CHAPTER XVI
CHARLES MARTEL AND PEPIN THE SHORT
WHEN Charles Martel seized power in 719, he had to deal with a condition bordering on anarchy within Francia and the successful encroachment of enemies from without. The struggle between the mayors of Neustria and Austrasia and the bitter resentment of the Austrasian palace at the attempted rule of Plectrude had reduced the regnum Francorum to a state of extreme weakness. In the south, Aquitaine under its duke Eudes was nearly independent; the Saracens were pressing beyond the Pyrenees, nearly to Toulouse; on the eastern frontier, Frisians, Alemans, Saxons and Bavarians were preparing to renounce Frankish suzerainty. But in Charles the Franks had found what at this juncture they above all needed, a fine military leader, a hammer (Martel) of their enemies.
His rule accordingly, from 719 to 741, was a period notable chiefly for frontier defence and the defeat of external enemies. Since war is expensive, it was also a period of oppressive rule for ecclesiastics and lay lords alike.
On the eastern frontier in 719 there was danger from the Saxons, Alemans, Suabians and Bavarians. Duke Lantfrid had gone so far towards independence as to issue on his own authority a new version of the old customary Lex Alemannorum; in Bavaria, the duke went his own way. Charles now undertook, almost every summer, campaigns for the restoration of his authority in the east. In 720, 722, 724 and 738 there were expeditions against the Saxons and the Alemans; in 730 the Alemannian duchy was reduced to a province. The years 733 and 734 saw what was really a conquest of the northern Frisians. In 725 and 728 Charles intervened in Bavaria, where duke Hucbert recognized his authority: but the duchy was distant and difficult to control from the Rhine mouth, and when Hucbert died Charles allowed his relative, Odilo, to succeed him. In Aquitaine, duke Eudes aspired to semi-independence, and when Charles made a military expedition there in 731 he did not succeed in getting effective control. But a greater danger now menaced Aquitaine than Austrasian overlordship: that of Muslim conquest from Spain. Between 714 and 717 the Muslim rulers of Spain had been pressing along the Mediterranean coast, and were engaged in conquering the Narbonnaise. In 721 one of them, Asama, attacked Toulouse, but was, however, defeated and killed by duke Eudes. Possession of Toulouse would have given the Arabs command of the valley of the Garonne, the northern frontier of Gascony: and when they turned back from the incorporation of this inland, north Pyrenean, region, they set themselves to gain Septimania, the coastal province that runs from the Pyrenees to the Rhone mouth, with Narbonne as its chief port. In 721 they took its cities of Carcassonne and Nîmes, and in August that year they took Autun.
For the next ten years, 721 to 731, Eudes sought to defend Aquitaine by exploiting the quarrels of Arabs and Berbers in Spain: he made a diplomatic marriage with the daughter of the Berber chief, ‛Uthman ben Abi Neza, who commanded the Pyrenean frontier guard of Arab Spain. But in 731 ‛Uthman rebelled against the Arab ruler ‛Abd ar-Rahman and was defeated: and in 732 ‛Abd ar-Rahman and his troops poured through the passes at the northern end of the Pyrenees and ravaged Gascony. They plundered the country and defeated Eudes at the crossings of the Garonne and the Dordogne: they burned the church of St Hilary at Poitiers, and they prepared to plunder the basilica of St Martin at Tours.
In this extremity, Eudes appealed for help to Charles Martel. He brought an army south to defend Tours, met the Saracens at the outskirts of Poitiers, as they advanced to the attack, and defeated and killed ‛Abd ar-Rahman: the Arabs withdrew beyond the Pyrenees. The battle of Poitiers had momentous results: it actually checked Saracen advance north of the Pyrenees, and it led to the submission of Aquitaine to Charles, who pressed his conquering march to the mouth of the Garonne and entered Bordeaux. Eudes’ sons showed themselves unwilling to forgo Aquitanian independence and had to be brought to submission by arms: in 736 Charles accepted one of them, Hunaud, as duke and received from him an oath of fidelity. Feudalism had not yet come: the oath taken by Hunaud was that of a vastus, a ‘recommandé’, to a patron.
The duchy of Aquitaine, however, was only a military command, not an administrative unit, and in spite of Hunaud’s submission Charles had difficulty in asserting his authority over south-east Gaul. Duke Mauront in Provence, the bishop of Auxerre and others tried to secure a local independence and needed military coercion to keep them subject. Charles led an expedition which held Lyons in 733, and left a garrison: but the local nobles intrigued with the Arabs against him, and in 735 the Arabs were able to enter Arles and plunder Provence. In 736 Charles had to lead an army south and retake Lyons, Aries and Marseilles: Arab capture of this port would have drawn tighter the economic blockade of western Europe. It is a sign of the difference of culture between the Mediterranean, quasi-Byzantine, south of France and the Germanic north, that in 736-7 duke Mauront and the Provençal nobles delivered to the Saracens Avignon and the left bank of the Rhone: and when Charles and his son Hildebrand in 737 led another army south to drive them out, retook Avignon and blockaded Narbonne, the local leaders were so lukewarm in support that they could not hold the country. They burned Nîmes, Agde, Béziers and other cities to punish the citizens and deprive the Arabs of supplies and retreated north. In 738, while Charles was occupied in a Saxon war, Mauront rebelled again and the Arabs crossed the Rhone: Charles had to ask help from the Lombard Liutprand, and he crossed the Alps and drove the invaders out. Local rebellions broke out again in 739 and 741: the last was suppressed by Hildebrand and his legitimate brother Pepin, son of Charles Martel, a few months before Charles’s death.
Charles Martel’s defence of the land of the Franks was achieved by ruthlessness to rebels and those who were reluctant to contribute to the cost of campaigns. There was no general measure of secularization of church property, but a long series of confiscations and usurpations as need arose and opportunity offered. Bishops who sided with rebels, as Rigobert of Reims and Wando, abbot of Saint-Wandrille, were deprived of all their lands, and the bishop of Orleans was thus punished for his inactivity against duke Eudes. But even without such a political justification, church lands were often arbitrarily seized and granted as precariae to the vassi who composed Charles’s armies; he needed cavalry and encouraged the growth of their number.
