History in Documents and a Document in History - страница 10
(Abridged from the original texts provided by Britannica Encyclopedia)
1. Answer the questions:
1) What documents are original?
2) What are drafts?
3) What are copies?
4) How could people create several originals?
5) How did the method of chirography work?
6) What was the method of chirography used for?
7) How can a document get the force of the original?
8) What led to the certification of forged documents?
9) Under what circumstances forged documents could receive validation?
10) What were registers used for?
11) What are the examples of registers?
12) What did the formula books contain?
2. Match the words to their definitions:
3. Fill in the correct word from the list below. Then, use the collocations to make your own sentences:
incoming, formula, forged, proof, validation, dignitaries, keeping, imperial
1) …………………. register
2) …………………. chancery
3) …………………… records
4) to receive …………………
5) ………………… documents
6) …………………. books
7) …………………. of authenticity
8) secular …………………….
Text 2. Classification of documents
Read the text and do the tasks after it.
The documents of the Middle Ages are usually classified under two groups: public documents, which are those of emperors, kings, and popes, and private documents, which comprise all others. Another way of classifying documents is according to whether they are evidentiary or dispositive. The former merely record a valid legal act already executed orally, while the actual issuing of the latter forms in itself the legal act. This distinction, found among Roman documents from the 3rd century A.D. onward, gradually ceased to exist after the early Middle Ages.
After the collapse of the Carolingian empire in the 9th century, private documents lost much of their function and were replaced by simple memorandums about legal acts and the witnesses to them. It was not until the late 11th and early 12th centuries that sealed charters of high secular or ecclesiastical dignitaries were again gradually considered as dispositive. Papal documents can be classified mainly as either letters or privileges, and royal documents can be classified as diplomas or mandates. Privileges and diplomas give evidence of legal transactions designed to be of long duration or even of permanent effect, while mandates and many papal letters contain commands.