WHILE the Carolingian imperial encouragement of schools tended to produce more educated and intelligent clergy, the product of new and original works in the field of the liberal arts was small. Here there was very little fertilizing contact with Byzantine or Arabic learning: only, in fact, in the case of music, and the Neoplatonist teaching about the structure of the universe. Only in the first case was there a real efflorescence of an art, when Byzantine music, Rome reformed, was introduced to the fine instrument of the monastic choirs, and the ninth and tenth centuries heard the first and most beautiful cadences of liturgical plainchant. Otherwise, while the greatest ninth-century teachers maintained that Greco-Roman learning was a most desirable part of clerical education, new and original works in the field of the liberal arts were few.
Alcuin was the first scholar to mark the non-mathematical off from the mathematical arts by the use of the term trivium and quadrivium, but he himself made no contribution to the quadriviutn as great as Bede’s De temporum ratione. His teaching must have been largely oral and informal, and his treatises on the arts were cast into the form of dialogues. That on grammar was set forth as between Alcuin himself as magister and two boys, one Saxon and one Frankish, in his school; they had just ‘burst into the thorny thicket of grammar’, and had to be taught about nouns, genders, cases, verbs, etc. The dialogues on rhetoric and dialectic were written as between Alcuin and Charlemagne: that on rhetoric dealt with the art of speaking well, and mainly in the law courts. These three treatises covered the trivium, but for the quadrivium Alcuin supplied no comprehensive treatises, but only two short tracts: On the full moon and the moon’s course and On leap year (‘What causes leap year? the tardiness of the sun in his course’, etc.). Alcuin had nothing apparently to add to Bede.
The prose works of Raban Maur bulked much larger than those of Alcuin, and if in his writings he contributed nothing new in the field of the quadrivium, at least he insisted that all seven arts should be included in the education of clerics, and he wrote two treatises dealing with the quadrivium himself. In the third book of his De institutione clericorum he insisted that the young cleric must be fully trained both in sapientia (the seven liberal arts) and caritas: it was not safe for a future ruler of souls to be ignorant of anything. He devoted a chapter each to grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, mathematics, arithmetic, geometry, music and ‘the books of the philosophers’. He wrote also a treatise, De computo in dialogue form, ‘Number’, he wrote, ‘has existed since the beginning of the world: take away number, and all is enveloped in blind ignorance: nor could we differ from the animals without it, for they know not how to reckon.’ But in this treatise the science of reckoning is not taken beyond the teaching of Boethius and Bede, though Raban passes in it beyond arithmetic to an exposition of the earth and the planets. ‘The heaven (coelum) is by nature subtle and fiery (clear and bright) and distant everywhere from the earth its centre by equal spaces.’ Wise men (sapientes) say that it ‘spins round with unspeakable swiftness each day, so that it would rush to destruction were it not restrained and moderated by the influence of the planets striving in their starry argument: for they fly round ever on a fixed course, performing their smaller gyrations each upon its hinge (cardo). And the ends of the earth’s axis, on which it turns in its revolution, we call the poles, which languish in icy stiffness.’ He goes on to deal with the five bands or climates of the earth, with comets, solstices, equinoxes, the waxing of the moon and leap-year, with the year of the Lord’s incarnation, and Dionysius’ exposition of the cycle of nineteen years by which Easter is reckoned, with epacts and the courses of the stars, with the moon’s cycle and the Easter moon. The treatise De computo thus covered much of the field of the quadrivium, and added to what the encyclopedists had taught only the application of arithmetical and astronomical knowledge for the problem of determining Easter and the rest of the church’s calendar.
More notable and longer than the De Computo was Raban Maur’s treatise on the universe, written about 844 (De Universo libri viginti duo). This was not merely a description of the physical universe, as known in the ninth century, but an effort to estimate its intention, its ratio. The early medieval mind was not empiricist: where modern inquiry insists on the ‘how’ of natural phenomena, the medieval mind concentrated on the ‘why’. Coming to the Greco-Latin description and explanation of the physical universe from a state of Germanic ignorance, the early medieval scholar was not predisposed to question such descriptions. Whether he was dealing with the old Greco-Roman science, or the Christian explanation of the creation, maintenance and rule of the universe he did not question assertions founded on knowledge much profounder than his own. The universe was as the sapientes described it, and its general purpose as the Christian doctors taught: but about the working of the universe they taught very little. To what purpose, he asked, did the planets, local thickenings or bosses, as it were, of their own crystal spheres, swing round the earth as their hinge and centre? All things below the sphere of the moon were mutable, compounded of earth, water, air and fire, and above the sphere of the moon immutable, where the planets swung on their individual spheres and the fixed stars on the sphere of the empyrean, of coelum itself. To what purpose was all this elaborate apparatus, behind which lay the Ideas, surely purposive, in the mind of God?
