[73] The minuscule was a small letter that displaced the awkward uncials used by the monastic scribes of the early centuries. It was the basis of the small letters of the modern Greek and Roman alphabets.
[74] After the law of his own country.
[75] Sixty golden solidi = $307.20.
[76] Of “the famous oath of Strassburg,” by which a dispute between Louis the German and his brother Charles the Bald was adjusted, Professor Freeman says: “That precious document ... shows that in 841 the distinctions of race and language were beginning to make themselves felt. The Austrasian soldiers of King Louis swear in the Old-German tongue, of which the oath is an early monument;” while the Neustrian soldiers of King Charles swear “in the lingua Romana ... a tongue essentially of Roman origin, and yet a tongue which has departed too far from the Roman model to be any longer called Latin. It has ceased to be Latin, but we cannot yet call it French, even Old French.... In the course of the next century it became nationalized as lingua Gallica.” See Historical Essays, I., 184.
Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced; some are noted in further detail below.
Page [71]: “In the year 750 [it should be 751]” is in the original book; it is not a note from the Transcribers of this eBook.
Page [93]: Missing ending quotation mark for text beginning with “The great distinction”. Transcriber added one after “sometimes assume.”
Page [115]: “of so noble” was printed as “of so no noble”; changed here.