“We wish to ask the ecclesiastics themselves, and those who have not only to learn but to teach out of the Holy Scriptures, who are they to whom the Apostle says, ‘Be ye imitators of me’; or who is that about whom the same Apostle says, ‘No man that warreth entangleth himself with the business of this world’: in other words, how the Apostle is to be imitated, or how he (the ecclesiastic) wars for God?”
“Further, we must beg of them that they will truly show us what is this ‘renouncing of the world’, which is spoken of by them: or how we can distinguish those who renounce the world from those who still follow it, whether it consists in anything more than this, that they do not bear arms and are not publicly married?”
“We must also inquire if that man has relinquished the world who is daily laboring to increase his possessions in every manner and by every artifice, by sweet persuasions about the blessedness of heaven and by terrible threats about the punishments of hell; who uses the name of God or of some saint to despoil simpler and less learned folk, whether rich or poor, of their property, to deprive the lawful heirs of their inheritance, and thus to drive many through sheer destitution to a life of robbery and crime which they would otherwise never have embraced?”
Several more questions of an equally searching character are contained in this remarkable Capitulary.
II. If doubts may arise in some minds how far Charles’s ecclesiastical policy was of permanent benefit to the human race, no such doubts can be felt as to his patronage of literature and science. Herein he takes a foremost place among the benefactors of humanity, as a man who, himself imperfectly educated, knew how to value education in others; as one who, amid the manifold harassing cares of government and of war, could find leisure for that friendly intercourse with learned men which far more than his generous material gifts cheered them on in their arduous and difficult work; and as the ruler to whom more perhaps than to any other single individual we owe the fact that the precious literary inheritance of Greece and Rome has not been altogether lost to the human race. Every student of the history of the texts of the classical authors knows how many of our best MSS. date from the ninth century, the result unquestionably of the impulse given by Charles and his learned courtiers to classical studies. It is noticeable also that this reign constitutes an important era in Paleography, the clear and beautiful “minuscule”[73] of the Irish scribes being generally substituted for the sprawling and uncouth characters which had gone by the name of Langobardic. In one of his Capitularies Charles calls the attention of his clergy to the necessity for careful editing of the Prayer-books; otherwise those who desire to pray rightly will pray amiss. He enjoins them not to suffer boys to corrupt the sacred text either in writing or reading. If they require a new gospel, missal, or psalter, let it be copied with the utmost care by men of full age. In another Capitulary, he expresses his displeasure that some priests, who were poor when they were ordained, have grown rich out of the church’s treasures, acquiring for themselves lands and slaves, but not purchasing books or sacred vessels for the church’s use.
Something has already been said as to the Academy in Charles’s palace, which was apparently founded on the basis of a court-school established in his father’s lifetime but became a much more important institution in his own. Probably it was then transformed from a school for children into an Academy for learned men, in the sense in which the word has been used at Athens, Florence, and Paris. Alcuin, after his departure from court, founded a school at Tours, which acquired great fame; and we hear of schools also at Utrecht, Fulda, Würzburg, and elsewhere. Doubtless, most of these schools were primarily theological seminaries, but as we have seen in the case of Alcuin, a good deal of classical literature and mathematical science was, at any rate in some schools, taught alongside of the correct rendering of the church service.
The Monk of St. Gall (who wrote, as we have seen, two generations after Charlemagne, and whose stories we therefore accept with some reserve) gives us an interesting and amusing picture of one of the schools under Charles’s patronage. After giving a legendary and inaccurate account of the arrival of two Irish scholars in Gaul, named Alcuin and Clement, he goes on to say that Charles persuaded Clement to settle in Gaul, and sent him a number of boys, sons of nobles, of middle-class men and of peasants, to be taught by him, while they were lodged and boarded at the king’s charges. After a long time he returned to Gaul, and ordered these lads to be brought into his presence, and to bring before him letters and poems of their own composition. The boys sprung from the middle and lower classes offered compositions which were “beyond all expectation sweetened with the seasoning of wisdom,” but the productions of the young nobility were “tepid, and absolutely idiotic.” Hereupon the king, as it were, anticipating the Last Judgment, set the industrious lads on his right hand and the idlers on his left. He addressed the former with words of encouragement, “I thank you, my sons, for the zeal with which you have attended to my commands. Only go on as you have begun, and I will give you splendid bishoprics and abbacies, and you shall be ever honorable in my eyes.” But to those on his left hand he turned with angry eyes and frowning brow, and addressed them in a voice of thunder, “You young nobles, you dainty and beautiful youths, who have presumed upon your birth and your possessions to despise mine orders, and have taken no care for my renown; you have neglected the study of literature, while you have given yourselves over to luxury and idleness, or to games and foolish athletics.” Then, raising his august head and unconquered right hand towards heaven, he swore a solemn oath, “By the King of Heaven, I care nothing for your noble birth and your handsome faces, let others prize them as they may. Know this for certain, that unless ye give earnest heed to your studies, and recover the ground lost by your negligence, ye shall never receive any favor at the hand of King Charles.”
There was one branch of learning in which Charles was evidently not enough helped by his friends of the classical revival, and in which one cannot help wishing that his judgment had prevailed over theirs. Einhard tells us that he reduced to writing and committed to memory “those most ancient songs of the barbarians in which the actions of the kings of old and their wars were chanted.” Would that these precious relics of the dim Teutonic fore-world had been thought worthy of preservation by Alcuin and his disciples!
He also began to compose a grammar of his native speech; he gave names to the winds blowing from twelve different quarters, whereas previously men had named but four; and he gave Teutonic instead of Latin names to the twelve months of the year. They were—for January, Wintarmanoth; February, Hornung; March, Lentzinmanoth; April, Ostarmanoth; May, Winnemanoth; June, Brachmanoth; July, Hewimanoth; August, Aranmanoth; September, Witumanoth; October, Windumemanoth; November, Herbistmanoth; December, Heilagmanoth.
III. It is of course impossible to deal with more than one or two of the most important products of Charles’s legislative and administrative activity.