It would seem that Raban Maur, fumbling after an answer to the question ‘why’, thinking as a philosopher, not a physicist, hoped to find it by applying to the known universe and its parts the method of interpretation which had long been applied to the Christian scriptures. By a fourfold interpretation, each scriptural passage might be understood literally, historically (tropologice), allegorically and mystically (anagogice). Raban, availing himself of the patristic and later commentaries on the Bible in the fine library of Fulda, seems to have desired to set down all he could find out about the how and why of the universe, using as a clue an allegorical, historical or mystical interpretation of the facts, such as the commentators used on the scriptural text: and using etymology as the first clue for such interpretation. In many sections of the De Universo Raban was thus led to incorporate much of Isidore’s Etymologies: but the work included theological explanations as well. In his preface, addressed to Louis the Pious, Raban explained that he has earlier sent his commentary on the scriptures to Louis, and that, when he was lately in the emperor’s presence, Louis had said that he had heard Raban had compiled works on the meaning of words and their mystical significance, and he had asked Raban to send it to him. This he has willingly done, dividing the work into twenty-two books, so that Louis might, if he wished, have it read before him, and so that he and his wisest readers might, if reason demanded, emend it.
For many things are there explained of the nature of things, and the meanings of words and even of their mystical significance. For I reasoned that it ought to be drawn up in order, so that the prudent reader might find continuously set forth the historical and mystical explanation of things, and thus satisfy his desire for the making plain of history and allegory.
Raban’s work, in fact, always noting the etymology of the term discussed, ranged over the whole field of knowledge. It discussed the nature of God, the holy Trinity, Adam, the patriarchs and great figures of the Old Testament, the prophets and the Wisdom books, the canon of the gospels, conciliar canons, the Easter cycle, the canonical hours and sacraments, the six ages of man, portents (as Varro describes them), domestic animals and how Adam named them, wild beasts, small animals like mice, serpents and fishes, dragons, and birds (including the phoenix, which is an Arabic bird, and the green parrot, which is an Italian bird with a loud voice, and can be taught to say, Cesar, ave!). By book ix, Raban is describing atoms, as the very smallest parts of the physical world, which cannot be seen or divided: ‘these in the early morning of the world flew in restless motion, even as the finest dust is seen when transfused by the sun’s rays pouring through a window. … Out of these atoms arose all trees and grass and fruits and fire and water: the philosophers have reckoned that out of atoms all things have been produced and do remain. Atoms exist either in the mass (in corpore) or in time or in number … the atom is that which cannot be divided, as the point in geometry … For the indivisible unity in things exists to have a mystical significance … the one God and Father of all.’
There is a great deal besides this; about elements, the heaven or firmament of the fixed stars: the stars, sun, moon, geographical terms, the phenomena of the weather, public buildings, ports, sewers, baths, prisons, windows, philosophers, poets, sibyls, magi, the pagan gods, racial names (the Scots are so called from a word in their own tongue meaning that they have painted bodies, pricked with sharp needles dipped in dyes), rocks, precious stones and metals, weights and measures, numbers and their allegorical significance, music and medicine, agriculture and trees, warfare and weapons, horses and chariots and hunting, the art of building and woodwork, weaving wool and garments, drinking vessels and kitchen vessels, and much else. The De Universo is not great literature, but its reader gains a good impression of the mind of the man called the praeceptor primus Germaniae, the most orderly and capacious mind of the ninth century in the west.
A few other ninth-century works in the field of the quadrivium have come down to us. The anonymous De mundi caelestis terrestrisque constitutione liber appears to be founded on the work of a disciple of the Neoplatonist philosopher Macrobius, but also on eastern and non-Christian material. After descriptions of geographical and climatic phenomena, and one of the planets which quotes the Historia Caroli as stating that Mercury was once seen for nine days as a spot on the sun, and an assertion that the spheres of the most distant planets take longest to move around the earth, it goes on to deal with the origin of the human soul, according to the diverse teachings of Anaxagoras, Thales of Miletus, the Stoics, Plato and Aristotle, and, finally, the Hebrews. Moreover, ‘it is the teaching of the philosophers that souls freed from the body desire to be, should be, and can be reincorporated’ Another astronomical treatise composed probably in Gaul early in the ninth century was entitled De forma caeli et quomodo decurrit inclinatum (or, Sphera caeli). Agobard of Lyons (d. 840) again, while he composed no general treatises in the field of the quadrivium, wrote one Liber de grandine et tonitruis where he denounced the common belief that storms were caused by incantations and magic, and explained them as natural phenomena: in his other writings he was ready to denounce superstition.
Apart from treatises on the seven arts, or in their field, various verse descriptions attest the Carolingian adoption of their study as the normal field of higher education. They were apparently also represented pictorially, though no Carolingian examples survive today: a poem of Theodulf of Orleans suggests the description of an actual picture or carving, as do others. It has been suggested that the representation of each art as a draped woman, carrying a symbol of her particular skill, goes back to Martianus Capella’s imagery of the arts as the seven bridesmaids, and certainly Martianus’ treatise had been continuously used in Gaul and was much esteemed by the Carolingians: but the allegorical use of the draped female figure with an emblem was much older than Martianus. The west Roman emperors had frequently used the reverse of their coins as a means of propaganda, depicting a draped female figure and emblem: Augustus used such figures of Virtus, Victoria, dementia, Iustitia, and Pietas: and later imperial coins stressed the emperor’s Providentia, and his subjects’ Securitas, Tranquillitas and Hilaritas. The allegorical Roman lady was long familiar before Martianus dealt with the arts as bridesmaids, and the Carolingian use of her in decoration went back probably to archaeological models rather than Martianus. The Irish monk, Dungal (d. 826), who knew some Greek, wrote a poem on the seven arts and medicine, apparently describing the arts thus figuratively painted, and a poem in a Saint-Gall manuscript similarly described a scene where wisdom (sapientia) sits in a circle formed by her seven daughters, the arts.