Charles ruled throughout as sovereign of the Franks, and for the last four years of his life, after the death of Thierry IV in 737, he did not create any new Merovingian shadow king. He issued edicts and did justice on his sole authority, that of the maiordomus of the palace. When Gregory III wrote to him for help against the Lombards in 739 and 740, he addressed him as subregulus: but his request for aid showed that he well knew Charles possessed the reality of Frankish power. Charles’s dispositions for the succession were those of an effective sovereign and still in the Merovingian manner, patrimonial. Shortly before his death at the villa of Quierzy in October 741, Charles had drawn up the act which decreed that his eldest son, Carloman, should receive Austrasia, Alemannia and Thuringia: the younger, Pepin the Short, Neustria, Burgundy and Provence: and a natural son, Grifo, lands in all three kingdoms, without sovereignty. Neither Aquitaine nor Bavaria appear in the act. Both Carloman and Pepin (Pepin the Short, Pepin III) became mayors of the palace, of Neustria and Austrasia respectively.
For ten years, from 741 to 751, the two mayors ruled France, not without opposition from those whose aspirations to independence Charles Martel had suppressed, and from their own half-brother Grifo. The peripheral regions under Frankish rule revolted immediately on the news of Charles’s death: the dukes of Aquitaine and Bavaria disclaimed allegiance, Theutbald claimed the position of duke in Bavaria, the Saxons plundered their neighbours, and Grifo rose against the authority of his half-brothers. Carloman and Pepin dealt with all these menaces to the peace in unison. They imprisoned Grifo, wasted Aquitaine in 742, defeating its duke, and in the late summer attacked the Alemans and marched through Alsace to the Danube.
Since some of the rebels had sheltered themselves under an unwillingness to obey a mere mayor of the palace, Carloman and Pepin now (in 743) raised the Merovingian Childeric III to the throne, without any diminution of their own power and dignity. In 743 and 744 Carloman led new expeditions against the Saxons; in 743 Carloman and Pepin jointly brought duke Odilo of Bavaria to submission. They invaded his country and at the peace of 744 deprived him of the Nordgau. The Alemans too were chastised by expeditions in 744 and 746.
While the two mayors were campaigning on the eastern frontier, the duke of Aquitaine again rebelled and even crossed the Loire to attack Neustria. In 745 Carloman and Pepin defeated him and forced his resignation in favour of his son.
Meanwhile, in the frontier regions beyond their effective control, Boniface the Anglo-Saxon missionary had long been working under Frankish and papal encouragement. In 719 he had gone to the pagans of Thuringia and Hesse; in 722 he had obtained episcopal consecration from Gregory II, and been commended by him to Charles Martel for protection; in 732 he had been made archbishop by Gregory III and had founded the sees of Büraburg, Wurzburg, Eichstätt and, in 741, Erfürt, all with Charles’s aid. Boniface had summoned helpers, monks and nuns, from England, and had taught the pagans, setting up preaching crosses at places where later churches were built and protecting the setting up of such crosses by obtaining papal licence; he had founded, not only greater monasteries, but small cells of monks for the Christianization of the countryside. In 735 he was summoned to Bavaria to preach and teach, and in 739, with duke Odilo’s help, he reorganized the church of that country. He divided the duchy into the four sees of Salzburg, Freising, Regensburg and Passau. He found the two mayors of the palace no less willing to support him in Germany than their father Charles, and anxious also for his help in two matters concerning the Franks: the use of the royal title and the reform of the Frankish church.
Their first action had been to strengthen his own hands in Germany: Carloman granted him the lands to support his great abbey of Fulda in Hesse, of which his disciple and successor, Sturm, was made the first abbot. In 745, to strengthen Boniface’s metropolitan authority and allow him to introduce reform into the Austrasian church, Carloman and Pepin sought to erect Cologne into an Austrasian archbishopric for him; but there was noble opposition, and in the end, Boniface was made, by the action of pope Zacharias and the concurrence of the two brothers, metropolitan of Mainz.
The Frankish clergy, both Austrasian and Neustrian, meanwhile stood in need of reform. The Merovingian nomination of bishops had not always produced a satisfactory episcopate and clerical hierarchy, and the recent annexation of episcopal and particularly monastic lands, however necessary in the cause of defence, had produced desolated minsters and wandering and irregular monks.
There were other causes also that made the Frankish church seem to Boniface and his friends, product of the golden age of monastic learning in Northumbria, admirers of Bede and the Benedictine life, very remiss and disorderly. For one thing, the ‘false monasteries’ that Bede complained of in his letter to archbishop Egbert of York, would seem to have developed in the more barbarian parts of northern Gaul, for the same cause was at work; when land held by tribal custom, not bequeathable at death, could be rendered thus bequeathable only by a written grant, and such grants were made normally to minsters, Germanic lords, Frankish or Anglo-Saxon, sometimes founded ‘private monasteries’ for the sake of getting bookland, continuing to live there themselves with their wives and families. Again, in an age when the Benedictine rule in Gaul was often used along with the Celtic rule of Columbanus, and not sharply distinguished from that of the vita apostolica, or communal apostolic life such as had been practised by Augustine of Hippo, there was cause for confusion in the minds of Benedictine reformers. Even great monasteries like those of St Martin at Tours and Saint-Denis were houses of canons rather than monks, and had old, lay bedesmen entered on their matriculae, and there were other houses of an intermediate and anomalous nature. Moreover, houses founded as Benedictine were sometimes allowed to become houses of canons, because canons were not bound to give up their patrimony, and bishops in times of civil exaction found it easier to feed canons than starving monks. All these causes, beside the downright irregularities and immorality of impoverished and wandering monks and clergy, cried out for the reform and reorganization of the Frankish church.
As early as 742 Carloman had appealed to Boniface to reform the manners of the Frankish clergy: with Boniface’s advice, Carloman announced at an Austrasian synod of 742 that lands usurped from churches should be restored. Pepin also asked Boniface’s help in 743. But the question of restoring monastic lands and thus aiding monastic order could not be solved by a simple decree of restoration, for that would have dispossessed the vavasores of the army, still needed for defence. Hence in an Austrasian synod at Estinnes in 743, and a Neustrian one at Soissons in 744, it was further laid down that part only of the lands should be restored and that on the other part the annual payment (cens) for the precaria, hitherto paid to the mayor, should now be paid to the church which had earlier possessed the land. From 750, moreover, it was ordered that church lands not hitherto confiscated in whole or part should suffer partial confiscation. The partial and unequal distribution of the burden of defence was better equalized.
The six years’ joint rule of the two brothers ended in August 747, when Carloman, uncompelled by external pressure, desired to become a monk. He went to Rome and received the clerical tonsure from pope Zacharias, planning to build himself an abbey on Mount Soracte: but in 750 he gave up his project and entered as a simple monk at Monte Cassino.
