In Medieval Latin, there are 6 noun cases – but for the purposes of charters, there are 5 main ones. These are as follows:

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• NOMINATIVE – The subject of a sentence

• ACCUSATIVE – The object of a sentence

• GENITIVE – A possessive noun / ‘Of’

• DATIVE – ‘To’ or ‘For’

• ABLATIVE – ‘By’, ‘With’ or ‘From’

 

The sixth case is one commonly found in the Bible and is referred to as the Vocative. This case refers to a declaration or address of someone, such as saying “O Lord…” It is often overlooked in guides to charters due to its rarity.

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Nevertheless, the easiest way to understand these cases is to, once again, analyse them using English. We have already looked at subject and object nouns in sentences and so let us move on to the three other cases.

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Genitive

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The Genitive case is used for prepositions:

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“I am using Anne’s Pencil” 

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English has adopted the use of the apostrophe for prepositions as seen in the example, but for the purposes of Medieval Latin, we would translate “Anne’s Pencil” as “the pencil of Anne”.

The use of ‘of’ in this example is the Genitive case. 

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Dative 

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The Dative case in Latin tells us the indirect object of a verb. In other words, whether the object receiver is the recipient or beneficiary of an action. A recipient is expressed by the word “for”, and a beneficiary is expressed by the word “to”. 

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A sentence example could be:

• “Anne buys a pencil for Roger”

• “Anne gives a pencil to Roger”

 

When translating from Latin to English you will have to decide whether the sentence needs either ‘to’ or ‘for’ if the noun is dative.

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Ablative

 

The final case is Ablative. Quite simply, this case is used to express ‘By’, ‘With’ or ‘From’. For example: 

• “I bought this land from the Lord”

• “Anne bought a house with a garden”

• “Roger lives by the church”

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It is rare, however, to have a sentence with just one case. Take for instance this sentence:

 

Robertus filius Willelmi dat terram suam domino.

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This translates to: “Robert, the son of William, gives his land to the Lord.”

 

This sentence contains a nominative, an accusative, a genitive, and a dative noun. But what noun correlates to which case?

• Nominative – Robert

• Accusative – Land

• Genitive – Of William

• Dative – To the Lord

 

Note: Words of the same ending will almost always follow the same case.

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Robertus Filius Willelmi

 

How do you know that Robertus Filius Willelmi is ‘Robert, son of William’, and not ‘William, son of Robert’?

 

Robertus Filius both end in ‘-us’ whilst Willelmi ends in ‘-i’. This means that Robertus and Filius are both nominative and follow the same case, whilst Willelmi is dative.

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