All these works on the quadrivium, and indications about the teaching of the seven arts down to the mid-ninth century, are little more than digests of the work of the encyclopedists, but with the comments or notes of John the Scot on Martianus Capella’s treatise there is a significant change. His comments have survived only in a single manuscript from Corbie, though there are two others which give his text together with additional notes by Remigius of Auxerre; Erigena’s explanation of the physical universe had no wide influence. Whereas the sixth-century encyclopedists and their Carolingian successors accepted a scheme of the planetary universe going back to Pliny the Elder and Ptolemy, a scheme in which the spheres of the moon, sun and planets swing round a central earth, Erigena followed Heracleides, Macrobius and Chalcidius in teaching that Venus and Mercury followed courses round the sun, while the sun, moon and the other planetary spheres revolved round the earth. In the De Divisione Naturae (see p. 515) he went further than Macrobius and Chalcidius and taught that Mercury, Venus, Mars and Jupiter revolved round the sun, which was midway between the earth and the fixed stars: ‘for the Platonists’, he wrote in his comments, ‘do not say that the course (circulum) of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars and the moon revolve round the earth, but only that Saturn revolves round the earth’. The earth, to Erigena, was not the centre of the whole planetary system: the sun swung round it with its own satellite planets.
His teaching about the ‘antipodes’ also was not that current in the ninth century. The antoikoi, he says, are those who live on this earth in the eastern sphere; the antichthones are so-called because they possess the opposite (contrary) part of the earth. ‘There are therefore four sets of people, that is: we and our antipodes, the antoikoi and their antichthones.’ The summer and winter seasons, and the length of day and night, differ for these four sets of people.
Erigena’s teaching on the other arts contains no such exceptional teaching as his above comments on ‘geometry’. It is now recognized, however, that already in this commentary on the arts he was leaning towards Neoplatonist teaching, and the position he expounded in the De Divisione Naturae.
It may fairly be said then, that the Carolingian renaissance was not an advance in the old Greco-Roman knowledge, but a great extension in the field of those who used it. One agent in this extension, the schools, has been mentioned, but there were two more, of the greatest importance and closely connected: the industrious recopying on vellum of Latin works, classical, patristic and legal, and the evolution of a fine, clear handwriting generally known as the Caroline minuscule. The monastic scriptorium did as much for the spread of knowledge in this period as the monastic scholasticus.
To take the fundamental advance in the technique of writing manuscripts first. There were, perhaps, two chief reasons for this technical change which conditioned the spread of knowledge and gave a certain shape to medieval culture from the ninth century onwards. One was the change from papyrus as a writing material to vellum (see p. 137), the other the need to economize space in so expensive a material and yet to use a script that, though smaller, could be clearly followed by the eye.
In the old Greco-Roman empire a great deal of writing had been done on papyrus, and some codices of great literary or legal works, and the Christian scriptures, had also been written on vellum. For the mass of temporary papers, letters, mercantile memoranda, the records of government collectors, etc., papyrus had been material that lasted long enough: ordinarily, some few years. The hand used on it was known as cursive and had been developed from the straight strokes used by those who took notes with a stylus on waxed tablets: but by the fifth century A.D. cursive documents had letters run together and curved forms. There was even a cursive book hand, more formal than that used in documents. But on the ridged surface of papyrus no difference could be made between thick and thin strokes, and no such decorative hand evolved as was possible on vellum: the meaning of ‘cursive’ indeed was ‘running’, and this implied both rapidity of writing and the running together of the letters: the scribes who used it were traders, officials and, pre-eminently, the notaries. The association between the cursive hand, the notaries and the law courts was very close, and remained so in the new barbarian kingdoms. Papyrus codices, bound books, were occasionally written, particularly legal tomes, but the great mass of papyrus manuscripts, written in the cursive hand, must have been in the form of loose schedulae or rolls.
For the great vellum codices of the Latin west from the fourth to the seventh centuries, two other hands were used: rustic capitals, derived from the lettering of Latin inscriptions, with every letter separate and the same height, but much narrower than the square capitals of the inscriptions: it was necessary to get very much more writing in a book than an inscription and the narrowing of the letters was an economy measure to save vellum by getting many more letters into the line. The other variety of script was the uncial or half-uncial, a hand evolved apparently in the fourth century as a papyrus book-hand: in this fine, rounded hand the letters were formed separately, but the shape of the Roman capitals had been modified to expedite writing. Half-uncial is the characteristic script of Christian writings till the mid-seventh century. Words in both scripts were undivided by spaces longer than those that separated each letter, and the eye had very little help from punctuation or a regular use of capital letters; the beginning of an important paragraph in a gospel book was however sometimes illuminated. The script, following in the tradition of uncial writing and stone inscriptions, was still large, though it had gone as far in the direction of narrow letters and economy as it could go. Though they were clear to look at, neither uncial lettering nor rustic capitals were particularly easy to read.