Pepin from 747 governed the Franks as sole mayor, Pepin III: he seems to have contemplated using his half-brother Grifo, and released him from prison, but Grifo departed to the Saxons, made trouble, and had to be suppressed with them, by an expedition, in 748. And when duke Odilo died at about that time, Grifo escaped to Bavaria and hoped to make himself independent there with the help of Lantfrid II, now duke. Pepin, however, marched into Bavaria, captured Grifo and Lantfrid II, and made Tassilo III, son of Odilo, duke in Lantfrid’s place, keeping a tight hand himself over the government of the duchy. To Grifo he accorded a few counties in Neustria: but Grifo preferred to leave them and take refuge in Aquitaine.
The single rule of Pepin the Short (751–768) was marked by the taking of the royal title: the Merovingian dynasty was at length changed for the Carolingian. Pepin was now uncontested master of France, with the exception of some small trouble from Carloman’s son Drogo. From 749 to 751 there had been a two years’ peace: and the omens were favourable for assuming the royal title, for the two great spiritual forces of the day, Boniface and the papacy, were ready to legalize the assumption of kingship, even as Samuel had anointed Saul to be king, changing the rule of Israel.
In 750 Pepin sent Burchard, bishop of Würzburg and Fulrad, abbot of Saint-Denis, to pope Zacharias, asking him which of the two he should judge worthy of the kingdom, Childeric who had the name of king but did nothing, or Pepin, who disposed of all the business of the kingdom? Zacharias answered them and announced by the authority of the blessed Peter the apostle that Pepin was king, and commanded him to be anointed to the kingship by Boniface, archbishop of Mainz, which thing should be done at Soissons. The anointing was performed by Boniface, at the head of a band of bishops in the autumn of 751, after an assembly at Soissons had formally raised Pepin on the shield: the change of dynasty received supernatural sanction.
The strength of Pepin’s position at home was now sufficient to enable him to intervene in Italy, and by his successful campaign there to become the dominant power in western Europe: to have a ‘foreign policy’ and not merely a ‘frontier policy’. He became a force to be reckoned with by rulers in Italy, Constantinople, Spain and even Baghdad, after the Italian expedition which he now undertook.
The appeals of pope Stephen II (or III) for help from Pepin have been already noticed (see p. 252 and also p. 322). On 6 January 754, pope Stephen, who had travelled from Italy, was met by Pepin three miles from his villa at Ponthion. The circumstances of the meeting were notable. Pepin acted as strator to the pope, dismounting and leading his horse by the bridle, which shows that the famous forgery, the Donation of Constantine (Constitutum Constantini) had already been produced in Italy, and studied by the papal scrinium. The Donation was a magnificant amplification of the theme of the old Actus beati Silvestri (see p. 176). It was addressed by Constantine to pope Silvester I: in its first part, Constantine related his instruction and baptism by pope Silvester at Rome, and the cure there of his leprosy. In its second part, by an expansion of Constantine’s laying aside of his imperial insignia in the Actus, Constantine conferred all these insignia on the pope (who refused, however, to wear the diadem, as unfitting to a head that had received the tonsure and received instead the tall white cap or phrygium), acknowledged his primacy over the four patriarchates of Antioch, Jerusalem, Alexandria and Constantinople and all other bishops, and conferred on him, among other privileges, the territorial rule of Rome, and all the provinces and towns of Italy. In sign of the temporal, quasi-imperial power thus conferred, Constantine himself acted as strator to Silvester, leading his horse by the bridle. There was, in fact, in the middle of the eighth century, a vacancy of power in the old exarchate of Ravenna and the Byzantine duchy of Rome, which the author of the Constitutum thus filled and more than filled. His work of historical imagination was to change the climate of opinion in the Latin west as effectively as St Augustine’s De Civitate Dei had done earlier: and the beginning of its effectiveness dates from the encounter of pope Stephen and Pepin at Ponthion.
Two actions of Stephen were dictated by the concept of papal temporal power lying behind the Donation: the renewed confirmation by the pope of Pepin and his dynasty as kings of the Franks, and the obligation imposed that they should act as protector of the papacy against its enemies. After wintering at Saint-Denis, pope Stephen in June 754, anointed Pepin and his two sons kings in a great ceremony at Saint-Denis, and conferred on them the title of patrician of the Romans. The title of patrician had been conferred on Charles Martel as a simple title of honour which the Byzantine emperors bestowed on such officers as the exarch of Ravenna, the (Byzantine) duke of Rome, etc: the title patricius Romanorum was new and was given as implying the obligation to the protectorate of the papacy. In pope Stephen’s letters, indeed, he spoke of the unction he had bestowed on Pepin and his sons precisely as making them protectors of the holy see, as if the office of protector as well as king was conferred with this sacramental sign. Pepin certainly understood this new obligation as binding him to defence of the papacy against the Lombards.
As to the moral question of the sanction conferred by the fabricated and tendencious Constitutum Constantini: it should be noticed that public opinion (or rather, notarial practice) tolerated at the time the production of written evidence of something held to be true: certainly the Constitutum was accepted by the papal household and scrinium, and by the notarially trained monks of Saint-Denis. This does not imply, however, any general or local tradition of the events related in the Constitutum, such as often lay behind the facts in a ‘forged’ land charter. The Constitutum was an able forgery, fine propaganda, the work of a single mind, used with boldness and imagination by Stephen II and his scrinium.
Pope Stephen’s object in his journey to France in 754 was the obtaining of Pepin’s help against the Lombard king Aistulf, the usurper of papal lands. Pepin encountered, however, some opposition from the nobles to the undertaking of an expedition to Italy to restore the papal lands: expeditions to distant Italy had not so far brought the Franks much good, and there had recently been an alliance with the Lombards: Carloman too left Monte Cassino and travelled to France, hoping to prevent the Frankish invasion and maintain peace. Pepin shut him up in a monastery at Vienne, where in 755 he died; and prevailed upon an assembly at Quierzy to accept his Italian project. He had motives other than devotion to the papacy to undertake the war, for Aistulf had been sheltering his enemy, Grifo.
In 755 Pepin fulfilled his promise to the pope by an expedition to Italy. He besieged Pavia and obtained from Aistulf a promise to restore to the Romani (i.e. the pope) Ravenna and the other territories of the exarchate. The Byzantine government, belatedly informed in 756, sent an embassy to Pepin to remonstrate, but fruitlessly. After the second expedition to Italy to enforce the Lombard cessions, and a two years’ partial rule of the territories by the Franks, Pepin’s envoy, Fulrad of Saint-Denis, formally and symbolically ‘restored’ them to the pope, laying the keys of certain exarchate cities and a written diploma on the altar of St Peter’s. The pope ruled the duchy of Rome and the exarchate, the respublica Romanorum,1 as a kind of papal state, under the protection of Pepin: and it was Pepin who arranged the further delimitation of territories between Stephen and the new Lombard king, Desiderius, in 763. Suzerainty over the duchies of Spoleto and Bene-vento was denied to him; Pepin remained in control of papal relations with the Lombards.
