Charlemagne struggled to protect a free peasantry against spreading serfdom,
but the power of the nobles, and the force of circumstance, frustrated him.
Even slavery grew for a time, as a result of the Carolingian wars against
pagan tribes. The King’s own estates, periodically extended by
confiscations, gifts, intestate reversions, and reclamation, were the chief
source of the royal revenue. For the care of these lands he issued a
Capitulare de villis astonishingly detailed, and revealing his careful
scrutiny of all state income and expense. Forests, wastelands, highways,
ports, and all mineral subsoil resources were the property of the state.
Every encouragement was given to such commerce as survived; the fairs were
protected, weights and measures and prices were regulated, tolls were
moderated, speculation in futures was checked, roads and bridges were built
or repaired, a great span was thrown across the Rhine at Mainz, waterways
were kept open, and a canal was planned to connect the Rhine and the Danube,
and thereby the North with the Black Sea. A stable currency was maintained;
but the scarcity of gold in France and the decline of trade led to the
replacement of Constantine’s gold solidus with the silver pound. The energy
and solicitude of the King reached into every sphere of life. He gave to the
four winds the names they bear today. He established a system of poor
relief, taxed the nobles and the clergy to pay its costs, and then made
mendicancy a crime.
Appalled by the illiteracy of his time, when hardly any but ecclesiastics
could read, and by the lack of education among the lower clergy, he called
in foreign scholars to restore the schools of France. Paul the Deacon was
lured from Monte Cassino, and Alcuin from York (782), to teach the school
that Charlemagne organized in the royal palace at Aachen. Alcuin (735-804)
was a Saxon, born near York, and educated in the cathedral school that
Bishop Egbert had founded there; in the eighth century Britain and Ireland
were culturally ahead of France. When King Offa of Mercia sent Alcuin on a
mission to Charlemagne, the latter begged the scholar to remain; Alcuin,
glad to be out of England when the Danes were “laying it desolate, and
dishonoring the monasteries with adultery,”consented to stay. He sent to
England and elsewhere for books and teachers, and soon the palace school was
an active center of study, of the revision and copying of manuscripts, and
of an educational reform that spread throughout the realm.
Among the pupils were Charlemagne, his wife Liutgard, his sons, his daughter
Gisela, his secretary Eginhard, a nun, and many more. Charlemagne was the
most eager of all; he seized upon learning as he had absorbed states; he
studied rhetoric, dialectic, astronomy; he made heroic efforts to write,
says Eginhard, “and used to keep tablets under his pillow in order that at
leisure hours he might accustom his hand to form the letters; but as he
began these efforts so late in life, they met with ill success.” He studied
Latin furiously, but continued to speak German at his court; he compiled a
German grammar, and collected specimens of early German poetry. When Alcuin,
after eight years in the palace school, pled for a less exciting
environment, Charlemagne reluctantly made him Abbot of Tours (796). There
Alcuin spurred the monks to make fairer and more accurate copies of the
Vulgate of Jerome, the Latin Fathers, and the Latin classics; and other
monasteries imitated the example. Many of our best classical texts have come
down to us from these monastic scriptoria of the ninth century; practically
all extant Latin poetry except Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius, and
nearly all extant Latin prose except Varro, Tacitus, and Apuleius, were
preserved for us by the monks of the Carolingian age. Many of the Caroline
manuscripts were handsomely illuminated by the patient art of the monks; to
this “Palace School”of illumination belonged the “Vienna”Gospels on which
the later German emperors took their coronation oath.
In 787 Charlemagne issued to all the bishops and abbots of Francia an
historic Capitulare de litteris colendis, or directive on the study of
letters. It reproached ecclesiastics for “uncouth language”and “unlettered
tongues,”and exhorted every cathedral and monastery to establish schools
where clergy and laity alike might learn to read and write. A further
capitulary of 789 urged the directors of these schools to “take care to make
no difference between the sons of serfs and of freemen, so that they might
come and sit on the same benches to study grammar, music, and arithmetic.”A
capitulary of 805 provided for medical education, and another condemned
medical superstitions. That his appeals were not fruitless appears from the
many cathedral or monastic schools that now sprang up in France and western
Germany. Theodulf, Bishop of Orleans, organized schools in every parish of
his diocese, welcomed all children to them, and forbade the priest
instructors to take any fees; this is the first instance in history of free
and general education. Important schools, nearly all attached to
monasteries, rose in the ninth century at Tours, Auxerre, Pavia, St. Gall,
Fulda, Ghent, and elsewhere.
To meet the demand for teachers Charlemagne imported scholars from Ireland,
Britain, and Italy. Out of these schools were to come the universities of
Europe. We must not overestimate the intellectual quality of the age; this
scholastic resurrection was the awakening of children rather than the
maturity of such cultures as then existed in Constantinople, Baghdad, and
Cordova. It did not produce any great writers. The formal compositions of
Alcuin are stiflingly dull; only his letters and occasional verses show him
as no pompous pedant but a kindly soul who could reconcile happiness with
piety. Many men wrote poetry in this short-lived renaissance, and the poems
of Theodulf are pleasant enough in their minor way. But the only lasting
composition of that Gallic age was the brief and simple biography of
Charlemagne by Eginhard. It follows the plan of Suetonius’ Lives of the
Caesars, and even snatches passages therefrom to apply to Charlemagne; but
all is forgiven to an author who modestly describes himself as “a barbarian,
very little versed in the Roman tongue.”
