Notarial Offices

The first reference to a notary public in the Portuguese kingdom dates back to 1212, with public and private notaries continuing to the present day¹Nogueira, 2001, p. 211; Fernandes, 2011, p. 35-36..

• Regimento dos tabeliães, dated 1305²Ed. LLP, p. 63-70.;
• Regimento dos tabeliães, dated 1340³Ed. Pereira, 1986, p. 681-688.;
• Ordenações Afonsinas, c. 1446, with eleven specific titles on notaries and/or scribes⁴OA, bk. 1, tit. 34-40, 42, 47-49.;
• Ordenações Manuelinas, dated 1521, with six specific titles on notaries⁵OM, bk. 1, tit. 59-64.;
• Ordenações Filipinas, dated c. 1604, with six specific titles on notaries⁶OF, bk. 1, tit. 78-81, 84-85. There are other references to the actions and competences of the notaries in the aforementioned compilation, conveniently listed in Gonçalves,2010, p. 28.;

General

The function of notaries in the medieval and early modern periods was to record, validate, and register documents, which gave them an authenticity accepted in courts of law (public faith), within the scope of a profession regulated by the crown¹¹Gomes, 2005, p. 93..

Not having jurisdiction over people and assets, their activity was limited to the production of documents requested by individuals and communities in public offices (notaries public) or in the production and registration of documents for judicial institutions with jurisdiction (judicial notaries). There were also notaries qualified to produce documents at the level of the kingdom (general notaries) or only within specific jurisdictions such as the Church (apostolic notaries)¹²Ribeiro, 2003, vol. 1, p. 277; Mendes, 2010-2011, p. 49; Mata, 2020, p. 13..

On entails

As part of their activity within the community, notaries recorded documents concerning the transmission of individual last wills and the establishment of entails¹³Amorim, 2002, p. 97; Rosa, 2012, p. 341. See examples of such typologies in Pinto e França, 2015..

Given the absence of specific collections for the medieval period—due to the lack of conservation of notarial notebooks—and their relative poverty, dispersion, and lack of indexing for the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries¹⁴Ribeiro, 2003, vol. 1, p. 280; Mendes, 2010-2011, p. 52; França e Pinto, 2015, p. 80., their offices were not the object of specific heuristic attention in the present project.

Institutional organisation

The notary’s (tabelião) office was run by the notary public who could be assisted by scribes (escrivães) in the writing up of documents¹⁶Coelho, 1996, p. 181..

The roles of its agents

The notaries wrote certificates (diplomas) on matters concerning entails in the same way as they wrote other types of documents, so the institution did not have specific officials to draw up such documents.

Notaries maintained relations with individuals and institutions that needed to have legal transactions recorded by a writing agent accredited by public faith¹⁷Coelho, 1996, p. 180..