“Rouergue has kept many medieval archives”: researchers and students dust off the life of 13th century Aveyron

The documents are over 800 years old. Forget the A4 sheet with small squares, the texts were written in pen on animal skin parchments which are, for some, incredibly well preserved, for others at the end of their life. All week, a team of researchers and students from the Jean-Jaurès University of Toulouse have invested the departmental archives of Rodez to transcribe these documents which depict life in Aveyron in the 13th century.

Their last arrival in January 2024 brought up to date the hitherto little-known details of the lordship around Villefranche-de-Rouergue, that of the Morlhon line. “These texts are transcribed for the first time. They have already been read, but to study them, you must first transcribe them,” explains teacher Hélène Debax, pointing to the teams of students who are looking at the parchments. , and who dissect their content, word by word, to copy them onto a computer.

“The lordship of Morlhon had been studied in an article by Jacques Bousquet in the 50s and 60s, but that's all. We are going back and copying all the documentation prior to 1300. Which allows us to put into shape what could be the various lordships of this region, to understand who intervened in such village, the relationship of rights between the lords and the bishop… And even the foundation of Villefranche-de-Rouergue, and of the bishop's bastide!” rejoices Roland Viader, researcher at the CNRS and initiator of the project.

Incredibly well preserved archives in Aveyron

The documents which have been preserved all these years and which can be studied are essentially donations to the bishopric of the time. “We also have a lot of acknowledgments of debt. And then we have trials! In particular one which is remarkable in 1279, between a second branch of the family and the bishop. The text is preserved on a 27 meter roll of parchment” .

Texts that are a little less easy to read than a children's novel. If the calligraphy is sometimes astonishingly precise, the words are nonetheless difficult to identify because they are in Latin… sometimes mixed with approximate Occitan. “It is a specificity of the region, many texts from the 13th century are written in Occitan, which is not the same as today. And at that time, Occitan was absolutely not standardized “Everyone wrote it in a more or less intuitive way. It makes me think of my daughter who tried to copy the lyrics of the group The Police as she heard them”, illustrates Roland Viader, amused.

Words are also written as abbreviations, “we find symbols to shorten words, it was to write faster. It's not always easy to invent the missing letters”, shows Hélène Dabax.

“After that, there’s not much you can resist!”

If the working group chose to come to Rodez, it is for the quality and age of the documents which have been preserved.
“Rouergue has kept a lot of medieval archives. For comparison, in the Gers, there is despair at that level. In the Hautes-Pyrénées, there is absolutely nothing. We could not do work equivalent to Auch or Tarbes. Such quantities from the 13th century are not found everywhere.

From Monday January 13 to Friday January 17, 2025, the archives studied focus on southern Aveyron, more precisely Lord Montpaon in Fondamente, near Saint-Affrique. A boon for the dozen “medieval worlds” master’s students who came to improve their practice of paleography. Clémentine and Mattéo work together on a long text to try to decipher it and transcribe it literally on the computer. “It's super educational. When you come to transcribe original documents like these for five days in a row, not much can resist you afterwards!”

Some archives are easier than others to decrypt. “We spotted an easy text, we can’t wait to take it. It’s relaxing between two documents that make your head hurt,” confides Clémentine. Two tables away, two students take out a UV lamp to bring out certain words erased by stains and time. “The documents are withering away, very clearly. The parchment is fine, but the most complicated thing is the ink which is fading little by little. This one for example, in 25 years, it's dead”, shows Martin , another student. Hence the urgency of safeguarding what is written there, while it is still possible.

Latin learning in decline

The number of people able to transcribe and study these texts is declining. “Latin was taught much more widely before. There were quite a few local scholars, until the 70s and 80s, who could confront this documentation by understanding it more or less well, and therefore tell the history of their village or look at the era that interests them, that’s completely lost,” notes Roland Viader.

And Hélène Debax responds: “all the students there learned Latin at university, but no one learns it since secondary school.” Even among the hundreds of experts in France, researchers at universities or at the CNRS, the circle of people capable of transcribing this type of documents is “fairly limited”.

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