To this ninth century Koch assigns the Virginis proles opifexque matris, which still holds its place in the Roman Breviary in a revised form. Less offensive to Protestant ears is the brief and beautiful sequence, probably of this century, Quod chorus vatum, which Mr. Blew has translated for his Church Hymn and Tune-Book (1855), and the editor of the Lyra Messianica has copied. Here also belongs the Ad Dominum clamaveram, which is one of the earliest attempts at a metrical treatment of the Psalms. It consists largely of extracts from the fifteen Psalms of Degrees. Here also belongs the Iste confessor Domini, which still holds its place in the Roman Breviary.
Of the less-known hymn-writers we may name the younger Prudentius, who, like his greater namesake, was a Spaniard by birth, his family probably being one of the many which took refuge in France from the rule of the Saracens. Indeed, he assumed the name out of compliment to the elder poet—a practice very reprehensible in the eyes of hymnologists, as increasing the amply sufficient confusion which hangs around the identity of hymn-writers. He was one of the most learned men of his time, and had the manliness to defend the Augustinian doctrine of predestination against Hincmar of Rheims, at the time when Gottschalk had brought it into ill repute by his paradoxical statement of it. But he and Hincmar found common ground in opposing John Scotus Erigena, who asserted that the whole controversy grew out of the ascription of temporal existence to the divine and eternal mind. His hymns are lost to us, those ascribed to him being certainly not of his authorship, unless perhaps the Virgo Dei genetrix.
Servatus Lupus (805-63), abbot of Ferrières, was one of the many pupils of Rabanus Maurus, who rose to eminence in the Church of this age, and were employed by the Karling kings in public affairs. His best monument is his letters, which give us a vivid picture of a time of disorder, and of a man of genuine capacity and honest purpose. His hymns in praise of St. Wigbert are of less worth.
Much more important is Theodulph of Orleans (ob. 821), the author of a single hymn, which has preserved his memory not less by its own merits than by its association with a beautiful but unhistorical legend of its authorship. He, too, was of Spanish birth and Gothic stock. He was honored and trusted by Charles the Great, and was one of the witnesses to his will. He was strongly imperialist in his politics, both before and after Charles’s death opposing the inevitable separation of France from Germany, especially in his poems to Charles and his sons, which are among the best of that age. In 818, however, he was implicated justly or unjustly in the rebellion of Bernard, King of Italy, against his uncle the emperor, and was imprisoned three years. While in prison he composed, tradition says, the hymn for Palm Sunday, Gloria, laus et honor, together with other poems, as the pastime of weary hours. The story runs that it was to the hymn he owed his liberation. On Palm Sunday of 821 the Emperor Lewis the Pious was at Angers, where the Bishop of Orleans was imprisoned in a monastery. Through an open window, when the emperor was within hearing, he sang the hymn, which so moved his heart that he gave orders to set the prisoner at liberty. Another version of the story is that he had taught it to the children of the church, who sang it before the emperor. The legend is discredited by the fact that in 821 there was a general amnesty for political offenders, which must have given him his liberty. He died within the year, by poison it is said.
To make the list complete we add the names of Ermanrich (ob. 840), abbot of Ellwangen in Würtemberg; Drepanius Florus (ob. 860), deacon of the church of Lyons; Eric, a monk at Saint-Germain at Auxerre, and Paul Alvarez of Cordova (ob. 861)—all of whom have left us hymns in commemoration of saints.
In the chapter on Notker a full account has been given of the three principal singers of St. Gall—Notker Balbulus, Tutilo, and Hartmann. There are two lesser sequence-writers of that monastery who belong to the same (ninth) century—Ratpert and Waltram. Ratpert (ob. 900), like Notker, was a pupil of the Irishman Möngal. He was of noble family and born in the neighborhood of Zurich, and made such proficiency that he was entrusted with the oversight of the outer school at St. Gall. His “proses” were composed especially for processional use and for pilgrimages, and therefore are not sequences in the strict sense. To adapt them to this use he fitted them with refrains, which might be caught up by those who had little familiarity with Latin. The Rex sanctorum angelorum is the best known of them. But most important is his position as the first in point of time of the German hymn-writers. He wrote a German hymn in honor of St. Gall (fecit carmen barbaricum populo in laude Sancti Galli canendum), of which unfortunately we have only Ekkehard’s Latin translation, made a century later.
Waltram never rose above the rank of deacon at St. Gall. He was more famous for his poems on secular themes, written to the music of the sequences, than for sequences proper. But one of the latter is ascribed to him.
CHAPTER XXX.
THE UNKNOWN AND THE LESS KNOWN HYMN-WRITERS.
[Tenth to Sixteenth Century.]
The tenth century—the century of the Danes, of the Normans, of the Othos, of the Olafs, of Dunstan, and of Cordova as a centre of philosophic and scientific culture—saw the general establishment of Christianity among the Teutonic peoples of Northern Europe. It was not rich in great Churchmen, great men of letters, or great hymn-writers. We find in it no name great enough to deserve a separate chapter. Yet Odo of Cluny and Fulbert of Chartres, the two Ekkehards, and Rupert of St. Gall are enough to show that it was not altogether barren.
This dark age was a time when the worship of Mary and the saints, already on the increase in previous ages, made rapid advances. The practice of formal canonization of the saints dates from 993. Perhaps the most characteristic hymn of the century is the Ave Maris stella, which has been ascribed to Venantius Fortunatus of the sixth century, but cannot be older than the tenth. Daniel’s final judgment was that a St. Gall MS. proves it to belong here, although he formerly had thought it might be as early as the sixth century. Moll and Mone, however, would put it even later, on the theory that it borrows from one of Hermann of Reichenau’s sequences. It is one of the favorite hymns of the Roman Catholic Church, being found in all the breviaries, and assigned for use not only at the Annunciation, to which it properly belongs, but to others of the many festivals in honor of our Lord’s mother. In the following version Mr. Duffield has given the easy form of the original: