco kelle terre per
kelle fini que tebe monstrai Pergoaldo
foro que ki contene et trenta anni le possette."

Two further documents deal with land disputes in the district of Teano.

The earlier of these two, dated 26 July

963, is known as the

Memoratorium of Teano.

It contains the oath

"Kella terra per kelle fini
que bobe mostrai Sancte Marie
è et trenta anni la posset
parte Sancte Marie."

The later of the two, the Placito of Teano, has 4 repetitions, one for each witness, of words nearly identical to those of the oath taken at Sessa:

"Sao cco kelle terre per kelle
fini que tebe mostrai 30 anni
le possette parte Sancte Marie."

The prime interest of these documents is linguistic, rather than literary.

Some scholars suspect that the disputes may have been preventive measures brought against straw men, for the purpose of establishing ownership of lands whose status could have been subject to genuine dispute in the absence of firm legal documentation.

In this view, the use of popular language for the oaths would have served to make the essential information clear to any reader.

Other scholars argue that certificates issued just a few years earlier by competent local authorities precluded any need for such legal reassurance, and the fact that only these documents contain testimony in Italian may be due to their being originals.

Others, which survive only in copies, have very similar oaths, invariably in Latin, arguably the result of emendation by copyists: e.g.,

"Scio quia ille terre
per illos fines et
mensuras quas Paldefrit
comiti monstravimus per XXXa annos
possedit pars Sancti Vincencii."

-- sworn in 954, also before Arechisi.

The Latin that frames and introduces the testimonies in Italian is unremarkably typical of practical papers of the time, lacking the accurate classicizing tone of highly trained authorship, and penetrated by localisms in Latinized form.

It was once believed that the Italian of the oaths was a conscious attempt at a refined version of the speech of the area, but various scholars have shown that they are almost certainly very accurate phonemic renderings of popular speech, with occasional phonetic detail, and few spurious Latinisms.

Consider, for example,

Sao cco kelle terre

(“I know that those lands”).

Although today dialects in Campania normally have a reflex of

"sapio" (“I know”) along the lines of

"saccio", the form

"sao" (“I know,” Italian "so") is still common in southern Italy (along with, e.g., "fao", “I make” or “I do”).

"Co" (also spelled "ko", and derived from "quod") is still widespread in the south.

The simple "k", rather than "kw" (Italian "quelle") of "kelle" (derived from "eccu illae", “those”) parallels modern Neapolitan "kidde" (further evolved in the raising of [e] to [i] and the delateralization /ll/, from/dd/).

These and other features appear to guarantee that the language of the Placiti is genuine and thus is a valuable early documentation of evolved Italian.