The Localization of the Capitulare de Villis1

Historians as well as Romance scholars will remember the debate which took place about a quarter of a century ago concerning the localization and the dating of the Capitulare de Villis. The old opinion that this venerable document was issued for the entire empire by Charles the Great in 812, had been rendered improbable by Alfons Dopsch, who endeavored to show that it was drawn up for Aquitania by the young king Louis the Pious, in 794 or 795, on the occasion of his marriage. As a result of Dopsch's book various scholars undertook the testing of this new evaluation of the Capitulary from a linguistic point of view. That it belonged in France no one doubted; but Baist found just as much evidence to localize it in the northern part of the country, as Winkler and Ettmayer in the South. Jud and Spitzer, in a very important article written in collaboration, denied the possibility of attributing the text to the South, and inclined rather to a northern origin, though they admitted that the text also contains elements which oppose a localization in the North. They doubted, therefore, the linguistic reliability of the text, and detected, underlying its linguistic form, a common North French-Carolingian official language. They preferred to rely upon the evidence of architectural details, as furnished by the terminology employed in the northern territory: ‘da mansionile, screona, pislum nur nordfranzösisch sind, so scheint der Haustypus wohl der Nordfrankreichs zu sein.’