Pepin’s conquest of the Lombards had brought him into relations with the Byzantine emperor, Constantine V (Copronymus). He sent an embassy to Constantinople in 756, and received one from Constantine at Compiègne in 757: the envoys brought him an organ as present from the emperor. But the Frankish conquests in Italy prevented permanently good relations with Byzantium, which had always valued southern Italy. Greek embassies in 765 and 767 tried in vain to arrange a Franco-Byzantine royal marriage, and to make trouble between Pepin and the pope on doctrinal issues.
The dominant position of Pepin in western Europe even made his alliance valuable to the Abbasid caliph of Baghdad, Mansur. Both he and Pepin seem to have sought to co-operate against the Umayyads of Spain: a Frankish embassy went to Baghdad in 765 and Arab envoys reached France in 768.
Though Pepin’s intervention in Italy stood out to his contemporaries as his most remarkable achievement, it was made during a long series of summer campaigns to establish or maintain his power over Aquitaine and the Mediterranean coast, the Saxons and Bavaria. There was still much fighting to be done with the Saracens from Spain; Charles Martel had attempted to drive them from Septimania, but had not succeeded. Various Saracen setbacks now favoured Pepin’s effort to expel them from the Frankish Mediterranean lands; the Kharijites (seceders) rose in Africa and caused difficulties to the caliphate after 740; the Berbers revolted against the Saracens in Spain in 741–2; the Kalbites, another Syro-Arabian sect in Islam, made difficulties in Spain in 745 and 746; the establishment of the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad caused a rift between the east and west of Islam, and, finally, the Umayyad amirate, independent of Baghdad, was established by ‛Abd ar-Rahman at Cordoba in 756. The Christian inhabitants of the Septimanian cities, with the help of the Visigothic leader Ansemund and a Frankish army, threw out their Saracen garrisons; the Franks regained Nîmes, Maguelone, Agde, Béziers and their territories; the last Saracen stronghold Narbonne, long enabled to hold out by the Arab fleet, was regained for the Franks in 759. The population rose and massacred the Saracen garrison.
The Frankish conquest of Septimania had disturbed the duke of Aquitaine, who had hoped to liberate it from the Saracens himself: he had attempted to seize Narbonne in 751. Pepin himself, however, was now able to safeguard his conquest of Septimania by attempting to gain the direct rule of Aquitaine, winning territory there gradually from the north. As excuse for sending armies to Aquitaine, he could allege the duke’s aid to his enemy, Grifo, and his confiscation of the lands of Austrasian churches in Aquitaine and disregard of other Frankish grants of privileges and immunities to churches. Between 760 and 763 he sent an army annually into Aquitaine, while the duke retaliated by raiding Septimania and Burgundy. But the Franks had secured themselves a citadel in 756 in Bourges, and from there they pushed eastward into the Auvergne and from 766 south-westward towards the Garonne. Pepin thus gradually won back the Aquitanian lands and had the duke assassinated on 2 June 768. He had secured the direct rule of Aquitaine: he now appointed counts for the territories within the duchy and issued at Saintes a capitulary for Aquitaine. The clauses of the capitulary guaranteed to his subjects personal security and Aquitanian private law, and to his clergy stability of their benefices; from them in return an orderly and regular church life was required.
The Saxons also Pepin brought back to their old relations of tribute and distant subjection. Throughout his reign they had been raiding Hesse and Thuringia: in 753 Pepin marched against them and conquered their lands to the Weser; after another expedition in 768 the Saxons had to promise an annual tribute of 300 horses. It is notable that these border Germanic tribes never paid tribute in money: their early tribute in cows represented the current wealth of the tribe, and the later tribute of horses points to Pepin’s military needs.
With Tassilo III, duke of Bavaria, Pepin had for a time good relations. Tassilo ruled under his protection, and in 757 actually came to France and before the assembly at Compiègne took the vassal’s oath of fidelity. He fulfilled his obligations of general loyalty and adherence by rendering military service to Pepin in the Italian expedition of 756, and in the first expedition to Aquitaine. The work of Christian missionaries now in Bavaria tended to support Frankish interests: Christianity penetrated at this time to the Slav races of Styria and Carinthia, to the north-east of Bavaria. In this border duchy, however, Frankish control of internal government was very difficult to maintain, and at the end of Pepin’s reign Tassilo was becoming more independent and less loyal.
Frankish government and institutions had developed during the 200 odd years since the reign of Lothar I, but without revolutionary change; even the rise to power of the mayors of the Austrasian palace was long prepared. From the first, the Frankish royal power was personal, resting on the astonishing military success of Clovis, and borrowing nothing of the Roman conception of a magistracy within the law. The lands of a tribal king won by conquest were his personal possession, to be divided out among his sons as family land would be divided out by the custom of the folk: hence, throughout Merovingian history, the patrimonial partitions of the regnum Francorum at a king’s death. The Frankish monarchy was despotic, and the royal orders or bans absolute; the régime hasbeen described as despotism tempered by religion and fear of assassination. The mysterious power of the saint to protect the people of his see, or the clients who resorted to his basilica, was one of the few things feared by the Merovingian king: St Martin, patron saint of the Franks, was strong enough to protect the people of Tours even from the Merovingian tax-surveyors, the makers of descriptiones. His miraculous protection more than once availed them and, by the king’s orders, they were not ‘described’.
As to the king’s powers in legislation: the Merovingians allowed private law to be regulated by Germanic folk custom, Roman law, or the curious ad hoc mixture of both administered by the mallus. Public law, however, they regulated by edicts or precepts issued on their sole authority: announced usually in an assembly but not the work of the assembly. Such edicts dealt with the organization of justice, the relations of the king with bishops, churches and abbeys, and the clerical order. In the royal writing office the notaries copied the rescripts of the late Roman emperors as preambles to the royal writs or letters and issued the diplomas of a privilege and immunity, and the formal series of documents used for royal appointments to bishoprics. In such appointments, contrary as they were to the canons, the kings often nominated from the palace lay, notarial, officers, who were then ordained to the see with or without observance of the canonical ‘interstices’ between the reception of the various grades of the clerical order. Election by the clergy and people of the see became exceptional in the later Merovingian period and, for the candidate, dangerous. Simony often accompanied the exercise of the royal power of episcopal appointment.
Not only did the king control the appointment of bishops, but the summons to church councils and the passage of canons, for which the royal authority was necessary. There was no firm boundary between matters temporal and spiritual, and kings and bishops lived and ruled from day to day, with no definitions and delimitations made between their powers. When Charles Martel made his heavy confiscations of church lands, there was no effective protest, not only because danger threatened, but because the resumption of benefices and precaria was often practised by the kings against lay land holders, and was, indeed, one of the subjects of discontent with their régime. The church was less able to defend herself. Pepin the Short was the patron of church reform and carried through with Boniface an equalization of the burden of his father’s confiscations: but he made no fresh grants to churches himself, except in the case of Saint-Denis, where he had been brought up.
The Merovingian secular government was neither specifically Roman nor Germanic: the kings preserved what coincided with their own interests, making innovations at need, but not systematically. No effort was made to preserve the old Roman structure of government in seventeen provinces under the praetorian prefect of the Gauls: but within the provincial structure of the old Roman government there had survived the civitas, the small Celtic or Iberian state which had preceded the Roman conquest: and these civitates remained. They had been economically ruined, but their territorial boundaries lived on into the period of Frankish rule, partly because each city had a bishop and clergy to serve the area and they knew the boundaries. Sixth-century Gaul had about 120 such ‘cities’, or sees, and the Merovingians took them over and used them permanently as administrative units. Without modifying their bounds, the king installed his representative in each city, his comes: the later emperors had used comites for various posts, but had never allotted one to each city and its territory. The Goths and Burgundians were the first to do this and Clovis had followed suit. The count was, in his territory, a real viceroy: he commanded the city’s military forces, and had final administrative and judicial power: he also enforced the payment of royal levies. In the south, he was for long chosen from Roman stock.
In the Germanic north, cities were few, and there was no ready-made counterpart to the comes: the Frankish centenarius or thunginus seems to have been an elected tribal officer, military or civil, and as such he soon disappeared. The Merovingian kings introduced counts among their own people in these regions, assimilating their position and work to that of the old graf (see p. 63). Little is known of the graf in early days: but he seems to have been an estate agent, a reeve, like the Anglo-Saxon 3erefa. The northern graf-count has as his sphere, however, not the territory of a city, but the pagus: in the basins of the Scheldt, Meuse and Rhine Christianity had been weak, and the city boundaries had been irrecoverably obliterated by the invasions.
The graf was not the only Merovingian estate agent: like the Visigoths and Burgundians the Frankish kings took over the territories of the fisc, and their administration by a domesticus. Each royal demesne was an administrative and judicial island of territory within the pagus or civitas, not under the jurisdiction of the count but of a domestic. The domestic ruled not merely a single demesne but a group and was normally the equal in importance of the count; the produce of the demesne went to the king’s treasure and the lodging of the king and court, if the demesne centred in a royal villa, or dwelling. In the seventh century, however, the use of domestics lapsed and the kings used a villicus, or steward of a single villa, in their place.
The administration of justice in the later Merovingian period adopted two dissimilar procedures, Roman and Germanic. In the later empire, the court of the praeses, the judex, of the province, had been held at different places within his wide jurisdiction and rested upon a written procedure. The judex had notaries who collected written depositions of evidence and the judex himself was sole judge, with wide discretionary powers. Visigoths and Burgundians adopted such a procedure.
Among the Franks, however, there persisted the old Germanic custom of judgment pronounced by a delegation of the freemen of each canton or pagus. The ‘hundred elder’ or hundredman, the centenarius, had merely presided over a tribunal of doomsmen, the mallus, and was charged with the execution of their sentence. The procedure was oral, formal and symbolic, and judgment followed the testimony of oath-helpers or the judgment of the ordeal.
The Merovingian kings used counts, however, both in the Roman south and the Germanic north, where the supervision of the whole canton or pagus by a ‘hundred elder’ soon lapsed; the count came to preside over the mallus in his stead. The count was given the pursuit of the criminal and the direct punishment of the guilty: but not the wide powers of the Roman praeses. Where there was a mixed population, Salian procedure was imported into the more Roman parts of Gaul: though it is notable how few references there are to Germanic legal procedure in the pages of Gregory of Tours. The count was not left unaided to pronounce judgment for a mixed population: the kings compelled the Gallo-Romans to appear periodically in each city to speak the law, as the Frankish delegates spoke it for themselves. The count’s court was the mallus, not now an assembly of freemen, but a bench of assessors or dooms-men, called in Latin boni homines (in later French, prudhommes), in Germanic Rachinbergii or Rathinbergii; they gave sentence and the count executed it. When the bishop sat in the count’s court, he seems to have been summoned to sit as a doomsman, to speak the law in some suit affecting clerics and laymen: suits between clerics went to his own tribunal.
In the mallus Germanic procedure thus predominated, for procedure was oral: by the awarding of rachat, (bot) or money compensation for crime, or by sworn testimony or by ordeal. Where society had become Germanic, or where the ruling class was Germanic, the more advanced Roman procedure was no longer suitable or available. The church pressed for the assuagement of injuries by bots, as preferable to the deadly faida or blood feud; the kings also pressed it, for they received a third of the composition money, called the fredum; the count collected this money, receiving a small fraction for his trouble. His main recompense for the duties of his office was the proceeds of some royal demesne. The mallus thus made its own legal decisions, without reference to legal textbooks: law was local, part Germanic and part Roman, according to territorial custom. The mallus was a useful agent of royal government, for the king’s orders could be proclaimed there, as also his summons to the army, and his royal edicts.
Franks and Gallo-Romans (Bede in 731 speaks of them as still distinguishable groups) were thus equal before the curious mixed law of the count and the mallus: and they were equally subject to royal absolutism. The king could give any office at pleasure: he could free a serf and make of him his vassal or count; he could use the officers of the palace for work outside their proper sphere, sell a bishopric to a Syrian refugee, or use a Jewish merchant to collect his taxes. The old senatorial class, so powerful in the Auvergne in the later empire, still persisted and bishops like Gregory of Tours still worked on lines they would have approved: but their old power as a class had disappeared by the end of the sixth century.
The Frankish nobility were, in historical times, always a nobility of service, a ‘thegn’ class, not a nobility of birth, like the eorlcundmen in early Wessex or Kent. A nobility of landholders and officeholders soon arose: the king’s service trebled a man’s wergeld. To enter the royal service, a freeman commended himself to the king, became his cliens, his fidelis, his leude, and in the early Carolingian period, his vassus. These commended men, these antrustions, and the later vassi, were no longer solely the war-band of the prince, as earlier: they included royal servants and even ecclesiastical dignitaries. High officers, proceres, optimates, dukes and counts, were all the king’s servants.
Each kingdom, Austrasia, Neustria, Burgundy, had a writing office, a scrinium like that of the old Roman king of Soissons and other Roman governors. The notaries of the scrinia were trained to receive reports, write letters and supervise accounts; a cancellarius was a notary of a special kind (see p. 401). The royal treasure was kept in a chamber adjacent to that in which the king slept, and was in charge of a camerarius and cubicularius. The officers of the palace (see p. 62) continued as in the early Merovingian period: pincerna, comes stabuli, seneschal (from the Germanic sinischalk, who had jurisdiction over the numerous palace servants), the capellani who guarded the royal relics, chief of them the capa or capella of St Martin, and, in charge of all the departments of the palace, the maiordomus. He was charged with the feeding and ordering of the whole body: as maior palatii he succeeded an officer of the Roman emperors, who had had the cura palatii.
The mayor’s court, his palace tribunal, was therefore a supreme court, over which he might preside himself: but for routine cases the comes palacii presided. The court was a tribunal for the leudes or vassi of the king’s entourage: it had no formal constitution or regular sessions and its sphere of jurisdiction remained undefined. Its procedure also was undefined: it was less formal and Germanic than that of the mallus. It was not a court of appeal: it was the court for the king’s clients or vassals: and both for those who formed the palace, and those who had been sent out to hold office in the countryside. With the king’s fidèles the ordinary local courts could not deal; and the king could, at will, summon any case to be tried by the court of the palace.
Though each kingdom in the Merovingian period had thus its palace, its central government with tentacles out in the countryside, though Paris, Soissons, Reims or Orleans were in a sense capital cities, yet the regnum Francorum had no capital and no centralized administration. Each king travelled with his palace, partly in order to feed his court at the different villae, partly for love of hunting, partly to keep in touch with the different parts of his kingdom. Byzantine terms and ceremonial were to some extent in use: the court physician was the iatros, the kings spoke of themselves as domini, spoke of indulgentia nostra, misericordia nostra, used a throne and some approximations to Byzantine court ceremonial. But their court was a simple and barbarian imitation of the Byzantine emperor’s, their court departments quite unlike the great officia, staffed by learned laymen, of the Byzantines.
Allusion has been made (see p. 131) to the mixed economy, so largely a food and services economy, of the later Merovingians. The longs lived on the produce of their demesnes, as did the counts and dukes; the kings had customs and tolls and sometimes levied money taxes, which all went into their treasure. Apart from military expeditions, the great field of expenditure of the kings’ revenue was that of diplomatic presents (Pirenne noted their size, and how it was frequently cheaper to buy loyalty than to fight a border tribe), and the presents made to their own leudes, their fideles. The kings needed their support, and like the old Germanic ‘ring-givers’ were forced to secure loyalty by generous giving: in their case of lands and immunities. The royal demesnes were, in time, very much granted out: e.g. what had been originally a complex of royal demesnes round Paris became gradually almost solely church lands: the territories of Saint-Denis, Chelles, Saint-Germain, etc.
The decay of the royal Merovingian power did not arise from popular opposition, or even relative impoverishment, but from eclipse by the Merovingian palace, and its mayor. A narrow ruling class of administrative nobles came to rule France; its members intermarried, and it included not only the ‘palace’, the royal household, but its once members, the counts, dukes, domestics, etc. out in the countryside. It was these distant members who met in assembly with king and palace once a year, constituting a ‘full palace’: the old tribal assembly of freemen, the champs de Mars, had ceased to meet in Clovis’s time. It was the palace who decided the succession, accepting or rejecting partition among the late king’s sons: it was the palace which ruled during the frequent minorities. Minorities were indeed so frequent in the Frankish kingdoms that they might almost be considered the normal state of affairs: warlike expeditions were none the less undertaken in them and the palace ruled, even before the power of its mayor became overshadowing. In the seventh century, except for Dago-bert’s reign, the three kingdoms were ruled by their palaces, even as in the eighth century the regnum Francorum was ruled by the mayors.
Circumstances favoured the rise of the mayor of the palace. The palace was strong because it controlled the armed forces; in the sixth century dukes had been rare and counts had sufficed, even for the leading of their local armies. In the course of the forty years of civil war (573–613) dukes appeared, soldiers who commanded armies, the count doing so only exceptionally. Duchies were at first not territories but military commands, dukes being assigned two or three cities for their support; territorial duchies developed only gradually, Champagne being an early example. The kings ceased to be effective leaders of military expeditions, which were now led by dukes: not single commanders but in numbers proportionate to the size of the expedition: one to Lombardy had as many as twenty dukes.
The mayors of the palace came to hold a leading position in the administration, both in peace and war, only after c. 550; but by 613 it was clear that in each kingdom the true master of the palace was the mayor. He was responsible for supply and for palace order and cohesion: he headed the king’s antrustions, his leudes. The other nobles now came to fear his power; in 642 the Burgundian nobles ridded themselves of their mayor, and in 673 the Neustrian nobles appealed against Ebroin, their most notable mayor, to the king. From 687 the Austrasian mayor was the real ruler, not only of Austrasia, but of the regnum Francorum: he changed his title only in 751, the substance of power he had had before.
Pepin III thus in 751 set the coping-stone in the work of his predecessors, and he equally laid the foundations for the great reign of Charlemagne, his son, and that in almost all the departments of Frankish life and policy. He was not, however, long lived. In 768, after a campaign in Aquitaine, though only fifty-four, he felt death near. He divided his kingdom, as Frankish rulers before him, between his sons, Carloman and Charles. He then died at Saint-Denis on 24 September 768.
Against this background of political struggle, frontier defence and frequent civil war, what happened to Frankish art and architecture in the long Merovingian and early Carolingian periods? They cover the age of Bede, who died in 735, and that of a very splendid period of Northumbrian art. There was peaceful intercourse with the Anglo-Saxons all the time and a parallel social development: yet no monuments of artistic culture like the Northumbrian crosses or the Lindisfarne gospels have come down to us from Merovingian France. The phenomenon deserves some explanation: some consideration as to whether the simple explanation is that there was more fighting among the Merovingians than the Anglo-Saxons, and therefore less margin of creative effort, or whether other causes supervened. In view of the wars in England between the kings struggling for the bretwaldaship, between the Deirans and Bernicians in Northumbria itself, between Northumbria and Mercia and Mercia and Wessex, the Anglo-Saxons would seem to have done as much fighting as the Franks: though not, of course, with external enemies like the Slav tribes, the Lombards and the Arabs.
