🚀 go-pugleaf

Unto the good gentles of the Rialto does Hossein Ali Qomi send greetings
and prayers for the blessings of Allah.

Lady Pagan and Lady Gwenllian are quite right in the individual cases
they cite of anthropomorphizing ascriptions of manufacture in medieval
artifacts.  However, I think that they have misunderstood my point.
I was speaking of central tendency, the mean, if you will, for such
ascriptions over a thousand-year period.  Certainly there are counter-
examples, but I think that that misses the point.  The reason why I
used terms like "more commonly," or "more likely," and the like, is
precisely because I was talking about central tendency rather than
outliers.  Now, for one of the specific cases: Anglo-Saxon artifacts.
You tend to see a lot of truly dreadful Latin style and grammatical errors
in Anglo-Saxon documents, inscriptions and artifacts (although there are
periods in Anglo-Saxon history where this is not the case, e.g., the
charters of Aethelstan II or Aethelred or Edward the Confessor).  Anglo-
Saxon use of Latin is an extraordinarily complex question.  This alone
makes the Anglo-Saxon cases seriously outlier.
                       
My bottom line is that a frequency count of such ascriptions over the
entire middle ages in western and central Europe would show forms of
"fio" occurring far more frequently than forms of "facio."  And Tadhg's
example of "fabrior" implies a level of Latin literacy which is simply not
exhibited by most medieval craftsmen.

My esteemed brother of the Book, Yaakov, raises two related questions.  The
first is the appropriateness of seals.  Certainly there were "national" seals
in the medieval period.  However, national seals were used for official
documents.  I don't think that was what Robyyan was talking about.
Second, he mentions regional and local ascriptions of production on
agricultural produce.  This was not uncommon.  However, it is two different
things, to my mind, to talk about an artifact being labelled as originating in
a particular city or region and to talk about it being labelled as a "national"
product.  I would find innocuous a label saying, for example, "in
Storovichiense fit" ("Storovichiensis" being how I would Latinize
"Storvik," which is a barony in Atlantia), but "in Atlantia fit" doesn't have
a medieval ring to it.

Hossein/Greg