The Germanic nations when they settled had therefore two types of writing to choose from: that derived from Roman capitals, and the cursive used by the notaries. They then developed writings of their own, called by modern palaeographers ‘national hands’. The Irish developed the most distinctive hand; they used it for the scriptures, office books, and such works as they could afford the vellum and time to copy. There is linguistic evidence that papyrus was not unknown in Ireland, but from the fifth century the Irish must have had to rely almost entirely on vellum, and it is not apparent that they had any notaries. They evolved a beautiful Irish book-hand, the Irish minuscule, and even an Irish majuscule, a rounder and more solemn hand, and both these scripts were carried to England and eventually to the continent by Irish missionaries. Among the Merovingian Franks, where the royal writing office changed quite suddenly from the use of papyrus to parchment (see p. 398), the royal notaries continued to use the cursive hand to which they were accustomed, evolving the ugly ‘Merovingian cursive’. The Visigoths in Spain developed a minuscule script founded on the half-uncial letters but with cursive elements; and in south Italy the scriptorium of Monte Cassino developed a beautiful parchment book-hand founded on cursive, the Beneventan script: the only ‘national hand’, indeed, founded on cursive.
Vellum had always been a scarce and expensive material, and the multiplication of monastic and episcopal scriptoria, together with the needs of the Carolingian palace and the writers of legal documents, made it even more difficult to get a sufficient supply. Vellum was from the end of the seventh century the only writing material, for all purposes: and the sheet prepared from the skin of a sheep, goat or calf, made only a single folio (folded sheet) of a codex. It was just not possible for the Carolingian scholars to write out the Latin Bible in capitals taking nine large folio volumes, as Cassiodorus had done. The Irish and Anglo-Saxon missionaries had worked out a much more economical minuscule script and used one or two varieties of it, but none of them, even the Irish script of Luxeuil, was very easy to read. In these circumstances, it was the distinctive contribution of the Franks to evolve a minuscule founded on cursive: it was the monks of Corbie who were the first to use the delightful, small, clear, rounded script that was to spread over Europe as the Caroline minuscule. It was in use in the palace school when Alcuin came there as director, and he appears to have promoted its use in the monastery of Tours when he went there: the beautiful ninth-century hand of Tours was a Caroline minuscule. Alcuin’s revised text of the Bible was written in this hand, and Charlemagne’s control of the Frankish church promoted its spread. He sent for an authentic copy of the Benedictine rule from Monte Cassino, and the copies of this document made for the use of Frankish abbeys seem to have been made in this hand and been a particular agent in the extension of its use; and his receipt of the Dionysto-Hadriana and the making of Frankish copies, together with his requirement that the Frankish liturgy and rite should conform to those of the Roman church, meant the further dispersion of many manuscripts using the new minuscule to all parts of the empire, and even outside the empire. The new script separated the words, connected the letters of the word by ligatures, and used a four-line system of letter-heights. Some letters reached a certain height or depth below the line and most were aligned within the two central lines. Some punctuation was used and a few abbreviations. This is the script which the fifteenth-century humanists called littera antiqua, because the earliest versions of classical writers that they could find were written in it and they believed it to be the original old Latin writing.
The Carolingian scholars were on the whole agreed that the reading of good Latin books (though pagan) was necessary for those aspiring to write good Latin themselves, and this led them to copy the Latin classics on vellum in the new minuscule. There must have been many papyrus copies of the works of Latin writers of the second rank now perished, for in many cases the oldest extant manuscripts of such works are on Carolingian vellum. Some of the works of Vergil and the greatest writers had always been written on vellum, in rustic capitals or uncials: but our knowledge of Latin literature would be very incomplete but for the Caroline manuscripts that fill the gaps. Not all Caroline efforts were praiseworthy from the palaeographical viewpoint, for vellum was in such demand that even the Irish scribes, who had a particular admiration for Vergil and Latin pagan literature, frequently washed down classical manuscripts to write copies of the Vulgate, etc.: the monks of Bobbio, for instance, used manuscripts of Cicero’s speeches, Plautus and the Letters of Fronto as palimpsests: they still survive at Milan. Saint-Gall, however, preserved its fourth- or fifth-century Vergil manuscript, and its monks copied Valerius Flaccus and the Verrine Orations. The monks of Rebais, near Paris, copied Terence, Cicero, Vergil and Horace, as well as books which might be termed textbooks for the liberal arts, Donatus on grammar, Priscian on rhetoric, and Boethius. Fulda preserved copies of Suetonius, Tacitus and Ammianus Marcellinus; the scribes of Saint-Gall, Bobbio, Reichenau, Fleury, Tours, Monte Cassino, Corbie, Reims, Saint-Denis, Mainz, Laon and the other Carolingian houses, very many more. While the works of Vergil, Terence and Livy have survived to us in the main on vellum manuscripts copied in the classical period, those of Caesar, Lucretius, Juvenal, both Plinies, Tacitus, Lucan, Martial, and other writers of the second class have survived only in Carolingian copies. They had possibly survived so far mainly as papyrus copies, difficult to read, fragile, and not thought worthy of retention once they were transcribed on vellum, or possibly the need for vellum, so generously used for vellum copies in the old, large hand of the classical period, occasioned the washing down of the works of some of these pagan writers of the second rank for palimpsests, once they had been copied in the Caroline minuscule. In any case, Europe was indebted to the Carolingian scribes for the preservation of the greater part of Latin literature.
It is in connexion with the enthusiasm of the Caroline scholars for copying old manuscripts, for preserving ancient texts, for having recourse to a written authority, that another of their activities should be considered: the compiling of forgeries and near forgeries. The Forged Decretals and the Forged Capitularies do not stand alone: they were the outstanding examples of documents fabricated by a scribe or an atelier of scribes, anxious to supply evidence to promote some worthy and desirable end. No real forgery was ever made without a purpose, whether it was that of a privilege or immunity for an abbey, the re-writing of an old and meagre saint’s life with many additional miracles, or the compilation of a set of conciliar canons with a tendentious mixture of authentic and dubious material.
It is, at a first glance, surprising that this tolerance of dubious or fictitious material by the mid-ninth-century Frankish compilers should have followed upon the careful sifting of historical material by a writer like Bede. Why had Bede a high standard of historical integrity and writers like Hincmar of Reims and those of the atelier that composed the False Decretals so little regard for it? There is one obvious reason: Bede was a good Benedictine monk, who lived all his life in his monastery, who certainly had a high regard for king Ceolwulf of Northumbria, but who was not engaged in any political struggle between kings: or with a turbulent and anticlerical court circle. Bede does mention in his letter to archbishop Egbert of York that certain ‘false monasteries’ have been founded by lay thegns who wished to secure the privileges and exemptions of land booked to a minster; he recommends Egbert to take them over on the ground of the uncanonical or unmonastic character of the life lived there. The need of any new written deed did not occur to him. In short, Bede lived before abbots and bishops had been drawn into the court circle and the royal service: there was apparently no urgent need for fabricated authorities to support good causes. Bede, again, had no notarial training.
Certain factors explain the climate of opinion with regard to ‘forgery’ in the Carolingian empire. In the first place, this drawing of the higher clergy into the service of the rulers of Austrasia, Francia, Italy and the dukes and counts who served them necessarily drew them into the rivalries and enmities of their masters. Secondly, these scholars had now perfected themselves in the art of the notariat: they knew how to draw up charters and privileges: they knew the formulae of capitularies and canons: they knew all the protocol. Thirdly, they were well aware that written authorities were now held desirable as proof of legal ownership or the right to inherit, and that it was lawful, when a document had been destroyed by fire, to supply a copy from memory and get it attested publicly by notarial signature. Such record of perished charters was a precedent for the writing down of grants originally oral, when it was believed that the new charter recorded a true oral tradition. Fourthly, the traditional material used by the notaries down to the last quarter of the seventh century had always been papyrus, and papyrus perished easily in western Europe. There was a movement in the late eighth and ninth century to copy old grants, and treatises written on papyrus, on to parchment, and in such copying it was possible to expand or clarify some clauses or slip in others not thought necessary in the originals: or to modernize the method of dating. Such manipulation of old material was not reprehended.
A halfway stage between making a slightly changed copy of old material, and making a frankly ‘forged’ grant of tendentious import, was the making of a ‘copie figurée’, when not only the old Latin forms (or Merovingian forms of liquescent Latin) were copied, but even the archaic lettering. To distinguish between a ‘copie figurée’, perhaps with interpolations, and an outright forgery, was difficult: the way for the tendentious forgery was prepared. Then too, the movement to rewrite and expand the old, brief acta of the martyrs and saints for the glory and financial advantage of particular churches must have lowered the standard of historical integrity in other writing.
Perhaps most important of all the factors making for the ninth-century tolerance of tendentious forgery was the general scribal fondness for les exercices à l’antique, both in the reproduction of script and illumination. The exact reproduction of old manuscripts, the making of facsimiles, has only been made possible by modern techniques of photography and printing: but some ninth-century scribes, both in Constantinople and the west, delighted in writing and illuminating in the antique manner, and even in producing an ‘antique text’ with script and illumination taken from different originals (F. Wormald). But even in such cases, their division of the words, their abbreviations, or perhaps their intrusion of an insular b in a text of rustic capitals, or some other current usage of their own day, would often show that the manuscript in question, purporting to have been written in the fifth or sixth century, was actually written in the ninth. To write a psalter, perhaps in three narrow columns in the antique manner, perhaps in rustic capitals, served no tendentious purpose, but was apparently a delight to the scribe who wrote it and the abbey for whom it was written. It is within this general atmosphere of admiration for the antique that the forged papyri of Saint-Denis, Hincmar’s life of St Rémi, or the collection known as the Forged Decretals should be viewed. They also were exercices à l’antique: tendentious ones.
