Witnesses (testes) in Hungary, 1100-1400: charter authentication and testimonial proof

The testes (witnesses) authenticated nearly every significant legal act in medieval Hungary: they appear in witness lists of royal privileges, judicial testimonies, and chapter testimonies of the loca credibilia. This study traces the term across 5,843 Hungarian records (Árpád period 1100-1301: 2,002; Angevin period 1302-1400: 3,841) and 1,055 Transylvanian records. The corpus reveals a structural reversal: in the Árpád period the charter-witness-list function leads (1,085 records) over judicial testimony (782); in the Angevin period judicial testimony overtakes (1,977 vs 1,863). This reversal records the institutional shift from documents authenticated by named personal witnesses to documents authenticated by the sealed letter of a chapter (locus credibilis), displacing the personal testis from his central authentication role. The ius commune supplied the theoretical framework in X 2.20 (De testibus et attestationibus) and in Hostiensis Summa Aurea II De testibus. This study is a corpus study: it counts and reads what a large body of edited medieval documents says about one concept, and sets that against modern scholarship. It was prepared with software and AI assistance. The counts, tables, charts and first draft were generated by a program (publisher.py) from the author's corpus, without a language model. The search rules, the concept's introductory paragraphs and the interpretive paragraphs were written with the help of an AI system (Claude, Anthropic), and a random sample of the matches was read in full to measure how many are true instances (section 2). The author read and approved the text before publication. Readings of the Latin marked as preliminary have not yet had a specialist's close reading. The counts depend on what the editions print and how their editors summarised it: editions are uneven by region and decade, modern summaries carry their editors' interpretations, and OCR may miss or misread words, so the numbers show proportions and trends, not totals. The study has not been peer reviewed. Corrections are welcome and will be published as new versions of this record.