First then, as to Anglo-Frankish intercourse, tending towards the production of a common culture. On the secular side, merchants crossed the Channel in both directions, to the fair of Saint-Denis, to London which, as Bede says, was a mart and emporium for many nations. The coins in the pouch of the king commemorated at Sutton Hoo in the mid-seventh century were all Frankish. Cross-travel by churchmen was equally frequent; Augustine had taken Frankish interpreters; Felix of Burgundy converted Suffolk, the Frankish Lothere, bishop of Wessex, attended the synod of Whitby while still unable to speak English; in Dagobert’s day Richarius went to preach in England. The Northumbrian Wilfrid was trained by and received the tonsure from Annemund of Lyons. Benedict Biscop took back glass makers from Gaul to glaze the window of his new church at Monkwearmouth and Jarrow. There was no great difficulty in Anglo-Frankish communications, and it might have been expected that the Northumbrian golden age would have extended to Merovingian France without a sixty years’ interval and the personal impetus given by Charles the Great.
Eventually, through the work of Boniface and the many Anglo-Saxon missionaries, the Northumbrian renaissance did influence Carolingian learning, art, scripts and illuminations. With Benedictine monks and nuns of Anglo-Saxon stock working in Frisia and among the Saxons, and with the influence of Boniface guiding Pepin the Short in the reform of Frankish clergy and monks, it could hardly have been otherwise. Carolingian art was itself born of the cross fertilization of two cultures: the Northumbrian and the Byzantine, just as the Northumbrian renaissance itself had been born of the fusion of Celtic, Anglian and Byzantine cultures. The Carolingian Franks bordered the Mediterranean, were awed by the remains of Greco-Roman art in Lombard Italy, and were in touch with Greek religion, books, churches and traditions in their new conquests of the middle Danube lands, and the patriarchate of Aquileia at the head of the Adriatic. Byzantium and Byzantine influence was always very close, and Carolingian art was not to be merely a reflowering among the Franks of Northumbrian art, transmitted by the missionaries. Nevertheless, Northumbrian art was one of the springs of Carolingian art, as Northumbrian learning, transmitted through Alcuin and others, was to be one of the sources of Carolingian sapientia: reference to it cannot, therefore, be altogether omitted.
It seems, then, that the art and learning of seventh- and eighth-century Northumbria grew out of the fusion of two cultures, the Celtic and the Anglo-Saxon, and that the immediate stimulus to such a flowering was the introduction of yet a third influence: that of Byzantine books, illuminations, textiles and reliquaries, brought by Benedict Biscop in the north, and by Theodore and Hadrian in the south. Benedict Biscop’s journeys to the continent and Rome are described in Bede’s Lives of the Abbots (of Monkwearmouth-Jarrow): he brought back from the continent a very fine library of books, which Bede was to use later: and he died in 690. Theodore and Hadrian founded a school of Greco-Latin learning at Canterbury, from which Aldhelm was to gain his scholarship. Both brought to England altar books and books for the divine office written on vellum, a very expensive material compared to the papyrus rolls and tomes which had so largely served the Roman empire; but a smooth material capable of taking illumination (illustration), as papyrus was not. In the Greco-Roman empire, book illumination was rare, for books were not used in any public ceremonial, as altar books in the Christian churches later, and the very expensive vellum was only used for such solemn tomes as copies of Vergil’s works, or, later, the Digest. Illumination could only be made on vellum, and there were few vellum books: representations of Vergil, however, were sometimes painted at the beginning of the Aeneid, and very occasionally similar ones of other writers also. The vellum altar books and service books now brought by Benedict Biscop and Theodore may well have had pictures of the four evangelists before their gospel, and of David before the book of psalms: for Byzantine books were sometimes thus illuminated, following the Vergilian precedent.
In one case this certainly happened: an extant manuscript, the Codex Amiatinus, was written in the monastery of Monkwear-mouth-Jarrow as a gift for the pope. It has a very early Vulgate text and also pictures of the evangelists and David, in the manner earlier described, and it shows connexions with the biblical text of Cassiodorus at Vivarium. It is accepted as having been copied from a book brought back by Benedict Biscop.
The Lindisfarne Gospels, again, with its evangelists’ portraits and its intricately beautiful pages of abstract ornament, has a Latin text founded on the Vulgate text of Codex Amiatinus, not on the old Latin version earlier in use in Britain, and from which the larger part of the text of the Book of Kells is drawn. None of the famous Northumbrian and Irish manuscripts, the Book of Durrow, the Lindisfarne gospels, the Book of Kells, could have been illuminated without access to a Byzantine manuscript or its copies, for reasons of text and ornament. The Northumbrian manuscripts use the typical Anglo-Saxon elongated animal in their ornament, and, even more, the Celtic spiral which had developed from La Tène art-forms, and the Celtic plaitwork. In Northumbria, however, and especially the northern province of Bernicia, the Celtic population far outnumbered the Anglian: it was really a Celtic countryside with an Anglian ruling race. But the ornament indigenous to Northumbria, or to Iona or the Irish monasteries, could not of itself have produced the Evangelists’ portraits, which are clearly Byzantine in origin.
The Bewcastle and Ruthwell crosses, again, which may be dated as between 664 and 700, and Acca’s cross of c. 740, mark a sudden efflorescence of figure-carving in stone, in the Byzantine manner. Here again, as in the illuminations, there is a curious mixture of cultures: Ruthwell, six miles north of the Roman Wall, has the northern, Runic letters and a verse from the Anglo-Saxon poem, the Dream of the Rood; Bewcastle has the names of the Anglo-Saxon princess Cyniburg, daughter of Penda, who married Alch-frith, Wilfrid’s patron. Both have ornament that looks back to Egyptian monasticism, the monasticism of the desert; Bewcastle has as one of its three main figures the Baptist, peculiarly a saint of the desert, and Ruthwell has the figure of Christ treading upon the asp and the basilisk, from the verse in psalm 90, the desert psalm (super aspidem et basiliscum ambulabis et conculcabis leonem et draconem). Yet both crosses have as their dominant figure subject the Byzantine representation of Christ in majesty, and the naturalistic rendering of the other figures can only be Byzantine in origin. The late Professor Saxl conjectured that illuminators familiar with the Byzantine treatment of figures drew the outline in paint upon the flat stone face of the cross’s shaft, and that the stone carver then worked upon them. He might well have known stone figures in the round of Roman emperors or matrons or soldiers; but here on the crosses is a figure of the Byzantine Christ such as could only have been designed by someone familiar with imported books, textiles or reliquaries.
All this flowering of Northumbrian art was due to royal patronage, but made at the instance or by the work of the church. No secular works of art, no palaces, have come down to us, though the Sutton Hoo finds have provided us with the personal equipment of a great East Anglian king of the middle of the seventh century. It is difficult to believe that such art flourished only in Northumbria, and that such churches as that of St Augustine’s, Canterbury, had, say in the late eighth century, nothing to equal it. As to memorial crosses like bishop Acca’s, William of Malmesbury tells us that two survived in the cemetery adjoining the church at Glastonbury in his time; and parts of an Anglo-Saxon cross, around which the Anglo-Saxon church of Recuiver was most probably built, and many fragments of other crosses survive. The sixth-century illuminated manuscript known as the Gospels of St Augustine’s, Canterbury, a manuscript of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, is now believed by experts to have been an altar book actually brought with him by St Augustine, and can scarcely have been without influence on Canterbury scribes. It has a miniature of St Luke in the Byzantine manner, and probably once had others of St Mark and St John; it has also a series of small pictures of the life of Christ, and had probably, as manuscript evidence suggests, very many more. The gospels are written in two columns to each page and in uncials; the tradition of large, clear lettering for an altar book recalls the request of Boniface in Germany that his friend should send him out such a book. Indeed Boniface’s almost wearisomely reiterated requests for books for his mission is evidence that the southern Anglo-Saxons were writing many manuscripts at the time, though few have survived. All this suggests that though the chief focus of the renaissance of Byzantine art in the early eighth century was in Northumbria, and though conditions in this remote part favoured survival because there was less rebuilding than in the south, yet the renaissance was not confined to Northumbria. With so many channels of communication open, it might have spread to the regnum Francorum.
In contrast to this outburst of Anglo-Saxon art and architecture, however, building and its attendant arts saw no such flowering among the later Merovingians and early Carolingians. No great Frankish buildings or monuments, at any rate, remain. It is likely that, in the south especially, some churches or even palaces, were built, for descriptions of buildings with colonnades and mosaics have come down to us (like those which Eddius Stephanus wrote about Wilfrid’s churches of Ripon and Hexham): but seventh- and eighth-century Frankish art survives for us in altar and personal ornaments and the remains of small churches rather than in the colonnaded buildings described by a few Merovingian writers.
There is some indication indeed that wood was used for the building of late Merovingian churches and houses, and such would not, of course, have survived. Wood was plentiful, particularly in the north-eastern lands of the Franks, where Christianity and the building of churches came late, and for building wood sufficed. Fortunatus (d. 670), writing of the country round Poitiers, has one poem about a wooden house: he doesn’t, he says, want a wall built of hewn stone, he prefers the craftsman’s timber work: the massive timber palaces reach up to the sky, and never a crack in their solid surface. Whatever protection rocks or gravel or limestone or clay may afford, here a nice little woodland has built a house all by itself: and loftier and greater than the stone ones, and surrounded on all sides by porticoes, and the wood carver has given his fancy free play in his sculptures. The Lex Burgundionum too rates a woodcarver higher than a blacksmith; while a goldsmith’s wer is 200 solidi and a silversmith’s 100, the woodcarver’s is 60 and the blacksmith’s 50. The reappearance in Carolingian art of Greco-Roman naturalistic sculpture, and also of a few features of Germanic pattern, seem to indicate that they were transmitted by the rustic woodcarver.
The treasuries of churches have transmitted a few illuminated manuscripts (not in the same class as the famous Northumbrian ones), ornaments and even textiles from the late Merovingian period. The treasury of the cathedral of Sens has a curious picture of the Assumption embroidered on linen, where the unskilled Frankish workers have tried to imitate the figures of an eastern silken brocade; the museum at Lyons has a silken tissue from the tomb of St Merry, who died at Paris c. 700, embroidered in gold and coloured silks with scrolls and fantastic little animals such as are found in manuscripts of the period. Part of a chasuble with silken embroidery like cloisonné metal work has survived to us from Balthilde’s abbey of Chelles (see p. 277).
The monasteries too of this period would seem to have been simply built, with church and domestic buildings within a hedged enclosure: the buildings themselves of wood and roofed with thatch. St Benedict of Aniane, according to his Vita, finding the valley in which he had at first settled too narrow, began to build a new monastery outside its limits. He and his brethren used to carry planks of timber on their own shoulders through lack of oxen to draw them … He ordained that the houses should not be made or roofed with shining or pictured walls and tiles, but with straw and other cheap material. He would not have vessels for the making of Christ’s body of silver, but first of all he had them of wood, and then of glass. Thatched roofs, however, involved risk of fire, and when the monastery was rebuilt in 782 tiles were used.
Some large abbeys still, however, in the Greco-Roman tradition had churches and oratories of stone, like that of Jumièges, built c. 684 on a cruciform plan; here the monastic enclosure was square, with ramparts and turrets. The abbey of St Riquier (Centula) near Abbeville is the only Frankish house of which we know the ground plan and buildings in the early Carolingian period, and this through a seventeenth-century drawing made from a very ancient miniature. The abbey had already an honourable history when Charlemagne presented the abbey to his son-in-law Angilbert in 792, together with new endowment for its rebuilding. Angilbert completely rebuilt church and cloister, in stone; there had in the days of Balthilde been three choirs in the abbey, singing the office in three chapels at successive hours. Angilbert rebuilt the great church of St Riquier, with the rectangular cloister stretching from its southern wall, and the small churches of St Benedict and St Mary at angles of the cloister. The interest of the main church lies in its equal emphasis on the east and west ends, where the nave is crossed by transepts surmounted by lantern towers: an arrangement of which the fundamental feature, the provision of two chancels, is not uncommon in great romanesque churches of monastic or capitular foundations. Several explanations of this plan are possible: some would ascribe it to the prevailing fashion of orientation, as opposed to the more common practice of occi-dentation in previous ages, in which case the old altar would not be abandoned, but retained in addition to the new; such was the case at Canterbury, where, upon the building of the eastern apse and new high altar by archbishop Odo (961–988), the altar in the western apse became the Lady altar. Another theory would find the desire to provide a grand parochial altar in addition to the monastic or conventual altar. These theories are not mutually exclusive, and the answer is probably that there were a variety of reasons for this development. Whatever the cause, the result was xtremely imposing, as may be seen from the several magnificent minsters erected on this plan which survive in Germany.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE