§ 3. NATIVE
The country had been early converted to Christianity, and the dominant form of Christianity was now Roman. But when we speak of a country being "converted" in the Middle Ages, we must regard the statement with considerable qualifications. Conversions were often political conveniences, rather than personal convictions. The people followed their chiefs, accepted the Church's ministrations and attended her services, but knew next to nothing of Christian truth. In France two things contributed to this ignorance: (a) the official language of the Church being different from that of the people; (b) the slackness and refusal of the Church in providing services and sermons in a language which the people understood.
Between the middle of the eighth and ninth centuries Latin was the language only of the learned and officials; the mass of the people ceased to understand it. Latin was sacrosanct, and to address God in any other language was profane. Hence the Church lost its spiritual hold upon the masses. "The hungry sheep looked up and were not fed." So serious was the situation that Charlemagne summoned five Councils at five different places, the most Southern being Arles, and ordered the Bishops to use the vulgar tongue in the instruction of their flocks. From this it is clear that the Bishops and Clergy were bilingual, but deliberately abstained from adopting in their pastoral work a language which their people could understand; even the Bible was a closed book. The heretics, on the contrary, were most zealous in supplying this want, particularly the Waldenses. Not only did they translate the whole of the New Testament and parts of the Old, but added notes embodying Sententiae or opinions of the Fathers. They contended that prayers in an unknown tongue did not profit. They knew by heart large portions of Holy Scripture[14] and readily quoted it in their discussions with the Church. The Catharists also had composed a little work called "Perpendiculum Scientiarum," or "Plummet of Knowledge" (cf. Is. xxviii. 17), consisting of passages of Scripture whereby Catholicism might be easily and readily tested. Not until the eleventh century do we come across in the West any translation into the vulgar tongue by the Church, and then only of Legends of Saints in the dialect of Rouen. In Southern France the vernacular which ultimately emerged was known as Langue D'Oc, and sometimes Provençal. "In its rise Provençal literature stands completely by itself, and in its development it long continued to be absolutely original. This literature took a poetic form, and this poetry, unlike classical poetry, is rhymed." No class of literature is more easily remembered than rhymed verse in common speech. The results of it, therefore, need not cause us surprise. It produced a sense of unity, of comradeship. Latin might be the language of the Church, but this was the language of the people. Its growth created a cleavage between Church and people, which the former sought to bridge by giving the latter accounts of miracles and legends in verse and prose in the Romance language, and by permitting them to sing songs of their own composition—and not necessarily sacred or even modest songs—in the Churches.[15] But the experiment or concession only served to secularize religion, and turned the services into amusements. Nor was it in accord with the real policy of Catholicism which was to prevent the people generally from forming their own opinions of Christianity by an independent study of the Scriptures—a policy which to the Gallican temperament would be particularly odious and exasperating.[16]