Two of these instances of the ninth-century expertise in the re-editing or fabricating of written evidence may be briefly noted. The abbey of Saint-Denis had a long-continued tradition of skill in this kind of work. A famous study of the manuscripts of this abbey, particularly of the Saint-Denis cartulary, has been made by M. Léon Levillain: he found that for a certain period ‘an office of forgery functioned regularly at Saint-Denis’. Till 658 the church of Saint-Denis, with the shrine of the famous martyr and his companions, Eleutherius and Rusticus, was always described as a ‘basilica’, not an abbey: the strict enclosure enjoined in the rule of St Benedict was not prescribed or observed: connexion with the court was close. King Dagobert (623–639) may, however, be said to have refounded Saint-Denis as an abbey: he certainly made it large grants, probably written ones. This refounding of Saint-Denis took place between 623 and 625; later, queen Balthilde encouraged the fratres of the abbey to accept the Columban-Benedictine rule and granted the house an immunity. In 654 her husband, Clovis II, confirmed a privilege which bishop Landri made to the abbey at Balthilde’s request, and this original papyrus survives. But in the ninth century the abbey produced also a pseudo-original privilege of bishop Landri, purporting to have been written in 653: it was written on the back of a genuine seventh-century papyrus document, but some of its clauses are anachronisms in a document purporting to be seventh century. Other documents written in Merovingian hands on papyrus and with seals taken from old charters affixed were also treasured at Saint-Denis: they had a notable collection of fabricated documents. M. Levillain demonstrated both the authenticity of Landri’s privilege, dated 22 June 654, and the fabrication of several later documents. As to why Saint-Denis embarked so successfully on the practice of fabricating evidence, the answer probably lies in the nearness of the abbey to Paris and its association with the court, together with the fact that its priest members were not originally Benedictine, and from early times were used for the writing of royal grants: they were early trained in notarial usage. The Carolingian kings continued to use the abbot and his well-trained monastic scribes. The needs of a great house and the exigencies of royal business must have made life at Saint-Denis very different from that at Monkwearmouth, and account for its fine collection of forged diplomas.
Archbishop Hincmar of Reims, again, had been trained in historical method at Saint-Denis. He was a great political bishop, the greatest in western Europe in the mid-ninth century; he was a good canonist, a good palaeographer well able to distinguish authentic from fabricated manuscripts, and he used his scholarly knowledge in the interests of Saint-Denis, his church of Reims, Charles the Bald and the church at large, regardless if necessary of historical integrity. Again, it should be noted that Hincmar and the ninth-century climate of opinion did not countenance the production of evidence to prove falsehood, but only to support what was believed to be most true and right when no written evidence existed; or existed only in old manuscript fragments or scattered allusions in annals: or of which there were only hints in pictorial representations.
Hincmar entered Saint-Denis as a canon, but when, by two synods held there in 829 and 832, the ordo monastica was ordered to be re-established, he gladly received the habit. He became the custos of the treasures and relics of the abbey and the assistant of his abbot Hilduin. ‘This intimacy not only introduced him to the elaborate mechanism of forged diplomas and falsified history by which the abbey sustained its territorial claims, but ultimately saddled him with the delicate task of attempting to reconcile the emperor Louis the Pious with Hilduin.’ It has been suggested that it was in the interests of this reconciliation that he compiled the Miracula Sancti Dionysii, and the larger study, the Gesta Dago-berti Regis, in which Hilduin seems to have collaborated with him. Dagobert was the great patron of Saint-Denis, and both tracts invited Louis the Pious to a further patronage of the abbey and to reconciliation with Hilduin. Levillain’s analysis of the Gesta Dagoberti shows that it is a marqueterie de textes of older abbey grants and saints’ lives, adding nothing new to their information: an illustration of the normal practice of these ninth-century compilers. They did not invent new incidents: what they said can be found in some other source. When the whole compilation was termed, as here, the Deeds of some saint or hero, the word ‘forgery’ need scarcely be used, though facts from unreliable sources were given equal weight with those from reliable ones. When, however, such a compilation took the form of a capitulary or set of canons attributed to particular kings or councils or canonists, or the letters of historical personages, the word forgery can hardly be avoided.
In 845 Hincmar moved from Saint-Denis to Reims: he had already served Charles the Bald on several missions, and when the council of Ver asked Charles to provide the church of Reims with a pastor, Charles appointed Hincmar. He took with him not only the historical technique learned at Saint-Denis, but copies of the Gesta Dagoberti: his characteristic style and constructions marked his new Vita Remigii, which was meant to do for Reims what the Gesta Dagoberti had done for Saint-Denis.
The publication of the Vita Remigii was the occasion of pope Nicholas I’s rebuke of Hincmar as the fabricator of evidence, the issue of clever forgeries to deceive the papacy about the metropolitical powers of the see of Reims. He wrote in 866 to the synod of Reims that Hincmar had used his astonishing astuteness for his own ends, and to Hincmar himself, that he could, if he had chosen, have legally accused Hincmar of fraud (fraudis aliquid in talibus committere fatere possemus). The allusion must have been to Hincmar’s drawing up of this life of St Rémi, meant to emphasize the position of St Rémi as the bishop who had baptized Clovis and brought the Franks from the darkness of paganism into the Christian church. The church of Reims could hardly claim to be of apostolic foundation, like Rome or Aquileia: but the Vita Remigii emphasized the parallel between John who had baptized Christ and Rémi who had baptized Clovis. John was no apostle: but among them that are born of women, who had arisen greater than John the Baptist? The Lord had said: No man. The church of Remigius was the baptismal church of the Frankish nation and, by inference, the rights of her bishop quasi-patriarchal.
The material used by Hincmar for the Vita Remigii is of great interest. He admitted that he was editing an older life of St Rémi, which he says was in a book that ‘like others, was so perished partly by damp, partly by the gnawings of mice, partly by the cutting out of leaves, that only a few scattered leaves of it could be found’. Nevertheless, some form of the acta and miracula of St Rémi must have been used in the choir at Reims, for the lessons of the night office before his feast, some form other than the few scattered mouse-eaten leaves of the old life, and to this Hincmar would have had access. Some political pièce justificative was needed when, on the emperor Lothar’s death in 869, Charles the Bald seized Lorraine and was crowned emperor by Hincmar at Metz: something to show that the anointing and coronation conferred on Charles a claim to wider rule than that of the west Franks. Hence, the Remigius in Hincmar’s new life is not merely the bishop who, as in Gregory of Tours’ history, baptized Clovis with fitting solemnity, hanging the space before the church with white cloths, and using much incense, but a Rémi who has been himself miraculously anointed at his own ordination with chrism sent from heaven, and who anointed Clovis with oil from an ampulla borne down by the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove.
Since there is such variation in the story of the baptism of Clovis as related by Gregory of Tours, a splendid ceremony only, and by Hincmar, it is of interest that it has been recently suggested that Hincmar did not simply invent the miraculous anointings of Rémi and Clovis, however excellently the two miracles served his purpose of exalting the more than metropolitan position of the church of Reims. He may have used iconographical and archaeological evidence, or suggestion. It was usual from the early seventh century to represent the baptism of Christ in Jordan with the holy dove descending head downwards above his head, giving an impression of great swiftness. In the tympanum of the church of Monza, where the Lombard Theodelinda’s little son was baptized, the down-rushing dove bears an ampulla of oil for the anointing of Christ at his baptism, anticipating the anointing with which the early church accompanied the immersion or effusion of water in the baptismal rite. The dove bearing the ampulla was probably a normal feature of the iconography of the Lord’s baptism, and Hincmar must have been familiar with it. He had also himself assisted at the (second) examination of the relics of St Rémi, and seen that by the bones of the bishop were laid two ampullae, or flasks. A chalice was often buried with a priest, as a symbol of his priesthood, and the two flasks (presumably for the holy oil and the chrism, that priests must seek from the bishop) may well have been buried as episcopal emblems. That they were so found is attested in the Life. Hincmar’s imagination, or perhaps older tradition, associated them with the miraculous descent of the holy dove bearing the ampulla on the old mosaics and carvings. The influence of Hincmar’s life of St Rémi was shown in the popularity of representations of the dove with the ampulla in the Reims school (see p. 547), from the second half of the ninth century onwards. Hincmar’s coronation and anointing of Charles the Bald with the chrism from the ampulla of St Rémi established the tradition that the kings of France must always be anointed from the Sainte Ampoule. The Sainte Ampoule no longer exists: the Convention of the French Revolution in 1793 ordered it to be destroyed; but descriptions of the object then destroyed suggest that it was of immemorial antiquity: a flask of old Roman glass.
The fabrication of a group of forged canons and capitularies, of which the Pseudo-Isidorian decretals had far the most permanent importance, was the work of a group of reformers alarmed at the condition of the Frankish church in the mid ninth century. The civil wars among the successors of Charlemagne and the raids of the northmen had not only plundered churches and abbeys of their treasures, but occasioned heavy financial demands by rulers and local counts, and, above all, widespread alienation of church lands to laymen. Conditions had become similar to those when Charles Martel, to support his wars, had impoverished the church and alienated her lands to laymen (see p. 287). Moreover, Frankish sees, especially east of the Rhine, had been originally missionary sees, and very large compared to the older sees of the Franks in Aquitaine, and the loose grouping of parishes under an archpriest did not suffice to keep church life zealous and orderly in these disturbed times: through the influence of the Irish monks, the country bishop (chorepiscopus) who had no see in a city and was a kind of rural missionary helped to keep church life going, but was much distrusted by the territorial bishops [as he had been earlier in the east]. In these circumstances, the episcopate of Charles the Bald took the normal procedure of protesting at the violence done to clerics and disregard of the canons and the rights of churches, and passing reforming canons at the councils of Loire, near Angers (843), Coulaines, near Le Mans (843), Meaux (845) and Paris (846). The bishops desired to declare excommunicate the usurpers of church lands and despoilers of the poor; they criticized royal demands on ecclesiastical treasure: they asked for an inquiry into alienations. When the royal assent was not accorded to the demands put forward in the councils, they presented them again to Charles the Bald at the general assembly at Épernay in June 846: and received a sharp rebuff. The lay nobles, whose interests were threatened, contended so vigorously against the proposals, and in such terms, that the bishops left the assembly in humiliation and despair; at which the assembly passed a mere twenty of the eighty-three capita proposed, choosing those most easily evaded.
The episcopal affront at Épernay inspired a group of scholars to compile what was apparently to be taken as a newly discovered and very full and helpful version of the old Isidorian canons (see p. 537): at least, the very strange ascription of them in one manuscript to ‘Isidore Mercator’ would seem to have implied some association with the great seventh-century canonist. The intention of the atelier of reforming scholars who composed them was to do what the council of Épernay had failed to do: safeguard the position of the bishop, himself the guardian of orderly church life, against the lay rulers who had humiliated him, and against the Celtic chorepiscopus. While the pseudo-Isidorian collection covered the whole field of western canon law, its purpose was especially to protect the territorial bishop, and this by emphasizing the position and rights of the papacy as the final authority in the church and the final court of appeal. The Christian empire of Charlemagne, with its Byzantine concept of the emperor’s rights over the western church, had proved unable to protect the church and had, in its financial necessities, plundered bishoprics and abbeys: the reformers invoked in counterbalance the intervention and protection of the papacy. In so doing, they exalted papal rights, not only over lay rulers but over the metropolitan bishops.
There was, in the ninth century, no single authoritative, exclusive collection of canons and decretals (papal letters giving a legislative decision or direction). For the Carolingian church the Dionysio-Hadriana (see p. 508) had a particular authority: the other great collection was the Hispana of the Visigothic church, which included some old African and early Frankish canons. The Pseudo-Isidoriana made use of both these collections, and supplemented them by non-authentic material. It was a collection involving much labour, and it was the last and finest of a series of fake capitularies and canons.
The Hispana was already widely used in the Frankish church, and in two forms. In one, the groups of canons were recorded chronologically: in the other rearranged in subjects (‘systematically’). This old Hispana-Gallica was already a severer code than the Dionysiano-Hadriana, and some Carolingian additions were made to it in a manuscript from Autun and copied in other manuscripts (the Hispana-Augustodunensis).
Again, the Capitula Angilramni was a partial summary of Roman practice purporting to have been sent by Hadrian I to bishop Angilram of Metz: it drew on the Theodosian Code, the Breviary of Alaric, and some non-authentic sources.
The False Capitularies were occasioned apparently by the refusal of Charles the Bald to issue the reforms suggested by the bishops at Épernay as new capitularies. The preface stated that Benedict the Deacon (Benedictus Levita) had been asked by Autcar, bishop of Metz, to complete the collections of (genuine) capitularies made by Ansegis; he had therefore collected in three supplementary books certain capitularies of Pepin, Charlemagne and Louis the Pious that Ansegis had overlooked. He had found them in loose sheets (schedulae) in divers libraries, particularly that of the church of Metz. The name of the author and the attribution to Metz were false; the material, secular and canon laws, was wide and both authentic and fictitious. There were borrowings from a council attributed to St Patrick, from the so-called Penitential of Theodore of Canterbury and various Carolingian councils, including an address of the bishops to Louis the Pious in 829. The work was too voluminous to have been the work of one compiler: the schedulae mentioned were actually the digests and excerpts made by a circle of collaborators from various historical sources. Very many changes were made, however, in the wording of the sources to make them harmonize with the views of the reformers: some diminished the authority of the metropolitan, some anathematized the secularization of church goods, some were directed against the chorepiscopi.
Internal evidence and method suggest that the False Decretals were the work of the same atelier of reformers as the compilers of the False Capitularies. They were preserved in five groups of manuscripts, the most widely copied of which was that ascribed to Isidore Mercator. This was in three parts, the first of which contained, among some fabricated and some authentic matter, a long series of apocryphal letters from the early popes of Rome, from St Clement of Rome (d. 100) to pope Melchiades (d. 314). No authentic collection has any knowledge of these letters, but the compilers of Pseudo-Isidore knew from the Liber Pontificalis that certain popes had taken part in doctrinal controversies or had issued liturgical or disciplinary canons: they therefore supplied apocryphal letters to lend the authority of venerable antiquity to their new collection. The second part contained the canons of early councils given in the Hispana, and Greek and African canons: it was headed by the apocryphal Donation of Constantine. The third part contained the decretals of thirty-three popes from Sylvester to Gregory II, with certain apocryphal canons, some earlier than the Pseudo-Isidorian compilers, some their work.
The Pseudo-Isidoriana was thus founded upon the Hispana, but stuffed with apocrypha and interpolations: the reformers had found the Hispana of Autun insufficient. It was a larger and more far-reaching work than the False Capitularies; and it represented the programme of the ninth-century reformers as rooted in antiquity. Of these reforming scribes, Fournier and Le Bras write in their great history of western collections of canons: ‘Il faut reconnaÎtre qu’ils ont sur ce point accompli leur Œuvre à l’aide d’un véritable luxe de textes faux.’ It is now accepted from internal evidence that they accomplished their work between 847 and 850: the ascription of the atelier of compilers to Le Mans, in the diocese of Tours, is less certain.
As to the influence of the False Decretals: they were not widely copied in the ninth century, or accepted by all canonists as genuine in their own day. In 852 Hincmar of Reims twice quoted from them: but would not accept all parts as genuine. The papacy was slow in accepting them. Their widest influence was when they were used as sources by the reformers of the eleventh century.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE