[Footnote 207: In his book De Disciplina Cleri. See Dom Pitria, Histoire de St. Léger.]
[Footnote 208: Berrington, History of Literature in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries.]
[Footnote 209: Gaillard, in his Histoire de Charlemagne, gives a list of masters who succeeded each other without interruption from Alcuin till the twelfth century.]
But, blockaded in their fortresses by barbarism, brigandage, and tyranny, what important deeds could they achieve, what feats of arms, what expeditions? In the first place, they held their position by keeping the ramparts in constant repair. In the scriptorium of every abbey, a numerous detachment of patient copyists, bending all day over manuscripts, transcribed the holy books and the masterpieces of antiquity, and rendered eminent service to the arts, to letters, and to history by preserving and keeping in order the store of munitions which otherwise would have been squandered and for ever lost. At the same time, watchful sentinels on the walls observed all that was passing in the world without, and made an exact report of it; that is to say, they drew up those chronicles, charters, and cartularies in which were recorded facts, names, contracts, donations, and the changes in the countries in which they lived, among the people they directed, in the lands they cultivated, the sovereigns who ruled over them, and the conquerors who despoiled them. [Footnote 210]
[Footnote 210: It is sufficient to mention the Polyptique of the abbot Irminon, (tenth century,) and the numerous cartularies that have been published within half a century.]
And that the descriptions might be complete, painters illuminated the margins of the vellum manuscripts, supplying by delicate and faithful miniatures in the brightest colors what was wanting in the text, general details respecting the splendor of the vestments, the sculptures on the walls and the ornaments of the houses, thus bequeathing to posterity a lively and true portrayal of their time. And the whole makes up the immense and inexhaustible treasure where we find depicted the manners, customs, classes of society, the nature of the soil, and facts respecting the tillers of the earth, their lords, and the church, forming the moral, industrial, and agricultural history of all Christendom. These transcripts, chronicles, and paintings are the magazines, casemates, and bastions without which the citadel of letters and science would have been dismantled and rendered uninhabitable for generations to come!
They did not confine themselves to this; nothing was neglected that should occupy a well-organized army; first, regular exercise, which makes the soldier active, robust, and ready for any duty; the study of the liberal arts, divided into two classes for the recruits and the veterans: the quadrivium, (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy,) and the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and dialectics. [Footnote 211] ) These labors were carried on in the interior of the fortress. They also made expeditions and sallies to keep the ways of access clear—commentaries upon authors, variations of texts, (as the commentaries on the Fasti of Ovid, [Footnote 212] the treatise De Senectute, with different readings of the same text, [Footnote 213] and numerous manuscripts with Greek annotations.[Footnote 214]) They undertook sieges, for a translation may be called a siege; everywhere you could find real workshops for translating Greek authors into Latin, such as books of medicine, (Galen, Hippocrates, and Oribasus,) the fathers, (the Homilies of St. John Chrysostom,) and the principal ancient authors, [Footnote 215] (the Logic of Aristotle.) Under the guidance of the leaders already named, they went forth to daily combat and even to fight great battles; in the schools, colleges, monasteries, and public lectures, professors, doctors, and students [Footnote 216] stimulated the public mind; they touched on every science, and treated, under the names of nominalism and realism, of all those questions about which man is continually agitated—his nature, his origin, his relations with God, and his destiny;
[Footnote 211: Mentioned by Roswitha in the tenth century.]
[Footnote 212: Found at Reichnau by M. Dantier.]
[Footnote 213: At Mr. Philipps's in England, by Dom Pitra.]