Those whom Cassiodorus calls antiquaries were simply scribes—that is to say, clerks or monks who deciphered the old manuscripts and transcribed the books. In the monastery of St. Martin, at Tours, calligraphy was the sole art practised. St. Fulgentius, a prelate distinguished both for his learning and eloquence; St. Gregory, Bishop of Agrigentum, no less celebrated; Mamertus Claudius, who was a regular walking library, themselves copied manuscripts which they gave to the Church. Calligraphy and illuminating were also favourite occupations with many nuns, amongst whom may be cited St. Melanie the younger, St. Cesarie, St. Harnilde, and St. Renilde, all Frenchwomen (Fig. 240), who, to use the language of the Christian annalist, wrote with elegance, rapidity, and correctness.
From the time that the monks were raised to the clerical rank, after first undergoing an examination, the clerks and monks studied together just as they had before prayed and lived in common, a monastery being a complete school of ecclesiastical research and administration. At Monte-Cassino, at St. Ferréol, at St. Calais, at Tours, and in many other flourishing abbeys in the sixth century, the monks, and especially the novices, were instructed in religious and secular subjects as well as in the duties of the priesthood.
The monastic dress was not in every case the same, for, though always simple and coarse, it varied in shape and appearance with the statutes of each order, and according to the necessities of climate. The cenobites in Egypt wore the lebitus or the colobium, the pera or melote, and the cuculla. The lebitus was a linen garment with long sleeves open at the hands, and sometimes up to the wrist. The pera, a jacket of goatskin, is spoken of in one of the epistles of St. Paul, who alludes to it as especially worn by holy men and prophets, when they were driven by threats of persecution into the desert. The cuculla covered the head, and came half-way over the shoulders. St. Benedict, who borrowed it from the early monks, had it so much lengthened as to envelop the whole body; but as in this shape it would have embarrassed the monks in their manual labour, he made it a garment only to be worn at ceremonials, and replaced it for ordinary wear by the scapulary (scapulum), which covered the head and the back. The Western monks also wore a short mantle—a sort of cape, called a maforte, according to Sulpicius Severus. The Greeks and Orientals adopted the pallium, which led to their being designated agmina palliata (an army in robes), when they assembled in large numbers. Every Greek who devoted himself to the cenobitic life was compelled to wear a black pallium.
Fig. 240.—St. Radegonde, Wife of King Clotaire (Sixth Century), receiving the religious garb from the hands of St. Médard, Bishop of Noyon.—“Histoire et Cronicque de Clotaire” (16mo, Paris, Jean Mesnage, 1513).
Pope Gregory the Great, who had been a Benedictine, was most ardent in the establishment of monasteries, of which he himself founded a large number. He was the chief promoter of two important missions which took place in 585 and 596; the first in Gaul, consisting of missionaries from Ireland, headed by St. Columba and St. Gall; the second in Great Britain, with monks from the Abbey of St. Andrew, headed by another monk, St. Augustine. This latter, who converted the Anglians and their king, Ethelbert, was the first Archbishop of Canterbury. Colomba founded the Abbey of Luxeuil, upon the southern side of the Vosgian forests; while Gall, his disciple, much younger than himself, penetrated into the country of the Helvetians, who were as deeply sunk in barbarism as the Anglians, where he founded a monastery which afterwards became famous under the name of its founder, and which owed its celebrity to the variety of subjects which were taught there.
St. Colomba was the first to draw up a complete set of monastic rules, which were generally adopted in France, just as the rules of St. Isidore, Bishop of Seville, and those of St. Augustine of Ireland, were followed in the British Isles. These three codes, very similar in their general principles, varied from each other in many particulars, for they were applicable to monks living in different countries. In the communities which adhered to the rules of St. Colomba, as in all the great Benedictine monasteries, prayer, mental culture, and manual labour were the invariable occupations of cloister life (Fig. 241). The rules drawn up by St. Colomba and his imitators, St. Isidore and St. Augustine, thus remained in force down to the eighth century, in spite of the new system of education and religious teaching inaugurated so zealously throughout Gaul by the Anglo-Saxon monk, St. Boniface; in spite, too, of the industrial and artistic, rather than scientific and contemplative, turn which St. Eloi gave to the studies of the monks in his abbey of St. Martin at Limoges, and in the other monasteries founded or reorganized by him. That illustrious Bishop of Noyon, Master of the Mint to King Clotaire II., afterwards treasurer, goldsmith, and minister to Dagobert I. (568–659), was at great pains to make the cultivation of art an important feature in monastic life.
It would be incorrect to suppose that the interior of a monastery in the seventh century presented the same appearance of asceticism and penance that were afterwards characteristic of certain communities subject to the most austere regulations. In the country districts the monasteries possessed vast domains which yielded wheat, rye, oats, hay, vegetables, and fruits; and on which were produced wine, beer, cider, and hydromel; they were tilled by numerous labourers in bands of tens and hundreds, who while at work sang hymns and prayers—a veritable religious militia, grouped beneath the banner of faith in the populous centres and in the neighbourhood of the towns. These monasteries were generally schools in which the monks gave gratuitous education, vast workshops in which they followed and taught every branch of trade—carving in wood, ivory, bronze, silver, and gold; painting on vellum, glass, wood, and metal; weaving tapestry, embroidering church ornaments and vestments; damask work, and enamelling of shrines, tabernacles, diptychs and triptychs, church furniture, and book-covers; the cutting of precious stones to prepare them for setting; the making of arms and instruments of music, illuminating, copying of manuscripts, &c. The whole life of a monk or nun was passed in the exercise of one description of art, or perhaps even in executing a single work which required miraculous patience.
Fig. 241.—The Abbey of St. Riquier, near Abbeville, founded in 799 by St. Angilbert, who gave it its triangular shape in honour of the Trinity.—From a Drawing in a very old Manuscript engraved in the Dissertation of Paul Petau, “De Nithardo” (4to, 1612).