THE USES OF LITERACY

IN FARLY MEDIAEVAL EUROPE

BLANK PAGE
 THE USES OF
LITERACY
IN EARLY MEDIAEVAL
EUROPE

EDITED BY

ROSAMOND McKITTERICK

CANEROINY Pa
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© Cambridge University Press 1990

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 1990

First paperback edition 1992
Reprinted 1995, 1998

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

Bnitish Library cataloguing in publication data

The uses of literacy in early mediaeval Europe.
1. Europe. Literacy, history
I. McKitterick, Rosamond
302.2094

Library of Congress cataloguing in publication data

The uses of literacy in early mediavel Europe/ edited by Rosamond McKitterick.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 0 521 34409 3
1. Literacy-Europe—History. 2. Social history-Mediaeval.
500-1500. I. McKitterick, Rosamond.
LC156.A2U74 1990
302.2'244—dc20 89-34283 CIP

ISBN 0 521 34409 3 hardback

ISBN 0 521 42896 3 paperback
 Contents

List of illustrations page v1

Preface xt
Contributors 1X
Abbreviations xu
Rosamond McKitterick 1
Introduction

| Literacy in Ireland: the evidence of the Patrick dossier in the

Jane Stevenson 11
Book of Armagh

Susan Kelly 36
2 Anglo-Saxon lay society and the written word

lan Wood 63
3 Administration, law and culture in Merovingian Gaul

4 Literacy and the papal government in late antiquity and the

Thomas FX. Noble 82

early middle ages

Roger Collins 109

5 Literacy and the laity in early mediaeval Spain

Stefan C. Reif 134

6 Aspects of mediaeval Jewish literacy

Margaret Mullett 156

7 Writing in early mediaeval Byzantium

U
v1 Contents
8 Literacy displayed: the use of inscriptions at the monastery

Fohn Mitchell 186

of San Vincenzo al Volturno in the early ninth century

9 Royal government and the written word in late Anglo-Saxon

Simon Keynes 226

England

Fanet L. Nelson 258

10 Literacy in Carolingian government

Rosamond McKitterick 297

11 Text and image in the Carolingian world

Index 334
Conclusion
Rosamond McKitterick 319
 Illustrations

1 San Vincenzo al Volturno, the site of the early mediaeval

buildings page 188-9

monastery (a) Overall plan (6) Detail of main excavated

2 Abbot Epyphanius (824-42), and inscription, crypt of Crypt

church, San Vincenzo al Volturno 192
3. Scroll with text from Micah 4.6, held by the figure of the
Prophet, assembly room, San Vincenzo al Volturno, c. 800 195

4 Inscription flanking the head-niche in a grave at the threshold

of the crypt church, San Vincenzo al Volturno, second
quarter of the ninth century 197
5 Epitaph of the priest Tamfrid, San Vincenzo al Volturno,
middle of the ninth century 200
6 Fragment of a funerary inscription, San Vincenzo al
Volturno, middle of the ninth century 200
7 Roman funerary inscription reused as a tread in a flight of
steps, San Vincenzo al Volturno, c. 800 202
8 Floor tile with the inscription LIVTPERTI SVM, assembly room,
San Vincenzo al Volturno, c. 800 202
9 Floor tile with the inscription LAN, assembly room, San
Vincenzo al Volturno, c. 800 202
10 Floor tile with the inscription, vr, and framing decoration of
undulating lines, refectory, San Vincenzo al Volturno, c. 800 203

11 Floor tile with the inscription ge, assembly room, San

Vincenzo al Volturno, c. 800 203
vil
VU1 Illustrations
12 Fragment of settings for metal letters, from the inscription of

ninth century 206

Abbot Iosue, San Vincenzo al Volturno, beginning of the

13. Fragment of setting for metal letters, from the inscription of

ninth century 207

Abbot Iosue, San Vincenzo al Volturno, beginning of the

Volturno, excavations 209

14 Fragment of setting for metal letters, San Vincenzo al
 Contributors

Roger Collins: Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities,

Edinburgh
Susan Kelly: British Academy Research Fellow, St Catherine’s
College, Oxford
Simon Keynes: Reader in Anglo-Saxon History and Fellow of
Trinity College, Cambridge
Rosamond McKitterick: Professor of Early Mediaeval European
History and Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge
John Mitchell: Senior Lecturer in the History of Art, University
of East Anglia
Margaret Mullett: Senior Lecturer in Byzantine Studies, The
Queen’s University, Belfast
Fanet L. Nelson: Professor of History, King’s College, University
of London
Thomas F. X. Noble: Professor of History, University of Virginia
Stefan C. Reif: Director of Genizah Research, Head of Oriental
Department and Senior Under Librarian, Cambridge University
Library
Fane Stevenson: Lecturer in History, University of Sheffield
Ian Wood: Professor of History, University of Leeds

1x

j
BLANK PAGE
 Preface

This book was conceived from the start as a collaborative venture. Each
author was asked to address the central theme from the perspective of her or
his specialized knowledge: we met to discuss the different aspects of the
topic in July 1987, and subsequently circulated drafts of our papers among
ourselves. Nevertheless, each author maintained the individuality of her or
his particular area, for we were anxious to stress the enormous divergences,
as well as the similarities, in the uses and emphases of literacy in different
parts of Europe in the early mediaeval period. We offer the book 1n the hope
that it will stimulate further research and thought on the uses and conse-
quences of literacy in the early middle ages. We are all too well aware of the
number of avenues left unexplored, quite apart from regions of Europe and
particular periods ignored, but this in itself is an indication of the richness of
the field.
The Editor wishes to thank, most warmly, all her contributors for their
labours, their patience and for the enthusiasm so manifest in their contribu-
tions. She and all the authors, moreover, are indebted to the staff of
Cambridge University Press, and especially to William Davies, for the
interest and assistance rendered in seeing the book through the press.
Acknowledgements for information and help received are recorded in the
individual contributions, but the Editor wishes to record here her particular
debt to Elizabeth Meyer of the University of Virginia for her timely and
stimulating criticism and comments.

x1
 Abbreviations

AB Analecta Bollandiana
AHR American Historical Review
Annales ESC Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations
ASE Anglo-Saxon England
BAR British Archaeological Reports
BBTT Belfast Byzantine Texts and Translations
BCH Bulletin de Correspondance Hellénique
BCL Michael Lapidge and Richard Sharpe, A
_ Bibhography of Celtic—Latin Literature, 400-
1200 (Dublin, 1985)
BL London, British Library
BMF E.A. Bond, Facsimiles of Ancient Charters in
the Bntish Museum, 4 vols. (London, 1873-8)
BMGS Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies
BN7F Byzantinische-neugniechische fahrbucher
BN lat. Paris, Bibliothéque Nationale manuscrit latin
BN n.a.lat. Paris, Bibliothéque Nationale manuscrit,
nouvelles acquisitions latines
BS Byzantinoslavica
CAG Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca
CCCC Cambridge, Corpus Christi College
CCSL Corpus Christianorum Series Latina
CFHB Corpus Fontium Historiae
Byzantinae=DOT
ChLA Albert Bruckner and Robert Marichal,
Chartae Latinae Antiquores: Facsimile
x1
 Abbreviations X111
Edition of the Latin Charters pnor to the
Ninth Century, I— (Olten and Lausanne,
1954)
Chron. Vult. Chronicon Vulturnense del Monaco
Giovanni, ed. V. Federici, 3 vols. (Rome,
1925-38)
CLA Elias Avery Lowe, Codices Latini
Antiquiores: A Palaeographical Guide to
Latin Manuscnipts pnor to the Ninth
Century, I-XI plus Supplement (Oxford,
1935-71)
Clm Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek,
Codices latini monacenses

CMCS Cambridge Mediaeval Celtic Studies

CO Classical Quarterly
CSEL Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum
Latinorum
CSHB Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae
DA Deutsches Archiv fur die Erforschung des
Mittelalters
DOP Dumbarton Oaks Papers
DOS Dumbarton Oaks Studies
DOT Dumbarton Oaks Texts=CFHB
EEBS Epetens Hetaireias Byzantinon Spoudon
EHD English Mistornical Documents, 1: c. 500-
1042, ed. Dorothy Whitelock (2nd edn,
London, 1979)
EHR English Histoncal Review
EF Encyclopaedia Judaica, 16 vols. (Jerusalem,
1962)

GRBS Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies

IHS Insh Historical Studies
XIV Abbreviations
FOB Jahrbuch der Oesterreichischen
Byzantinisttk
FRS Journal of Roman Studies
FTS Journal of Theological Studies
LD Liber Diturnus Romanorum Pontificum, ed.
Hans Foerster (Berne, 1958)
LP Le Liber Pontificalis, texte, introduction, ed.
L. Duchesne, 3 vols. (Paris, 1886-1957)
McKitterick,
Carolingians R. McKitterick, The Carolingians and the
Written Word (Cambridge, 1989)
MGH Monumenta Germaniae Historica
AA Auctores Antiquissimi, 15 vols. (Berlin,
1877-1919)
Cap. Capitulania. Leges Sectio I1, Capitulana
regum francorum, ed. A. Boretius and V.
Krause, 2 vols. (Hanover, 1883-97)
Conc. Concilia. Leges Sectio WI, Concilia, 2
vols. in 3, ed. W. Wattenbach (Hanover,
1893-1908), and III, ed. W. Hartmann, Die
Konzilien der Karolingischen Tetlreiche 843—
859 (Hanover, 1984)
Diplomata Diplomata Karolinorum, ed. E.
Karolinorum Mihlbacher and T. Schieffer, 2 vols. (I and
III; vol. Il, Die Urkunden Ludwigs des
Frommen, ed. P. Johanek, is in preparation)
(Hanover, 1906 and 1966)
Epp. Epistolae | and II, Gregoriae papae
registrum epistelae, ed. P. Ewald and
W. Hartmann (Hanover, 1887-91)
Epp. merov. et karol. Eptstolae merovingici et karolint aevt
(=MGH Epp. WI-VIII) (Hanover, 1892-
1939)
Epp. sel. Epistolae selectae, 5 vols. (Hanover,
1916-52)
 Abbreviations XU
Fontes Fontes turns Germanici antiqui in usum
scholarum ex Monumentis Germantiae
Fistoncis separatim editi, 13 vols. (Hanover,
1909-86)
Formulae Leges Sectio V, Formulae Merovingici et
Karolini aev1, ed. K. Zeumer (Hanover,
1886)
Leges nat. germ. Leges nationum germanicarum, ed. K.
Zeumer (Lex Visigothorum); L.R. de Salis
(Leges Burgundionum); F. Beyerle and R.
Buchner (Lex Ribuana); K.A. Eckhardt
(Pactus legis Salicae and Lex Salica); E.
von Schwind (Lex Baiwariorum) 6 vols. in
11 parts (Hanover 1892-1969)
Poet. Poetae aevt karolim, ed. E. Dummler, L.
Traube, P. von Winterfeld and K. Strecker,
4 vols. (Hanover, 1881-99)
SS Scriptores in folio, 30 vols (Hanover, 1824—
1924)
SS 1.U.S. Scniptores rerum germanicarum in usum
scholarum separatim editi, 63 vols.
(Hanover, 1871-1987)
SS rerum Scriptores rerum Langobardicarum et
Langobardicarum [talicarum saec. VI-IX, ed. G. Waitz
(Hanover, 1878)
SS rer. merov. Scriptores rerum merovingicarum, ed. B.
Krusch and W. Levison, 7 vols. (Hanover,
1885-1920)
OCA Onentaha Chnstiana Analecta
OSF Facsimiles of Anglo-Saxon Manuscnpts, ed.
W.B. Sanders, 3 vols., Ordnance Survey
(Southampton, 1878-84)
PG Patrologia cursus completus series graeca,
ed. J.P. Migne, 167 vols. (Paris, 1857-76)
PL Patrologia cursus completus series latina, ed.
J.P. Migne, 234 vols. (Paris, 1844-55)
xU1 Abbreviations
PMLA Publication of the Modern Languages
| Association of America
PRIA Proceedings of the Royal Insh Academy
PT The Patrician Texts in the Book of Armagh,
ed. and trans. Ludwig Bieler (Dublin, 1979)
REB Revue des Etudes Byzantines
Sawyer Peter H. Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters: An
Annotated List and Bibliography, Royal
Historical Society Guides and Handbooks 8
(London, 1968)
Settumane Settimane di Studio del centro Italiano di
Studi sull’alto Medioevo 1— (Spoleto, 1955—)
Settlement of Disputes The Settlement of Disputes in Early
Mediaeval Europe, ed. Wendy Davies and
Paul Fouracre (Cambridge, 1986)
TRHS Transactions of the Royal Historical Society
Vat. reg. lat. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, codices
reginenses latini
Vat. pal. lat. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, codices
palatini latini
 —
Introduction

Rosamond McKitterick

This book aims to investigate the respects in which literacy and orality were
important in early mediaeval Europe. It examines the context of literacy, its
uses, levels, and distribution, in a number of the societies of early mediaeval
Europe, that 1s, the area from Ireland to Byzantium and the eastern
Mediterranean between c. 400 and c. 1000. None of the contributors has
attempted a comprehensive survey, nor 1s it intended that any chapter
should be regarded as an attempt to be definitive. Rather, we hope to open
up a topic in relation to the early middle ages that has already been treated
extensively for earlier and later periods and 1n modern societies. We aim to
indicate some of the areas for debate and argument and make new research
available to scholars and students.
In many ways the book represents, therefore, an introduction to the
subject of literacy in the early middle ages. Its basic premise 1s that literacy
is a subject with which early mediaevalists should be concerned. Our
studies set out to provide the factual basis from which assessments of the
significance of literacy in the early mediaeval world can be made, and to
offer some suggestions about what that significance might be. In other
words, the significance of literacy and why it is important to observe its uses
and implications in the early middle ages have to be established on the basis
of the evidence available; they cannot be assumed before we start. It 1s, after
all, only from a firm knowledge of the evidence, its implications and its
limitations as far as degrees of literacy are concerned in any one region or
society at a particular time that one may build further and explore the
significance of literacy, its implications and its consequences for the
societies in which we observe it.
Concentration on the uses and functions of literacy, and thus primarily
on literacy as a tool, in a great variety of contexts has the advantage of
providing knowledge about the ways in which uses of literacy might change
over time and place and thus more about the societies that changed them. It
matters where literacy was applied simply because, as will be clear from the
essays 1n this book, it was applied in different ways from a whole range of
l
2 Rosamond McKitterick
different assumptions and convictions about the written word. Establishing
when and where literacy is used, for what purposes and in what contexts,
and what kind of literacy it is, may actually tell us about the ways in which
literacy was regarded as important in early mediaeval society, and why.
It is with these considerations in mind that we embarked on our work. We
were also prompted to focus on the early middle ages, however, from asense
that assumptions were being made too readily about the levels, ranges and
significance of literacy in the early middle ages by those who concentrate on
the eleventh and twelfth centuries and later periods. Stock’s work, for
example, is a subtle and illuminating exposition of the implications of
literacy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.’ But that is one of its major
drawbacks; it begins too late and 1s too categorical about the irrelevance of
the earlier period. In his survey of literacy in Europe, Cipolla offers a theory
of the close association of mercantile development and urban life and the
consequent increase in literacy from the eleventh century onwards. In
doing so he dismisses northern Europe in the period before the eleventh
century with the words: ‘from the fifth to the tenth century all evidence of
literary culture based on the written word comes from the area south of the
Loire’.* Ina large survey of the kind attempted by Cipolla, detail is difficult,
but such a statement 1s at odds with the evidence. Other surveys have fallen
back with evident relief on the concepts of ‘restricted literacy’ or ‘craft
literacy’ confined to clerics in early mediaeval Europe as a whole.’ Even if
these concepts were valid for the early middle ages, to invoke them in this
way is merely to identify a context in which literate skills were exercised. It
tells us nothing about the role of literacy and its importance for the people
who used literate modes.
A further problem to tackle ts the definition of literacy itself. Does
literacy need to be variously defined according to circumstances? Does it
invariably mean the ability to read and write, or just the ability to read, and
what levels of accomplishment are conceded as indicating literacy as
opposed to illiteracy? Does it not cover to some degree both the content of
the written tradition and the levels of individual achievement in it? We take

' Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in
the Eleventh and Twelfth Centunes (Princeton, 1983).
* Carlo Cipolla, Literacy and Development in the West (Harmondsworth, 1969), p. 41. Fora
further example of blinkered vision see J.W. Thompson, The Literacy of the Laity in the
Middle Ages (New York and London, 1939 and 1960). An idea of the range of approaches to
literacy can be gauged from the bibliography provided by Harvey J. Graff, Literacy in
ENstory: An Interdisctplinary Research Bibliography (New York and London, 1981).
> The terms are defined by Jack Goody, ‘Introduction’, in Literacy in Traditional Societies,
ed. Jack Goody (Cambridge, 1968), pp. 11-20. A welcome exception to this kind of
approach was provided by Patrick Wormald, “The uses of literacy in Anglo-Saxon England
and its neighbours’, TRHS 5th series 27 (1977), 95-114.
 INTRODUCTION 3
the view that it is impossibly narrow to define literacy strictly 1n terms of the
ability to read and write. For one thing, in terms of mediaeval terminology,
litteratus referred to one who was learned in Latin, not someone able to
read.* Consequently, an illitteratus was someone not learned in Latin.
[llitteratus, in other words, is a term which says very little about the rank,
education, ability and importance of the person concerned in any sphere of
activity in the early middle ages other than Latin literature.” As Susan Kelly
points out, indeed, in many cases one is obliged also to register the
complication of the existence, in Anglo-Saxon England, for example, of a
separate literary language (Latin) entirely different from the vernacular.°
In England, the use of the vernacular for documentation and literary
purposes was already common in the ninth century, a very early date in the
European context, but Latin continued to have priority in literature and
formal communications. In the east and south of Europe, Greek or Arabic
rather than Latin fulfilled this function.
It is necessary, moreover, to allow for many levels of competence 1n both
reading and writing. It should be remembered that one can learn to read
without being able to write. Reading ability can range from the recognition
of a limited number of simple words to the comprehension and enjoyment
of acomplex philosophical treatise. A scribe might be trained to copy out an
existing text, or to take dictation, while being totally incapable of compos-
ing a text himself or herself. Reading aloud and memorization, in any case,
were far more important adjuncts to education in the early middle ages than
they are today.
Writing is a skill far more difficult to acquire than reading.’ It comprises
several levels of competence, ranging from the ability to copy an existing
text to a capacity for literary composition in both the vernacular and in the

* The terminology was exhaustively examined by Herbert Grundmann, ‘Litteratus-

illitteratus: der Wandel einer Bildungsnorm vom Altertum zum Mittelalter’, Archiv fur
Kulturgeschichte 40 (1958), 1-66, and compare his earlier ‘Die Frauen und die Literatur im
Mittelalter’, Archiv fur Kulturgeschtchte 26 (1936), 129-61. Further nuances are provided
by Franz Bauml, ‘Varieties and consequences of medieval literacy and illiteracy’, Speculum
55 (1980), 237-65.
> A point emphasized by Karl-Ferdinand Werner, ‘Bedeutende Adelsfamilien im Reich Karls
des Grossen’, in Karl der Grosse, Lebenswerk und Nachleben, ed. Wolfgang Braunfels, 4
vols. (Dusseldorf, 1965), I, pp. 83-142, at p. 129, and English translation in The Medieval
Nobility, ed. Timothy Reuter (Amsterdam, 1978), pp. 137-202, at p. 182.
° A point stressed by Kelly, below, pp. 51-61.
” Petrucci tackles the fundamental problem of how one learnt to write. He insists that writing
and literacy were not confined to those who could write books in a technical or professional
way: Armando Petrucci, ‘Alfabetismo ed educazione grafica degli scribi altomedievali (secc.
VII-X)’, in The Role of the Book in Medieval Culture, ed. Peter Ganz, 2 vols., Bibliologia,
Elementa ad librorum studia pertinentia 3 and 4 (Brepols, 1986), 3, pp. 109-32.
4 Rosamond McKittenck
common language of Christianity in the west and east, Latin and Greek. In
Umayyad Al-Andalus and in the Jewish communities of the Mediterranean,
bilingualism and trilingualism in Latin/Romance and in Hebrew, Aramaic
and Arabic, respectively, are assumed. Writing in the early middle ages was
probably practised by only a small proportion of those able to read. One
must also note the special function and status of the scribe and secretary in
relation to the social status of those whom he served. The strong element of
professionalism in the skills of literacy made it unnecessary for the higher
groups in society to practise them on their own behalf. That a man or
woman used a secretary may tell us nothing about their own ability either to
write or read but it does tell us that they were accustomed to use literate
modes, even if indirectly, to conduct certain of their affairs. A king or
nobleman or royal official could call upon the services of a secretary to take
dictation or read out documents or books. The secretary might be a cleric or
a specially trained servant or even a slave. When King Alfred, for example,
ordered all his judges to immerse themselves in study, he conceded that
those who were too old or too knuckle-headed to learn could order someone
else to read aloud to them, and implied that they might already have made
provision for this.®
The problem of literacy is thus partly one of technical skill and the
popular acquaintance with what can be done with an alphabet. It is also one
of education and social custom and includes a commitment of traditions to
writing. More importantly, for mediaeval studies, Stock has proposed a
further sophistication in his notion of textuality. He argues that a text does
not have to be written; 1t can be spoken aloud as a structure and coherent
discourse, and within a ‘textual community’ such texts can influence the
illiterate and quasi-literate as well as those who can read and write.’ For
Stock, the primary importance of literacy is not as a personal skill so much
as a mode of communication. Thus there 1s a distinction to be made between
the reception of texts (which need not demand literacy) and the creation of
texts and their dissemination beyond the range of the human voice.
Literacy therefore clearly has different connotations according to the
context in which it is considered, whether political, social, anthropological
or historical. Clanchy’s exposition of the shift ‘from memory to written
record’ in post-Conquest England, firmly embedded in its historical and

® Asser’s Life of King Alfred, ed. W.H. Stevenson (Oxford, 1904), c. 106, p. 95, translated in
Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge, Alfred the Great: Asser’s ‘Life of King Alfred’ and Other
Contemporary Sources (Harmondsworth, 1983), p. 110. The requirements of pragmatic as
opposed to learned literacy are made clear by Malcolm Parkes, ‘The literacy of the laity’, in
Literature and Western Civilization: The Medieval World, ed. David Daiches and A. K.
Thorlby (London, 1973), pp. 555-77, especially p. 555.
” Stock, Implications of Literacy, p. 7.
 INTRODUCTION 5
social context, is exemplary in its demonstration of this.'° It is also the work,
above all others, which ts regarded as free from the technological determin-
ism that Goody in his anthropological—-ethnographical study of literacy in
‘traditional societies’ allegedly encouraged with his concept of literacy as a
‘technology of the intellect’.!' Clanchy does not treat social and intellectual
changes in mediaeval England as consequences of literacy, due to the
inherent qualities of writing, so much as he exposes changing literate
practices in a particular society which imply particular attitudes towards the
written word and its use. In part, Clanchy is reacting against Goody and his
followers. So, too, Street is persuasive in his characterization of the logical
flaws in Goody’s ‘autonomous model’. Street prefers to define literacy as a
‘shorthand for the social practices and conceptions of reading and writing’
__ and proceeds according to what he labels the ‘ideological model’.'* This is
preferable to Havelock’s insistence that it is a ‘social condition that can be
defined only in terms of readership’ or Pattison’s unhelpful ‘potent form of
consciousness’.'? Yet without Goody’s identification of literacy and its uses
as a vital key to the understanding of any society, much subsequent work
would have been the poorer. Goody’s notion of the ‘consequences’ or, at
least, ‘implications’ of literacy in the process of historical change is also
much more useful than some of his critics have been prepared to
acknowledge.
For all their different emphases, studies of literacy in a wide variety of
historical contexts reveal a common theme. It is that literacy in any society
is not just a matter of who could read and write, but one of how their skills
function, and of the adjustments — mental, emotional, intellectual, physical
and technological — necessary to accommodate it. It is this understanding of
literacy that underlies the various studies in this book.
The functions of literacy need, furthermore, to be established in relation
to a particular society's needs. As those needs change, so do the particular
contexts in which literate modes are required. In the essays which follow,
we explore the extent to which literate modes were established in the
centuries between late antiquity and the millennium. How much survived,
not only of Roman patterns of literacy but also of the motivation for

'0 Michael Clanchy, From Memory to Wnitten Record: England 1066-1307 (London, 1979).
'! Literacy in Traditional Societies, ed. Goody, p. 1. On technological determinism, see Brian
V. Street, Literacy in Theory and Practice, Cambridge Studies in Oral and Literate Culture
9 (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 19-66. Apart from the work of the social anthropologists, Street is
also implicitly criticizing the theoretical basis for such works as Walter J. Ong, Orality and
Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London and New York, 1982).
'2 Street, Literacy, p. 1.
'3 Eric A. Havelock, Origins of Western Literacy (Toronto, 1976), p. 19, and R. Pattison, On
Literacy: The Politics of the Word from Homer to the Age of Rock (Oxford, 1982), p. x.
 6 Rosamond McKitterick
choosing literate modes of cultural expression and legal business? What was
the role of the church and the Christian faith? What, indeed, was the role of
religions dependent on written revelation, such as Christianity, Judaism
and Islam, in relation to literacy? How important are questions about the
number of people who could read and write? Is it not more important to
establish who was literate, what role in society they performed and what the
likely repercussions of that role may have been? What 1s the relationship
between writing and other means of communication such as oral discourse
and pictures in the early middle ages?
Although these are the principal general questions with which we have
each been concerned, inevitably consideration of particular contexts has
thrown up special problems, the discussion of which in turn opens up more
general issues. The contexts in which literacy is considered in this book in
any case are only a few among many feasible. It did not prove possible, for
example, to discuss fully the uses of literacy in late antiquity in this book.
The work in preparation by Meyer, however, promises a trenchant
examination of the subject, particularly in relation to law in the late Roman
world. Meyer examines the initiatives which create documentary practice in
the Roman world, the voluntary use of documents, and the extent to which
this leads to the growing prestige of a literate system of legal practice.'* The
degree to which Egypt, from which the most papyri evidence survives, is
representative of the late Roman Empire as far as the uses of literacy is
concerned is also receiving attention,’> as are the changing character of
writing, the cultural context within which writing was produced, and the
complex interrelationship between writing and other elements of social and
cultural practice in the late Roman world.’
The legacy of Rome and the problems of continuity nevertheless are a
constant preoccupation in many of the essays which follow. In Gaul, for
example, discussed by Ian Wood, what was the status and nature of the
Latin language in the centuries of Merovingian rule? Is there any truth in
the traditional picture, from the classical viewpoint, of literary degeneracy
approaching widespread illiteracy among the Frankish and formerly Gallo-

'4 Elizabeth A. Meyer, ‘Literacy in late antiquity’, PhD dissertation, Yale University, 1988,
now in preparation for publication.
'S Keith Hopkins, Roman Egypt (forthcoming), and see also the studies by Tonnes Kleburg,
Buchhandel und Verlagswesen in der Antike (Darmstadt, 1969); G. Cavallo, Libri, editon e
pubblico nel Mondo antico (Rome, 1975); and Roger A. Pack, The Greek and Latin Literary
Texts from Greco-Roman Egypt (Michigan, 1952; 2nd edn 1965). See the new dimension to
studies of literacy in antiquity provided by the Vindolanda tablets, studied by Alan Bowman
and J. David Thomas, Vindolanda: The Latin Wnting Tablets (Gloucester, 1984).
'© Some of this has already been published by Mary Beard, ‘Writing and ritual: a study of
diversity and expansion in the Arval Acta’, Papers of the British School at Rome 53 (1985),
114-62. There are also comments of relevance in C.H. Roberts and T.C. Skeat, The Birth of
the Codex (London and Oxford, 1983).
 INTRODUCTION 7
Roman populations? Does the evidence available reveal literary continuity
and an underlying social and cultural continuity? What differences can one
detect in the literary style of the seventh century as opposed to that of the
fifth? What happened also to late antique educational traditions? As in
Meyer’s identification of the importance of the law in late antiquity, 1s it
primarily in the spheres of legal transactions and administration that a
continuity in practice and assumptions about the usefulness of literate
modes is to be observed? Further, in the consideration of literacy in
Merovingian Gaul is there any substance to the customary divide between
levels of culture north and south of the Loire? In what sense, above all, can
the society of Merovingian Gaul be described as literate?"
The papacy can also be considered as an heir to Rome in terms at least of
its administrative structure, for it was based in important ways on the use of
the written word. How was literacy assured and transmitted within the
Lateran administration? To focus on the papacy does not preclude wider
consideration of the roles played by literacy in the history of the early
Christian church, but, as Thomas Noble suggests, the examination of the
enormous range of the kinds of records the papal administration produced
and conserved can provide us with the necessary exactitude to assess how
literacy was exploited by the Christian church generally.'®
If the papacy can be regarded as the conservator of both the Roman and
the Christian traditions to perhaps a far greater degree than can the
barbarian successor states, the combined impact of the Roman world and
the Christian church is nevertheless a preoccupation of all but one of the
papers in this book. The exception, included precisely because its parallels
and contrasts are both salutary and illuminating, is Stefan Reif’s study of
early mediaeval Jewish literacy.'? His paper seeks to complement the other
essays not only by providing an external yardstick against which to measure
the significance of developments in literacy in Christian Europe, but also to
draw attention to certain similar developments. The accurate evaluation of
these will become possible only once the beginnings of Jewish settlement in
Christian Europe have been more fully investigated.
Ireland, on the other hand, potentially presents contrast of another kind,
for it appears to have supported extensive and sophisticated learned activity
by its native learned classes without the use of writing at all. The Irish were
aware of writing, as the ogam inscriptions attest, but they did not at first
have much use for it. On this culture is imposed Christianity, requiring not
only literacy but latinity. This at least is the traditional picture whose
validity is tested by Jane Stevenson in the context of the Patrician docu-
ments relating to Armagh and the way literacy may have served the uses of

'” Wood, below, pp. 63-81. " Noble, below, pp. 82-108.
'9 Reif, below, pp. 134-55.
8 Rosamond McKitterick
illiteracy, expressing the values, needs and interests of the native culture,
virtually untouched by Roman traditions, as well as those of the new
religion.”
Contact with a non-Roman and non-Christian culture and problems of
continuity of a different kind are provided by Roger Collins’ study of
literacy and the laity in early mediaeval Spain, for the principal question at
issue is whether the evident literacy of Arab Spain was influenced by the
survival of an educated laity from the Visigothic period.*! What role did
literacy, written records, book buying and book reading play in the society
of late Umayyad Al-Andalus? What are the consequences of the Jack in
Islamic society of a separate priestly caste? How does the degree of literacy
in Umayyad Spain compare with that evident in the Visigothic period?
The Roman and Christian heritage as it was filtered into early Anglo-
Saxon England, on the other hand, has to be considered within the
framework of a vigorous vernacular and oral culture to which the written
word 1s introduced by the Christian missionaries. Susan Kelly explores the
conditions attendant upon the introduction of the written word into a pre-
literate society.“ She assesses the success of literacy in England by
considering the extent to which the use of the written word superseded, or
was accommodated within, the established oral procedures of early Anglo-
Saxon government and society and takes as her starting point the signifi-
cance of the use of charters, the attitude towards written titles to property
and whether the symbolic function of the diploma is more important than
its value as a written record. But the relation of the vernacular to Latin
literacy has to be considered. What does the appearance of vernacular
documents tell us about literacy in Anglo-Saxon England? What was the
extent of lay literacy? How high was the quality of ecclesiastical literacy, and
what were the methods of instruction? These questions are pursued also in
later Anglo-Saxon England by Simon Keynes but the focus 1s on the role of
literate modes in government and the evidence for pragmatic literacy.”
What evidence is there that there is a routine resort to bureaucratic methods
and use of writing in the government and administration of Anglo-Saxon
England before the Conquest? Keynes explores the relationship between
the monarch and literacy and in particular the effects Alfred’s initiatives had
on tenth-century royal government. Why were the laws produced in written
form and what relation does this have to their publication and implemen-
tation? Could royal officials in later Anglo-Saxon England read, and were
they required to read the law in written form? What role did literacy play in
the administration of the realm and communication with the royal officials?

*) Stevenson, below, pp. 11-35. *! Collins, below, pp. 109-33.

* Kelly, below, pp. 36-62. *? Keynes, below, pp. 226-57.
 INTRODUCTION 9
The use of the written word in government and administration also
provides the focus for Janet Nelson’s discussion of the Carolingians, and
constitutes a useful means of comparing practices and assumptions on
either side of the Channel.*t How much evidence of the practical use of
writing, as a means of communication and record, is there? But she also asks
who produced the documents and what role laymen played in this. Was lav
literacy, active as well as passive, even in Latin, far more widespread than
has often been assumed? What can be said about the symbolic uses of
literacy and to what degree do they qualify the ostensibly practical ones?
The function of literacy in the Frankish kingdoms under the Carolingians
has to be considered within a cultural context in which the use of writing
associated with the Christian and Roman past was a privileged mode of
communication among other modes.
Further aspects of literacy to be considered in this book are the visual
impact of letter forms and their relation to pictures. Margaret Mullett
tackles the manifestations of writing and their significance in Byzantium in
the ninth and tenth centuries, invoking a rather different and more
continuous Roman past than that which we encounter in the germanic
kingdoms of western Europe.” It has been customary hitherto to assess
Byzantine literacy very positively and to stress the supreme power of the
written word in Byzantine society and the ability of the Byzantines to
appreciate it on the grounds that continuity in levels of literacy, literary
production and education from the Roman period 1s clear. While acknow-
ledging that there 1s some truth in it, Mullett challenges the impregnability
of this view and examines afresh the use of literate modes in Byzantium. She
points out that because of its prolonged period of iconoclasm, the place of
art in relation to words was exhaustively discussed; visual material 1s thus as
important in a study of Byzantine literacy as words. How should one assess
the relationship between art and writing? Do words and pictures say the
same thing? Or do pictures perform a function that words cannot? Similar
preoccupations are relevant for western Europe and Rosamond McKit-
terick examines the relationship beteween image and word and the cultural
and social context within which writing was produced in the Carolingian
period.*® What were the Carolingian views on the relative value of writing
and pictures? What were the reasons and possible consequences of the
Carolingian conviction of the superiority of writing to pictures? She
considers the impact on the Franks of the gift of writing bestowed by the
Christian faith and the law of God, and the degree to which the written
word and the book had a symbolic as well as a practical role in Carolingian

4 Nelson, below, pp. 258-96. *5 Mullett, below, pp. 156-85.

°° McKitterjck, below, pp. 297-318.
 10 Rosamond McKitterick
society. Both these papers are complemented by John Mitchell’s, for he
looks in detail at the extravagant use of inscriptions — painted inscriptions on
the walls, elaborate painted texts on scrolls held by life-sized standing
figures, finely carved funerary inscriptions, the extensive use of inscribed
tiles on the floors of rooms and passages, monumental gilt-bronze inscrip-
tions with letters about a Roman foot high on the facades of the buildings of
the monastic complex and the prominent display of any old Roman
inscriptions the community was able to acquire — at the monastery of San
Vincenzo al Volturno in central Italy in the first half of the ninth century.”
What are the implications of this amazing richness of literacy displayed?
To our lasting regret it was not possible to include studies of either
Byzantine or Lombard Italy. This is greatly to be lamented, not least
because in Byzantine Italy one has a remarkable survival of Roman
traditions which would perhaps enable one to assess continuity much more
precisely than elsewhere as well as to work out the degrees to which literacy
_ in Ravenna and the Roman areas of early mediaeval Italy was unique in
comparison with the other areas we have studied. Such a study is in
preparation by T’.S. Brown. As far as Lombard Italy is concerned, it is clear
_ that literacy and its uses deserves a wholescale study, but much has been
published already by Chris Wickham; there is also work in preparation by
Ross Balzoretti which has much of great value on the subject.” Ideally,
therefore, both Byzantine and Lombard Italy should have been included in
this volume. Similarly, a study of the Islamic world and its sets of contrasts
and parallels would have been illuminating. Other areas of western Europe
and, of course, the multitude of other aspects of the uses of literacy in the
areas we have looked at, remain to be investigated.””? Nevertheless, the
questions raised in this book, and the particular contexts in which they were
discussed, represent a deliberate selection rather than a random one. We
felt that the areas chosen and the diverse uses of literacy we discuss in them,
would serve to introduce the theme in all its complexity and variety as one of
vital importance for study in relation to the early middle ages.

7 Mitchell, below, pp. 186-225.

28 C.J. Wickham, Early Medieval Italy: Central Power and Local Society 400-1000
(London, 1981), pp. 124-7; zdem, ‘Land disputes and their social framework in Lombard-
Carolingian Italy, 700-900’, in Settlement of Disputes, pp. 105-24, especially p. 112, and
see in the same volume Roger Collins’ pertinent comments in his section of the Conclusion
on “The Role of writing in the resolution and recording of disputes’, ibid., pp. 207-14. See
also Ross Balzoretti’s University of London PhD thesis in preparation on “The lands of
Saint-Ambrose: the acquisition, organization and exploitation of landed property in north- -
west Lombardy by the monastery of Sant’Ambrogio c. 780-1000’, where he establishes the
widespread use of documents and preservation of legal records as well as the existence of a
sophisticated notarial tradition centred on Milan.
29 Simon Franklin, ‘Literacy and documentation in mediaeval Russia’, Speculum 60 (1985),
1-38.
 I

2
Literacy in Ireland:
the evidence of the Patrick dossier
in the Book of Armagh

Fane Stevenson

Ireland was culturally, as well as geographically, peripheral to early

mediaeval Europe.’ In some ways, early mediaeval Ireland was shaped by
the common western European inheritance, the twin legacy of imperial
Rome and Christianity, but in others, it was completely anomalous.
Although individual Irishmen contributed a great deal to the development
of European culture, and, conversely, there is much in the history of early
Ireland which should be seen in terms of the Empire and its aftermath, the
fact that Ireland was never conquered by Rome resulted in radically
different social and political developments of which literacy 1s both an
example and a symptom. For instance, it has become something of a truism
that literacy finds its natural environment in towns, and is normally much
more prevalent in the urban than in the rural population.” Using this as a
guideline, one would have to assume that a completely townless society,
operating as a set of small units classically defined as ‘tribal, rural,
hierarchical and familiar’,’ and without any form of centralized govern-
ment,* was peacefully illiterate.

' T should like to thank Rosamond McKitterick and the other contributors to this volume for
their helpful comments on a draft of this paper, and also Richard Sharpe for his generous and
perceptive advice. Whenever an edition of one of the texts discussed has an accompanying
translation, I have noted this in the footnotes, but the translation of the passages quoted are
usually my own.
2 W.V. Harris, ‘Literacy and epigraphy I’, Zeitschnft fur Papvrologie und Epigraphik 52
(1983), 87-111.
> D.A. Binchy, ‘Secular institutions’, in Early Irish Society, ed. Myles Dillon (Dublin, 1954),
pp. 52-65, at p. 54.
* Although this is true in one sense, F.J. Byrne’s qualification, ish Kings and High-Kings
(London, 1973), p. 40, should also be noted: ‘[their system of government] had a surface
appearance of extreme fragmentation, but ... was nevertheless linked into a coherent
pattern. At no period for which we have sufficient information . . . do we find any one of the
numerous and seemingly autonomous tuatha existing in splendid isolation.’ The tuath was
11
12 Fane Stevenson
In the case of Ireland, the truism leaves two major factors out of the
equation, the order of poets (filid), and the dependence of the Christian
church on literacy.- Leaving,.Christian Latin literacy to one side for the
moment, it is truly remarkable that the filid (who seem to have been unified
and centralized in a way which was not true of the kings) were able to
achieve a standard vernacular literary diction without significant dialectal
variations across the whole of the country by the end of the sixth century,
and also a high degree of standardization in orthography.’ This argues for a
great deal of self-confidence and practice in the use of literary skills within
Irish vernacular culture. It also casts considerable doubts on the relevance
to Ireland of another familiar truism, that in the early mediaeval west,
literacy 1s by definition Latin literacy, and firmly in the control of the
church. Because of the positively embarrassing riches of vernacular Irish
culture, and the extreme complexity of the material, which I have discussed
elsewhere,° I intend in this paper to confine my attention to Hiberno-Latin,
and to examining one particular centre through which many of the issues
relating to Irish ecclesiastical culture from the fifth to eighth centuries can
be explored.
The church of Armagh is the primatial church of Ireland, and the coarbs
(successors) of St Patrick, the apostle of Ireland, its senior churchmen. The
evidence from which the early development of this primacy can be traced ts
in the Book of Armagh, which was written for the abbot of Armagh in 807.’
The Book of Armagh is one of the most important early Irish manuscripts.
It is divisible into three separate books of the same dimensions
(c. 195145 mm), written at the same time and in the same scriptorium.
The first of these is a dossier of texts relating to St Patrick, the second is the
only complete copy of the New Testament to survive from any of the
Insular churches (known to students of Bible-texts as D), and the third is
Sulpicius Severus’ life of St Martin. Another reason why it is so important 1s
that it is one of the most accurately datable of Irish manuscripts, because the
master scribe, Ferdomnach (ob. 846), noted that he had completed his
transcription of the Gospel of Matthew at the request of ‘Torbach, who was
abbot for only ten months in 807-8. While it was once thought that the

the basic social unit of Irish society. Eoin MacNeill estimated that there were between eighty
and a hundred twatha in early Christian Ireland (D.A. Binchy, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon
Kingship, O’Donnell Lecture (Oxford, 1970), p. 5).

* Kim McCone, ‘The Wiirzburg and Milan Glosses: our earliest source of Middle Irish?’, Eriu
36 (1985), 85-106, at 103.
° J. Stevenson, ‘The beginnings of literacy in Ireland’, PRIA 89 C (1989), 127-65.
” Dublin, Trinity College 52 (CLA II. 270).
 LITERACY IN IRELAND 13
manuscript was the result of many years’ work, this has now been dis-
proved, and the whole volume shown to have been written in 807-8.*
There are several elements in the Patrick dossier. ‘These, in order, are the
Vita S. Patricu, by Muircht moccu Machthéni, written c. 690;’ a catalogue
of churches founded by, or given to, St Patrick, written by Tirechanc. 670,
together with subsidiary texts known as additamenta and notulae.'® All
these were written by an assistant scribe. In a slim booklet added next,
Ferdomnach himself copied a text called Liber Angeli, datable to between
640 and 670, which purports to be a sort of contract between God and St
Patrick, giving St Patrick authority over the entire ecclesiastical establish-
ment of Ireland, and establishing the dignity of Armagh and its bishop. "'!
Lastly, Ferdomnach included a version of St Patrick’s own Confessio, the
sole representative of a text tradition quite different from that of the other
exemplars, and abbreviated by approximately one third.'* The Book of
Armagh enables us to look at literacy in Ireland from a variety of angles. It
contains one of the two surviving prose texts known to have been written in
Ireland in the fifth century, the Confessio of St Patrick, and this gives us a
glimpse into the culture and society of Ireland at that time. It offers
abundant evidence for the importance of Latin literacy to the seventh- and
eighth-century Irish church, and some insight into the logistical problems it
faced. It also gives us some information about the relationships between
different centres of ecclesiastical culture. And finally, it provides us with
information about vernacular literacy in seventh- and eighth-century Ire-
land, and the extent to which social practices dependent on literacy did or
did not influence secular society.
The Patrick dossier compiled at Armagh contains much valuable infor-

* Richard Sharpe, ‘Palaeographical considerations in the study of the Patrician documents in

the Book of Armagh’, Scriptonum 36 (1982), 3-28.
” BCL no. 303 (pp. 84-5). There is independent corroboration of Muircht’s existence, status
and floruit in the guarantor list to Cain Adomnain (promulgated 697), where he appeared as a
signatory (as Murchu macut Mactheine). See Mairin Ni Dhonnchadha, “The guarantor list
of Cain Adomnain, 697’, Peritia 1 (1982), 178-215, at 180 and 196.
'° BCL no. 301 (pp. 83-4).
'! BCL no. 360 (p. 105). For the date, see Richard Sharpe, ‘Armagh and Rome in the seventh
century’, in/reland and Furope: The Early Church, ed. Préinséas Ni Chathain and Michael
Richter (Stuttgart, 1984), pp. 58-72.
'2 M. Esposito, ‘St Patrick’s “Confessio” and the “Book of Armagh”’, IHS 9 (1954-5), 1-12;
Douglas Powell, “The textual integrity of St. Patrick’s confession’, AB 87 (1969), 387-409 ;
idem ‘St. Patrick’s Confession and the Book of Armagh’, AB 90 (1972), 371-85; R.P.C.
Hanson, “The omissions 1n the text of the Confession of St Patrick in the Book of Armagh’,
Texte und Untersuchungen 115 (=Studia Patristica 12) (1975), 91-5. The edition of the
Confessio | quote is the most accessible, that in St Patrick, his Wntings and Muirchu’s Life,
ed. and trans. A.B.E. Hood (Chichester, 1978).
 14 Fane Stevenson |
mation, though chiefly about the seventh century rather than the fifth. Itisa
guide to the pretensions of Armagh rather than to those of St Patrick, and rt
shows us an ambitious church seeking to claw its way into a high-status
position by inflating the reputation of a Romano-British bishop who may or
may not have been its founder. Its claim to be Patrick’s original and
particular church is somewhat eroded by the fact that the saint was known to |
have been buried at Dun Lethglaisse (Down), an awkward fact which
Muircht does his best to explain away.'?
The importance of St Patrick for literacy in Ireland is necessarily
dependent on what he was actually doing there. It has recently been argued
that Patrick was not, or not primarily, an evangelist to the Irish, let alone
their one apostle. His sphere of activity lay mainly among the ‘tot milia
hominum’ who, like himself, had been carried off from Britain by Irish
pirates and enslaved. He was thus the roving bishop of the (British)
Christians in Ireland, and only by extension a missionary bishop among the
Irish themselves.'* In his own words, ‘ego ueneram ad Hibernas gentes
[note the plural] euangelium praedicare’.' Some of these Britons, like
Patrick himself, are likely to have been literate, or reasonably well versed in
the tenets of the Christian faith. This may be why Patrick speaks less of
preaching than he does of baptism and confirmation, and does not speak of
teaching at all: his primary responsibility was not to inculcate the rudiments
of the faith, but to provide priestly services and sacraments, and this, he
emphasizes, he was assiduous in doing, at whatever cost to himself.
Patrick does indeed mention conversions among the Irish: ‘fili1 Scot-
torum et filiae regulorum monachi et uirgines Christi esse uidentur’.!® In
the next paragraph, he singles out ‘una benedicta Scotta genetiua nobilis
pulcherrima adulta erat, quam ego baptizaui’.!’ In the same section, he
mentions parenthetically ‘et de genere nostro qui ibi nati sunt nescimus

'3 Richard Sharpe, ‘St Patrick and the See of Armagh’, CMCS 4 (1982), 33-59, at 40-3.
'¢ E.A. Thompson, ‘St Patrick and Coroticus’, 77S NS 31 (1980), 12-27.
'S: Confessio, 37, ed. Hood, p. 30: ‘I came to the peoples of Ireland to preach the Gospel’. On
the other hand, Hiberno-Latin writers of the early middle ages, who had little or no sense of
‘Ireland’ as a cultural unit, habitually used gens to mean tuath (‘population-group’/‘tribe’).
We have no comparative evidence to clarify St Patrick’s use of this word: was he thinking in
the same terms as the Irish, or, as a Romano-British citizen, treating Hibernia as a single
political or ethnic unit? His other use of gentes in § 48 (ed. Hood, p. 32) does nothing to
‘resolve what he meant by it.
'6 Confessio, § 41, ed. Hood, p. 31: ‘sons and daughters of Irish kings are seen to be monks and
virgins of Christ’.
'” Confessio, § 42, ed. Hood, p. 31: ‘there was a blessed Irish woman, of noble race, beautiful
and grown up, whom I baptized’.
 LITERACY IN [IRELAND 15
numerum eorum’.'® If a contrast is intended between the Scott: whom he
has been discussing and genus noster, then it follows that the clause should
be interpreted as meaning ‘our people [that ts, Britons] who have been born
there [Ireland]’. It is surely more natural to take the word noster, used by a
Roman-Briton addressing other Roman-Britons, as signifying “Roman-
Briton’, than it 1s to assume that the common ground 1s the Christian faith,
and ‘our people’ are the children of Lrish converts.
Dumville takes this whole argument a stage further, by drawing attention
to the first notification that there was an Irish church in Prosper of
Aquitaine’s annal for 431:
in the famous annal for 431, . . . he makes it plain that Bishop Palladius was being
sent to an already Christian Irish community (‘ad Scottos in Christum credentes’).
Who these Irish Christians were must now concern us. We cannot be sure that when
Prosper said Scottos he necessarily meant ‘racially Irish’; it seems doubtful that he
would be so well informed. He must be taken as meaning what seems natural in the
context, especially for a distant foreigner, namely ‘people who live in Ireland’,
without further specification.”
So, ‘Palladius, we must suppose, was the first bishop of this British
population in involuntary exile ... [and]... with the advent of Patrick,
this community had effectively acquired a bishop from among its own
number.’ Patrick on this argument appears to have been the second bishop
of the Irish branch of the Christian church of post-Roman Britain. He sheds
some kind of light on the literacy of fifth-century Ireland, but this must be
seen within the context of his limited role there and not of the grandiose
claims of his hagiographers.
If Patrick founded a Christian church among the Irish, rather than
ministering entirely to British Christians, then like Augustine of Canter-
bury he would have had to found a school of Latin literacy and biblical
study,’ for if he did not, the Irish church would not be able to provide
leaders from among its own people in the next generation. Though literacy
in Ireland may not be dependent on Christianity, Christianity was certainly
dependent on literacy.
Patrick says of his relationship with the Irish ruling class that ‘interim

- 18 “And we do not know the number of those of our people who have been born there
[Ireland].’
'? D.N. Dumville, ‘Some British aspects of the earliest Irish Christianity’, in Jreland and
Europe: The Early Church, ed. Ni Chathdin and Richter, pp. 16-24, at pp. 16-17.
0 [bid., pp. 18-19.
71 Cf. P.T. Jones, ‘The Gregorian mission and English education’, Speculum 3 (1928),
335-48.
16 Fane Stevenson
praemia dabam regibus praeter quod dabam mercedem filiis ipsorum qui
mecum ambulant’.** He would have been quite unable to move freely
through Ireland unless he were recognized as equivalent to a fil, that is, a
member of the native learned class, for only people of very high status and
outlaws wandered about the country,” and an important way of dis-
tinguishing one from the other was that filid and the like travelled with a
sizeable retinue indicative of their rank.** In an equivalent situation, the
Irish missionary bishop Aidan, sent from Iona to evangelize the Northum-
brians, had a group of followers around him despite his great personal
humility, and Bede says: ‘omnes qui cum eo incedebant siue adtonsi seu
laici, meditari debuerunt, id est aut legendis scripturis aut psalmis discendis
operam dare’. Patrick, equally, may have used his time on the road to
instruct his companions in Christian learning, or to teach them to read, but
he does not mention doing so.
Patrick’s own writing was, as he freely admitted, crude. In spite of this,
he bears an indirect witness to the high standards of cultivated latinity
normally expected of a Romano-British bishop, for he needed to defend
himself to his sentores on this account. He explained to them that he was
captured as a young lad, after his basic education was complete, but before
he had embarked on the elaborate training in rhetoric and the manipulation
of acomplex, mandarin style which was the hallmark of upper-class Latin in
the fifth century, and the index of intellectual and scholarly capability. His
literary background barely stretched beyond the Bible, but his knowledge
of the sacred text was detailed and thorough. There are a couple of passages
in the Confessio which have some interesting implications for the nature of
his literacy. He records many visions and supernatural experiences, and of
these, two involve writing.“°

2 Confessio, § 52, ed. Hood, p. 33: ‘from time to time I gave presents to the kings, apart from
the rewards I gave to their sons who travelled with me’. The background to this is explained
by Clare Stancliffe, ‘Kings and conversion: some comparisons between the Roman mission
to England and Patrick’s to Ireland’, /ruhmittelalterliche Studien 14 (1980), 57-94, at
78-83.
23 Stancliffe, ‘Kings and conversion’, 63-4.
*4 Eoin MacNeill, ‘Ancient Irish Law: the law of status or franchise’, PRIA 36 C (1921-3),
265-316, gives the appropriate retinue for each grade of filid from Uraicecht Becc, V.56.20—
V.70.27, p. 275 (there is a new edition promised from the Dublin Institute of Advanced
Studies, by Christopher McAll). The extreme status-consciousness of the filid was satirized
in later mediaeval Ireland in Tromdamh Guaire, ed. Maud Joynt (Dublin, 1931).
25 Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum III, § 5, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and
R.A.B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969), pp. 226-7: ‘all those who went about with him, whether
tonsured or lay-people, had to study, that is, to perform the task either of reading the Bible,
or learning the Psalms’.
© Confessio, § 23 and § 29, ed. Hood, pp. 27 and 28.
 LITERACY IN IRELAND 17
Et ibi scilicet uidi in uisu noctis uirum uenientem quasi de Hiberione ... cum
epistolis innumerabilibus, et dedit mihi unam ex his et legi principium epistolae
continentem ‘Vox Hiberionacum’, et cum recitabam principium epistolae putabam
ipso momento audire uocem tpsorum qui erant iuxta siluam Focluti ... et sic
exclamauerunt, quasi ex uno ore: ‘Rogamus te, sancte puer, ut uenias et adhuc
ambulas inter nos’.”’

ad noctem illam uidi in uisu noctis <scriptum quod> scriptum erat contra faciem
meam sine honore, et inter haec audiui responsum diuinum dicentem mihi: ‘Male
uidimus faciem designati nudato nomine’.*

In both cases, the content of the letter is experienced rather than read. The
word recitabam in the first passage shows that he read aloud, as was the
normal practice, but when he holds the document in his hand, he hears the
voice, or voices, of the writer, rather than seezng the words on the page. It 1s
a way of reading far removed from our abstract appreciation of written data.
Probably when Patrick tead the Bible, he perceived it as the voice of God
speaking directly to him, which may help to account for his very personal
usage of the text and his passionate identification with St Paul.
That 1s as much as can usefully be said about the historical Patrick and
literacy in Ireland. But there 1s a rich harvest to be gleaned from the Patrick
of the Armagh hagiographers. Both Tirechan and Muirchi buttress their
texts by copious reference to their sources,”’ and provide, by their accounts
of Patrick’s actions, insight into the place of writing within the church of the
seventh century.
It is important to remember that the church required a considerable
amount of written material for efficient functioning, and so we should not
be surprised to find this reflected in early mediaeval Ireland. First of all
come the Psalter, the Gospels, the Pauline Epistles, and other books of the
Bible. Among the very earliest surviving Irish manuscripts are Codex
Usserianus Primus, a Vetus Latina gospel-text datable to c. 600,” the

27 “And it was there I saw in a vision by night a man coming as if from Ireland ... with
innumerable letters, and he gave me one of them, and I read the heading of the letter: “The
voice of the Irish”, and as I read out the beginning of the letter, I seemed at the same
moment to hear the voice of those who were near the wood of Foclut . . . and they cried out
thus, as if in one voice: “we ask you, holy boy, to come, and walk again among us”.’
8 ‘That same night, I saw in a vision by night a writing which was written over against my
face, without honour [i.e. without the title, ‘episcopus’], and meanwhile, I heard a divine
prophecy saying to me: “we were grieved to see the face of our appointed one with his name
stripped bare”.’
2? For example, Muirchti says of Patrick’s birthplace in I.1, ‘quem uicum constanter
indubitanter comperimus esse Ventre’ (PT, pp. 66-7: ‘we have discovered for certain and
beyond any doubt that this township is Ventre’). This suggests that he was comparing
different versions of incidents in his hero’s life.
3° Dublin, Trinity College 55 (A.4.15) (CLA I1.271), discussed in Julian Brown, ‘The oldest
18 Jane Stevenson
Springmount tablets (discussed below), which carry a psalter-text,*! and
the Cathach of St Columba, a Gallican psalter.°* Next in order of import-
ance come tools for interpreting the biblical narrative, principally the works
of the Latin fathers. Columbanus, writing on the Continent to Gregory the
Great at the end of the sixth century, revealed his knowledge of the
exegetical writings of Jerome and of Gregory himself.*? The seventh-
century Vita S. Columbanti by Jonas of Bobbio records what was known to
his disciples of his background and career in Ireland, and he makes
particular mention of the importance of exegesis in his education in
Ireland.** The third main category of Christian writing is canon law, and
the recording of decisions on practical disciplinary problems. This is
evidenced in Ireland by the so-called First and Second Synod of St Patrick,
possibly written in the sixth century, the Collectio Canonum Hibernensis,
which draws on sixth- and seventh-century material from Ireland as well as
on the Continental canons,*° and in a slightly different field, the Irish
penitentials which go back to Finnian (Uinniau), a contemporary and
countryman of Gildas, resident in Ireland.*’ The fourth is the whole

Irish manuscripts and their late antique background’, in Ireland and Europe: The Early
Church, ed. Ni Chathain and Richter, pp. 311-27, at p. 312. See also BCL no. 515 (p. 133).
5! Dublin, National Museum of Ireland SA 1914:2 (CLA Supp. 1684); BCL no. 505 (pp.
130-1).
% Dublin, Royal Irish Academy s.n. (CLA II.266); BCL no. 506 (p. 131).
33 Sancti Columbani Opera, ed. and trans. G.S.M. Walker (Dublin, 1957), pp. 2-13, at pp.
10-11.
3 Tonae Vitae Sanctorum Columbani, Vedastis, Iohannis, ed. Bruno Krusch (Hanover,
1905), p. 158.
35. Synodus IS. Patricti (also called Synodus episcoporum) is in The Insh Penitentials, ed. and
trans. Ludwig Bieler (Dublin, 1963), pp. 54-8, and also in The Bishops’ Synod: A
Symposium, ed. M.J. Faris (Liverpool, 1976), pp. 1-8. See further BCL no. 599 (p. 153).
Synodus IT S. Patncit is also in The Insh Penitentials, ed. Bieler, pp. 184-96, See further
BCL no. 600 (p. 153). The dating of these canons 1s still very much in dispute. D.A. Binchy,
‘Patrick and his biographers, ancient and modern’, Studia Hibernica 2 (1962), 7-173, at 46,
placed them in the seventh century. On the other hand, Kathleen Hughes dated the first
Synod to the second quarter of the sixth century, in her The Church in Early Insh Society
(London, 1966), pp. 44-52, and the second to the second half of the same century, in
‘Synodus [I S. Patricu’, in Latin Scnpt and Letters A.D. 400-900: Festschrift Presented to
Ludwig Bieler, ed. J.J. O'Meara and Bernd Naumann (Leiden, 1976), pp. 141-7, at p. 142.
© Die Irische Kanonensammlung, ed. F.W.H. Wasserschleben (Giessen, 1874; rev. edn,
Leipzig, 1885), BCL nos. 612-13 (pp. 156-7). There are two recensions of the Hibernensis:
The latest author cited in the A-text is Theodore of Canterbury (ob. 690), and the latest
author in the B-text is Adomnan of Iona (0b. 704) (Henry Bradshaw, in Die Insche
Kanonensammlung, ed. Wasserschleben, p. Ixx).
7 The Irish Penitentials, ed. Bieler, pp. 74-94, BCL no. 598 (pp. 152-3), and see Richard
Sharpe, ‘Gildas as a Father of the Church’, in Gildas: New Approaches, ed. Michael
Lapidge and D.N. Dumville (Woodbridge, 1984), pp. 193-205, and D.N. Dumuville,
‘Gildas and Uinniau’, in zbid., pp. 207-14.
 LITERACY IN IRELAND 19
complex area of ecclesiastical arithmetic and computus, which was well
established in Ireland by 600, on the evidence of Columbanus.*® Lastly,
there is the keeping of annals, which may have developed from the need to
keep Easter tables.*’ The first Hiberno-Latin annals were probably written
in the middle of the sixth century.
It is clear that in Ireland we have evidence ranging from reasonable to
excellent for all these forms of written documentation essential to the
smooth running of the church, and that these were proliferating during the
sixth century, and well established by the beginning of the seventh. It can
only have been a matter of four or five generations from the humble
beginnings witnessed by St Patrick to a situation in which a very substantial
technical and economic investment had been made in the creation (and,
presumably, storage) of permanent written documents within the Christian
centres of Ireland. This investment lay not only in the production of
parchment, which was itself a substantial commitment of labour, capital
and livestock, but in the training of scribes.
Tirechan, in particular, was clear that his hero was deeply concerned
with Christian education. He built up a picture of Patrick as saintly
thaumaturge and effective primate of all Ireland (a far cry from the harried
and beleaguered bishop of the Confessio).*' In the book of Armagh, there is
a short collection of notes between the end of Muirchti’s Vita and Tirechan’s
imcipit. These closely resemble Tirechan’s Collectanea, and may have been
displaced from it. The first sentence is as follows: ‘portauit Patricius per
Sininn secum quinquaginta clocos, quinquaginta patinos, quinquaginta
calices, altaria, libros legis, aeuangelii libros, et reliquit illos in locis
nouis’.** What is implied here is an extensive and orderly programme of
evangelization, in which Patrick scattered fifty Christian nuclei across the
face of Ireland, providing each with a basic priest’s kit: a bell, altar-
furniture, a liber legis*? and a gospel-book. This is just the kind of thing
Patrick himself did not tell us, even though he says ‘ordinauit ubique

38 In Epistola I, Sancti Columbani Opera, ed. Walker, pp. 2-6. See also Déibhi O Créinin,
‘Mo-Sinnu moccu Min and the computus of Bangor’, Peritia 1 (1982), 281-95, at 282-5.
9 Daibhi O Croinin, ‘Early Irish annals from Easter tables: a case restated’, Peritia 2 (1983),
74-86.
*° A.P. Smyth, ‘The earliest Irish annals’, PRIA 72 C (1972), 1-48.
*! Binchy, ‘Patrick and his biographers’, 58.
* T1.1, PT, pp. 122-3: ‘P. carried with him across the Shannon fifty bells, fifty patens, fifty
chalices, altar-stones, books of the law, books of the Gospels, and left them at the new sites.’
* The sense of this is unclear: it might mean part of the Old Testament, or a guide to practice
such as the acta of church councils. The existence of the Synodus episcoporum and Svnodus
IT S. Patrica attest that the need for ecclesiastical legislation was felt at an early stage of the
development of the church in Ireland, certainly before Tirechan’s time, though not
necessarily in St Patrick’s.
20 Fane Stevenson
Dominus clericos per modicitatem meam’,** and no priest could effectively
function without these things. It 1s odd that Tirechan’s list does not include
a psalter, indispensable for the Office, and particularly venerated in
Ireland.** One possible explanation is that in Tirechan’s day, the psalter
was normally learned by heart as part of the preparation for priesthood.
However, he noted a little later that Patrick wrote a psalter for an ordinand
named Sachellus, which he himself had seen, and this might argue against
the theory that psalters were not basic necessities. On the other hand, the
ownership of a psalter may have been rather unusual, and the incident may

needed explanation. ,
simply reflect the chance survival of a single venerable manuscript which

A curious anecdote at the beginning of Tirechan’s account is a witness to

the use of wooden tablets as writing material in the early Irish church.*
Patrick and his men were seen ‘cum tabulis in manibus scriptis’ (‘with
written tablets in their hands’); the people mistook the wooden tablets for
some kind of sinister weapon, and the Christian party was nearly lynched. A
group of six wax tablets, dating to c. A.D. 600, inscribed with a text of Ps.
XXX~X XXII, have been recovered from Springmount bog, and are now 1n
the National Museum. These tablets are c. 775X210 mm, c. 7 mm thick, and
appear to have been lashed together as a group of six, waxed sides together.
It is hard to imagine their being mistaken for anything potentially deadly,
however unfamiliar they appeared;*’ so perhaps the bulky, Roman-style
waxed tablet was not the only form of writing material in use, and Tirechan
was envisaging something slimmer which could be mistaken for a dagger.
There are two possible lines of approach to this story. The debris of the
Roman fortress at Vindolanda (c. A.D. 100) proved on excavation to contain
quantities of discarded correspondence, written on pieces of new wood as
thin as veneer, which was folded over and tied round the middle before
being sent.*® This is less expensive and technically less complex as writing
material than the waxed tablet, and much more ephemeral and disposable.
No such leaf-tablets (as Bowman calls them) have ever been found in

4 Confessio, § 48, ed. Hood, p. 32: ‘the Lord ordained priests everywhere through my
agency’.
*° See Martin McNamara, ‘Psalter text and psalter study in the Early Irish Church (A.D. 600-
1200)’, PRIA 73 C (1973), 201-72.
*© 11.3 (1), PT, pp. 122-3.
47 The seventh-century Abbot Adomnén at the beginning of his De Locis Sanctis also makes
reference to writing notes on tablets: ‘primo in tabulis describenti fideli et indubitabili
narratione dictauit; quae nunc in membranis breui textus scribuntur’ (ed. and trans. Denis
Meehan (and Ludwig Bieler) (Dublin, 1958), p. 36).
48 A.K. Bowman and J.D. Thomas, Vindolanda: The Latin Wnting-Tablets (London, 1983),
pp. 29-31.
 LITERACY IN IRELAND 21
Ireland, but it should be remembered that it was only with the Vindolanda
excavations in 1973-5 that this form of script medium, which was almost
certainly ubiquitous in the Roman world,” first came to the attention of
classical archaeologists. Another purely visual comparison which comes to
mind is the Scandinavian rune-stick.*” The Irish ogam alphabet was
particularly well adapted for writing on the edges of objects, and ogam-
staves may also therefore have had this shape for purely practical reasons.
But Patrick should reasonably be visualized as being equipped with Roman
writing equipment, not Irish. The problem is probably insoluble: it
remains a tantalizing insight.
There are two anecdotes of Tirechan’s in which he asserts that something
written by Patrick was still extant in his own day, the one mentioned above,
‘et scripsit ill ibrum psalmorum, quem wuidi’ (my italics),°' and one
referring to the district of Selc: ‘Castrametati sunt in cacuminibus Selcae et
posuerunt ibi stratum et sedem inter lapides, in quibus scripsit manus sua
literas, quas hodie conspeximus oculis nostris.*** Whatever the force of the
attribution to Patrick, it seems that Tirechan had seen a psalter which was
already clearly ancient in the seventh century, and also a Christian inscrip-
tion, presumably in Roman script, which local tradition associated with the
saint.
Tirechan presents Patrick as both writer and scribe. His Confessio and
Epistola are not mentioned directly, but he 1s said to have sent letters to his
priests Caetiacus and Sachellus to rebuke them for ordaining in Mag Ai
without his permission. There are four other references to his own writing:

babtitzabat cotidie homines et illis litteras legebat ac abgatorias

<scribebat>.
inuenit Iarnascum sanctum sub ulmo ... et scripsit illi elimenta.
cui [the son of a new ordinand] scripsit Patricius abgitorium.
babtitzauit Patricius filium et scripsit illi abgitorium.*°

9 Ibid., pp. 37-44.

°° See Kelly’s chapter in this volume, below, pp. 37-8.
51 11.5, PT, pp. 122-3.
‘2 Tirechan, 30 (2), PT, pp. 146-7. ‘They camped on the heights of Selc, and there they made
their resting-place amidst stones, on which his hand wrote letters, which today we may see
with our own eyes.’
3 Ibid., 6.1, pp. 126-7, 33.1, pp. 150-1, 37.3, pp. 152-3, and 47.1, pp. 160-1: ‘he baptized
people every day, and he read the letters to them, and wrote abgitoria’; ‘he found the holy
Iarnasc under an elm, and wrote elementa for him’; ‘for whom P. wrote an abgitonum’; and
‘P. baptized the son, and wrote an abgitorium for him’.
22 Jane Stevenson
The context of these gifts of abgitoria appears ultimately to be ordination.
They are twice given at the recipient’s baptism, but in each of those cases,
there is an implication that the recipient was later ordained. The association
with ordination is also found in the other two examples. What is written 1s
three times called abgitonum, once elimenta. Abgitorium is, of course, from
Latin abecedarium ‘alphabet’. But although the Hiberno-Latin word can
bear this simple meaning, it is often used more in the sense of ‘rudiments’.**
It may be that Tirechan means to imply some form of elementary Christian
knowledge, such as a creed, or the Paternoster, or the Ten Command-
ments. Whatever exactly Tirechan means by his abgitoria, it is clear that he
assumes that, whatever the state of affairs among the laity, it is vitally
necessary that priests should be literate and educated, and that they should
have the elements of their faith to meditate on, or teach from. Tirechan’s
account of Patrick’s efficient administration of the conversion of Ireland
implies an active scriptorrum in fifth-century [reland, busy turning out
enough copies of the Gospels for every church in Ireland. This in itself
suggests that the need was keenly felt in his owm time, and that the copying
of basic texts to replace old worn-out ones was a never-ending task which
absorbed much time and energy in a large church with many dependants,
such as Armagh.
Muircht and Tirechan both acknowledged substantial dependence on
written sources. Muirchi shows that he knew the Confesszo and possibly the
Epistola: summarizing Patrick’s background from the opening of the
Confessio, he says the saint was ‘filifus], wt zpse ait, Potiti presbiteri’ (my
italics),°° and he knew that Patrick had written a letter to Coroticus, though
he did not quote the letter (which perhaps showed Patrick too powerless for
Muirchi’s purposes), and instead gave a wholly fabulous account of the
metamorphosis of Coroticus into a fox.°° In addition, Muirchi and
Tirechan had various written and oral sources of information, some of
which they held in common. This shows clearly that the second half of the
seventh century did not mark the beginning of hagiography in Ireland, and
that information on Patrick was collected at least a generation earlier.
Muircht goes into some detail on his sources. He opens with a sort of
apologia, an example of the familiar topos of authorial modesty, lamenting
his incapacity for the task, and implying in his address to ‘mi domine Aido’ |
(Aed, bishop of Sleaty) that he had not taken on the job of his own volition.
First of all he says that many people had already attempted to reconcile the
stories about Patrick: ‘multi conati sunt ordinare narrationem utique istam

5¢ Brian O Cuiv, ‘Irish words for “alphabet”’, Eviz 31 (1980), 100-10.

55 Muirchi, I.1, PT, pp. 66-7: ‘son, as he himself said, of the priest Potitus’.
56 Ibid., 1.29 (28), PT, pp. 100-1.
 LITERACY IN IRELAND 23
secundum quod patres eorum . . . sermones tradiderunt illis’.°’ The conflict
of opinions in the oral tradition has prevented anyone from creating a
‘canonical version’: ‘propter difficillamum narrationis opus diuersasque
opiniones et plurimorum plurimas suspiciones numquam ad unum
certumque historiae tramitem peruenierunt’.°® Several points are being
made here. On the surface, he 1s saying that he 1s not the first person to write
about Patrick, and that there is a large body of oral tradition relating to the
saint, much of which is mutually contradictory. But Muirchi, on behalf of
Armagh, is deliberately annexing a saint who on his own showing died at
Saul and was buried at Down, and these churches are likely to object
fiercely to his version of the story. This prologue is calculated to preempt
potential opposition, since oral stories cannot be checked or substantiated,
and any different versions can be dismissed as variants, which Muircht had
considered and chosen to reject.
Another important source for Muircht and Tirechan is Ultan, bishop of
Dal Conchobuir in Brega (ob. c. 655), who 1s specifically acknowledged by
both writers. Muircht says ‘inueni quattuor nomina in libro scripta Patrici
abud Uldanum episcopum Concubrensum’, and does not mention him
again.’ Tirechdn is more detailed in his reference, saying: “Tirechan
episcopus haec scripsit ex ore uel libro Ultani episcopi, cutus ipse alumpnus
uel discipulus fuit’.°° and adding, like Muircht (who might possibly have
taken this from Tirechan, rather than directly from Ultan), ‘inuen
quattuor nomina in libro scripta Patricio apud Ultanum episcopum Con-
chuburnensium’. He also depended on Ultan, his teacher, for oral tradi-
tions of Patrick: ‘erat autem in una ex insolis. . . annis triginta mihi testante
Ultano episcopo’.®’ There may have been a single book, referred to as liber
Ultani and liber apud Ultanum, there may have been two, one written by
Ultan, and one owned by him. A third reference to a written source in
Tirechan’s account is ‘omnia autem quae euenierunt inuenietis in plana
illius historia scripta’.°* In context, illus may refer to Patrick, or,

>” Ibid., prologus (1), PT, pp. 62-3: ‘many have attempted to write this story coherently
according to the traditions of their fathers’.
*8 Ibid., prologus (1), PT, pp. 62~3: ‘the great difficulties which the telling of the story
presents, and the conflicting opinions and many doubts voiced by many a person have
prevented them from ever arriving at one undisputed sequence of events’.
° Ibid., prologus (6), PT, pp. 62-3: ‘I found the four names of Patrick in a written book
belonging to Ultan, bishop of Connor’.
6 Tirechdn, 1 (1), PT, pp. 124-5: “T. the bishop wrote this from the words and from the book
of Ultan the bishop, whose pupil or disciple he was’.
®! Ibid. 1 (6), PT, pp. 124-5: ‘he was in one of the islands . . . for thirty years, as bishop Ultan
testified to me’.
& Ibid. 1 (1), PT, pp. 124-5: ‘you will find everything which happened to him in his
straightforward history’.
24 Fane Stevenson
possibly, to Ultan. Is this plana historia a third book, or are all three the
same?
Some additional written sources seem to lie beneath the surface of the |
texts, showing that these Irish writers of the mid-seventh century already
had quite a variety of written material to draw on. Bieler pointed out that
three sets of phrases near the beginning of Muircht’s account form rhymed,
octosyllabic lines, and are somewhat poetic in diction. They are compat-
ible with one of the poetic styles used in seventh-century Hiberno-Latin
hymnody, and it 1s quite possible that the wreckage of a lost hymn on the life
of Patrick is their source. The extraordinary ‘druidic prophecy’ quoted in a
Latin version by Muirchti™ and surviving also in Irish, is so archaic in style,
and so completely unChristian in tone, presenting as it does an
unsympathetic outsider’s view of the weird appearance and antics of
Christian priests, without any acknowledgement of their true purpose, that
it may be extremely ancient.® So if there is a single compendium, Ultdan’s
plana historia, this itself must be a somewhat heterogeneous document,
containing a Vita S. Patrici, at least one Hiberno-Latin poem on the saint,
and some vernacular material. Ult4n was not directly connected with
Armagh, but took a specialist interest in Irish hagiography. He collected all
the miracles of Brigit, according to the Irish Liber Hymnorum,®° and may be
implicated in the development of the concept, found in Armagh’s Liber
Angeli and in a later poem, “Brigid bé bithmaith’, that Patrick and Brigit are
the ‘two pillars’ of Ireland: ‘Inter sanctum Patricium Hibernenstum Bri-
gitamque columpnas amicitia caritatis inerat tanta, ut unum cor con-
siliumque haberent unum... Vir ergo sanctus Christianae uirgini ait: “O
mea Brigita, paruchia tua in prouincia tua apud reputabitur monarchiam
tuam, in parte autem orientali et occidentali dominatu in meo erit.”’©’ The
legends of the two saints are intertwined for mutual support,® with Brigit

° PT, pp. 1-18.

6 Muirchi, I.10 (9), PT, 76-7.
® The prophecy also survives in Irish, and in other slightly different Latin versions. See
James Travis, ‘A druidic prophecy, the first Irish satire, and a poem to raise blisters’, PMLA
57 (1942), 909-15, and PT, p. 200.
© The Irish Liber Hymnorum, ed. and trans. J.A. Bernard and R. Atkinson, 2 vols. (London,
1898), I, p. 14, II, p. 8; and see Richard Sharpe, ‘Vitae S. Bngitae : the oldest texts’, Peritta

°7 Liber Angeli, § 32, PT, pp. 190-1: ‘between holy Patrick and Brigit, pillars of the Irish,
there was so great a friendship of charity that they had one heart and one mind . . . the holy
man said to the Christian virgin: “O my Brigit, your paruchia will be deemed to be in your

domination.” |
province in your dominion, but in the eastern and western part it will be in my

° Tirechan twice links Patrick and Brigit. He notes in 16 (1) (PT, p. 136), that a church
 LITERACY IN IRELAND 25
the regina Austn, though under Patrick’s patronage, and Patrick’s power
centred in the north.” The arrangement somewhat resembles an informal
parallel to the relationship between the two archbishops of Canterbury and
York, since more than one archbishop of Canterbury, notably Theodore,
acted from time to time as though he had ultimate jurisdiction over the
entire English church.
The evidence suggests that the two churches of Armagh and Kildare both
launched a major propaganda campaign some time during the first half of
the seventh century, having come to some kind of an agreement to back up
rather than destroy one another’s claims to dominance, thus slotting
themselves in as First and Second in the pecking-order of the churches of
Ireland.”” The Armagh—Kildare relationship is further indicated by
Muircha, whose model (as he said in his preface) was ‘pater meus
Coguitosus’, by whom we should almost certainly understand Cogitosus,
author of the Vita I/ of St Brigit.
In pointing out that this all represents an extremely sophisticated use of
the craft of literacy, cunningly exploiting its advantages over oral narrative
and utilizing the rhetorical skills that can marshal a collection of shaky facts
and downright misinformation into an apparently watertight case, it should
not be overlooked that Armagh and Kildare are the two religious sites of
Ireland most likely to have had their origins in the old religion. St Brigit is
completely a-historical, and shows every sign of being the Celtic goddess of
the same name, perfunctorily euhemerized and provided with a biography.
Ard Machae and Emain Machae were the twin capitals of the Ulaid, not in
the sense that either was a royal citadel, but that they were sacred sites of
great importance. ‘Cathedral Hill, the ancient Ard Macha, is the only Irish
pagan celtic sanctuary-site which we can identify with any degree of
certainty.’”’ Sharpe has therefore argued that the custodians of the sacred
site came to a joint decision to go over to the new religion, and, being
without a patron saint in the usual way, annexed St Patrick, and set about

founded by Patrick was held by Brigit’s uncle, Mac Cairthin, and in 16 (3) (2brd., p. 136),
that the church in which Brigit received the veil from Mac Caille was also a foundation of
Patrick’s.
©? Sharpe, ‘St Patrick’, 38-9.
0 Sharpe, ‘Vitae S. Brigitae : the oldest texts’, 102-3; and see further Kim McCone, ‘Brigit in
the seventh century: a saint with three lives?’, Penttia 1 (1982), 107-45, at 115-18 and
136~44.

1 Etienne Rynne, ‘Celtic stone idols in Ireland’, in The [ron Age in the Irish Sea Province,
Council for British Archaeology Research Report 9, ed. Charles Thomas (London, 1972),
pp. 79-98, p. 80. This has been recently reinforced by Brian Lambkin, in a paper he gave at
the 1987 Irish Conference of Historians, Maynooth, in which he suggested that a pagan
deer-cult was in existence at Armagh not only in Patrick’s time, but even in Muirchu’s.
26 Jane Stevenson
empire-building and consolidating their position within the new religious
framework.” It is not necessarily irrelevant that it was the two Irish
religious sites with the most obvious pagan antecedents that were able to
manipulate oral and written sources with such skill and flair that they
imposed their version of reality not only on their contemporaries, but on
every historian of the church of Ireland down to the twentieth century.
Patrick and Brigit are two of the Three Thaumaturges of Ireland not from
some kind of natural right, but because Ultan, Cogitosus, Muirchti and
Tirechan, or perhaps rather the prelates whom they wrote to serve, put
them in that position, and kept them there (the third, Columba, was the
subject of an equally brilliant propaganda campaign, but one which is
outside the scope of this discussion).”°
The Patrician dossier in the Book of Armagh, besides illuminating the
relationship between specific churches, also sheds a more general light on
interactions between the Christians and the filid. This is obviously relevant
to the question of the position of literacy in early Ireland. One of the more
important testimonies to this relationship is the story of Patrick, Dubthach
moccu Lugair and Fiacc.’* One important thing about it is that it shows
later writers, looking back at the beginnings of Christianity, assuming that
Patrick turned to the orders of poets, who were, after all, the native
intelligentsia, when he sought suitable candidates for the episcopacy.”
Muircht was evidently aware of this story, since he brought Dubthach,
Patrick and Fiacc together, claiming that Dubthach was the first pagan to
honour Patrick as a holy man.” Fiacc became first bishop of Sleaty
(Sléibte), so it is interesting that Muircht tells this story: Aed, the then
bishop of Sleaty, was the man who commissioned Muircht to write. It
would seem that Aed, in the late seventh century, saw no cause for
embarrassment in confirming that the founder of his see (who was also a
member of his kin-group)” had had his first training as a pagan fill.”®

“ Sharpe, ‘St Patrick’, 53-6.

73 See, for example, J.-M. Picard, ‘The purpose of Adomnan’s Vita Columbae’, Peritia |
(1982), 161-92.
Additamenta 14. 1-5, PT, pp. 176-7.
® T[bid.: ‘Patrick asked Dubthach for the material of a bishop from among his disciples of
Leinster’.
76 Muircha, 1.20, PT, p. 92.
7 Ni Dhonnchadha, ‘The guarantor list’, 192-3. Aed and Fiacc were both Uj Bairrche.
’8 There is a hymn to Patrick in the Irish Liber Hymnorum attributed to Fiacc, though clearly
much later, which claims to be based on ‘stories’ (scélaib, stanza 1) and ‘writings’ (lini,
stanza 6), ed. Bernard and Atkinson, I, p. 97, II, p. 32. This composite hymn gives in the
 LITERACY IN IRELAND 27
The sources of the Patrick dossier, and the latent information about the
attitude of seventh-century churchmen to writing which it conceals, by no
means exhaust the interest of this material for the study of literacy. A
considerable proportion of the text of Tirechan, and also the appended
additamenta, consists of short descriptions of the donation of churches or
property to God and St Patrick, by named individuals, which evidently
bear some relationship to the concept of a charter.”? As Doherty put it:

The work of Tirechan, writing about the same time, takes us closer to the detailed
research undertaken to substantiate the claims so clearly reflected in Muircht’’s life.
Tirechan’s journeys, allegedly following the missionary circuits of Patrick, were .
really field-surveys of old missionary and diocesan churches (not necessarily
Patrician) which were now in decay or which were aligned to politically irrelevant
communities.”

Tirechan’s language for recording the perpetual gift of land, a community,

or a family, to Patrick is formulaic and legalistic. He uses the word immolo
(‘I offer’) to mark a formal gift, for example: ‘et dixit Endeus: “filium meum
et partem hereditatis meae ego zmmolo Deo Patricii et Patricio” (my
italics).°' The permanence of gifts made to Patrick and his church is often
stressed, with words like ‘in saeculum’, ‘sempiternum’, ‘usque in diem
iudicu’. Another word which seems to bear a precise legal significance in
this context is oblatio, found, for example, in Liber Angeli: ‘item ait
[Patricius]: “Nonne ergo mihi sufficit quicquid deuote uouerint ac

fifteen stanzas which seem to be the earliest part the name Cothraige, Patrick’s sojourn in the
Tyrrhene Sea, and the information that he studied the ‘canon’ (the New Testament). This
suggests an acquaintance with either Muirchu or his sources, and perhaps the possibility
that a Patrick dossier was formed at Sleaty as well as at Armagh. Both Aed and his successor
Conchad made a formal submission of Sleaty to the abbot of Armagh (additamenta 16.1-2,
| PT, pp. 178-9) which, as Ni Dhonnchadha says, ‘was in effect the forging of a monastico-
political alliance between Sleaty, one of the principal churches of the declining Uf Bairrche
(to which Aed of course belonged) and the rising star of Armagh’ (“The guarantor list’, pp.
185-6). So Sleaty in Aed’s time had come to identify Patrick and Armagh’s interests with its
own.
”? Wendy Davies, ‘The Latin charter tradition’, in Ireland in Early Mediaeval Europe, ed.
Dorothy Whitelock, Rosamond McKitterick and David Dumville (Cambridge, 1982), pp.
274-80, has discussed the distinctive characteristics of what seems to be a Celtic charter-
tradition. She has found a corpus of 203 complete charters of a consistent and distinctive
type, at least a hundred fragments of the same type, and four charter inscriptions on stone
(pp. 259-61). The Tirechan additamenta are discussed on p. 273.
80 Charles Doherty, ‘Some aspects of hagiography as a source for Irish economic history’,
Peritia 1 (1982), 300-28, at 303.
81 Tirechan, 15 (2), PT, pp. 134-5: ‘and Ende said: “I offer my son and my share in the
inheritance to the god of Patrick and to Patrick.”’
223 Fane Stevenson...
uoluerint Christiani homines offere de regionibus atque oblationibus suis
per arbitrium suae libertatis?”’.8* Doherty concludes, ‘as Eoin Mac Néill
pointed out a long time ago, oblationes above [he gave two examples from
the additamenta to Tirechan] is equivalent to “zdparta”’, the technical Irish
word for grants to the church’. The verbs zmmolare and offerre, then, are
being used in a highly technical sense. The force of zmmolare may be ‘to
alienate’ with offerre meaning ‘to grant’.®
The additamenta to Tirechan are even more legalistic in content, and
form what is effectively a narrative cartulary. I will quote a couple of
consecutive examples (in English, since the text is in Irish):
Ernéne made over to Cummén and to Alach and to Ernin Tir Gimmae and Muine

doomsday. .
Buachaile and Tamnach. These three nuns made over these lands to Patrick until

Cummén and Brethann purchased Ochter Achid together with its [whole] estate,
in wood, plain, and meadow, with its enclosure and its herb-garden. Hence half this
heritage belongs absolutely to Cummén, in house, in man, until her chattels be paid
to her, that is, three ounces of silver, and a can of silver, and a necklace worth three
ounces, and a circlet of gold [calculated] according to ancient measurements and
ancient dimensions: the value of half an ounce in pigs and the value of half an ounce
in sheep, and a garment worth half an ounce, all of these calculated according to
ancient measurements [and given] on account of a marriage settlement.**
These are, as the examples show, very detailed records of transactions, even
though they do not have the usual distinguishing features of a charter, such
as a witness list. Their formal character shows that they were based on
previously existing documents, and are evidence that the church of Armagh
made some use of charters in the seventh and eighth centuries, although
these are otherwise not attested in Ireland until the eleventh and twelfth
centuries.® These records differ from the characteristic western European
charter, in that they do not have a formal protocol, initial invocation, formal
title and address, dating clause, or subscriptions or other signs of validation.
But these formal deficiencies are also found in the other Celtic charters
discussed by Davies, who notes that, as a group, Celtic charters are
retrospective not dispositive in intention, and not claiming to be issued by

82 Liber Angeli, § 13, PT, pp. 186-7: ‘again he said: “is it not sufficient for me, whatever
Christian men have devoutly vowed and wished to offer me from their land, offerings of
their own free choice?””’.
83 Doherty, ‘Some aspects of hagiography’, p. 305, quoting Eoin MacNeill, ed. John Ryan, St
Patrick (Dublin and London, 1964), p. 200.
84 Additamenta, PT, pp. 174-5.
85 Richard Sharpe, ‘Dispute settlement in medieval Ireland: a preliminary inquiry’, in
Settlement of Disputes, pp. 169-89, at p. 174.
 LITERACY IN [IRELAND 29
the author of the grant. Instead, like late imperial notitrae, they are
intended to be a narrative record of a transaction which has already taken
place.*°
The concept of a witness list was not unknown in seventh-century
Ireland, as the Cain Adomnain demonstrates. This was a nationally
accepted law for the protection of non-combatants proclaimed by
Adomnan, abbot of Iona, at the Synod of Birr in 697, and witnessed by
forty-one abbots and bishops, beginning with the bishop of Armagh, and
hfty kings, from all over Ireland. The list of signatories, or witnesses,
appears to be perfectly genuine.*’ In the Book of Armagh, the list of names
associated with Trim in the additamenta may possibly represent the
fragmented remains of a witness list, with the names given a perfunctory
genealogical form.*® This garbled account in the additamenta is the only
occasion on which the principle of the guarantor or witness list can be shown
to have been extended from ecclesiastical legislation to ecclesiastical
charters. The additamenta show several different styles of writing. The
documentation of patrician churches in Connacht appears to be a disjointed
series of extracts from charters or notulae. By contrast, the ramified
churches and churchmen associated with Trim and Sleaty are cast into the
form of stories, full of circumstantial detail. This may represent a compro-
mise between the ecclesiastical tradition of the charter, and the secular
society's senchas (topographical, legal and genealogical traditions, includ-
ing tribal history), the essentially oral form in which a class of specialists
within Irish society maintained knowledge from one generation to the
next.°°
It is not easy to answer the question of why Armagh chose to record land
transactions 1n this way in the context of normal Irish legal practice, which
established the rights and wrongs of inheritance mainly by appeal to
witnesses, memory and the swearing of oaths: ‘extant sources suggest that
written evidence of title to land never became widely accepted in Irish legal

8© Davies, ‘The Latin charter tradition’, p. 262.

87 Ni Dhonnchadha, ‘The guarantor list’, 178-81.
*8 Additamenta, 2 (1)-4 (2), PT, pp. 168-71. I owe this suggestion to Richard Sharpe, who
also points out that the plebilis progenies (‘lay succession’) of Fedelmid on pp. 170-1 is
particularly suspicious. The Irish concept of inheritance within an extended family group
makes the nine clear generations of direct father-son inheritance which this text purports to
show fundamentally implausible. The names may have started off as witnesses to the
submission of Trim to Armagh. See Richard Sharpe, review of PT, Eigse 18 (1980-1), 329-
32, at 331-2.
89 F.J. Byrne, ‘““Senchas”: the nature of Gaelic historical tradition’, Historical Studies 9
(1974), 137-59, at 138.
30 Fane Stevenson
practice’.”” The normal procedures are recorded in the early vernacular
lawtract Berrad Atrechta (The Shearing of the Court), § 59: ‘As the native
law recites: where is proof found in Irish law? Do heirs have memories
without ogam [inscriptions] on stones, without public lot-casting, without
mac-sureties, without vath-sureties? Although they have been proclaimed,
how shall contracts of the [deceased] ancestors be enforced? It is witnesses
who make fast proof.”! However, a little later, the concept of written
evidence is introduced, though as only one of a list of alternatives: ‘for those
are the seven things which dissolve any [attempt at] dissolving [a contract].
Valid witnessing, immovable stones, rath-sureties [as a guarantee| of
prescriptive rights, godly old writings’, etc.”
This charter tradition in early Ireland is, as the words translated ‘godly
old writings’ (senscriband deoda) indicates, a Christian interpolation in the
normal processes of Irish land law. The ecclesiastical context of the Celtic
charter tradition as a whole is clear and explicit. It is also noticeable that
some of the formulaic vocabulary commented on by Davies and Doherty
can be paralleled in patristic and early ecclesiastical writing, for example,
immolare meaning ‘give’, found in both Ambrose and Isidore.?* Davies has
argued that the background to this development was in late and post-
imperial Britain.”* Celtic charters (Irish, Welsh and Breton) represent the
fossilized practice of the bishops of western Britain in the mid-fifth century,
which in themselves reflect the bureaucracy of the Roman administration.
The Irish canon collection records, in her view, an attempted introduction
of land contracts ‘more Romanorum’ as early as the end of the sixth
century.” Irish ecclesiastics were certainly persisting with the form in the
eighth century for the Collectio Canonum Hibernensis records the appeal to
written testimony in the case of a dispute between churches:” ‘Sinodus

99 Sharpe, ‘Dispute settlement’, p. 170. Geardid Mac Niocaill, ‘Admissible and inadmissible
evidence in early Irish law’, The Irish Junst NS 4 (1969), 332-7, gives as the three main
classes of admissible evidence: oath-helpers, casting of lots or submission to an ordeal and
sworn evidence. Written evidence, apart from ancient inscriptions on ogam stones, was
accepted only reluctantly.
”! Translation from Robin Stacey, ‘Berrad Airechta’, in Lawyers and Laymen: Studies in the
Estory of Law Presented to Professor Dafydd Jenkins on his Seventy-Fifth Birthday, Gwyl
Ddewi, 1986, ed. 'T.M. Charles-Edwards, Morfydd E. Owen and D.B. Walters (Cardiff,
1986), pp. 210-33, at pp. 220-1.
% Berrad Atrechta, § 62 (1bid., p. 221).
73 Davies, ‘The Latin charter tradition’, pp. 277-8.
4 Ibid., pp. 274-80.
5 Ibid., p. 268.
© Die Irische Kanonensammlung, ed. Wasserschleben, rev. edn, XLII, § 8, pp. 163—4 (see
also XXXII, § 24, pp. 11-18). As Mac Niocaill pointed out, ‘Admissible and inadmissible
 LITERACY IN IRELAND 31
Hibernensis: Ager inquiratur in scriptione duarum ecclesiarum, si in
scriptione non inueniatur, requiratur a senioribus et propinquis, quantum
temporis fuit cum altera, et sit sub tubileo certo mansit, sine uituperatione
maneat in eternum. Si vero senes non inuenti fuerint, dividant.”’ There is
another example of this ecclesiastical stress on written transactions in
Synodus Il S. Patrictt, which Hughes dates to the second half of the sixth
century.”* ‘Numquam uetitur licet, uirum obseruande sunt legis iubelei,
hoc est quinquagissimi anni, ut non adfirmentur incerta ueterato tempore;
et ideo omnes neguti<ati>o subscriptione <more> Romanorum confir-
manda est.”
Another issue which is relevant to the Irish church’s problem with native
land law is that of permanent tenure. It will be remembered that the
additamenta record gifts of land to Patrick ‘usque in diem iudicii’. Within
secular Irish society, land was owned by the kin-group rather than the
individual and was theoretically inalienable. This clashed directly with the
need of the church to establish permanent land-holdings, and the compro-
mise adopted was a period of legal warranty, based on the Old Testament
tubtlaeum, from which it was given the name tubail/iubaile. Within this
variable period (often much less than the biblical fifty years), either party, if
dissatisfied, could claim restitution. This was to ensure that land was not
alienated without the full consent of the whole kin-group. The compilers of
Hibernensts accepted the principle, but made some important exceptions to
it, °° stressing that the zwbazle applied only to family land, but not in other

evidence’, 333, we find in the Hibernensis evidence that the church accepted both forms of
evidence: see particularly XXXVI, §5 (zbid., p. 129): ‘accepi librum possessionis tuae
signatum; accepi stipulationes [=nazdm, ‘enforcing surety’] et ratas [=rath, ‘paying
surety] et signa.’ See Mac Niocaill, ‘Admissible and inadmissible evidence’, or Sharpe,
‘Dispute settlement’, for further explanation of these terms.
7 «An Irish synod: [the ownership of] a field should be inquired for in the records of the two
churches. If it is not found in the records, it is sought among the elders and neighbours, for
how long a time it was with the other [church], and if it remained clearly theirs throughout
the period of warranty, let it remain theirs for ever, without argument. If it was not found,
let it be divided.’ Between churches, written record is tried first, then appeal to the memory
of witnesses.
8 Hughes, ‘Synodus II S. Patrici’ (see n. 35). The Irish Penitentials, ed. Bieler, pp. 184-97,
at p. 196.
” ‘Concerning claims that have become obsolete: Although these are not forbidden at any
time, yet the laws of the jubilee year, that is, of every fiftieth year, are to be observed, so that
claims that have become uncertain through lapse of time may not be asserted; and therefore
every business transaction should be confirmed by signature in the Roman manner’ (The
Insh Penitentials, ed. Bieler, p. 197). There is a variant version of this canon in Hibernenszs
XXXVI, § 8 (Die Insche Kanonensammlung, ed. Wasserschleben, p. 130).
1 Hibernensis XXXVI, § 10 (Die Inrische Kanonensammlung, ed. Wasserschleben, p. 130).
The whole of Book XXXVI (pp. 128-31) is devoted to the zubaile and problems of
land-law.
32 Jane Stevenson
circumstances, of which the most practically significant is the gift of land by
a king to the church.
This use of charters in the Book of Armagh is a demonstration of the way
in which the literate habit of mind did and did not impinge on early
mediaeval Ireland. The Romano-British Christians who settled in Ireland
appear to have brought the concept of the charter with them, and used it
among themselves as the Hibernensis and the Armagh additamenta, which
are evident copies of earlier notes of agreements, both show. Since
Christianity is dependent on literacy and the preservation of documents in
any case, there was little to be lost by adding the making of notes on
property to the scriptorium’s tasks. So the reason that the Armagh docu-
ments seem to be an isolated experiment must be sought elsewhere. The
apparent failure of the most important church in Ireland to introduce the
charter as an effective weapon suggests a great reluctance on the part of Irish
secular society to accept the imposition of this alien approach to witnessing
transactions. Secular Irish society clung to its own way of dealing with land
rights. The church’s way, as Berrad Airechta shows, was recognized to
some extent, but not copied. The secular lawyers retained enough prestige
and confidence to keep the church from gathering the right to record and
arbitrate in land law into its own hands.’°’ Tirechan’s writing, even as early
as the 670s, may represent a move away from the charter-like documents
which underlie the additamenta, since the latter carried no evidential
weight outside of the monastery walls, and towards the native Irish concept
of appealing to the memory of witnesses. But whereas a secular senchaid
orally recalled the details of a land transaction, appealing to the witness of
common memory and physical objects such as standing stones, Tirechan,
standing in a comparable position, wrote circumstantial stories. It 1s a
compromise between an oral and a literate tradition, and it was successfully
forced on the church by the secular legal tradition.
The Book of Armagh also offers another level of information about
literacy in Ireland, which is to do with its orthography, specifically its
spelling of Irish. The text includes an abundance of proper names, and
much of the additamenta is in Irish prose. Although the book was put
together at the beginning of the ninth century, from copies of the texts at
least two removes from the originals, the scribes seem to have copied the

'O! This, as D.A. Binchy commented, was unusual: ‘one of the most revolutionary innovations
following the partial “reception” of Roman rules [among barbarian peoples] was the
insistence that certain juristic acts, notably transfers of ownership in land, should be
enforced in writing. In this way, an illiterate population had to rely on the services of the
only persons in the community who were skilled in this novel and mysterious art, members
of the clerical order’ (‘Irish History and Irish Law, I’, Studia Hibernica 15 (1975), 7-36, at
28-9).
 LITERACY IN IRELAND 33
names in the additamenta as they found them in the sources. It may also be
the case that Muirchti and Tirechdn themselves reproduced the ortho-
graphic forms found in their written sources. Many names are preserved in
very archaic forms, and, even more significantly, there are traces of more
than one orthographic system in use.
The background of literacy in Ireland is complex. There is evidence,
which is no later than the fifth century, that the Irish developed literacy for
themselves, independent of the church, and in direct response to the
literacy of the Roman Empire, with which they traded and negotiated. This
evidence is in an unique and cumbersome script called ogam, which is a
system of parallel strokes, apparently developed for carving on wood and
stone, and possibly as a cypher. The surviving monuments are short
inscriptions on immovably large boulders, normally saying ‘{the monu-
ment] of x, son of y’, or ‘of x, son of y, moccu z’, the last element being a sort
of tribal name. This material has been recently subjected to a searching
examination by Harvey,'”* who has concluded that in spite of the limited
nature of the surviving evidence, some part of the Irish population was
literate both in Latin and Irish from a very early date.!"°
The Romano-British Christians who came to Ireland in the fifth century
brought with them the Christian’s far greater dependence on writing (as we
have already seen in the context of the charters), and a characteristic
orthographic scheme of their own, which was based on the pronunciation
that they used both for their own language and for Latin. As Harvey has
pointed out, in an early mediaeval context, the spoken language provides
the phonetic fixed point (the concept of a ‘reformed pronuncation’ of Latin
is a very modern one), and Latin provides the orthographic fixed point.
Jackson brought out the implications of this in a lucid formulation: ‘For
example, they [the British] pronounced medicus as [medigéas], and conse-
quently regarded the Latin letters d and c as meaning respectively /6/ and /g/
when standing between vowels, and so mutatis mutandis with the letters p,
t,b, g, andk.’'™* The native Irish and the British orthographic systems are

102 A. Harvey, ‘Early literacy in Ireland: the evidence from ogam’, CMCS 14 (Winter, 1987),
1-14.
'03 It seems historically plausible that the first Irish literates were the merchants or
entrepreneurs who dealt directly with the Romans, and that the craft of writing filtered
through the community to the native Irish learned class, which maintained considerable
faith in the craft of memory-training and oral transmission, and allowed writing only a
limited and subsidiary place.
'°* Kenneth Jackson, ‘Who taught whom to write Irish and Welsh?’, in ‘Some questions in
dispute about early Welsh literature and language’, Studia Celtica 8-9 (1973-4), 1-32, at
18. Similarly, in this system, Patricius was pronounced /pa:drig(ius)/, poc (‘kiss’) as /po:g/,
popul (‘people’) as /pobul/, etc. See also Harvey, ‘Early Literacy in Ireland’.
34 Jane Stevenson
not widely divergent, but are occasionally incompatible. However, the
process by which the British-derived orthographic system superseded the
native orthography is one of ‘merger and adjustment between two only
slightly varying systems’.’°° One of Harvey’s most important findings is that
there is a continuous development between the orthography of the early
ogam inscriptions and the standard orthography of Old Irish, with some
‘manuscript’ spellings on ogam stones, and some ‘ogam’ spellings in
manuscripts. This is complemented by McManus’ work on the chronologi-
cal development of Old Irish, which similarly shows a continuous develop-
ment from the most archaic types of Latin loanword to the later types,
rather than two distinct strata, a wave of archaic ‘Cothriche’ loans in the
fifth century, and another wave of ‘Patraic’ loans in the sixth or seventh.
Kelly demonstrated that the orthographic forms in the writings of
Muircht and Tirechan basically reflect the orthography of the original
seventh-century authors, even though the Book of Armagh is at least two
removes from the original exemplars.'°° One important feature of
Muirchi’s orthographic system is the doubling of unlenited consonants
(ard or ardd; ecne, eccne ; mac, macc; Colgu, Colggu)'*’ Harvey has shown
in his paper on early literacy in Ireland that in the ogam inscriptions,
consonants are doubled to indicate unlenitability, except when they are in
word-initial position, where the purely orthographic convention (borrowed
from Latin) that words never begin with doubled consonants overrides the
phonetic rule.'°® Muirchit’s text seems to be showing some acquaintance
with this native Irish spelling system, though he normally uses the British-
derived method of differentiating lenited and unlenited consonants.
Muircht’s treatment of Ultan’s name also deviates from standard spelling:
the ¢ in the name stands for /d/, but when he refers to a book ‘abud Uldanum
episcopum’ the d must, presumably, be read as/d/, not as /6/ (or 9).!°? So the

105 Damian McManus, ‘A chronology of the Latin loanwords in early Irish’, Eviu 34 (1983),
21-72, and idem, “The so-called Cothrige and Patraic strata of Latin loanwords in early
Irish’, in Ireland and Europe: The Early Church, ed. Ni Chathdin and Richter,
pp. 179-96.
'6 Fergus Kelly, ‘Notes on the Irish words, with particular reference to dating’, PT,
pp. 242-8.
'07 Ibid., p. 244. The existence of orthographic rules which were to some extent mutually
contradictory resulted in a good deal of uncertainty in the writers who attempted to use
them. The treatment of post-vocalic /d/ is an obvious case in point, and the rule that
unlenited, but non-initial, consonants should be doubled is another. Native users of
orthographic systems do frequently misapply their own rules, either by false analogy or
hypercorrection — an example of this in English is the misspelling of wezrd, sezze, etc.,
which results from the rule ‘“ before e except after c’.
108 Harvey, ‘Early literacy in Ireland’.
109 The spelling of the sound /d/ post-vocalically (i.e. in the middle or at the end of a word) was
 LITERACY IN IRELAND 35
orthographic system used by an Irish bishop in the second half of the
seventh century would appear to have some part of its origin in a system of
writing the Irish language which was already ancient by his time, and
independent of the Romano-British Christian influence on literacy in
Ireland. Here, as in the other early Irish manuscript books, we find the
confluence of two different orthographic traditions.
This philological research 1s very exciting in its historical implications, in
that it points firmly to a native Irish tradition of literacy, which occupied
only a limited place in the social structure. That is, there 1s not a simple
opposition between a literate religion and an illiterate society, but a contrast
between a native Irish tradition of literacy, and a writing-dependent
Christian Church. The Book of Armagh is a crucial link in the chain of
evidence.
The Book of Armagh illustrates the problem of literacy in early mediaeval
Ireland in many ways. Directly, 1t shows the kinds of use that the seventh-
and eighth-century church in Ireland made of literacy. Indirectly, it may
also be used to shed light on the extent to which literacy impinged on the
non-clerical population, and the gap between the church’s aspirations and
the social and political reality within which it had to operate. It shows us a
seventh-century church with a very substantial commitment to Latin
literacy, as a look at the surprisingly large amount of seventh-century
Hiberno-Latin literature which survives well demonstrates.''’ But for all
that, the church on its own, without the substructure of the imperial Roman
administration to support it, was unable to bring the crucially important
area of property rights and land law into a literate framework. For this
reason, the case of early mediaeval Ireland calls into question commonly
received notions about the power of literacy in itself to effect social change.

particularly problematic for Irish writers who worked in milieux in which the British-
derived orthography had not yet completely superseded the native Irish spelling-system.
In British, t lenites as /6/ post-vocalically, in Irish, ¢ lenites as /O8/. This naturally caused a
good deal of confusion and hypercorrection.
10 The ‘Ireland’ section of BCL lists approximately fifty-five texts of varying lengths and
characters known to have been written in Ireland in or before the seventh century.
 2.

Anglo-Saxon lay society

and the written word

Susan Kelly

The study of literacy in Anglo-Saxon England in some ways resembles the

hunt for a certain elusive type of sub-atomic particle: the direct evidence for
its existence is negligible but the fact that it does exist can be inferred from
its perceived effect upon its environment. When we scour the primary
sources for references to reading and writing, to the literacy of individuals,
to basic education and book-ownership, our haul is sparse indeed.
Inferences drawn from scribal competency can be suggestive, but hardly
provide a sufficient basis for general analysis of the quality and extent of
Anglo-Saxon literacy. The conclusions that derive from this type of
material are plainly limited; they tend to reinforce the traditional view that
literacy was essentially an ecclesiastical preserve, for it is impossible to
demonstrate that the occasional indication to the contrary is anything more
than an exception. Fortunately, the argument can be amplified by consider-
ing the problem from a rather different perspective and studying the ways in
which the Anglo-Saxons utilized the written word and the extent to which
writing superseded speech and memory as the standard method of convey-
ing and storing information. This approach leads us to a rather different
conclusion, for it seems to show that by the end of the period, if not several
centuries before, written documentation had an important place in secular
society and was used in ways which could imply a degree of literacy among
certain sections of the laity.
Before we can assess the impact which literacy had on Anglo-Saxon
society, it 1s necessary to try to establish a starting point for the investiga-
tion. The obvious answer might seem to be the seventh century, when
Christianity and its attendant Latin literary culture gained a foothold in
England. But it would be a mistake to see pagan Anglo-Saxon society as
entirely ignorant of writing. The Anglo-Saxon settlers brought with them
from Germany the runic alphabet and there survives a small corpus of runic
inscriptions on stones and on portable objects, which includes examples
from the pagan period and from subsequent Christian centuries. Most of
36
 ANGLO-SAXON LAY SOCIETY 37
these inscriptions are very short, consisting of no more than a name or a
couple of words, and some seem to be gibberish, with possible magical
connotations. But there is a handful of slightly longer texts, the most sig-
nificant being the inscriptions on the Auzon (Franks) Casket and the lines
from The Dream of the Rood which were engraved on the Ruthwell Cross’.
The limited nature of the evidence makes it difficult to evaluate the
importance of runes in pagan Anglo-Saxon society and the extent of runic
literacy. A point of some interest is that runic characters were originally
devised for engraving on wood, which 1s only rarely preserved from the
early middle ages. The site of the mediaeval city at Bergen in Norway has
yielded approximately 550 runic inscriptions on wood dating from the
fourteenth century, many of them letters and everyday messages cut into
small wooden sticks or tablets which were easily transported.* There is
some evidence for rune-stick letters in Scandinavian contexts as far back as
the ninth century.’ It is possible that the early Anglo-Saxons made
extensive use of rune-sticks for practical communications, but the absence
of even one surviving example makes it difficult to proceed beyond
speculation. We do have some evidence for familiarity with the runic
alphabet among the educated classes of society. For instance, the solution to
certain Anglo-Saxon riddles depends upon knowledge of runes, and the
poet Cynewulf used them to attach a cryptic ‘signature’ to some of his
works.‘ In the later part of the eighth century two runes (p, p) were adopted
into the Roman alphabet for writing words in the vernacular, in order to
represent sounds in English (/e/, /6/, /u/) for which there was no Latin
equivalent; this suggests that some Anglo-Saxon clerics were literate in
runes.° There are runic legends on a number of proto-pennies (sceattas)
from the seventh and eighth centuries and on a few pennies of late eighth-
and early ninth-century date from Mercia, Northumbria and East Anglia,
which indicates at the very least that some moneyers were familiar with
runic script.° But there are signs that by the later Anglo-Saxon period runes
1 The most accessible discussion of runes and runic inscriptions is by R.I. Page, An
Introduction to English Runes (London, 1973).
2 A. Liestgl, ‘Correspondence in runes’, Mediaeval Scandinavia, 1 (1968), 17-27.
5 A. Liestgl, ‘The literate Vikings’, Proceedings of the Sixth Viking Congress, ed. P. Foote and
D. Strémback (Uppsala, 1971), pp. 69-78.
* Riddles: Page, Introduction, pp. 202-5. Cynewulf: K. Sisam, Studies in the History of Old
Enghsh Literature (Oxford, 1953), pp. 1-28.
> For the date, see A. Campbell, Old English Grammar (Oxford, 1959), pp. 12, 26-8, and K.
Sisam, ‘Anglo-Saxon royal genealogies’, Proceedings of the British Academy 32 (1953), 287-
346, at 310-11.
° Page, Introduction, pp. 119-33; P. Grierson and M. Blackburn, Medieval European
Coinage, I: The Early Middle Ages (5th to 10th Centuries) (Cambridge, 1986), pp, 158, 293,
and nos. 668-9, 685-6, 707-15, 1121la—c, 1236, 1479, 1482.
 38 Susan Kelly
were no longer in common use and might be regarded primarily as an exotic
script with cryptic possibilities.’
It appears that Latin and the Roman alphabet were first introduced into
the Anglo-Saxon areas of Britain by foreign missionaries from the later sixth
century onwards.® In southern England the primary influence was from
Rome and the Frankish church, but the north was effectively evangelized
by missionaries from Ireland and Iona and long retained strong cultural
links with these areas, even after the capitulation of the Northumbrian
clergy to Roman usage at the Synod of Whitby in 664.’ It would be
interesting to consider whether the impact of literacy and the written word
on early Anglo-Saxon society was appreciably different in these two areas,
but the distribution of the surviving evidence makes such comparison very
difficult. From southern England we have numerous documents of secular
interest, mainly in the form of land-charters and law-codes. In the north
and east of the country this type of documentation disappeared, presumably
as a result of the upheavals of the Scandinavian settlements, and thus most
of the surviving material from the earlier period of Anglo-Saxon history in
these areas is concerned with purely ecclesiastical or scholarly matters.!° It
is clear that Irish scholarship was an enormous inspiration to the Northum-

’ See Page, Introduction, pp. 34-5, 69-70, 215; R. Derolez, Runica Manuscripta (Bruges,
1954), pp. 137-69.
® For the progress of evangelization see H. Mayr-Harting, The Coming of Chnistianity to
Anglo-Saxon England (London, 1972). Augustine and his companions were preceded in
southern England by Liudhard, the bishop who had accompanied the Merovingian princess
Bertha to Kent on her marriage to King Aithelberht I: Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the
Enghsh People, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969), pp.
72-4 (1.25). The marriage is usually dated to before 560, which implies the presence of
literate Franks in Kent for almost four decades before Augustine’s arrival. It has been
suggested that this was of some significance for the recording of sixth-century events in the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: K. Harrison, The Framework of Anglo-Saxon History to A.D. 900
(Cambridge, 1976), pp. 121-3. There is, however, good reason to think that the marriage
should be dated rather later, perhaps as late as 581: see I. Wood, The Merovingian North
Sea, Occasional Papers on Mediaeval Topics 1 (Alingsas, Sweden, 1983), pp. 15-16.
? This clear-cut division should perhaps be modified: see J. Campbell, ‘The first century of
Christianity in England’, Ampleforth Journal 76 (1971), 12-29 (reprinted in his collected
papers, Essays in Anglo-Saxon History (London, 1986), pp. 49-67). For continuing
relations between Ireland and Northumbria, see K. Hughes, ‘Evidence for contacts between
the churches of the Irish and the English from the Synod of Whitby to the Viking Age’, in
England before the Conquest: Studies in Pinmary Sources Presented to Dorothy Whitelock,
| ed. P. Clemoes and K. Hughes (Cambridge, 1971), pp. 49-67.
'© For an indication that the Northumbrian church did produce land-charters see Stephanus,
The Life of Bishop Wilfrid, ed. and trans. B. Colgrave (Cambridge, 1927; paperback edn
1985), p. 16; and the reference to regalia edicta by Bede in his letter to Bishop Egbert: in
Venerabilis Baedae Opera Historica, ed. C. Plummer (Oxford, 1896), p. 415 and trans.
EHD, p. 805. See also P. Chaplais, “Who introduced charters into England? The case for
Augustine’, in Pnasca Munimenta, ed. F. Ranger (London, 1973), pp. 88-107, at pp.
101-2.
 ANGLO-SAXON LAY SOCIETY 39
brian church in the seventh and eighth centuries, but is is difficult to decide
whether this intellectual contact had an effect on the assimilation of the
written word into Northumbrian society. A potentially important point is
that the Irish ecclesiastics, like the English but unlike the Italian and
Frankish missionaries, spoke a vernacular which had no basis in Latin, and
were therefore accustomed to learning the literary language of the church as
a foreign tongue. It is possible that this experience of bilingualism was of
value to them in the training of Anglo-Saxon clerics in literary skills, and the
consequence could have been that literacy had a deeper foundation in the
Northumbrian church. The Irish may also have had some influence on the
early development of a tradition of vernacular writing in England, although
there 1s no clear evidence to this effect.'' I will consider below the links
between the vernacular literary tradition and lay literacy.
The primary and most accessible record of the interaction between early
Anglo-Saxon society and the written word is the Latin land-charter (techni-
cally, diploma) and the associated vernacular documents which deal with
land and property. We have some 1,500 such documents from the Anglo-
Saxon period as a whole, and about a third of these purport to date from the
ninth century or earlier.'* Approximately 300 charters survive as ‘originals’,
that is, written in contemporary script on separate sheets of parchment; the
rest are later copies on single sheets and copies in monastic cartularies.!°
This is a significant collection of material, but it can be difficult to use. A

'' The problems of the Irish missionaries and their attitude to the vernacular are considered by
D.N. Dumville, ‘Beowulf and the Celtic world: the uses of evidence’, Traditio 37 (1981),
109-60, at 110-20.
'? For a general introduction to Anglo-Saxon charters, see F.M. Stenton, Latin Charters of the
Anglo-Saxon Period (Oxford, 1955); EHD, pp. 369-84; N.P. Brooks, ‘Anglo-Saxon
charters: the work of the last twenty years’, Anglo-Saxon England 3 (1974), 211-31. The
surviving charters to the end of the reign of Edgar are edited by W. de G. Birch,
Cartularium Saxonicum, 3 vols. and index (London, 1885-99); later charters are found
only in the earlier edition of J.M. Kemble, Codex Diplomaticus Aevi Saxonici, 6 vols.
(London, 1839-48), in vols. III, 1V and VI. The vernacular documents are well edited by
F.E. Harmer, Select English Mistoncal Documents of the Ninth and Tenth Centuries
(Cambridge, 1914), and zdem, Anglo-Saxon Wnts (Manchester, 1952); Anglo-Saxon Wills,
ed. D. Whitelock (Cambridge, 1930); Anglo-Saxon Charters, ed. A.J. Robertson (Cam-
bridge, 1939; 2nd edn 1956) Three important archives exist in modern editions: Charters of
Rochester, ed. A. Campbell, Anglo-Saxon Charters 1 guide to London, 1973), Charters of
Burton Abbey, ed. P.H. Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters 2 (London, 1979) Charters of
Sherborne, ed. M. A. O’Donovan, Anglo-Saxon Charters 3 (London, 1988). The indis-
pensable guide to the study of this material is Sawyer’s handbook. For more recent work see
Brooks, ‘Anglo-Saxon charters’, and the articles listed in the annual bibliographies in Anglo-
Saxon England.
'3 Originals and later copies on single sheets are reproduced in BMF and OSF. Facsimiles of
Anglo-Saxon charters dating before c. 800 are to be found in ChLA III and IV. Charters
omitted from these collections and recent discoveries appear in a British Academy volume:
Simon Keynes, A Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Charters: Archives and Single Sheets (forth-
coming). On the definition of an ‘original’ diploma, see P. Chaplais, ‘Some early Anglo-
 40 Susan Kelly
fairly high proportion of Latin charters are forgeries or have been in some
way tampered with or rewritten. It is possible that this is true for as many as
a third of the extant texts, and for the earlier period the percentage of
suspicious documents is higher. Some forgeries are blatant, but in other
cases the fabrication or alteration can be detected only by the most subtle
scholarship; sometimes it is not possible to prove one’s suspicions of a
document. These difficulties of establishing authenticity should not prove a
deterrent against proper consideration of this type of source-material.
Charters provide the most important illustration of how the secular society
of Anglo-Saxon England absorbed the ecclesiastical gift of the written
word.
The earliest charters with any claim to authenticity date from the 670s
and come from Kent, Surrey and the kingdoms of the West Saxons and the
Hwicce. Shortly afterwards comes the first surviving East Saxon charter."
The date of these charters has led scholars to associate the introduction of
this type of document with the arrival in England in 669/70 of Theodore of
Tarsus and Abbot Hadrian, together with a fresh influx of Italian clerics.
But there are difficulties in accepting this view and some grounds for
suggesting that the idea of the land-charter was current in England at a
rather earlier date. The distribution of the earliest extant texts over such a
wide area of southern England seems incompatible with a very recent
introduction. So does the fact, highlighted by Chaplais, that these charters
broadly conform to a basic diplomatic pattern which is unique to England,
while exhibiting a range of variations within that pattern which suggests
that the local charter-scribes were familiar enough with the basic model to
depart from it with confidence; if the diplomatic initiative truly belonged to
Theodore’s time, we would expect a greater degree of uniformity."
Chaplais has argued in detail that the evidence points to the evolution of the
Anglo-Saxon charter over a fairly long period before the date of the first
surviving examples, and to the earliest Roman missionaries as the agents
who introduced the concept into England. Other scholars have recently
suggested that the Anglo-Saxon charter had rather more diverse origins;
they point to possible instances of Frankish and even Celtic influence, and
propose that the idea of charter-writing was introduced into different parts
of England by different agents at different times in the late sixth and seventh
centuries. '®
Saxon diplomas on single sheets: originals or copies?’, in Prsca Munimenta, ed. Ranger,
pp. 63-87.
4 Kent — Sawyer no. 8 (=EHD no. 56 (679)); Surrey — Sawyer no. 1165 (=EHD no. 54
(672X674)); Wessex — Sawyer no. 1164 (=E'AD no. 55 (670676)) Hwicce — Sawyer no.
51 (676); Essex — Sawyer no. 1171(=EHD no. 60 (685 X694)).
, ~ 18: Chaplais, ‘Who introduced charters into England?’, pp. 100-1.
, 16 A. Scharer, Die angelsdchsische Kénigsurkunde im 7 und 8. Jahrhundert (Vienna, 1982),
 ANGLO-SAXON LAY SOCIETY 41
Either contention requires us to account for the total disappearance of the
hypothetical charters written before c. 670 and the improved rate of
preservation immediately thereafter. An attractive explanation is that the
earliest charters were written on papyrus, which was the normal medium
for charter-writing in both Italy and Gaul in the sixth and seventh
centuries. The survival rate of papyrus documents in western Europe 1s
very poor indeed. The earliest surviving product of the papal chancery is a
letter of Hadrian I dated 788; beween this date and the second half of the
tenth century, when the papal chancery began to use parchment, only forty
papal bulls have been preserved as originals, out of the thousands that are
known to have been issued.'’ Of the Merovingian charters written on
papyrus, Pirenne has memorably observed, ‘La rareté des actes
mérovingiens ne doit ... pas nous faire illusion. Ils ne sont que les van
nantes échappés au gouffre de l’oubli.”’® The chancery of the Merovingian
kings used papyrus until the later part of the seventh century, when it was
phased out in favour of parchment. The available evidence points to the
670s as the period of transition: we have five originals on papyrus in the
name of Chlothar IIT (31 October 657-10 March 673), while the first
original on parchment was issued by Theuderic III in September 677." It
may be more than a coincidence that the earliest surviving Anglo-Saxon
original is a charter of Hlothhere of Kent, issued in May 679. The close
connection between the Merovingian and Kentish dynasties has long been
recognized. Two kings of Kent married Merovingian princesses, and many
of their descendants were given Frankish names (for instance, Hlothhere 1s
equivalent to Chlothar). Wood has recently put a strong case for the
existence of Merovingian overlordship not only over Kent but also over
much of southern England in the sixth and seventh centuries.*” This
political connection could have led to the imitation in England of some
Frankish administrative practices, and could perhaps have prompted the

pp. 56-7; P. Wormald, Bede and the Conversion of England: The Charter Evidence
(Jarrow Lecture, 1984), pp. 14-19.
'7 R.L. Poole, Lectures on the History of the Papal Chancery down to the Time of Innocent III
(Cambridge, 1915), p. 37, and see Noble’s comments 1n this volume, below, pp. 35-94.
'8 H. Pirenne, ‘Le Commerce du papyrus dans la Gaule mérovingienne’, Comptes Rendus des
Séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (1928), 179-91, at 183.
'? G. Tessier, Diplomatique royale francaise (Paris, 1962), p. 17. Tessier stresses that the
scarcity of originals makes it impossible to be sure whether or not there was an abrupt
abandonment of papyrus, but it seems certain that parchment was the normal medium for
charter-writing in Gaul by the end of the seventh century. Papyrus continued to be used in
Gaul until the eighth century and it seems unlikely that the changing practice of the
chancery is to be explained by shortage of papyrus or interruption in the supply: see N.
Lewis, Papyrus in Antiquity (Oxford, 1974), p. 92.
20 Wood, Merovingian North Sea, pp. 12-18.
 42. Susan Kelly |
jettisoning of papyrus by Anglo-Saxon charter-scribes in favour of parch-
ment. Unfortunately, this argument is difficult to sustain. As we shall see,
charters in early Anglo-Saxon England were almost certainly never written
in any form of royal chancery; they seem to have been drafted and written
mainly in episcopal scriptoria, at least until the early tenth century.
Moreover, it should be noted that the Frankish influence detectable in the
Anglo-Saxon charter is very slight. Direct imitation of the Merovingian
chancery therefore seems unlikely. The papyrus predecessors of the extant
diplomas must remain hypothetical.”
The peculiar nature of the Anglo-Saxon charter on its first appearance is
sufficient in itself to suggest a period of development prior to the 670s.
Superficially it seems to conform to normal diplomatic practice, but in its
essentials it breaches some of the most important diplomatic conventions.”
The most bizarre aspect is the complete absence of any outward mark of
validation. There is no sign of the autograph szgna or subscriptions of the
donor, witnesses and notary which were normally found in the Italian
private charter, nor of the autograph valedictions and monograms which
validated papal and imperial documents. The Anglo-Saxon diploma _
certainly concludes with a list of the subscriptions of ecclesiastical and lay
witnesses, but these are almost invariably written by a single scribe, usually
the scribe of the text. This is the case whether the subscriptions are in
subjective form (Ego N consensz) or objective form (Signum manus N), and
in spite of regular claims in the text that the subscription was autograph
(manu propria). There is not a single example in an Anglo-Saxon charter of
a true autograph subscription. This should not be regarded necessarily as a
reflection of massive illiteracy among clergy and laity. [talian diplomatic
made provision for the illiterate witness, who was allowed to make his mark
(usually the sign of the cross) alongside the note signum manus N. Both
subjective and objective subscriptions in Anglo-Saxon charters are
generally preceded by a cross, but not one of these can be proven to be
autograph; in surviving original charters the crosses are uniform and
presumably written by the scribe of the text. Thus, in an apparently

71 Note that a number of papal privileges and letters were sent to England in the seventh to
ninth centuries and that none of these has survived as originals: see W. Levison, England
and the Continent in the Eighth Century (Oxford, 1946), pp. 24-30, and pp. 255-7, for an
ingenious reconstruction of two corrupt papal privileges, apparently transcribed from
fragmentary papyrus originals.
2 See the discussion by Chaplais, ‘Single sheets’, passim.
*3 Bruckner has suggested that the crosses in a small number of Anglo-Saxon charters might be
autograph, but his examples are not convincing: ChLA III, no. 186, pp. 29-31, no. 190, pp.
, 42-3; IV, no. 236, pp. 16-17. See, however, S.D. Keynes, The Diplomas of King A:thelred
‘the Unready’, 978-1016 (Cambridge, 1980), p. 101 n. 54, for a diploma of 993 with
possible autograph crosses alongside some of the subscriptions.
 ANGLO-SAXON LAY SOCIETY 43
genuine charter datable to 697 or 712 in favour of a monastery at Lyminge,
King Wihtred of Kent declares that he has made the sign of the cross
because he does not know how to write (pro ignorantia litterarum signum
sancte crucis express); yet all the subscription-crosses in this charter are
identical.** The witness list of the Anglo-Saxon charter seems to represent
an attempt to imitate the outward form of a regular Italian charter without
regard for its legal substance. It is difficult to believe that any Mediter-
ranean ecclesiastic could be responsible for such a travesty. Rather, in its
received form the Anglo-Saxon charter seems to reflect some measure of
adaptation to English conditions and perhaps the dilution of the strict
diplomatic conventions at the hands of English clerics trained by Augustine
and his successors. The evidence suggests that the number of Roman
missionaries who travelled to England was fairly limited, and most seem to
have arrived within a few years of each other at the turn of the sixth century.
It is possible that the Anglo-Saxon charter acquired its unique features
during the central years of the seventh century, when the original mission-
aries were dying out and their English disciples were taking over the
episcopal chairs and scriptoria.
The early Anglo-Saxon diploma is essentially an ecclesiastical document,
unlike its Italian models which originated in secular society. In its typical
form it records a grant of land by a king to an individual cleric as the
representative of his community or to a member of the laity who wished to
use the land to found or endow a monastery. The diploma was drafted by an
ecclesiastic, usually the local bishop or one of his scribes, on behalf of the
beneficiary rather than the donor.** The conventional formulae employed
have a strong ecclesiastical flavour, the most obvious manifestation of this
being the substitution of spiritual punishments for the secular penalties
threatened against those who refused to abide by the provisions of the
grant.“° The Anglo-Saxon charter reflects the desire felt by the early
churchmen to have some written guarantee for their property. But what
legal force could such a document have in secular Anglo-Saxon society? It
was all very well for the church to assert that its own records, drawn up in
pseudo-legalistic form, were proof of ownership. It was also necessary for
the validity of the written word to be recognized by the laity.

4 Sawyer no. 19 (=OSF III.1).

*° For discussion of charter-production in early Anglo-Saxon England, see N. Brooks, The
Early Mstory of the Church of Canterbury (Leicester, 1984), pp. 168-70, and P. Chaplais,
“The origin and authenticity of the royal Anglo-Saxon diploma’, in Prisca Munimenta, ed.
Ranger, pp. 28-42, at pp. 36-42. The case for production of charters by a royal secretariat in
the tenth and eleventh centuries is argued by Keynes, Diplomas. See also Keynes, below,
pp. 244-8.
© For penalty-clauses see Chaplais, ‘Single sheets’, pp. 71~2.
44 Susan Kelly |
This difficulty seems to have been resolved, at least in part, by
incorporating the charter into a formal ceremony marked by highly visible
rituals. This kind of activity is not well represented in our sources, but there
are occasional references in the early charters to the transfer of a sod of earth
from the estate granted and to the placing of the sod or of the charter on an
altar or gospel-book.*’ There is some evidence that charters might be stored
on the altar or bound into a gospel-book; certainly by the later Anglo-Saxon
period and perhaps at an earlier date charters were copied into blank spaces
in gospel-books.”® In this way the charter was visibly associated with the
divine. It seems likely that the document was ceremonially handed over by
the donor to the beneficiary as a symbol of the transaction, and there may
have been some accompanying ritual in which the donor and perhaps the
witnesses touched the parchment as a formal guarantee of their testimony.”
Some early charters have been written in two stages, the witness list having
been added at a later date.*° This suggests that the text of the charter was
written out by or on behalf of the beneficiary before the ceremony, and that
the witness list was added during the ceremony or subsequent to it. We have
some evidence that a note of the witnesses present might be made on a
separate scrap of parchment (a scedula) for reference when completing the
charter; two such scedulae survive, sewn onto the parchment of original
charters of the ninth century.*' It should be noted that in one of these two
cases the text and witness list of the charter were written by a single scribe
apparently at the same time, which implies that when this particular
document was witnessed during the conveyance ceremony the parchment
itself was blank. It seems likely that, in the eyes of the laity, the transfer of
land was effected and guaranteed by the rituals which marked the transac-
tion, and that the diploma was important as a part and symbol of these
ceremonies, not on its own account as a written record of the transaction.
The value of a diploma as a title-deed resided less in the information which
it contained than in its function as a potent symbol of ownership.
This is an important key to understanding the subsequent history of the
Latin diploma in England. The churchmen seem to have achieved their aim
of inspiring lay recognition of the diploma as a title-deed and thus brought
about the integration of the written word into land-ownership. So success-

27 See, for instance, Sawyer nos. 1164 (=EHD no. 55), 1258 (=EHD no. 79).
8 Chaplais, ‘The royal Anglo-Saxon diploma’, pp. 33-6. See also Collins, below, p. 117.
2? Chaplais, ‘Single sheets’, p. 77.
3° Ibid., pp. 83-4.
31 Sawyer nos. 163 and 293 (=BMF II. 9 and OSF III. 17). See M.P. Parsons, ‘Some scribal
memoranda for Anglo-Saxon charters of the eighth and ninth centuries’, Mitteilungen des
Osterreichischen Instituts ftir Geschichtsforschung 14 (1939), 13-32, at 15-19, 21-2.
 ANGLO-SAXON LAY SOCIETY 45
ful was this manoeuvre that laymen also began to acquire written title to
land. By the later eighth century we find charters in which a layman ts
named as the beneficiary and in which there is no clear indication that the
land is subsequently to be used for ecclesiastical purposes. By the later
Anglo-Saxon period the majority of surviving Anglo-Saxon charters are in
favour of laymen, and it seems probable that this represents only a small
proportion of the total number of such charters, since on the whole these
documents have been preserved only if at some point they entered the
archive of an ecclesiastical community. The attraction of acquiring a charter
seems to have lain in the type of land tenure with which it was associated,
which derived from special measures for the original endowment of the
church. Land covered by a charter was bocland and could be freely disposed
of by its owner, unlike folcland which was subject to the normal claims of
heirs and kindred, as well as to a number of rents and dues. The Latin
charter was a useful way of marking and guaranteeing alienable property,
and it could be transferred together with the land to a new owner.”
It is this last aspect of the function of the Anglo-Saxon diploma that
demonstrates the relative unimportance of its content. A very few of the
surviving single-sheet charters bear an endorsement noting the transfer of
the land and documentation from the original beneficiary to a new owner.
Thus, when a comes of King Cenwulf of Mercia came into possession of a
Kentish estate and its charter, recording Offa’s grant of the land to an abbot
in 767, he took care to have the change of ownership noted, confirmed and
witnessed on the dorse.*’ This charter was being brought up to date to
reflect the changing circumstances of ownership. But most original charters
have no such endorsement, even in cases where ownership is known to have
changed on more than one occasion. Some of the surviving records of
dispute over land show that charters might be stolen or otherwise
fraudulently obtained and yet still have the power of proving ownership:
possession was all. A well-known eighth-century instance concerns King
Cynewulf of the West Saxons. In a document of 798 recording the end of
the dispute, we are told that King Aéthelbald of Mercia granted a monastery
at Cookham with all its lands to Christ Church, Canterbury, and to

*¢ For discussion of these types of land tenure, see: H.R. Loyn, Anglo-Saxon England and the
Norman Conquest (London, 1962), pp. 171-5; Keynes, Diplomas, pp. 31-3; Wormald,
Bede and the Conversion of England, pp. 19-23; E. John, Land-Tenure in Early England
(Leicester, 1960), pp. 51-3; zdem, Orbis Britanniae (Leicester, 1966), pp. 64-127.
33 Sawyer no. 106 (=BMF 1.9). Other examples of endorsements to original charters
recording changes of ownership are Sawyer nos. 287 and 332 (=BMF I1.28, OSF'1.10), but
neither 1s straightforward. Cartulary copies of charters on occasion contain notes of changes
of ownership which could be derived from endorsements, but a number of these seem
unacceptable and may have been added by the cartularist or an archivist.
 46 Susan Kelly
safeguard the donation sent a sod of earth and all the title-deeds to Christ
Church to be placed on the altar there. After the death of the incumbent
archbishop, the documents were stolen and given to King Cynewulf, who
thereupon converted to his own use the monastery and all its possessions. **
It would appear that land and charter might be transferred to new owners
without any attempt being made to alter the text of the charter to bring it
into line with the new situation. The charter was a title-deed insofar as it
gave symbolic proof of ownership; the content was relatively immaterial. In
cases of dispute resort was frequently made to the testimony of witnesses,
local inhabitants or supporters who could give evidence about the previous
history of the estate.°°
In the ninth century we seem to see some change in the concept of the
charter’s function. One of the most important manifestations of this is the
development of the boundary-clause. Previously charters had contained
only an occasional and vague indication of boundaries 1n Latin, expressed in
terms of the cardinal points of the compass. Reliance seems to have been
placed on the fact that local estate-boundaries were well-known. There may
have been a ceremony of ‘beating the bounds’ to impress them on local
memories; in the earliest known original charter, datable to 679, King
_ Hlothhere is made to assert (with a poor regard for spelling and grammar)
_ that the land is to be held ‘according to the well-known boundaries
_ demonstrated by myself and my officers’ (2uxta notissimos terminos a me
_ demonstratus et proacuratoribus meis).*° In the ninth century and later
_ charter-scribes regularly included a detailed boundary-clause in English,
_ which indicates that charters now functioned, at least in some respects, as
_ true written records. It is important to note that this development involved
the use of the vernacular.
| From at least the beginning of the ninth century onwards, Latin diplomas
- came to be supplemented by an extensive range of documents in English or
in a mixture of Latin and English, which included wills, leases and
miscellaneous agreements. The most important of these documents were
_ sealed royal writs, in which the king drew to the attention of the officials of
_ the local shire court or other interested parties any new donation of land or
transfer of property or privilege; this was in addition to the issue or transfer

34 Sawyer no. 1258 (=EHD no. 79).

35 See J.L. Laughlin, ‘The Anglo-Saxon legal procedure’, in Essays in Anglo-Saxon Law
(Boston, 1876), pp. 183-305; A.J. Kennedy, ‘Disputes about bocland: the forum for their
adjudication’, Anglo-Saxon England 14 (1985), 175-95. Patrick Wormald has recently
reassessed the place of documentary evidence in such disputes: ‘Charters, law and the
settlement of disputes in Anglo-Saxon England’, in Settlement of Disputes, pp. 149-68.
3© Sawyer no. 8 (=EHD no. 56). See also the formal tracing of the boundaries of a Worcester
estate to settle an eleventh-century dispute: Sawyer no. 1460 (c. 10101023).
 ANGLO-SAXON LAY SOCIETY 47
of a Latin diploma and ensured that the beneficiary’s right to the land would
be recognized. There is some evidence that such writs might also have been
used for routine administrative matters. The earliest trustworthy examples
date from the reign of Cnut, but it is possible that similar documents were 1n
use in the tenth century and perhaps earlier. Those writs dealing with land-
ownership represent a significant development in the use of the written
word in this area. They supplied the deficiencies of the formal Latin
diploma as a witness of legitimate possession, and also regularized the
informal oral procedures of guaranteeing ownership by recourse to local
witnesses. °’
Rather more complex transactions involving land and property were also
recorded in vernacular documents. For example, fifty-eight wills survive
from Anglo-Saxon England, of which fifty-three are in English.** The
earliest example is the will of a Kentish reeve named Abba, which survives
on its original parchment and is datable to between 832 and 840.’ Abba
made elaborate provisions for future eventualities, according to whether he
were to have a child or whether his widow wished to remarry or enter a
convent. His intention was to ensure that the land eventually reverted to his
kindred, but even that was not the end of his concern; he further specified
which members of his family were to receive the land in turn and what was
to become of it after their respective deaths, and finally arranged that if his
family should die out completely the estate was to pass to Christ Church in
Canterbury. Whoever held the property was to donate a regular render of
livestock and other produce to the monastery at Folkestone, and to make
extensive gifts of money to the church and to individual clerics: ‘and
Freothomund is to have my sword’. On the dorse of the document appears
an additional statement by Heregyth, Abba’s wife, to the effect that future
owners of an estate at Challock (probably not the land covered by Abba’s
provisions) were to pay a specified annual render to the Christ Church
community. Abba’s will was probably written by a Christ Church scribe; it
was witnessed by the archbishop and members of the community and

37 For these documents see Harmer, Writs, and Facsimiles of English Royal Writs to A.D. 1100
Presented to Vivian Hunter Galbraith, ed. T.A.M. Bishop and P. Chaplais (Oxford, 1957).
See also J. Campbell, ‘Some agents and agencies of the late Anglo-Saxon state’, in
Domesday Studies, ed. J.C. Holt (Woodbridge, 1987), pp. 201-18, at pp. 214-25, and
Keynes, below, pp. 244-8.
*8 Sawyer nos. 1482-1539. Note that the Latin wills are all late copies and probably represent
translations of English originals or fabrications. A number of wills appear in both vernacular
and Latin versions, but invariably the vernacular text seems to be primary. A new study of
Anglo-Saxon wills is being prepared as a Cambridge doctoral thesis by Kathryn Lowe:
‘Literacy in Anglo-Saxon England: the evidence of the wills’.
89 Sawyer no. 1482. This is the earliest will on a separate piece of parchment. Sawyer no. 1500
(805 X 832) was added to a copy of the charter granting land to the testator.
48 Susan Kelly
named Christ Church as the ultimate beneficiary to the land after his
family: in return for this last concession, the head of the Christ Church
community was to afford his protection to Abba and his heirs and to act as
their advocate. There is a definite ecclesiastical interest in Abba’s arrange-
ments, but it is not an overriding one; the main concern of the document 1s
the complex provision for the future inheritance of the property within the
kindred. It appears as if Abba himself recognized the value of recording this
information.
Other laymen and women seem to have felt the same, for the majority of
surviving wills relate to lay bequests. Many of them are concerned with the
elaborate provisions surrounding the property of the wealthy and well
connected. Thus we have the wills of two kings (Alfred and Eadred), two
queens, an xtheling, five ealdormen and a number of other individuals
known to have been related to the royal dynasty and the nobility. An
outstanding example is the early eleventh-century will of Wulfric Spott, a
member of an important Mercian family and the brother of Ealdorman
fElfhelm, which disposes of no fewer than eighty estates scattered over
eleven counties in north-west Mercia and the southern Danelaw, as well as
an enormous amount of treasure, not to mention a hundred wild horses and
sixteen tame geldings.*° There are also a number of wills in the name of men
and women of less exalted rank, who make rather humbler bequests. For
instance, in the middle of the ninth century Badanoth Beotting, who seems
to have been a minor official in the court of King A‘thelwulf of Wessex,
bequeathed to Christ Church in Canterbury his heritable land, which
amounted to only sixteen yokes of arable and meadow. Badanoth specified
that the estate was not to pass to the church until after the death of his wife
and children, and that they were to pay an annual rent to the community.*!
A number of other wills, as well as some agreements affecting the immediate
relations of the parties, refer to a similar arrangement: the donor pledged
land to the church and (sometimes) promised an annual rent or render, on
condition that his or her heirs were allowed to retain the property for their
lifetimes. Such an arrangement satisfied the demands of piety while
ensuring provision for dependents, and could also enlist the advocacy of a
powerful ecclesiastical community on the side of the donor and family.
The mirror of such pledges was the ecclesiastical lease.** Documents

* Sawyer no, 1536 (=EHD no. 125). See discussion by Sawyer, Burton Abbey, pp.
XV—-XXXVI111.

+! Sawyer no. 1510 (=BMF II.25).

*2 It is probably correct to see a continuum between an individual’s pledge of land to the
church and an ecclesiastical lease; they may represent the same transaction from different
 ANGLO-SAXON LAY SOCIETY 49
recording tenancy arrangements survive in a number of ecclesiastical
archives. The most important source is Worcester, which preserved a
magnificent series of leases from the eighth century until the end of the
Anglo-Saxon period, including no fewer than seventy-six in the name of
Bishop Oswald (960/1-92). Oswald leased the lands of the Worcester
community to his relatives, his clerics, his thegns and his followers almost
invariably for a period of three lifetimes (that is, for the lifetimes of the
beneficiary and two subsequent heirs). The scale of Oswald’s leasing
arrangements seems to have been unusual, but ecclesiastical leases were by
no means a novelty in his day: the earliest surviving Anglo-Saxon lease
which seems trustworthy dates from the second half of the eighth century,
and the practice must have been widespread by 816 when the Synod of
Chelsea attempted to limit the timespan of leases of church property to a
single lifetime.*? The larger churches could not hope to farm all their estates
in demesne, and it made sound economic sense to let some of their property
to free tenants in return for certain payments. The production of a written
lease formalized such arrangements and gave the church some guarantee
that the reversion clause would be honoured. We have records of well over a
hundred Anglo-Saxon leases, probably representing only a small fraction of
the total issued since these were ephemeral documents, but only a dozen
survive as originals.** These show that, at least by the tenth century it was
usual to produce such documents in the form of a chirograph. The text of
the agreement was written out in duplicate or triplicate (and occasionally in
quadruplicate) on one sheet of parchment and CYROGRAPHUM (or a variant)
was added in large letters in the gaps between the copies. The parchment
was then cut through the word CyrRoGRAPHUM and the separate pieces
distributed to the interested parties and sometimes to disinterested
churches or to the king for safekeeping and an additional guarantee. Thus
both sides had a record of the agreement and if a dispute arose the copies
could be compared and matched. The earliest surviving example of a
chirographic lease comes from 904, but there is a possibility that a lost lease
of 855 was originally drawn up in this form.* The chirograph may possibly

viewpoints. Such arrangements seem likely to have a connection with the Roman concept of
precarium and its later development in Gaul: for this, see R. Latouche, The Birth of the
Western Economy (2nd edn, London, 1967), pp. 24-7; M. Bloch, Feudal Society (2nd edn,
London, 1962), p. 164.
*3 Sawyer no. 1254; Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents Relating to Great Britain and
Ireland, ed. A. Haddan and W. Stubbs, 3 vols. (Oxford 1871), III, p. 582.
Sawyer nos. 1270, 1281, 1288, 1326, 1347, 1385, 1393, 1394, 1399, 1405, 1417, 1487.
*® Sawyer no. 1273. See Chaplais, ‘Single sheets’, p. 63 n. 3.
 50 Susan Kelly
have had its origin in Ireland, but it reached its greatest formal development
in England.* It proved a remarkably efficient document and was used for a
range of purposes. The reason for the popularity of the chirograph (and
perhaps the motive for its invention) may have been its capacity for
involving illiterate laymen in the documentary process. The production of
_ chirographs on a regular basis perhaps indicates that secular society took a
strong interest in written documentation.
Leases might be written variously in Latin or English or in a mixture of
the two. Eleven of Oswald’s leases are in the vernacular, but a number of
these have some Latin admixture. The rest are basically in Latin, but
almost all contain some sections in English, generally a boundary-clause
and perhaps a sanction or notes on the conditions of the lease. Approx-
imately a quarter also contain within the text a very brief passage in the
vernacular summarizing some portion of the Latin, most commonly the
date and the provision that the land was to revert to Worcester after three
lives, which were the essential details. The inclusion of such a summary
might indicate that the lease might be read by someone who was literate in
the vernacular but not in Latin. At any rate, the casual bilingualism of these
documents displays something of the linguistic attitude of the scribes who
drafted them. It appears that English was not thought to be out of place,
even in an important ecclesiastical record.
Other aspects of land tenure and property-ownership were covered by
different types of vernacular document. Regularly we find memoranda on
the exchange or purchase of land. Thus, when a Kentish nobleman named
Godwine bought a piece of land from his sister, Eadgifu, the transaction
was noted in a tripartite chirograph.*” So too was an agreement imposed
upon the three monastic communities in Winchester by King Edgar which
involved the adjustment of their respective boundaries.*® We also have a
number of documents in both Latin and English recording the manumis-
sion of slaves. This would seem to have been essentially an oral ceremony,
but the details were frequently recorded, usually in a free space in a gospel-
book, as a precaution against a subsequent challenge to the freedman’s
status. The surviving manumissions date from the tenth century and
later.” At least by the eleventh century written documentation had come to

*© For the possible Irish origin of the chirograph, see B. Bischoff, ‘Zur Friihgeschichte des
mittelalterliche Chirographum’, inidem, Mittelalterliche Studien, 3 vols. (Stuttgart, 1966—
81), I, pp. 118-22.
47 Sawyer no. 1473 (1044x1048) (=BMF IV.28).
*8 Sawyer no. 1449 (964X975).
? See EHD, pp. 383-4 and nos. 140-50. No. 147 demonstrates the importance of a proof of
free status.
 ANGLO-SAXON LAY SOCIETY 51
play a part in another important social transaction: we have two vernacular
marriage agreements, from Canterbury and Worcester respectively, detail-
ing the property arrangements made between the groom and the bride’s
kindred.°° Various documents describing disputes over property and the
subsequent settlements have been preserved. Sometimes these appear to be
formal records of agreements; an early example is a Worcester document of
825 concerning a dispute over swine-pasture.°! Elsewhere we find more
partisan accounts, designed to be of use in a continuing quarrel; such is the
description of a dispute over toll-rights in the Wantsum Channel between
the two Canterbury houses, Christ Church and St Augustine’s, which
consistently sets out the Christ Church point of view.°* Many land-
transactions, whether purchases, exchanges or formal settlements, were
guaranteed by supporters who were willing to stand surety for the parties.
Fortuitously, two lists of such sureties have survived, almost certainly the
remnant of a much larger number of similar records; one of these is an
extensive compilation detailing the guarantors for a series of Peterborough
estates which must have been put together from scattered records and notes
in the abbey’s archive.°* Alongside this we can set a long Bury St Edmunds
memorandum about rents and renders which was compiled from miscel-
laneous material, probably shortly after the Norman Conquest.** We can
deduce from such compilations and from the occasional fortunate Old
English survival that, at least by the end of the Anglo-Saxon period, the
great monastic houses kept detailed records of their estates, tenants, rents,
stock and disbursements, which supplemented their formal title-deeds.*
The king and many lay landowners might have followed the same practice;
such secular records had no chance of direct survival, but they probably
underlie many sections of Domesday Book.
The extent of vernacular literacy among the clergy and the laity and the
implications of the use of the vernacular in formal and informal documents
are issues of the greatest importance. In the tenth and eleventh centuries,
English had a respected place as an alternative literary and documentary
language. Some ecclesiastics composed extensively in the vernacular and
many manuscripts written in this period contain vernacular texts, such as

” Sawyer nos. 1459 (10141016), 1461 (1016 1020) (=EHD nos. 128, 130).
*! Sawyer no. 1437 (original charter lost).
2 Sawyer no. 1467 (=BMF IV.20).
*? Charters, ed. Robertson, nos. 47 (Sawyer no. 1452) and 40.
* TIbid., no. 104.
» For instance, some early eleventh-century farm accounts from Ely survive on binding-
strips: N.R. Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon (Oxford, 1957), no.
88; see also nos. 6, 22, 77, 353.
52 Susan Kelly
sermons, poetry and translations from Latin. English was a medium of
instruction in schools and was regularly used by the draftsmen of leases and
agreements and by the royal administration for sealed writs and law-
codes.°° Moreover, from the later tenth century some churchmen made
successful efforts to standardize the vernacular by promoting the use of the
West Saxon dialect elsewhere in the country.°’ There are signs that some
members of the church might be literate in English but have difficulty
reading Latin. Bishop Athelwold of Winchester was commissioned by
King Edgar and his wife to translate the Rule of St Benedict into the
vernacular, apparently for a community of nuns, and several later manu-
scripts of the Rule are bilingual.°®
Such toleration and encouragement of vernacular literacy as a necessary if
regrettable substitute for latinity 1s usually traced back to the educational
initiatives of King Alfred. In the much-discussed epistolary prose preface
attached to his translation of Pope Gregory’s Pastoral Care, Alfred set out
his observations on the state of English literacy and outlined his plans to
improve it.°? He began by remarking on the good fortunes enjoyed by
England in former times when learning was valued, and went on to
complain of such a neglect of learning that hardly anyone south of the River
Humber (and probably not many north of it) could understand the divine
services in Latin or translate a letter from Latin into English. Indeed,
Alfred professed to be unable to recollect a single person capable of these
feats south of the Thames at the time when he became king. He saw the
beginnings of this decline in the period before the immense devastation
wrought by the Viking invaders, and speaks of churches filled with books
and a great number of clerics who could not read the books because they
were not written in their own language. As a remedy for the general
ignorance of the clergy, Alfred decided to promote the translation of
essential texts into English. Free-born young men who were otherwise
unoccupied were to be taught to read such works in the vernacular, and
those who were intended for holy orders could go on to study in Latin
afterwards. We have the testimony of Asser that at least some part of this

°© See, generally, D.A. Bullough, ‘The educational tradition in England from Alfred to
AElfric: teaching utriusque linguae’, Settimane 19 (Spoleto, 1972), 453-94. For manu-
scripts written in the vernacular, see Ker, Catalogue.
°” H. Gneuss, ‘The origin of standard Old English and thelwold’s school at Winchester’,
ASE 1 (1972), 63-83.
8 [bid., 73-4.
°° King Alfred’s West Saxon Version of Gregory’s Pastoral Care, ed. H. Sweet, Early English
Texts Society, Original Series 45 (London, 1871), pp. 2-8. For a translation see S. Keynes
and M. Lapidge, Alfred the Great: Asser’s ‘Life of King Alfred’ and Other Contemporary
Sources (Harmondsworth, 1983), pp. 124-6.
 ANGLO-SAXON LAY SOCIETY 53
educational scheme was implemented; he tells how Alfred’s sons and
daughters were taught how to read books in Latin and how to write, in the
company of the well-born children of almost the entire region and many of
less distinguished birth.™
The validity of Alfred’s remarks about the abysmal state of learning in
ninth-century England has been meat for a great deal of discussion.® It
seems likely that Alfred exaggerated to some degree in his implication that
southern England was almost entirely bereft of competent latinists; the fact
that he had recruited three Mercian teachers to help in his educational and
literary projects implies that the tradition of Latin learning had not
completely died out, at least in parts of Mercia. But the available evidence
suggests that the standards of Latin in the south were generally poor.
Brooks has used the wealth of surviving ninth-century charters from
Canterbury to suggest that, even in such an important centre, there seem to
have been very few scribes able to draft a Latin charter by the middle of the
century and these scribes themselves were unsure of grammar and orthogra-
phy.® Later research has broadly confirmed this assessment and also
indicated a gap in the copying of literary manuscripts in the central decades
of the century. Alfred seems to have been largely justified in his horror at
the decline of Latin learning in ninth-century England and in his under-
standing that this decline preceded the large-scale Viking attacks; Canter-
bury charters of the 820s show signs of weakness in Latin grammar and
composition.® Note, however, that poor spelling and grammar are not
found only in ninth-century charters. A dreadful example is the earliest
original charter, datable to 679, which was drafted in Kent while that
excellent scholar, Theodore of Tarsus, was archbishop of Canterbury.°°
But, in general, reasonable standards seem to have been achieved and

© Asser’s Life of King Alfred, ed. W.H. Stevenson (Oxford, 1904), pp. 58-9 (c. 75); Keynes
and Lapidge, Alfred the Great, pp. 90-1.
°! See P. Wormald, ‘The uses of literacy in Anglo-Saxon England and its neighbours’, TRHS
5th series 27 (1977), 95-114, and most recently J. Morrish, ‘King Alfred’s letter as a source
on learning in the ninth century’, in Studies in Earlier Old English Prose, ed. P.E. Szarmach
(Albany, NY, 1986), pp. 87-107.
© Life of Alfred, ed. Stevenson, pp. 62-3; Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred the Great, pp. 92-3.
The ninth-century Mercian compiler of the Old English Martyrology was also a competent
latinist: see J.E. Cross, ‘The latinity of the ninth-century Old English Martyrologist’, in
Studies, ed. Szarmach, pp. 275-99.
°} Brooks, Early History, pp. 164-74.
** Papers by D.N. Dumville and M. Lapidge delivered at a symposium on ‘England in the
ninth century’ which took place at the British Museum in January 1987.
° For example, Sawyer no. 1436 (=BMF IJ.18).
© Sawyer no. 8. See Chaplais, ‘Single sheets’, pp. 65-6.
54 Susan Kelly
maintained in the eighth century. The subsequent breakdown in the early
ninth century may have been due in part to the attempts of the Canterbury
charter-scribes to produce more ambitious and complex documents, and
perhaps also to a sudden expansion of output as a result of the extensive
land-transactions engaged in by Wulfred in his efforts to reorganize the
archiepiscopal estates.°’
Alfred’s scheme to provide regular instruction for the laity in the
vernacular and his sponsorship of the translation of important Latin works
seem likely to have contributed to the enthusiasm with which English was
used for literary and documentary purposes in the tenth and eleventh
centuries. Moreover, his insistence that his officials set themselves to
studying on pain of losing their position may have provided a foundation for
the expansion in the tenth century of the range of administrative documen-
tation in the vernacular.® But Alfred’s own statement shows that vernacular
literacy was already well established in England. Bede seems to have
recognized the value of English as a medium of translation, for on his
deathbed he was still working on a translation of Isidore’s De natura rerum
for the benefit of his pupils as well as a translation of the first six chapters of
St John’s Gospel for the church’s use (ad utilitatem ecclesie Dei).©? We
have a number of eighth- and ninth-century manuscripts containing glos-
saries, in which Latin words are given an English equivalent; the main
function of these seems to have been to facilitate the study of Latin
vocabulary.”” Even before Alfred initiated large-scale translation from
Latin, literary texts in English were being copied in scriptoria, although
none has survived in contemporary manuscripts; we learn from Asser that
Alfred’s mother gave him a volume of Saxon poems and that, as king, Alfred
made a habit of reading English books aloud.” In addition, the use of the
vernacular for certain types of legal document was already common in the
first half of the ninth century. As already mentioned, the earliest surviving
Anglo-Saxon will on a single sheet dates from the 830s. We have an
apparently genuine English lease dated 852 from Medeshamstede/Peter-
borough and an English record of a dispute over swine-pasture dated 825

°? Wulfred’s land-transactions are discussed by Brooks, Early History, pp. 132-42.

& For this see Life of Alfred, ed. Stevenson, pp. 934 (c. 106); Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred the
Great, p. 110. See Keynes, below, pp. 226-57.
© Cuthbert, Epistola de obitu Baedae, ed. and trans. Colgrave and Mynors, Bede’s
Ecclesiastical History, p. 582.
7” W.M. Lindsay, The Corpus, Epinal, Erfurt and Leyden Glossaries (Oxford, 1921); M.
Lapidge, “The school of Theodore and Hadrian’, Anglo-Saxon England 15 (1986), 45-72.
"Life of Alfred, ed. Stevenson, pp. 20, 59 (cc. 23, 76); Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred the Great,
pp. 75, 91.
 ANGLO-SAXON LAY SOCIETY 55
from Worcester.’ Most impressive is a small group of vernacular docu-
ments from the middle of the century connected with the affairs of the
Kentish nobility. This group includes two grants of annual renders of
produce to Christ Church in Canterbury and two to St Augustine’s Abbey
in the same city.’? We also find a complicated agreement, datable toc. 871,
between an ealdorman named Alfred and Christ Church: in return for a
lifetime lease on an estate at Croydon, Alfred promises to bequeath another
estate to Christ Church, but also makes arrangements to safeguard the
position of his daughter in respect of both estates.’* Even more interesting is
a slightly earlier agreement between a widow and her husband’s kinsman
about land which her husband had given her, the purpose of which was to
ensure that the land was not alienated from his family; the archbishop and
the Christ Church community are witnesses and the charter was probably
drawn up in the archiepiscopal scriptorium, but the church in no way
benefits from the agreement.”
The use of the vernacular for such legal documents in the ninth century
has been attributed to the increasing scarcity of scribes capable of drawing
up a Latin charter. Brooks’ work on the archiepiscopal scriptorium at
Canterbury, the source of most of these ninth-century vernacular texts,
seems to illustrate this tendency. At Canterbury painful efforts were made
to ensure that royal diplomas granting land were still produced in Latin.
But elsewhere even this last distinction may have been ignored; the
evidence is a unique vernacular charter in the name of King Berhtwulf of
Mercia, datable to 844 or 845, which concerns a perpetual grant of land at
Wotton Underwood in Buckinghamshire.’° This charter, which survives as
an original, is seen as demonstrating ‘that at least one Mercian church had
already at that time to resort to producing a royal diploma in English rather
than Latin, and indeed a very strange form of English at that’.’”” This
example may not be as straightforward as it at first appears. We know that in
the ninth century it seems to have been the normal practice for a land-
charter to be drawn up in the local episcopal scriptorium, although there
were occasional exceptions to this rule.”* The Buckinghamshire estate

” Sawyer nos. 1482, 1440, 1437.

Christ Church — Sawyer nos. 1195, 1197. St Augustine’s — Sawyer nos. 1198, 1239.
™ Sawyer no. 1202.
> Sawyer no. 1200; see also nos. 1196, 1199. For the relationships between these Kentish
noblemen and women see Brooks, Kazly History, pp. 147-9.
© Sawyer no. 204 (=OSF 1.8).
” Brooks, Early History, p. 174.
8 See above, p. 43 and n. 25.
56 Susan Kelly
granted by Berhtwulf would have lain in the contemporary diocese of
Leicester, and the incumbent bishop, Ceolred, is one of the witnesses to this
charter. In another charter, dated 844, Bishop Ceolred appears as the initial
donor of an estate at Pangbourne in Berkshire, less than 30 miles from
Wotton Underwood, which was subsequently granted by King Berhtwulf
to the ealdormen of Berkshire; this charter, which was preserved in the
archive of Abingdon Abbey, was drawn up in Latin and, although awkward
in its phraseology and grammar, it conforms in most respects to the normal
conventions of Latin diplomas.’””? The Pangbourne charter seems to show
that the tradition of Latin charter-writing was by no means moribund in this
part of the Middle Anglian diocese. It may be sensible to treat the
vernacular charter concerning Wotton Underwood as an anomaly rather
than a clear demonstration of declining standards of latinity. It is possible,
although difficult to prove, that the document was a temporary record of the
transaction for use in the conveyance ceremony and was intended to be
written up in a more formal manner at a later date.*°
The Wotton Underwood charter is the only example of a royal diploma
drawn up entirely in the vernacular. In general, there was a clear distinction
between royal diplomas, intended to function as title-deeds, which were
invariably in Latin (although by the ninth century it was normal for a Latin
diploma to incorporate some sections 1n English, such as a boundary-clause
or a list of appurtenances and dues), and other types of document, such as
wills, leases and grants of render, which might be in Latin but which were
usually drawn up in-English in the ninth century and subsequently. Weak
ecclesiastical command of Latin is thus unlikely to be a complete explana-
tion for the development of a strong tradition of vernacular documentation
in the ninth century. The use of English had several functional advantages.
In some circumstances English was far more convenient and more accurate
than Latin for the type of information that had to be conveyed; this was true
for the extensive lists of renders found in ninth-century Kentish docu-
ments, which involved some vocabulary for which it would have been
difficult to find an exact Latin equivalent, and also for detailed boundary-
clauses. Another incentive for using English may have been the need to
record a verbal statement of intent or agreement.®! Above all, the value of
English lay in its accessibility to a wider public. A Latin diploma was doubly

79 Sawyer no. 1271 (=EHD no. 87).

80 Compare Sawyer no. 163, discussed above, p. 44, where it seems that the parchment was —
blank when used in the conveyance ceremony.
$1 For the importance of the verbal declaration see Sawyer no. 1462 (=EHD no. 135). Anglo-
Saxon wills may also have originated as public statements: see discussion by M.M.
Sheehan, The Will in Medieval England (Toronto, 1963), pp. 3-106.
 ANGLO-SAXON LAY SOCIETY 57
inaccessible to the uneducated. Not only did it have to be read out to them;
it also required translation into the vernacular. Thus, when two letters of
Pope Zacharias were presented to the Synod of Clofesho in 747, they were
read out and then translated (et manifeste recitata et in nostra lingua
apertius interpretata sunt) ; the translation may have been for the benefit of
King Atthelbald of Mercia and the principes and duces who were attending
the synod, but it was probably also appreciated by many of the clerics
present, especially those in lower orders.®* A document written in English
could reflect more closely the oral procedures which it recorded and could
be read out to the interested parties, their supporters and witnesses. While
it lacked the dignity and arcane authority associated with the use of Latin, it
was more functional in a secular context than any Latin document could be.
The reasons for the early development of the non-Latin vernacular as a
vehicle for legal documentation must lie partly in the circumstances of early
English history, which included the apparent disappearance of spoken
Latin and of all vestiges of the late Roman bureaucracy; Latin was so remote
from the secular side of society that greater use had to be made of the
vernacular 1n all areas of administration and social regulation. This point is
illustrated most forcibly by the surviving Anglo-Saxon law-codes. The
earliest is that of King A‘thelberht I of Kent and thus almost contemporary
with the introduction of Latin literacy into England. Bede tells us that,
among the other benefits which he conferred on his people, King
/Ethelberht established a law-code according to the example of the Romans,
which was written up in English (Anglorum sermone) and still observed by
the men of Kent in Bede’s own day.** Three other vernacular law-codes
survive from the seventh century, two from Kent and one from Wessex.® It
has been suggested that the reason for the use of the vernacular in this
context was the inability of those clerics charged with drafting the laws to
bridge the gaps in legal terminology between Latin and Old English.®° This
explanation is not convincing, since the three later seventh-century law-
codes were produced in the years when Theodore and/or Hadrian were
resident in Kent; they taught Roman law to their English pupils (among

82 Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, III, p. 362.

83 Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, ed. F. Liebermann, 3 vols. (Halle, 1903-16), I, pp. 3-8;
EHD no. 29.
8¢ Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, ed. Colgrave and Mynors, p. 150 (II.5).
85 Kent — Laws of Hlothhere and Eadric (673-6857), Laws of Wihtred (695); Wessex — Laws
of Ine (688-94). See Gesetze, ed. Liebermann, I, pp. 9-14, 88-123; EHD nos. 30-2.
86 P. Wormald, ‘Lex scrnipta and verbum regis: legislation and Germanic kingship from Euric
to Cnut’, in Early Medieval Kingship, ed. P.H. Sawyer and I.N. Wood (Leeds, 1977), pp.
105-38, at p. 115.
58 Susan Kelly
them Aldhelm, a West Saxon) and were presumably capable of drafting a
law-code in Latin if one were required.®’ In the case of the laws of
/Ethelberht, the path chosen involved the Roman missionaries in an even
greater difficulty than finding Latin terms for unfamiliar concepts: namely,
the creation of a new literary language from an unfamiliar tongue hitherto
unwritten, except in runes. The magnitude of this step should be appreci-
ated. It involved the transformation of sound into writing and required
informed decisions on spelling and grammar.
Such an initiative was unlikely to be undertaken solely to produce a law-
code. It must be seen in the wider context of the progress of the Roman
mission in Kent. Augustine and his companions were already worried about
linguistic difficulties before they arrived in England. In order to allay their
anxieties, Pope Gregory arranged that they should be joined by Frankish
priests who would act as interpreters.°® Much ink has been spent on the
question of the mutual intelligibility of Frankish and English; alternatively
it is possible that mercantile and political contact between Kent and Gaul
and the presence of Franks at A‘thelberht’s court had familiarized some
Franks with English (and some Anglo-Saxons with Frankish).®° In spite of
the services offered by the Franks, the Roman missionaries had little chance
of success unless they quickly came to terms with the English vernacular,
which was essential for preaching and for the instruction of English youths
and indeed for communication with their royal patrons. [t was probably in
the process of teaching themselves English that they came to write down the
language for the first time, perhaps in the form of glossaries. The only
vernacular documents to survive from the seventh century are the four
southern law-codes, but it is probable that the new literary language was
also used for other material, particularly items required for the basic
instruction of clerics. We can seek a parallel in the development of a written
vernacular in Germany, where the missionaries (Anglo-Saxons and others)
were also faced with the instruction of a people with an unwritten language:
the earliest texts in Old High German are glossaries, translations of the
Lord’s Prayer and Creed, and prayers.”

8” Lapidge, ‘School of Theodore and Hadrian’, 52-3.

88 Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, ed. Colgrave and Mynors, p. 68 (1.23); MGH Epp. I, pp.
423-4 (=EHD no. 162).
8° Bishop Agilbert, a Frank, declined an invitation to speak at the Synod of Whitby because he
would have needed an interpreter and he had previously been dismissed by King Cenwealh
because his speech was regarded as barbarous: Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, ed. Colgrave
and Mynors, pp. 300, 235 (111.25, 7).
°° J.K. Bostock, A Handbook on Old High German Literature (2nd edn, Oxford, 1976),
especially pp. 90-117; R. McKitterick, The Frankish Church and the Carolingian Reforms,
789-895, Royal Historical Society Studies in History 2 (London, 1977), pp. 184-205.
 ANGLO-SAXON LAY SOCIETY 59
The early English church had to be tolerant of the vernacular if it was to
have a priesthood of any size. In his letter to Bishop Egbert, Bede remarked
that he had often given the Creed and Lord’s Prayer translated into English
to priests ignorant of Latin, and he recommended that not only laymen but
also clerics and monks with no Latin should be taught these texts in the
vernacular.”' For the church’s purposes, the encouragement of vernacular
literacy as a prelude to (and often a substitute for) Latin literacy was
perhaps inevitable. Without an organized procedure for educating clerics,
there was a risk that the expansion of the church in England would leave the
priesthood swamped with non-latinists; in the eighth and early ninth
centuries the shortage of teachers was probably exacerbated by the
departure of so many talented scholars for Germany.” It may well have
been the dilution rather than the decay of learning which led to the situation
bemoaned by Alfred, with a clergy in general incapable of profiting from the
library stocks of the churches because the books were not in English.
Basic education in the vernacular may have been available to young
laymen as well as to boys intended for the priesthood. We have a little
evidence from the early Anglo-Saxon period that the sons of Anglo-Saxon
noblemen might attend monastic schools, apparently in some cases as an
extension of the practice of sending children to be fostered in another noble
household. Thus Wilfrid as a youth was entrusted to the care of a nobleman
who had entered the monastery of Lindisfarne and while living there seems
to have received some kind of an education, although he was still unton-
sured (/aicus capite), and does not seem to have been already destined for
the church. When Wilfrid himself became a bishop, noblemen sent their
sons to him to be taught (ad erudiendum), and Stephanus makes it clear
that when these boys grew up they could choose whether to become
warriors or priests.”> We have no way of estimating the proportion of
laymen and women who had the benefit of such instruction or the quality
and extent of the education that they received. But it seems likely that, as in
the case of young men intended for the priesthood, education was bilingual
and any training in the skills of literacy would begin (and sometimes end)
with the vernacular. This is the impression given by the only detailed
description of the basic education of an Anglo-Saxon layman. Asser’s
account of the successive stages of Alfred’s progress in literacy and learning
is not as coherent as we might wish, but the outlines can be discerned. The

”! Baedae Opera Historica, ed. Plummer, p. 115; EHD, p. 801.

2 See for instance the references to learned men travelling to assist Boniface in Hesse and
Thuringia: Vita Bontfatu auctore Willibaldo, ed. W. Levison, MGH SSi.u.s. LVI, p. 34,
trans. C.H. Talbot, The Anglo-Saxon Missionaries in Germany (London, 1954), p. 47.
3 Life of Bishop Wilfrid, ed. and trans. Colgrave, pp. 6, 44.
60 Susan Kelly
future king remained idlitteratus until his twelfth year or even later,
apparently because no suitable teachers were available. Before this,
however, he was an avid listener to vernacular poetry and made a habit of
memorizing it. At some point his mother promised a volume of vernacular
poetry to whichever of her sons could most quickly understand and recite it;
Asser’s version of the episode is confused, but it would appear that Alfred
took the volume to his tutor, who read it aloud so that he could memorize it.
We next hear of Alfred’s literary capacities after he became king at the age of
twenty-two. Among his many activities he often read aloud (vecitare) books
in English (Saxonici librt), while continuing to learn by heart vernacular
poems. But he was distressed by his ignorance of divine wisdom (divina
saptentia) and the liberal arts. To repair this he assembled a coterie of
learned men who would read aloud to him, thus allowing him to become
acquainted with scholarly texts; Asser explains that he could not under-
stand these works himself because he had not yet begun to read anything
(non ... adhuc aliquid legere inceperat). On the face of it this seems to
contradict his earlier statement that the king spent part of his time reading
aloud from English books. The explanation would seem to be that at this
time the king was literate in the vernacular but not in Latin. We might also
be correct to see a distinction between the general ability to read Latin and
the ability to read complex Latin texts. Asser’s account gives the impression
that the king could understand spoken Latin, even if he could not read it; it
is, however, possible that the scholars were translating and explaining the
texts as they read. Asser notes that it was in the year 887 that Alfred first
began to read and translate (legere et interpretari); here he presumably
refers to works in Latin. There is no evidence that Alfred ever learned to
write, although his children were taught to do so; we do know that the king
later called upon Asser’s services as a scribe to jot down striking passages in
the works that they were studying together.”
No doubt a small number of laymen, like Alfred, went on to understand
and even to read Latin. Alfred, in the preface to his translation of the
Pastoral Care of Gregory, reminisces that there had previously been
learned men (uwiotan) both within and without the church (@géer ge
godcundra hada ge woruldcundra); it seems likely that he is referring to
Latin learning.” Two seventh-century kings were given the accolade
doctisstmus (very learned) by Bede, although it must be admitted that both
seem to have been educated abroad.” Other early Anglo-Saxon kings

* Life of Alfred, ed. Stevenson, pp. 20, 59-63, 73-5 (cc. 22-3, 76-8, 87-9); Keynes and
Lapidge, Alfred the Great, pp. 75, 91-3, 99-100 (and p. 239 n. 46 for discussion).
> Pastoral Care, ed. Sweet, p. 2; Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred the Great, p. 124.
© Colgrave and Mynors, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, pp. 190 (Sigeberht of East Anglia),
 ANGLO-SAXON LAY SOCIETY 61
showed enthusiasm for learning and literature, and the study of history,
involving as it did the achievements of their ancestors and peers, was
especially dear to their hearts. Bede implies that King Ceolwulf of Nor-
thumbria was actively interested in the progress of the Ecclesiastical
History and indeed had asked for a copy of it.”” We discover from a chance
reference in a letter of Alcuin that King Offa of Mercia also owned a copy of
Bede’s most celebrated work.” A continuing royal interest in history is
reflected in the fact that the first literary work to be produced in the
vernacular in Alfred’s reign seems to have been the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
Vernacular poetry and the Chronicle were secular literature and, even
though clerics could and did appreciate the former and may have been
responsible for the latter, probably imply a secular audience.” Asser
provides the information that volumes of Saxon poetry and English books
were available before Alfred gave a boost to the written vernacular. From
the ninth century we have a significant number of vernacular charters and
other documents which show laymen and women taking advantage of the
medium of writing to record complex agreements and arrangements about
property. It appears that, even before Alfred’s time, certain sections of the
laity were interested in writing and written material. We cannot tell if _
laymen in large numbers had acquired the mechanical skills of reading and
writing: the details of Alfred’s education remind us that in the early
mediaeval period listening, reading aloud and extensive memorization were
far more important adjuncts of learning than they are today. The strong
element of professionalism in the skills of literacy might make it unnecess-
ary for the higher classes of society to practise them; instead they could call
on the services of a secretary to take dictation or to read aloud books and
documents. In the last resort, the case for widespread literacy in the modern
sense among the early Anglo-Saxon laity must remain unproven, and it is
impossible even to approach the question of whether lay familiarity with
runic writing laid the foundation for reception of conventional literacy or to
any extent contributed to the strength of the vernacular written tradition.
Nevertheless, it seems clear that already by the ninth century the written
word had been accommodated within secular society. Keynes’ chapter in

430 (Aldfrith of Northumbria) (III.15, [V.26). Sigeberht was educated in Gaul, Aldfrith
in Ireland.
7 Ibid., p. 2 (Preface). See D.P. Kirby, ‘King Ceolwulf of Northumbria and the Historia
Ecclestastica’, Studia Celtica 14/15 (1979-80), 163-73.
8 Levison, England and the Continent, pp. 245-6.
% See discussion by P. Wormald, ‘Bede, Beowulf and the conversion of the English
aristocracy’, in Bede and Anglo-Saxon England, ed. R.T. Farrell, BAR, British Series 46
(Oxford, 1978), pp. 32~95, at pp. 42-9.
62 Susan Kelly
this volume demonstrates that by the later Anglo-Saxon period the royal
adminstration and the upper reaches of society were using writing, and
especially vernacular writing, on a routine basis. No doubt this state of
affairs at least in part reflects the success of Alfred’s plans for lay education
and his wisdom in promoting English rather than the less accessible Latin as
a basis for instruction. But Alfred did not initiate the use of vernacular
writing in England; rather he attempted to enlarge the scope of books
available in English in order to promote learning and philosophy and to
improve the calibre of the nobility. English had been used since the seventh
century to record material of lay interest. ‘The foundation for the outstand-
ing literary activity of the later Anglo-Saxon period already existed.'

100 T should like to thank David Dumville, Rosamond McKitterick and Simon Keynes for
their comments and criticism.
 3

Administration, law and culture

in Merovingian Gaul
———
lan Wood

Merovingian Gaul was, in certain respects, a bureaucratic society; 1t was ‘a

society used to, needing and demanding, documents’.' This is not to say
that documents were used equally by everyone, or in all parts of the
Merovingian realm, but that they were regarded as useful by those classes of
people for whom we have any quantity of evidence. And while most of the
people who feature prominently in the sources were members of the secular
or ecclesiastical elite, it is clear from administrative and legal texts that
literacy was not confined to the highest stratum of society.
Certainly lay and ecclesiastical magnates had literate administrators,
servants and slaves on their estates and in their households. In his account
of the trial of Bishop Egidius, Gregory of Tours refers both to a diocesan
and to a royal archive in which copies of correspondence were preserved,
the former at Rheims and the latter at Chelles.* Fragments of financial
records from Tours show something of the complications of estate manage-
ment, and also of the need for documentation.’ The agents of a great
monastery or of a secular magnate must have been able to keep such
accounts, although there would have been no need for them to have been as
learned as the slave of the senator Felix, Andarchius, who was said by
Gregory of Tours to be well versed in Vergil and the Theodosian Code.’
Felix may have been an exception, but if he was it was because of the extent
of his learning, not because of his literacy.
For the use of the written word outside the major institutions and estates

1 P. Fouracre, ‘“Placita” and the settlement of disputes in later Merovingian Francia’, in

Settlement of Disputes, pp. 23-43, at p. 26.
* Gregory of Tours, Liber Histortarum X c. 19, ed. B. Krusch and W. Levison, MGH SS rer.
merov. 1.1, pp. 510-13; E. James, The Franks (Oxford, 1988), p. 181.
3 ChLA XVIII, no. 659, pp. 3-61.
* Gregory of Tours, Liber Historiarum IV c. 46, ed. Krusch and Levison, MGH SS rer.
merov. 1.1, p. 181.

63
64 lan Wood
of the Merovingian kingdom it 1s possible to look at diplomatic evidence,
although not at the surviving charters, which almost all related to a handful
of important monasteries, but rather at the Formularies. These collections
of model documents survive largely in manuscripts of the ninth century,
but in the case of that of Marculf, the compilation clearly dates from the
Merovingian period. Further, individual formulae in the other collections
can be shown to have been modelled on sixth- or seventh-century docu-
ments; for instance, precise historical references in the Auvergne Formu-
lary suggest that one of the texts was based on a document drawn up shortly
after Theuderic’s attack on Clermont in the mid-520s.° It is possible,
therefore, to examine some, but not all, of the formulae as evidence for the
use of written records in Merovingian Gaul.
In certain respects even the Formularies which cannot be shown to have
been compiled in the Merovingian period may provide better evidence for
the sixth and early seventh centuries than for the eighth and ninth, despite
the date of the manuscripts. For instance, the gesta municipalia, or local
archives, are well attested in Merovingian sources, whereas most
Carolingian references to them are to be found in the formulae, where they
may be no more than outmoded survivals from earlier documents.’ This is
not to say that the Formularies themselves were no longer used at that time,
but that their detailed information on local government is not necessarily
relevant to ninth-century conditions. It is, indeed, possible that the
compilation of the Formularies themselves is a mark of decline; the act of
drawing up a volume of blue-prints might suggest that scribal activity had
become somewhat spasmodic, and that, in place of a local administrative
staff well versed in the diplomatic traditions of the later Roman Empire and
the successor states, clerics now had to consult a manual before drawing up
a new document. In the case of the Angers Formulary the compiler
apparently drew on diplomas in the archives of the city’s basilican church,
for the most part omitting specific details, in order to create an appropriate
handbook.® A similar case could be argued for Marculf’s work, which
presupposes the need for a collection of models, and which was commis-
sioned by a bishop, probably of Paris, Landericus.?

> Fouracre, ‘ “Placita” and the settlement of disputes’, p. 24.

© Formulae Arvernenses 1, ed. K. Zeumer, MGH Formulae, p. 28; 1.N. Wood, ‘Disputes in
late fifth- and sixth-century Gaul: some problems’, in Settlement of Disputes, pp. 7—22, at
pp. 12~13.
7 P. Classen, ‘Fortleben und Wandel spatrémischen Urkundenwesens im friihen Mittelalter’,
in Recht und Schnft im Muttelalter, ed. P. Classen, Vortrige und Forschungen 23
(Sigmaringen, 1977), pp. 13-54, at p. 44.
8 Wood, ‘Disputes in late fifth- and sixth-century Gaul’, p. 9 and n. 11.
9 Marculf, Formulae, praef., ed. Zeumer, MGH Formulae, p. 36.
 MEROVINGIAN GAUL 65
For the sixth and at least for the first half of the seventh centuries,
however, the Formularies provide a vivid insight into a society where all
sorts of transactions had to be set down in writing, and to be registered in
the local archives, which could in theory be consulted in the case of
disputes. How easy it was to use the archives in practice 1s, however, an
open question. Even finding a reference to a particular estate in a single
document like the will of Bertram of Le Mans is no easy matter, since
references to some places occur explicitly as afterthoughts, tacked on as and
when they came to mind.’° It may not have been any easier to find the
document itself in the first place. Nevertheless, the will of Bertram, like
other wills, deeds and grants, was entered in the gesta municipalia.'' In
addition there were plenty of other documents which were not publicly
registered, or which nobody expected to be able to find in the public
archives; hence the Auvergne formula dating apparently to the 520s, which
deals with the problem of making good the destruction of deeds.’* Similar
formulae in the Angers collections deal with the theft of documents, and
with the processes by which men justified their claims to land before two
cartae could be drawn up, one for the landowner and the other to be kept 7
foro publico, which may be another way of referring to the gesta.’°
Most of the Formularies are concerned primarily with providing models
of documents which would be of use to local administrators, although by no
means all envisage registration in the gesta municipalia. Indeed, they are
not simply concerned with land and property, even if deeds of gift, dowry
and sale do form a substantial portion of the formulae. There are in addition
models for documents of protection, dependence, and manumission as well
as blue-prints for legal judgements, apparently appropriate for local courts.
Not all of these can be dated to the Merovingian period; nevertheless those
preserved by Marculf show that many of these types of document were in
existence by the early eighth century."
Marculf is not only important in showing the variety of formulae which
were definitely known in the Merovingian period, but he 1s also unique in
providing numerous specimen orders addressed by the king to his agents.
There are royal requisitions, gifts, grants of protection, responses to

10 Bertram of Le Mans, Testamentum, in Actus Pontificum Cenomannis in urbe degentium,

ed. G. Busson and A. Ledru (Le Mans, 1901), for example pp. 114 (Pene michi in oblivione
fuit positum), and 139 (Adhuc parva memoravi quod valde in oblivione tradid1). On making
alterations to wills, see Marculf, Formulae 11.17, ed. Zeumer, MGH Formulae, pp. 86-8.
'! Bertram, Testamentum, p. 141.
12 Formulae Arvernenses 1, ed. Zeumer, MGH Formulae, p. 28.
'S Formulae Andecavenses 32, ed. Zeumer, MGH Formulae, pp. 14-15.
'* Marculf, Formulae 1.18, 22, 24, 11.5, 28, 32, 33, 34, 39, 40, ed. Zeumer, MGH Formulae,
pp. 55, 57, 58, 77-8, 93, 95-6, 98-100.
66 Ian Wood
petitions, orders for the appointment of bishops, for the execution of justice
and arrangements of redress, as well as model replies to announce the arrival
of the king’s command.’ Although no other source gives a comparable idea
of the range of written orders emanating from the Merovingian court,
Marculf’s evidence suggests that royal government should be considered as
being tied firmly to the written word.
It is worth approaching the legislation of the Merovingian kings with this
in mind. Most obviously related to this tradition of written law are the edicts
appended to the Pactus Legis Salicae, the Pactus pro tenore pacts, the
Edictus Chilbpernci and the laws of Childebert II,'° but there is also
legislation within Lex Ribuana which must have originally been issued as
edicts, as can be seen from the phraseology of individual clauses.’’ In this
respect the general profile of the major Merovingian codes, which do not
claim to be the legislation of individual monarchs, is misleading. Hidden
within the texts are unascribed edicts, giving further emphasis to the
written nature of sixth- and seventh-century government. In the minor
courts of the Merovingian kingdom the lawmen may have been illiterate, !®
but there was, nevertheless, a strong tradition of written legislation and of
written instruction, which would have worked most smoothly when offi-
cials could read; at the very least they required a literate household.'”
That the leading officials of the Merovingian kingdom could write 1s
shown by the signatures of mayors and counts of the palace to be found on
original charters which survive from the Merovingian period. Some offi-
cials, indeed, were able not only to sign their names in cursive, but also to
attest documents in the short-hand system known as tironian notes.”° Nor
were they the only people to subscribe to Merovingian charters. Among the
surviving originals is a document of 673, in which Chrotildis installs her
niece as abbess of Bruyéres-le-Chatel; ratifying this action are twenty-four
signatures, including those of clerics and laymen.”’

'S_[bid., 1, passim; for several of the relevant texts in translation, and a discussion, see James,
The Franks, pp. 186-9.
© Pactus legis Salicae, capitulare legi salicae addita 11, IV, VI, ed. K.A. Eckhardt, MGH
Leges nat. germ. 1V.1, pp. 250-4, 261-3, 267-9.
'7 See the use of the verb iubere in Lex Ribuaria 61.i, vii, 91.1, ii. ed. F. Beyerle and R.
Buchner, MGH Leges nat. germ. 111.2, pp. 108-9, 111, 133-4.
'8 For the courts of the rachymburgi see Fouracre, ‘ “Placita” and the settlement of disputes’,
pp. 39-41.
'? Compare Asser, De rebus gestis Alfredi, c. 106, in Asser’s Life of King Alfred, ed. W.H.
Stevenson (Oxford, 1904), pp. 92-5. ,
20D. Ganz, ‘Bureaucratic shorthand and Merovingian learning’, in Ideal and Reality in
framish and Anglo-Saxon Society, ed. P. Wormald (Oxford, 1983), pp. 58-75, at pp.
“1 ChLA XIII, no. 564, p. 63.
 MEROVINGIAN GAUL 67
Other documents carry the autographs of kings, including those of
Chlothar II, Dagobert I, Clovis I], Childebert III and Chilperic II.** The
ability of the seventh- and eighth-century kings to sign their own names may
not tell us as much about their literary skills as do the poems of Chilperic I,*
or even Gregory of Tours’ concise description of Gundovald, brought up as
is the custom of kings, long-haired and literate, [itteris eruditus,** but it
does suggest that members of the royal family were able to read and write
throughout the seventh and early eighth centuries.
It appears, therefore, that literacy was not uncommon in Merovingian
Gaul, and it is likely that many members of the royal court, from the king
downwards, were able to read and write. This last point can be supported
not just by charter subscriptions, but by the Vitae of those saints who spent
the early parts of their careers in royal service, although here there 1s
reference not to basic literacy but to learning in general, and in particular to
legal knowledge. Thus Desiderius of Cahors learnt Roman law,* and
Bonitus of Clermont knew the Theodosian Code.*° Leodegar was handed
over by his uncle, Dido of Poitiers, ad diversis studtis, quae saeculi potentes
studire solent, and we are told specifically that he had a knowledge of secular
and canon law.*’ The second Passio of Leodegar describes him as being
learned in litterarum studiis.**
That a knowledge of law, both secular and ecclesiastical, was common, at
least among those royal servants for whom we have detailed information, is
not surprising; at times both Desiderius and Bonitus had to exercise secular
judicial functions,” and as bishops they and Leodegar had legal roles to fill.
Not all learning and culture, however, was so directly utilitarian, and yet
almost all of the most literate figures of the Merovingian age were adminis-
trators of note. Parthenius, who had a particularly bad press from Gregory
of Tours because of his rapacity, which eventually prompted his murder at
the hands of the people of ‘Trier, was the grandson of Ruricius of Limoges,

22 Ibid., nos. 551, 552, 554, 555, pp. 10, 16, 22, 26; ibid. XIV, nos. 583, 587, 588, 593, pp. 38,
55, 58, 80.
3 Gregory of Tours, Liber Historiarum V c. 44, ed. Krusch and Levison, MGH SS rer.
merov. 1.1, p. 254; see D. Norberg, La Poésie latine rythmique (Stockholm, 1954), pp.
31-40.
*4 Gregory of Tours, Liber Historiarum VI c. 24, ed. Krusch and Levison, MGH SS rer.
merov. 1.1, p. 291.
5 Vita Destdentt c. 1, ed. B. Krusch, MGH SS rer. merov. IV, p. 564.
© Vita Boniti c. 2, ed. B. Krusch, MGH SS rer. merov. VI, p. 120.
77 Passio Leudegarii 1 c. 1, ed. B. Krusch, MGH SS rer. merov. V, pp. 283-4.
*8 Passio Leudegarit, II c. 1, ed. B. Krusch, MGH SS rer. merov. V, p. 324.
29 Vita Desident c. 7, ed. Krusch, MGH SS rer. merov. IV, p. 568; Vita Boniti cc. 2-3, ed.
Krusch, MGH SS rer. merov. V1, pp. 120-1.
68 Ian Wood
and was related to Sidonius Apollinaris.*° He received an education at
Ravenna and was clearly a man of literary pretensions. Childebert II’s
tutor, Gogo, seems to have regarded Parthenius as a rhetorician to be
emulated, and he himself was the author of a number of florid letters
preserved in the collection known as the Epistulae Austrastacae, which may
have been compiled as a set of exemplars.*' In this same collection there are
letters of other magnates of the period, most notably the patrician
Dynamius. Like Parthenius, he came from a family which could boast a
number of distinguished men of letters, and he numbered among his
correspondents Gregory the Great and Venantius Fortunatus.** He also
played a significant, if not altogether praiseworthy, role in the Provengal
politics of his time. Numerous other politicians are commemorated in the
poems of Venantius Fortunatus, which provide the fullest insight into the
court circles of late sixth-century Francia.*’ Granted the known cultural
aspirations and achievements of these men, it is not surprising that
Asclepiodotus, who drafted legislation for both Guntram and Childebert
II, was a man of some literary skill.**
The letters of the Epistulae Austrasiacae and the poems of Venantius
Fortunatus belong firmly to the sixth century, but the literary traditions
which they represent continue well into the seventh, as can be seen in
another letter collection: that of Desiderius of Cahors.** From a Gallic
point of view the traditions begin in the fifth century with Sidonius
Apollinaris, who was explicitly considered to be a model writer by his
relatives, Avitus of Vienne and Ruricius of Limoges.* Ferreolus of Uzés is
also said to have written books of letters in the manner of Sidonius,*’
although these have not survived. The opening letters in the Epistulae

3° Gregory of Tours, Liber Historiarum il c. 36, ed. Krusch and Levison, MGH SS rer.
merov. 1.1, pp. 131-2; K.F. Stroheker, Der senatorische Adel 1m spatantiken Gallien
(Tiibingen, 1948), no. 283, p. 199.
3! Epistulae Austrasiacae 13, 16, 22, 48, ed. W. Gundlach, MGH Epp. merov. et karol. I, pp.
128, 130, 134-5, 152-3.
% Tbid., 12, 17, ibid., pp. 127, 130-1; Stroheker, Der senatorische Adel, no. 108, pp. 164-5.
33. R. Koebner, Venantius Fortunatus (Berlin, 1915), pp. 28-39; D. Tardi, Fortunat (Paris,
1927), pp. 113-32.
34 Stroheker, Der senatorische Adel, no. 38, p. 149; C.P. Wormald, “The decline of the
Western Empire and the survival of its aristocracy’, Journal of Roman Studies 66 (1976),
217-26, at 224.
35 Desiderius of Cahors, Epistulae, ed. W. Arndt, MGH Epp. merov. et karol. 1.
36 Avitus, epp. 43, 51, ed. R. Peiper, MGH AA VI.2, pp. 72-3, 79-81; Ruricius, ep. 1.26, ed.
B. Krusch, MGH AA, VIII, pp. 332-3.

37 Gregory of Tours, Liber Historiarum V1 c.7, ed. Krusch and Levison, MGH SS rer. merov.
I.1, p. 276.
 MEROVINGIAN GAUL 69
Austrasiacae were written by Remigius of Rheims, a contemporary and a
correspondent of Avitus,*® and, while the collection contains no letters
which can be securely dated to the 520s and 530s, continuity in the tradition
of letter-writing can be inferred from the works of Arator, friend and fellow
student of Ruricius’ grandson Parthenius, whom Gogo cited in the next
generation as a master of rhetoric.*” By the time of Gogo, however, the art of
letters had received a further fillip with the arrival of Venantius Fortunatus.
Although there is a gap of some thirty years between the last letter in the
Eptstulae Austrasiacae and the first in the correspondence of Desiderius of
Cahors, both belong to the same tradition of letter-writing. How far the
tradition survived Desiderius is more difficult to determine. There are a
handful of Merovingian letters later in date than the last in his collection,
but they are isolated examples and do not have to be seen in the same context
as those written by him or his literary forebears.” As for the letters of
Boniface, despite the fact that they share certain characteristics with those
of Sidonius, the Epistolae Austrastacae and Desiderius, it 1s clear from his
more private letters, which are directed largely to Anglo-Saxon friends and
well-wishers,*! and also from the letters of Aldhelm,* that a tradition of
letter-writing was already established in England, and it was that, rather
than the survival of late antique culture in Francia, which lay behind
Boniface’s own style of correspondence.
The Gallic and Frankish letters deal with a wide range of topics, and doso
in a variety of styles. It is, nevertheless, possible to talk about them as
belonging to a coherent genre of letter-writing because throughout the
various collections are to be found letters whose chief concern is the
cultivation of friendship, of amucitia in the earlier collections, or of dulcedo
(sweetness) in the writings of Venantius Fortunatus.* That such letters
were written, despite the apparently insignificant nature of their contents, is
an indication, on the one hand, of the strength of literary tradition within
court circles, and, on the other, of the continuing value of such letters for
sixth- and seventh-century society.

*8 Epistulae Austrasiacae 1-4, ed. Gundlach, MGH Epp. merov. et karol. 1, pp. 112-16;
Avitus, ep. 98, ed. Peiper, MGH AA V1.2, p. 103.
* Arator, Epistola ad Parthenium, ed. A. McKinlay, CS9EL LX XII (Vienna, 1951), pp. 150-
3; Epistulae Austrasiacae 16, ed. Gundlach, MGH Epp. merov. et karol. 1, p. 130.
9 Epistulae Aevi Merovingici Collectae 16, 17, ed. W. Gundlach, MGH Epp. merov. et karol.
I, pp. 461-7.
*! Boniface, Epistolae, ed. M. Tangl, Die Briefe des hetligen Bonifatius und Lullus, MGH Epp.
sel. I.
42 Aldhelm, ed. R. Ewald, MGH AA XV;; see also Aldhelm: The Prose Works, trans. M.
Lapidge and M. Herren (Ipswich, 1979).
43 J.M. Wallace-Hadrill, The Frankish Church (Oxford, 1983), p. 83.
70 Ian Wood
In the late Roman period the exercise of friendship, especially through
letter-writing, was important in ensuring that a senator had a range of
contacts on whom he could call to assist him in any eventuality; the classic
example of this is to be found in the correspondence of Symmachus.**
Similar concerns underlie the writings of Venantius Fortunatus, who, as a
foreigner, was dependent on the kindness of others.* Desiderius of Cahors
presents an analogous case; having served at court as treasurer to Chlothar
II, he was sent to Marseilles as count by Dagobert I, and was subsequently
appointed to the bishopric of Cahors.* His letters date largely from this last
period of his life, and represent a determined attempt to keep up contacts so
that, geographically separated though he was from court politics, he might
still be able to call on old friends when he needed their help. Among his
correspondents were Dagobert I, Sigibert III, Grimoald, the mayor of the
palace and a number of powerful bishops, including Eligius of Noyon and,
above all, Audoin of Rouen, to whom he addressed a famous letter,
reminding him of times past, when the two of them and Eligius, amongst
others, were all present at the court of Chlothar II.*’
Equally remarkable are a group of letters addressed to Desiderius from
his mother, Herchenafreda.*® These are not preserved along with those
written by the saint, but are included in the Vita Desiderm, whose author
clearly had access to a larger collection than that which now survives.
Herchenafreda’s letters cast particular light on two further points; first, on
the role of letter-writing within the family — a point that can also be
paralleled in the works of Sidonius, Avitus, Ruricius and Ennodius;*” and
second, on the important part a woman could play in this aspect of the
maintenance of family cohesion. Other literate women are known from the
seventh century,’ but these letters provide a unique example of such a
woman manipulating traditions of culture and communication to preserve

4 J.F. Matthews, ‘The letters of Symmachus’, in Latin Literature of the Fourth Century, ed.
J.W. Binns (London, 1974), pp, 58-99, at p. 64.
** Koebner, Venantius Fortunatus, pp. 30-1.
46 Vita Desiderii cc. 2-15, ed. Krusch, MGH SS rer. merov. IV, pp. 564-74.
47 Desiderius, epp. I. 2-6, 10, 11.6, 9, 17, ed. Arndt, MGH Epp. merov. et karol. 1, pp. 194-6,
199, 206, 207-8, 212.
48 Vita Desideni cc. 9, 10, 11, ed. Krusch, MGH SS rer. merov. IV, pp. 569-70.
9 The genealogies included in Stroheker, Der senatorsche Adel, depend precisely on this.
°° Apart from the Vita Radegundis by Baudonivia, ed. B. Krusch, MGH SS rer. merov. I, pp.
377-95, it might reasonably be assumed that the lives of two other queens edited in the same
volume by Krusch, the Vita Balthidis, pp. 482-508, and the Vita Geretrudis, pp. 453-64,
were also written by women. See also n. 107 below, p. 78.
 MEROVINGIAN GAUL 71
the status of her family, despite the death of one son and the murder of
another.”!
The friendship letters of the Merovingian period, like those of the fifth
century, tend to be written in a style which has been identified in the
writings of Sidonius Apollinaris as the styvlum pingue atque flondum.” It
was the style thought appropriate for correspondence between friends, and
its elaborate ornamentation was intended to delight the reader. The
importance of choosing an appropriate style was well known to anyone with
a proper rhetorical training. Avitus of Vienne explicitly tailored his style to
his audience,*? and it is probable that Caesarius of Arles cultivated literary
rusticittas not because of any rhetorical incompetence, but because he
regarded the simple style as appropriate for sermons which were intended to
attract large congregations drawn from all classes of society.*t That an
appreciation of style remained is apparent from Gogo’s comment on the
rethonica dictio of Parthenius.” The letters of Gogo, Desiderius and their
correspondents must have been deliberately florid.
This awareness of style is in apparent contradiction to Gregory of Tours’
comment that ‘the exercise of the liberal arts 1s in decline, or rather is dying,
in the cities of Gaul’,°° an opinion which the bishop’s own Latin is
sometimes thought to substantiate. Problems of the textual transmission of
Gregory's Histories, however, make it difficult to determine the exact
nature of this Latin; it may well be that the earliest manuscript is not a good
guide to what Gregory actually wrote, and that he should be credited with
the more classicizing language of later manuscripts.°’ Besides, there is a
further point: it 1s quite wrong to confuse questions relating to the use of
classical grammar with those concerned with adherence to stylistic tradi-
tions, especially in a period of linguistic change, like that of the sixth,
seventh and eighth centuries, when Latin developed slowly into a variety of
proto-Romance forms.

*! Vita Desideni c. 11, ed. Krusch, MGH SS rer. merov. IV, p. 570.
°* A. Loyen, Sidoine Apollinaire et l’esprit précieux en Gaule (Paris, 1943), pp. 129-34.
3 Avitus, De spiritalis historiae gestis, prologus, ed. Peiper, MGH AA V1.2, pp. 201-2.
** M.-J. Delage, Césaire d’Arles: sermons au peuple, Sources Chrétiennes 175 (Paris, 1971),
pp. 180-208.
»° Epistulae Austrastacae 16, ed. Gundlach, MGH Epp. merov. et karol. 1, p. 130.
°© Gregory of Tours, Libri Historiarum, praefatio, ed. Krusch and Levison, MGH SS rer.
merov. 1.1, p. 1.
*” W. Goffart, ‘From Histonae to Historia Francorum and back again: aspects of the textual
history of Gregory of Tours’, in Religion, Culture and Society in the Early Middle Ages, ed.
T.F.X. Noble and J.J. Contreni (Kalamazoo, 1987), pp. 55—76.
72 lan Wood
Gregory’s own writings not only display a great gift for narrative,°® but
also an awareness of appropriate style, despite the bishop’s protestations of
incompetence. Indeed the protestations are themselves an indication of
such an awareness, and in general the prefaces to the Histones, especially
that to book 5 denouncing civil war, employ rhetoric with some skill.
Gregory also uses rhetorical tricks to dramatic effect in his condemnation of
Chilperic I as ‘the Nero and Herod of our time’, appropriately placed to
provide a survey of the king’s life, after the account of his murder.*”
A similar sense of correct form can be found in the Vita Columban: of
Jonas of Bobbio, which is prefaced by a dedicatory letter, whose Latin 1s
remarkable for its obscurity. Two factors combine to make this so: on the
one hand Jonas’ grammar and orthography are far from being classical, on
the other he deliberately chose a florid style as being appropriate to his
purpose. True to tradition he reserves his most elaborate writing for an
expression of his own unworthiness, contrasting his celtic nard with the
balsam of earlier writers.’ The mixture of seventh-century grammar and
the tricks of late antique rhetoric make the passage well-nigh incomprehen-
sible, but it does show a commitment to appropriate literary form, and an
awareness that a hagiographical preface has a specific function in that it
provides the author with an opportunity to place himself, or herself, in a
particular relationship with subject, patron and audience. The narrative
section of a saint’s life is concerned with other matters, and fortunately in
the main body of the work Jonas resorts to a clearer style, fit for the task in
hand.
Jonas’ works might be claimed as a monument to Lombard culture, since
although he came from Susa, which was in Merovingian hands,®! he was
educated at Columbanus’ Italian monastery of Bobbio. Such national
distinctions, however, are of little significance; the third abbot of Bobbio
was Bertulf, a relative of Arnulf of Metz.™ In any case, other Merovingian

°8 Gregory’s narrative skills have generally been recognized; for two recent surveys of
traditional interpretations of Gregory’s art see G. de Nie, Views from a Many-Windowed
Tower (Amsterdam, 1987), pp. 1-26, and W. Goffart, The Narrators of Barbarian History
(Princeton, 1988), pp. 112-19. Both authors go on to offer major new interpretations of
Gregory’s writings.
»? Gregory of Tours, Liber Historiarum VI c. 46, ed. Krusch and Levison, MGH SS rer.
merov. 1.1, pp. 319-21.
6° Jonas, Vita Columbani, ep. to Waldebert and Bobolenus, ed. B. Krusch, MGH SS rer.
merov. 1V, pp. 61-3.
61 Fredegar, Chronica IV c. 45, ed. J.M. Wallace-Hadrill, The Fourth Book of the Chronicle of
Fredegar (London, 1960), pp. 37-9.
62 Jonas, Vita Columbani II c. 23, ed. Krusch, MGH SS rer. merov. IV, p. 114.
 MEROVINGIAN GAUL 73
saints’ lives are also prefaced with letters of dedication which are written ina
style more elaborate than the rest of the work, but which nevertheless
invoke the traditional disclaimer of incompetence; Audoin, in his preface to
the Vita Eligiti emphasized the rusticity of his Latin,® as did the author of
the first Passio Leudegari;™ the author of the life of Wandregisil stressed
his incompetence,” and the man who wrote the Vita Bonitz announced his
unworthiness. This awareness of the idea that certain styles were regarded
as appropriate to particular tasks is, thus, to be found throughout the
Merovingian period, and has its palaeographical counterpart in the use of
litterae elongatae for kings’ names in original charters.°
The appropriate use of style raises interesting questions about education
in the sixth and seventh centuries. The schools of rhetoric which had
existed in late antique Gaul seem to have come to an end in the sixth century
at the latest,°* although it is possible that some form of secular education
was still available during the reign of Chilperic I, since he ordered all the
civitates to teach young boys an alphabet with an extra four letters.” Some
of the early Merovingian writers whose letters are contained in the Epistu-
lae Austrasiacae could have had access, therefore, to a traditional Roman
education. For the most part, however, we are probably dealing, even in the
sixth century, with the products of a very much less developed educational
system, dominated by local schools, such as that in Avallon attended by
Germanus of Paris,’” or that in the Auvergne, where Leobardus learnt the

3 Audoin, Vita Eligtt, praef., ed. B. Krusch, MGH SS rer. merov. IV, pp., 663-5.
* Passio Leudegani 1, ep. to Herminarius, ed. Krusch, MGH SS rer. merov. V, p. 282.
© Vita Wandregisili c. 1, ed. B. Krusch, MGH SS rer. merov. V, p. 13.
© Vita Bonttt, prol., ed. Krusch, MGH SS rer. merov. VI, p. 119.
°? ChLA XIII, nos. 565-8, 570, pp. 68, 71, 76, 78; ChLA XIV, nos. 572-7, 579, 581, 584-91,
593, pp. 8, 11, 15, 23, 32, 42, 46, 49, 55, 58, 63, 66, 68, 80; compare the lack of litterae
elongatae in the charters of Pippin III before his usurpation; ChLA XIV, nos. 595-6, pp. 3,
8. This should perhaps be set in the wider context of the notion of a hierarchy of scripts,
which was established ‘by the beginning of the eighth century’; see R. McKitterick, ‘The
scriptoria of Merovingian Gaul: a survey of the evidence’, in Columbanus and Merovingian
Monasticism, ed. H.B. Clarke and M. Brennan, BAR, International Series 113 (Oxford,
1981), pp. 173-207, at p. 189; and see D. Ganz, “The preconditions for caroline minuscule’,
Viator 18 (1987), 23-44, at 32, where the full development of the technique is placed in the
context of the Carolingian renaissance.
8 P. Riché, Education et culture dans l’occident barbare, vie—viiie siécles (3rd edn, Paris,
1962), pp. 69-75.
°° Gregory of Tours, Liber Histonarum V c. 44, ed. Krusch and Levison, MGH SS rer.
merov. 1.1, p. 254.
7° Venantius Fortunatus, Vita Germani c. 2, ed. B. Krusch, MGH AA IV.2, p. 12; Riché,
Education et culture, pp. 324-6.
74 lan Wood
psalms.’! In the seventh century there are records of similar local establish-
ments; Filibert was educated in the city of Aire,” while Praeiectus received
his schooling at Issoire in the Auvergne.” These seventh-century schools,
moreover, may well have been ecclesiastical; Aire was, after all, an
episcopal city’”* and Issoire had a major church dedicated to the cult of
Austremonius.’> Equally, the subjects taught may suggest that the educa-
tion was an ecclesiastical one; this is indicated not just in the case of
Leobardus, but also of that of Eucherius of Orleans, who learnt the church
canons before embarking on the monastic life.”°
In addition to the schools already mentioned, it is possible that the royal
court had some role to play in the education of the children of the nobility.
Certainly there was a royal tutor, of whom the most famous was Gogo,
nutritor of Childebert II, as well as friend of Venantius Fortunatus, and
contributor to the Epzstulae Austrasiacae.’’ The existence of such an
official, however, did not necessarily mean that the children of magnates
were brought up in the royal household. In the case of Audoin and his
brothers, we are told that they were sent to the king, who handed them over
to be educated by members of the aristocracy (ab inlustris viris).”* More
revealing is the information in the second Passio of Leodegar, which tells of
how the saint was sent by his parents to Chlothar II, who handed the boy
over to Dido, bishop of Poitiers, for his education.” The first Passio
actually makes no reference to the palace, but simply recounts the boy's
education in Poitiers, organized by Dido,*° who was also his uncle. It seems
as if the palace acted as a clearing house, placing the sons of officials and
magnates in appropriate households for their upbringing.
Parallel to this is the role of the court as a focus for talent. There are

”. Gregory of Tours, Liber Vitae Patrum XX c. 1, ed. B. Krusch, MGH SS rer. merov. 1.2, p.
741.
” Vita Filiberti c. 1, ed. W. Levison, MGH SS rer. merov. V, p. 584.
> Passio Praeiecti c. 2, ed. B. Krusch, MGH SS rer. merov. V, p. 227.
% Vita Filiberti c. 1, ed. Levison, MGH SS rer. merov. V, p. 584. On episcopal schools see
Riché, Education et culture, pp. 328-31.
’> Passio Praeiecti c. 9, ed. Krusch, MGH SS rer. merov. V, p. 231.
© Vita Euchenii c. 3, ed. W. Levison, MGH SS rer. merov. VII, p. 48.
” Gregory of Tours, Liber Historiarum V c. 46, ed. Krusch and Levison, MGH SS rer.
merov. 1.1, p. 256; on his successor see VI c. 1, zbid., p. 265; Epistulae Austrasiacae 13, 16,
22, 48, ed. Gundlach, MGH Epp. merov. et karol. 1, pp. 128, 130, 134-5, 152-3. Riché,
Education et culture, pp. 267-8, 283-4.
8 Vita Audoini c. 1, ed. W. Levison, MGH SS rer. merov. V, p. 554.
” Passio Leudegari II c. 1, ed. Krusch, MGH SS rer. merov. V, pp. 324-5.
80 Ibid., pp. 283-4.
 MEROVINGIAN GAUL 75
examples of boys being sent to court after they had received an education,
among them Filibert, Geremar, Bonitus, Wulfram and Ermeland.*' There
is also some evidence that members of the roval court kept an eve open for
promise. Thus Patroclus, who came from a landed family, but scarcely a
wealthy one, since as a child he had to look after his father’s flocks, was
commended to Childebert I’s adviser Nunnio, as a result of his prowess at
school.** After his schooling Arnulf, later bishop of Metz, was sent to the
household of the rector palatii Gundulf.®
The role played by the court makes it difficult to discuss Merovingian
culture in regional terms. Many of the leading individuals, especially in
seventh-century Francia, came from the provinces to the palace and
subsequently returned to the provinces again. Thus, Eligius was born in the
Limousin, but after he had received his training as a goldsmith, he made his
way to Neustria, where he was noticed by Chlothar II’s treasurer, Bobo,
who gave him his entrée to court. In later life, however, he became bishop of
Noyon.** At court he belonged to the same circle as Desiderius of Cahors,
Audoin of Rouen, Paul of Verdun, Sulpicius of Bourges, Arnulf of Metz
and Grimoald, all of whom, bar the last, had similar career structures.”
In the light of this it is important not to overemphasize regional variations
in Merovingian culture, although there undoubtedly was variety. Certainly
the famous anecdote illustrating the cultural superiority of the south,
Domnolus’ refusal to accept the see of Avignon from Chlothar because he
would be tired out by sophistic senators and philosophical judges, can be
made to bear too much weight.” After all, the first reason for refusing the
southern diocese which Gregory attributes to Domnolus 1s the man’s desire
not to be exiled from court, a sentiment close to the heart of Desiderius of
Cahors a century later.®’ As for the philosophers of the Rhéne valley, they
should not be allowed to obscure the very strong bureaucratic traditions of
Le Mans, the city where Domnolus finally did become bishop. Domnolus’

*! Vita Filiberti c. 1, ed. Levison, MGH SS rer. merov. V, p. 584; Vita Gereman c. 3, ed. B.
Krusch, MGH SS rer. merov. \V, p. 628; Vita Boniti c. 2, ed. Krusch, MGH SS rer. merov.
VI, p. 120; Vita Vulframi c. 1, ed. W. Levison, MGH SS rer. merov. V, p. 662; Vita
Ermelandi c. 1, ed. W. Levison, MGH SS rer. merov. V, p. 684.
*2 Gregory of Tours, Liber Vitae Patrum 1X c. 1, ed. Krusch, MGH SS rer. merov. 1.2, pp.
702-3.
83 Vita Arnulfi c. 3, ed. B. Krusch, MGH SS rer. merov. II, p. 433.
84 Vita Eligit I cc. 1-3, ed. B. Krusch, MGH SS rer. merov. IV, pp. 669-71.
85 Desiderius, ep. 1.10, ed. Arndt, MGH Epp. merov. et karol. 1, p. 199.
8© Gregory of Tours, Liber Historiarum V1c.9, ed. Krusch and Levison, MGH SS rer. merov.
1.1, p. 279.
87 Desiderius, ep. 1.10, ed. Arndt, MGH Epp. merov. et karol., 1, p. 199.
 76 Ian Wood
own church was later to be responsible for the preservation of various
Merovingian episcopal acts, most notably the will of Bishop Bertram,
admittedly in the somewhat suspect Gesta episcoporum Cenomanensium.*
Moreover, the diocese could boast another centre of note, the royal
monastery of St Calais. It might, indeed, have been the political import-
ance of the district which made Le Mans acceptable to Domnolus, when
Avignon had not been.
While the centrality of the Merovingian court in the late sixth and seventh
centuries modifies the distinction between a romanized south and a bar-
barian north-east, at the same time the evidence relating to the education of
the leading men of the kingdom weakens the divide between secular and
ecclesiastical learning.”” Although most of our evidence concerns the lives
of saints, many of them only entered the church late in life, after they had
already had secular careers. Despite his family’s connections with Colum-
banus, and despite his own piety, Audoin remained a layman until his
appointment as bishop of Rouen in 640. Indeed, because he was a layman he
insisted on spending a year going through the required grades of the church
canonically, before his consecration.?! His education was as much that of a
secular magnate as of a churchman, and the same will probably have been
true of his two brothers, the treasurer Rado and the ascetic Ado.”
Desiderius of Cahors also had a secular career before he became bishop, as
did Arnulf of Metz and Bonitus of Clermont.” These men were by no
means unfit for episcopal office. Equally Leodegar, although his master,
Dido bishop of Poitiers, wished him to become a churchman, was versed in
secular letters and the law, as well as the canons.” In any case most
education would probably have had a strong religious component.

88 In general see W. Goffart, The Le Mans Forgeries: A Chapter from the History of Church
Property in the Ninth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1966); on the authenticity of the will of
Bertram, pp. 263-4.
: 8° For an indication of its importance see Gregory of Tours, Liber Historiarum V c. 14, ed.
Krusch and Levison, MGH SS rer. merov. 1.1, p. 207.
7° For an alternative reading of this evidence see Ganz, ‘Bureaucratic shorthand’, pp. 62-3. I
take the same evidence to imply an overlap between secular and ecclesiastical culture, rather
than a clerical chancery.
71 Vita Audoini c. 7, ed. Levison, MGH SS rer. merov. V, p. 558; compare Vita Eligit IIc. 2,
ed. Krusch, MGH SS rer. merov. IV, pp. 695-6.
2 Jonas, Vita Columbani | c. 26, ed. Krusch, MGH SS rer. merov. IV, p. 100; Vita Audoini c.
1, ed. Levison, MGH SS rer. merov. V, pp. 554-5.
3 Vita Desideni cc. 2, 6,7, ed. Krusch, MGH SS rer. merov. 1V, pp. 564-8; Vita Arnulfi c. 4,
ed. Krusch, MGH SS rer. merov. I], p. 433; Vita Boniti cc. 2-3, ed. Krusch, MGH SS rer.
merov. V1, pp. 120-1.
* Passio Leudegant I c. 1, ed. Krusch, MGH SS rer. merov. V, pp. 283-4.
 MEROVINGIAN GAUL 77
Leobardus was taught the psalms not because he intended to embark on the
religious life, but because it was part of a boy’s basic education.”> The
sources do not suggest that there was any distinction to be drawn between
the culture of a secular magnate and that of a bishop; both needed to be
literate and for both the cultivation of letters had its social and political
advantages. Nor was there much difference between the ambitions of lay
aristocrats and senior clergy ; churchmen were often in open competition for
power in the late seventh century, and more than one bishop died a death as
violent as any layman.
The clear overlap of religious and secular education may also explain why
it is so difficult to determine whether Fredegar was a layman or an
ecclesiastic. The continuators of his Chronicle acted on the orders of two
members of the Carolingian family, Counts Childebrand and Nibelung.”
Of Fredegar himself we know nothing except what can be deduced from his
writings. Apart from geographical indications which seem to place him in
Burgundy,”’ what is most striking is the odd mixture of secular and religious
information. Although he has more to say about non-ecclesiastical matters,
he was well acquainted with Jonas’ Vita Columban: within a short period of
its composition,” and also seems to have known Sisebut’s life of Desiderius
of Vienne.” His Chronicle is a peculiar mixture of information, and yet it
is one that fits well with that element of aristocratic society influenced
by Luxeuil, where noble patronage blended with Hiberno-Frankish
asceticism. |”
The overlapping culture of lay and clerical magnates, which was
apparently a feature of Merovingian Gaul in the sixth and seventh cen-
turies, suggests a remarkably literate aristocracy. The cultural standards
implied are less surprising for the clergy, but there may also have been a
greater tradition of clerical learning than is usually recognized. There are

°° Gregory of Tours, Liber Vitae Patrum XX c. 1, ed. Krusch, MGH SS rer. merov. 1.2, p.
741.
© Fredegar, Continuations 34, ed. Wallace-Hadrill, Chronicle of Fredegar, pp. 102-3; I
follow Wallace-Hadrill, zbid., pp. xxv—vi, in seeing Childebrand and Nibelung as being the
patrons and not the authors of the text.
97 Wallace-Hadrill, Chronicle of Fredegar, p. xxii.
% Fredegar IV c. 36, ed. Wallace-Hadrill, Chronicle of Fredegar, pp. 23-9; compare Jonas,
Vita Columbani I c. 18, ed. Krusch, MGH SS rer. merov. IV, p. 86; 1. N. Wood, “The Vita
Columbani and Merovingian hagiography’, Peritia 1 (1982), 63-80, at 68.
% The juxtaposition of the reference to Desiderius’ martyrdom with an account of the
accession of Sisebut in Fredegar IV cc. 32-3, ed. Wallace-Hadrill, Chronicle of Fredegar,
pp. 21-2, is suggestive.
100 F, Prinz, ‘Columbanus, the Frankish nobility and the territories east of the Rhine’, in
Columbanus and Merovingian Monasticism, ed. Clarke and Brennan, pp. 73-87.
78 Ian Wood
references to lost works of theology, particularly from the pen of Bonitus of
Clermont,!°! and it is known that there were church councils which debated
matters of doctrine, whose canons have not survived.!** This information,
however, relates to the seventh century, and not to the church castigated by
Boniface, whose gloomy evaluation of the prelates of his day has tended to
make the last half-century of Merovingian rule appear like a cultural and
spiritual desert.'°
Any assessment of this impression is severely hampered by the state of the
evidence; Milo may not have been typical of the Merovingian episcopate as
a whole,!% and as for the priest who baptized im nomine patna, filia et
spiritus sanctus ,'°° he need not represent the norm for Francia, since he was
working in Bavaria. He is more likely to illustrate the declining standards of
learning amongst Christian communities established a century earlier by
missionary groups, such as those sent out from Luxeuil by Eustasius, and
perhaps subsequently neglected.'”°
Turning away from the straitjacket imposed by Boniface’s assessment of
the situation, there are some general points which can be made; in
particular the culture of the early eighth century can more easily be
discussed in regional terms than that of previous generations. Thus, it 1s
possible to argue for significant continuity in the north, but it is very much
harder to do so in the south. The major historical work of this period, the
Liber Histoniae Francorum, was written somewhere in the Ile de France,
probably in Soissons, in 727.'°’ The life of Audoin was apparently com-
posed in the previous generation,'® and the Vita Wandregisili must date

'8! Vita Boniti c. 17, ed. Levison, MGH SS rer. merov. V1, p. 129.
102 Vita Eligit I c. 35, ed. Krusch, MGH SS rer. merov. IV, p. 692.
103 P. Riché, ‘Le Renouveau culturel 4 la cour de Pépin III’, Francia 2 (1974), 59-70, at 59.
'0* Boniface, ep. 87, ed. Tangl, MGH Epp. sel. 1, p. 198; E. Ewig, ‘Milo et etusmodi similes’, in
Spatantikes und frankisches Gallien IT (Munich, 1979), pp. 189-219.
105 Boniface, ep. 68, ed. Tangl, MGH Epp. sel. I, p. 141.
'06 Jonas, Vita Columbant II c. 8, ed. Krusch, MGH SS rer. merov. IV, pp. 121-2.
'07 R. Gerberding, The Rise of the Carolingians and the Liber Historiae Francorum (Oxford,
1987), pp. 1, 150-9; for the possibility that the work was written by a nun of Notre Dame at
Soissons see Janet L. Nelson, Times Literary Supplement, 11-17 March 1988, p. 286; the
suggestion could be defended on the grounds that, although Gerberding’s case for the work
being composed in Soissons 1s persuasive, the failure of the Liber Histonae Francorum to
make much of the cult of St Medard makes composition in that house unlikely; a nunnery
dedicated to the Virgin, however, would have had no interest in promoting a particular
Frankish cult, and might well have produced a work lacking allegiance to a specific local
Saint.
108 W. Wattenbach and W. Levison, Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen im Mittelalter, I:
Vorzeit und Karolinger, ed. W. Levison (Weimar, 1952), p. 128 n. 307.
 MEROVINGIAN GAUL 79
from approximately the same period.'”’ Other indications of cultural
continuity can be seen in the production of manuscripts at such centres as
Corbie and perhaps at Chelles.'’? Further south the evidence is less
impressive; the Auvergne can boast a solitary saint’s life, that of Bonitus,
but there is little else from Aquitaine or from Provence and the Rhéne
valley. Vienne, which had supplied Benedict Biscop with manuscripts,'"
has nothing to offer in the early eighth century. Indeed, its bishop,
Wilicharius, retired to Agaune because of the disasters inflicted on his see
by Charles Martel.''* Carolingian writers saw this as a period of destruction
in the Rhone valley with Islamic invasions and Frankish counterattacks. ''?
The significance of the military threat to cultural traditions is perhaps
confirmed by the history of book production of Luxeuil, which appears to
have been interrupted when the monastery was sacked by the Saracens in
732.114
This history of devastation in the south and continuity in the north makes
possible some observations on the question of culture or its absence in
certain centres of late Merovingian Gaul, but the nature of the evidence is
such that it 1s not easy to make general comparisons between the sixth and
seventh centuries on the one hand and the eighth on the other. What 1s most
obviously absent in the later period is any information which allows the
historian to build up a picture of a court circle, such as can be observed in
the Epistulae Austrasiacae and the letters of Desiderius of Cahors. There is
nothing to suggest that the court acted as a focus for talent. This may be no
more than the reflection of a lacuna in the evidence, but it is possible that
there was a genuine change in the significance of the royal court in the last
years of the seventh and the first years of the eighth centuries.
The evidence for a court circle made up of men who were drawn into

' Ibid., p. 138.

0D. Ganz, ‘The Merovingian Library of Corbie’, in Columbanus and Merovingian
Monasticism, ed. Clarke and Brennan, pp. 153-72; McKitterick, “The scriptoria of
Merovingian Gaul’, pp. 194—6, and see also her arguments for a scriptorium at Jouarre in
the early eighth century: “The diffusion of insular culture in Neustria between 650 and 850:
the implications of the manuscript evidence’, in La Neustne: les pays au nord de la Loire de
650 a 850, ed. Hartmut Atsma, Beihefte der Francia 16, 2 vols. (Sigmaringen, 1988), IT,
pp. 395-432, at pp. 406-12.
'! Bede, Historia Abbatum c. 4, ed. Plummer, Baedae Opera Historica, p. 367.
112 Ado, Chronicon, PL 123, col. 122.
13 Fredegar, Continuations cc. 14, 18, 20-1, ed. Wallace-Hadrill, Chronicle of Fredegar, pp.
91, 93-5; see I.N. Wood, ‘A prelude to Columbanus: the monastic achievement in the
Burgundian territories’, in Columbanus and Merovingian Monasticism, ed. Clarke and
Brennan, pp. 3-32, at p. 19.
''4 R. McKitterick, ‘The scriptoria of Merovingian Gaul’, p. 188.
80 Ian Wood
royal service at the palace, and who subsequently held episcopal and secular
office elsewhere, is more or less unbroken until the 670s. Thereafter, the
evidence for such a group 1s negligible for half a century or more. According
to Paul the Deacon, Chrodegang of Metz was brought up in the household
of Charles Martel,''> but Charles sent his own sons to be educated at St
Denis and at the court of the Lombard king, Liutprand.''® It would only be
in the days of Pippin III that the Carolingians established a court anything
like that of the sixth- and seventh-century Merovingians.'!’
Chronologically the absence of a cultured court circle coincides with
Ebroin’s struggles for power, and subsequently with Carolingian attempts
to dominate the Merovingian kings. It is possible that during these struggles
for power, the palace ceased to provide the chief focus for talent in the
kingdom; politics at a court level were too dangerous, and with increasing
polarization between a small number of factions, which were no longer
dominated by the king, the chances of preferment were restricted. Thus,
whilst individual families still maintained contacts throughout Francia,!"
these no longer depended on the friendships established by young courtiers
early in their administrative careers. The impact of this on royal govern-
ment would have been considerable; for the continuity of regional and local
administrative traditions and culture in individual centres, it would‘have
been of little significance.
Whatever the explanation for the difference between the evidence for the
court before the days of Ebroin and afterwards, the sources relating to the
first century and a half of Merovingian rule suggest that the administrative
classes, both within the cities, and more particularly at court, were largely
literate. Members of the aristocracy and of the royal family were expected to
be able to read and write, and those destined for secular office received the
same education as those intended for the church. Some may have been
educated at court, but the majority were educated in the provinces and
joined the royal household subsequently; in time most were sent out to
positions elsewhere in the kingdom, where, separated from their peer
group, they cultivated the friendship of their sometime colleagues by the
exchange of letters, whose form and content were circumscribed by a set of
literary traditions going back to the late Roman period. At the same time,
situated in the provinces, they were the recipients of royal missives, which

"5 Paul the Deacon, Gesta Episcoporum Mettensium, ed. G.H. Pertz, MGH SS II, p. 267;
Riché, ‘Le Renouveau culturel 4 la cour de Pépin III’, 63—4.
© Riché, ‘Le Renouveau culturel 4 la cour de Pépin III’, 69.
NT Ibid., passim.
'18 See, for example, P. Geary, Aristocracy in Provence (Stuttgart, 1985), pp. 144-8.
 MEROVINGIAN GAUL 81
were based on models, such as those preserved by Marculf, and they had to
deal with the equally formulaic writings of local administration. In this
blending of social and governmental literacy the administrative classes of
sixth- and seventh-century Francia continued the traditions of their Gallo-
Roman predecessors until the days of Ebroin, Pippin II and Charles
Martel.
 4

Literacy and the

ee
papal government in late antiquity
and the early middle ages

Thomas F’. X. Noble

It would be entirely legitimate to investigate many of the roles played by

literacy in the story of the rise of the Roman church and of the papal
administration. Wilken has seen the dawning of ‘proto-catholic’ tradition as
a major stage in the rise of the Roman church, and he identifies the quest to
define canon, creed and authority as distinguishing marks of that tradition.'
The ability to write, to read and to understand texts played a major role in
that process. It 1s true that Rome played a small role in the definition of the
scriptural canon — apart perhaps from providing some impetus to the
preparation of the Vulgate translation — but the papal role in struggles over
creeds and authority was large and long-standing.* Early Christianity saw
the development of many written rules for living, some of which were
ascetic, or monastic, and of little interest in Rome — initially at least — but
others of which, embodied in almost countless conciliar enactments, were
or became subjects of intense concern at the papal court. Finally, many
Christian communities, but none more so than that of Rome, generated
abundant records of the routine minutiae of ecclesiastical administration.
Treating the subject of literacy in the papal administration, then,
requires a focus that will rest essentially on the kinds of records which that
administration produced and conserved. In some instances it is easy to see
why certain kinds of records appeared, but in other cases it is more difficult.
Sometimes we shall be able to see exactly who produced the records, but

' Robert Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them (New Haven, 1984).
* On Jerome’s commission from Pope Damasus, see: H.F.D. Sparks, ‘Jerome as a biblical
scholar’, in The Cambridge History of the Bible, ed. P.R. Ackroyd and C.F. Evans, 3 vols.
(Cambridge, 1970), I, pp. 513-16. The papal roles in the great trinitarian and christological
controversies can be read in almost any standard and substantial church history. There is no
point in citing a list of them here. I confine myself to drawing attention to the appropriate,
individually signed chapters in History of the Church, 11: The Impenal Church from
Constantine to the Early Middle Ages, ed. Hubert Jedin and John Dolan (New York, 1980).
82
 LITERACY AND PAPAL GOVERNMENT 83
sometimes we do not know. Strategies for conserving and using documents,
while occasionally apparent, are often undetectable. Basically, there are two
major categories of evidence. For purposes of discussion they can be
labelled intellectual, and jurisdictional or bureaucratic (though sharp lines
cannot always be drawn).
At the outset I should clarify some of the terms I shall be using in
pursuing my subject. When I speak of the ‘Roman church’ I mean
essentially the church in the province of which the pope was ordinary
bishop. This means Rome and its suburbicarian dioceses, or roughly the
Roman and Byzantine duchy of Rome. Viewed from this angle, the pope
was much like other bishops, and his institutional needs and responsibilities
were similar to theirs. One could well compare the papal administration to
that of, say, the patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch or Constantinople. But
this study cannot range so far afield and, in any event, the Roman church
province represents a formidable object of study.
Perhaps it will be objected that the papal administration had responsibili-
ties that extended far beyond the environs of Rome. The objection would be
just, but can be met by observing that, first, Rome’s ‘universal’ responsibili-
ties emerged only slowly and, second, the institution that came in time to
administer the universal church of the Christian middle ages was
fundamentally the old bureaux and branches of the early papal administra-
tion refined for new tasks. In other words, the emphasis here will be on the
introduction to the story of literacy and the papal government. Another way
to counter that objection would be to say that in looking at some intellectual
and jurisdictional questions I shall indeed break out of the confines of the
Roman region.
In the context of the papal administration I have three basic notions of
literacy in mind. The first concerns institutional record keeping of every
kind that has left a trace in the surviving evidence. I shall attempt to
describe the major kinds of records, tell who produced them, how, and for
what purposes. Second, I hope to say something about who was literate and
what levels of literacy were attained. It must not be forgotten that the people
and institutions I shall be describing constituted a relatively small clerical
elite that used literacy to carry out its own business and to promote its own
interests. Literacy in papal Rome had a great deal to do with the acquisition,
retention and exercise of power.*° My approach is very much a functionalist
one. I will argue that Rome had, or developed, the kinds of literacy it
needed to do what it wanted to do. It was only incidentally that papal Rome
made any contributions to the literary culture of Europe or to the levels of

* Jack Goody, ‘Introduction’, in Literacy in Traditional Societies, ed. Jack Goody (Cam-
bridge, 1968), pp. 2, 11-14.
84 Thomas F. X. Noble |
literate attainment in my period. Third, at the end of this essay, and
necessarily only summarily, [ shall draw attention to the broad realm of
intellectual history and mention theology and ecclesiology as two areas
where at least some popes made durable contributions.

The early history of papal records, and of papal record keeping, is shrouded
in obscurity. The first faint rays of light appear in the notice concerning
Pope Fabian (236-50) in the Liber Pontificalis.* There we read that this
pope installed notaries in each region of the city and gave them the charge of
recording the deeds of the martyrs. We shall see below that this brief remark
sheds some light on the beginnings of institutional history writing in Rome
but for the moment it is the appearance of the papal administration, in the
shape of the notaries, that must be pursued.
Pope Fabian appears to have divided Rome into seven ecclesiastical
regions and to have placed at the head of each region a deacon and
subdeacon. The regional deacons began as ministers for charitable services
and they soon acquired responsibility for the administration of church
properties in their regions. The regional deacons became powerful officers
of the church. They had their headquarters in the Lateran and functioned
as the pope’s chief personal representative in each region of the city. If these
officers truly appeared in the third century, their duties and visibility grew
greatly after the time of Constantine and continued growing for centuries.
By the late eighth century the seven regional deacons came to be called
‘cardinal’ deacons and they were both electors and eligible for election as
pope.” The deacons were the chief figures in the administrative side of the
papal government and they worked alongside but independently of the
pastoral administration whose chief representatives were the titular priests.
The archdeacon appears to have been the head of the ecclesiastical person-
nel as a whole.°®
Under the deacons the key officers were the notaries and the defensors.
The notaries may have had some duties as historians in early times but from
the fifth century onwards they had different and more important tasks.
Perhaps the notaries functioned by analogy to the Roman notarm and
tabelliones as the preparers and keepers of records out in the regions and it is
reasonable to suppose that they or their subordinates — we have no idea how

* LPI, p. 64. Harry Bresslau, Handbuch der Urkundenlehre fiir Deutschland und Italien, 2
vols. (4th edn, Berlin, 1969), I, pp. 191-2.
> T.F.X. Noble, The Republic of St. Peter: The Birth of the Papal State, 680-825 (Philadel-
phia, 1984), pp. 217-18. Much of what follows depends upon this book and because it is fully
documented I do not always cite all literature and sources here.
© Ibid., p. 218 and n. 30.
 LITERACY AND PAPAL GOVERNMENT 85
many notaries there were — never lost this role. Still, we eventually find
notaries writing papal documents, keeping the papal archives, and serving
as the secretariat in papal synods.’ By the pontificate of Gregory I the
notaries were organized into a schola, a corporation, within which the seven
regional notaries held first rank. Two of these, the pramicernus and the
secundicerius, were among the greatest officers of the church.°
The prmicenius not only supervised the notaries who produced docu-
ments but also directed the papal archives, and, for a time, the library,
where documents were conserved. By 649 the archives were in the Lateran
whereas before then they may have been kept at the basilica of St Lawrence
in Damaso.? The primicernus remained chief archivist throughout our
period but his relationship with the papal library is more difficult to fix
precisely. In the seventh century the sources make no sharp distinction
between a library and an archive and I am inclined to think that
bureaucratic records as well as various codices were kept in the same place
under the charge of the pramicerius.'° In the early eighth century we meet
for the first time a brbliothecanius'' and then under Pope Hadrian [ (772-95)
three more bibliothecarii appear by name.* By 829 this office had achieved

” On the tabelliones see A.H.M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire, 2 vols. (Baltimore, 1986),
I, pp. 515-16. On the notaries, see Rudolf von Heckel, ‘Das papstliche und sicilische
Registerwesen in vergleichender Darstellung mit besonderer Beriicksichtigung der
Urspriinge’, Archiv fur Urkundenforschung 1 (1908), 398-400.
® Gregory I, Registrum, 8.16, ed. Dag Norberg, CCSL 140-140a (Turnhout, 1982), 140a,
pp. 534-5. Giuseppe Palazzini, ‘Primicerio e secundicerio’, Enciclopedia cattolica, 12 vols.
(Vatican City, 1953), X, cols. 20-2.
? Noble, Republic of St. Peter, pp. 219-21 and n. 39. Martino Giusti, ‘The Vatican secret
archive’, in The Vatican: Spint and Art of Christian Rome (New York, n.d.), p. 299, thinks it
impossible to locate the archives in San Lorenzo in Damaso. I think he is correct to challenge
the traditional meaning of the inscription that has long been cited as proof that Damasus
installed the archives 1n San Lorenzo: Giovanni Battista De Rossi, Imscriptiones Chnistianae
Urbis Romae Septimo Saeculo Antiquiores, U1, pt 1 (Rome, 1857), p. 151, no. 23. The
inscription only proves that Damasus’ father had been a notary at that church and that
Damasus himself had grown up there.
0 Noble, Republic of St. Peter, pp. 219-22 nn. 29-51. Pierre Riché, Education and Culture in
the Barbarian West Sixth through Eighth Centunes, trans. John J. Contreni (Columbia,
South Carolina, 1976), pp. 175-6, 419-20. Joan Peterson, ‘ “Homo omnino Latinus”? The
theological and cultural backgrounds of Pope Gregory the Great’, Speculum 62 (1987),
529-51, at 533, has criticized me for assuming that the library and archives were alike
transferred from San Lorenzo to the Lateran before 649. I had actually meant to say only
that, before the eighth century, there was one collection of materials, and not a distinct
library. Now I am less sure than I was about the transfer from San Lorenzo but I do think
that Peterson, Riché and I all basically agree on the development of the library.
'' LPI, p. 396; Noble, Republic of St. Peter, pp. 221-2.
2 Philippus Jaffé, Regesta Pontificum Romanorum, 2 vols. (Graz, 1956), I, nos. 2401, 2431,
2457. Leo Santifaller, Saggio di un elenco dei funzionan, impiegati e scnttori della
cancellania pontificia dall’inizio all’anno 1099, 2 vols. (Rome, 1940), I, pp. 36-47.
86 Thomas F’. X. Noble
sufficient prestige and differentiation from the notarial administration that
it was usually filled by one of the suburbicarian bishops.'* I have elsewhere
offered the suggestion that a rising volume of business may have occasioned
the separation of the archives from the library.'* Although almost nothing
can be known about the holdings of the early mediaeval papal library, or
about its development, and also because nothing certain is known about the
principles of archival management that were employed in Rome, there is a
limited amount that can confidently be said about the way in which books
and documents were conserved.
Two kinds of documents, papal letters and bureaucratic enactments,
were probably enregistered in some way from the late fourth or the early
fifth centuries. Walter Ullmann believed that registers of letters may have
been compiled from the beginning of the fifth century if not perhaps before.
He argued that as the papacy came to have a greater sense of itself as a
public, legal, authoritative institution it needed to keep its records as
evidence of the positions that it had taken and that it might wish or need to
refer to in the future.'° Other scholars think papal letters may have been
registered as early as the pontificate of Liberius (352-66),'° while some
think that no evidence from before Leo I (440-61) can be regarded as
conclusive.'’ Finally, it has been suggested that registers could have been
kept almost immediately after the Constantinian ‘Peace of the Church’
inaugurated by the Rescript of Milan in 314.'8
The difficulty in determining when papal registers began being kept is
almost entirely attributable to the nature of the surviving evidence. Before
the time of Innocent III in the thirteenth century no complete or partial
register survives in its original form. We are wholly dependent upon copies.
The oldest surviving part of an original papal document is a fragment of a
letter of Hadrian I from 788, and the oldest complete document 1s a letter of

'3 Percy Ernst Schramm, ‘Studien zu friihmittelalterlichen Aufzeichnungen iiber Staat und
Verfassung’, Zeitschnft der Savigny-Stiftung fur Rechtsgeschichte, 62, germanistische
Abteilung 49 (1929), 167-232, at 205; Bresslau, Urkundenlehre, 1, p. 211. But Schramm
thinks that 829 saw the first permanent bzbliothecanus whereas, like Santifaller, I hold for
Hadrian’s pontificate.
'* Noble, Republic of St. Peter, pp. 221-2.
'S Walter Ullmann, Gelasius I (492-496): Das Papsttum an der Wende der Spatantike zum
Mittelalter, Papste und Papsttum 18 (Stuttgart, 1981), pp. 35-44.
16 Harold Steinacker, ‘Uber das lteste papstliche Registerwesen’, Mitteilungen des Instituts
fir Osterreichische Geschichtsforschung 23 (1902), 1-49, at 7. See Jaffé, Regesta Pontificum
Romanorum, I, no. 216.
'7 Othmar Hagender, ‘Papstregister und Dekretalenrecht’, in Recht und Schrift im Mit-
telalter, ed. Peter Classen, Vortrige und Forschungen 23 (Sigmaringen, 1977), pp. 320-1.
'8 Steinacker, ‘Registerwesen’, 7-8. ,
 LITERACY AND PAPAL GOVERNMENT 87
Paschal I from 819.'? For the whole period before these letters were written
there survive some 2,500 papal letters of one kind or another but all of them
are transmitted through copies. For example, two early canonical collec-
tions — collections, that is, of papal letters treated as having authoritative
legal status — the Quesneliana and the Collectio Avellana point to the
existence of fifth-century registers and give some hints about their contents.
In a related vein, the eleventh-century canonist Deusdedit of Milan
incorporated into his collection of canons substantial blocks of material that
point directly to registers for Honorius I (625-38), Gregory II and III
(715-41), Leo IV (847-55), Nicholas I (858-67) and John VIII (872-82).
The closest thing we have to a complete register is that of Gregory I (590—
604) containing more than 850 letters. But even this represents only about
sixty letters per year for what was a busy and eventful pontificate. Much has
been lost. We have almost one hundred papal letters from Gregory III to
Hadrian I dispatched to the Frankish court, the so-called Codex Carolinus.
This collection is invaluable to historians but as it was prepared in 791 at the
Frankish court on the order of Charlemagne it tells us very little about the
procedures of the papal chancery and archives. From the fourth century to
the late ninth, nevertheless, we have an impressive array of register
fragments and from them a good deal can be learned.”
Roman imperial practice provided the basic model for papal registers in
two distinct respects. First, the imperial rescript provided the model for the
actual form of the papal letters.*’ Second, imperial commentari, that is
annually organized and chronologically arranged collections of letters,
provided the actual model for the registers.” Down to the time of Gregory I
papal registers were like the imperial in that they included both in-coming
and out-going letters. In Gregory’s time the number of in-coming docu-

'? Reginald Lane Poole, Lectures on the History of the Papal Chancery down to the Time of
Innocent III (Cambridge, 1915), p. 37. Cf. Jaffé, Regesta Pontificum Romanorum, I, nos.
2462, 2551.
” Poole, Papal Chancery, pp. 29~30; Hagender, ‘Papstregister’, pp. 320-1; Jaffé, Regesta
Pontificum Romanorum, I, nos. 285-327 (Innocent I), 398-551 (Leo I), 619-743 (Gelasius
I), 2153-228 (Gregory II), 2674-888 (Nicholas I), 2889-953 (Hadrian II), 2954-3386
(John VIII). For the Codex Carolinus see the MGH edition by Wilhelm Gundlach (Berlin,
1892). For the register of Gregory I the new edition by Norberg (cited above n. 8) has
replaced the MGH edition by P. Ewald and W. Hartmann.
7! Peter Classen, Kaiserreskript und Kénigsurkunde. Diplomatische Studien zum Problem der
Kontinuitat zwischen Altertum und Mittelalter, Byzantine Texts and Studies 15 (Thes-
salonika, 1977), pp. 99-101.
“ Harry Bresslau, ‘Die Commentarii der rémischen Kaiser und die Registerbiicher der
Papste’, Zertschnift der Savigny-Stiftung fur Rechtsgeschichte, 19, romanistische Abteilung
6 (1885), 242-60, especially 255-60. This old study was incorporated into his
Urkundenlehre and remains the basis for all subsequent work.
88 Thomas F. X. Noble
ments included in the registers appears to have declined dramatically and by
the ninth century they had all but disappeared. It 1s possible, however, that
the persons responsible for excerpting various registers may have left out
the in-coming material and in the process distorted our understanding of
the structure of the registers.” In the ninth century John the Deacon, ina
biography of Gregory I, says, with neither emphasis nor surprise, that this
pope left a volume of letters for each year of his pontificate.”* It is likely,
therefore, that papal registers were always organized annually. Through the
ninth century papal documents were always written on papyrus, a material
whose very high perishability helps to account for the disappearance of so ,
many documents.” It appears that the papyri were put in the archive one by
one, in chronological order, and then bound or bundled together 1n annual
volumina according to indiction years. Steinacker sensibly proposed years
ago that some indexing system must have been used but no one has been
able to figure out from the surviving copies what that system was, and there
has been some reluctance to embrace Steinacker’s own hypotheses. He
guessed that rubrics in a different script, probably uncial, and in a different
colour, probably red, served as a kind of running index. He even imagined
double columns with the texts in one and the rubrics in the other.“ This is
both possible and unprovable. There has been some controversy over
whether originals or copies were enregistered. The present state of the
evidence really makes it impossible to answer this question satisfactorily.
Basic elements of the processes of composition and compilation do not seem
to be in doubt. A notary took dictation from the pope or other high Lateran
official and then went to the scrinium where at least two complete copies
were prepared. One went to the archives to be enregistered and one went to
the addressee. By the late ninth century there is some evidence that only
extracts were going into the registers and this may be yet another indicator
of the change in chancery standards that Lohrmann and others have noted
and characterized as decline.*’ But it may be that a rising volume of business
led to excerpting as a practical matter.

3 Steinacker, ‘Registerwesen’, 8-9.

24 Vita Gregori, 4.71, PL 75, cols. 223A-B.
25 Naphtali Lewis, Papyrus in Classical Antiquity (Oxford, 1974).
6 Steinacker, ‘Registerwesen’, 45-6.
27 The later period has been studied by Dietrich Lohrmann, Das Register Papst Johann VIII,
Bibliothek des deutschen historischen Instituts in Rom 30 (Tiibingen, 1968). Some general
insights can be gleaned from a study that is most valuable for the later middle ages: M.
Giusti, Studi sui registri di bolle papali, Archivi vaticani 1 (Vatican City, 1968). Steinacker,
‘Registerwesen’, 10-36, still has much of value. The annual structure is made clear by John
the Deacon in the Vita Gregorit.
 LITERACY AND PAPAL GOVERNMENT 89
The papal registers, indeed the papal archives, were accessible for
consultation. This had always been true with Roman archives because
under the Roman system it was only the public, archived copy of a
document that had probative value. Many times, it seems, parties to an
action or dispute did not personally receive copies of documents pertaining
to their case. The truly official copies were available in the archives for
consultation or for copying when an aide-memotre seemed desirable. Even
when the preparation of a document proceeded more from private will than
from public action, the roles of the archives and of the documents were the
same. For example, a person might present himself to one of the tabelliones
for the purpose of having a will drawn up. The individual would then take
that will, after having had it properly authenticated, to the archive where it
was enregistered. The copy in the archives then became the valid one. One
of the characteristics of the transition from Roman to mediaeval times was a
shift in the nature and use of documents. Basically, one can say that the shift
involved a change in probative value from the public doument in the
archives to the private copy in the hands of a recipient.”
As we move across the period from the fourth to the ninth centuries we
can see that only the papal archives survived as a major public repository.
But others had existed, especially in the earlier part of this period.
Cassiodorus’ Variae and the Ravenna papyri provide valuable insights into
the Ostrogothic and Byzantine archives at Ravenna. The former represent
extracts made by Cassiodorus from the palace archives, perhaps registers, at
Ravenna during or just after his own period of service,”’ and the latter
constitute a good number of examples of the exercise of public authority
under the Exarchate of Ravenna.*° For a time public archives continued in
all the germanic kingdoms but by the sixth, or at the latest the seventh,
century they seem to have faded out everywhere largely because of the
‘privatization’ of modes of documentary proof noted above.”?
If we wish to know what happened to the many papal registers that must

28 This is one of the principal themes of Classen’s Kaiserreskript und Konigsurkunde. See also
von Heckel, ‘Registerwesen’, 395-9, and Bruno Hirschfeld, Die Gesta Municipalia in
romischer und fruhgermanischer Zeit (Marburg, 1904), pp. 23-49.
*9 Cassiodorus, Vaniae, ed. A.J. Fridh, CCSL 96 (Turnhout, 1973). See also James J.
O’Donnell, Cassiodorus (Berkeley, 1979), pp. 55-102.
3° See J.O. Tjader, Die nichtliterarischen lateinischen Papyn Italien aus der Zeit 445-700, I
(Lund, 1955).
*! Hirschfeld, Gesta Municipalia, pp. 61~81, discusses the fate of archives, but Classen,
Kaiserresknipt und Konigsurkunde, pp. 107-37, does so more fully and capably. See also
concerning Gaul: Ian Wood, ‘Disputes in late fifth- and sixth-century Gaul: some
problems, in Settlement of Disputes, pp. 7-22, especially pp. 12-15. And see Nelson’s
chapter in this volume, below, pp. 258-96.
90 Thomas F. X. Noble
once have existed, then, I think we can point to three or four factors in their
disappearance. The use of papyrus will certainly have been responsible for
some losses. A decline in standards or a deliberate change in policies in the
later ninth century may have caused some material to disappear. The papal
administration may have behaved like other archives and chanceries in that
it gradually exhibited more concern for the documents it was sending out
than for the ones it was keeping. Finally, papal Rome was often a turbulent,
violent place. Riots and rebellions associated with internal strife and foreign
attacks by Lombards, Byzantine officials and Arabs may be responsible for
the loss of some documents.
Just as we modern historians are grateful for what does survive, so too
people in the early middle ages appear to have been much attached to the
papal archives. From as early as the pontificates of Innocent I (401-17) and
Boniface I (418-22) popes made reference to the consultation of their
archives. Phrases such as ‘in sacro scrinio nostro’, ‘sicut in scriniis nostris
legimus’, ‘testimonium nostri declarat scrini’, or ‘ut scrinii nostri
monumenta declarant’ are met again and again.” It is not surprising that
papal officers made frequent use of the archives but it is important to see
that ‘outsiders’ did as well. Jerome, for example, was once accused of
misrepresenting a papal letter and he wrote that anyone who wished to
verify his statements could go and look for the pope’s letter ‘in Romana
Ecclesiae chartario’.°> Although this is the only case I know of the use of
‘chartario’, Jerome’s meaning is perfectly clear and the case serves as a
splendid example of what I would call the ‘public’ side of the archives. ‘The
registers of Gregory I were regularly consulted. Bishop Braulio of Sara-
gossa (ob. c. 651) asked a priest, Taio, who had ‘by his zeal and sweat’
brought to Spain codices of Gregory’s writings ‘not yet known there’ to
transcribe copies and send them on to him.** He does not state his exact
reason for wanting these works, which appear to have included some of
Gregory’s letters. Taio may, therefore, have visited the archives.
Much better known is the case of Nothelm, a contemporary of Bede,
who sent the great Northumbrian author documents concerning Pope
Gregory’s English mission that had been uncovered in researches in the
archives in Rome.* While Bede had scholarly interests in the archives his

32 Jaffé, Regesta Pontificum Romanorum, 1, nos. 300, 350, 369, for example. See also: von
Heckel, “Registerwesen’, 410, and Hartmann in his preface to the MGH edn of Gregory’s
register, MGH Epp. Il, pp. vii—viii.

33 Jerome, Epistula adversus Rufinum, c. 20, ed. P. Lardet, CCSL 79 (Turnhout, 1982), p.

3 Braulio to Taio, PL 80, col. 690B.

> Bede, Venerabilis Baedae Historiam ecclesiasticam gentis anglorum, ed. Charles Plummer
 LITERACY AND PAPAL GOVERNMENT 91
countryman Boniface had more practical, ecclesiastical aims in mind in
requesting from the cardinal-deacon Gemmulus a copy of some letters of
Gregory I.°° And, on another occasion, Boniface wrote to Pope Stephen II
to ask for a copy of Pope Sergius’ original instructions to Willibrord
concerning the rights of the bishopric of Utrecht.*” Finally, the Frankish
court requested from Hadrian I in 794 a copy of the register of Gregory |
and got some 684 letters. This collection provides the basis for all modern
editions of the register but it is hard to know whether it is itself an extract or
whether by the end of the eighth century only 684 letters survived from
what must have been a much larger collection.** Many more examples could
be cited but they would only serve to reinforce the same points. People all
over Europe, over a long period of time, turned to the papal archives for
documents that could be used in local situations. There is an irony here in
that the dispatch from Rome of documents for local cases shows the
‘privatization’ of evidence which was discussed above but if the ‘public’
papal archive had not been there no such evidence would have been
available. Here again there is evidence for several kinds of bureaucratic
literacy and for some of the uses to which it was put. Private individuals like
Taio or Nothelm could go to Rome to do research but we have to assume
that there were competent officials there to help them. And Boniface could
write to Rome for documents and act as if he were doing a perfectly normal
thing. How many more such requests have simply vanished? Finally, of
course, it should be stressed that it was written documents on all manner of
subjects that were at issue in these cases.
Surviving letters display vividly the wide range of activities and interests
of the papal administration. Extant texts were addressed to emperors,
kings, prominent laymen, patriarchs, archbishops and bishops, abbots,
missionaries and Roman ecclesiastical administrators. People from the
north of England to Spain, from Gaul and Germany to Sicily, from North
Africa to Constantinople and Jerusalem received missives from the popes.
The subjects treated in these letters are numerous. Emperors were instruc-

(Oxford, 1896), p. 6. This is not the place for a full discussion of the complicated matter of
what Bede actually got from Nothelm. For thorough discussion, with references, see Paul
Meyvaert, Bede and Gregory the Great (Jarrow Lecture, 1984), pp. 8-13, 23-4, and dem,
‘Bede’s text of the Libellus Responstonum of Gregory the Great to Augustine of Canter-
bury’, in England before the Conquest: Studies in Primary Sources Presented to Dorothy
Whitelock, ed. P. Clemoes and K. Hughes (Cambridge, 1971), pp. 15-33.
°° Die Briefe des heiligen Bonifatius und Lullus, no. 54, ed. Michael Tangl, MGH Epp. sel. I,
pp. 96-7.
7 Ibid., no. 109, p. 236.
38 Hartmann, in the preface to his and Ewald’s edn, MGH Epp. I], p. viii, and Norberg, in the
preface to his edn, CCSL 140-140a, p. v.
 92 Thomas F. X. Noble
ted on proper relationships between secular and ecclesiastical officials.
Synods were told what topics could be debated, and in what terms.
Missionaries were encouraged and advised. Points of biblical exegesis were
discussed. Routine matters of church administration were often raised. One
could, I think, open Jaffé’s Regesta Pontificum at any point and read, say,
three pages of its brief entries and in so doing form a good impression of the
kinds of letters produced in the Lateran and of the kinds of people to whom
they were sent. And, of course, these documents show clearly the many uses
to which literacy was put, ranging from the simple matter of actually writing
the letters to the larger and more complex intellectual, legal, spiritual and
other matters which had to be understood in order for the letters to respond
adequately to the circumstances attending their composition.
A second type of material that was certainly archived and enregistered
consists of a huge array of administrative documents that were for the most
part very local in scope and significance. Some of these documents survive
in the remaining fragments of papal registers, especially that of Gregory I,
but most have disappeared. For bureaucratic enactments there are two
possible Roman models. Major Roman officials had notaries and archives
attached to their offices and these notaries both wrote and kept public
records.*’ Here, certainly, we have an example of the kind of work that, in
| the papal government, resulted in the preparation and preservation of so
many documents relating to everyday matters of administration. Rome also
had public tabelliones who were ‘public’ notaries in the sense that they were
licensed by the government and accessible to ordinary citizens who needed
documents, say wills or deeds, drawn up, but ‘private’ in the sense that they
were not attached to the offictum of a Roman officer or archive. The
tabelliones were supervised by the magister censuum.” In 758 and again in
821 the magister is mentioned at Rome so there were still, evidently, public
notaries and thus a model for the papal notariate right through our period.*!
By 861 a new officer appears, the protoscriniarius , who was not a member of
the schola of the notaries and who was on occasion a layman. He may have
been a papal appointee who took over leadership of the public notaries.”
From the fifth century onwards it 1s impossible to determine the relation-
ship between the public and papal notaries but as the former were much the
older of the two, they undoubtedly exercised influence on the work of the

*° Hirschfeld, Gesta Municipalia, pp. 23-65; von Heckel, ‘Registerwesen’, 396-9, 406-9;
Classen, Kaiserresknipt und Konigsurkunde, pp. 92-8.
* Jones, Later Roman Empire, 1, pp. 515-16, 691-2.
*! Bresslau, Urkundenlehre, 1, pp. 205-8.
*2 Noble, Republic of St. Peter, p. 221.
 LITERACY AND PAPAL GOVERNMENT 93
latter. Another possible model for the papal notariate, and especially for the
enregistering and archiving of bureaucratic records, may have been the
gesta municipalia, which were enregistered accounts of public business,
especially judicial matters. Contemporary evidence from Ravenna, and also
from the Frankish and Burgundian kingdoms, shows, as we have already
seen, that these gesta continued, at least through the sixth century, and it
may be, although there is no certain testimony from Rome, that they were
influential in the development of the papal collections of more or less public,
administrative records.*
In other words, Roman practices provided many models for the prepara-
tion and preservation of records and there can be no doubt, in view of the
obvious parallels, that the Roman church adopted and adapted numerous
Roman structures and techniques. For example, papal registers look much
like both imperial commentari and gesta municipalia in that they contain
both formal letters and routine bureaucratic enactments. But under the
Roman regime these were two different kinds of records and they were
handled in two different ways. Roman notari and tabelliones played
different but complementary roles, and they may have continued doing so
under the papal government but we cannot tell for sure and, even if they
did, it appears that all documents went into the one set of papal archives.
Furthermore, every major Roman officium — as we might say ministry or
department — had its own notarial staff and an archive in the form of an
annual register. Did the papal government have department registers, or
did everything come together in the one series of papal registers? Looking at
the way the papal regime adapted the Roman system in other respects does
not permit an unambiguous answer to this question. In any event, only the
general papal registers survive in any form and, as already noted in a
different context, they have a decreasingly bureaucratic flavour. This might
mean that in the eighth and ninth centuries there was increasingly spe-
cialized record keeping and that, as a result, bureaucratic records were kept
in departmental registers that have vanished. Or it may be that, because all
surviving registers come down through non-official extracts, we have only a
reflection of the interests and needs of the copyists; presumably major papal
pronouncements and not administrative minutiae seemed worth copying.
Judicial records, which might have been among those kept separately
from the general registers, were produced by the second schola of officers
who worked in the regions alongside the notaries and under the deacons.
These were the defensores. Just when the defensores first appeared 1s not
known, but Gregory I organized them into a schola in 598. It seems that
they emerged by analogy to the Roman defensores civitatis who had been

*° Hirschfeld, Gesta Municipalia, remains the basic study but it is much in need of updating.
94 Thomas F. X. Noble
minor officials charged to protect citizens from mistreatment by Roman
officials, and to handle small-scale judicial business. Under their chief, the
primicenus defensorum, another of the great officers of the church, the
defensores appear to have functioned as the legal staff of the Lateran. A fair
amount is known about the kinds of judicial records that had been prepared
in secular Rome, so it is quite reasonable to suppose that the papal
defensores were responsible, like their secular counterparts, for the creation
of a good many documents. Unfortunately, not a scrap of this putative
evidence survives. This is especially unfortunate because these records
would have provided details on how the papal courts worked, on what kinds
of business went before them, on the quality of justice that was supplied and
on the kind of law that was applied. These records might have told us a great
deal indeed about some of the major kinds of literacy that existed in papal
Rome and about the uses to which that literacy was put. There is no warrant-
to speculate about details, but it 1s not illegitimate to point out that there had
to have been considerable knowledge of law and legal procedure, and also of
the kinds of record keeping appropriate to the smooth functioning of a legal
and judicial system. The actual disappearance of the records is probably
attributable to the fact that they will in the great majority have concerned no
more than the local and mundane affairs of daily life; they lacked, in other
words, great historical or theoretical significance for those who came along
in later years and made copies of, for example, the papal registers.
Another category of records produced in the Lateran and conserved in
the archives derived from the office of the vestaranus. This official, one of
the seven major figures in the papal government, had charge of the fabric of
all the churches and monasteries in Rome that belonged to the papal
administration and also responsibility for the vestments, sacred vessels and
other precious possessions of the church.** No actual records from this
Lateran department survive for study but some impression of what they
might have been like comes from several notices in the Liber Pontificalis in
which the building, remodelling, or refurbishing activities of several popes,
most notably Hadrian I, Leo III (795-816), Paschal I (817-24) and
Gregory IV (827-44), are recounted in considerable detail.*° The compilers
of the Liber Pontificalis clearly made use of the records of the vestararius.
Because there exists nothing in the surviving register fragments like the
vestararius records transmitted by the Liber Pontificalis these records,

44 Balthasar Fischer, ‘Die Entwicklung des Instituts der Defensoren in der rémischen
Kirche’, Ephemendes Liturgicae 48 (1939), 443-54; Noble, Republic of St. Peter, p. 222
and n. 52.
45 Noble, Republic of St. Peter, p. 226 and n. 77.
© TPT, pp. 499-515(Hadrian), II, pp. 1-4, 3-34(Leo), 53-63(Paschal), 74-83(Gregory).
 LITERACY AND PAPAL GOVERNMENT 95
even at second hand, may well provide a hint about the existence of separate
departmental archives and registers that could not be demonstrated on the
basis of the general registers alone.
The financial administration of papal Rome was directed by two major
Lateran officers, the sacellarius and the arcanus, the former having been
the paymaster and the latter, the treasurer. Both had subordinates.*” The
greatest single source of revenue was the papal patrimonies, a vast complex
of large and small estates scattered throughout Italy. While much can be
learned about patrimonial administration from, above all, the letters of
Gregory I, little can be known for certain about the relationship between
the financial and patrimonial administrations.** Thus, although strictly
speaking no financial records survive, one can suggest without being
reckless that financial records were produced and kept in the archives. The
existence of a financial administration, plus the presumed existence of its
records, points to yet another kind of literacy, or, rather, to two related
kinds: the knowledge necessary for the actual work and the ability to make
and keep the records. Where financial records are concerned, moreover, we
have a hint of numeracy in the papal administration
At this point we must depart from our account of the particular branches
of the papal government and the evidence which they produced to turn to
four other kinds of evidence. These are the Liber Diurnus, the Liber
- Pontificalis, the liturgical books and the law books of the Roman church.
Each of these bears an ambiguous relationship with one or more branches of

of literacy. |
the papal administration, and each throws light on one or more branch.
These materials are revealing of several independent and interrelated kinds

First, there is the Liber Diurnus.’” This is a collection of formulae that

was once thought to represent the actual formula book of the papal
chancery. Santifaller then broke with that view and argued that it was a
‘school and exercise book’ for the training of notaries in the chancery.
Confronted with the fact that all surviving manuscripts are north Italian in

*? Noble, Republic of St. Peter, p. 225 and nn. 68-76.

*8 Edward Spearing, The Patrimony of the Roman Church in the Time of Gregory the Great
(Cambridge, 1918); Vincenzo Recchia, Gregorio Magno e la societa agricola, Verba
seniorum, NS 8 (Rome, 1978); Peter Partner, The Lands of St. Peter (Berkeley, 1972), pp.
1-10; Noble, Republic of St. Peter, pp. 242-8.
*° LD. The best place to get a sense of all the controversies surrounding this book, and to find
the basis for most current thinking, 1s in Leo Santifaller, Liber Diurnus: Studien und
Forschungen von Leo Santifaller, ed. Harald Zimmermann, Papste und Papsttum 10
(Stuttgart, 1976). Shorter studies are: Giulio Batelli, ‘Liber Diurnus Romanorum Pontifi-
cum’, Enciclopedia cattolica, 12 vols. (Vatican City, 1951), VII, cols. 1262-7; Hans
Foerster, ‘Liber Diurnus Pontificum Romanorum’, New Catholic Encyclopedia, 17 vols.
(New York, 1967), VIII, p. 694.
96 Thomas F. X. Noble
origin, private, and without demonstrable connection to Rome, Santifaller
abandoned his earlier position. He did establish, however, that the surviv-
ing version of the book does in fact contain many formulae that were actually
used in Rome, and that a book like the Liber Diurnus must have been used
both to train notaries and to prepare actual documents.
The formulae in the Liber Diurnus reveal many of the same kinds of
things as the bureaucratic records. For example, let us begin at the
beginning of Foerster’s edition and see what we find: Formata quam accipit
episcopus; Synodale ut episcopus altenus civitatis in alia ecclesia possit
incardinan; Preceptum de adunandis ecclesus; Petitio dedicationis
oratoru; Responsum oratoru dedicandi; Responsum de speranda sanctu-
ania.>° The second example, the one relating to the transfer of a bishop, can
only refer to the pope but the other formulae listed here could have been
used in almost any episcopal church. Thus it is easy to see why the surviving
copies of the Liber Diurnus come from north Italian bishoprics. Portions of
the Liber were copied and used outside Rome because Roman administra-
tive practices, and the documents that accompanied those practices, were
both useful and influential. But as with the formula for episcopal transfers,
so in many other cases the formulae were only relevant to Rome and the
pope. Perhaps the best example of this is the series of formulae pertaining to
the adminstration of the church during a vacancy in the papacy and the
documents relating to the election of anew pope.”' As noted, then, the Liber
Diurnus reveals much about several dozen kinds of actual documents, about
the preparation of those documents, and about the administrative practices
associated with those documents.
Second, there is the Liber Pontificalis.** In the last years of the fifth or the
first years of the sixth century the lives of all the early popes were written
up and collected. Then from Boniface II to Leo III (530-816) each pope
received a contemporary vita. These differ a great deal in length, style and
amount, or quality, of information. There are several indications that the
Liber Pontificalis was produced in the papal chancery. Its language
regularly echoes that of other documents written in the scrinium, especially
papal letters.*’ Just as importantly, however, virtually every vita bears
marks of research 1n the archives. It 1s easy to spot references to or even
quotations from letters, administrative records, synodal enactments and

°° LD, pp. 81-4. >! Tbid., pp. 113-21.

°2 The major source of information on the LP is formed by the hundreds of pages of notes in
Duchesne’s edition. I have expressed myself on this text in ‘A new look at the Liber
Pontificalis’, Archtvum Historiae Pontificiae 23 (1985), 347-58, at 347-8 n. 3, I cite much of
the relevant literature.
°3 Erich Caspar, Das Papsttum, 2 vols. (Tiibingen, 1933), II, pp. 732, 795. |
 LITERACY AND PAPAL GOVERNMENT 97
liturgical sources.** It cannot be a mere coincidence that notarial language
and notarial sources are so liberally strewn throughout the pages of the Liber
Pontificalts and that the notaries and archivists, or librarians, worked in one
bureau under the prmicenius notariorum.
The Liber Pontificalts is, of course, a history of the popes. It is, indeed,
an official history that provides a clear indication of how the papacy wanted
its history told.’ The work is distinguished neither by elegance of style
nor sophistication of philosophical conception. Instead, it relentlessly,
monotonously recounts basic facts about each of the popes. The book also
follows certain basic themes, such as relations between the papacy and the
Byzantine court, or Lombard pressure on Rome. The whole point of the
Liber Pontificalis appears to have been to show how traditional the papacy
was and to describe, but never to analyse in detail or to apologize for, the
traditions that the papacy embraced. The book was widely copied outside
Rome, and highly influential for the development of other ecclesiastical
histories such as those of Ravenna, Metz, St Wandrille and St Gall.*®
Certain characteristics of the Liber Pontificalis suggest the possibility
that it may have played a role in the education of young Roman clerics. The
book says that Stephen III was ecclesiasticis traditionibus inbutus.°’ It is
hard to imagine a better means of accomplishing that end than by a careful
reading of the Liber Pontificalis, the papacy’s own official version of papal
history, that is of ‘ecclesiastical traditions’. There are also quasi-formulae at
the beginning of each vita that look like the kind of mnemonic devices one
would expect to find in an elementary textbook. For example, popes who
were especially solicitous of Rome’s poor were always called mansuetus, or
mitissimus or something similar, and popes who were involved in doctrinal
controversies were named eruditus, or instructus or the like.°® Sot has
argued that all ecclesiastical histories were addressed to a public des clercs*”
and one such history, that of Agnellus for Ravenna, contains explicit
reference to auditores, to ‘hearers’, to an audience, who heard the text read
out.°” Riché has drawn attention to a Lucca codex that contains a variety of

4 Noble, ‘Liber Pontificalis’, Appendix, pp. 357-8.

°° Walter Ullmann, Short History of the Papacy (corr. edn, London, 1974), p. 30.
°° Herbert Grundmann, ‘Geschichtsschreibung im Mittelalter’, in Deutsche Philologie im
Aufnss (2nd edn, Berlin, 1967), cols. 2253-4; Michel Sot, Gesta episcoporum, gesta
abbatum, Typologie des sources du moyen 4ge occidentale 37 (Turnhout, 1981). See also
Noble, ‘Liber Pontifical’, 348-9.
37 EPI, p. 468.
*8 Noble, ‘Liber Pontificalis’, 351. »? Sot, Gesta episcoporum, pp. 45-6.
°° Agnellus, Liber pontificalis ravennatis ecclesiae, c. 79, ed. O. Holder-Egger, MGH SS
rerum Langobaraicarum, p. 331. I wish to thank Tom Brown for first drawing my attention
to the importance of this passage.
 98 Thomas F’. X. Noble
historical works, including the Liber Pontificalis , ‘which must have figured
in the study program of young clerics’.°' The nature of the text itself and the
uses to which it was put outside Rome suggest strongly that, to some extent
at least, the Liber Pontificalis was a school text in papal Rome. If this
hypothesis is valid then the Liber Pontificalis represents both a kind of
historical writing and a use of literacy to provide an historical record, and an
actual book that was written and read to serve those very purposes.
The Liber Pontificalis has value for modern historians because it shows
some of the kinds of records that were kept in papal Rome and because it
adds weight to other evidence to the effect that the papal archives were used
by various branches of the papal government. But even more significant is
what the Liber Pontificalis reveals about the papacy’s historical memory and
its commitment of that memory to writing. As the title of his important
book shows, Clanchy has detected, in high mediaeval England, a crucial
transformation from communities where memory sufficed for the conduct
of public business to communities where written records came to have a
dominant role.” The Liber Pontificalis provides two reasons to suppose
that Clanchy’s theme will not fit papal Rome in the early middle ages. First,
the written Liber Pontificalis was based throughout on careful research in
the written memory, in the archives, of the papal government, and, second,
it was the written Leber Pontificalis that helped to form the individual and
the collective historical memory of clerics in training for the papal govern-
ment. One might well say that in papal Rome one proceeded from written
record to memory.
Third, there are the liturgical books of the Roman church. The Roman
liturgy was a long time taking shape but for the period before the fourth
century there exist only scattered bits of evidence.™ From the fifth century
onwards, however, the record is quite full, and also very controversial. The
technical details of liturgical history are of little concern to us here. Our

6 Riché, Education and Culture, trans. Contreni, p. 408.

6 I refer, of course, to Michael Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066-
1307 (London, 1979).
°§ Good general accounts are: Theodor Klauser, A Short History of the Western Liturgy, trans.
John Halliburton (2nd edn, Oxford, 1979), pp. 5-77; Cyrille Vogel, Introduction aux
sources de l’histoire du culte chrétien au moyen age (Spoleto, 1975), pp. 20-57. Older but
still valuable are Ludwig Eisenhofer and Joseph Lechner, The Liturgy of the Roman Rite,
trans. A.J. and E.F. Peeler (London, 1961) (prepared from the 6th German edn of 1953),
especially pp. 241-70, and Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (2nd edn 1945; repr. New
York, 1983), especially pp. 546~612.
° Eisenhofer and Lechner, Liturgy of the Roman Rite, pp. 252-6, is a good account of the very
early period but see also Klaus Gamber, Codices Liturgici Latim Antiquiores, 2 vols. (2nd
edn, Freiburg, 1968), I, pp. 93—105.
 LITERACY AND PAPAL GOVERNMENT 99
intention is only to notice the kinds of books produced in the Roman church
for the purpose of organizing its public, ritual celebrations.
The most important of Rome’s liturgical books was the sacramentary, a
volume containing the mass prayers per circulum ann. A full sacramentary
needed collects, secrets, propers and prefaces, all of which could change for
each celebration, along with the canon and post-communion which were
relatively constant. By the eighth century, in Italy and elsewhere, there
were missalia plenana containing not only mass prayers but also readings,
antiphons and responses.” In Rome, however, it appears that the various
kinds of liturgical books tended to remain distinct.
It is difficult to say just when the Roman church produced its first
comprehensive sacramentary. The so-called ‘Leonine Sacramentary’ con-
tains a great deal of clearly Roman material from the period 450 to 560 but
the oldest surviving manuscript was written in Verona about 600. Several
popes, Leo I, Gelasius I and Vigilius, certainly made important contribu-
tions to what became the ‘Leonine Sacramentary’ but not one of them can be
called its author. The Liber Pontificalis says that Gelasius wrote
sacramentorum praefationes et orationes®’ and Gennadius speaks of a liber
sacramentorum in connection with this pope.™ In the eighth century some
writers picked up these remarks and began to attribute a sacramentary to
Gelasius, and the famous manuscript Vaticanus Reginensis 316 is widely
but somewhat misleadingly called the ‘Gelasian Sacramentary’. Actually,
liturgical scholars are not sure that Gelasius wrote a sacramentary.
Chavasse thinks the ‘Gelasian’ 1s really a mass book from the seventh-
century title churches while Gamber believes that the book was written in
sixth-century Ravenna.” No one, in any case, doubts that the book is full of
genuinely Roman material from the fifth and sixth centuries. The most
likely candidate for the authorship, if that is not too strong a word, of a Liber
sacramentorum anni circuli Romanae ecclesiae is Gregory I but, as
Deshusses has pointed out, the traditions attributing a complete sacramen-
tary to Gregory are no older than the eighth century and, even though it is
almost certain that Gregory made huge contributions to the ‘Gregorian

° Gamber, Codices, II, pp. 527-8.

° David M. Hope, The Leonine Sacramentary: A Reassessment of its Nature and Purpose
(Oxford, 1971); Gamber, Codices, I, pp. 292-9; Vogel, Introduction, pp. 31-42.
7 TPT, p. 255.
6’ Gennadius, De viris illustribus, c. 96, PL 58, cols. 1115B-1116A.
6° Antoine Chavasse, Le Sacramentaire gélasien (Vaticanus Reginensis 316). Sacramentatre
presbyténal en usage dans les titres romains au vue siécle, Bibliothéque de théologie, ser. 4,
no. | (Paris, 1958). See also Gamber, Codices I, pp. 292-318, especially pp. 299-300, and
Vogel, Introduction, pp. 48-57.
100 Thomas F. X. Noble
Sacramentary’, it is also true that from Leo II (682-3) to Hadrian I (772-
95) there were important modifications.”” Taken together, the evidence of
the ‘Leonine’, ‘Gelasian’ and ‘Gregorian’ Sacramentaries shows that the
fifth and sixth centuries were rich ones for the development of the Roman
liturgy.
Rome’s other liturgical books can be treated more briefly. First, there is
the lectionary. Before the fourth century there was lectio continua from
Bible codices and then, in the fourth and early fifth centuries, pericopes,
selected passages, were marked out for reading. The first evidence for an
epistolary, a Liber comitis, dates from around 450 and shortly after that the
first Capitulare evangeliorum, or evangelistiary, made its appearance. By
the middle of the sixth century lectionania plenana began to appear in
central Italy. It is not known where the Liber comitis first appeared and the
Capitulare evangeliorum may have had its origin in Ravenna or Carthage.
Leaving origins aside, one can say that by the end of the sixth century Rome
had developed its lectionary, its book of biblical readings selected to
accompany every major liturgical celebration per circulum anni, to a very
high and precise state.”
The Roman antiphonary in the early middle ages contained both the
antiphons for the divine office and the responses for the mass. In later times
these were divided into the antiphonal and the gradual, respectively.
Tradition attributes the antiphonary to Gregory I but the books most
widely used in Rome and elsewhere seem to have taken shape by about 500.
A good deal of older material went into them, of course, for example, the
Introitus attributed to Celestine I (422-32).’* Probably Gregory I did make
a major contribution to reorganizing the antiphonary.”
Finally, there are the ordines, the rites for almost every conceivable kind
of liturgical ritual celebrated in the Roman church. Ordo Romanus I is a
remarkably detailed set of instructions for a major papal mass, while other
ordines survive for different masses and also, to cite but a few examples, for
ordinations of clergy, for the consecration of altars, for the installation of

79 Jean Deshusses, Le Sacramentaire grégorien, 3 vols. (2nd edn, Freiburg, 1979), especially
I, pp. 50-6. Gamber, Codices, I1, pp. 325-47; Vogel, Introduction, pp. 67-83. 1 have not
discussed the so-called ‘eighth-century Gelasian sacramentary’ because it 1s a hybrid book,
formed in the Frankish world out of essentially ‘Gelasian’ and ‘Gregorian’ elements
according to a design and purpose that are not yet fully understood. It provides no
independent evidence for Rome. See Bernard Moreton, The Fighth-Century Gelasian
Sacramentary (Oxford, 1976).
” Gamber, Codices, I, pp. 429-39, 446-83; and, more fully, Vogel, Introduction, pp. 239-
88, 309-20.
” LPI, p. 230.
® Gamber, Codices, II, pp. 492-526; Vogel, Introduction, pp. 328-32.
 LITERACY AND PAPAL GOVERNMENT 101
relics and for a host of other rites. The oldest surviving Roman ordines date,
in their preserved forms, from the seventh century but it is clear that their
basic material is often much older, reaching back to at least 500 and
probably even earlier.”
Rome’s liturgical books provide evidence of several kinds of literacy.
They show how a particular historical sense, a feeling for the continuity of
worship, could be committed to writing and transmitted through time and
across space. They represent the writing down of a splendidly Roman sense
of order and decorum and solemnity in the conduct of public life. They
betray an ability to articulate a sense of form and purpose in the administra-
tion of worship that 1s no less impressive than the articulation of much else
in the papal administration. Finally, liturgy and, within the liturgy, one
particular set of books, the lectionaries, show that as the Word of God was
proclaimed and spread, other words laid out the context in which the Word
would be heard and responded to. People around Europe did indeed turn to
Rome for guidance on liturgical matters. Pope Vigilius (538-55) sent a
sacramentary to Bishop Profuturus of Braga’? and Hadrian I sent a
‘Gregorian Sacramentary’ to Charlemagne.’© Roman antiphonaries were
sent, among other places, to England in the time of Egbert of York and to
Francia in the time of Pippin III.’’ This activity represents a very
important use of literacy.
Fourth, and finally, there are Rome’s law books. From at least the time of
Pope Celestine I in 429 the Roman church had insisted that all clergy know
the canons: Nulli sacerdotum suos licet canones ignorare.’® It was only in
the fifth and sixth centuries, however, that Rome began showing a real
interest in collecting its law. In fact, the period from about 400 to 600 was an
extraordinarily rich one in the history of law throughout the old Roman
world. This age saw two major compilations of Roman law, those of
Theodosius II and Justinian, a large number of germanic codes, dozens of
monastic rules which are, after all, law-codes of a certain kind, and the
earliest papal collections.”” Papal law was based above all on synodal

“* Michel Andrieu, Les Ordines Romani du haut moyen age, 5 vols., 11, Spicilegium Sacrum
Lovaniense 23 (Louvain, 1971); Vogel, Introduction, pp. 127-81.
> PL 69, cols. 15-19.
76 Charlemagne had charged Paul the Deacon to secure the sacramentary in Rome and in
about 785/6 Hadrian complied: Jaffé, Regesta Pontificum Romanorum, 1 no. 2473 (=codex
Carolinus, no. 89); Vogel, Introduction, pp. 72-8.
”” Gamber, Codices, I, pp. 494-5.
78 Jaffé, Regesta Pontificum Romanorum, I, no. 371.
” Classen, ‘Fortleben und Wandel spatr6mischen Urkundenwesens im friiheren Mittelalter’,
in Recht und Schnft, ed. Classen, pp. 19-20.
102 Thomas F, X. Noble
enactments and papal decretals, which were authoritative pronouncements
by the popes.®° The most influential early synodal collections were those of
Nicaea (325) and Chalcedon (451) but canons from many other local and
regional councils found their way into the collections. The oldest papal
decretals were issued by Siricius (384-99) and as time passed many
decretals entered the collections; but not all of them because some were lost
and because some were deliberately excluded.
The Liber Pontificalis says of Gelasius I that he ‘made a constitution
concerning the whole church’.*' It is very hard to know what this means
because Gelasius is not known to have issued a general code of church law
although he did address a decretal in twenty-eight chapters to the bishops of
southern Italy and Sicily.°* More important and better known is the work of
the Scythian monk Dionysius Exiguus who came to Rome in the time of
Anastasius I (496-8) and produced, around 500, the first major Roman
corpus canonum. It has come to be called the Collectio Dionysiana and with
its careful selection of conciliar canons and papal decretals it was meant to
reflect the law of the church as it was understood and applied in Rome and
its environs. For nearly three centuries this collection grew by the addition
of new decretals and by the incorporation of canons from various Roman
synods, especially those of 649, 721, 743 and 769. In 774, or shortly
thereafter, Hadrian I sent a copy of the Collectio Dionysiana, henceforth
called the Dionysio-Hadriana, to Charlemagne. In other words, the
period from 500 to 800 was a rich one in the history of canon law and a
comparably important period, in Rome, would not be seen again until the
eleventh century.
A knowledge of law, and of legal traditions, along with the ability to
produce sophisticated legal collections, is evidence of several kinds of

80 Hagender, ‘Papstregister’, pp. 320-2; Hans Erich Feine, Kirchliche Rechtsgeschichte (5th
edn, Cologne, 1972), pp. 89-91; Paul Fournier and Gabriel Le Bras, Histoire des
collections canoniques en occident depuis les fausses décrétales jusqu’au Decret de Gratien,
2 vols. (Paris, 1931), I, pp. 10-13; Alfonsus M. Stickler, Historia luris Canonict Latina, 1:
Historia Fontium (Rome, 1950; repr. 1974), pp. 42-52.
81 EPI, p. 255.
82 Duchesne in ibid., I, p. 256 n. 7.
83 Fournier and Le Bras, Histoire des collections canoniques, 1, pp. 13-25; Feine, Kirchliche
Rechtsgeschichte, pp. 90-6. Hubert Mordek, Kirchenrecht und Reform im Frankenretch,
Die Collectio Vetus Gallica, Beitrige zur Geschichte und Quellenkunde des Mittelalters 1
(Berlin, 1975), pp. 2-9.
84 For the transmission of the Collectio Dionysiana see H. Mordek, ‘Kirchenrechtliche
Autoritadten im Frihmittelalter’, in Recht und Schnft, ed. Classen, pp. 237-55, especially
pp. 238-41. Controversial but still valuable as an assessment of legal foundations is the first
chapter of Walter Ullmann, The Growth of Papal Government in the Middle Ages (3rd edn,
London, 1970), pp. 1-43.
 LITERACY AND PAPAL GOVERNMENT 103
literacy. Above all, however, I would draw attention to the ability to
articulate, and to write down, precise rules for the daily ordering of an
ecclesiastical polity. For centuries the church had managed without much
written law and then, in a period when so many laws were being written, the
church was fully able to participate in the legal activity of the time.
These four kinds of evidence help to round out the picture that was
sketched earlier from the administrative records. The Liber Diurnus, the
Liber Pontificalis, the liturgical books and the legal collections are excep-
tionally revealing documents. They provide insights into the workings of
various branches of the administration that we otherwise would not have.
The Liber Pontificalis, in particular, shows how some administrative
records in the church were actually used. The formulae in the Liber Diurnus
reveal the existence of many kind of documents for which there are no
surviving examples. All of these books, in different but complementary
ways, reveal a remarkable sense of history, and a perception that history
needed to be written down and acted upon. The legal and liturgical books
show a profound sense of order and precision that had come increasingly to
depend on written instructions. Indeed, everywhere that one looks in the
papal administration one finds the use of the written word.
The use and growth of literacy depended, after all, on the existence of
trained personnel and on the presence of institutions capable of providing
the necessary training. It is well, therefore, to say a little about education in
papal Rome. There is a lot that simply cannot be known, but two points
seem reasonably clear. Papal bureaucrats received training in the specific
area of their administrative competence within the scholae and all clerics
received a broader education. Because Gregory I had a potent dislike for
laymen serving in the church’s government, it seems that after his time, but
with the possible exception of some of the lesser patrimonial administrators,
all key figures were clerics who were both trained and educated.
Explicit testimony shows that Gregory II (715-31) was educated ‘from
earliest youth in the patriarchium’,® and the same was true of Leo ITI (795—
816),% and Sergius IT (844-7).°’ Evidently, then, there was some kind of a
school in the Lateran complex but not all aspiring clerics were educated
there. Hadrian I (772-95),88 and Nicholas I (858-67)* were educated
privately, probably by tutors hired by their families, and Stephen ITT (768—
72) was educated in the Greek monastery of St Chrysogonus.” Primarily
the education was scriptural but we do hear that Sergius II learned
communes artes®! and that Nicholas I had a father who was a liberalium
artium amator.”* It is impossible to say exactly what the liberal arts might

8 EPI, p. 396. 8 EPIL, p. 1. 7 LP II, p. 86. EP I, p. 498.

899 EP II, p. 151. EPI, p. 468. 1 EP II, p. 86. 2 EPH, p. 151.
 104 Thomas F. X. Noble
have meant in papal Rome. Guillou has evidence that is not easily datable
from Ravenna, pointing to the study of grammar, rhetoric, dialectic,
morals, physics, arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy, theology,
history, chant and computus.” This list of subjects looks suspiciously ideal
and comprehensive, and Brown has observed that, even in Ravenna, the
liberal education of the sixth century declined badly in the seventh.”* It is
possible that clerical schools in Rome too gradually eclipsed the public ones,
but the persistence, noted above, of public tabelliones into the ninth
century suggests that some public education remained available for laymen.
And because so many judicial, financial and patrimonial documents issued
by the papal government were addressed to laymen, it seems possible to
infer that some degree of lay literacy was present.
The needs of the papal regime were essentially ecclesiastical and
administrative, and, in consequence, such schools as might have existed
were there for very specific purposes. Boys entered the papal administration
through either the cubiculum — the pope’s chamber — or the schola cantorum
— the agency charged with providing singers for the liturgy.” Just as the
schola cantorum taught chant, and thus was not really a school in any large
or comprehensive sense, so too the other scholae taught, not academic
subjects, or even communes artes, but law or the notarial art. Certainly
clerics in training learned the liturgy as we meet it in the ordines and there 1s
evidence that the Liber Pontificalis may have figured in clerical education.”°
Somewhere in the Lateran palace there must have been a school for the boys
| who entered young into the papal government but the education provided
there was appropriate for boys and young men who were going to live and
work in an ecclesiastical setting. Illmer has reminded us that early
mediaeval monastic and cathedral schools must not be idealized; that is, we
must not exaggerate the level of learning attained in Rome. Schools existed
to teach young men to be able to function and to succeed in a particular kind
of religious community. If those schools turned out scholars then that was
an inadvertent by-product of a quest for different goals.”

3 André Guillou, ‘L’Ecole dans !’Italie byzantine’, Settimane 19 (Spoleto, 1972), 291-311.
* T.S. Brown, Gentlemen and Officers: Imperial Administration and Anstocratic Power in
Byzantine Italy A.D. 554-800 (Rome, 1984), pp. 79-81, especially p. 79.
°° Georg Heinrich Horle, Frihmittelalterliche Ménchs- und Klerikerbildung in Italien
(Freiburg, 1914); Michel Andrieu, ‘Les Ordres mineurs dans I’ancien rite romain’, Revue
des Sciences religieuses 5 (1925), 232-74; Riché, Education and Culture, trans. Contreni,
pp. 417-19; Noble, Republic of St. Peter, pp. 228-9.
© See above n. 60.
7 Detlef Illmer, Formen der Erziehung und Wissensvermittlung im frihen Mittelalter:
Quellenstudien zur Frage der Kontinuitat der abendlandischen Erziehungswesens, Min-
chener Beitrage zur Mediavistik und Renaissanceforschung 7 (Munich, 1971).
 LITERACY AND PAPAL GOVERNMENT 105
Were we not so ill-informed about the holdings of the papal library and
about the contours of education in papal Rome, we might be able to say
more about the body of information that was available for transmission and
consultation. Let me cite two cases where our ignorance of basic issues
complicates our understanding. Before the sixth century Rome did not have
a complete set of the canons of the ecumenical councils, and Dionysius
Exiguus was set the task of ordering and completing the material and
perhaps also of translating it from Greek into Latin.”? Under such circum-
stances, it is very difficult to say how much was known in Rome before the
sixth century about the history of the councils, and about their actual
decisions. Another problem concerns the theology of the Greek east. Right
through our period there were popes and papal administrators who knew
Greek, but we do not know how many Greek books they had, or how well
they understood the arguments of eastern churchmen, or how hard they
tried to understand. A reader of Cassiodorus’ Institutes will be familiar with
the large number of Greek theological works that had been translated into
Latin. But we cannot with confidence place many of those translations in
Rome. Ambrose and Augustine played key roles as mediators between
Greek and Latin but it is difficult to move from that perfectly valid
generalization to a concrete statement about theological knowledge in papal
Rome.”
I am inclined to take a rather positive view of the amount of knowledge
that was available in Rome. [ do not think that ignorance, let us say of Greek
or of Greek thought, accounts for what some have seen as intellectual
sterility. Far from being sterile, early mediaeval papal Rome shows us the
gradual emergence of Latin, western and papal traditions which were
afterwards gripped tenaciously. One kind of literacy involves understand-
ing. The popes understood their world and its issues very well but they
chose not to contend and instead to defend. Gregory II (716-31) and
Gregory III (731-41) are good examples. The former refused to accept in
Rome the canons of a major Byzantine church council held under imperial
auspices in 692, and he solemnly rejected Byzantine iconoclasm. The latter
continued to reject 1conoclasm and also spoke bravely about the inappropri-
ateness of imperial intervention in dogmatic issues.'°° The popes, in other

°8 Peterson, ‘Gregory the Great’, 572; Judith Herrin, The Formation of Chnstendom (Oxford,
1987), pp. 85, 104-5.
% The great study of Greek is Walter Berschin, Griechisch-Lateinisches Mittelalter (Munich,
1980), especially pp. 113-18. I have examined a few aspects of the problem in “The
declining knowledge of Greek in eighth- and ninth-century papal Rome’, Byzantinische
Zeitschnft, 78 (1985), 56-62.
10 TPT, pp. 396-410, 415-21.
106 Thomas F. X. Noble
words, knew what they needed to know to rule over and through their
church and to respond in the many and complex issues that confronted
them. It is hard to see what more could be asked of them.
Because of the particular demands of the papal government, it is arguable
that literacy in the papal administration was more widespread than
anywhere else in the mediaeval west and also that, more so than anywhere
else, it was necessary to almost every aspect of the functioning of the papal
system; that is, that certain functions of the system assumed and depended
upon the written word for success. But literacy did not mean scholarship,
higher studies or learning for the sake of learning. Someone from the schola
cantorum was ‘literate’ when he knew how to chant. Someone from the
schola notariorum was ‘literate’ when he could draw up a document
correctly. Both of these people were also literate in the sense that they could
share in the divine office and probably read their psalms and gospels. The
schools in the papal government, that is, taught people exactly what they
needed to know to do the work and to live the life for which they were
intended.
At the upper level of the papal administration there were the popes and
the major administrators, men who were themselves papabili, and these
people were literate in every imaginable sense of the word. At the lowest
levels of the administration there were simple clerics in minor orders whose
literacy was pretty much confined to the possession of certain bureaucratic
skills and to the ability to act on rudimentary written instructions. The
majority of papal administrators were probably able to read and write and
they will have had to have made frequent use of all manner of written
materials in their daily tasks. The whole administration may, however, have
formed one or more of what Stock has expressively called ‘textual communi-
ties’. He says that ‘what was essential to a textual community was not a
written version of a text, although that was sometimes present, but an
individual who, having mastered it, then utilized it for reforming a group’s
thought and action’.'"' It is fruitful to think of the Liber Pontificalis as one
book around which a textual community might have formed and where the
essential understanding would have been historical. The liturgical books
are another example. The liturgy contained written and spoken parts but
celebrants and worshippers always had different roles to play. Neverthe-
less, words and movements bound a whole community together in a
profound and shared experience. I can only repeat that people knew what
they needed to know; they were as literate as they needed to be.

101 Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation
in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centunes (Princeton, 1983), pp. 88-151; the quotation 1s
from p. 90.
 LITERACY AND PAPAL GOVERNMENT 107
Although I have concentrated my attention on administrative literacy, I
wish to acknowledge one or two other aspects of the issue. The popes were
routinely involved in theological controversies, the great majority of which
were not of their own making. For the most part, therefore, the popes did
not seek to make distinguished or original contributions to theology.
Instead, as with the 7ome sent by Leo I to the Council of Chalcedon (451)
we see a document that ‘reflects and codifies with masterly precision the
ideas of his predecessors’.'"* An exception might appear to be Gregory I, a
prolific and, for centuries, deeply influential writer. But this pope was, in
his theology as in his administration, practical above all else. He was a
conservative traditionalist who sought to synthesize, to teach and to
disseminate more than to speculate and to innovate.'”’ As with theology, so
too with ecclesiology and political thought. Leo I, Gelasius I, Gregory I
and several ninth-century popes made lasting contributions to the
mediaeval understanding of the nature of ecclesiastical authority, and the
relationship between the sacred and the secular.'** I can do no more here
than note, therefore, that other kinds of literacy than administrative,
historical, liturgical and legal existed in the papal government in the early
middle ages. As in so many other cases so too here as well, this ‘intellectual’
literacy depended upon both a broad understanding of precise issues and,
even more importantly, an ability to reduce that understanding to writing
and to disseminate the writings thus produced.
Indeed, there are some remarkable convergences in the development of
literacy in the papal government. The period from roughly 400 to 600 saw
the first great elaboration of the papal administration, with all that this
entailed for the preparation, dissemination and conservation of documents.
But this was also the first great age for Roman liturgical and legal books.
The official papal history, the Liber Pontificalis, was begun in this period.
Major decretals, such as those of Leo I on the petrine theory of papal
primacy, or of Gelasius I on proper relations between imperium and
sacerdotium, were written in this period, as were tremendously significant
books such as Gregory’s Dialogues'®° and Pastoral Care. All of this seems to
102 J.N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines (2nd edn, New York, 1960), p. 337.
'03 G.R. Evans, The Thought of Gregory the Great, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and
Thought, Fourth Series, 2 (Cambridge, 1986).
'* Walter Ullmann devoted his life to studying the ideological foundations of papal activity.
One can look with profit at the appropriate sections of any of his stimulating and
controversial works. For a reasonably balanced summation on the early middle ages, see
Jeffrey Richards, The Popes and the Papacy 1n the Early Middle Ages, 476-752 (London,
1979), pp. 9-28.
'05 | am impressed but not persuaded by the massive circumstantial case built against
Gregorian authorship of the Dialogues by Francis Clark, The Pseudo-Gregonian Dialogues ,
2 vols. (Leiden, 1987).
108 Thomas F, X. Noble
me attributable to the spread and elaboration of ecclesiastical administra-
tion after the Constantinian peace, to the patronage of the Roman govern-
ment, to the entry in large numbers into the clerical ranks of educated
Roman nobles and to the assumption of responsibility by the church for so
much formerly secular administrative work. Then in the eighth century,
the assumption of temporal rule by the popes brought a second
efflorescence of literate activity. Administrative structures were refined,
new structures were created, the library and archives grew in importance
and, apparently, more documents were produced. Papal Rome, moreover,
became a source for authoritative books — legal and liturgical ones, for
example — all over Europe.
Modern scholars have commented in detail on how hard it is to determine
just what literacy means. '°° Today one hears talk of ‘cultural literacy’, or of
‘computer literacy’. The former involves reading, notably the reading of the
classics, but the latter has nothing at all to do with reading or writing and
much to do with the possession of a certain kind of skill or knowledge. It 1s
this kind of literacy, or knowledge, that I have been emphasizing in
connection with the papal government. The literary attainments of Gregory
I were very high, and this appears to have been true of a number of the
popes if we can assume that their letters — no more — were their own
compositions. But the level of literary achievement of the rectores and
actionarn on the papal patrimonies had to have been slight. A papal notary
may have learned communes artes but he needed only to read his psalter and
to draw up a contract or a letter. There existed a number of different kinds
of literacy in papal Rome and there were many literate people. But the
literacy was overwhelmingly practical in use and the literate were primarily
a clerical, governing elite. Words — God’s — had empowered a church to
exist and other words, tightly kept and formally applied, empowered that
church to act in the world. For that is how the papal administration used
literacy: to act in the world, to rule, to govern.

106 See, for example, Harvey J. Graff, ‘Introduction’, in his Literacy and Social Development
in the West: A Reader (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 1-13, especially pp. 1-5.
 Literacy and the laity
in early mediaeval Spain
enema aes
Roger Collins

In the early seventeenth century the Morrocan author Al-Maqgari, looking

back on the departed glories of Al-Andalus, recalled that:

rich men in Cordova, however illiterate they might be, encouraged letters, rewarded
with the greatest munificence writers and poets, and spared neither trouble nor
expense in forming large collections of books; so that, independently of the famous
library founded by the Khalif Al-hakem [961-76], and which is said by writers
worthy of credit to have contained no less than four hundred thousand volumes,
there were in the capital many other libraries in the hands of wealthy individuals,
where the studious could dive into the fathomless sea of knowledge and bring up its
inestimable pearls. Cordova was indeed 1n the opinion of every author the city in
Andalus where most books were to be found, and its inhabitants were renowned for
their passion for forming libraries. '

His words may seem ambivalent. On the one hand he hints that some of
these avid collectors may not have been able to read the books they sought so
hard to acquire, whilst on the other he implies that the substantial libraries
that they formed were accessible to scholars more studious if less rich than
themselves. Al-Maqqari’s principal source here would seem to have been
the thirteenth-century author Ibn Sa’id, whose own purposes were both
satirical and moralizing.* He was criticizing the wealthy collectors who were
interested only in the outward show of their books: the rarity value of the
works and the fame of their calligraphers. Some modern bibliophiles might
find his words uncomfortable. This was obviously a recognized target of
criticism, and Al-Maqqari quotes another passage from [bn Khaldtn
(1332-1406) to the effect that the antics of these philistine collectors were
driving the price of books beyond the financial reach of those who really

' Al-Maqqari, Nafh at-Tib, trans. P. de Gayangos, The History of the Mohammedan
Dynasties in Spain, 2 vols. (London, 1840), I, p. 139.
* Ibn Sa’id al-Maghribi, quoted by Al-Maqaari, trans. Gayangos, Mohammedan Dynasties,
I, pp. 139-40.
109
110 Roger Collins
needed them and appreciated them for their contents rather than their
appearances.”
Despite the didactic character of the information there are reasonable
grounds for believing that not only book buying but also book reading
played an important role 1n the society of late Umayyad Al-Andalus, above
all in Cordoba. Although the precise figures should not be trusted, Al-
Maqgari’s report of the great library of the Caliph Al-Hakam II and his
extensive literary patronage can be corroborated from other sources. The
fragment of the Hasty Notes of Sa’id ibn Ahmad of Toledo, written in 1067/
8, records the Caliph’s use of agents throughout Egypt, Syria and Iraq in
hunting out books for his library, which in the author’s view at least was
more extensive than that of the ‘Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad.* Traditionally
it is reported that the scientific and philosophical collections in this library
were destroyed after the Caliph’s death on the order of the dictator Al-
Mansur (d. 1002) to appease religious fundamentalists, though this may
have as little accuracy in it as the comparable story of the dispersal of the
palace library of Charlemagne.’ However, whatever the truth of that, it
must be assumed that the Umayyad caliphal library was wholly or largely
destroyed when the palace complex of Medina Azahara was sacked and
destroyed in 1010.°
A distinction between lay and ecclesiastical literacy makes little sense in
an Islamic society in which no separate priestly class exists. Even distinc-
tions between what may be considered to be more narrowly religious
literature, which would include the Koran itself, collections of traditions,
and exegetical works, and other literary genres that could be classed as
secular are not always easy to make. Works of history, for example, could be
written for didactic and triumphalist religious ends.’ For present purposes
what is significant is that there 1s a considerable amount of evidence
available to indicate that there existed a fairly substantial though unquanti-
fiable urban market for books in late Umayyad Spain, and, as both a
number of extant works and the recorded titles of others that are lost

* Ibn Khaldtn, quoted by Al-Maqaari, trans. Gayangos, Mohammedan Dynasties, 1, p. 140.

* Sa’id ibn Ahmad ibn Sa’id of Toledo, trans. Gayangos, Mohammedan Dynasties, I,
appendix C, pp. xl—xhu.
> Sa’id ibn Ahmad, zbid., p. xli, and Einhard, Vita Karoli ed. O. Holder-Egger, MGH SS1.u.s.
XXV.
° For the sack of 1010 and the events leading up to it see E. Lévi-Provencal, Histoire de
V’Espagne musulmane, 3 vols. (Paris and Leiden, 1951), II, pp. 291-320.
” For Arab historiography see D.M. Dunlop, Arab Civilization to AD 1500 (London and
Beirut, 1971), pp. 70-149; for some of the problems to be faced see R. Collins, Eazly
Medieval Spain: Unity in Diversity, 400-1000 (London and Basingstoke, 1983), pp. 146-9.
 LITERACY IN EARLY MEDIAEVAL SPAIN 111
indicate, this was also reflected in the considerable output of new works ina
variety of genres in the same period, basically the second half of the tenth
century.
There are, as seen in the case of Al-Maqqari’s use of his earlier sources, a
number of problems to be encountered in evaluating this evidence, and
most of the information is later in date than the period it purports to
describe. However, a useful control can be applied in the form of an
examination of the literature and literary output of the minority elements in
the society of Islamic Al-Andalus: the Jews and the Christians.* Both
groups enjoyed a period of considerable literary and intellectual activity in
the late tenth century, at least in Cordoba. Although relatively few new
works were composed by Christian authors, the process of the translation of
a number of standard late antique Latin texts into Arabic, which had been
underway since perhaps as early as the eighth century, received consider-
able impetus from the patronage of the Caliph Al-Hakam IT, for whom a
story of the Franks was composed by a Bishop Godmar of Gerona and
who commissioned a translation of Orosius.’ The text of the former has
been lost, but it 1s possible that 1t underlay some of the surprisingly detailed
and accurate information on a number of topics that it might have dealt with
which are to be found in the works of later Arab authors, such as Ibn al-
Athir, writing in the east.'"? The Arabic Orosius is still extant, and the
degree of indebtedness to it of various Andalusi authors is becoming
increasingly clear.'' It may also have initiated a renewed interest in
historical composition among Christian literati, who by that time wrote
exclusively in Arabic. '*
The impression of an active literary culture existing in the capital of
Umayyad Al-Andalus in the last three-quarters of a century of the dynasty’s
rule is thus not too difficult to document, even on the basis of the few
examples given here. What it implies in terms of the extent and dissemina-

§ For Jewish learning in Spain, not be treated here, see C. del Valle Rodriguez, La escuela
hebrea de Cordoba (Madrid, 1981); also M.E. Varela Morena, ‘La escuela de gramaticos
hebreos de Cérdoba, in Los Judios en Cordoba (ss. X-XII), ed. J. Peldez de Rosal (Cordoba,
1985), pp. 103-18. But compare Reif, below, pp. 134-55.
? For the translations of Christian works into Arabic see G. Levi della Vida, ‘I Mozarabi tra
Occidente e Islam’, Settumane 12 (Spoleto, 1965), 667-95.
'0 For example Ibn al-Athir is better informed on the regnal succession of the Visigothic kings
than any of the Spanish Arab historians.
11 See in general G. Levi della Vida, ‘La traduzione araba delle storie di Orosio’, Al-Andalus 19
(1954), 257-93; for its use by Arab authors see L. Molina, ‘Orosio y los geégrafos
hispanomusulmanes’, Al-Qantara 5 (1984), 63-92.
12 G. Levi della Vida, ‘Un texte mozarabe d’histoire universelle’, in idem, Etudes d’orien-
talisme dédiées a E. Lévi Provencal, 2 vols. (Paris, 1962), I, pp. 175-83.
112 Roger Collins
tion of literacy, however, is not so easy to pin down. A learned court
certainly existed, which could embrace the rulers and a wide range of
Muslims, Christians and Jews who served the caliphs in a variety of
capacities that were not mutually exclusive. The Jewish Nasi and scholar
Hasdai ibn Shaprut served Abd ar-Rahman III and Al-Hakam as doctor
and as diplomat, even in his cure of the obesity of the Leonese King Sancho
the Fat combining the two in a single exercise.'’ Several Christian doctors
are recorded as having been attached to the caliphal court at this time too."
There existed a learned class from whose ranks the caliphal bureaucracy
was drawn, in some cases providing dynasties of office holders.'!° Some of
these men, such as the prolific Ibn Hazm, vizier to one of the more
ephemeral Umayyads, were authors themselves; others were patrons of
poets and scholars. !° But their literary skills also served immediate practical
needs. Throughout the central government of the Umayyad state writing
played a dominant part. Unfortunately none of the administrative docu-
ments of Umayyad Al Andalus has survived, though it has been claimed
that fragments of two diplomatic letters in Latin, dating to the mid-tenth
century are preserved in Barcelona.'’ Certainly this period saw numerous
diplomatic exchanges involving not only the Arab-speaking world and
Constantinople, but also the newly created Ottonian monarchy in Ger-
many, for which a variety of linguistic and document drafting skills would
have been required.'®
Regrettably, the Barcelona letter fragments have not yet been published,
and their discoverer has even kept their precise location within the vol-
uminous collections of the Archivo de la Corona de Aragén concealed.
However, some deductions can be made on the basis of the partial
photographs of them that are available. One at least of the letters 1s
addressed to the Counts Miro and Borrell, whose period of joint rule in
Barcelona is dated to 950-66. The claim that this text represents a formal

'S On Hasdai ibn Shaprut, see Rodriguez, Escuela hebrea, pp. 59-85; J. Peléez de Rosal,
‘Hasday ibn Shaprut en la corte de Abderrahman ITT’, in Los FJudios en Cordoba, ed. Peldez
de Rosal, pp. 63-77.
14 Some of the Christian doctors will be found in J. Vernet, ‘Los médicos andaluces en el Libro
de las Generaciones de Médicos de Ibn Yulful’, Anuano de Estudios Medievales 5 (1968),
445-62.
'> For dynasties of office holders see, for example, Historia de la conquista de Espana de
Abenalcotia el Cordobeés, ed. J. Ribera (Madrid, 1926), p. 78.
'6 For Ibn Hazm, see M. Cruz Hernandez, Historia del pensamiento en Al-Andalus, 2 vols.
(Seville, 1985), I, pp. 65-103.
'7 A. Mundo, ‘Notas para la historia de la escritura visig6tica en su periodo primitivo’, in
Bivium: Homenaje a Manuel Cecilio Diaz y Diaz (Madrid, 1983), p. 187 and plate 6.
'8 Collins, Early Medieval Spain, pp. 196, 201, 203, 205.
 LITERACY IN EARLY MEDIAEVAL SPAIN 113
caliphal epistle, composed for the Umayyad ruler by court scribes, must be
rejected completely. In comparison with other examples of Arab chancery
production the sheer baldness and lack of the necessary protocols evidenced
in this letter makes such a supposition inconceivable. No such document
would start without the full enunciation of the ruler’s titles, and for a caliph
to address Christians, and not even royal ones at that, as Karisstmos meos
fulgentissimos et amantissimos sincerissimos is beyond the bounds of the
_ possible.'? This is clearly correspondence between Christians and one with
a marked ecclesiastical ring to it. A suspicion that the author of one or
probably both of these letters is Bishop Reccimund of Cordoba (fl. 960), the
friend of Liutprand of Cremona, is not unreasonable.*° Thus, if impossible
as evidence of the Latin secretariat of the Caliph, these fragments at least
add testimony to the latinity of the Cordoban episcopate.
It is more difficult to visualize the degree to which literacy played a role
beyond Cordoba. It is notorious how overly centralized the Umayyad state
became, and it is interesting to see that its collapse was followed by a
considerable flourishing in literary culture in most of the former provincial
cities which became capitals of the short-lived kingdoms of the Taifa
period.” These regimes needed the same sort of skilled bureaucracy that
had been drawn on so extensively by the Umayyads, and it 1s at least a
reasonable surmise that they were able to depend on local resources. Here
too a useful indicator may exist in the form of the practices of the Christian
communities. Despite the unchallenged dominance of Arabic as the literary
language of Al-Andalus, a considerable number of Christians continued to
erect Latin funerary inscriptions. What 1s striking 1s not so much the
continued use of Latin, which remained the language of the Christian
liturgy, as the quality of the epigraphy and the sophistication of many of the
texts employed in these inscriptions.” A skilled stone cutter may not have to
be able to read what he was carving, but the interest of his clients in such
monuments presupposes the continued existence of people capable of

'? Mund, ‘Notas’, p. 187, the text is legible in plate 6; for Arab regnal titles see Rusum Dar al-
Khilafah of Hilal al-Sabi’, trans. E.A. Salem (Beirut, 1977), pp. 81-90: ‘The rules of
caliphal correspondence’ and “The rules of writing letters’. For some examples, see S.M.
Stern, Fatimid Decrees (Oxford, 1964), nos. 3-10.
© On Bishop Reccimund, see F.J. Simonet, Historia de los Mozdrabes de Espana (repr.
Madrid, 1984), pp. 603-18.
“1 For the overly centralized nature of Umayyad rule, see Collins, Early Medieval Spain, pp.
varies D. Wasserstein, The Rise and Fall of the Party Kings (Princeton, 1985), pp.
*2 These Christian Latin inscriptions are still surprisingly little known. The greater part of
them are to be found in E. Hiibner, Inscnptiones Hispaniae Christianae (Berlin, 1871),
appendix titulorum recentiorum, inscriptions 210-28. Compare the San Vincenzo al
Volturno inscriptions discussed by Mitchell, below, pp. 186-225.
114 Roger Collins
reading them. These inscriptions, which continue on into the middle of the
eleventh century, are neither exclusively dedicated to members of the
Christian clergy nor do they confine themselves to mere statements of
name, age and date of death. Furthermore, they are found throughout at
least the heartlands of Al-Andalus, from Granada and Malaga to Cordoba
and Seville, testifying to a more than metropolitan phenomenon.
Although some of the points of detail may be unfamiliar, the general
picture here presented will probably occasion little surprise. Expectations
of the level of sophistication of Muslim Spain are generally high; sometimes
exaggeratedly so.™ It is necessary, for example, not to read back the
attainments of the later tenth century into the early eighth. In terms of a
literary production and a readership in Arabic it is wise to be cautious and to
envisage a gradual and measured advance. The earliest known Arab texts
composed in Al-Andalus only date from the ninth century.** The rise in
literacy in Arabic and composition in the language may indeed parallel the
growth in the number of indigenous converts to Islam, a phenomenon that
also can be said to have taken off in the tenth century, at least insofar as it is
possible now to assess it.” Methodological disagreements and limitations of
evidence make this an area particularly difficult to delineate precisely.
However, allowing that there is a rough correlation between the rise of
both the adoption of Islam and of an increasingly Arabized intellectual and
material culture in Spain, it is of some interest to take an inquiry such as this
back into earlier stages of the process. Indeed, any study of the dissemina-
tion of literacy in the peninsula under Arab domination should consider to
what degree the ground had been prepared in the preceding Visigothic
period and how far there existed a real continuity in learning across the
notional divide of the Arab conquest. Thus it is necessary to start this
inquiry at a point earlier than the invasion of 711, and to form some
assessment of the nature and extent of literacy in the Visigothic period.
Furthermore, it may also prove instructive to look beyond the shifting
frontiers of Al-Andalus to take comparative note of what was happening in
the Christian states in the north of the Iberian peninsula in the eighth to
tenth centuries.
The evidence for lay literacy in the ranks of the upper levels of society in

3 For example, A.J. Cheyne, Muslim Spain, its History and Culture (Minneapolis, 1974).
24 The earliest work to have survived, though only now in a Portuguese translation of c. 1300 is
that of Ar-Razi (c. 925); see Cromica del Moro Rasis, ed. D. Catalan and M. Soledad
(Madrid, 1975). The existence of some ninth-century authors can be established, even if
their works survive only in the form of brief (and possibly interpolated) extracts in later
texts.
5 See the arguments of R. Bulliet, Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period (Cambridge,
Mass., 1979), pp. 114-27.
 LITERACY IN EARLY MEDIAEVAL SPAIN 115
the period of the Visigothic kingdom is qualitatively if not quantitatively
good.*° Two of the kings look to have been capable of poetic composition.
In the case of the earlier of them, Sisebut (612-21), this is evidenced by his
Epistola missa ad Isidorum de Libro Rotarum, which, even if in excerpted
form, shows evidence of its author’s previous reading of classical poetic and
scientific texts.*’ The case of the other royal versifier, Chintila (636-9), is
less clear-cut in that the evidence takes the form of a brief dedicatory
inscription on some gift sent by the king to the (unnamed) pope, and this
could just as easily have been composed for him as by him.® In the case of
Sisebut the existence of other works attributed more or less certainly to him,
notably the remnants of his collection of letters and the Vita Desiderii, seem
to justify belief in his own compositional powers.’
Aristocratic libraries also appear to have been a feature of Visigothic
society. Isidore’s pupil Braulio of Saragossa (d. 651) wrote in the 640s to an
Abbot Aemilian in Toledo, who was one of the leading figures of the court of
Chindasuinth, to ask him to obtain for him acopy of the Commentary on the
Apocalypse of Apringius of Beja, having failed to find it closer to hand. He
suggested that a copy had once existed in the library of a Count Laurentius,
who is otherwise unknown. In his reply Aemilian regretted his inability to
find the book in question, pointing out that the count’s library had been
dispersed on his death. He had, however, though equally unsuccessfully,
searched the king’s library for a copy.*°
In the case of the Visigoths it 1s important to appreciate that dynastic
succession was relatively rare, and in all of the cases mentioned above,
including the reference to the library of Chindasuinth, the kings concerned
were the first of their lines to hold the throne. They were thus not educated
as future monarchs, but as members of the Gothic nobility, and these
scattered examples suggest a broader and more literary side to such an
education than might have otherwise have been anticipated. Evidence on
schooling is not so easy to discover. One short text that would seem to
belong to seventh-century Spain, the pseudo-Isidoran Instituta Dis-

© See in general P. Riché, Education et culture dans l’occident barbare, vie—viiie stécles (3rd
edn, Paris, 1962), pp. 331-6, 339-50, 401-9.
*”? For the poem of Sisebut, see Isidore de Seville: Traité de la Nature, ed. J. Fontaine
(Bordeaux, 1960), pp. 328-35 (text), pp. 151-62 (study); also V. Recchia, ‘La poesia
cristiana: introduzione alla lettura del Carmen de Luna di Sisebuto di Toledo’, Vetera
Chnstianorum 7 (1970), 21-58.
8 Anthologia Latina, ed. A. Riese, I. 2 (Leipzig, 1906), no. 494.
2° For the other writings attributed to Sisebut, with account of their manuscript transmission,
Miscellanea Wisigothica, ed. J. Gil (Seville, 1972), pp. 1x—xx, 3-28, 53-68.
3° Epistolario de San Braulio, ed. L. Riesco Terrero (Seville, 1975), letters XXV, XXVI, pp.
122, 124.
116 Roger Collins ©
ciplinae, gives an indication of some of the values that might have been
sought to have been inculcated, and later Arabic sources hint at the
existence of a palace school in Toledo, to which scions of the office holding
aristocracy of the late Visigothic kingdom might have been entrusted.”’
Unfortunately, this information comes from a very insecure context: the
stories of how Count Julian of Ceuta revenged himself on the Visigothic
King Roderic by aiding the Arabs to cross the straits. This story of the
king’s seduction of the count’s daughter when sent to Toledo to be educated
forms part of an interrelated group of legends concerning the events of the
conquest, virtually no element of which can be found to have any historical
foundation.** So at best the palace school in Toledo has to remain an
interesting possibility. More probable is the education of the sons of the
nobility in episcopal households. A number of monasteries also provided
schooling, but in all cases where this is referred to it is in the context of
aspiring monastic or clerical pupils. There do exist a number of texts that
may have been composed for educational purposes. These include not only
the grammar ascribed to Bishop Julian of ‘Toledo, but also the rhetorical set
pieces appended to his Historia Wambae.** Likewise, Bishop Eugenius II
of Toledo’s short versifications of sections of Isidore’s Etymologiae might be
expected to fit such a context, and the small corpus of poetic texts
constituting the dubia et spuria in the Monumenta edition of Eugenius has
recently been characterized as a ‘Speculum per un nobile visigoto’.**
Although it may have been common practice in late antiquity for letters to
be read aloud to the recipients, their family and households, a presumption
of literacy may be attached to lay correspondents in seventh-century Spain
as much as in fifth- and sixth-century Gaul. As in the latter the literary
exchanges of upper-class society were not just confined to families of Roman
origin but seem to have been as avidly pursued by the Visigothic
aristocracy. Few letter collections of this period have survived and none in
anything like complete form. That of Braulio of Saragossa is the most
substantial Spanish example, and as well as with clerics he exchanged letters
with a number of lay correspondents, almost all of whom had germanic

31 P, Riché, ‘L’Education a l’époque wisigothique: les Institutionum Disciplinae’, Anales

Toledanos 3 (1971), 171-80.
32 On the Arab legends, R. Brunschvig, ‘Ibn ‘Abd al-Hakam et la conquéte de |’Afrique du
Nord par les Arabes’, Al-Andalus 40 (1975), 129-79, is judicious.
33 Ars Iuliani Toletani Episcopi, ed. M.A.H. Maestre Yenes (Toledo, 1973); see the review by
L. Holtz, Revue des Etudes Latines 52 (1975), 75-82; on the purposes of the appendices to
the Historia Wambae, see R. Collins, ‘Julian of Toledo and royal succession in late seventh-
century Spain’, in Early Medieval Kingship, ed. P.H. Sawyer and I.N. Wood (Leeds,
1977), p. 39.
34 N. Messina, Pseudo-Eugenio de Toledo, Speculum per un nobile visigoto (Santiago de
Compostela, 1983).
 LITERACY IN EARLY MEDIAEVAL SPAIN 117
names.*> Unfortunately none of their letters to him has survived in the
collection.
Although it has been strangely fashionable amongst its own modern
historians to decry it, the Visigothic state preserved several of the
administrative and legal practices of its Roman predecessor. In all of these
the role of writing was of considerable importance. The earliest extant
charter of the Visigothic period is a document of donation of property made
by the deacon Vincent to the monastery of Asan in Aragon on the 29th of
September of either 550 or 551.° The original does not survive but the text
was copied on to the first folio of a twelfth-century Bible preserved in the
Pyrenean see of Huesca. Despite the considerable temporal gulf between
the time of the donation and its record there are no good grounds for
doubting the authenticity of the document thus preserved. The procedure
of writing such a text into a Bible is unusual but has parallels elsewhere.3”
More significantly, not only do the formulae employed in the donation seem
to authenticate it, but also its use of a citation of Roman law, in this case Lex
Aquilia, is not anachronistic. This last point is significant in that in a small
number of ninth- and tenth-century instances charters make a token
reference to the same law. However, in all such cases the citation is purely
formulaic and has no relationship to the known content or purpose of the
original Lex Aquilia.*® In the case of the document of 550/1 the reference
relates to the second part of the Lex, which was abrogated by Justinian, but
which was described in the Institutes of Gaius, a text known in abbreviated
form in Visigothic Spain.°?
Although few other such texts have survived that date to the Visigothic
period, there are a small number of fragmentary originals, and one

°° Letters of Braulio to lay correspondents: nos. XV, XVI, XIX, XX, XXVIII, XXIX,
XXX, XXXIV, of Epistolano, ed. Riesco Terrero. Compare the discussion of letter-
writing in Gaul by Wood, above, pp. 68-71.
6 The Asan charter is published in Diplomdtica Hispano-Visigoda, ed. A. Canellas Lépez
(Saragossa, 1979), no. 14, pp. 126-8; see also P. Diaz Martinez, ‘La estructura de la
propriedad en la Espana tardoantigua: el eyemplo del monasterio de Asan’, Studia
Zamorensia Historica 6 (1985), 349-62.
” For example the Book of Durrow: R. Sharpe, ‘Dispute settlement in medieval Ireland: a
preliminary inquiry’, in Settlement of Disputes, pp. 170, 173-4. See also Kelly’s chapter in
this volume, above, pp. 44—5.
8 For an anachronistic use of a citation of Lex Aquilia: L. Barrau-Dihigo, ed., ‘Chartes de
Péglise de Valpuesta’, Revue Hispamique 7 (1900), no. VII, pp. 302-4, of Nov. 894.
%° For the real Lex Aquilia: Imperatoris lustiniani Institutionum Libri Quattuor IV.iii, ed.
J.B. Moyle (Oxford, 1955), pp. 526-34; the part of the Lex most pertinent to its use in the
Asan charter is the second chapter, declared obsolete by Justinian, and for that it is
necessary to have recourse to Gaius: Gaz Institutionum Commentant Quattuor I11.215~16,
Fontes uns Romani Antejustiniani, ed. J. Baviera (Florence, 1968), p. 145; see also W.W.
Buckland, A Text-Book of Roman Law (3rd edn, corr., Cambridge, 1975), pp. 585-6.
118 Roger Collins
palimpsest, which looks very much as if it were the product of a royal
writing office.*° Its style and format have been compared with those of some
of the Merovingian royal documents. Unfortunately, it is too damaged to
yield up either its exact date or the name of the king who issued it.*!
Alongside these texts written on parchment, however, can be placed the
celebrated if still mysterious slate documents, discovered lying in open
countryside in a number of locations in the region of Salamanca.** Likethe
Albertini tablets from North Africa, a number of these seem to be locally
made records of legal transactions, notably deeds of sale. Others seem to
have a magical purport, and there are yet others that have been described as
school exercises in writing and composition. There are also a small number
that have exclusively numerical markings, the purposes of which are
unclear.
The urban and rural courts of the Visigothic period produced a consider-
able amount of documentation. The settlement of disputes seems, from the
prescriptions of the Forum Iudicum, generally to have turned on the
production of written evidence of title, although additional procedures were
employed to counteract the obvious dangers of forgery, and legal hearings
were prolific in the production of written records in the form of sworn
statements by witnesses, judges’ declarations and renunciations on the part
of the losers.** A notariat was clearly envisaged by the law code for the
immediate enscribing of such documents in the court. The limitation in the
evidence available for the Visigothic period proper makes it difficult to
specify whether such notaries were lay or clerical. In subsequent centuries,
when the procedures that originated in the time of the Visigothic kingdom
were still employed in both Christian- and Muslim-ruled parts of Spain, the
writing of such documents in court was carried out largely by scribes who
described themselves as priests or deacons, and in Catalonia at least
beneficiary production replaced a court notariat.** However, it is conceiv-
able that lay notaries had functioned in the Visigothic period proper.

#0 Mund6, ‘Notas’, p. 179; for the text see Diplomdtica Hispano-Visigoda, ed. Canellas Lépez
no. 119, p. 198.
*! A. Millares Carlo, Tratado de paleografia espanola, 3 vols. (3rd edn, Madrid, 1983), I, p.
42 and n. 29.
42 First published in M. Gémez-Moreno, Documentaci6n goda en pizarra (Madrid, 1966);
some additions have been made to the corpus since then: M.C. Diaz y Diaz, ‘Los
documentos hispano-visigéticos sobre pizarra’, Studi medievali 7 (1966), 75-107. See now
the new and complete edition in I. Velazquez Soriano, El Latin de las pizarras visigoticas, 2
vols. (Madrid, 1988). This includes a study of each text.
43 On the classification of these documents, see R. Collins, ‘Sicut lex Gothorum continet: law
and charters in ninth- and tenth-century Le6én and Catalonia’, FHR 100 (1985), 489-512.
* Ibid., 505-6.
 LITERACY IN EARLY MEDIAEVAL SPAIN 119
The Arab conquest and the various civil wars fought in the peninsula in
the 740s and 750s caused considerable damage and imposed a number of
radical discontinuities on Spanish society.* Yet probably even more
striking were the survivals, and some modern research has started to stress
the continuities across the divide of this period of upheaval, particularly in
respect of administrative structures and practices.*® For the Christians,
who provided the majority population probably throughout the whole of
the period under consideration, although certain restrictions were imposed
on them and they lost their previous monopoly of political power, the
processes of change were slow. Indeed the change in their standing and the
challenge presented by Islam and a no longer persecuted Judaism led to
both conservatism and a treasuring of their traditions. This was reflected
almost immediately in the first resurgence of historiographical composition
since the early seventh century.*’ It has been assumed that the authors of
the two anonymous chronicles, known for convenience as those of 741 and
754, were clerics, though this is not certain.
In some respects Christian learning, liturgy and lifestyles became fos-
silized in Al-Andalus, or so it is often asserted.*® In comparison with the
developments north of the Pyrenees, particularly in the Carolingian
Empire, this is perhaps true. On the other hand, absorption into an Arab
world that stretched the whole length of the Mediterranean and beyond
opened the church in Muslim Spain to new currents of influence from
Christian communities in the east. This could take the form of movements
of both personnel and of texts.*? Moreover, it is possible that the current ran
more than one way, as the veneration of Spanish saints and certain
palaeographical indications from manuscripts found in the library of St
Catherine’s monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai seem to suggest.”
The political geography of the church in Al-Andalus was not slow to

*5 For a reassessment of this overly neglected period see R. Collins, The Arab Conquest of
Spain, 710-797 (Oxford, 1989).
*6 J. Vallvé, ‘Espafia en el siglo VIII: ejército y sociedad’, Al-Andalus 43 (1978), 51-112.
4” The chronicles may be found in Corpus Scriptorum Muzarabicorum, ed. J. Gil, 2 vols.
(Madrid, 1973), I, pp. 7-54; there is a more recent edition of that of 754 in Cronica
mozarabe de 754, ed. J.E. Lopez Pereira (Saragossa, 1980).
48 M. Marquez-Sterling, Ferndn Gonzdlez First Count of Castile (Mississippi, 1980), pp. 28-
32, sees the Mozarabic influx into Leén as a further cause of its judicial conservatism.
* Levi della Vida, ‘I Mozarabi’, 677-8, on the possibility of Nestorian texts circulating in
Al-Andalus.
°° E.A. Lowe, ‘An unknown Latin psalter on Mount Sinai’, ‘Two new Latin liturgical
fragments on Mount Sinai’, and “Two other unknown Latin liturgical fragments on Mount
Sinai’, reprinted in Paleographical Papers 1907-1965, ed. Ludwig Bieler, 2 vols. (Oxford,
1972), II, pp. 417-40, 520-45, 546-74.
120 Roger Collins
follow the realignments of the structures of power in the peninsula. Toledo,
which had secured for itself an unchallenged predominance as both the urbs
regia and primatial see for the whole church of the Visigothic kingdom,
retained few traces of its former material glory and intellectual preeminence
by the end of the eighth century. This, of course, may be more a reflection
of the vagaries of the evidence than of contemporary reality. The city itself,
though, appears to have become a frontier fortress, and was to be much
plagued by inter-communal tension between the indigenous population and
various Berber garrisons.°' However, the shift of emphasis under the Arab
rulers to the south and particularly to the Guadalquivir valley greatly
benefited the great cities of Seville and Cordoba.
It may seem paradoxical that better evidence of lay literacy can be found
in the surviving small corpus of Christian Latin writing produced in the
south of the peninsula in the period of the rule of the Arab Umayyad
dynasty than in the voluminous literary remains of the preceding Visigothic
period. However, this is the case. The quantity of such Latin writing
produced by the minority Christian culture is small, and is concentrated in
the ninth century.°* By the tenth century Arabic had achieved a
predominant role. A small number of short works in Latin have survived
from the eighth century; almost all being the products of clerical authors.
The Voluntary Martyr Movement that flourished briefly in Cordoba in the
mid-ninth century produced a sudden resurgence in the composition of
Christian Latin writing. This largely resulted from the need for the
principal protagonists of the movement to defend the actions of those who
sought martyrdom by.deliberately confronting the Muslim authorities and
reviling their Prophet against the criticisms of fellow Christians, who
objected to this disturbance of the modus vivendi that had been created
between the two communities.** A number of accounts of the martyrdoms
were written by the priest and titular Metropolitan of Toledo Eulogius.**
He was also responsible for the bringing of a small corpus of Latin poetic
texts to Cordoba from the region of Pamplona, on the basis of which there
occurred a minor revival of verse composition in the Umayyad capital.>
>! On the problems in Toledo see Lévi-Provengal, Histoire de l’Espagne musulmane, I, pp.
107-9, 154-9, 291-6.
°2 Allin Corpus Scriptorum Muzarabicorum, ed. Gil.
*3 On the Martyr Movement there exists a useful description of the sources in E.P. Colbert,
The Martyrs of Cordoba (Washington, 1962), especially chapters VII~XIV; the classic
account 1s that of Simonet, Historia de los Mozarabes de Espana, pp. 319-472; a recent
1983). at an assessment is K. B. Wolf, Christian Martyrs in Muslim Spain (Cambridge,

** Eulogius, ed. Gil, Corpus Scriptorum Muzarabicorum, 1, pp. 363-503.

°° R. Collins, ‘Poetry in ninth-century Spain’, Papers of the Liverpool Latin Seminar, 4
(1984), 181-95.
 LITERACY IN EARLY MEDIAEVAL SPAIN 121
Interesting as Eulogius may be in his own right, for present purposes his
friend and later biographer Paul Alvar is even more significant. For he was a
layman. Under the instruction of Eulogius, who devoted a brief spell of
imprisonment to the study of metrics, he became the most productive of the
Cordoban poets. He also composed a considerable corpus of prose works.”®
The most substantial of these is his Indzculus Luminosus, a spirited defence
of the martyrs. As well as his Vita Eulogii, he wrote a Confessio, an extended
lament on his own sinfulness, and has left part of a substantial collection of
letters. Not the least interesting of the latter are his epistolary exchanges
with Flavius John of Seville, a fellow layman otherwise unknown.°’
Another lay correspondent was the doctor Romanus.°*® Of the six letters that
passed between him and John four are by Alvar, and relate to a series of
theological issues the two men were discussing. These included the
Christian’s attitude to the study of rhetoric, the immortality of the soul and
a Christological debate.
To some extent it may be thought that Alvar at least was self-consciously
trying to recreate the kind of learned Amicitia expressed through exchange
of letters that he would have found in his reading of patristic letter
collections.*’ Of these he certainly knew some of those of Jerome, Fulgen-
tius, Gregory and Braulio. Even if he was being rather too demonstratively
learned and with an eye on a readership beyond his correspondent, the
range of texts that he was able to quote from is impressive, and includes a
variety of exegetical texts by Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine and [sidore. He
was also up to date on recent controversies, at least within Spain, providing
the first citations of Beatus’ letter to Elipandus condemning Adoptionism,
and, it has been claimed, of the Commentary on the Apocalypse. Even John,
who is more restrained in both the number and size of his letters, managed
to include quotations from Origen in Rufinus’ translation, Sedulius,
Gregory the Great and the letters of Jerome and Leo. Even if some of
these works were available only in excerpted or abbreviated form, and there
is no evidence to suggest this, the impression that considerable libraries of
Christian learning were available to these two laymen in their respective
cities is hard to deny.
What, then, of the education that underlay such interest in Christian
literature and theological discussion? Of John of Seville nothing more can

°° Paul Alvar, ed. Gil, Corpus Scriptorum Muzarabiccrum, I, pp. 143-361.

>? Ibid., pp. 144-201; on the correspondence, see C.M. Sage, Paul Alvar of Cordoba: Studies
on his Life and Wntings (Washington DC, 1943), pp. 43-81.
°§ Alvari Epistula IX, ed. Gil, Corpus Scriptorum Muzarabicorum, |, pp. 211-14.
°° As suggested by Sage, Paul Alvar, pp. 43-4.
©° See the references given to the citations in the edition of Gil.
122 Roger Collins
be said, but Alvar does reveal something of his own debt to his master the
Abbot Speraindeus. In his Vita Eulogi Alvar records the beginning of his
friendship with Eulogius when they were both pupils of the abbot.*’ His
somewhat elliptical references seem to suggest that Eulogius himself was
being taught elsewhere, quite possibly in the Basilica of St Zoilus, one of the
patrons of Christian Cordoba, to which he was to be attached as a priest, but
came to Speraindeus for additional instruction. Such an impression fits in
with what is known of teaching in the Visigothic period, in which urban
basilicas served as places of instruction for oblates later enrolled in the ranks
of the clergy. Monasteries likewise provided instruction.® But it is not
possible to be certain that such facilities were extended to members of the
laity who had no intention of accepting ordination or the monastic life. It is
possible that Alvar had been so destined but had changed his mind, but the
clear evidence of a learned laity in both the Visigothic kingdom and in ninth-
century Al-Andalus cannot be explained away on the grounds of a number
of such last-minute changes of heart. It does look as if the educational
resources of the church were extended to the laity. In all cases this presumes
a certain social level. If then there appears to be an essential continuity in
practices from the Visigothic period in the south after 711, what of the
north?
A search for lay literacy in the Christian states that began to develop in the
north of the Iberian peninsula from the end of the first quarter of the eighth
century onwards is considerably harder to pursue than the comparable
study of conditions in the Muslim-dominated south.™ For one thing new
literary production, of the kind to be associated with such Cordoban clerics
and laymen as Eulogius and Alvar, is not to be found in the north. The only
large-scale new work to be composed in these regions before the turn of the
millennium comes in the form of the Commentary on the Apocalypse of the
Asturian monk Beatus (fl. 785) and the polemical letter that he wrote in
association with Bishop Eterius of Osma attacking the Adoptionist theology
of Elipandus of Toledo.” To these may be added the short chronicles and

6! Vita Eulogit 2, ed. Gil, Corpus Scriptorum Muzarabicorum, I, p. 331.

2 For boys attached to the basilica of St Eulalia in Mérida: Vitas Patrum Emeretensium 1.1,
ed. J.N. Garvin, The Vitas Sanctorum Patrum Emeretensium’ (Washington DC, 1946), p.
138. See also n. 104 below.
©$ For the monastery of Cauliana near Mérida as a school in the early seventh century, see the
anecdote recorded in The ‘Vitas Patrum Emeretensium’, 11.14, ed. Garvin, p. 152.
** For the history of these Christian states see J. Pérez dé Urbel and R. del Arco, Historia de
Espana, VI: Espana Cristiana: 711-1038, ed. R. Menéndez Pidal (Madrid, 1956).
© Beati Liebanensis et Eterti Oxomensis, Adversus Elipandum Libri Duo, ed. B. Lofstedt,
CCSL Continuatio Medievalis 49 (Turnhout, 1984); Beati in Apocalipsin Libri Duodecim,
ed. H. Sanders (Rome, 1930).
 LITERACY IN EARLY MEDIAEVAL SPAIN 123
chronological collections associated with the court of the Asturian King
Alfonso III (866—-910).°° In general the search has to be confined to a small
corpus of inscriptions and, 1n valuable distinction to the Visigothic period, a
substantial body of charters.°’
Of Beatus remarkably little is known. Certain embroidering of his
biography has been possible on the basis of late traditions but these give few
grounds for confidence.® Even his authorship of the Commentary has to be
regarded as no better than a strong possibility, though that of the Epzstula 1s
certain.” Beatus was possibly not a priest, but in the absence of any certain
indicator of his place of origin it would be unwise to make too many
assumptions as to the evidence his writing provides for his education. What
is striking are the resources that Beatus or the author of the Commentary
had at his disposal for the compiling of the work. In itself it is largely a
piecing together of excerpts taken from earlier commentaries on the same
book, but the variety of such sources including works that otherwise seem
rare, such as the comparable commentary of the African Donatist
Tyconius, argues for the existence of a significant library at his disposal.’
Was such a thing really to be found in an Asturian monastery or even in its
royal court? Were the author of the Commentary not to be Beatus then the
whole question of his geographical location would have to be reopened.
The Asturian kingdom came into being around the years 718/22 as a
realm without towns, a feature that was only intensified by the reported
depopulation of the urban settlements of the Duero valley by one of the
earliest kings, Alfonso I (739-56).”' On the other hand, this process
brought a fresh influx of population into the mountain kingdom that had
been used not only to town life but also to the legal and governmental system
of the Visigothic monarchy. By about 800 the Asturian kingdom had
developed a new permanent court centre in Oviedo, which grew rapidly into

°° M. Gémez-Moreno, ed., ‘Las primeras crénicas de la Reconquista’, Boletin de la Real

Academia de la Historna 100 (1932), 600-28.
°” The charters of the Asturian period are conveniently collected in Diplomatica del periodo
astur, ed. A.C. Floriano, 2 vols. (Oviedo, 1949, 1951); for the inscriptions see Hubner,
Inscnptiones Hispaniae Chnstianae, nos. 229-88.
© On the almost absolute lack of information relating to the biography of Beatus see L.
Vazquez de Parga, ‘Beato y el ambiente cultural de su epoca’, in Actas del Simposio para el
estudio de los cédices del ‘Comentano al Apocalipsts’ de Beato de Liébana, 3 vols. (Madrid,
1978), I, pp. 35-45.
©? The question of the authorship has remained closed for too long; it was usefully reopened by
Professor Diaz y Diaz in the discussion following the paper cited in n. 68: zbid., p. 47.
Beati in Apocalipsin, praefatio 1.5, ed. Sanders, p. 1.
” Chronicle of Alfonso III 8, ed. J. Prelog, Die Chrontk Alfons III (Berne and Cirencester,
1980), pp. 32-9 (versions A and B).
124 Roger Collins
a recognizable town, and, what is more, in art, architecture, governmental
forms and self-presentation it was seeking to make itself look like the heir
and perpetuator of the former Visigothic kingdom.”
The earliest extant royal charter of the Asturian monarchy only dates to
774, but by the reign of Alfonso II (791-842) such documents had
proliferated.”? Furthermore the quality of their drafting had been greatly
improved.’* In general the legal procedures and norms of the Visigothic law
were preserved in the Asturian kingdom and then in its southwards
extension into Le6én, not least in the emphasis on the importance of written
title to property, the use of written evidence and the production of
documentation in the course of the settlement of legal disputes.’> Unlike the
contemporary Catalan counties, then under Frankish suzerainty, the
Asturian and Leonese documents do not always bear the names of the
scribes who wrote them. This makes it difficult to generalize about the kind
of notariat that is responsible for the production of this substantial corpus of
texts, not all of which is yet published.’° However, it does seem likely that
such notaries were ecclesiastics. No certain evidence of any form of lay
notariat, as may have existed under the Visigothic kingdom, can be detected
in its self-proclaimed successor.
The existence or otherwise of a royal chancery in these centuries has
aroused surprisingly little interest, particularly in the light of the lively
debate on this question in respect of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom.” Admit-
tedly, although the quantity of charter materials from the Asturian and _
Leonese kingdoms is considerable, the proportion of royal documents is
relatively small. A full-scale investigation would require more space than is
available here. However, an indicator could be taken from just one reign
that is comparatively well represented in the production of royal diplomas,

” C. Sanchez-Albornoz, ‘La restauracién del ordén gotico en el palacio y en la iglesia’, in his

Origenes de la naci6n espanola, 3 vols. (Oviedo, 1972-5), II, pp. 623-40.
73 Ledn, Archivo de la Catedral, doc. 1; A. Millares Carlo, ‘Consideraciones sobre la escritura
visig6tica cursiva’, no. 15 and plate, inzdem, Leon y su Historia II (Leén, 1973), p. 355.
For drafting, see the discussions accompanying the documents in Diplomdtica del periodo
astur, ed. Floriano.
> Collins, ‘Stcut lex Gothorum continet’, 489-512.
’° Although some of the main bodies of documents and cartularies have been published,
notably in Documentacién de la Catedral de Leon (siglos IX—X), ed. G. del Ser Quijano
(Salamanca, 1981), and Coleccién diplomatica del Monasterio de Sahagin (siglos IX y X),
ed. J.M. Minguez Fernandez (Leén, 1976), certain major collections, such as those relating
to Lugo and the cartulary of Celanova, have never been edited in full.
“| On the debate over the Anglo-Saxon chancery see $.D. Keynes, The Diplomas of Aethelred
‘the Unready’, 978-1016 (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 14-83, and the bibliography cited there;
also the chapters by Kelly and Keynes in this volume, above, pp. 39-46, and below, 232-48.
 LITERACY IN EARLY MEDIAEVAL SPAIN 125
that of Ramiro III of Leén (966-84). For this period at least it can be
asserted that all of the known documents produced in the name of this king
were written by scribes otherwise found in the context of the household of
the bishops of Leén.” It looks as if the episcopal scriptorium served the
purposes of the royal chancery. It should be noted that this is not a case of
beneficiary production, as the bulk of the documents were drawn up for
third parties. Such a conclusion is probably not a surprising one, other than
for those who would regard the existence of a court-based chancery as the
natural presumption. In the case of the Spanish kingdoms it may well be
that not until the twelfth century would such an assumption be justified.”
Such an ecclesiastical monopoly of the production of governmental and
private documents is certainly indicative of a more limited dissemination of
literacy, but does not necessarily indicate a lack of it in the upper levels of
secular society, where it might most be expected. The problem is that of
obtaining the evidence. Signatures to charters may be revealing, though
this is by no means a sure test of literacy, as the use of stencils enabled
otherwise illiterate laymen to write their own names on documents.*” Even
this form of evidence, though, is often denied the inquirer, in that unlike
most of the Catalan collections the greater part of the Asturian and Leonese
materials have survived not as originals but as later cartulary copies. Many
of the ‘originals’, too, turn out on inspection to be early copies. Thus the
copious bodies of charters that can be associated with some of the leading
figures in the tenth-century aristocracy of the kingdom of Le6én do not help
to determine the educational attainments of their owners.*!
On the other hand, the latter’s books might be expected to provide better
information, and some knowledge of these can be obtained through some of
the same charters in which they are bequeathed or donated. Two collections
of all such references to books in documents from the Leonese kingdom

’8 This becomes clear from a study of the extant charters of Ramiro III in relation to those of
the bishop of Leén; most of the published texts will be found in Colecci6n diplomatica de
Sahagun, ed. Minguez Fernandez and Documentos de la Catedral de Leon, ed. del Ser
Quiano; a full study of this is to follow.
7? See now B.F. Reilly, ‘The chancery of Alfonso VI of Leén-Castile (1065—-1109)’, in
Santiago, Saint-Denis and St. Peter, ed. B.F. Reilly (New York, 1985), pp. 1-40.
5° There exist several apparently fluent signatures by counts of Barcelona in the Catalan
charter collections, e.g. Barcelona, Archivo de la Corona de Aragén, pergaminos: Miro. 3
(sig. of Count Sunyer), Archivo de la Catedral de Urgell, consagracions 12 (sig. of Count
Miro).
8! In particular the two great Galician monasteries of Celanova and Sobrado, founded by the
greatest of the noble dynasties of the region. For Sobrado see Tumbos del monasteno de
Sobrado de los Monjes, ed. P. Loscertales de Garcia de Valdeavellano, 2 vols. (Madrid,
1976), and for Celanova the unpublished Tumbo: Madrid, Archivo Histérico Nacional,
seccién de cédices 986B.
126 Roger Collins
dating to before the turn of the millennium have been made, one of which
relates exclusively to charters from Galicia. A wide and various range of
books has emerged from these trawls. Unsurprisingly, the greater part of
the donors were ecclesiastics, but a number of laymen do feature. Of the
twenty-eight relevant Galician documents dating to before the year 1000
only seven contain gifts of books by laymen, and two of these qualify
themselves as confesus.**? The lay donors are generally figures of consider-
able local significance and include Ilduara Eriz, wife of Count Hermene-
gildo and mother of Bishop Rosendo of Santiago, Count Hermenegildo of
Presaras and his wife Paterna, the Countess Mummadona Diaz, and Count
Osorio Gutiérrez.™
Consideration of the books actually given and the contexts in which the
donations were made suggests that considerable caution 1s necessary in
using such materials to suggest anything about their owners’ literacy. In
most cases the gifts of books were made as part of the endowment of a newly
founded monastery. This is true of the donation of exclusively liturgical
books to the monastery of San Fiz and the Macchabees made by Osorius and
his wife Argilona in 933, and of the gifts made by Count Hermenegildo and
his wife to their foundation at Sobrado in 952, and of the provision of books
for his newly created monastery of Lorenzana on the part of Count Osorio
Gutiérrez in 969. Of all the books included in these various donations,
other than that of Mummadona Diaz, only one is not liturgical or a book of
monastic rules, and that is a copy of the Visigothic law-code, the Forum
Iudicum, here called Liber Goticum, given to the family monastery of
Celanova by Iduara Eriz in 938.* It is only sensible to assume that in all but
the last case the books were specially made or bought for the purpose of
providing the newly founded monasteries with the necessary texts for the
carrying out of liturgical observance.
The donation made in 959 by the Countess Mummadona Diaz to the
monastery she founded at Guimaraes, formerly the monastic see of Dumio,
is exceptional in the context of the other documents in that she provided her
new house with a substantial library. This included, as well as the

82 C._ Sdnchez-Albornoz, ‘Notas sobre los libros leidos en el Reino de Leén’, Cuadernos de
IMstonra de Espana 1/2 (1944), 222-38; M.R. Garcia Alvarez, ‘Los libros en la documenta-
cidn gallega de la alta edad media’, Cuadernos de Estudios Gallegos 20 (1965), 292-329.
83 Garcia Alvarez, ‘Los libros’, nos. 20 and 26, pp. 310, 312.
$4 Ibid., nos. 17, 21, 23, and 25, pp. 309, 310-11, 312.
85 Ibid., nos. 15, 21, and 25, pp. 308, 310-11, 312.

86 5v—6v.
gumbo de Celanova: Madrid, Archivo Hist6érico Nacional, secci6n de cédices 986B, fols.
 LITERACY IN EARLY MEDIAEVAL SPAIN 127
mandatory liturgical books and a considerable collection of monastic rules,
some Isidore, Ildefonsus and Gregory the Great, the Vita Martini, a
Mstona Ecclestastica (Rufinus’ translation of Eusebius?), Ephrem Syrus
and a Troyano, probably indicating Dictys Cretensis. Such a collection,
located in what was at the time a remote frontier region of the kingdom, is
surprising, and some of the items find no parallels in other evidence relating
to the monastic libraries of northern Spain.®” How the countess acquired
such books remains uncertain, though an ultimately southern Spanish or
Cordoban origin for some of them at least might be postulated. One possible
line of transmission would be through the episcopal monastery of Abeliare
in Le6n, founded and endowed by Bishop Cixila in 927, where copies of
these texts are known to have existed.®® As the ‘milk-sister’ of King Ramiro
IIT (931-51) Mummadona and her family were powerful and influential, and
her obtaining of copies of such otherwise rare books as the Ephrem Syrus
from Abeliare may explain their appearance in Guimaraes.* In any case no
certainty exists that she would have read all or any of them herself.
Thus it looks as if at best there is no evidence on which any secure
assessment of lay literacy in the Christian kingdoms of the north of the
peninsula can be based. These small, under-urbanized states could be
regarded as being essentially frontier societies that developed largely on the
basis of raiding and opposition to their larger and more powerful Muslim
neighbour to the south. Their royal courts were small and relatively poor
and the aristocracy newly emerged and concerned with developing profits
from war and from land. Their needs for education were limited. Even their
often extensive monastic patronage could be suspected of having an
economic purpose to it in helping to develop the under-populated and waste
frontier regions.”
Yet it would be unwise to write off the Christian kingdoms of the Asturias
and Leén, let alone their diminutive eastern counterpart, centred on
Pamplona, that came into being early in the ninth century, as being in this

$8? University of Coimbra, Archivo, doc. 1 (twelfth-century copy of lost original). On

Mummadona Diaz see J. Mattoso, ‘As familias condais portucalenses dos séculos X e XI’,
Studium Generale 12 (1968/9), 59-115, no. IVB, reprinted in his A Nobreza medieval
portuguesa (Lisbon, 1981), pp. 101-57, especially pp. 139-40.
88 For Cixila’s library at Abeliare see M. Gémez-Moreno, Iglesias mozdrabes, 2 vols.
(Madrid, 1919), I, pp. 347-8.
8° On Mummadona’s relationship with the Leonese royal house, see J. Rodriguez, Ramiro II
rey de Leon (Madrid, 1972), pp. 32-4.
°° On the economic and social role of monasteries, see, inter alia, M. Pallares Méndez, El
monasterio de Sobrado: un ejemplo del protagonismo monastico en la Galicia medieval (La
Corufia, 1979).
128 Roger Collins
respect unworthy heirs of the Visigoths.’! Perhaps the most striking
testimony to a level of lay literacy and an interest in learning in these
societies, otherwise so largely concealed by the limitations of the evidence,
comes in the form of the principal historical composition of the Asturian
kingdom, the Chronicle of Alfonso IIT. This now survives in two distinct but
related versions, and argument continues as to the priority to be ascribed to
one or other of them, and their relationship to an original first form of the
text.°* But, whatever the nature of the beliefs held as to the precedence,
place of origin and authorial milieu of the two extant recensions, there is still
a general unanimity as to the royal authorship of the original Chronicle. ‘The
Chronicle of Alfonso III was in its first state actually written by and not just
for the Asturian King Alfonso III, probably around the year 383.”
Arguments that would make of him too busy a ruler to have contemplated
such an undertaking have proved as ill-founded as if applied to the literary
work of Alfonso’s contemporary, the West Saxon King Alfred.”* Both were
monarchs facing formidable military and administrative problems, and
both found the desire and the time to write. In the case of the Asturian king
his Chronicle might have been little more than a history of the reign of his
father, Ordono I (850-66), but it is no mean achievement.”
Alfonso III may have generated too many successors in respect of the
practical and military aspects of kingship: he was deposed by a conspiracy of
his own sons in 910. But he failed to pass on his model of the royal
participation in scholarship. The kingdom created by his heirs with its
centre in Leén has been seen as intellectually arid and failing to develop the
seeds of the revival of learning produced by the court of Alfonso.”° This is
perhaps not entirely fair. Scholars may have been few, but for certain very

7! On the literary culture of the kingdom of Pamplona in the ninth century, see R. Collins, The
Basques (Oxford, 1986), pp. 145-51. For the tenth century, see 5. de Silva y Verastegui,
Iconografia del siglo X en la Reina de Pamplona-Ndjera (Pamplona, 1984).
% For the fullest discussion of the manuscripts, together with an edition of the two earliest
extant (together with two other later) versions of the text, see Die Chrontk Alfons III, ed.
Prelog; for some of the arguments as to priority, see M. Gdmez-Moreno, ‘Las primeras
cronicas de la Reconquista’, Boletin de la Real Academia de la Historia 100 (1932), 5-628,
and Cronica de Alfonso IIT, ed. Ubieto Arteta (Valencia, 1971), pp. 8-12.
3 Ubieto, Cronica, pp. 12-15; Crénicas asturianas, ed. J. Gil Fernandez, J.L. Moralejo and
J.1. Ruiz de la Pefia (Oviedo, 1985), pp. 38-41, 60-80.
4 L Barrau-Dihigo, ‘Remarques sur la Chronique dite d’Alphonse III’, Revue Hispanique 46
(1919), 323-81, and on Alfred, see Kelly, above, pp. 52-5, and Keynes, below, pp. 230-4.
°5 As argued by Gil, in Crénicas asturianas, ed. Gilet al., p. 75.
© J.1. Ruiz de la Pefia, inzbid., p. 42, here following the verdict of L. Garcia de Valdeavellano.
 LITERACY IN EARLY MEDIAEVAL SPAIN 129
practical things the ability to read was increasingly necessary, and not just
for clerics. The most obvious example of this comes with the role of the
judge. The considerable number of judicial documents produced in the
course of the settlement of legal disputes that have survived from the
kingdom of Leén testify to the continued application 1n practice as well as
theory of the legal procedures of the Visigothic kingdom.”’ As has been
mentioned, in most cases those who wrote such documents, the production
of which was enjoined on the courts by the law itself, were clerics. However,
most of the judges whose names are known were laymen.”
Such judges can be sub-divided in terms of their status. In many of the
peripheral regions of the kingdom, particularly in Galicia and the county of
Castille, which emerged 1n the late ninth century, the counts, initially royal
appointees but from their landed base effectively hereditary regional
nobles, presided over the courts.””? Obviously such men could be thought of
as eminent presidents but dependent on the skills of other better trained
subsidiary judges. This is perhaps the case, but at least two donations of
copies of the code, the Forum Iudicum, or ‘Gothic Book’ as it came
increasingly to be called, might indicate that such counts were themselves
possessors of the law book.'*° As well as such great men, who filled the
presidential role that the king himself could undertake in Leon, there did
exist a body of what may be termed professional judges. Not only do such
men feature in making up the panels who sat in judgement at the hearings,
but, significantly, they can also be found using zudex as a title and mark of
their status in private charters in which they feature and which have no
relationship to their performance of their judicial responsibilities. '"!
As the records of several of the hearings indicate, the role of the judge
involved more than just the application of common sense and a spirit of
compromise to the solution of disputes. It was necessary that proceedings
and above all rules of evidence, both in respect of written testimony and of

”” R. Collins, ‘Visigothic law and regional custom in disputes in early medieval Spain’, in
Settlement of Disputes, pp. 85-104, especially pp. 85-8.
8 For lay judges, see, in the absence of comprehensive listing, the various cases cited and
discussed in Collins, ‘Sicut lex Gothorum continet’, and idem, ‘Visigothic law and regional
custom’.
Collins, ‘Sicut lex Gothorum continet’, 498, 508.
'09 Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional MS 18387, fol. 240, gift of Adosinda Gudestéiz; Madrid,
Archivo Histérico Nacional, seccidn de cédices 986B, fol. 6, gift of Iduara Eriz.
‘Ol For example, ‘Abozehar iudez’ and ‘Bello iudex’ who signed as witnesses to the donation
made to the monastery of Santiago in Leén in 959 by the conversa Justa: El] Monasteno de
Santiago
147-8. de Leon, ed. M. Yanez Cifuentes (Le6n and Barcelona, 1972), doc. 13, pp.
 130 Roger Collins
_ witnesses, should be obeyed and should follow the norms stipulated in the
code.’ Thus at various points it is clear from surviving documents that the
Forum Iudicum was openly consulted by the judges. ‘Perquisivimus et
legimus in librum gothicum’ 1s a standard formula in the judicial transcripts
of hearings for the stage at which the judges consulted the code for such
rules, and in a number of instances the relevant text itself was cited and
included in the document, even with the precise reference to the law, title
and book of the Forum Iudicum being provided.'®°
It should be stressed that there is a strong element of the formulaic in this.
Such citations were generally concerned with the procedures rather than
with the interpretation of law. To some extent, then, this was intended as a
public display of the fact that things were being done properly; indeed,
were being done ‘by the book’. However, this does not detract from the clear
implication of these records that the judges themselves, and in the main
they were laymen, could read the book they thus resorted to. Such a
deduction is strengthened by the evidence of the surviving manuscripts of
the Forum Iudicum themselves. These are almost all what could be
regarded as being working codices.'** They are generally quite small, not
necessarily written on the finest vellum, and with a highly restrained
ornamentation that detracts in no way from the readability of the text.
Indeed the ornamental element, which shows signs of standardization and
may derive from Visigothic prototypes, looks intended to enhance the ease
of access to the contents of the book.'® All of this is in contrast to the
manuscripts of the conciliar collections, none of which seems to have been
intended for ease of portability or frequent reference. Admittedly, there
exists one grand manuscript of the code, written in the mid-eleventh
century for the abbot and judge Froila, but there are grounds for suspecting
that this was copied from the authoritative exemplar of the law book
preserved in the royal monastery and /nfantado of San Salvador in Leén.'™
It may well have come to serve a similar purpose itself in the royal house of
San Isidoro in the same city.

102 For the rules of evidence, see Titles iv and v of book II of the Forum Iudicum, ed. K.
Zeumer, MGH Leges nat. germ., 1.1, pp. 94—120.
'03 The citations of the Forum Iudicum in Catalan documents are tabulated in M. Zimmer-
mann, ‘L’Usage de droit wisigothique en Catalogne du [Xe au Xlle siécle: approches
d’une signification culturelle’, Mélanges de la Casa de Velazquez 9 (1973), 240-53; no
such survey of the Leonese materials has been carried out.
10* For the MSS see M.C. Diaz, ‘La Lex Visigothorum y sus manuscritos — un ensayo de
reinterpretaci6n’, Anuanio de Historia del Derecho Espanol 46 (1976), 163-223.
105 Common decorative schemes may be found in the majority of the MSS and fragments
listed in zbid.
106 Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional, MS Vitr. 14~15.
 LITERACY IN EARLY MEDIAEVAL SPAIN 131
Such considerations obviously raise the question of where, if anywhere,
such judges received their training.'°’ To which the immediate answer must
be that no evidence has yet emerged with a bearing on the matter. Charter
references make it clear that many of the principal monasteries and
episcopal churches of the kingdom owned copies of the code.'"* Several of
their abbots feature as judges, and in cases not apparently involving their
houses. For the lay judges it is probably safe to assume that no such thing as
a specialized training in law existed. At best they may well have learned
their profession in the execution of it or by personal instruction from other
practitioners.
In general such education as existed in the Christian regions of Spain
after 711 appears to have been centred on monastic schools. Again this is
hardly surprising, as this may well have been the norm in the preceding
Visigothic period, and was also to be found in the Muslim-ruled south 1n
these centuries. The only appreciable difference in structural terms is that
there seems to have been no equivalent in the north to the schools based in
the major martyrs’ basilicas that had existed under the Visigoths and still
could be found in ninth-century Cordoba.'”’ These, though, were essen-
tially urban foundations. The discontinuities in town life in the north meant
that any such institutions as may have existed in these regions before 711
failed to survive.
One other element that may be new or indeed may be a revival of a
Visigothic practice is the existence of what may be presumed to have been
court schools. In charters of the late tenth and early eleventh centuries from
both Leén and Pamplona the presence of an ecclesiastic at court holding the
title of magister can be noted.'!° From such references the existence of a
schola regis has been deduced.'!' This may be being overly optimistic, and
it is important to recall that this same period saw the writing of royal

'97 R. Gilbert, ‘La ensefianza del derecho en Hispania durante los siglos VI a XI’, Jus
Romanum Medtu Aevi, Pars 1, 5b (Milan, 1967), pp. 3-54.
108 S4nchez-Albornoz, ‘Notas sobre los libros’, 281, lists the evidence of monastic ownership
of copies of the code. To this should be added the donation of Ilduara Eriz cited above, nn.
86 and 100. No such list exists for the monasteries of Catalonia.
'0? See some of the accounts of the lives of the mid-ninth-century martyrs given by Eulogius,
which include some references to their training: for example the priest Perfectus sub
paedagogts basilicae sanctt Actscli clara erudttione nutritus, Eulogt Memonale Sanctorum
11.1.1, ed. Gil, Corpus Scnptorum Muzarabicorum, I, p. 398.
'!0 For example, Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional, MS 18387 (‘Cartulario de Samos’), doc. 156,
fol. 272 r/v of 983 includes the signature of ‘Froyla Hamitiz magister regis’; Abbot
Galindo, ‘Magister regis’ to King Sancho II Garcés of Pamplona: Madrid, Archivo
Histérico Nacional, seccidn de clero, carpeta 1404, doc. 5. Such references can be
multiplied.
1! Gibert, ‘Ensefianza del derecho’, p. 35.

}
132 Roger Collins
documents by the episcopal scriptorium. Certainly no major centres of
learning should be envisaged in the existence of what might at best have
been a tutor to the royal family.
Cautious as it is necessary to be, there are features of the conditions in the
north that suggest that in the matter of lay literacy, despite differences in
both economy and social structure, the Christian kingdoms did not let go
entirely of their Visigothic inheritance. Certainly it appears to have been
intensely practical in character, and a really disinterested revival of concern
for scholarship was slow in coming in Christian Spain; perhaps not to be
looked for much before the thirteenth century. Even the monasteries appear
to have been great landowners and centres of liturgical observance before
being places of learning. But some of them were able to combine all three
purposes, and in so doing served the purposes of their lay founders.
One other dimension that should not be overlooked 1s the continuing
impact of the south on the Christian north, especially from the beginning of
the tenth century. In 882 a corpus of books, ones that had probably once
belonged to or were copies of those of Eulogius, reached Oviedo from
Cordoba, very probably as part of a diplomatic exchange. Their subsequent
fate is unknown, though the possibility exists that some of them, or copies,
featured in Bishop Cixila of Leén’s gift to his monastery of Abeliare in
927.'!2 Cixila himself has been seen as a ‘Mozarab’ or Arabized Christian
refugee from Muslim Al-Andalus; if so he could have brought his books
with him.'!° As has been seen above his monastery’s library looks a possible
source for the subsequent donation of books to her new foundation for nuns
at Giumaraes on the part of Mummadona Diaz. Whatever the truth be as to
the origins of Cixila, certainly some southern Christians did come north and
establish themselves above all in the frontier regions of Leon. They founded
monasteries with the backing of the kings and the Leonese aristocracy, and
they brought more books with them.'"’
The limited nature of the evidence relating to early mediaeval Spain
remains a permanent problem, and there are features that have not been
discussed here, such as the possible impact of developments north of the
Pyrenees, above all on Catalonia. However, it may be hoped that some
impression may have been formed of continuities across the supposed
chasm of the Arab conquest of the peninsula. Most obviously these can be
seen in the continuing hold of the learning, liturgy and law of the
Visigothic period on the Christian population throughout the peninsula

2 On the list, see M.C. Diaz y Diaz, Cédices visigéticos en la monarquia leonesa (Leén,
1983), pp. 42-53.
"3 Collins, ‘Poetry in ninth-century Spain’, 189 and n. 39.
"4 On the books of the Mozarabs see Gémez-Moreno, Iglesias mozdrabes, I, pp. 345-64.
 LITERACY IN EARLY MEDIAEVAL SPAIN 133
after 711. But such a clinging to tradition in threatening circumstances
occasions small surprise. What is more notable 1s the survival in the south of
a literate laity in, of course, the upper levels of society. ‘To a more restricted
degree the same 1s true of the Christian-ruled north as well.
This continuity in the existence of what may be termed a reading public
needs to be underlined when the flowering of the patronage of scholarship
and the collecting of books in late Umayyad society be recalled. The two
have never been associated, largely due to the existence of assumptions that
the cultural floresence of Arab Spain needs no explanation. In fact it would
be quite fallacious to assume that conditions were identical throughout the
Arab world. Why not just the Umayyad court but also the upper classes 1n
general in the major cities of Al-Andalus were avid readers needs some
positive explanation. This was a population whose last major influx from
outside the peninsula had occurred in the mid-eighth century. In other
words, it was largely composed of increasingly Arabized but indigenous
elements. Although the question has to be answered in a fuller and more
complex way, it 1s not unreasonable to suggest that some part in it should
have been played by this survival of the existence of an educated laity from
the period of the Visigothic kingdom onwards.
 2 6

Aspects of mediaeval Jewish literacy

Stefan C. Reif

The purpose of this essay 1s twofold. Unlike the remainder of the contribu-
tions, it sets out to describe cultural developments that occurred within a
non-Christian tradition and that seem first to have flourished in an environ-
ment dominated by Islam. The geographical area in question ranges from
Muslim Spain, through North Africa, Egypt and the Syro-Palestinian
territories, to what is today Iraq and Iran, and the chronological limits are
from the sixth to the eleventh centuries of the Christian era. This departure
from Europe for more oriental climes is not a matter of scholarly choice but
is dictated by a dearth of evidence in that continent for the chronological
span just defined that frustrates current research and contrasts with the
wealth of sources emanating from the Jewish communities of the Arab
world. The description here being offered will serve to complement the
other essays not only by providing an external yardstick against which to
measure the significance of literary trends in the world of European
Christianity but also by drawing attention to certain parallel developments,
_ the accurate evaluation of which will become possible only when scholarly
research increases knowledge of the beginnings of Jewish settlement in
Christian Europe.' Its second aim, which has more in common with the
other subjects treated in the volume, is to assess the degree to which literacy
penetrated various societies around the Mediterranean area and to the east
of it in the latter half of the first Christian millennium and thereby to dispel
some of the myths that have led to the overall representation of that period
in terms of ‘the dark ages’. By means of such an assessment a more accurate
picture will emerge of what was innovative and what long-standing in the
matter of Jewish literary achievement in the post-mediaeval and early

' It is clear from A. Grossman’s Hebrew volume on The Early Sages of Ashkenaz (Jerusalem,
1981) — cf. also his The Early Sages of France (Jerusalem, 1989) — that little may be said
about developments prior to the tenth century. In the volume A History of the Jewish People,
ed. H.H. Ben-Sasson (London, 1976), the chapter by him entitled ‘Jewish social and
cultural life until the end of the eleventh century’, pp. 439-61, devotes only three pages out
of twenty-three to Jews in the non-Islamic environment.
134
 ASPECTS OF MEDIAEVAL JEWISH LITERACY — 135
modern periods. The need for the picture to include many themes and to
deal with the totality of a religious culture rather than with a single element
in it will of necessity entail the painting of a broad canvas rather than an
intense and detailed miniature. The treatment will commence with some
general points about Jewish attitudes to language and text and then move on
to the nature of the Jewish literary experience between the sixth and
eleventh centuries.” The period has been chronologically defined in this
way in order to match the Jewish periodization of history. The concept of
literacy will here be understood as referring to the commitment of traditions
to writing, the technical process of scribal activity and the popular acquain-
tance with what can be done with an alphabet.
To explain the nature of developments in the 500 years of the post-
talmudic or geonic period (that 1s, the age when the leaders or ge ‘onzm of the
talmudic academies in Babylon guided Jewish cultural trends), it is necess-
ary to make mention of the part played by the transmission of the written
word in the Jewish religious heritage. Both internal and external evidence
demonstrates a substantial use of the written word in ancient Israel for
archives, inscriptions and the establishment of religious authority. To that
latter end a significant element in codification appears to have been
textualization, which was regarded as a means of ensuring the permanence
of knowledge, guidance and edification for the faithful. Committing a text
to writing lent it an impressive spiritual status and the acts of copying and
reciting texts that ultimately became part of the Hebrew Bible were
established practices by the beginning of what is known to Jewish historians
as the second temple period (515Bc—ab 70), that 1s, late in the sixth pre-
Christian century. As the people’s record of what it regarded as its special
revelation and its religious history, this body of texts was looked upon as
sacred, attracted various forms of veneration and declamation and also came
to be used for theurgical purposes. Central as it was to the faith, it also
became the primer from which children would familiarize themselves with
both the written language and the religious message.” It is indeed difficult to

* Although this period is the subject of a good deal of current scholarship, especially in Israel,
this specialized research and its conclusions have yet to be consolidated in a general history of
the period in either English or Hebrew. In the meantime, more general scholarly interest is
served by S.W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 18 vols. (New York, 1952
~— New York, London and Philadelphia, 1983), ITI-VIII (New York, London and
Philadelphia, 1957-8); Cecil Roth, The World Mistory of the Jewish People. Medieval Penod.
The Dark Ages (London, 1966); and the work edited by H.H. Ben-Sasson and cited inn. 1
above.
3 Typical examples of illustrative texts in the Hebrew Bible are Exodus 17:14, Deuteronomy
17:18, Isaiah 8:1, Jeremiah 17:1 and the whole of chapters 32 and 36, Ezekiel 37:20 and
Habakuk 2:2. See E. Wiirthwein, The Text of the Old Testament (4th edn, London, 1980),
pp. 3-11; Y. Kaufmann, The Religion of Israel from its Beginnings to the Babylonian Exile
136 Stefan C. Reif
disentangle the intertwined strands of text, language and religion in the
Judaism of the late biblical period and Hebrew itself became so identified
with the sacred ideology that, whatever its later fate as a spoken vernacular,
it was ultimately given a special status as the sacred, cultic or perhaps even
divine language in Jewish tradition.* At the same time, however, Greek
language and literature issued a serious challenge to the Jews, particularly in
the communities of the diaspora, and tensions were created between the
desire for written communication in the language of the national heritage,
or in one closely associated with it, namely, Aramaic, and the exciting
prospect of adopting a more universal medium for the transmission of
Jewish religious ideas.”
As the second temple period gave way to the early rabbinic period, just
before and after the time of Jesus, the concept of sacred scripture took ona
meaning much wider than the transmission of the words in text or
recitation. If the revealed word represented the will of God, then all
theological developments must originate there and its ideology must be
transmitted by way of popular expansions, interpretations and adjustments
of the original text that paradoxically incorporated novel ideas into ancient
canon. The Hebrew Bible was thus credited with being the source of many
of the apocryphal, pseudepigraphical, Qumranic, Hellenistic and rabbinic
traditions of the late pre-Christian and early Christian centuries and
renderings of its text spawned various Aramaic and Greek translations and
paraphrases that themselves contributed to a considerable expansion of
Jewish (and, ultimately, Christian) literature.° The early rabbinic liturgy

(London, 1961), pp. 174-5, 354-62; R. de Vaux, Ancient Israel: Its Life and Institutions
(London, 1965), pp. 48-50; and J.L. Crenshaw, ‘Education in ancient Israel’, Journal of
Biblical Literature 104 (1985), 601-15.
* S. Esh, ‘HOBH. Der Heilige Er Sei Gepriesen.’ Zur Geschichte einer Nachbiblisch-
Hebraischen Gottesbezeichnung (Leiden, 1957), pp. 82-3, explaining the term ‘tongue of
holiness’ used in the Mishnah, Sotah 7.2,4 and Yevamoth 12.6. See also, for the history of
Hebrew in the late biblical period, E.Y. Kutscher, A History of the Hebrew Language, ed. R.
Kutscher (Jerusalem and Leiden, 1982), especially pp. 81-114; J. Naveh, ‘Hebrew and
Aramaic in the Persian period’, in The Cambridge Mtstory of Judaism, ed. W.D. Davies and
L. Finkelstein (Cambridge, 1984), I, pp. 115-29; and C. Rabin, ‘Hebrew and Aramaic in
the first century’, in The Jewish People in the First Century, ed. S. Safrai and M. Stern, 2
vols. (Assen and Philadelphia, 1974-6), II, pp. 1007-39.
> See S. Lieberman, Greek in Jewish Palestine (New York, 1942); M. Hengel, Judaism and
Hellenism (London, 1974); G. Mussies, ‘Greek in Palestine and the Diaspora’, in The
Jewish People, ed. Safrai and Stern, II, pp. 1040-64; and the attempt by L.H. Feldman to
offer a corrective in his ‘How much Hellenism in Jewish Palestine?’, in Hebrew Union
College Annual 57 (1986), 83-111.
6 E. Schiirer, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ (175 B.C.-A.D. 135),
ed. G. Vermes and F. Millar, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1973-87), I (Edinburgh, 1973), pp. 17-
122, and III (Edinburgh, 2 parts, 1986-7), pp. 177-889; The Jewish People, ed. Safrai and
Stern, I, pp. 1-61; and Jewish Wntings of the Second Temple Pernod, ed. M.E. Stone (Assen
and Philadelphia, 1984).
 ASPECTS OF MEDIAEVAL JEWISH LITERACY = 137
incorporated elements of both the biblical and the post-biblical forms of the
Hebrew and Aramaic languages and the tannaitic traditions were
incorporated into the Mishna, Tosefta and Talmud in the same contempor-
ary Hebrew language that was used by Bar Kokhba to write his army orders
in AD 132-5.’ Jewish culture of the early Christian period consequently
made use of three languages, namely, Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, not
only in the vernacular, as the evidence of inscriptions makes abundantly
clear, but also in the formulation of its transmitted traditions.
It must not, of course, be assumed that all these traditions were
committed to textual form. In some cases the content of the biblical text
underwent a popular transformation and emerged as oral teaching while, in
others, orally transmitted lore acquired a more formal, literary structure at
the hands of generations of transmitters and evolved into authoritative text.
It may well be fair to say that the halakhic (legal) and aggadic (other
religious) traditions of the rabbis became predominantly oral while their
equivalents among other Jewish groups, ranging from the Hellenistic to
what for ease of reference may be referred to as the sectarian, were
consigned to the written form. What remained basic to all groups were the
veneration and recitation of biblical scroll-texts, and a linguistic knowledge
sufficient to understand them or their translations, a respect for the written
word as the source of religious teachings and the medium for conveying at
least some of them, the use of legal documents to impose the requirements
of the Mosaic code as they understood it, and an educational system that
furnished members of the community with the ability to adhere to these
values. It is not by some semantic quirk that the sum total of Jewish
religious theory and practice came to be known by the talmudic rabbis as
torah, the Hebrew word for ‘teaching’. Similarly, the epithet gara’ could
mean ‘reader’, ‘scholar’ or ‘expert in Bible’, and the titles of a number of
classical rabbinic works, including the Mishnah and the Talmud, carried
the basic sense of ‘learning’ or ‘teaching’. The whole learning and teaching
process lay at the centre of Judaism and 1s incapable of comprehension
outside the linguistic and literary context just described.°
A glance at the world of rabbinic religious traditions in the sixth century

” Kutscher, Hebrew Language, pp. 115-47; J. Heinemann, Prayerin the Talmud: Forms and
Patterns (Berlin, 1977), pp. 123-38, 159, 190-2, 265-6, 278 and 287; Y. Yadin, Bar
Kokhba: The Rediscovery of the Legendary Hero of the Second Jewish Revolt against Rome
(London, 1971), pp. 124-39; and J.C. Greenfield, ‘Languages of Palestine 200 b.c.e.—
200 c.e.’, in Jewish Languages: Theme and Vanation, ed. H.H. Paper (Cambridge, Mass.,
1978), pp. 143-54.
§ In addition to the relevant sections of the literature cited in n. 6 above, see The Literature of
the Sages. First Part: Oral Tora, Halakha, Mishna, Tosefta, Talmud, External Tractates,
ed. S. Safrai (Assen, Maastricht and Philadelphia, 1987), especially the chapter by the editor
on ‘Oral Tora’ (pp. 35-119), and H. Dimitrovsky’s collection of reprinted essays Exploring
the Talmud, I: Education (New York, 1976).
138 Stefan C. Reif
and an examination of the phonetic spelling in which they were recorded in
later manuscripts reveal that the method of transmitting many of them still
remained predominantly an oral one. While scrolls of the Hebrew Bible
were carefully copied, and there were surely some texts of the Aramaic
versions (Targumim), of the early third-century corpus of Jewish law
(Mishnah) and of synagogal poetry and biblical commentary in existence,
the massive body of rabbinic (more accurately, talmudic—midrashic) teach-
ings, covering the whole field of textual interpretation and legal discussion
and the liturgical formulations of some five centuries, were gradually
acquiring a more formal structure but were yet to be committed in any
substantial degree to writing.”
Texts of such works were, unlike their biblical antecedents, for private
recall rather than public circulation and edification and were never familiar
to any more than an influential minority. Not only is there no evidence of
widespread copying of rabbinic traditions, there are clear indications 1n the
statements of some of the talmudic rabbis of an aversion to the possible
results of a misguided equation with the authoritative biblical texts and a
neglect of the oral method of education. The oral transmission of these
traditions is described as a special feature of the revelation to Israel and of
Jewish education and ‘there is no authority for committing oral sayings to
writing’.’° Since the earlier evidence of the late second temple period has '
been seen to point to something of a textual explosion, it is not unreasonable
to see the oral trend of the rabbis as the defence of a more populist
philosophy and the choice of an alternative and less formal medium for its
transmission.
The course of the next 500 years of Jewish history ensured a major change
in this situation. While under Parthian and Byzantine hegemony, the
Jewish communities of the Near East and the Mediterranean area had been
prone to periods of tolerance interchanging with times of persecution and
had been unable to rely on any degree of political stability, their position in

? M.L. Klein, Genizah Manuscripts of Palestinian Targum to the Pentateuch (Cincinnati,

1986), introduction to the first volume, especially pp. xxxiv-xxxvi; A. Goldberg, “The
Mishna — a study book of Halakha’, in Literature of the Sages, ed. Safrai, pp. 211-62; T.
Carmi, The Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse (Harmondsworth, 1981), introduction, pp. 13-
20, based largely on the Hebrew volume of E. Fleischer, Hebrew Liturgical Poetry in the
Middle Ages (Jerusalem, 1975); J. Heinemann and J.J. Petuchowski, Literature of the
Synagogue (New York, 1975); G.G. Porton, Understanding Rabbinic Midrash (Hoboken,
New Jersey, 1985); D. Weiss-Halivni, Midrash, Mishnah and Gemara (Cambridge, Mass.,
1986), especially p. 83; and S.C. Reif, ‘Some liturgical issues in the talmudic sources’,
Studia Liturgica 15 (1982-3), 188-206.
'0 Babylonian Talmud, Gittin 60b and cf. Palestinian Talmud, Pe’ah 2.6 (17a) and Megillah
4.1 (74d). See Literature of the Sages, ed. Safrai, and B. Gerhardsson, Memory and
Manuscnpt: Oral Tradition and Wntten Transmission in Rabbinic Judaism and Early
Chnstianity (Uppsala, 1961), especially pp. 113-70.
 ASPECTS OF MEDIAEVAL JEWISH LITERACY — 139
general society underwent a considerable revolution with the conquest of
that mass of territory by the Arabs and its subsequent domination by Islam.
The Jew remained a second-class citizen but his status was legally
established; the religio-political system under which he lived held sway
from Afghanistan to Spain; and the Arab absorption of the finest achieve-
ments of the peoples they conquered led to a flourishing of what was
perhaps the broadest culture yet known to man. This not only led to the
emergence of a variety of religious and heretical trends from both within
Islam and outside it, but also provided an example of centralization,
authority, standardization and intellectual progress that the Jews were not
slow in adapting to their own communal, religious and literary require-
ments. The major Jewish communities that were subject to the various
caliphates of the geonic period were located in Babylon, the Holy Land,
North Africa and Spain and it was in these centres, each in its own heyday,
that the various components of Jewish literature gradually acquired the
forms that later became familiar to Jews and non-Jews and instrumental in
the formation of their respective ideas. The various literary achievements of
these communities must now be separately considered.!
Whether inspired by the example of the Koran or the Syriac Christian
tradition, or the result of the schism between Rabbanites, who upheld the
authority of the talmudic tradition, and Karaites,'* who looked to a literal
interpretation of the Hebrew Bible for their religious guidance, a new
expertise was developed in the orthography, punctuation, vocalization and
cantillation of the Hebrew Bible and subsequently transferred to other areas
of Hebrew linguistic expression. These experts, known as Masoretes (from
the Hebrew masorah meaning ‘traditional transmission’ or possibly at an
earlier stage, ‘counting the letters’), introduced a number of divergent
systems for protecting the authenticity of the textual tradition, one of which
ultimately became standard in the majority of important manuscripts, and,
by peppering the biblical text with their comments and instructions, laid
the foundations for the later emergence of Hebrew philological studies
beginning in the tenth century.'’ The earliest exponents of these studies

'! §.D. Goitein, Jews and Arabs: Their Contacts through the Ages (2nd edn, New York,
1964); E.I.J. Rosenthal, Judaism and Islam (London and New York, 1961); N.A.
Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands: A History and Source Book (Philadelphia, 1979); and B.
Lewis, The Jews of Islam (London, 1984).
'2 For further details of the Karaite movement and ideology, see L. Nemoy, Karaite
Anthology (New Haven and London, 1952), and P. Birnbaum, Karaite Studies (New York,
1971).
'S ‘Wiurthwein, Old Testament, pp. 12-41; A. Dotan, ‘Masorah’, E¥ XVI, cols. 1401-82; and
the more dated but historically useful material assembled by $.D. Leiman in The Canon
and Masorah of the Hebrew Bible: An Introductory Reader (New York, 1974).
140 Stefan C. Reif
were not slow in detecting the linguistic affinities between Hebrew,
Aramaic and Arabic and in composing dictionaries, grammars and theoreti-
cal principles to explain their structure and relationship. Almost inevitably,
an intellectual backlash was also created and written efforts were made to
defend an imagined Hebrew purity against the onslaught of the early
mediaeval equivalent of the comparative semiticist.'
Since neither the Hebrew nor the Aramaic versions that were tradition-
ally recited in the synagogue were necessarily and consistently understood
without difficulty by sections of the Jewish community, it then became
customary to add a rendering in Arabic to the traditional, earlier versions
and to use the Hebrew script which, significantly, was assumed to be widely
familiar, for its written transmission. In the earlier part of the geonic
period, it is clear that a variety of Aramaic and Judaeo-Arabic versions
circulated. As with the vocalized text itself, however, standard versions of
both the Aramaic and the Arabic were promoted and ultimately became
accepted at the end of that period and this inevitably had a major influence
on the way in which the biblical text was understood.’ As the rational
interpretation of the Hebrew Bible took on new significance in the theolog!-
cal struggles within the Jewish community and with Muslims, Christians
and heretics outside it, so the fanciful, poetic and colourful exegesis of
midrashim, which had had their origins in the synagogue and academy,
gradually gave ground to the more literal, clinical and philological commen-
taries that were to grace the folios of the manuscripts newly being produced
at the time. While one must be careful not to overdo the characterization of
one whole community as committed to the idea of the authoritative version
and another to the preservation of diversity there is little doubt that the
Babylonian ge’onim were more prone to the former tendency while their
Palestinian counterparts generally favoured the latter. The spread of
Babylonian influence as far as Spain, and later to Provence and France, and

'* D. Téné has written on such early comparative study in the volume of Hebrew essays
Hebrew Language Studies Presented to Professor Zeev Ben-Hayyim, ed. M. Bar-Asher, A.
Dotan, G.B. Sarfattiand D. Téné (Jerusalem, 1983), pp. 237-87. See also A. Maman, “The
comparison of the Hebrew lexicon with Arabic and Aramaic in the linguistic literature of the
Jews from Rav Saadia Gaon (10th cent.) to Ibn Barun (12th cent.)’ PhD dissertation in
Hebrew with English summary, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1984, pp. vii—xxvii and

'S On the Aramaic translations see R. Le Déaut, Introduction a la Littérature Targumique

(Rome, 1966); J.W. Bowker, The Targums and Rabbinic Literature (Cambridge, 1969);
and Y. Komlosh, The Bible in the Light of the Aramaic Translations (Tel-Aviv, 1973). For
an explanation of the development of Judaeo-Arabic literature see J. Blau, The Emergence
and Linguistic Background of Judaeo-Arabic (1st edn, Oxford, 1965; 2nd edn, Jerusalem,
1981), pp. 19-50.
 ASPECTS OF MEDIAEVAL JEWISH LITERACY 141
the final eclipse of the Palestinian Jewish presence through appalling
slaughter at the hands of the Crusaders, or flight to Egypt or Syria to avoid
it, subsequently strengthened the move towards standardization and auth-
ority not only in the field of biblical exegesis but in other areas of the Jewish
religious tradition. '®
While the trend in the evolution of the talmudic traditions during the first
few Christian centuries had been towards the intellectual, the dialectical
and the search for the authoritative source, the position was forced to alter
when the general form and content of the Babylonian Talmud was decided
and much of the editorial process concluded in the sixth century. From that
period onwards the aims of the rabbis had to be geared as much to the
practical as to the theoretical and they saw as their function not only the
arrangement of higher talmudic education but also the provision of
guidance for the communities who looked to them for leadership. Conse-
quently, the exposition of the talmudic text, the response of the expert to
the specific halakhic question addressed to him and the more systematic and
extensive codification of Jewish religious law in general came to stand as
much at the centre of the talmudic tradition as the argumentation about its
own origin that was so typical of its earlier method of transmission. Edited
texts of the Babylonian talmudic tractates were disseminated throughout
the Jewish world. Written guaestiones et responsa, sometimes exchanged
between cities in Spain and Mesopotamia, and dealing with textual as well
as exegetical and legal problems, were received and issued by such leaders as
Yehuda: ben Nahman (eighth century), Amram ben Sheshna (ninth
century) and Saadya ben Joseph (tenth century) of Sura, and Sherira ben
Hananiah (tenth century) and Hai ben Sherira (eleventh century) of
Pumbedita. Collections of decisions, including the Halakhoth Pesugqoth
attributed to Yehuda, and the Halakhoth Gedoloth now assumed to be the
work of Simeon Qayyara (ninth century ?) were composed and circulated.!”
This is not to say that oral discussion was replaced by written debate during

'© These developments are discussed in detail by Baron, History of the Jews, particularly in
VI, pp. 152-313. On the history of Palestinian Jewry until the Crusades, see M. Gil,
Palestine dunng the First Muslim Period (634-1099), 3 vols. (Tel-Aviv, 1983), and for an
edited collection of the most important sources about the leadership of Babylonian Jewry
see A. Grossman, The Babylonian Exilarchate in the Gaonic Period (Jerusalem, 1984).
'’ Baron, History of the Jews, VI, pp. 3-151; S. Abramson, Bamerkazim Uvatefusoth
(Jerusalem, 1965), and tdem, ‘Inyanoth Besifruth Hage’onim (Jerusalem, 1974), both in
Hebrew; Weiss-Halivni, Midrash; and A. Goldberg, ‘The Babylonian Talmud’, in
Literature of the Sages, ed. Safrai, pp. 323-45, followed by an appendix on manuscripts of
the Babylonian Talmud by Michael Krupp, pp. 346-66. The work of L. Ginzberg in
English and S. Assaf in Hebrew may be consulted for more detail and earlier interpreta-
tions: Geonica, 2 vols. (New York, 1909), and S. Assaf, Gaonica (Jerusalem, 1933).
142 Stefan C. Reif
the geonic period. The educational value and the historical authenticity of _
the former was still argued in the time of Sherira (tenth century) and there
continued to be an oral system of advanced adult education at the
Babylonian academies for two short terms twice a year, during which time
the scholars were expected to present to a more popular audience a
comprehensive digest of their studies.'® The foundations had, however,
been laid for the wider use of the written word and the later collapse of the
Babylonian centres did not therefore spell disaster for the transmission of
their talmudic learning.’
In the field of liturgy, too, what had previously been specifically
designated as an orally transmitted medium was first committed to writing
in the ninth century. With the arrival of the prayer book, authoritative
instruction on the precise nature, function and wording of the various
prayers finally emerged victorious from its age-old battle with spontaneity
and pluralism. Those who had embraced the view of the second-century
scholar Eliezer ben Hyrcanus” that fixed prayer can never be supplicatory
saw the erosion of their ideal and its replacement with a more practical
commitment to a defined text. While various rites continued to enjoy
parallel existence, certain fundamental principles came to be accepted by
them all and firmly controlled the extent to which variation was possible.
Attempts were made to define the basic nature of the Jewish prayer and
benediction and thereby to exclude what could then be regarded as
excessively innovative.*! The element of pure creativity in the realm of
prayer was channelled into the mystical and poetic streams of the tradition
and even there it continued to attract virulent criticism whenever the
rabbinic authorities identified what they regarded as departures from what
had become the established norm. As far as liturgical poetry (pzyyut) 1s
concerned, this was, at its earliest stage in the late talmudic and early geonic
periods, the province of the composer and the reciter and had no popular
application or educational significance. If texts were copied, they were

'8 Iggeret R. Scherira Gaon in der franzosischen und spanischen Version, ed. B. Lewin (Haifa,
1921), p. 71; A. Neubauer, Mediaeval Jewish Chronicles (Oxford, 1887), pp. 83-5; Baron,
History of the Jews, V1, pp. 36, 213, 430-1; and a Hebrew paper delivered by R. Brody at
the Ninth World Congress of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem in 1985, entitled “The testimony
of geonic literature to the text of the Babylonian Talmud’ and scheduled for publication ina
collection of essays by the Talmud department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
'? For the transfer of that learning to the North African centre see M. Ben-Sasson, ‘The Jewish
community of medieval North Africa: society and leadership’, PhD dissertation in Hebrew
with English summary, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1983.
20 Mishnah, Berakhoth 4.4.
41 1|.A. Hoffman, The Canonization of the Synagogue Service (Notre Dame and London,
1979).
 ASPECTS OF MEDIAEVAL JEWISH LITERACY 143
copied by or for the liturgical poets themselves and the public’s knowledge
was limited to what they heard recited between and within the standard
prayers. By the tenth century, however, it is clear from the nature and
extent of the manuscript evidence that pzyyutim were emerging as a less
technical and more independent literary genre and texts were being
transcribed and circulated not only by the experts and the learned but also
by a wider body of interested laymen for educational and aesthetic reasons
as well as for liturgical purposes. The basis of the change lay in the
adaptation of Hebrew poetry to the dominant Arabic forms and Dunash ibn
Labrat’s contribution to this process has been described by T. Carmi as ‘one
of the most drastic operations in the history of Hebrew poetry’. As he
expresses it, “The complexion of Hebrew poetry — one 1s tempted to say its
physiognomy — was dramatically transformed in the tenth century with the
emergence of the Andalusian school ... and the appearance of secular
poetry.”
The situation regarding developments in mysticism and philosophy is of
a different nature from that applying to the more dominant rabbinic
traditions just described. The written dimension was obviously a familiar
one to the mystic in the early talmudic period and stress was laid on the
theurgical power of texts, names, letters and numbers, as recorded on
papyrus and on artefacts, throughout the geonic period. Interpretation and
formulation were by definition restricted to initiates although clients for
practical application were never in short supply.“ Conversely, the study of
systematic philosophy among the Jews of the early mediaeval period was not
a direct continuation of its Hellenistic forerunner but the result of
influences emanating from Christian and Muslim theological circles. The
composition of texts on this subject was inevitably, therefore, a novel
development. No change from the oral to the written is then detectable in
the history of Jewish mysticism and philosophy in the period under
discussion but it is clear that there were moves towards the creation of
systems, forms and conventions here no less than elsewhere and that these
were recorded in the ever-increasing number of manuscripts being written
and circulated.”

2 Fleischer, Hebrew Liturgical Poetry, pp. 333-421.

*3 Carmi, Hebrew Verse, pp. 19-20.
24 G. Scholem, ‘Kabbalah’, in E¥ X, cols. 508-12; I. Gruenwald, Apocalyptic and Merkavah
Mysticism (Leiden, 1980), pp. 98-234; and N. Sed, La Mystique Cosmologique Fuive
(Paris, 1981), pp. 75-261.
25 C. Sirat, A History of Jewish Philosophy in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 1-13;
see also I. Husik, A History of Medieval Jewish Philosophy (New York, 1916), introduction,
pp. xiii-l, and J. Guttmann, Philosophies of Judaism (London, 1964), pp. 47-60.
144 Stefan C. Reif
The point has already been made that the literary achievements just
described were a product of the Jewish communities living in the Islamic
environment. There were also substantial Jewish communities in the
Byzantine Empire, Italy and the Rhineland but the conditions there were
certainly inferior to those enjoyed to the south and the east and the pressure
from Christian authorities tended to be more pervasive than that of most of
their Muslim counterparts. The two sets of Jewish communities were
certainly in contact both personally and by correspondence, and ideas
forged in the one must have been imported into the other. By the tenth
century the Italian and Byzantine Jewries had already enjoyed a long, if
chequered, history and had produced liturgical poets, talmudic scholars
and chroniclers of their own, probably as a result of their close relationship
with the Holy Land. For its part, the Franco-German centre was set to
carry forward these Jewish cultural traditions but was still in its infancy.
The limited scholarly knowledge that we do have of that community that
later became known as Ashkenaz suggests a lower degree of literary
productivity than its counterpart under Islam in the geonic period under
discussion.”° On the basis of later developments, however, we may assume
that the influences of the oriental Jewish communities were already making
themselves felt at that time and that foundations were being laid for similar
cultural expansion when the communities of Christian countries also
became more organized and comfortable. As is amply demonstrated in
other contributions to this volume, there were internal developments in the
early mediaeval Christian communities of the northern Mediterranean and
western Europe that led to an expansion of literacy.2’ Whatever the
political, religious, administrative or legal considerations that motivated
that expansion, their relevance to the wider community appears to have
been limited and they seem to constitute neither a necessary nor a related
effect as far as the later history of European Jewish literacy is concerned.
The precedents for that appear to have been established chronologically,
geographically and culturally elsewhere. This is not to say that the
influences of the western Christian world on Jewish religious culture were
negligible. It is simply to stress that the trend towards a wider and more

6 Baron, History of the Jews, III, pp. 3-74, IV, pp. 3-88; B. Blumenkranz, Fuifs et Chrétiens
dans le Monde Occidental (Paris, 1960), and his reprinted essays in Fuifs et Chrétiens
Patnstique et Moyen Age (London, 1977); Roth, World History; A. Grossman, “The Jews
in Byzantium and medieval Europe’, in The Jewish World, ed. E. Kedourie (London,
1979), pp. 168-77; A. Sharf, Byzantine Jewry from Justiman to the Fourth Crusade
(London, 1971); and nn. 1-2 above.
27 This is particularly well exemplified, for the purposes of comparison, in the chapters in this
volume by Collins, Kelly, Keynes, Mitchell and Nelson.
 ASPECTS OF MEDIAEVAL JEWISH LITERACY 145
intensive degree of Jewish literacy had originated at an earlier period,
further south and east.
It 1s now necessary to pause in the presentation of elements in Jewish
literary history and to assess their significance for any definition of Jewish
mediaeval literacy. If, for the moment, such literacy is equated with the
composition of literature, the spread of the written tradition among a
substantial proportion of the population, and the part played by authorita-
tive texts in shaping the lives and ideals of the community, it must be
acknowledged that Jewish literacy, which had already existed at a fairly high
level in earlier centuries, made substantial, further progress during the
geonic period. Standard texts of the leading religious works were edited,
rational methods of textual exegesis were initiated and written guidance was
provided for both ritual and theology. In order to justify the claim that such
developments affected a substantial proportion of the Jewish population
rather than an elitist minority, some reminder is required of the literary
nature of the Jewish religious tradition as it related to that population.
The text of the Pentateuch stood at the centre of the tradition and
confronted the ordinary Jew in synagogue, home and school. It was not the
rabbi who functioned as the intermediary between the people and its God
but sacred scripture and the exegesis that was regarded as an integral part of
it. If a liturgy, gua religious communion, existed in rabbinic Judaism, it
was experienced through the learning process, so that education developed
an almost cultic function. It was not a specially ordained priest who
performed a symbolic ceremony to demonstrate the allegiance of the
faithful but any Jew educated enough in the sources to be called vabbz, ‘my
teacher’, and to lead his co-religionists through the intricacies of the
traditions, the knowledge and practice of which demonstrated their com-
mitment to religious continuity. Hebrew was a sine qua non of Jewish life
and even the rare Jew who had for some reason remained illiterate was
malgré lui caught up in its appearance, recitation and sound.”
What is equally important, and what seems to have received little
recognition from those engaged in research on the period, is that it was a
change in the medium of transmission that led to these achievements. The
contents of scrolls were copied on to codices, where they attracted bountiful
glossing, and oral traditions were committed to manuscript and thereby
acquired a new degree of authority. The centralization and organization of
the Jewish community under Islam made possible the wide distribution of

28 For details of how the mediaeval Jewish community operated as a whole, see I. Abrahams,
Jewish Life in the Middle Ages, ed. Cecil Roth (London, 1932); T. and M. Metzger, Jewish
Life in the Middle Ages (New York, 1982).
146 Stefan C. Reif
such texts and their acceptance as authoritative. It ensured that, when the
caliphate disintegrated and smaller independent Jewish communities
emerged, they already had a corpus of written sources to which they looked
for instruction and inspiration. Established Jewish familiarity with the
religious function and authoritative nature of the written word helped to
overcome any reticence about the novelty of such a medium in some
traditionally oral disciplines. What is more, the fact that leading scholars
chose to summarize the religious traditions in such published forms seems
to indicate a conviction on their part that there existed a large enough body
of literate Jews to make the whole exercise effective and influential.”? This
point will shortly receive further attention.
Turning to the evidence of Hebrew codicology, one finds an almost total
absence of Hebrew manuscripts between the second and the ninth centuries
and it is unlikely that this is to be attributed to historical accident. More
convincing would be the theory that the dominant tendency during these
centuries was the oral one and that it was only with the expansion of the use
of the codex, for the reasons just described, that the trend was reversed.
Texts other than Hebrew Bible scrolls then began to make a wide
appearance. Although the number of complete Hebrew codices that have
survived from the ninth and tenth centuries is still only in single figures and
their content predominantly biblical, the evidence of the Cairo Genizah,
shortly to be discussed, leaves little room for doubt that many of the
fragments from that source originally belonged to codices of various types of
literature dating from those centuries or even a little earlier and emanating
from the oriental communities to which reference has already been made.
Until Hebrew palaeographical research makes further progress it can only
be surmised that the Hebrew codex made its appearance in the early geonic
period, perhaps in the eighth century when there are traces of Islamic
influence, and within three centuries became the standard medium for
textual transmission. While the eighth-century post-talmudic tractate of
Palestinian provenance, Massekheth Soferim, was, with the exception of
one problematic reference,” primarily concerned with the writing of a
biblical scroll, the position totally changed within two or three centuries by
which time there were already standard practices for Jewish scribes copying
all kinds of literature on to codices. With similar developments taking place
among the Muslims, the Jews were gradually replacing papyrus with vellum

? The emergence of the Hebrew codex is touched upon by D. Diringer, The Hand-Produced
Book (London, 1953), pp. 321-35, and by R. Posner and I. Ta-Shema, The Hebrew Book:
An Histoncal Survey (Jerusalem, 1975), pp. 33-62.

30 Massekheth Soferim, ed. M. Higger (1st edn, New York, 1937; 2nd edn, Jerusalem, 1970),
.6, p. 125.
 ASPECTS OF MEDIAEVAL JEWISH LITERACY 147
as the primary material for the transcription of texts and would soon begin
to adopt paper. Quires were composed, catchwords included, sections
numerated, lines justified, folios pricked and ruled, and the mastara
(ruling-board) was employed to facilitate the planning of the lines. Pride
was taken in producing particularly beautiful codices of the Hebrew Bible.*!
The different Jewish communities followed their own customs in these
scribal practices but the codex was unique in offering versatility, ease of
reference and substantial capacity.” It was therefore widely adopted for the
circulation of the literature created and expanded in the previous few
centuries. It has indeed recently been demonstrated by Ben-Sasson that in
the Jewish communities of North Africa in the ninth and tenth centuries
texts were being widely copied and circulated and extensive libraries, both
private and public, and covering various languages, were being amassed
and sold. Such libraries included not only the classical Jewish sources but
also the newest commentaries on the one hand and more general learning on
the other. By creating and disseminating the contents of these libraries, the
Maghreb: Jews of means introduced a wide variety of literary works to other
communities and thereby exercised a powerful influence on the levels of
Jewish cultural achievement.”
While literacy may justifiably be understood to refer to an acquaintance
with literature, it may also convey, and indeed more often today conveys,
the sense of linguistic knowledge, that is, the ability to read and write a
language or more than one language. If we are to understand the Jewish
situation in this connection during the period under discussion, it will be
necessary to liberate ourselves from an exclusive concern with the history of
literature and to attempt a consideration of the more mundane aspects of
Jewish life more than a thousand years ago.
As in earlier generations, trilingualism was a feature of Jewish society,
Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic being used ina variety of contexts by different
people for sundry reasons, with each of these languages exercising an
influence on the others. While Hebrew obviously continued to be the

5! M. Beit-Arié, Hebrew Codicology (1st edn, Paris, 1977; 2nd edn, Jerusalem, 1981); C.
Sirat, Ecnture et civilisations (Paris, 1976), and idem, Les Papyrus écrits en lettres
hébraiques trouvés en Egypte (Paris, 1981); M. Beit-Arié and C. Sirat, Manuscnits
medtévaux en caractéres hébraiques, 2 vols. (Paris, 1972-9).
** The significant advantages of the codex are outlined by C.H. Roberts and T.C. Skeat, The
Birth of the Codex (London, 1983), pp. 45-61.
33M. Ben-Sasson, ‘Maghreb libraries in the Genizah’, a paper delivered at the third
international congress of the Society for Judaeo-Arabic Studies held in Cambridge in July,
1987, and shortly to be published in the proceedings of that congress scheduled to appear in
the publications of the Faculty of Oriental Studies at the University of Cambridge handled
by Cambridge University Press, or, if not yet ready, in a later publication.
148 Stefan C. Reif
language of the biblical lectionaries, was adopted for masoretic notes on the
biblical text (see p. 139 above), and was retained as the language of
midrashim, of the statutory prayers (in a predominantly mishnaic form)
and of liturgical poetry, it was Arabic that was chosen for biblical commen-
tary and translation. This Arabic, usually written in Hebrew characters and
preserving more vernacular forms than classical Muslim Arabic, and
currently entitled Judaeo-Arabic, was also the language chosen for the
earliest philological studies, philosophy, theology, science and more
ephemeral documents of a social, political and economic nature. The
language that had once been a vernacular in Roman Judaea, Aramaic, was
restricted to a more scholarly role, being used for the Talmud and for
commentaries on it and codes extracted from it. It was also employed for the
targumim (the Aramaic biblical renderings that had once served to inform
and edify Aramaic-speaking Jews but had since developed a literary life of
their own) and for some parts of the liturgy. Arch-linguistic conservatives
that they were, the Arabic-speaking Jews of the early middle ages did not
elect for one language or another but composed trilingual versions in which
the Hebrew, the Aramaic and the Judaeo-Arabic appeared side-by-side on
each verse.**
But the situation was never quite so clear-cut. Mundane letters were also
written in Hebrew,* poems were composed in Aramaic,*© rubrics for the
Hebrew prayers were couched in Judaeo-Arabic’’ and Hebrew vowel-
points were attached to Judaeo-Arabic texts.*? Sometimes the same work
was composed in both Hebrew and Judaeo-Arabic.*? The Karaites, in fact,

34 Cambridge University Library, MSS T-S B1.1—-25; the articles on Hebrew and Judaeo-
Arabic by J. Blau, and on Aramaic by J.C. Greenfield, in Jewish Languages, ed. Paper, pp.
1-13, 121-31 and 29-43; and W. Chomsky, Hebrew: The Eternal Language (Philadelphia,
1964), pp. 93-183.
> Examples may be found in J. Mann, Texts and Studies in Jewish History and Literature, |
(Cincinatti, 1931), and zdem, The Jews in Egypt and in Palestine under the Fatimid
Caliphs, ed. S.D. Goitein (original edn, 2 vols., Oxford, 1920, 1922; repr. New York,
1970), and throughout the publications of S.D. Goitein, listed in the bibliography compiled
by R. Attal, A Bibhography of the Wntings of S.D. Goitein (Jerusalem, 1975 and 1987).
36 M. Sokoloff and J. Yahalom, ‘Aramaic Piyyutim from the Byzantine period’, Jewish
Quarterly Review 75 (1985), 309-21.
37 J. Mann, ‘Genizah fragments of the Palestinian order of service’, Hebrew Union College
Annual 2 (1925), 269-338, reprinted in Contributions to the Scientific Study of the Jewish
Liturgy, ed. J.J. Petuchowski (New York, 1970), pp. 379-448.
38 J. Blau and S.A. Hopkins, ‘A vocalized Judaeo-Arabic letter from the Cairo Genizah’,
Jerusalem Studies tn Arabic and Islam 6 (1985), 417-76.
3%? R. Drory has dealt with this topic in a book shortly to be published by Tel-Aviv University
entitled The Emergence of Jewtsh-Arabic Literary Contacts at the Beginning of the Tenth
Century. She also has a paper entitled ‘Words beautifully put - Hebrew v. Judaeo-Arabic in
tenth century Jewish literature’, scheduled for publication in the proceedings referred to in
n. 33 above.
 ASPECTS OF MEDIAEVAL JEWISH LITERACY 149
took to writing Hebrew texts in Arabic script with Hebrew vowel-points*®
and also composed a highly Arabicized Hebrew that would appear to have
been comprehensible to nobody but themselves.*’ Some generations of
Karaites preferred Arabic while others reverted to Hebrew.” This variety
in the choice of the language written in particular contexts demonstrates
that there was more at stake than the simple matter of comprehensibility.
The choice may have amounted to a polemical statement, a way of
demonstrating one’s adherence to a particular tradition or one’s departure
from it.
One possible reason for the complicated language distribution just
described may be sought in the tendency to treat new literature as deserving
only of the vernacular while venerating older literature by continuing to use
the ancient tongues in which it had long been transmitted. Another may
have to do with the level of education available to those making most use of a
particular genre. Alternatively, Drory may be justified in postulating the
existence of a distinction in the Jewish mind of the period between the
literary, aesthetic and solemn significance of Hebrew and the communicat-
ive value of Arabic as a widespread vernacular.*? Whatever the reasons, this
trilingual circumstance was a major factor in the blossoming of philological
study among the Jews. Familiar as they were with the forms occurring in
three Semitic languages, they were able to construct theories about the
general form of these languages and how they related to one another and to
use the characteristics of one to explain the anomalies of another.
It was not without good reason that the Arabs referred to the Jews as ah/
al-kitab, ‘the people of the book’. The literary output and the linguistic
competence just described pre-supposes an almost obsessive concern with
the written word. While, as has been pointed out, that concern had its
origins in the biblical period, it had to a large extent been transferred to the
area of oral transmission in talmudic and immediately post-talmudic times
insofar as the rabbinic traditions were concerned. Only with the passion of
the rabbinic authorities to establish their whole ideology and practice as
central and definitive did it return to its original form, or even to an
extension of that form. Anxious as they also were to refute the accusation
made by such theological opponents as the Karaites that their oral traditions

© G. Khan, ‘The Medieval Karaite transcriptions of Hebrew into Arabic script’, [srael
Onental Studies (forthcoming).
*! §.A. Hopkins, ‘Arabic elements in the Hebrew of the Byzantine Karaites’, a paper
scheduled for publication in the proceedings referred to in n. 33 above.
*2 Z. Ankori, Karaites in Byzantium (New York and Jerusalem, 1959), pp. 189-93, and
Khan, ‘Karaite transcriptions’.
*? Drory, The Emergence of Jewish-Arabic Literary Contacts, and idem, ‘Words beautifully
put’.
150 Stefan C. Ref
were a travesty of the original, sacred scripture, prone to error and
alterations, the Rabbanites embraced the written medium once again and
utilized it to publicize an ever-expanding variety of works that adopted the
latest ideas to defend and promote their own theological position. The more
catholic outlook that lay behind the complaint of the ninth-century head of
the Sura academy, Natronai ben Hilai, that other disciplines were being
neglected in order to concentrate on Talmud was fast becoming the norm by
the end of the geonic period.”
This regeneration of wider interests, as in the golden age of Spanish
Jewry, combined with an enthusiastic adoption of the codex to produce a
wealth of new, scholarly texts. The question that remains to be answered is
to what extent 1t may be assumed that the wider availability of such texts was
paralleled by a broadly based knowledge of them on the part of what may be
referred to as the Jewish masses.
While in respect of most cultures of the early mediaeval period there are
few sources that may fairly be described as reflecting the reality of everyday
existence, Jewish scholarship has for about a century been in the happy
position of having the documentary evidence of the Cairo Genizah to call
upon. These 200,000 fragments, almost three-quarters of which are in the
possession of Cambridge University Library were, out of pious fear of
destroying anything that might be considered sacred, amassed by the
Jewish community of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo in its genizah
(synagogal depository) from at least as early as the eleventh century and
shed light on every aspect of Jewish life in the Mediterranean area from the
ninth until the nineteenth centuries. Unscrupulous synagogue officials
began to sell items to visitors and dealers about a hundred years ago and
some fragments thus made their way to various academic institutions in
Europe and America. It was Solomon Schechter, who was lecturer, and
later reader, in talmudic literature at the University of Cambridge from
1890 until 1902, who persuaded the Chief Rabbi of Cairo to grant him
permission to remove the bulk of the collection to Cambridge in 1897 and it
was he who began the systematic and scientific exploitation of its contents.
In the first decades of research the interest of scholars was primarily in the
fragments’ importance for the study of Jewish literary, religious and
communal history but more recent work, especially that of Goitein and his
students over the last quarter of a century, has concentrated on the unique
information they contain about legal, commercial, social, political, scien-
tific, educational and personal matters.*

* Baron, History of the Jews, V1, pp. 236, 313 and 441.
*% EF XVI cols. 1333-42; S.D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, I (Berkeley and Los
Angeles, 1967), pp. 1-28, and zdem, Religion in a Religious Age (Cambridge, Mass., 1974),
 ASPECTS OF MEDIAEVAL JEWISH LITERACY © 151
What the evidence from the Cairo Genizah convincingly demonstrates is
that written material of a great variety of content existed in the Jewish
community in and around Cairo from the tenth to the twelfth centuries. If
some 200,000 manuscript fragments, yielding a total of about three times
that number of discrete leaves, the majority of them dating from those
centuries, have survived the ravages of time and the elements, one may with
a fair degree of confidence assume that the original hoard deposited in the
synagogue genizah was greatly in excess of that number and itself represen-
ted only a proportion of what was actually produced in the communities in
and around Cairo. Also to be taken into account in assessing the evidence is
the fact that Cairo was not renowned for being the most scholarly or literate
of the Jewish societies of the period. Indeed, much of this material
emanated from circles that were not primarily concerned with scholarship,
religion or science. Its particular value lies in the fact that it represents what
has been referred to as ‘counter-history’ rather than the views of the
leadership, and as such it provides ample testimony to the whole gamut of
education from elementary to advanced and from children’s alphabetical
exercises to adults’ guest lectures. What is more, while explicit dates are not
usually given, hundreds of the fragments may pre-date the tenth century,
therefore bearing direct witness to the heart of the geonic age, while the
customs reflected in the collection as a whole appear to be relevant to a wider
geographical area than Cairo and its environs.*° It will therefore be of value
in the present context to summarize the research to date so that some sense
of the wider literacy of that age in that area may be obtained and it may be
convincingly demonstrated that the dissemination of texts was likely to have
a major impact on large sections of the Jewish people.
Since it was degrading for a Jew to be unable to participate fully in those
aspects of the synagogal service that involved simple recitation of Hebrew
and a mark of some distinction to be knowledgeable enough to undertake
the rarer and more difficult readings, the basic aim of elementary education

pp. 3-17, 139-51; S.C. Reif, A Guide to the Taylor—-Schechter Genizah Collection (1st edn,
Cambridge, 1973; 2nd edn, 1979); zdem, ‘Genizah collections at Cambridge University
Library’ (Hebrew) in Te ‘uda, I, ed. M. Friedman (Tel-Aviv, 1980), pp. 201-6; dem, “The
Taylor—Schechter Genizah Research Unit’, in Newsletter 19 of the World Union of Jewish
Studies (August, 1981), 17*-21*; zdem, ‘1898 preserved in letter and spirit’, The Cam-
bridge Review 103, no. 2266 (29 January, 1982), 120-1; idem (with G. Khan) ‘Genizah
material at Cambridge University Library’, E¥ Year Book 1983/85 (Jerusalem, 1985), pp.
170-1; and zdem, Published Material from the Cambridge Genizah Collections: A Biblio-
graphy 1896-1980 (Cambridge, 1988), introduction.
*© S$.D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 5 vols. (Berkeley, Los Angeles. and London, 1967—
88), II, p. 173; Beit-Arié, Hebrew Codicology, pp. 9-19; and S.A. Hopkins, “The oldest
dated document in the Geniza?’, in Studies in Fudaism and Islam Presented to S.D.
Goitein, ed. S. Morag, I. Ben-Ami and N.A. Stillman (Jerusalem, 1981), pp. 83-98.
152 Stefan C. Reif
was to set him on the road toward these achievements. Most of the male
community achieved at least the simplest level of reading and writing
Hebrew while the fewer more educated members became familiar with
more difficult, biblical and rabbinic texts. Literacy in Hebrew also provided
the opportunity to write Judaeo-Arabic, that is, to record their own
vernacular in a script more familiar to them than Arabic. Not that Arabic
itself was ruled out. Some Jews were taught the required calligraphy and
such a competence could qualify them for those administrative, religious,
medical and commercial professions for which it was required. If one may
include numeracy under the general heading of literacy, references are also
found to arithmetic although less frequently than to Hebrew and Arabic.
Classes in those subjects took place in the synagogue, communal study-
centre or in the teacher’s home and were conducted by a professional
teacher whose fees were paid either by parents or by the community if the
parents lacked the means or the children were orphans. Reinforcement of
these lessons, or education in wider religious practice, was the task of the
father in the synagogue and of either or both parents in the domestic setting.
Being largely phonetic, Hebrew could be taught analytically letter by letter,
although there is evidence of a pedagogical innovator who preferred the
global method. Scrap paper was used for practice and, copies of books being
an expensive item, one text was often used for the whole class and pupils
therefore had to acquire the ability to read the text from whatever angle at
which they might be seated in relation to the script. Alphabet primers were
among the few items of Hebrew literature that attracted illumination and
individual wooden boards were in use. Naturally, the learning situation was
not always ideal‘and there are cases of fathers expressing concern about
corporal punishment and teachers demonstrating frustration at absence,
lateness and unruly behaviour. For example, a scribbled note from a rather
cross teacher informs the father of little Abu el-Hassan that his son had at
first been most conscientious but that one of the class, egged on by the
others, had soon put a stop to this by breaking the newcomer’s writing
board. Similarly, two little boys who came late to school brought a note
explaining that the elder had been delayed by studying Arabic at home and
the younger, who could not make his own way, had had to wait for his
brother. The teacher 1s politely asked to refrain from spanking either for the
tardiness of their arrival. Teachers did enjoy a respected position in the
community and parents made efforts to maintain good relations with them,
presumably to the advantage of their children’s education.*’

*” Goitein, Mediterranean Society, U1, pp. 173-83, 185-90; idem, ‘Side lights on Jewish
education from the Cairo Geniza’, Gratz College Anniversary Volume, ed. 1.D. Passow and
S.T. Lachs (Philadelphia, 1971), pp. 83-110.
 ASPECTS OF MEDIAEVAL JEWISH LITERACY 153
Girls did not automatically receive such an education but occasionally
there were parents who made such arrangements for them, usually for
biblical studies, and some succeeded so well that they became professional
teachers themselves, while others developed skills as calligraphers. In one
sad little manuscript a father bewails the loss of just such a daughter,
mournfully remembering her intellect, her knowledge of the Torah and her
piety, and poignantly recalling the lessons he used to give her. The fact that
there are a number of letters in which wives are directly addressed by their
husbands, as against others in which a male colleague is requested to pass on
written information by word of mouth to the writer’s spouse, appears to
demonstrate that women were not universally illiterate. One such letter,
written by Isaac ben Barukh from a small town in the Egyptian countryside
to his wife in Cairo, and probably dating from the eleventh century, is
typical of so many Genizah letters in the insights it provides and therefore
deserves to be quoted extensively (in my own translation):
My greetings abound: may God’s help soon be found, by the Jews all around. To my
worthy and modest wife. I am aware of your admirable behaviour and there is no
need for me to dwell on this here. In contrast to your own happy position, I am
thoroughly miserable and miss you all, particularly the eyes of my beloved young
son whom I adore and cherish. In tears and anguish, I look for consolation at every
corner, day and night, but I expect none, other than from God. I know that there is
no need for me to lay down the law but do please think of your religious duties and
conduct yourself in a way that brings you honour. Take every care of our dear,
beloved child and spare no effort on his behalf. This will be a sure sign of your love.
Do not worry at all about me. If only I could catch a swift cloud I would return in
record time. But with God’s help I shall finish my business and come home quickly
with a pocket that is less than full but with a happy heart.

Since there are also letters and documents from female hands 1t is clear that
some women were acquainted not only with reading but also with writing,
but it should be acknowledged that even these occurrences are in the legal,
communal and personal spheres rather than in the literary. One mother was
so anxious that her daughter should receive a sound education that she made
a death-bed request in a letter written in her own hand to her sister,
requesting that the latter should take on the responsibility for ensuring this,
although she was aware that this would strain the family resources. At once
moving and instructive, the text 1s worthy of citation, at least in part (in
Goitein’s translation):
This is to inform you, my lady, dear sister — may God accept me as a ransom for you
— that I have become seriously ill with little hope of recovery, and I have dreams
indicating that my end is near. My lady, my most urgent request of you, if God, the
exalted, indeed decrees my death, is that you take care of my little daughter and
make efforts to give her an education, although I know well that I am asking you for
something unreasonable, as there is not enough money — by my father — for support,
154 Stefan C. Reif
let alone for formal instruction. However, she has a model in our saintly mother . . .
my lady, only God knows how I wrote these lines!**

Those boys who advanced to higher scholarly levels developed a more

educated hand and the range of styles recorded among the Genizah texts
begins at the primitive and advances to the most expert. Some young men
spent many years at talmudic centres of learning both at home and abroad,
maintained by communal and individual subscriptions, and adults who
were engaged in making a living nevertheless devoted time, sometimes
daily, to studying the traditional sources, biblical and rabbinic, with
friends, or attending courses given by local scholars or lectures delivered by
specially invited authorities. The learning process often took place at night,
or during the night, and Maimonides makes a point of stressing how
important it is to use the dark hours profitably in this way. Communities
ensured that there was accommodation available for such devoted study,
usually on the synagogal premises. Book-lists are a common feature of the
Genizah discoveries and demonstrate the existence of reference literature
for such educational activities. Bibles, prayer books, talmudic texts and
commentaries, Jewish legal and theological tracts, as well as scientific and
philosophical works, are among the items that are regularly listed. Cairo
was better known among the communities of the Jewish world for its
economic activity than for its academic prowess and yet even there such
evidence of literacy abounds. Scholarly notes, invitations to lectures, details
of refresher courses — all point to an intense degree of educational activity
while the remainder of the evidence confirms that it was not an elitist or an
exclusivist preoccupation.” |
By the eleventh century, then, literacy for the Jews of the communities
living under Islam constituted a fairly complex and sophisticated level of
education for a broad section of the community in a variety of Jewish and
non-Jewish subjects. By this time, too, their Jewish brethren in Christian
Europe were following their lead and had established a sound base for a later
flowering of Hebrew and Jewish letters in that centre that was to have
important cultural consequences for the modern western world. The
paradox is that while these centres to the north flourished, so their
counterparts to the south began to decline and a process got underway that
was to stand the geography of Jewish educational achievement on its head.

*8 Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York, MSS ENA 2935.17 and Misc. 6*;
Cambridge University Library, MS T-5S 13J20.9; Goitein, Mediterranean Society, U1, pp.
183-5, III, pp. 220-1, 235; and Mann, Jews in Egypt, 11, pp. 307-8.
Goitein, Mediterranean Society, 11, pp. 191-211; Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Talmud
Torah 3.13, ed. M. Hyamson, The Book of Knowledge (Jerusalem, 1965), 60a; J. Mann,
‘Listes de livres provenant de la Gueniza’, Revue des Etudes Juives 72 (1921), 163-83, and
idem, Texts and Studies, pp. 643-84.
 ASPECTS OF MEDIAEVAL JEWISH LITERACY 155
To refer to that process is, however, to anticipate and to move beyond the
parameters of the subject here defined.”

°° My friend, Professor Raphael Loewe, has kindly let me see an English version of a paper on
Jewish attitudes to Hebrew (‘Jews, language and Judaism: master and servant’) that
appeared in Hebrew in ‘Am va-Sefer NS, no. 4 (1987), 10-52, edited by Chaim Rabin in
Jerusalem, and is relevant to various issues raised in this essay. I am indebted to the editor of
this volume, to my fellow contributors, to my colleagues Dr G. Khan and Dr R. Brody, and
to my dear friend Professor E. Fleischer of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, for their
helpful suggestions, and to my wife, Shulie, as always, for assistance with the final
arrangement of the material.
 7

el
Writing 1n early mediaeval Byzantium

Margaret Mullett

On 18 (or 12) July 836 the brothers Theodore and Theophanes, forever
afterwards to be described as the Graptoi (the inscribed), were interrogated
by the Iconoclast emperor Theophilos. -
But when the saints remained silent, returned no answer, and bent their heads
towards the ground, the Emperor said to his Prefect, “T'ake away these impious men
and tattoo their foreheads, inscribing these iambics, and hand them over to two of
the sons of Hagar, that they may conduct them to their own country.’ Near the
Emperor there stood a man named Christodoulou who had composed the iambics
and who had them at hand. The Emperor commanded him to read them aloud in the
hearing of all and he added, ‘Even if they are badly composed, never mind.’ He said
this, knowing how excellently they themselves practised accuracy in poetical
composition, and how much they would be ridiculed by the champions of Christ.
One of those present, wishing to please the Emperor, said, ‘But they are not worthy,
O Lord, of better iambics.”!
This passage epitomizes a view of Byzantine literacy widely current among
both Byzantinists and western mediaevalists, of the supreme power of the
written word, and of the ability of the Byzantines to appreciate it. Here, at
least, the classical tradition was not dead, where simple monks could be
shamed by the quality of versification of their tormentors, composed by a
layman-about-court. Whatever the vicissitudes of literacy in the states
which succeeded the Roman Empire in the west, Byzantium offers a clear
foil of continuity in literary production and education, and of widespread
lay, even female, literacy.’
This view has a certain amount to recommend it. There were women
hitterati at most periods of Byzantine history,’ though there may well have

' Life of Michael the Synkellos, ed. and trans. M.B. Cunningham, BBTT 1 (Belfast, 1991), p.
84. For the date, see commentary, n. 162.
2 R. Browning, ‘Literacy in the Byzantine world’, BMGS 4 (1978), 39-54, voices traditional
assumptions; for a more sceptical view, see E. Patlagean, ‘Discours écrit, discours parlé;
niveaux de culture 4 Byzance au VIIIe -XIe siécle’, Annales ESC 34 (1979), 264-78.
3 To take the most famous examples: the empress Athenais-Eudokia under Theodosios II; the
nun Kasia under Theophilos; Anna Komnene under John II and Manuel I Komnenos;
156
 WRITING IN EARLY MEDIAEVAL BYZANTIUM 157
been fewer than in societies whose literacy practices are frequently com-
pared with Byzantium.’ And lay literacy, the concern of so many of the
papers in this present volume, was never a problem in Byzantium, although
clerical literacy (or lack of it) was.” (There was a strong strain in the
monastic tradition which regarded books — even liturgical books — as luxury
objects rather than repositories of the Word, and which scorned book-
learning as not even the ‘outer wisdom’ of more mainline thought.)° Nor is
there any problem about aristocratic literacy. Emperors composed literary
works, hymns, orations, histories, and though they may not actually have
set pen to paper there is no reason to believe that this is because they were
unable to.’ Their aristocracy, as in so many other matters, followed suit.°
As for the rest of the population, it has been suggested that at least more
were literate than in the west. The evidence of a declining number of
inscriptions is set against the increase in use of personal lead seals at roughly
the same time, and prolific signatures on documents of land tenure point the
same way.”
But this view has for some time been under attack. A group of papers
given at a Dumbarton Oaks symposium in 1971 agree in questioning the
assumptions of the traditional viewpoint.'° The elitist nature of book-
ownership was pointed out, with elaborate compilations balancing the cost
Eirene-Eulogia Choumnaina Palaiologina under Andronikos III. See the remarks of J.
Herrin, ‘In search of Byzantine women: three avenues of approach’, in Women in Antiquity,
ed. A. Cameron and A. Kuhrt (London, 1983), pp. 167-93; on female patronage in the
twelfth century see various studies by E. Jeffreys including “The Sebastokratorissa Eirene as
literary patroness: the monk Iakovos’, JOB 32/3 (1982), 63-71; for a cautionary view and a
discussion of one woman’s reading, see M.E. Mullett, “The “disgrace” of the ex-Basilissa
Maria’, BS 45 (1984), 202-11.
* Classical Chinese is suggested by W.J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the
Word (London and New York, 1982), p. 114. In fact female literacy seems less striking in
Byzantium than in the mediaeval west, see A. Wey! Carr, Byzantine Illumination 1150-
1250: The Study of a Provincial Tradition (Chicago, 1987), p. 205, on women’s ex libs; P.
Wormald, “The uses of literacy in Anglo-Saxon England and its neighbours’, TRHS 5th
series 27 (1977), 95-114, at 98, on male and female literacy.
> Note the need for Alexios Komnenos’ edict on the reform of the clergy, ed. P. Gautier,
‘L’Edit d’Alexis Jer sur la réforme du clergé’, REB 31 (1973), 165~201.
© See, for example, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, Bessarion, 12, trans. B. Ward, SLG
(London, 1975), p. 42.
’ Leo VI, Constantine Porphyrogennetos, Manuel II are perhaps the most distinguished,
Justin I and Basil I the least; for a discussion of Justinian’s level of literacy, see A.M.
Honoré, ‘Some Constitutions composed by Justinian’, 7RS 65 (1975), 107—23, especially
122.

® See The Byzantine Anstocracy IX-XIII Centuries, ed. M.J. Angold, BAR, International
Series 221 (Oxford, 1983), p. 8, and in many other papers in the volume.
” On all these indicators, see Browning, ‘Literacy in the Byzantine world’.
'° Byzantine Books and Bookmen: A Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium (Washington DC, 1975).
158 Margaret Mullett
of books against what we know of civil service salaries. The cost of
parchment alone, it was suggested, was enough to make literacy prohibitive
to the average Byzantine.'' Manuscript studies emphasize the scarcity of
manuscripts and their apparent lack of use; studies of literary works’
emphasize the elite nature of even so-called ‘popular’ literature’ and in the
wake of this symposium linguists suggest that even though Byzantium had
no learned language accessible only to a literate class, the difference
between rhetorical Greek and the vernacular may have been almost as wide
as between Latin and the vernaculars in the west.'* A figure of 200 at any
one time receiving a rhetorical education has received enormous currency
and has been widely quoted.'? Work on levels of style, much heralded at the
beginning as helping to define the audience of Byzantine literature, came up
against difficulties which suggested that Byzantine lutterat1 may not have
directed their writings to a specific level of audience, but may have written
in the highest style open to them while they aimed at reading in the lowest
style available.'° The Byzantine reading public vanished overnight.
There are various ways of casting doubt on the validity of this attack. For
one thing book-ownership in mediaeval societies is a poor indicator of
literacy;'’ for another, papyrus (cheaper than parchment) may have con-
tinued to be used even in tenth-century Anatolia;'® work on levels of style is
at present crude in the extreme;’’ analyses of Byzantine literary society are
of little use in determining if there was widespread functional literacy in the

'! N.G. Wilson, ‘Books and readers in Byzantium’, in zbid., pp. 1-16.
'2 J. Irigoin, ‘Centres de copie et bibliothéques’, in ibid., pp. 17-28; C. Mango, ‘The
availability of books in the Byzantine Empire, AD 750-850’, in zbid., pp. 29-45. 8
'3 H.G. Beck, ‘Der Leserkreis der byzantinischen “Volksliteratur” im Licht der handschr#f-
tlichen Uberlieferung’, in zb1d., pp. 47-67.
'+ M.J. and E.M. Jeffreys, ‘The literary emergence of vernacular Greek’, Mosaic 8/4 (1975),
171-93.
'S P. Lemerle, Le Premier Humanisme byzantin (Paris, 1971), pp. 155-7. |
'© H. Hunger, ‘Stilstufen in der byzantinischen Geschichtsschreibung des 12 Jahrhunderts:
Anna Komnene und Michael Glykas’, Byzantine Studies — Etudes Byzantines 5 (1978),
139~70; I. Sevéenko, ‘Levels of style in Byzantine literature’, XVI International Byzantine
Congress (Vienna, 1981), pp. 289-312.
'7 On book-sharing in the mediaeval west see M. Parkes, ‘The literacy of the laity’, in
Literature and Western Civilization: The Medieval World, ed. D. Daiches and A.K.
Thorlby (London, 1973), pp. 555-77, at pp. 556-7 and 571-2; M. Clanchy, From Memory
to Written Record: England 1066-1307 (London, 1979), p. 198; B. Stock, The Implications
of Literacy: Wntten Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth
Centuries (Princeton, 1983), passim and p. 522.
'8 See Arethas, ep. 40, ed. L.G. Westerink, Arethae Scripta Minora, I (Leipzig, 1968), p.
297.
19 For example the dictionary approach in Sevéenko, ‘Levels of style’, p. 291.
 WRITING IN EARLY MEDIAEVAL BYZANTIUM — 159
sense of ‘acquiring the essential knowledge and skill to engage in all those
activities in which literacy 1s required for effective functioning in the group
and community’.“° Indeed, the further the literary language is deemed to be
from everyday speech the more likely it is that functional literacy operated
on a different linguistic (and certainly stylistic) register .*!
Another line of attack influential in recent years has been to emphasize
orality in Byzantine society. Early attempts to apply the theories of Parry
and Lord to some Byzantine literature were unsuccessful,” but more
nuanced viewpoints have been far more persuasive. Work on the role of the
vernacular and its emergence 1n the twelfth century as a literary option has
made scholars more conscious of the differences between spoken and
written speech ;*’ distinctions between oral composition, transmission and
performance”* have opened up a considerable interest in the performance
aspect of Byzantine literature. The place of rhetoric in Byzantine literature
has ceased to be an example of a classical straitjacket® and become an
indicator of orality: the prevalence of funeral orations, speeches to the
emperor, rhetorical descriptions (ekphraseis), occasional speeches of all
kinds and sermons has' taken on new significance recently.”°
It has become normal to ask questions unthinkable fifteen years ago, and
about very different texts. Evidence for performance is sought for works
like the satire Timarion and Theodore Prodromos’ Life of Meletios;
ceremonial settings are sought for Paul the Silentiary’s Ekphrasis of Agia
Sophia and some of Romanos’ hymns.*” The most uncompromisingly

20 This is a definition made in a statement by UNESCO in 1962, see B.V. Street, Literacy in
Theory and Practice, Cambridge Studies in Oral and Literate Culture 9 (Cambridge,
1984), p. 183.
21 See R. Browning, ‘The language of Byzantine literature’, Byzantina kai Metabyzantina, |:
The Past in Medieval and Modern Greek Culture, ed. S. Vryonis Jr (Malibu, 1978), pp.
103-33.
2 M.J. and E.M. Jeffreys, ‘Formulas in the Chronicle of the Morea’, DOP 23 (1973), 163-95.
3 R. Beaton, ‘“De vulgari eloquentia” in twelfth-century Byzantium’, ed. J. Howard-
Johnston, Byzantium and the West c. 850-c. 1200 (Amsterdam, 1988), pp. 261-8.
24 See the discussion in R. Beaton, Folk Poetry of Modern Greece (Cambridge, 1980), pp.
179-92.
25 R.J.H. Jenkins, ‘The Hellenistic origins of Byzantine literature’, DOP 17 (1963), 37-52, at
52: ‘the paralysing grip of Hellenistic rhetoric, a strait-jacket which held its prisoner in a
state of mental retardation’.
6 For example in the exaugural lecture of M. Alexiou, Birmingham, 1985.
27 S. Whiston, ‘A reading of the Hades episode in the Timarion’, MA dissertation, University
of Birmingham, 1987, pp. 13-14; P. Armstrong, “The lives of St Meletios by Theodore
Prodromos and Nikolaos of Methone, introduction, translation and commentary’, MA
dissertation, University of Belfast, 1988, section III; M. Whitby, “The occasion of Paul the
Silentiary’s Ekphrasis of S. Sophia’, CQ 35 (1985), 215-28; R. Macrides and P. Magdalino,
 160 Margaret Mullett
literary works, it is now accepted, were written for performance in the
theatra of Constantinople.” This viewpoint has been greatly facilitated by
the work of social anthropologists and psychologists (as well as oral
historians and the students of folk poetry); using this theoretical perspec-
tive it begins to look as if Byzantinists should identify as exceptional those
texts which were not written for performance.”? There are problems,
though, on leaning too heavily on this body of theory. For one thing it in its
turn leans heavily on theories of orality discredited among specialist
scholars in specialist fields;*° for another the attempt to privilege the oral
only emphasizes the ‘Great Divide’ which characterized literacy studies in
anthropology until recently.*' It may still in some quarters be necessary to
emphasize the orality of Byzantine society and literature, but much the
most interesting work in literacy studies is at present being done in the area
of mixed modes in residually oral societies, and it is surely possible to view
Byzantium in this light.
A third line of attack on the monolithic view of high Byzantine literacy is
to open the diachronic perspective and point out that the Byzantine
experience was not static. The early eighth century is a favourite point at
which to evoke Byzantium in contrast to the west: unfortunately for those
who do so we now have dated to precisely this period the curious text called
the Parastaseis Syntomat Chrontkat which reveals that a group of people in
Constantinople, purporting to be scholars, had no access even to Pro-
copius, an important text of only two centuries previously.*? This is one

‘The architecture of Ekphrasis: construction and context of Paul the Silentiary’s Ekphrasis
of Hagia Sophia’, BMGS 12 (1988), 47-82; M.E. Mullett, ‘Romanos’s Kontakia on the XL
martyrs; date and setting’, The XL Martyrs of Sebasteia, BBTT 2 (Belfast, forthcoming).
78H. Hunger, Reich der Neuen Mitte (Graz, Vienna and Cologne, 1965), p. 341; M.E.
Mullett, ‘Aristocracy and patronage in the literary circles of Comnenian Constantinople’, in
The Byzantine Anstocracy, ed. Angold, pp. 173-201.
”? Ong, Orality and Literacy, pp. 157-9; for guidance in the theoretical literature, see H.G.
Graff, Literacy in History: An Interdisciplinary Research Bibliography (London and New
York, 1981).
59 Recent work on Homer, for example, has tended to view the work by Milman Parry and
Albert Lord on oral composition as useful but not all-explanatory, see G. Kirk, The Ihad, a
Commentary (Cambridge, 1985), p. 12; B.C. Fenik, Homer, Tradition and Invention
(Leiden, 1978), p. 90; J. Griffin, Homer on Life and Death (Oxford, 1980), pp. xui—xiv.
The theoretical literature, on the other hand, depends heavily on the Parry—Lord approach.
3! R. Finnegan, ‘Literacy versus non-literacy: the great divide’, Modes of Thought: Essays on
Thinking in Western and Non-Western Societies, ed. R. Finnegan and R. Horton (London,
1973), pp. 112-44 offers analysis of the problem and an early attempt to avoid the trap.
32 J. Goody, The Interface between the Wntten and the Oral (Cambridge, 1987); Street,
Literacy, especially pp. 95-7.
°° Parastaseis Syntomoi Chronikai, trans. A. Cameron and J. Herrin in conjunction with A.
Cameron, R. Cormack and C. Roueché, Constantinople in the Early Eighth Century
(Leiden, 1984), p. 46. On the reading of the author of the Parastaseis, see pp. 38-45.

H
 WRITING IN EARLY MEDIAEVAL BYZANTIUM © 161
reason why Byzantinists, unlike historians of the west, cling to the term
‘Dark Ages’ to describe the period from the 630s to the 790s, when literary
activity appears to have been at a minimum and when profound changes
transformed the eastern Empire. City culture came to an end; not only the
old aristocracy but also the classical name system died out; education
changed radically in purpose and after that became harder to get. These
among other factors suggest that not just the high culture of the capital may
have suffered but that province-wide disruption of practical literacy may
have occurred.**
Clearly there is room for much discussion about the depth of darkness of
the Dark Ages and the nature of the recovery from it: what was, for
example, the implication of the change from uncial to minuscule — an
attempt to recirculate lost works or a sizeable rise in demand which needed
supply?” But it is clear that, if there is no question in Byzantium of a ‘revival
of literacy’ in the eleventh and twelfth centuries,*© there is a real sense in
which literacy cannot be taken for granted over the whole span of its
existence.
And, given the likelihood of the seventh and eighth centuries as a
watershed or period of reduced literacy, an understanding of the ninth and
tenth centuries becomes crucial. Byzantium in the ninth and tenth cen-
turies, the ‘Imperial Centuries’, has been seen as being at its height.*” A
military recovery followed the scholarly recovery*® and the Empire held a
special place, maintaining diplomatic links with the west, the Arab world
and the Steppes. It has been seen as a time of increasing wealth, confidence
and security and conspicuous artistic activity.°’ It was a time when the

** C. Renfrew, ‘Systems collapse as social transformation: catastrophe and anastrophe in early

state societies’, in Transformations: Mathematical Approches to Culture Change, ed. C.
Renfrew and K.L. Cooke (New York and London, 1979), pp. 481-508, offers an
alternative viewpoint; J.F. Haldon, ‘Some remarks on the background to the iconoclast
controversy’, BS 38 (1977), 161-84, and zdem, ‘Some considerations on Byzantine society
and economy in the seventh century’, Byzantinische Forschungen 10 (1985), 75-112, offers
the best survey of the Byzantine evidence.
> Mango, ‘Availability of books’, p. 45.
%© There was, though, a revival of rhetoric in the eleventh century which leaned on rhetorical
commentaries of the tenth century and facilitated the boldly original literary experiments of
the twelfth century. See G.L. Kustas, Studies in Byzantine Rhetonc, Analecta Blatadon 17
(Thessalonika, 1973), pp. 21-6.
7 R, Jenkins, Byzantium: The Imperial Centuries (London, 1966), or idem, ‘The age of
conquest’, in P. Whitting, Byzantium: An Introduction (2nd edn, London, 1981), pp.
61-82.
38 W. Treadgold, ‘The revival of Byzantine learning and the revival of the Byzantine state’,
AHR 84 (1979), 1245-66.
%° R. Cormack, ‘Patronage and new programs of Byzantine iconography’, XVII International
Byzantine Congress (Washington DC, 1986), pp. 609-38, at p. 609.
162 Margaret Mullett
Empire functioned most efficiently, an Empire which has been described as
‘an archetypical bureaucratic state’.*° Certainly it needed literacy: to
facilitate communications between the capital and its decentralized local
government (theme) system, and between the capital and the field offices of
its centralized tax machine; to carry out the mass of diplomatic activity; and
to record the intricacies of a society obsessed with order (t&&tc).*! Is it
possible to determine these and other uses of literacy from the sources
which have survived? Only to a limited extent, for the quantity of documen-
tary (as against literary) sources which has survived is disappointingly
small, and very selective. A tenth-century treatise on tax-collection may be
put together with an eleventh-century cadaster and a group of charters
which run throughout the period, but the paucity is remarkable for a
bureaucratic state. The runnings of the central administration must be
deduced from four seating plans for imperial banquets; we have law-codes
from the period, but no case-law until the eleventh century with the Pezra
(‘Rulings’). As for literary sources, histories rewrite previous reigns and
maintain imperial authority; rhetoric eases the great occasions of everyday
life; and records of imperial ceremonial lay down the greater occasions of
less everyday life.*
Certainly there is enough evidence to argue that literate modes were
normal in Byzantium.* If inscribed tombstones are not common for the
period, personal lead seals are;** charters are preserved with rich arrays of
peasant signatures; wills are beginning to surface;* monasteries have
*© A. Epstein, ‘Art and hegemony in Byzantium, 9th to 12th century’, XXVI International
Congress of the History of Art (Washington DC, 1986), abstracts, p. 9.
*! On Byzantine administration in the period, see J.B. Bury, Jmperial Administration in the
Ninth Century (London, 1911); N. Oikonomides, Les Listes de préséance byzantines des
[Xe et Xe stécles (Paris, 1972); H. Ahrweiler, ‘Recherches sur |’administration de l’empire
byzantin au [Xe -XIe siécles’, BCH 184 (1960), 1-111.
*? On the lack of surviving documentary evidence, see R. Morris, ‘Dispute settlement in the
Byzantine provinces in the tenth century’, in Settlement of Disputes, pp. 125-7. Note,
though, the neat detachment of widespread literacy from documentation in Kievan Russia
in S. Franklin, ‘Literacy and documentation in mediaeval Russia’, Speculum 60 (1985),
1-38.
3 At least in the terms of Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, pp. 2-4.
# 1S. Allen and I. Sevéenko, The Dumbarton Oaks Bibliographies Based on Byzantinische
Zeitschrift, 2nd series, 1: Epigraphy (Dumbarton Oaks, 1985), offers the best survey at
present of the epigraphic evidence; N. Oikonomides, Byzantine Lead Seals (Dumbarton
Oaks, 1985), points to the seventh century (boullotenia in general use, p. 3) and the eighth
century (use of seals increased, p. 21) as crucial periods.
*§ Actes d’Iviron, ed. J. Lefort, N. Oikonomides and D. Papachryssanthou, I (Paris, 1985),
pp. 117-29.
*© The will of Eustathios Boilas, ed. P. Lemerle, Cing études sur le Xle siécle byzantin (Paris,
1977), pp. 15-63, is not only the most famous but also an early example.
 WRITING IN EARLY MEDIAEVAL BYZANTIUM — 163
foundation charters;*’ letter-bearers on major routes must have been a
familiar sight. Even more familiar, and far less welcome, must have been
the activities and presence of the officers of the fisc, equipped with their
instructions, their cadaster, or notes therefor; one such officer is simply
called the avayoaqgeuc, the writer-up. Captions and books abound in
wall-paintings; litugical books were necessary even if small villages could
not boast the riches of early Byzantine Syria.** It would not have been easy
for any Byzantine peasant to be unaware of the possibilities of writing.
Given the state of surviving evidence, however, it would be difficult to go
further than this. Our sample of bureaucratic documents is insufficient to
draw the kinds of conclusions open to Clanchy; still less can we discriminate
between different kinds of literacies, ritual and functional,*? or detect the
personal literacy skills of an individual.°” It seems unlikely that villages
would escape evidence either of ritual or of functional literacy in terms of
the church and the fisc, or that there was not a wide range of competence
from the professional scholar or scribe downwards.°’ But it is hard to
imagine our evidence yielding much more — except perhaps in the area of the
Athos acts.”

*”7 See K.A. Manaphes, Monasteriaka Typika-Diathekai (Athens, 1970), and the forth-
coming Dumbarton Oaks Typikon Project. There are ninth- and tenth-century examples,
but they increase noticeably after the mid-eleventh century.
*8 M. Mundell, ‘Patrons and scribes indicated in Syriac manuscripts 411-800 AD’, JOB 32
(1982), 3-12.
See J. Goody, ‘Restricted literacy in Northern Ghana’, in Literacy in Traditional Societies,
ed. J. Goody (Cambridge, 1968), pp. 199-264; idem, The Interface, pp. 137-9, on
‘restricted literacy’; Street, Literacy, pp. 130-1 and section 2 passim on distinctions in
Persia between ‘maktab’, ‘commercial!’ and ‘debestan’ literacies; Clanchy, From Memory to
Written Record, pp. 258-60, for ‘practical literacy’.
°°? J. Goody with M. Cole and S. Scribner, ‘Writing and formal operation: a case study among
the Vai’, in Goody, The Interface, pp. 191-208, is an analysis of one man’s writing. An
Approach to Functional Literacy (Adult Literacy Resource Agency, 1981), pp. 24-8, givesa
series of literacy skills (‘find the main ideas in the text’; ‘recording and communicating for
others’, etc.) which could be modified for use in mediaeval societies.
*! On professionalism among Byzantine writers see P. Magdalino, ‘Byzantine snobbery’, The
Byzantine Anstocracy, ed. Angold, pp. 58-78, at pp. 67-8, and A.P. Kazhdan and A.W.
Epstein, Change in Byzantine Culture in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centunes, The
Transformation of the Classical Heritage 7 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1985), p. 131
(exaggerated views), and on the working conditions of Byzantine scribes, see Wilson,
‘Books and readers’, pp. 9-11, and of illuminators, for example, R. Nelson, “Theoktistos
and associates in twelfth-century Constantinople: an illustrated New Testament of AD
1133’, ¥. Paul Getty Museum Journal 15 (1987), 53-76. On the role of the scribe in
organizing specific commissions, see Carr, Byzantine Illumination 1150-1250, p. 144; on
taboullarioi, see Morris, ‘Dispute settlement’, pp. 140-1.
°2 See now N. Oikonomides, ‘Mount Athos: levels of literacy’, DOP 42 (1988), 167-78.
164 Margaret Mullett :
What may perhaps be managed is to look further at the special character-
istics of the period and see what may be perceived in the area of literate
mentalities. The first is summed up in the term ‘Macedonian Renaissance”
or in the equally ambitious ‘First Byzantine Humanism’.** Was the recovery
after the Dark Ages of such magnitude as to justify such terms? The
implications of classical learning in both terms may perhaps be disposed of
first; although classical texts were again available, read by Photios and
bought by Arethas and taught in the nebulous schools reestablished after
the mid-ninth century, it is not in this area that the tenth century excelled,
and in any case it is a crude and misleading indicator, only too familiar to
students of the mediaeval west.” |
Even when we abandon classical yardsticks the literary achievement of
the tenth century does not impress: epistolography, which we shall examine
below in greater detail, is perhaps its acme. Historiography was centrally
orchestrated, hagiography less than innovative, rhetorical genres practised
in moderation. Occasional poems have been preserved. Nor does the
achievement in scholarship outstrip the period’s creativity.°° Wilson, for all
his enthusiasm for Photios’ reading opportunities, makes it clear that none
of the activities of the learned men of the day approximates to our idea of
scholarship’’ any more than those of the ‘scholars’ of the Parastaseis who
looked at ancient statues and discussed their possession by evil spirits. And

°3 The ‘Macedonian Renaissance’ was invented by K. Weitzmann, see, for example, “The :
character and intellectual origins of the Macedonian Renaissance’, in K. Weitzmann,
Studies in Classical and Byzantine Manuscript Illumination, ed. H.L. Kessler (Chicago
and London, 1970), pp. 176-223, queried by C. Mango, “The date of Cod. Vat. Regin.gr. 1
and the “Macedonian Renaissance”’, in Acta ad archaeologiam et historam artium
pertinentia, Institutum Romanum Norvegiae 4 (Rome, 1969), pp. 121-6, and relegated toa
postscript in Cormack, ‘Patronage’. W. Treadgold, ‘The Macedonian Renaissance’, in
Renaissances before the Renaissance: Cultural Revivals of Late Antiquity and the Middle
Ages, ed. W. Treadgold (Stanford, 1984), pp. 75-98, is incisive on the question of
definitions, clear on the (lack of) original achievement of the period and positive in
defending Byzantine literary society against twentieth-century critics.
°* Lemerle, Premier humanisme.
5 M.E. Mullett and R. Scott, Byzantium and the Classical Tradition (Birmingham, 1981),
seek to free the study of Byzantine civilization from the inappropriate imposition of classical
norms.
© On the literary achievement of the period, see A.P. Kazhdan (with G. Constable),
Byzantine People and Power: An Introduction to Modern Byzantine Studies (Washington
DC, 1982), pp. 113, 135; realistically, Treadgold, ‘Macedonian Renaissance’, p. 94: ‘it
seems as if literary research was in fashion and original composition was not’; ‘the
Macedonian renaissance was much more a revival of knowledge than a revival of literature’.
°7 N.G. Wilson, Scholars of Byzantium (London, 1983), for example, p. 135 on Arethas and
ch. 7, pp. 136-47, though Photios is signalled as ‘the most important figure in the history of
classical studies in Byzantium’, because ‘he must be presumed to have read more ancient
literature than anyone has been able to since his day’ (p. 89).
 WRITING IN EARLY MEDIAEVAL BYZANTIUM _ 165
for once these off-the-cuff value judgements may not be impossibly unfair
to their subjects.
Where the period clearly did excel was in organization. It is the period par
excellence of encyclopaedism.*® Every possible class of material was col-
lected, copied, sorted, preserved. Earlier emperors had codified law to
make it more manageable and accessible;>? emperors, churchmen and
scholars in the ninth and tenth centuries processed their reading,” saints’
lives,°' literary terms and works,” recipes and agricultural lore,® liturgical
information, ceremonies,” diplomatic and ethnographic information,
tactics,°’ propaganda.® Rather than a renaissance or a flowering of human-
ism, it looks, as it was, like a society which had come close to losing its
collective literacy and was building a bulwark against its ever happening
again.®”
So if we are trying to characterize the levels and uses of literacy in tenth-
century Byzantium, it is hard to make a great case for achievement at the top
of the ladder. There was a group of rhetorically educated people who were
capable of writing in the highest-style Attic Greek and who among them-
selves amused each other with works of wordy brilliance. But they chose to
put their abilities to a purpose unusual in the Empire, impressive in scale,
but hardly of a sophistication worthy of the term ‘Renaissance’. Of the
composition of that group much has been written,’”” but I think that it is

°8 Lemerle, Premier humanisme, pp. 267-300.

59 See N. Svoronos, Recherches sur la tradition juridique a Byzance: la Synopsis major des
Basthiques et ses Appendices, Bibliothéque byzantine, Etudes 4 (Paris, 1964); Morris,
‘Dispute settlement’, pp. 126-9.
°° For example, Photios, Bibliotheca, ed. R. Henry, 8 vols. (Paris, 1959-77).
°! For example, Symeon Metaphrastes, PG, 114-16.
62 Suidae Lexicon, ed. A. Adler, 4 vols. (Leipzig, 1928-38).
63 Geoponica, Geoponica sive Cassiani Bassi scholastici de re rustica eclogae, ed. H. Beckh
(Leipzig, 1895).
4 For example, the Typikon of the Great Church, ed. J. Mateos, OCA 165-6 (Rome, 1962-3).
® De cerimoniis, ed. I.1. Reiske, CSHB, 2 vols. (Bonn, 1829-30).
6 De administrando imperio, ed. G. Moravesik and R.J.H. Jenkins, DOT 1=CFHB 1
(Washington DC, 1967).
°’ Poliorcétique, Enée le Tacticien, ed. A. Dain and A.M. Bon (Paris, 1967).
6 Genesios, Basileiat, ed. K. Lachmann, CSHB (Bonn, 1834); Theophanes Continuatus,
Chronographia, ed. 1. Bekker, CSHB (Bonn, 1838).

211-12. ;
©? Compare the remarks of H. Hunger, “The past in literature’, XVII International Byzantine
Congress, p. 519. On lists as ‘elementary forms’ of literacy, see Goody, The Interface, pp.

7° On the social composition of the literary elite in the period, see H.G. Beck, Das literarische
166 Margaret Mullett
worth noting that in particular nothing excluded in Byzantium the military
man from participation in literary and scholarly life.’ And to characterize
the lowest levels of literacy is if anything harder. To show the place of
writing in everyday disputes in two different provinces of the Empire is
possible, but it is not possible to be clear about the individual levels of
literacy of the disputants. On issues like the provision (or lack of it) of
education on a wide scale in the provinces, ’* and the existence (or not) of
mass functional literacy, the greatest caution is advisable.
But there is one other characteristic of the period which suggests a
particular approach to the problem of literacy. This is that Byzantium was
not only emerging from the Dark Ages at this time; it was also emerging
from 150 years of Iconoclasm. The contribution of Iconoclasm to the
revival of learning has been much discussed, and it has been shown that the
impetus to produce texts as backing for arguments led to the early rush to
copy texts at the end of the eighth century.”* But by the mid-ninth century
the place of art in society and the relationship of art to words had been
exhaustively discussed, and in any study of the ninth and tenth centuries it
is difficult to ignore the place of the visual.’* Religious art had been
validated finally by texts and textual argument, and much literature of the
ninth and tenth centuries is concerned with art, with inauguration
sermons,’ with epigrams designed to complement, adorn or mark a
building or work of art;’° with ekphraseis .”

Schaffen der Byzantiner (Vienna, 1976), pp. 11-15; Kazhdan, People and Power, pp. 101-
3; compare the remarks of Mullett, ‘Literary circles’, pp. 18-20.
” For example, Nikephoros Ouranos and many correspondents of letter-writers, compare
Kekaumenos, n. 54, ed. B. Wassilewsky (Vasily Grigor’evich Valisevsky) and V. Jernstedt,
Cecaumeni Strategicon et incerti scriptons De officius regis libellus [Consilia et narrationes |
(St Petersburg, 1896), p. 19, and Cormack on the assumption that military emperors
‘resented spending money on the arts’: ‘Patronage’, n. 17.
” A. Moffatt, ‘Schooling in the Iconoclast centuries’, Iconoclasm, ed. A.A.M. Bryer and J.
Herrin (Birmingham, 1977), pp. 85-92.
3 Lemerle, Cing études, pp. 105-7; Mango, ‘Availability of books’, p. 45; Treadgold, ‘The
revival of Byzantine learning’.
Cormack, ‘Patronage’, p. 627. See now the excellent L. Brubaker, ‘Byzantine art in the
ninth century: theory, practice and culture’, BMGS 13 (1989), 23-94.
’’ For example, the homilies X and XVII of Photios, ed. S. Aristarches (Constantinople,
1900), trans. C. Mango, The Homilies of Photios, Patriarch of Constantinopole, English
Translation, Introduction and Commentary DOS 3 (Washington DC, 1958), pp. 184-90;
286-96.
© See, for example, P. Magdalino, “The Bath of Leo the Wise’, in Mazstor, Studies for Robert
Browning, ed. Ann Moffatt, Byzantina Australiensia 5 (Sydney, 1984), pp. 225—40, and the
forthcoming PhD thesis of Valerie Nunn.
7” See, for example, A.W. Epstein, ‘The rebuilding and redecoration of the Holy Apostles in
Constantinople: a reconsideration’, GRBS 23 (1982), 79-92.
 WRITING IN EARLY MEDIAEVAL BYZANTIUM _ 167
From first principles it might appear that art did not play a great part in
Byzantine society: the status of the artist appears to be well below that of the
writer. Works are not signed until well after our period; Constantine
Porphyrogennetos is the exception to the rule that emperors may write but
not paint; it is arguable that the patronage of works of literature and of
works of (visual) art is different in kind as well as degree.’ Mango in a
classic article designed to show that the Byzantines were unappreciative of
their classical heritage demonstrated also their apparent insensitivity to the
visual ;’”” descriptions of works of art make readers doubt that their authors
had seen the work in question.”
Yet when Byzantines compare pictures and words, unlike their col-
leagues in the west,®! it is usually to the detriment of writing. Three
examples are famous. Theodore of Stoudios contrasts the Gospels (writing
in words) with icons (writing in gold); the Patriarch Nikephoros
emphasizes the vividness of deeds in pictures, and in Homily XVII
Patriarch Photios clearly privileges pictures over words — they will teach
better, have a greater effect, aid the memory, stimulate emulation of the
martyrs. It is a pity that these judgements cannot be taken at face value, for
all three churchmen had a vested interest in pictures. It 1s particularly
disappointing in the case of Photios, for here we have an unrivalled
opportunity to compare a Byzantine’s reception of both known works of
literature and known works of art. But given a sensitive understanding of
the differences of genre between the Bibliotheca and his inauguration
sermons it might be possible to understand why his literary criticism 1s
largely evaluative, while his treatment of art clearly commits the affective
fallacy. But Photios’ example also shows the assimilation of both writing
and pictures in an age when forms of the verb yoaqw were used for both.”
So instead of searching for statements by contemporaries on the relation
between art and literature we should concentrate on finding a way to view
the interface. Three models have been tried in recent years; many more will

78 Cash on the nail seems to be the exception rather than the rule in the production of
Byzantine literature; on the hard commercial facts of Byzantine art in the period, see
Cormack, ‘Patronage’. Much work remains to be done.
” C. Mango, ‘Antique statuary and the Byzantine beholder’, DOP 17 (1963), 53-75.
8° H. Maguire, ‘Truth and convention in Byzantine descriptions of works of art’, DOP 28
(1974), 111-40. Some consolation may be found in Ong, Orality and Literacy, p. 127.
8! See McKitterick, below pp. 297-301.
82 Photios on literature: G.L. Kustas, ‘The literary criticism of Photius’, Ellenika 16 (1988—
9), 132-69. Photios on art: R. Cormack, Writing in Gold: Byzantine Soctety and tts Icons
(London, 1985), pp. 142-58, and many of the contributors to the Birmingham symposium
on the Byzantine Eye.
83 For instance the word LOTOELOYEAGHOS, is ambiguous.
 168 Margaret Mullett
no doubt emerge. One sees a ‘great divide’ between art and literature.
Writing reaches the literate; art reaches the parts writing cannot and 1s ‘a
vehicle of consolidation and control of a largely oral but centralised and
bureaucratic state’.8* This view assumes a contradiction which is more
apparent than real; to say that Byzantium was a residually oral society 1s not
to deny the enabling function of literacy in its bureaucratic workings. And it
also assumes that art is more transparent, more legible than words, an
equally questionable assumption.® And it politicizes art in a way which
reduces it to the function of propaganda, simplifying relations between
centre and periphery.*°
A second model assumes that writing and pictures say more or less the
same thing, so that pictures seek to express words and the modern scholar
can use words to explain pictures. This model is behind many manuscript
studies which relate the words on a page with its illustrations,®’ and, more
subtly, in recent attempts to persuade early Byzantine rhetoric to explain
iconographic or stylistic peculiarities in middle Byzantine art. Here orality
_ has a place also: the topoi of early Byzantine literature read by bishops
educated in the schools of Constantinople were relayed in Sunday sermons
to the faithful who included the painters who decorated the churches
viewed by the faithful.*? It also enables other scholars to deduce a public or a
patron from a work of art,® a practice currently under just attack.”” Much
work is still necessary here to test the usefulness of the model: some help
might be gained by studying the epigrams apparently commissioned at the
same time as minor works of art to accompany them.
A final model assumes that pictures will not duplicate texts, and that we
must look for functions that only pictures can perform. Art, it is suggested,
does not only embellish and instruct; it offers a channel to the other world;

84 Epstein, ‘Art and hegemony’, p. 9.

8° Compare M. Camille, ‘Seeing and reading: some visual implications of medieval literacy
and illiteracy’, Art History 8 (1985), 26-49.
5° Epstein, ‘Art and hegemony’, p. 9, and in a series of articles on Byzantine political art, for
example, “The political content of the paintings of Agia Sophia at Ochrid’, JOB 29 (1980),
315-29.
8’ For example, S. Der Nersessian, ‘The illustrations of the Homilies of Gregory of
Nazianzus, Paris gr. 510; a study of the connections between text and image’, DOP 16
(1962), 195-228.
88 H. Maguire, Art and Eloquence in Byzantium (Princeton, 1981), especially pp. 109-11.
®° For example, A. Cutler, ‘The mythological bowl in the treasury of San Marco in Venice’,
Near Eastern Numismatics, Iconography, Epigraphy and History: Studies in Honour of
George C. Miles, ed. D.K. Kouymjian (American University of Beirut, 1974), pp. 235-54;
L. Brubaker, ‘Politics, patronage and art in ninth century Byzantium: the Homilies of
Gregory of Nazianzus in Paris BN Gr 510’, DOP 39 (1985), 1-13.
9° Cormack, ‘Patronage’.
 WRITING IN EARLY MEDIAEVAL BYZANTIUM — 169
it is simultaneously a witness of the powers of the supernatural; it acts
subliminally to predispose the viewer to accept the order of the universe; it
confers authority on a dubious text; it involves the emotions; and, above all,
it is able to say the unsayable.”’ This model has many attractions, though it
may not be universally applicable: it assumes, for example, that text and
image are equally available to the same audience, and it may have to make
room for the use of text in images. But it avoids the easy answers of allowing
texts to ‘explain’ images: theoretical and methodological problems of
interpreting pictures must be faced.
Thus research has so far focussed on the reflection of pictures in writing,
or on the particular importance of pictures. The representation of writing in
pictures has not so far been studied to any great extent, except from the
point of view of orality.”* Looking at religious representation it is easy to see
why. Artists appear to have been impressed by the opportunities of
representing the technical equipment of the scribe in evangelist portraits;
books appear open or closed in certain stereotyped situations; liturgical
books are often represented as rolls.”? Texts cited in particular programmes
are recognized as being of particular importance, but they are usually more
indicative of their context than of general problems of literacy. It 1s worth
trying to look outside these possibilities and one obvious example offers
itself .°*
The Madrid manuscript of the Synopsis [storion of John Skylitzes, one of
the few pointers to the illustrated chronicle in Byzantine art, tells 1ts story in
three ways: in the text, in 574 narrative illustrations (one or two to the page
and occupying its full width) and in red captions which identify major
actors and events in the scenes.” Two major difficulties warn against its

7! Cormack, Writing in Gold, p. 47: a channel to the other world; p. 94: a witness to the power
of the supernatural; p. 153: the viewer and the order of the universe; p. 175: authority
conferred on a dubious text; p. 150: the emotions involved; p. 242: saying the unsayable.
% For example, the paper given by Robert Nelson to the XXI Spring Symposium of
Byzantine Studies: The Byzantine Eye, Word and Perception, Birmingham, 1987.
°3 Apart from evangelists, hymnographers are also shown in the act of composition and
prophets carry their utterances. Bishops are equipped with codices in the early period and
rolls in the middle. Moses receives the tablets of the law; the census is taken for Caesar
Augustus in the days of Herod the King and the Book has a central place in the Last Days. A
book is a constant companion of Christ in iconography, for example, as Pantokrator.
J.C. Estopafian, Skylitzes Matritensis, 1: Reproducciones y miniaturas (Barcelona and
Madrid, 1965); A. Grabar and M. Manoussacas, L’/llustration du manuscnit de Skylitzes
de la bibliothéque nationale de Madrid, Bibliothéque de l’institut hellénique d’études
byzantines et postbyzantines de Venise 10 (Venice, 1979). In what follows I give first the
folio number, then the serial number in Estopajian, then the reference to an illustration in
Grabar and Manoussacas (abbreviated as GM hereafter) if there is one.
95 On the manuscript tradition, see J. Thurn, Joannis Scylitzae Synopsis Histonarum editio
princeps, CFHB 5 (Berlin and New York, 1973), pp. xx—xlvi; a Belfast project aims to
tackle the problems of narrative in text, illustrations and captions.
170 Margaret Mullett
indiscriminate use as an indicator of Byzantine attitudes and mentalities (or
indeed of anything more concrete): first its production in twelfth-century
Sicily raises the problem of milieu. It may not be a very Byzantine artefact,
and it is certainly a twelfth-century representation of an eleventh-century
narrative of ninth- and tenth-century events. Second, its very rarity value
raises the problem of models; the artists may have been drawing on the
specific conventions of secular illumination which has nowhere else
survived. So we are looking at ninth- and tenth-century events viewed both
from an earlier and a later perspective, a kind of fictionalized account, which
needs to be checked 1n various ways from the inside. Even with these
provisos, and moving with the maximum caution, I believe it can still offer
us valuable insights.”°
In the Madrid Skylitzes, literacy bulks large, shown in nearly forty of the
574 illustrations, twice the number of illustrations which concern them-
selves with moveable works of art, though fewer than the illustrations which
show the spoken word. In only one case is the issue of literacy explicit: in the
sad story of Patriarch Tryphon (928-31). Skylitzes tells us how the
metropolitan of Caesarea, ‘Theophanes Choirinos, in accord with Romanos
Lekapenos’ wishes, duped the patriarch into putting his name to his own
resignation. On the pretext of accusations that the patriarch was illiterate
(&yocpuatoc), Theophanes persuaded Tryphon to call a synod and then
to prove his literacy by signing his name and titles (effectively a blank
cheque) to which were added the words of resignation.”” The Madrid
manuscript shows the story in four pictures: the original interview between
Theophanes and Tryphon,” Tryphon calling the synod,” and then a pair
of scenes on the same folio showing Tryphon confronting the synod,
signing his name (actually at the top of the sheet)! and the denouement: at
the left Tryphon 1s being bundled out of the patriarchal palace while the
emperor sits facing the synod while Tryphon’s resignation is read aloud to
him.'°’ Writing and listening are visually opposed; the irony is in the orality

© On the milieu see N.G. Wilson, ‘The Madrid Scylitzes’, Scrittura e civilta 2 (1978), 209-
19; on using the illustrations, C. Walter, “Raising on a shield in Byzantine iconography’,
REB 33 (1975), 133-75; tdem, ‘Saints of second iconoclasm in the Madrid Scylitzes’, REB
39 (1981), 307-18; and most recently in C. Walter, Art and Ritual in the Byzantine Church,
Birmingham Byzantine Series 1 (London, 1982), pp. 41-5.
7 Skylitzes, ed. Thurn, pp. 226-7; on the letter ‘of resignation’ (=~Grumel 786) and the
relative veracity of the accounts in Skylitzes and in Theophanes Continuatus, see V.
Grumel, Les Régestes des actes du patriarcat de Constantinople, 1: Les Actes des
patriarches, I1: Les Régestes de 715 a 1043 (Chalcedon, 1936), I, p. 222.
% Fol, 128ra=E316=GM309, fig. 151.
® Fol. 128rb=E317=GM310, fig. 152.
'® Fol. 128va=E318=GM311, fig. 153, pl. XXVI.
'*! Fol. 128vb=E319=GM312, fig. 154.
 WRITING IN EARLY MEDIAEVAL BYZANTIUM | 171
represented. Both these last scenes take place in public: reading and writing
was an issue at the heart of tenth-century politics. For Tryphon, at least, a
little literacy was a dangerous thing.
Elsewhere books are taken for granted, both in codex and roll form:
codices on the knees of the emperor Theophilos interrogating the Grapto1
(writing as a weapon);’™ rolls as part of the professional equipment of the
bishop.'”’ Books are also part of the equipment of the schools started by
Constantine VII (teaching ratio of twelve pupils to six books to three
teachers: favourable) ,'** and symbols of Christianity in the process of the
conversion of Rus; placed in a bonfire, Christian books are burnt but not
consumed.!°° Other documents (chrysobulls, pittakia)!"° appear also, and
documents are used to convey concepts like conversion, '”’ appointment, '®
administration'”’ and diplomacy.'’° Various literate practices are represen-
ted: bishops sign decrees promulgated by Nikephoros Phokas and a
secretary offers them to him (an indication of their subservience to him) ;!"!
the plot of Basil against Leo VI is detected by secretaries hidden behind a
bed taking down a conversation verbatim (surely a clear case of silent
writing!)'!* and then reading the transcript back to the emperor.'!? Reading
is both public and private, oral and visual. The deposition of the empress
Zoé is marked by the reading of a declaration of the emperor publicly in the
Forum of Constantine by the Prefect of the City;''* Leo V has read aloud in
front of the empress (who has asked for the pardon of Michael of Amorion)
the oracle predicting that Leo would be killed by someone called Michael ;'°
on the occasion of the conspiracy of Leo Phokas the epz tou kanikleiou reads
an imperial chrysobull to his soldiers.''® Private reading is shown in two
cases, both exceptional: in one case Leo the Philosopher is shown worrtedly

'% Fol. 51=E127=GM121, fig. 50. The Graptoi do the talking.

'3 Fol, 2irb=E41=GM35.
104 Fol. 134=E336=GM329, fig. 164.
95 Fol. 103vb=E242=GM235, fig. 114.
1 Fol. 125v=E306=GM299; fol. 56v=E141=GM fig. 60; fol. 157vb=E415=GM fig. 204.
07 Fol, 103va=E241=GM234, fig. 113.
08 Fol, 2irb=E41=GMB5.
' Fol. 154r=E404=GM397.
0 Fol. 210r=E517=GM5S510, fig. 245; fol. 96r=E224=GM217, fig. 97.
Ml Fol, 154=E404=GM397.
2 Fol. 110ra=E259=GM252, fig. 127. On silent writing, see Clanchy, From Memory to
Wnitten Record, p. 218; Ong, Orality and Literacy, p. 26.
"3 Fol. 110rb=E260=GM253, fig. 128. "Fol, 219va=E542=GM535.
15 Fol, 24va=E50=GM44. © Fol. 125v=E306=GM299.
172 Margaret Mullett
poring in secret over the letter from the Caliph Mamoun, technically the
enemy;'!’ in another John Tzimiskes and Romanos Kourkouas receive
offers of promotion if they join a revolt; exceptionally their letters are shown
open and folded, underlining the secrecy and complicity of the context.'”8
A remarkably high proportion (over half) of the representations of
literacy involve letters, perhaps not so remarkably, if it is true that while ‘not
in itself a spontaneous development of writing, [letter-writing] comes near
to being a universal feature’.''? In twenty cases, sometimes where explicitly
called for in the text, sometimes to spell out a phrase like eyoape mQd¢ TOV
Baovréa!”? or méumer wtv moecoPevtic, eFattiv .. .'2' letter-exchange
is represented. But the way in which it is spelt out is not by representing the
moment of composition, either writing or dictating, or the moment of
reading, either aurally or visually, but the process of letter-exchange,
epitomized in the transaction of delivery, the primary reception of the text.
The bearer, the komistes, hands over a scroll to the recipient. In some
cases'4 the whole process is shown, from (from right to left) the handing
over of the letter to the bearer by the sender, through the carrying of the
letter, to the delivery of the letter to the recipient. In three cases! the swift
horses of the bearer are shown; in two cases’*‘ the recipient waits patiently
for his aide de camp to receive the letter and either hand it to him or read it
aloud. The same formula is used for the translation to Constantinople after
George Maniakes’ capture of Edessa of the letter of Christ to Abgar,
differentiated from other letter-deliveries only by the reverently covered
hands of the komistes.'** In all, the emphasis is on ceremony, on the
transaction, on the public nature of letter-exchange, on the social and
political importance of communication.
Tenth-century Byzantine letters which have survived’ are rarely of this
political importance, though some are more political than others. We have,
for example, the vital correspondence between Nicholas Mystikos and

NT Fol. 75=E191=GM184, fig. 75.

8 Fol. 144ra=E370=GM363.
19 Goody, The Interface, p. 231.
'20 For example, fol. 109ra=E256=GM249, fig. 124.
'21 For example, fol. 226rb=E560=GM553.
'22 For example, fol. 75v=E191=GM185, fig. 76.
123 Fol, 19va=E35=GM29; fol. 19vb=E36=GM fig. 30; fol. 230rb=E569=GM362 fig. 270.
24 Fol, 230rb=E569=GM563, fig. 270; fol. 78a=E197=GM191.
125 Fol. 205rb=E508=GMS501.
128 See the list in M.E. Mullett, ‘Theophylact through his letters: the two worlds of an exile
bishop’, University of Birmingham PhD thesis, 1981, fig. I, pp. 798-800.
 WRITING IN EARLY MEDIAEVAL BYZANTIUM — 173
Symeon of Bulgaria;'*’ we have whole sets of letters revealing the abyss of
synodal politics during the ninth and tenth centuries, '*® and the letters of
Theodore of Stoudios are classic examples of the consolidating role of
correspondence during the Second Iconoclasm.'”’ But in general the letters
which have survived from the period were preserved for another reason;
they were preserved deliberately by the author or the recipient because of
their literary merit, '%° and they were collected for posterity in manuscripts
which unite admirable letters of all periods, or in manuscripts uniting
rhetorical works of many genres, or as the collected works of a single writer.
They were seen as having permanent value only in that they succeeded as
works of art, and as such they have succeeded in drawing expressions of
puzzlement and disgust from modern critics.
Byzantine letters lack all the normal characteristics of a letter.'>’
To us, a letter is a message accompanied by an expression of personal regard; a
Byzantine letter is an impersonal flourtsh which either contains no message at all, or
if it does, the message 1s couched 1n so obscure and allusive a fashion as to be nearly
unintelligible. !5?
The Byzantine letter is about as concrete, informative and personal as the modern
mass-produced greeting card. Just as we have a selection of illustrated cards suitable
for every occasion so the Byzantine had his formularies of model letters. '*°

This reaction is common to all Byzantine letters, despite their wide

difference over time; the tenth century has attracted most of this abuse
because letters of that period have been seen in the context of a Macedonian
Renaissance, because tenth-century letters have been more (if not better)
studied than letters of earlier and later periods'** and because the work that

127 Epp. 3-31, ed. R.J.H. Jenkins and L.G. Westerink, Nicholas I Patriarch of Constan-
tinople, Letters, DOT 2=CFHB 6 (Washington DC, 1973), pp. 17-215.
'28 See the collections of Alexander of Nicaea, Leo of Synada, Theodore of Nicaea, Theodore
of Kyzikos in J. Darrouzés, Epistoliers byzantins du Xe siécle, Institut Francais d’Etudes
Byzantines. Archives de l’Orient Chrétien 6 (Paris, 1960).
'29 See P. Alexander, ‘Religious persecution and resistance in the Byzantine empire of the
eighth and ninth centuries — methods and justifications’, Speculum 52 (1977), 238-64.
'5° For discussion of mediaeval letter collections generally, see G. Constable, Letters and
Letter Collections, Typologie des sources du moyen Age occidental 17 (Turnhout, 1976).
‘5! W. Schubart, Einfuhrung in die Papyruskunde (Berlin, 1918), p. 212.
'32 Jenkins, ‘Hellenistic origins’, 45.
133 G.T. Dennis, The Letters of Manuel II Palaeologus, Text, Translation and Notes, DOT
4=CFHB 8 (Washington DC, 1977), p. xix.
134 There is no good study of tenth-century letters. In 1972-3 Antony Littlewood wrote a long
and thorough article, ‘Byzantine letter-writing in the tenth century’, for Aufstieg und
Ntedergang der romischen Welt which is still, regrettably, unpublished.
174 Margaret Mullett
has been done has concentrated on establishing chains of influence which
readily give the impression of a dry and cliché-ridden genre.'*>
It is in fact possible to see the period as a golden age of Byzantine letter-
writing. About one thousand letters have survived, in the major collections
of Leo Choirosphaktes, Arethas, Theodore of Kyzikos, Theodore of
Nicaea, Leo of Synada, Symeon Metaphrastes, Philetos Synadenos,
Nicholas Mystikos and three anonymous collections, as well as many
shorter collections. It is in a sense a real revival of the great days of patristic
letter-writing, and letters of the period contrast both in quantity and nature
with the bread-and-butter efforts of the Iconoclast centuries and the rich
but isolated eleventh-century collections of John Mauropous and Michael
Psellos. ‘Theodore’s letters were entirely political in purpose, and Photios’
are those of a working patriarch, but in the letters of [gnatios topoi look back
to antiquity and forward to the group of letter-collections which are
preserved for the tenth century. Those letters stretch from the period of the
Tetragamy and the Bulgarian wars through to the victories of Byzantium on
the eastern frontier in the reign of Basil II and continue into the eleventh
century. !*
Despite the impression of homogeneity and boredom which one gains
from the secondary works, from the letters themselves the impression 1s
more of diversity and variety. In social origin, the letter-writers are more
diverse than at any other period of Byzantine epistolography. Ambassadors,
generals, literary figures, schoolmasters, rub shoulders with the great
officials of church, bureaucracy and provincial administration, who are
often thought of as the staple literary class of Byzantium. Writers famous
for works in other genres (hagiography, historiography, rhetoric, tactics,
occasional poetry) have all left their letter-collections. Some of these
collections are more concrete than others, indeed tediously so; it is possible
to reconstruct Alexander of Nicaea’s entire campaign for reinstatement
from the series of letters he has left,'*’ and to isolate various political crises
from the letters of Theodore of Nicaea.'*> The anonymous schoolmaster’s
letters deal with the day-to-day ups and downs of the job,’ and Nikephoros

"55 See G. Karlsson, [déologie et cérémonial dans l’épistolographie byzantine: textes du Xe

stécle analysés et commentés, Studia Graeca Upsaliensis 3 (2nd edn, Uppsala, 1962). In its
own terms it is excellent; a further work on the same subject is still needed.
136 For full details see my thesis, “Theophylact through his letters’. Since then see the edition
of the letters of Leo of Synada by M.P. Vinson, The Correspondence of Leo Metropolitan of
Synada and Syncellus, Greek Text, Translation and Commentary, DOT 8=CFHB 23
(Washington DC, 1985).
'57 Alexander of Nicaea, ep. 1, ed. Darrouzés, Epistoliers byzantins, pp. 67-9.
138 On the various affairs touched on in these letters see zbzd., pp. 54-7.
'39 Anonymous Londiniensis, ed. B. Laourdas, ‘H ovAdoyh ExtotoA@v tot xadixoc BM
 WRITING IN EARLY MEDIAEVAL BYZANTIUM © 175
Ouranos!* offers a most unsoldierly apercu of the delights of campaign.
The encomium of the apple and ekphrasis of his garden by John Geometres
on the other hand are rhetorical set-pieces as well as epistolary gems.'*!
Littlewood and Karlin-Hayter have each shown how individual treatments
of the same circumstances can be in the period;'** individuality is a real
characteristic of these letters. There are many valuable rarities: in the
letters of Theodore Daphnopates we observe the phenomenon (which is
much commoner in the west) of letters written by a secretary in the name of
the employer ;'* in the correspondence between Constantine Porphyrogen-
netos and Theodore of Kyzikos'** we have not only the rare opportunity of
following both sides of a conversation, but also of seeing the private life of a
most public emperor in these charming letters, which are the friendliest of
friendship letters.
This is something the collections have in common: they are letters of
friendship, written between friends, or between enemies, rivals or fellow
heads of state under a cover of letter-friendship, using a well-tried
repertoire of writing about friendship incorporated into the letter at a very
early stage. The topoi of the Aristophanes myth, the winged visit, the other
self, the illusion of presence are all there;'* it would have been astonishing
if they had not been; they were expected and appreciated articulations for
the enormous emotional need for communication and the function of letters
as the shared outlook of a close group, '*° which marks out letters of this kind
as an example of symbolic literacy in middle Byzantine society. But a word
of caution is necessary here: I have shown recently'*’ that friendship in

Add. 36749’, Athena 58 (1954), 176-98; R. Browning, “The correspondence of a tenth-

century Byzantine scholar’, Byzantion 24 (1954), 397-452; R. Browning and B. Laourdas,
‘TO x€tevov tov ExtotOA@V tot xwdixog BM 36749’, EEBS 27 (1957), 151-212;
319-21; A. Steiner, Untersuchungen zu einem anonymen byzantinischen Briefcorpus
des 10. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt, 1987).
40 Nikephoros Ouranos, ep. 47, ed. Darrouzés, Epistoliers byzantins, p. 245.
'41 Tohn Geometres, five letters, ed. A.R. Littlewood, The Progymnasmata of Joannes
Geometres (Amsterdam, 1972).
142 P. Karlin-Hayter, ‘Arethas, Choirosphaktes and the Saracen Vizir’, Byzantion 35 (1965),
282-92; Littlewood, ‘Byzantine letter-writing in the tenth century’, under the heading of
‘Letters of friendship’.
43 For example, Symeon Magistros for the Patriarch Nicholas; Theodore Daphnopates for
Romanos II. Byzantine letter-collections compared with their counterparts in the
mediaeval west are remarkably free from this kind of letter.
'4 Ed. Darrouzés, Epistoliers byzantins, pp. 317-32.
' Karlsson, [déologie et cérémonial, pp. 62-7, 57-8, 34-5.
46 See my thesis, ‘Theophylact through his letters’, 11.4, pp. 270-308.
47 M.E. Mullett, ‘Byzantium: a friendly society?’, Past and Present 118 (1988), 3-24.
176 Margaret Mullett
Byzantium should not be regarded as the exclusive vocabulary of an elite; it
was also a functional form of social cohesion as essential as kinship.
Symbolic literacy could turn out to be functional too.
The collections all share the constant concerns of the Byzantine letter, its
recognizable subject-matter of sickness, death and exile.'** Tenth-century
epistolographers, like all Byzantine letter-writers, complain of illness, reply
to complaints, send wishes for recovery, use sickness as an excuse for not
writing, request medical assistance and regard sickness, like separation, as a
trial wished by Providence, which can, however, be eased by letters. “Gout
oppresses us and every hair falls out of my head”’*’ is Alexander of Nicaea’s
problem. ‘I was prostrated by shivering as a report announcing your illness
completely maimed my soul and my tongue’ is Nikephoros Ouranos’
response to news from a correspondent;!? Symeon Magistros trusts that
relief provided by Divine Providence will ensure that the pain arising from
his correspondent’s illness will not increase.'°' John of Mount Latros tries
the sickness excuse: ‘It is unkind to accuse me of forgetfulness, for I have an
invisible malady.’'** ‘Get better,’ writes Alexander of Nicaea, ‘for if you do
not I will die.’!°3 Theodore of Nicaea thanks a friend for a comforting letter
which had a calming effect on ‘me who cannot bear the harshness of the
shifting heat and the mosquitoes, and who am wasting away with stomach
pains and lack of sleep’.'**
Like all Byzantine letter-writers, tenth-century epistolographers dealt
also with death.’*° About half are consolatory letters, for one of the original
typoi was MaoaUVONnTLXOG'*® and to many mediaeval letter-writers the
letter was itself a consolatio.’°’ Compared with other death genres and
forms, '** the epitaphios logos, the paramythettkos logos, the threnos and the

'48 On sickness and letters, see my “Theophylact through his letters’, 11.3, pp. 223-69.
'49 Alexander of Nicaea, ep. 1, ed. Darrouzés, Epistoliers byzantins, p. 70.
'S0 Nikephoros Ouranos, ep. 36, ibid., p. 236.
'S1 Symeon Magistros, ep. 37, zbid., p. 125.
152 John of Mount Latros, ep. 6, ibid., p. 214.
'®3 Alexander of Nicaea, ep. 8, :bid., pp. 82-3.
‘54 Theodore of Nicaea, ep. 37, ibid., p. 303.
'S5 On death and letters see my thesis, “Theophylact through his letters’, I1I.2, pp. 403-49.
5 Demetrios Phalereus, Typoi Epistolikot, 5, ed. R. Hercher, Epzstolographi graeci (Paris,
1873), p. 2; Proklos, Pert epistolimaiou charakteros, 21, ibid., p. 10.
'57 See Karlsson, [déologie et cérémonial, pp. 45-7.
'8 On death genres in Byzantine literature, see M. Alexiou, The Ritual Lament in Greek
Tradition (Cambridge, 1974), and (for the rhetorical side of the picture) my thesis,
“Theophylact through his letters’, III.2, pp. 423-43, and fig. IIb, pp. 832-6.
 WRITING IN EARLY MEDIAEVAL BYZANTIUM © 177
epitaph, the letter is personal (one addressee), immediate (written as soon
as the news is heard), closer in emotional time than a speech (delivered at
some distance from the death) and habitually concerned with human
emotion.'°’ Tenth-century letter-writers took full advantage of the pos-
sibilities with remarkable originality.
On the theme of exile the tenth-century letter-writers have a great deal to
say.'©? Karlsson has well analysed the themes of separation which are the
obverse of friendship-thinking: the illusion of presence, the letter as
consolation for absence, the letter as Sevtegoc mAotc, the winged visit,
the unio mystica.'*' Writers of our period add to the repertoire in terms of
separation from a place as well as from people: Theodore of Stoudios’
narration of his journey to exile follows the footsteps of John Chrysostom!”
and builds a role-model figure of heroic ecclesiastical exile. Four tenth-
century collections pinpoint the conditions and mentalities of political
exile: Leo Choirosphaktes, a casualty of the Tetragamy crisis, wrote eight
letters to friends and patrons, detailing the conditions of his imprisonment
and appealing for recall.'°? Niketas Magistros, who fell from favour in 927—
8, was deported and tonsured and settled on his own property on the south-
east shore of the Hellespont where he lived the life of a gentleman farmer for
eighteen years, during which he wrote the thirty-one letters which survive
to us.'** Alexander of Nicaea was exiled in 944 for no clear reason, but he
used letters, of which seventeen have survived, to secure the vote of this or
that bishop for his return.’ Theodore of Kyzikos was exiled shortly after
the death of Constantine Porphyrogennetos in 959 to Nicaea where he wrote
twelve letters, patient and resigned, with more of an eye to the next world

159 A. Littlewood, ‘An “ikon of the soul”: the Byzantine letter’, Visible Language 10 (1976),
218-19; idem, ‘Byzantine letter-writing in the tenth century’, contains these arguments in
greater detail, first given at the VII Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, Birmingham,
1973.
'60 On exile and letters see my thesis, ‘Theophylact through his letters’, IV, pp. 551-653.
'©! Karlsson, [déologie et cérémoniel, pp. 34-9, 45-7, 48-57, 57-8, 58-61.
162 John Chrysostom, letters to Olympias, epp. 1, 2 (from Nicaea), 3, 4 (from beyond
Caesarea), 5, 6 (Koukousos), ed. A.M. Malingrey, Chrysostom, Lettres a Olympias
Sources chrétiennes 13 (Paris, 1947), pp. 95, 96, 97, 98, 100, 102; Theodore of Stoudios,
ep. 1.3, PG 99, cols. 913-20.
63 On Leo Choirosphaktes, see G. Kolias, Léon Choirosphactés, magistre, proconsul et
patnce, biographie-correspondance (texte et traduction), Texte und Forschungen zur
byzantinisch-neugriechischen Philologie (Athens, 1939), pp. 15-20, 53-60, and for his
psychological makeup, P. Karlin-Hayter, ‘Arethas, Choirosphaktes and the Saracen Vizir’.
'* For Niketas Magistros, see Nicétas Magistros, lettres d’un exilé (928-946) ed. L.G.
Westerink (Paris, 1973).
'65 On Alexander of Nicaea, see P. Maas, ‘Alexandros von Nikaia’, BN¥ 3 (1922), 333-6;
Epistoliers byzantins, ed. Darrouzés, pp. 27-32.
178 Margaret Mullett
than this.'© But it is not in the letters of legal exiles, but in those of
administrators like Philetos Synadenos, judge at Tarsos,'®’ or Nikephoros
Ouranos the general that we have the clearest impression of deprivation and
loss, what it was to be cut off from the smoke of Constantinople and the
magic circle of like-minded friends.’®
Tenth-century collections share with all Byzantine letters the mysterious
quality which so infuriates modern scholars, asapheta (lack of clarity),
which has been described as ‘a touchstone of Byzantine rhetoric’.’©? They
are also particularly concerned with this characteristic, and the issues of
levels of literacy, comprehensibility and the badge of rhetoricity which arise
from it. All agreed that letters should be written with clarity ;'”? one of the
classic letter-types known from antiquity was the riddling letter (avey-
uattxn),!7! but an equally classic statement of letter style was that ‘a letter
is designed to be the heart’s good wishes in brief; it is the exposition of a
simple subject in simple terms’.'” Letters were not thought of as a written
conversation”? but something more structured and formal; riddles,
though, were explicitly excluded by Gregory of Nazianzus.'”* No Byzantine
letter, however, was easily read, and over the centuries, of the three classic
epistolary virtues, clarity, brevity and decoration, clarity was increasingly
sacrificed to decoration.
It is in precisely this period that there is thought to be a change in the
theorists of rhetoric, towards an acceptance of asapheza as a literary option.
And there are frequent complaints in our tenth-century letters of obscurity:
Symeon Metaphrastes wonders whether a certain metropolitan is being

166 On Theodore of Kyzikos, see Epistoliers byzantins, ed. Darrouzés, pp. 58-61; for his
letters, see S. Lampros, ‘Epistolai ek tou Biennaiou kodikos phil gr. 3426’, Neos
Ellenomnemon 19 (1925), 269-96; zbzd., 20 (1926), 31-46, 139-57; Epistoliers byzantins,
ed. Darrouzés, pp. 317-41.
'67 Philetos Synadenos, see Epistoliers byzantins, ed. Darrouzés, pp. 48-9, 249-59, especially
epp. 11 and 12 on Tarsos and Antioch.
168 Nikephoros Ouranos, ep. 47, ibid., p. 246.
19 Kustas, Studies in Byzantine Rhetoric, p. 93.
170 Simplicius, Eis tas Kategorias tou Anstotelous, ed. C. Kalbfleisch, CAG 8 (Berlin, 1908),
pp. 750-4; Demetrios, Pert Ermenetas, no. 223, ed. Rhys Roberts, Demetrius on Style
(Cambridge, 1902), p. 172.
‘71 Proklos, Pert epistolimaiou charakteros, ed. V. Weichert (Leipzig, 1910), p. 32.
172 Demetrios, Peri Ermeneias, no. 231, ed. Roberts, Demetrius on Style, p. 176.
'73 Demetrios, Pert Ermenetas, no. 224, ibid., p. 172, distinguishes the letter from the
dialogue on precisely these grounds.

74 Gregory of Nazianzus, ep. 61, ed. P. Gallay, Grégotre de Nazianze, Lettres (Paris, 1964),
, p. 67.
 WRITING IN EARLY MEDIAEVAL BYZANTIUM — 179
deliberately obscure;'” Theodore, metropolitan of Nicaea, complains of
receiving a letter full of Pythagorean riddles;'© Arethas’ unaccustomed
simplicity in a letter to the emir of Damascus is explained in a marginal )
annotation ‘it is simply phrased for the understanding of the Arabs’,'”” but
another letter shows him on much more usual form when he defends his
style against a friend who had sent back a work and complained that he
could not understand it.'’* Here, rhetoric, the most abstruse use of literacy
in tenth-century Byzantium, 1s used to create a badge of membership of an
elite club, so exclusive that it defeats its own purpose.
So the letters which have been preserved in manuscript collections are
very different from the letters which form part of the Skylitzes narrative;
they have been collected, which may in some cases mean homogenized (just
like saints’ lives put through the process of encyclopaedism), just as the
letters described in the chronicle are those which affected crucially the
politics of the period. But 1n some ways the picture they present is very
similar. In both the moment of receipt 1s featured; in both the bearer 1s a
central concern; in both the practicalities of communication and literacy
practices are emphasized, and in both a sense of immense value placed on
the letter as a means of communication is conveyed.
Here is Symeon Metaphrastes receiving a letter:
When your letter reached me, these worries were dissipated like the shadows of
dreams after waking. When I got it into my hands, I loosed the fastening and
immediately looked at its length, just as the thirsty gaze at the size of the cup before
drinking, then slowly dwelling on each syllable, I read it, prolonging for myself the
pleasure and desiring not to stop the cause of my pleasure until I was satisfied.'””
and here John Mauropous:
I thought that the season was already autumn and not spring. Where then did this
nightingale of spring come from to visit me now? Its voice did not resound from
some distant wood or grove, but— wonderful to tell —it flew into my very hands. And
here it sings to me of spring, and listening to the liquid notes close at hand, I stand
spellbound. Yet if I must speak the truth, it seems to me that though the voice of this
most beautiful bird is that of a nightingale, its form is that of a swallow. Its song is
clear and melodious like the nightingale’s; but on its body two contrasting colours
are wonderfully blended together like the swallow’s. The black words stand out on

‘73 Symeon Metaphrastes, ep. 94, ed. Darrouzés, Epistoliers byzantins, p. 154.
'70 Theodore, metropolitan of Nicaea, ep. 7, ibid., p. 277.
'7” Arethas, ep. 26, ed. Westerink, Avethae Scripta Minora, |, pp. 133-45; P. Karlin-Hayter,
‘Arethas’ letter to the Emir of Damascus’, Byzantion 29 (1959), 282-92.
'78 Arethas, ep. 17, ed. Westerink, Arethae Scripta Minora, I, pp. 186-91.
'7? Symeon Metaphrastes, ep. 89, ed. Darrouzés, Epistoliers byzantins, p. 150.
180 Margaret Mullett
the white paper like a rich purple embroidered on a shining and translucent material.
But whether a nightingale or a swallow, this marvellous letter filled me with
complete joy.’*”

One concentrates on the literal procedures of reception, the other on the

oral and visual experience. The letter, it 1s clear, was thought of as both.
A similar impression arises from examining the value placed on the letter
by contemporaries. Oral images are common — birdsong,'*' the bewitching
song of the Sirens,!®* but so also are visual — the meadow of delightful
flowers,'®* the icon of the soul.'®* (Scent and taste, Hymettos honey and
precious perfumes, also have a place.) It seems that in the view of letter-
writers there was no great conflict between writing and speech; the letter
could be described in terms of both.
This is not because letter-writers were uninterested in questions of
literate practice; far from it. Alexander of Nicaea’s letters abound with
literacy. When he was arrested at night his papers were searched, and
confiscated, he was forced to write his will,'® his whole consciousness
focuses on who signed or did not sign various documents in the case.'*° He
tells his correspondent that he would write in blood and tears if they were
available and has to fall back on his usual ink.'®’ Deprivation of writing
materials'*® became a symbol of the conditions of his imprisonment,
unaware (like Richardson’s Pamela)’® of the ironies of such description.
Yet as in all our writers the opposite of communication is described in oral
terms, OLWwa7H or oLyy, silence.'”°
Just as literacy is a common concern of letter-writers, so are the
difficulties of communication, which only serve to enhance the enormous

180 John Mauropous, ep. 1, ed. P. Lagarde, ‘Johannis Euchaitorum metropolitae quae in
codice vaticano graeco 676 supersunt’, Abhandlungen der konighchen Gesellschaft der
Wissenschaften zu Gottingen 28 (1881), 51.
'8! For nightingales and swallows see Karlsson, [déologie et cérémonial, pp. 106-11.
182 Symeon Metaphrastes, ep. 23, Nikephoros Ouranos, ep. 19, ed. Darrouzés, Epistoliers
byzantins, pp. 114, 226.
'83 For example, Symeon Metaphrastes, epp. 23, 91, ibid., pp. 114, 152.
184 For example, Symeon Metaphrastes, epp. 85, 89, zbid., pp. 147, 151; for full treatment see
Littlewood, ‘An “ikon of the soul” ’, passim.
185 Alexander of Nicaea, ep. 1, ed. Darrouzés, Epistoliers byzantins, pp. 68-71.
186 Idem, e.g., epp. 12, 13, 14, ibid., pp. 88, 89-90, 91-3.
'87 Idem, ep. 1, ibid., p. 68.
188 dem, e.g., ep. 2, ibid., p. 73; ep. 5, p. 77.
'89 Compare D. Kennedy, ‘The epistolary mode and the first of Ovid’s Heroides’, CO NS 34/2
(1984), 413-22, at 413.
190 See my thesis, “Theophylact through his letters’, 1.5, pp. 144-6.
 WRITING IN EARLY MEDIAEVAL BYZANTIUM © 181
value placed on letters which link the separated across great distances. The
practicalities of weather and travel and bearers, requests for replies,
apologies for not writing, loom large in most correspondences.
And just as the Madrid illustrations express the exchange of the letters in
shorthand by a gesture of the bearer, so many letters of the tenth century
also place him in the foreground. Not only recommendatory letters, which
have as their purpose the delineation of the qualities and the validation of
the komistes ,'”' but also other letters give a cue to the bearer to elaborate on
particular aspects of their issue, to expand or to confirm. Occasionally he
conveys a message desired by the recipient but not articulated by the
sender.'** But we need to be careful in our interpretation of Byzantine
statements on the role of the bearer. When John Mauropous writes: ‘As
useless as a lantern at midday or well water in midwinter are letters when
you have a talkative and many-voiced bearer’’”’ he does not mean that the
letter carried no message and should be seen as mere wrapping paper for the
message of the bearer. Most often it would seem that the letter and the oral
report were meant to supplement each other, both bearing the same
message but concentrating on different aspects of it. Note how in several
letters Nicholas Mystikos opposes the two kinds of message.'”* Long before
the tenth century, epistolographers had made literary capital out of this
essential feature using various kinds of hyperbole. Julian pointed out how
the letter of friendship is enriched when delivered by a third friend. '”° Basil
describes a favourite bearer as a man who could take the place of a letter.'”°
In general perhaps it is helpful to use Synesios’ image of a double letter, the
living and the lifeless,’”’ rather than pursue Mauropous’ idea of ‘useless-
ness’, itself in this tradition of hyperbole. The letter is then to be seen, in an
ideal situation, when the available bearers met with the writer’s approval
and confidence, as comprising two parts, the written letter and the verbal

"1 On the recommendatory letter see Demetrios, Typoi epistolikot, ed. V. Weichert (Leipzig,
1910), pp. 3-4; Libanios, Epistolimaio: charakteres, ibid., pp. 10, 22, 58; Steiner,
Untersuchungen, pp. 62-5.
'%2 For example, Nicholas Mystikos, ep. 182, ed. Jenkins and Westerlink, Nicholas I, p. 512.
'°3 John Mauropous, ep. 1, ed. Lagarde, ‘Johannis Euchaitorum’, 52.
'4 Nicholas Mystikos, ep. 6, ed. Jenkins and Westerink, Nicholas I, p. 38; ep. 19, ibid., p.
126. Sometimes the bearer was used as a safety net in case more detailed letters failed to
arrive, ep. 77, zbid., p. 330.
195 Julian, ep. 61, ed. W.C. Wright, The Works of the Emperor Julian, Il (London and
Cambridge, Mass., 1923), p. 212.
196 Basil, ep. 200, ed. R.J. Deferrari, Saint Basil: The Letters, 11] (London and Cambridge,
Mass., 1934), p. 135.
197 Synesios, ep. 85, ed. Hercher, Epistolographi Graeci, p. 691.
182 Margaret Mullett
report. It is the built-in disadvantage of letter-writing study that half of the
letter, the living half, is automatically missing, and the form in which the
other half is preserved may be distorted by the process of collection. And, it
should be remembered, many Byzantine letters have not been preserved at
all.
But just as letters in literary letter-collections bear no resemblance to the
majority of Byzantine epistolary exchanges, one may be sure, so the neat
depictions of letter-exchange in the Madrid Skylitzes are equally far from
the reality. For one thing few letters can have been a single sheet of rolled
parchment, even if the metron of a letter (I estimate 400 words) has
something to do with how many words can be got on a single sheet. The
whole business must have been much more unwieldy, perhaps resembling
the arrival of the widow Danelis or at least the handing over of captured gifts
and prisoners!”* than the formula for letter-exchange. A large proportion of
the letters we know of were intended to be accompanied by gifts, whether
poems, books, works of art, lettuces or fish. The variety of objects sent with
letters has frequently been noted,'” but no satisfactory explanation is
usually offered. Why should the supreme and elegant compression of
literary art be marred by the banality of cabbages or sheepskins? One
answer is that the letter was itself regarded as a gift;*°° another is that it was
not viewed as a totally literary experience. All the senses are intended to be
comforted, amused, inspired, informed by the act of communication
involved. In our letters, John Geometres made a present of six apples which
he accompanied with three encomia;*"’ Symeon Metaphrastes receives
butter and sends bread and wine;”"* Theodore, metropolitan of Nicaea, was
only one of many Byzantine letter-writers to receive a gift of fish;””’ the
correspondence of Theodore of Kyzikos and Constantine Porphyrogen-
netos is rich in gifts, the famous lettuce from Olympos, but also wine, cake,

figs. 111, 112. |

'°8 For example, fol. 200=E495; fol. 204ra=E504; fol. 102rb and c=E239 and 240=GM,

' For example, by L. Robert, ‘Les kordakia de Nicée, le combustible de Synnade et les
poisson-scies. Sur les lettres d’un métropolite de Phrygie au Xe siécle. Philologie et
réalités’, Journal des Savants (July—Dec. 1961), 97-106 (Jan.—June 1962), 5-74; J.
Shepard, ‘“Tzetzes’ letters to Leo at Dristra’, Byzantinische Forschungen 6 (1979), 191-
239; A. Karpozelos, ‘Realia in Byzantine epistolography, X—XII c’, Byzantinische
Zeitschrift 77 (1984), 20-37.
200 Demetrios, Pert Ermeneias, no. 224, ed. Roberts, Demetrius on Style, p. 172; compare
Karlsson, [déologie et cérémonial, ch. 5, pp. 112-37.
201 See Littlewood, The Progymnasmata of Johannes Geometres.
202 Symeon Metaphrastes, epp. 72, 99, ed. Darrouzés, Epistoliers byzantins, pp. 141, 157.
203 Theodore, metropolitan of Nicaea, ep. 18, ibid., p. 286; Robert, ‘Les Kordakia de Nicée’,
and Shepard, ‘Ttetzes’ letters’, on some which went off.
 WRITING IN EARLY MEDIAEVAL BYZANTIUM _ 183
fish, incense and an Arab goblet.*°* A letter of Symeon Metaphrastes
underlines the value of such gifts (gifts of a friend, the product of holy
hands, the quantity) to end amusingly with a suggestion that his corre-
spondent had overdone it, sending not the first fruits but the harvest.2°
Number symbolism is often cited; rarely 1s there any suggestion that the gift
itself is more important than the transaction. But there is no doubt that gifts
were a standard and expected part of the letter-exchange.
One part of the visual component of the letter-experience does often
survive.” It is estimated that 60,000 Byzantine lead seals are preserved
world-wide, four times my own estimate of surviving letters.“°’ The seal was
at once the commonest and cheapest form of art visible throughout the
Empire and the vital validation of the written and oral parts of the letter.
The letter was validated not by what the seal sazd but by being recognizable
to the recipient as the sender’s ‘usual lead seal’.*”’ This clearly has implica-
tions for literacy (using a seal becomes a sub-literate practice) but also for
the role of the visual; the letter was validated by its seal as icons had been
validated by written arguments during Iconoclasm. All letters needed this
kind of validation; it has been suggested by Mango on the basis of a Coptic
text that the globes carried by angels in Byzantine art are misunderstood
seals; the approximation of angels and letters is also made in tenth-century
texts.?!0
So a letter in ninth- and tenth-century Byzantium was not only a
component of an abstruse literary genre, the letter-collection; it was a
transaction, an act of communication between two people. It was written,
oral, material, visual, and it had its own ceremony, lost for us totally except
in the pages of the Madrid Skylitzes and allied representations. While we
can gain some idea of the subsequent acts of performance and preservation
of letters — such as reading aloud to the senior pupils, performance in a
theatron, copying into a collection, showing to friends who would appreci-
ate its literary qualities — from internal evidence, the letter-writers, ‘men

204 Theodore of Kyzikos, epp. 7, 10, 11, 12, 1,3, 6, 12, ed. Darrouzés, Epistoliers byzantins,
pp. 324, 327, 328, 320, 322, 329.
20 Symeon Metaphrastes, ep. 29, ibid., p. 119.
206 W. Seibt, Die Byzantinische Bletsiegel im Oesterreich, 1 (Vienna, 1978), p. 34.
207 See my ‘Classical tradition in the Byzantine letter’, in Mullett and Scott, Byzantium and
the Classical Tradition, p. 75.
208 See A. Cutler, ‘Art in Byzantine society’, XVI International Byzantine Congress, pp.
759-88.
209 N. Oikonomides, “The usual lead seal’, DOP 37 (1981), 147~57.
719 Epistoliers byzantins, Lettres diverses, ep. 17, ed. Darrouzés, p. 355, plays on the idea of
YOOPMATHPSOOS as GYYEAOS.
184 Margaret Mullett
who had a love for learning, a love for beauty and a love for each other’,*"!
focussed on the moment after that recorded by the manuscript. The writers
of letters are interested in the receipt, the holding in the hand, the unloosing
of the seal and the perusal of the letter rather than the arrival of the komustes
at the residence of the recipient, his reception, entertainment, ushering into
the presence and handing over of the parchment and the gifts. What follows
is clear from neither:*’” in some miniatures the recipient takes the letter
himself; in others his household shields him from it; in no case is it clear
whether the recipient reads the letter silently, whether a member of his
household (as in the Tryphon story) or whether the bearer reads it to him,
before the bearer offers his oral contribution; what it clear is that many
rereadings must have been necessary before the aimigmata and asapheia
gave up their meanings to the recipient. Communication theory which
makes use of the concept of decoding (however challenging the implications
of intentionalism here) may be of supreme use to the Byzantinist.
Two things here are worth noting: one is the reason for the puzzling,
deconcretization of the letter-as-preserved-in-letter-collections: 1t may be
deconcretized because of the circumstances of collection, but it 1s mostly so
because it is only part of a much bigger whole. Writing in itself was not
enough.*!* The other is the usefulness of the evidence of the Skylitzes, even
with all its worrying problems of milieu and models. McCormick has
recently warned against taking any picture of a ceremony as evidence for its
performance;*!* what the Skylitzes representations can do for us is to point
to a ceremonial context which might otherwise be totally neglected.
All our evidence is partial; letter-collections preserve (on literary
grounds) a tiny part of the wrtten part of letter-exchange; seals preserve
(on random?” survival) some elements of the visual part of the process; the
emphasis on the komistes in the miniatures of the Madrid Skylitzes and their
captions“’® points us to the oral part of the transaction. The exchange of

2\1 J. Bryennios, ep. 82, ed. N. Tomadakes,‘O’ loon Bovévviog nau n Kory xara to 1400
(Athens, 1947), p. 126.
712 Tt might be possible to get some idea from extrapolating from descriptions of diplomatic
receptions in the same way that it is assumed that episcopal administrations were modelled
on the patriarchal secretariat or that aristocratic palaces were scaled-down versions of
imperial ones.
213 Compare the importance of perambulation in the settlement of boundary disputes, see
Morris, ‘Dispute settlement’.
214 M. McCormick, ‘Analysing imperial ceremonies’, JOB 35 (1985), 1-20, at 9-10.
715 On the circumstances of preservation of seals, see G. Zacos and A. Veglery, Byzantine
Lead Seals, 1/1 (Basel, 1972), p. vit, and Oikonomides ‘Usual lead seal’, 149.
216 The komistes is frequently signalled in the captions; I have here simply avoided the topic of
the captions but hope to take it up elsewhere.
 WRITING IN EARLY MEDIAEVAL BYZANTIUM — 185
letters in ninth and tenth-century Byzantium was a multi-media experience
where oral, visual and written elements combined in an expected
ceremonial. Sound, writing and pictures were complementary and essential
elements in the process of communication.
Does this perception help at all towards an appreciation of the place of
writing in Byzantine society? We have seen that letter-writing was regarded
as being of functional as well as of ritual importance and that books were
represented as a natural part of the ninth- and tenth-century environment.
But it should now be clear that Byzantium cannot be viewed as a rich
backdrop of high literacy against which to view the vicissitudes of the west;
Byzantine literacy also had its ups and downs; it also had literacies rather
than a single literacy. It too was a ‘residually oral’ society in which writing,
pictures and speech each had a place. Patriarch Tryphon rather than the
Graptoi may point the way to future research.*’’

“17 This paper was begun in the legendary favourable atmosphere of Dumbarton Oaks and
completed in the mists of the Veneto. I am grateful to many Washington friends, to the
Istituto di Studi Bizantini at Padova and the Istituto Greco di Studi Bizantini e
Postbizantini at Venice and especially to Andreina Sartori.
 a
Literacy displayed:
the use of inscriptions at the
monastery of San Vincenzo al Volturno
in the early ninth century

Fohn Mitchell
(To the memory of Don Angelo Pantont OSB)

The monastery of San Vincenzo on the Volturno 1s situated at the head of

the Volturno valley, a little more than 1 kilometre distant from the source of
the river. It lies some 25 kilometres north of the old Roman town of
Venafrum, modern Venafro, and about 30 kilometres north-east of Monte-
cassino, across the Mainarde range of mountains. Founded in the first years
of the eighth century, by three young men of noble birth from Benevento, it
grew in size and fame, and became, for a relatively short period, one of the
great monasteries of Europe. Contemporary sources refer to the exceptional
size of the community in the closing years of the eighth century.’ In the later
ninth century its fortunes began to decline, and in 881 it was sacked by an
army of Saracens from North Africa, which had been harrying much of
southern Italy for more than twenty years. The monks returned to San
Vincenzo in 914, after thirty-three years of exile in Capua. The damaged
buildings wereitsgradually
never regained former sizerepaired and reconstructed,
and reputation. Finally, in the but
laterthe yore
eleventh
century new monastic buildings were erected, and subsequently, under the

' Pope Hadrian I, in a letter to Charlemagne of 784, refers to the community at San Vincenzo
as ‘tam magnam congregationem’, Codex Carolinus: MGH Epp. merov. et karol. | (=MGH
Epp. 111. 66, p. 594); and Paul the Deacon, in his history of the Lombards, composed at the
neighbouring monastery on Montecassino, probably in the 790s, writes that the monastery
of San Vincenzo ‘nunc magna congregatione refulget’ (Lib. 6, ch. 40), ed. G. Waitz, MGH
SS rerum Langobardicarum, p. 179; Paul the Deacon, History of the Lombards, trans. W.D.
Foulke (Philadelphia, 1907; new edn, Philadelphia, 1974), p. 283. In the early twelfth-
century chronicle of San Vincenzo, it is recorded that either 500 or 900 souls were killed by
the Saracen war-band which sacked the monastery in October 881. This number is said to
have included the inmates of various monasteries and cells subject to San Vincenzo, who had
gathered at the main monastery, presumably for protection (Chron. Vult., I, p. 368).

186
 LITERACY DISPLAYED 187
Abbots Gerard and Benedict the main abbey church of San Vincenzo was
completely rebuilt.”
Until recently it was assumed that the monastery of the eighth to the
eleventh centuries occupied the same site as its successor of the eleventh to
the twelfth centuries, a somewhat elevated position in a bow of the
Volturno, protected by deep rock-cut ditches on two sides, and by the river
gorge to the east, and that the material evidence for its principal church and
buildings had been utterly destroyed in the process of reconstruction.°
However, excavations carried out during the years 1980—5 have demon-
strated conclusively that the early monastery was, in fact, situated about 300
metres to the west of the later abbey, on the opposite bank of the River
Volturno, on the eastern slopes of a low hill, the modern Colle della Torre,
and on the narrow strip of plain between the hill and the river (Fig. 1).
According to the Chronicle, the three founders established their monas-
tery on the site of an abandoned settlement, where there stood an old
oratory, dedicated to St Vincent, reputedly built by the emperor Constan-
tine.* Three churches are recorded as having been constructed in the first
half of the eighth century: San Vincenzo under the first abbot, Paldo (703 ?-
20),° Santa Maria Maior under his co-founder Taso (729-39)° and San
Pietro under Ato (739-60).’ During the following fifty years the rate of
growth increased. A generation after Ato, Abbot Paul (783-92) founded the
church of Santa Maria Minor,® and some years later his successor Iosue
(792-817) completely rebuilt the principal abbey church, San Vincenzo, as
an aisled basilica with sixteen columns in each arcade.’ Under the Abbots
Talaricus (817-23) and Epyphanius (82442), four further churches were
built, so that by the second quarter of the ninth century there were in all
eight churches within the confines of the monastery.'? During this period of
expansion, between the late 780s and 840s, in which six new churches were
constructed, the number of donations and bequests made to the com-

* The new abbey church of Abbots Gerard and Benedict survived, radically altered and
truncated, until the Second World War. It was completely rebuilt by the monks of
Montecassino thirty years ago. Most of what is known of the early history of San Vincenzo al
Volturno is contained in the chronicle of the monastery, which was compiled early in the
twelfth century, and incorporates earlier material. There is an excellent modern edition:
Chron. Vult. A good brief account of the early history of San Vincenzo is given by A. Pantoni,
“ Guese e gh edifict del monastero di San Vincenzo al Volturno (Montecassino, 1980), pp.

3 Pantoni, Le chiese, passim. * Chron. Vult., 1, pp. 111, 145-8.

S Ibid., p. 145. © Ibid., p. 155.
7 Ibid., p. 162. 8 Ibid., p. 204.
” Ibid., 1, pp. 220-1. The date of its '0 Ibid., pp. 287, 288.
dedication is given as 808.
|| 188

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1 San Vincenzo al Volturno, the site of the early mediaeval

monastery (a) (above) overall plan (6b) (nght) detail of main
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munity, mostly gifts from the dukes of Benevento and from local Lombard
landowners, greatly increased,'' and the new Frankish rulers of Italy,
Charlemagne, and his son, Louis the Pious, seem to have taken a direct
interest in San Vineenzo.!”
The recent excavations have largely confirmed the evidence of the
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Chronicle (Fig. 1).'° The early ninth-century monastery was quite small,
and had been established among the ruins of a small fifth- to sixth-century
estate centre, a villa rustica, situated on the north-east slopes of the hill,
close to an old Roman bridge over the Volturno, which is still in use today.
A fifth-century funerary church, which had served this early Christian
community, was repaired and refurbished, perhaps as the first conventual
church dedicated to St Vincent. Various eighth-century phases of construc-
tion have been identified, but it was not until the last years of the century

'! I[bid., passim.

12 Tbid., pp. 204-15, 218-43, 289-90; Codex Carolinus: MGH Epp. merov. et karol. J (=MGH
Epp. III. 66 and 67, pp. 593-7. See below, pp. 223-4.
'5 Interim reports on the excavations have appeared each year from 1981 to 1986 in
Archeologia Medievale. A volume of preliminary studies on various aspects of the project
was published in 1985: San Vincenzo al Volturno: The Archaeology, Art and Terntory of an
Early Medieval Monastery, ed. R. Hodges and J. Mitchell, BAR, International Series 252
(Oxford, 1985). The Final Report on the excavations is in preparation.
 LITERACY DISPLAYED 189
that major changes took place in the layout and the appearance of the
monastery. In two phases of activity, it was completely redesigned, with
new construction taking place on a massive scale. The first of these phases
has been associated with the Abbots Paul (783-92) and Iosue (792-817),
and the second phase can be assigned to the time of Epyphanius (82442),
who erected two churches, and whose portrait is featured in the painted
crypt of a small church at the northern end of the site, the crypt church,
which was remodelled during the second phase of construction (Fig. 2).
During this half-century of building activity the monastery expanded to
something like ten times its original size.
In the first phase of expansion, the original nucleus was extended towards

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 190 John Mitchell
the south, and a new abbey church, a columnar basilica, was built on an |
artificially constructed platform at the south-eastern corner of the hill,
providing a new focus for the monastery. In the area of the late antique
settlement to the north, an elevated guest hall, with a chapel at one end, was
erected in the shell of the old funerary church, and immediately to the south
of this an old garden atrium was remodelled with elegant columned porticos
on two sides, and a refectory for distinguished guests on the side towards the
river. Fronting this garden, to the west, was a splendid entrance hall, a
building with arched and pilastered facade, containing a large staircase,
which provided access to the raised guest hall and to ranges of buildings on
the lowest slope of the hill behind. To the south, lay a great two-halled
refectory, 33 metres long and 14 metres wide, with seating for about 450
monks. On the western side of this refectory, against the slope of the hull,
was a long assembly room, with benches built against all its walls. This
probably served as an ante-room for those about to dine, and may also have
doubled up as a chapter-house. Beyond the refectory, in all probability, lay
the kitchens, a large cloister, the dormitory and, to judge from extensive
surface-scatter of building debris, a succession of further structures, all of
_ which have yet to be excavated. In the second phase of construction, a long
range of rooms and a substantial church were erected on the terraced slope
of the hill overlooking these principal buildings, the guest hall at the
northern end of the complex was rebuilt to a grander specification and
provided with an inlaid marble floor and rich paintings on its walls, and the
crypt church, to the north, was remodelled and embellished. On the middle
slopes of the hill is the burial ground of the early mediaeval community,
containing something in the order of 2,000 graves, and beyond this, on the
summit, are the remains of another substantial structure, probably a church
from the second phase. At the southern end of the hill, construction
continued out on to the plain, and it was here that the monastery’s
workshops were located. Abundant evidence of the manufacture of vessel-
and window-glass and enamel and of fine metal-working has been excavated
in this area.'* Surface-scatter indicates the presence of further extensive
ranges of buildings far out on to the plain at this end of the complex. It is
clear that, by the mid-ninth century, the monastery had evolved into a
loosely structured concentration of churches, halls, cells, courts, passages
and workshops extending over an area of about 6 hectares.
Two things would have struck a ninth-century visitor to San Vincenzo
with particular force. The first of these would have been the brightly painted
surfaces of the plastered walls. The extent of the painted decoration of the

4 J. Moreland, ‘A monastic workshop and glass production at San Vincenzo al Volturno,

Molise, Italy’, in San Vincenzo al Volturno, ed. Hodges and Mitchell, pp. 37-60. :
 LITERACY DISPLAYED 191
monastery is remarkable. T’o judge from the recent excavations and survey
of the site, 1t seems that nearly every interior wall-surface was painted, not
only the walls of the churches and of the large communal rooms, like the
monks’ refectory, the assembly room and the guest hall, but also the covered
passages and porticos, and the individual cells of the ranges on the lower
slopes of the hill. Even a building in the industrial area of the monastery,
dating from the middle years of the century, which has been identified as the
dwelling of the glass-master or the fine-metalsmith, had plastered walls with
a simple decorative scheme of bands of colour.
In the great majority of the excavated rooms from both of the ninth-
century phases of construction, the lower sections of the walls were
ornamented with a dado painted in imitation of panels of polished stone
revetment, with diagonal undulant veining endlessly repeating in sequences
of stacked upright and inverted chevrons. This recalls the polished marble
revetment of ancient Roman buildings, and of the more splendidly appoin-
ted early Christian churches. The upper surfaces of the walls carried figural
subjects, in many of the rooms so far excavated are simple standing figures,
prophets, apostles and saints, often set beneath elaborately painted arcades.
Porticos and passages were also richly decorated. The rear wall of the
eastern portico of the garden atrium had an elegant painted colonnade, with
plants and shrubs in the intercolumniations, echoing the real colonnade of
reused fluted ancient columns, and probably also real shrubs which once
stood in pots between the columns. One of the long corridors, which are a
feature of the plan of the monastery, conserves traces of its early ninth-
century scheme of decoration, a sequence of panels, at dado level, painted to
imitate crustae, cut pieces of polished stone, skilfully laid together to form
elaborate repeating patterns, and on one end wall a great round multi-
* coloured disc.
The best-preserved painting at San Vincenzo is on the walls of the small
crypt of a church at the far northern end of the complex, the crypt church."

‘> Some painted plaster still adheres to the walls of the excavated rooms, but the greater part of
it fell away in the decades following the Saracen sack of 881, and fragments of broken
painted plaster were recovered in large quantities from most parts of the site. Considerable
progress has been made in reassembling these fragments, and on the reconstruction of the
various schemes of decoration. For a preliminary account of this material, see my chapter,
‘The painted decoration of the early medieval monastery’, in San Vincenzo al Volturno, ed.
Hodges and Mitchell, pp. 125-76. A team of restorers working for the Istituto Centrale di
Restauro in Rome has continued the recomposition of the pieces of fallen plaster, and a
preliminary report of their progress has been published: G. Basile, ‘Abbazia di 8S. Vincenzo
al Volturno: restauri in corso’, Arte Medievale 2nd series, 2, part 1 (1988), 153-6.
‘© H. Belting, Studien zur beneventanischen Malerei (Wiesbaden, 1968), pp. 24-41, 193-
222, ills. 12-60; San Vincenzo al Volturno e la cnpta dell’abate Epifamo 824/842
(Montecassino, 1970), figs. 29-63.
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 LITERACY DISPLAYED 193
these has been deciphered and identified. However, their form and setting
indicate that they ran along walls at major horizontal divisions 1n decorative
schemes, presumably identifying or commenting on an adjacent image,
spelling out an exhortation to the spectator or recording the names of the
individuals responsible for the works. Other excavated fragments clearly
come from small inscriptions set in fields of colour, evidently from short
titul: written within scenes and images, which identified events, individuals
and places. Both of these types of inscription are preserved im situ in the
paintings of the crypt at the north end of the site (Fig. 2).'’ Inscriptions of
these kinds were commonly employed by artists in western Europe in the
early middle ages.
Somewhat less usual, however, was the practice of writing legible texts in
books held open by individual painted figures. In the crypt, both Christ and
Mary are represented with open books, the one with the words spoken by
God to Moses from the burning bush: Ego sum D[eus] Abraha[m], the
other with a passage from the Magnificat. '® These were clearly legible when
they were newly written. While it is by no means unknown for figures to be
depicted holding open books with legible texts in the early middle ages, it 1s
certainly more usual for them to be shown with books which are closed, or
which, if open, are either blank or covered with indecipherable script-like
notations. The presence of two such fully inscribed books in a single small
pictorial cycle, at this period, 1s exceptional. The written word was clearly a
thing of some significance to the inventors of the pictorial scheme in the
crypt.
This interest is more forcibly expressed in the painted imagery of the long
west wall of the large assembly room, which adjoins the refectory. The
decoration of this wall has been reconstructed from the excavated fragments
of its fallen plaster.'? A sequence of Prophets, almost life-size, stood, at
intervals of about 1 metre, between the columns of a painted arcade. In his
left hand each held a large scroll inscribed with a text, written in alternating
lines of red and black capital letters (Fig. 3). The letters are about 5
centimetres high, and variant forms as well as inscript characters (small-
'7 Belting, Studien, ills. 19, 21, 23, 26, 32, 33, 38, 41, 49; San Vincenzo al Volturno ela cnpta
dell’abate Epifanio, figs. 34, 38-43, 45, 46, 51-4, 56, 60-2.
'8 Belting, Studien, ills. 21, 45; San Vincenzo al Volturno e la cripta dell’abate Epifanio, figs.
53, 54, 56, 62; F. de’ Maffei, ‘Le arti a San Vincenzo al Volturno: il ciclo della cripta di
Epifanio’, in Una grande abbazia altomedievale nel Molise, San Vincenzo al Volturno: atti
del 1 convegno di studi sul medioevo meridional (Venafro — S. Vincenzo al Volturno, 19-22
maggio 1982, ed. F. Avagliano (Montecassino, 1985), pp. 274, 285.
'? Mitchell, ‘The painted decoration’, pp. 143-50. figs. 6:17-6:25; Basile, ‘Abbazia di S.
Vincenzo al Volturno’, 153-6, figs. 3-7. A detailed reconstruction of the scheme of
decoration on this wall will be published in the Final Report on the excavations,
‘Excavations and surveys at San Vicenzo al Volturno’, I, forthcoming.
 194 Fohn Mitchell
scale letters which are embraced by ones of full size) are employed, for the
sake of variety and ornamentation. The one inscription which has, so far,
been more or less fully reconstructed has eight lines of script, and the length
of the complete scroll was something in the order of 30 centimetres. The
text is: [n die alla dicit D[omi]n[u]s congregabo claudicantem et eam quam
eleceram congregabo, a variant reading of Micah 4.6. The convention of
introducing writing on scrolls or books was employed in the middle ages as a
means of incorporating the act of speech into the mute medium of painting,
and here the Prophets were represented calling out their prophecies in
, succession. Fragments of tztulz recovered from the other side of the room
suggest that the Apostles faced the line of Prophets, from the long east wall,
and they may have held answering texts in their hands.
Figures holding open scrolls bearing legible inscriptions are not com-
monly found in the mediaeval west before the eleventh century; and in the
one outstanding surviving instance of their use the texts in question were
carefully and purposefully chosen, and relate to a particular historical
situation: the four church fathers painted on the walls flanking the main
apse of Santa Maria Antiqua in Rome, in the middle of the seventh century.
These four figures carry enormous scrolls inscribed with long texts in
Greek, taken from the passages from their writings which were cited in
refutation of monothelitism at the Lateran Council of 649. It was largely asa
result of the decrees of this Council and of the staunchly anti-monothelite
stance of the pope, Martin I, that the pope was abducted from Rome by the
Byzantine exarch, transported to Constantinople, humiliated, tried and
exiled to the Crimea. The images in Santa Maria Antiqua are usually
interpreted as instruments of anti-Byzantine propaganda, commissioned
after 649 and perhaps before Martin’s removal in June 651.” In the west
scrolls of this kind seem to have been of the utmost rarity before the eleventh
century, and it was only in the twelfth century that they are often put in the
hands of Prophets and other figures, in wall-paintings, mosaics, manuscript
painting, ivory carving and in other media.”' In the Byzantine east the motif

20 G.M. Rushforth, ‘The church of S. Maria Antiqua’, Papers of the British School at Rome |
(1902), 68-73; P. Romanelli and P.J. Nordhagen, S. Mana Antiqua (Rome, 1964), pp. 32-
4; P.J. Nordhagen, ‘S. Maria Antiqua: the frescoes of the seventh century’, in Acta ad
archaeologiam et historiam artium pertinentia, Institutum Romanum Norvegiae 8 (Rome,
1978), pp. 97-9, pls. III-XI. For an account of the events of these years, see P. Llewellyn,
Rome in the Dark Ages (London, 1971), pp. 150-6. A second, earlier, isolated instance of an
inscribed scroll of this kind, bearing the Greek word txOys, is held by Christ at: the
Second Coming on one of the panels of the fifth-century wooden doors of S. Sabina, in
aome: G. Jeremias, Die Holztur der Basilika S. Sabina in Rom (Tibingen, 1980), pls. 68,

2! An early instance, dating from the 1070s, are the Prophets in Sant’Angelo in Formis, near
Capua: O. Demus, Romanesque Mural Painting (New York, 1970), pl. 7.
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is somewhat more common. It appears already in the fifth century, in the
mosaic in the apse of St George, in Thessaloniki, where Christ holds a scroll
bearing a long inscription,” and is found occasionally in the succeeding
centuries: on pre-iconoclastic panel-paintings of the Virgin of Intercession,
of St John the Baptist and Elijah, preserved in the monastery of St
Catherine on Mount Sinai,” and on one of the ivory plaques of the so-called
Grado Chair group, carved with the figure of the Prophet Joel.** From the
tenth century onwards, the Prophets in monumental schemes of decora-
tion, in the eastern Mediterranean, are often represented displaying their
words on large open scrolls.”
It is possible that the idea for the motif was the result of the artists’
acquaintance with Byzantine imagery” but, given its rarity in the west, the
reason for the choice is likely to have been a desire to place special emphasis
on the inscriptions held by the Prophets. The particular significance of the
one text which has been fully reconstructed is not obvious, and it may be
that it was the display of script, the very presence of lines of elegant letters
on white fields, as much as the content of the texts, that interested the
person who devised this scheme of decoration.
Painted inscriptions are also found in early mediaeval graves at San
Vincenzo. A small percentage of the many block-built graves excavated in
various parts of the site had plastered walls and painted decoration. In most
cases the state of preservation was too poor for the schemes of decoration to

#2 R. Hoddinot, Early Byzantine Churches in Macedonia and Southern Serbia (London,

1963), colour pl. VI, pl. 48a; A Grabar, Christian Iconography: A Study of its Origins
(Princeton, 1968), fig. 117.
23K. Weitzmann, The Monastery of Saint Catherine at Mount Sinai: The Icons, I: From the
Sixth to the Tenth Century (Princeton, 1976), catalogue nos. B.4, B.11, B.17.
*4 These ivories are dated by Goldschmidt to the sixth century, and by Weitzmann to the
eighth century: A. Goldschmidt, Die Elfenbeinskulpturen aus der Zeit der karolingischen
und sachsischen Kaiser, 4 vols. (Berlin, 1914-26), IV, no. 121; K. Weitzmann, “The
ivories of the so-called Grado Chair’, DOP 26 (1972), fig. 4.
*° The earliest examples, for which material evidence survives, seem to be the figures of the
four major Prophets on the northern and southern tympana in Hagia Sophia, in Istanbul:
C. Mango, Materials for the Study of the Mosaics of St. Sophia at Istanbul (Washington
DC, 1962), figs. 78, 80, 81, 85, 86. However, to judge from Photius’ dramatic description,
the Prophets in mosaic in the church of the Virgin of the Pharos, in the Great Palace, of 864,
already held up scrolls inscribed with their prophecies: The Homilies of Photius, Patriarch of
Constantinople, English Translation, Introduction and Commentary, ed. C. Mango, DOS
3 (Washington DC, 1958), p. 188; idem, The Art of the Byzantine Empire 312-1453:
Sources and Documents (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1972), p. 186. The type is also
found in manuscript illumination later in the tenth century, in a copy of the Major and
Minor Prophets, in Rome, Vat. Chis. R. VIII.54: K. Weitzmann, Die byzantinische
Buchmalerei des IX. und X. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 1935), pl. XIII, fig. 61.
6 Belting, Studien, pp. 200-2.
4 Inscription flanking the head-niche in a grave at the threshold of
the crypt church, San Vincenzo al Volturno, second quarter of the
ninth century

be reconstructed, but in the two instances in which the painted surface was
preserved on the walls, inscriptions figured prominently on the short wall
surface behind the dead man’s head. One of these, the grave of a young man,
who died in the second quarter of the ninth century, is located before the
threshold of the crypt church. The wall surface surrounding the head-niche
carried an inscription in well-formed red capital letters, ending with the
formula EY VITAM ETERNAM (Fig. 4).’” The inscription is in some of the
finest painted script found at San Vincenzo, although the quality of the
plaster on which it lies is extremely poor. A second painted grave, whose
plastered sides are well preserved, is located under an arcosolium in a
passage which ran beneath the great guest hall at the northern end of the
site. A large cross is painted in the middle of each of the four walls, and the
cross at the head is flanked by the protective inscription: CRVxX XPI CONFVSIO
DIABOLI.” Plastered and painted graves were not uncommon in early
mediaeval Italy, and quite often they bear inscriptions. However, they
appear to have been more common in the north than in the south of the

77 Mitchell, ‘The painted decoration’, p. 158, fig. 6:32.

8 Ibid., figs. 6:33 and 34.
198 John Mitchell
peninsula.” Since the only two such graves at San Vincenzo to retain their
painted decoration bear inscriptions, it seems likely that a high percentage
of them would have been similarly inscribed.
A further category of inscription at San Vincenzo is found on grave-
stones. Some twenty-five of these, most of which are fragmentary, have
survived (Figs. 5 and 6).°° The majority date from the ninth century and are
in variant forms of a single script.*’ The letters are tall and narrow in
proportion and usually set quite closely together. Their individual strokes
are Clearly and deeply cut wtih slanting profiles, which meet at something
approaching a right-angle in the trough, and create a lively play of lighted
and shaded planes. Curving strokes expand and contract quite dramati-
cally, while vertical strokes have almost parallel sides, which expand a little
at their terminals into little wedge-serifs. ‘The bars of letters such as “T’ and
‘E’ are formed of prominent triangular wedges. For the sake of variation and
decoration variant forms of characters are used, for instance ‘A’ with
straight or broken bar, and inscript letters are quite common. These
inscriptions are clear and sharp, decorated with restraint and give an
appearance of ordered, elegant precision. They are distinctly superior in
quality to the general run of funerary inscriptions from early mediaeval
Italy, and show that there was a carefully cultivated tradition of funerary
calligraphy at San Vincenzo in the ninth century.
A number of stones carrying ancient Roman funerary inscriptions were
reused in the construction of churches and monastic buildings at San
Vincenzo, in the building phases of the later eighth and early ninth
centuries (Fig. 7). They were almost always laid so that the inscribed
surface faced outwards or upwards, visible to the passer-by.** Although the

9 Ibid., pp. 158-65; C. Fiorio Tedone, ‘Tombe dipinte altomedievali rinvenute a Verona’,
Archeologia Veneta 8 (1985), pp. 251-88; 7dem, ‘Dati e riflessioni sulle tombe altomedievali
internamente intonacate e dipinte rinvenute a Milano e in Italia settentrionale’, Att: del 10.
congresso internazionale di studi sull’alto medioevo, Milano 26-30 settembre 1983
(Spoleto, 1986), pp. 402-28.
3° A. Pantoni, ‘Epigrafi tombali di S. Vincenzo al Volturno’, Samnium 36 (1963), 14-33;
Panton, Le chiese, pp. 158-70: San Vincenzo al Volturno, ed. Hodges and Mitchell,
frontispiece. The early mediaeval carved inscriptions from San Vincenzo will be described
in the forthcoming Final Report on the excavations.

monuments. |
31 The same script is also found on a number of other small fragments of carved inscriptions,
found at San Vincenzo, which cannot with certainty be identified as deriving from funerary

32 The examples found, to date, are situated in the following locations: in the north wall of the
guest hall; in the refectory, set at the western end of the central spine-wall, forming the base
of the western-most of the sequence of columns which support the roof; in the pavement of a
walkway immediately to the south of the south wall of the refectory; in one of the treads of a
flight of steps climbing up onto the first terrace, immediately behind the west wall of the
 LITERACY DISPLAYED 199
mediaeval masons did not always reuse these ancient gravestones in upright
positions, with their texts correctly oriented, it is clear that they intended
the lines of script to be seen.
There are two further instances of the display of script at San Vincenzo,
both of which are exceptional and remarkable. The first of these are the
inscribed tiles of fired clay with which the floors of the principal rooms,
corridors and porticos of the monastery were paved, and the inscribed roof
tiles used to cover the majority of the buildings (Figs 8, 9, 10 and 11).*
Four types of flooring were employed at San Vincenzo in the building
phases of the late eighth and early ninth centuries. The most prestigious
buildings were paved with small, smooth, shaped sections of marble and
coloured stone laid in repeating patterns — opus alexandrinum. This was
used in the various churches constructed during the period, and in the great
elevated guest hall at the northern end of the complex. Buildings of second
rank were paved with large rectangular clay tiles. The third kind of floor,
which is found in ranges of cells on the lower terraces of the Colle della
Torre, and in other buildings of less significance, is of mortar. The simplest
floors are of compacted earth, and are found in structures of a purely
utilitarian nature, like the workshops. ,
The tiles which compose the second kind of floor, and which concern us,
are of three sizes, all of them large: c. 54X40X4cm; c. 50X36X4cm;
c. 38X30.5xX4 cm. The roof tiles are large tegulae and imbrices, which were
laid in alternating rows to form a continuous covering more or less resistant
to the weather. Both floor and roof tiles were manufactured in one spate of
production during the first phase of building operations which completely
transformed the appearance of the monastery during the years around 800.
The production was extensive, but short-lived. It had evidently ceased by
the time of the following phase of construction, which took place a
generation later. Tiles employed in this later phase were all old ones,
reused.
Some 38 per cent of the floor tiles, and a similar proportion of the
tegulae and imbrices from the roofs, were marked with inscriptions and
decorative motifs before firing. These record the names of over eighty
individuals, almost always in abbreviated form. The names are not evenly
distributed among the tiles. Over 250 examples of one name, VR, have
been found, while of others there are only one or two instances. Sixteen
names are found on both the floor and the roof tiles, and show that both
types were manufactured at the same time. The letters of the inscriptions

assembly room (Fig. 7). These inscriptions will be described and analysed by John
Patterson in the forthcoming Final Report on the excavations.
°3 The tile industry at San Vincenzo will be described in some detail in the Final Report.
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 LITERACY DISPLAYED 201
are large and very legible. On the floor tiles and on the roof tegulae they vary
in height from 2.5 to 48 centimetres, the majority being between about 6
and 25 centimetres tall, while on the smaller arched zmbnices they vary from
2.5 to 8.5 centimetres, with a normal height of about 4 centimetres. The
inscriptions are in letters of sufficient size to attract the eye, even to demand
the attention, of any walking over them.
Only one of the tiles, laid in the floor of the assembly room, is inscribed
with a full name: LIVTPERTI SvM (I am of Liutpertus) (Fig. 8). Other tiles
marked with the name Liutpertus, and all of the other floor and roof tiles,
carry abbrevated forms of names, with one, two, three or four letters. The
abbreviated names include: ALip (Alipertus), ge, GVN, LAN, me, Sa, TEVP
(Teupertus) and vr. Sometimes these inscribed tiles are embellished with
compass-drawn designs of intersecting circles and arcs, or with reiterated
undulating lines which apparently imitate the diagonally veined marbling of
the painted dados of all the principal rooms of the monastery. When found
in situ, the tiles with compass-drawn ornamentation are usually laid in
prominent positions, at the thresholds of doorways, or before important
features, such as the lector’s pulpit in the refectory.
Tiles inscribed in this fashion, and dating from the early middle ages, are
extremely rare. A few late Roman examples bearing abbreviated names in
large letters have been found in Cividale, in the far north of Italy (two of
these are displayed in the town archaeological museum), one dating from
the fifth to the sixth centuries has been found in Naples, and a number of
floor tiles from the church of San Giovanni at Canosa di Puglia carry the
monogram of a sixth-century bishop of Canosa, Sabinus.** The only other
site where quantities of similarly inscribed tiles have come to light in an
early mediaeval context 1s Montecassino. There they have been found both
beneath the eleventh-century church of Abbot Desiderius on top of the
mountain, and in the town below in the church of Santa Maria delle Cinque
Torri, constructed under Abbot Teodemar (778-97) .*° Both groups of tiles
from Montecassino can be dated to the last quarter of the eighth century,
that is, to approximately the same time as the production at San Vincenzo.
Montecassino lies some 30 kilometres to the south-west; the two
** P, Arthur and D. Whitehouse, ‘Appunti sulla produzione laterizia nell’Italia centro-
meridionale tra il VI e XII secolo’, Archeologia Medievale 10 (1983), figs. 3 and 7.
35 E. Scaccia Scarafoni, ‘La chiesa cassinese detta “Santa Maria delle Cinque Torri” ’, Rivista
di Archeologia Cristiana 22 (1946), 186; A. Pantoni, ‘Su di un cimitero alto medioevale a
Montecassino e sul sepolcro di Paolo Diacono’, Atti del 2. congresso internazionale di studi
sull’alto medioevo. Grado 7-11 settembre 1952 (Spoleto, 1953), pp. 260-1; zdem, Le
vicende della basilica di Montecassino attraverso la documentaztone archeologica (Monte-
cassino, 1973), pp. 42, 84, fig. 40; zdem, ‘Santa Maria delle Cinque Torri di Cassino:
risultatie problemi’, Rivista di Archeologia Cnstiana 51 (1975), 252-6, figs. 6and 7; Arthur
and Whitehouse, ‘Appunti sulla produzione laterizia’, 529, fig. 5.
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inta! t throughout the ea ] iddle ages and

h asteries
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nd ibi tf travelled
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incenZo

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ctors who had c towards
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individuals donating particula ! he ates pa
iption recording the
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An
nam h paid
and so
204 John Mitchell
for, would be worked into the mosaic of the floor. Instances of this practice
are to be found at Grado, in the sixth-century pavement of the cathedral and
in the fifth-century floor of the church of Santa Maria.*° However, at San
Vincenzo various factors suggest that the names are likely to be those of the
men who made the tiles, and not those of friends of the monastery who
contributed towards its rebuilding. First, tiles carrying a particular name
are not laid in groups, as one would expect if a benefactor was involved, but
are set among tiles bearing other names, in seemingly random sequence.
Second, the bare record of the name, almost always in abbreviated form,
makes it most unlikely that the names of donors are recorded here. Their
identity would have been forgotten within a generation. Third, the manner
in which a particular name is recorded on different tiles 1s not standard. A
name can be abbreviated in various ways, for instance Liutpertus, which is
abbreviated ‘LI’, ‘Li’, or ‘L’. Fourth, each name, on all the tiles on which it is
found, appears to be by a particular hand. To judge from the script, it does
not seem that any one hand inscribed a number of different names on tiles.
All in all, it seems most likely that it was the makers of the tiles who
inscribed their own names into the clay before firing.
If we are right, and it was the tilers who drew the inscriptions into the
tiles, it is clear that they were literate, at least to the extent of being able to
write their own names. None of the hands responsible for the tiles is
hopelessly unpractised, and some of them appear to be well trained, and
fully conversant with the conventions of contemporary scribal practice — the
abbreviations ‘ge’ (Fig. 11), ‘me’ and ‘sa’ were all written by men well
acquainted with pre-Caroline cursive script. It is most likely that the monks
themselves were the tilers. All would probably have been able to read, many
would have been able to write and some among them would have been
trained scribes. The great number of names, over eighty in all, the
frequent incidence of some and the sporadic and rare occurrence of others,
would be consonant with a situation in which a number of the monks were
detailed to manufacture the tiles, while many of their brethren gave
occasional assistance, or tried their hands at turning out half a dozen items,
each man taking pride in inscribing his name.
A further question is why the men who made the tiles took such pains to
record their names on them. A possible explanation might be that the
inscriptions served to keep a tally of the number of items made by each
individual, perhaps to facilitate the calculation of payment. However, if this
had been the purpose of the names, one would have expected either every
tile to be inscribed, or else every fifth or tenth, or so, so as to keep a record of

3° G. Brusin, Aquileia e Grado: Guida storico-artistica (Padua, 1964), p. 269, fig. 159, pp.
247-8, fig. 143.
 LITERACY DISPLAYED 205
production. And, if it was the monks who made the tiles, it is almost
inconceivable that they would have demanded or received payment.
It is possible that the makers inscribed their tiles as an act of humility and
self-mortification, in the knowledge that their names were destined to be
trodden over by future generations of monks, and by visitors to the
monastery, year in and year out. However, the inscriptions and the
ornamental motifs of the roof tiles, which appear with a frequency more or
less equal to those on the floor tiles, clearly cannot be explained 1n this way.
They would have been fully visible probably only to people engaged on
repairing the roofs of the buildings. Besides, many of the names on the floor
tiles are inscribed with considerable flourish in large characters, and a not
inconsiderable number are grandly framed by undulating lines imitating
the veining of marble, or by elaborate compositions of compass-drawn
circles and arcs. All this is hardly compatible with a desire for self-
abasement and mortification.
The fact that thirty-eight per cent of the floor tiles and many of the roof
tiles bear names, and that there is a very uneven distribution of the
numbers of tiles carrying each name, indicates, on the one hand, a certain
want of system and economy in the production of the tiles, and, on the
other hand, a great interest in, even an infatuation with, writing, and
perhaps also a concern to advertize mastery of the skills of literacy.
Undoubtedly the most exceptional and the most technically elaborate
inscriptions at San Vincenzo were those composed of large gilded metal
letters, which were set up on the fagades of more than one of the principal
buildings of the monastery in the early ninth century. Angelo Pantoni, the
distinguished architect, archaeologist and antiquary of Montecassino,
recognized two limestone slabs which had been reused in the opus sectile
pavement of the Romanesque abbey church of San Vincenzo, constructed
by the Abbots Gerard and Benedict on the new site in the years around
1100, as fragments of the setting of the gilded inscription which their
predecessor Iosue is recorded as having placed on the facade of his own new
basilica of San Vincenzo in the first decade of the ninth century.*” These
two pieces are at present set into the interior wall of the north aisle of the
new abbey church of San Vincenzo, where the full text of the original
inscription has been completed with painted characters (Figs. 12 and 13).
The larger of the two fragments measures 62.7 30.8 cm, the smaller,
1817.5 cm, and both are about 4 cm thick. The first bears the letters RDO,
the second, the remains of the letters Es. The letters themselves are lost, and
what has survived are the shallow sunken settings cut to the shapes of the

37 A. Pantoni, ‘Due iscrizioni di S. Vincenzo al Volturno e il loro contributo alla storia del
cenobio’, Samnium 35 (1962), 74-9; Pantoni, Le chiese, pp. 163-5.
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* Pe 3
ot Iosue, San Vincenzo al Volturno, beginning
inth t

e«
stone. None of these letter-settings is completel reserved, but enough

°>
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ight, that
and 30 centimetres in height, thatis about
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(29.6ci The
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terial of the lett th ] in all babilit ll f
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manner of attachment to the support . he etters are distinctly irregular in

» .ongLJ Pp ’ 4*
execution: ‘O’ is asymmetrical about its vertical axis, and the vertical shaft
O ows out to the leit; and two of them are noticeably un-Koman 1n
design: ‘O’ ts verti ally elongated and faintly ointed, and the leg of ‘R’ hasa
reverse Curve forms which are typical of ninth-century carved and painted
inscriptions trom San Vincenzo. Furthermore, the letters from San

characteristic a feature of ancient Koman monumenta Capita 5. I e set -

”»>ee
tings are also uncnaracteristic o oman WOTK. oman metal letters are
I} it bstantial obj d lie in d ket t into th

* . es a
a

underlying stone support. J hey are secured by means of small rectangular

lugs which project from their rear surfaces and are set 1n lead In correspond-
ing rectangular cuts 1n the floors of the sockets. The letters at San Vincenzo,
ye trast, seem to € pee ery ) sockets 2g omy etwe
and 4 millimetres dee and the were held In lace b round-sectioned ?

rivets which passed right through the thickness of the stone support. ‘This
manner of fixing 1s apparently unparalleled on Koman monuments.
‘neue Ee ICES
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13 Fragment of setting for metal letters, from the inscription of

Abbot Iosue, San Vincenzo al Volturno, beginning of the ninth
century

the pavement of the Romanesque abbey church fit perfectly into the text of
the inscription which is recorded as having been set up in golden letters on
the facade of the abbey church of San Vincenzo, by Abbot Iosue, 1n the first
years of the ninth century:

; oe ; ;
Quaeque vides ospes pendencia celsa vel ima
Vir Domini Josue struxit cum fratribus una.*®

The overall length of the inscription on the front of losue’s San Vincenzo
can roughly be calculated from the two fragments re-used in the floor of new
abbey church. The mean width of a letter, to judge from the three preserved
on the larger fragment, was about 15 centimetres, and the mean interval

38 Chron. Vult., 1, p. 221. The passage in which the erection of this inscription is referred to,
reads as follows: ‘Ita autem virtus Domini cor regis [Louis the Pious] in huius operis amore
convertit, et fratrum devocionem ac laborancium manus iuvit, ut non multo tempore
preclaro opere et maximis columpnis ecclesia levaretur, in cuius ecclesie fronte ita, deauratis
litteris, legebatur: Quaeque vides, ospes, pendencia celsa vel ima, Vir Domini Iosue struxit
cum fratribus una’— “The power of the Lord so affected the heart of the king with love of this
work, and strengthened the devotion of the monks and the hands of the labourers, that ina
short time the church was constructed with outstanding workmanship and with great
columns: and on the facade of this church there could be read, in gilded letters: “Whatever
lofty structures you see here, traveller, extending from low on high, were built by the
servant of the Lord, Iosue, and his brother monks”.’ [ am grateful to Michael Lapidge for
help with this translation.
208 John Mitchell
between them 5 centimetres. Consequently, the length of the inscription
would have been something like 14.5 metres. It is likely that an inscription
of these proportions would have run across the fagade of the nave of the
church, high up, under the base of its gable, in the manner of an inscription
on the front of a Roman temple. The width of the nave of [osue’s church can
roughly be calculated. The overall width of the building is recorded 1n the
Chronicle of the abbey as 16 passus.*? The passus of 5 standard Roman feet
of 29.6 centimetres had a length of 1.48 metres, which if applied to Iosue’s
church would make its overall width 23.68 metres. But in the pre-metric
period the length of the passus varied greatly from area to area. The passus
which seems geographically most relevant to usage at San Vincenzo, one
which is recorded as having been widely used in Campania and southern
Abruzzo, measures 1.846 metres.*” The antiquity of this particular local
standard is uncertain, but local norms of measurement are likely to be fixed
by tradition and to have long ancestries, and it is at least possible that this
one, which was in use in the early modern period, was in origin far older.
The application of this local standard for the passus to the measurements of
the basilica recorded in the Chronicle would give a width of 29.536 metres
for the full church, nave and aisles. Assuming that this passus of 1.846
metres is the one referred to by the chronicler, and assuming that the
proportions of Iosue’s church were similar to those of a contemporary
columnar basilica, whose dimensions are known, San Salvatore in Cassino,
at the foot of Montecassino, in which each aisle was roughly half the width

%° Chron. Vult., 1. p. 221.

*° Various lengths of passus in use in Italy, including the passus of 1.846 metres, are collected
by R.E. Zupko, Italian Weights and Measures from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth
Century (Philadelphia, 1981), pp. 187-8. Pantoni, Le chiese, p. 21, briefly discusses the
lengths of foot and passus current in Italy in the middle ages, in connection with the
dimensions of Iosue’s church, and opts for a short passus, consisting of 5 Liutprandian feet
of 28.5 centimetres each. This would give a width of 22.80 metres for Iosue’s church.
Pantoni’s choice of the Liutprandian foot is determined by his observation that the
dimensions given in the chronicle would more or less accord with those of the rebuilt abbey
church of c. 1100 if calculated on the basis of this standard, and by his belief that this new
edifice, whose dimensions have been recovered by excavation, was constructed directly over
Iosue’s earlier church, and that the two buildings were more or less of the same size.
However, the recent excavations have shown that the site of the new church of San Vincenzo
was not settled by the monks before the late eleventh century, and that Iosue’s church was
almost certainly located at the original site of the monastery on the other side of the river.
Archaeological excavation has so far thrown no light on the dimensions of the earlier
building.
A. Pantoni, citing F. Guillaume, E'ssaz historique sur Vabbaye de Cava (Cava dei Tireni,
1987), p. xiv, also refers to a long passus of 5.5 feet, varying between 1.87 and 1.96 metres,
which he says was widely used in the middle ages. This long passus 1s close in length to the
Campano-Abruzzan passus of 1.846 metres, which we have identified as a possible
candidate for the passus refered to in the Chronicle of San Vincenzo.
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 210 Fohn Mitchell
destruction layer over the garden atrium. The third was picked up on the
surface, on the plain at the south-eastern corner of the Colle della Torre,
immediately in front of the pilastered facade of a prominent structure of c.
800, which has been tentatively identified as Abbot Iosue’s abbey church of
San Vincenzo. However, the settings on these fragments, and those
recovered from the pavement of the Romanesque abbey church by Panton,
_ differ in their cutting and in the diameter of their rivet-holes. The shafts of
the letters of the fragments found in the floor of the new abbey church seem
to have been narrower than those of the second and third fragments found
on the site of the early monastery, and the rivet-holes of the former
fragments have a somewhat wider bore than those found during the
excavations. The settings in the first and second fragments from the old site
are sharply cut with steeply sloping sides. Those of the third fragment and
of the two pieces from the floor of the abbey church are less exact in their
cutting. There is a distinct possibility that different craftsmen were
responsible for these various pieces, and that more than one of the early
ninth-century buildings at San Vincenzo carried inscriptions in large
gilded-copper letters on their facades.
These letter-settings are remarkable on two counts. First, inscriptions of
large metal letters were employed only very rarely in the middle ages, and,
second, the practice of setting monumental inscriptions of any kind up on
the facades of buildings was more or less totally abandoned in late antiquity.
In Roman antiquity, inscriptions in large metal characters had been
common, and had been used, throughout the Empire, in a variety of
contexts, on the facades of temples,‘ on triumphal arches, ** on city gates, **

*2 For example, on the Augustan Maison Carrée at Nimes: R. Amy and P. Gros, La Maison
Carrée de Nimes, 38th supplement to Gallia, 2 vols. (Paris, 1979), I, pp. 177-95, II, pls.
41, 74a, b and c; on the temple in the main square at Assisi, and in Rome, on the Pantheon:
W.L. MacDonald, The Architecture of the Roman Empire, I: An Introductory Study (rev.
edn, New Haven and Connecticut, 1982), pls. 96, 102; on the Temple of Hadrian: E.
Diehl, Inscnptiones Latinae (Bonn. 1912), pl. 17; and on the Temple of Antoninus and
Faustina in the Forum Romanum: R. Cagnat, Cours d’épigraphie latine (Paris, 1914), pl.
XI, 2.
#3 For example, on the Arch of Cottius at Susa: J.E. Sandys, Latin Epigraphy (Cambridge,
1919), p. 122; on that of Augustus at Aosta; and, in Rome, on those of Claudius: E. Nash,
Pictorial Dictionary of Ancient Rome, 2 vols. (rev. edn, London, 1968), I, figs. 106 and 107;
of Titus: Cagnat, Cours d’épigraphie, pl. VIII, 2, Nash, Pictorial Dictionary of Ancient
Rome, I, fig. 143; of Septimius Severus: R. Brilliant, “The Arch of Septimius Severus in the
Roman Forum’, Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 29 (1967), pls. 14, 15a, 16a and
b; and of Constantine: Cagnat, Cours d’épigraphie, pl. XX, 1, Nash, Pictonal Dictionary of
Ancient Rome, I, fig. 112; and on that of Trajan at Benevento: M. Rotili, L’Arco di Tratano
a Benevento (Rome, 1972), pls. III, VII. For comparative illustrations of inscriptions on
arches, see Diehl, Inscriptiones Latinae, pl. 26.
** For example, on the Claudian Porta Maggiore, at Rome: Nash, Pictorial Dictionary of
Ancient Rome, I1, fig. 968; and on the triple gate at Pisidian Antioch, erected by Gaius
 LITERACY DISPLAYED 211
on public buildings,* on the bases of columns and statues“ and even set flat
into the pavements of fora and other public spaces.*” However, metal
inscriptions seem to have gone out of fashion in the fourth century. One of
the last instances of their use on a major monument was on the Arch of
Constantine in Rome, dedicated in 315. For more than thirteen
centuries they almost completely disappeared; and it was not until the
seventeenth century that they began to be reintroduced.*
Apart from San Vincenzo, they are met with only once on an early
mediaeval building: in the framed inscription set high up on the facade of
the Westwerk at Corvey, a late Carolingian structure, erected between 873
and 885.” There, the inscription, which calls on God and his angels to
protect the monastery, is in metal letters 11 centimetres high, four short
lines within a frame 84 centimetres high and 168 centimetres wide. The
script 1s in well-proportioned square classicizing capitals.
The small scale of the letters of two metal-letter inscriptions known from
the twelfth century makes them essentially different in kind from the ones
from San Vincenzo. Abbot Suger, in his Liber de rebus in administratione
sua gesta, and in his Libellus alter de consecratione ecclestae Sancti
Dionysu, records a dedicatory inscription in gilded copper letters, which he
ordered for his new church of St Denis.°’ In the latter work he gives its

Julius Asper, consul in ap 212: D.M. Robinson, ‘Roman sculptures from Colonia Caesarea
(Pisidian Antioch)’, Art Bulletin 9, no. 1, (1926), 45-6, figs. 1 and 67. I owe this reference to
Stephen Mitchell of University College, Swansea.
** For example, on the basilica in the forum at Silchester, in Britain: G.S. Boon, Silchester,
the Roman Town of Coleva (2nd edn, Newton Abbot, 1974), p. 116.
*© For example, on the base of the column of Antoninus Pius, erected in ap 161, now in the
Vatican: Sandys, Latin Epigraphy, p. 128; and an inscription with a dedication to the
emperor Tiberius, from the base of an equestrian monument in the forum at Saepinum, in
the Biferno valley, north of Benevento.
*” For example, the inscription which spans the forum at Saepinum, and the inscriptions on
the dial of the great solanum of Augustus in Rome: E. Buchner, Die Sonnenuhr des
Augustus (Mainz am Rhein, 1982), pls. 134-41, Nachtrag, pls. 1, 3-6.
*8 It appears that it was in Paris, in the mid-seventeenth century, that monumental inscrip-
tions in metal letters were first reintroduced in modern times. Two early examples can be
seen on Lemercier’s portal at the Sorbonne of 1641, and on the facade of the church of the
Val-de-Grace, erected in the mid-1640s (M. Fleury, A. Erlande-Brandenburg and J.-P.
Babélon, Pans Monumental (Paris, 1974), figs. 164, 225. For this information I am
indebted to James Mosley, of the St Bride Printing Library in London, and to David
Thomson, of the University of East Anglia.
9 W. Effmann, Die Kirche der Abtei Corvey (Paderborn, 1929), p. 11, pl. 30,2; Kunst und
Kultur im Weserraum 800-1600, Ausstellung des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen, 2 vols.
(Corvey, 1966), I: Bettrage zur Geschichte und Kunst, p. 20, 11: Katalog, no. 378, p. 645;
H. Thiimmler, Weserbaukunst im Mittelalter (Hameln, 1970), figs. 2 and 32.
°° E. Panofsky, Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St.-Denis and its Art Treasures, ed. G.
 212 Fohn Mitchell
location as super portas ... deauratas, that is, over the golden historiated
doors in the central portal of the west front. Thus it was set low down on the
facade, so as to be readily visible to any person entering the church, and the
letters were probably quite modest in size. This 1s certainly the case with the
mid-twelfth-century metal (leaden?) inscriptions on two brackets support-
ing sculpted groups of figures which flank the west portal of the cathedral at
Termoli, in Molise.
The only other ninth-century phenomenon which is in any way compar-
able to the inscriptions in metal letters at San Vincenzo and at Corvey is a
series of gravestones from Saint-Martin at Tours, of the second quarter of
the century, with legends in lead letters in quite well-formed romanizing
capitals, between 5 and 6 centimetres high, let into the surface of the
stone;>! and a fragment of an epitaph preserved in one of the cloisters at the
abbey of Farfa, which has been identified as that of the Abbot Ingoald, who
died around 830. The latter, which is badly damaged, carried an inscrip-
tion in two lines of metal letters about 10 centimetres high.°°
In setting a great gilded-copper inscription on his new church at San
Vincenzo, Abbot Iosue was clearly reviving Roman practice. His action was
highly original, even idiosyncratic, seemingly without exact parallel in the
years around 800, a period in which interest in Roman antiquity was
becoming more intense in western Europe. Not only the idea of using large
metal letters was taken from Roman usage, but also certain details of the

Panofsky-Soergel (2nd edn, Princeton, 1979), pp. 46-7, 98-9. Paul Williamson, of the
Victoria and Albert Museum; drew my attention to Suger’s accounts of this inscription.
Another instance of the use of metal letters in the twelfth century is to be found in the
prominent inscription which runs round the main entablature of the ciborium over the high
altar in San Nicola in Bari: see C.A. Willemsen and D. Odenthal, Puglha, Terra dei
Normanni e degli Svevi (Bari, 1959), pl. 183.
°! P. Descamps, ‘Paléographie des inscriptions de la fin de l’époque mérovingienne aux
derniéres années du XIle siécle’, Bulletin Monumental 88 (1929), pp. 5-86, pl. II, fig. 2;
M. Vieillard-Troiekouroff, ‘Les Sculptures et les objets préromans retrouvés dans les
fouilles de 1860 et de 1886 a Saint-Martin de Tours’, Cahiers Archéologiques 13 (1962), 112-
13, figs. 33-5; N. Gray, A History of Lettering: Creative Experiment and Letter Identity
(Oxford, 1986), fig. 69.
2 David Whitehouse, of the Corning Museum of Glass, has tentatively identified Ingoald as
the subject of this epitaph.
53 Gray, A History of Lettering, p. 86, apparently refers to this fragment. The metal characters
have been removed by robbers, but the settings give the outlines of rather irregularly
formed classicizing square capitals, with rectangular cuttings to take the fixing lugs. This
inscription, like the well-known epitaph of Ingoald’s successor, Sicardus (C.B.
McClendon, ‘An early funerary portrait from the medieval abbey at Farfa’, Gesta 22/1
(1983), 13-26, fig. 9), has an enframing moulding which does not project to protect the
lettering, as is almost invariably the case with framed classical inscriptions. Instead the
moulding is sunk into the surface of the slab.
 LITERACY DISPLAYED 213
fragmentary inscriptions from San Vincenzo seem to reveal a close acquain-
tance with Roman exemplars.
No complete letter from the San Vincenzo inscriptions survives, but
enough remains of the two fragments which can be certainly associated with
Tosue’s inscription to show that the letters were originally about 29 to 30
centimetres tall. This is close to 1 Roman foot (29.6cm). The precise
measurements of the characters of inaccessible inscriptions on Roman
monuments are hard to come by, but in two instances where I have been
able to ascertain the size of the letters, they are exactly, or close to, 1 Roman
foot in height: the inscription on the front of the Maison Carrée at Nimes,
where the letters of the two-line inscription are precisely 29.6 centimetres
high,>* and the inscriptions on the attic of the Arch of Constantine in Rome,
where they are slightly larger, between 30 and 32 centimetres. It is possible
that the foot-high letter was a size regularly employed on Roman buildings,
and that the measurements of the inscription on Iosue’s church of San
Vincenzo were taken from standard Roman practice.
A second feature of the fragments seems to show that the makers of the
inscription may have taken a particular accessible Roman example as their
model. As was said above, Roman metal letters were usually anchored to
their support by small rectangular lugs which projected from their rear
surface and were set in lead in corresponding rectangular sockets cut into
the stone. The inscriptions from San Vincenzo are remarkable in that they
were held in position by round-sectioned rivets which passed right through
the thickness of the stone support. Occasionally Roman metal letters were
held in place by round-sectioned lugs, or nails. One instance of this is a
gilded bronze letter ‘V’ found at Colchester, which was secured by two nails
which passed through its arms.°° Another inscription with metal letters held
in place by small round-sectioned dowels has been found at a site closer at
hand. This bears a dedication to Tiberius, and comes from the base of an
equestrian statue which stood on the south-west side of the forum at
Saepinum, the Roman town on the road between modern Boiano and
Benevento, about 60 kilometres to the south-east of San Vincenzo.°° The
holes for the dowels do not pass right through the stone slab, but the sockets
for the letters, their copper fillings long-since removed to reveal the small
round holes for attachment, could well have provided the makers of the San

** Amy and Gros, La Maison Carrée de Nimes, 1, pp. 177-95, especially p. 187, and II, pls.
41, 74a, b, and c.
> R.G. Collingwood and R.P. Wright, The Roman Inscriptions of Britain, 1 (Oxford, 1965),
p. 64, no. 198.
°© It is now kept in one of the two small museums at the site.
214 Fohn Mitchell
Vincenzo inscriptions with the idea of using long rivets to tie their letters to
their stone supports.°’
The gilded metal inscriptions from San Vincenzo were remarkable also in
another way. Dedicatory inscriptions in large carved letters are found on the
facades of ancient Roman buildings in all provinces of the Empire. They are
one of the characteristic features of any major Roman settlement. On
mediaeval monuments, however, they are very rare indeed. As was the case
with metal letters, so also the practice of setting a large carved inscription on
the facade of a building was abandoned in late antiquity; and the tradition
was not revived until the middle of the fifteenth century, when Leone
Battista Alberti ran the dedicatory inscription, in large Roman capitals,
across the facade of his temple, the Tempio Malatestiano, at Rimini.*®
In mediaeval Italy the normal position for an inscription recording the
foundation or dedication of a church was outside, immediately over or
flanking one of the principal doors, or inside, usually in the main apse. The
few cases in which an inscription of large letters was set in a prominent
position high up on the front of a building are instructive. There are only a
handful of instances. The first are the inscriptions on the front and on the
side-porches of the Tempietto sul Clitunno, near Spoleto. This is a small
Christian oratory, constructed by the local Lombard aristocracy, probably
in the second half of the seventh century, but so classicizing in its form and
ornamentation, and using Roman spolia so successfully, that Palladio
published it as an ancient temple,°’ and modern scholars have sometimes
been tempted to date it centuries too early.©? The inscription which runs
across the front of the building under its main pediment is in elegantly cut
romanizing capitals, 15 centimetres tall. The reason for the extraordinary
classicizing appearance of this building has never been satisfactorily
explained. But the inscriptions play a crucial role in the Roman language of
its architecture.°’ A second instance of a large inscription on the front of an
early mediaeval church is on the cathedral at Salerno, which was con-

°” To judge from the published photographs, the letters of the inscriptions at Corvey may also
have heen held in place by small round dowels, rather than by rectangular lugs: Thiimmler,
Weserbaukunst 1m Mittelalter, fig. 32.
8 L.H. Heydenreich and W. Lotz, Architecture in Italy 1400 to 1600 (Harmondsworth,
1974), fig. 19; A. Bartram, Lettering in Architecture (London, 1975), figs. 15 and 16.
°? A. Palladio, J quattro libri dell’architettura, 8 vols. (Venice, 1570), IV, pp. 98-102.
© The most recent publication on the Tempietto, in which the earlier literature is cited, is /
dipintt murali e l’edicola marmorea del tempietto sul Clhitunno, ed. G. Benazzi (Spoleto,
1985).
61 The inscriptions on the Tempietto sul Clitunno served as the inspiration for the ones on the
facades of two other twelfth-century buildings in the vicinity, the cathedral at Foligno, and
the church at Bovara.
 LITERACY DISPLAYED 215
secrated in July 1084. This also runs directly beneath the gable of the
facade, and is in large and carefully designed Roman capitals. These record
that Robert Guiscard paid for the construction of the building from his own
purse. Robert, who in 1084 had entered Rome, liberated the pope, Gregory
VII, and had driven out the emperor Henry IV, is given the title:
ROBBERTVS DVX. R. IMP. MAXIM(V)S TRIVMPHATOR, which has been com-
pleted ‘Robbertus Dux Romani Imperii Maximus Triumphator’.© Robert
is identified as a triumphator of or over the Roman Empire, and this may
have been the reason for the decision to lay the inscription across the front of
the building, in imitation of ancient Roman imperial usage. Prominent
inscriptions were also set on the facades of three churches of the late twelfth
and the early thirteenth centuries: in elegant carved letters on the archi-
traves of the porches of Ss. Giovanni e Paolo and San Giovanni in Laterano,
in Rome, and in mosaic on the arch and porch on the front of the cathedral
of Civita Castellana. All three were the work of Roman marmorari, who, in
a broad climate of reform, drew heavily on ancient Roman and early
Christian architecture and sculpted ornament.”

62 FE. Bertaux, L’Art dans I’Italie méridional (Paris and Rome, 1903), p. 318; M. de Angelis,
Nuova guida del Duomo di Salerno (Salerno, 1937), pp. 23-5; A. Carucet, // Duomo dt
Salerno e il suo Museo (Salerno, 1962), p. 27; H. Bloch, Monte Cassino in the Middle Ages,
3 vols. (Rome, 1986), I, p. 83. A. Thiery, in his commentary on Bertaux’s text in the
Aggtornamento dell’opera di Emile Bertaux sotto la direzione di Adriano Prandi (Rome,
1978), p. 554, seems to have the wrong inscription in mind. Bertaux, L’Art dans l’Italie,
stated that the inscription was not put up in the eleventh century, but did not give his
reasons.
© Carucci, J] Duomo di Salerno, p. 27; Bloch, Monte Cassino in the Middle Ages, 1, p. 83 n. 2.
The full text of the inscription runs as follows: ‘M(atthaeo) a(postolo) ET EvA(n)GELISTAE
PATRONO VRBIS ROBBERTVS DVX. R(Omani?) IMP(eril?) MAXIM(U)S TRIVMPHATOR DE AERARIO
PECVLIARI .

°* The implications of the titles given to Robert Guiscard in the inscription are obscure. They
may refer to his entry into Rome and his effective victory over the recently crowned
emperor, Henry IV. However, if the inscription is later than the consecration of the
cathedral, as Bertaux believed, the titles may be no more than a fanciful tribute to the great
duke who was responsible for its rebuilding. For Robert’s activities in the 1080s, see: F.
Chalandon, Histoire de la domination normande en Italie et en Sicilie, 2 vols. (Paris, 1900),
I, pp. 258-84; H.E.J. Cowdrey, The Age of Desiderius: Montecassino, the Papacy, and the
Normans in the Eleventh and Early Twelfth Centunes (Oxford, 1983), pp. 136-76.
65 ‘The porch of the Lateran basilica, which was demolished in the early eighteenth century,
bore the name of the mason Nicolaus de Angelo, and the porch of Ss. Giovanni e Paolo has
been attributed to the same master. Both were erected probably around 1180. The
inscriptions on the central arch of the porch of Civita Castellana give the names of master
Iacobus and his son Cosmas and the date 1210. The work of the Roman marmoranz is the
subject of an excellent recent book, which covers the subject in exhaustive detail: P.C.
Claussen, Magistri Doctissimi Romani: Die romischen Marmorkunstler des Mittelalters
(Stuttgart, 1987), pp. 22-6, fig. 17 (San Giovanni in Laterano), pp. 32-3, figs. 35, 36 (Ss.
 216 Fohn Mitchell
It is clear that not only the gilded metal letters, but also the very presence
of a long dedicatory inscription on the facade of the abbey church of San
Vincenzo, were extraordinary in an early mediaeval context. In both aspects
of the inscription, specific reference is made to imperial Roman practice.
The ninth-century visitor to San Vincenzo would have been confronted
by script wherever he looked. As he approached the monastery, his eye
would have been caught by the great inscription set high up on the front of
the principal church, glinting golden in the sunlight. Once inside the
complex, tztul: accompanying painted images would have spoken to him
from every wall, and as he entered the assembly room the line of Prophets,
almost life-size, would have cried out to him the words written on their long
scrolls.°° Walking through the rooms, his feet touched script at almost every
step, the names of the tilers written on the tiles in large letters. Periodically
he would come across an ancient Roman funerary inscription incorporated
into the new monastic structure, and in the areas reserved for the burial of
the monks stone slabs carved with epitaphs in the incisive and elegant script
practised by the monastery’s masons were set into the floor over the
individual inhumations. If our traveller’s visit had happened to coincide
with the burial of one of the members of the community, just before the
grave was closed he would probably have caught a glimpse of a protective
formula written 1n neat capitals on the plaster behind the deceased man’s
head. The quantity of lettering at San Vincenzo, the care which was taken
over it, and the variety of the media and forms in which it was executed, are
remarkable.
The various means of exhibiting script employed in the churches and the
other buildings derive from disparate traditions. It would appear that a
purposeful effort was made by the men coordinating the expansion and the
reconstruction of the monastery to feature lettering of various kinds on a

Giovanni e Paolo), pp. 82-91, figs. 98, 99, 103, 104 (Civita Castellana). Good illustrations
of the inscription on the porch of Ss. Giovanni e Paolo are to be found in Bartram, Lettering
in Architecture, figs. 11-14. The revival of Roman and early Christian types and motifs in
Rome in the late eleventh and the twelfth centuries is briefly discussed by Claussen,
Magistn Doctissimi Romani, pp. 239-41), and at some length by R. Krautheimer, Rome:
Profile of a City, 312-1308 (Princeton, 1980), pp. 161-202.
6 A vivid reference to the mute utterances of imaged Prophets is given by the late ninth-
century patriarch of Constantinople, Photius, in his description of the church of the Virgin
of the Pharos, in the Imperial Palace at Constantinople. It is most likely that the texts he
records were written on scrolls held up by the figures on the walls of the church: ‘A choir of
apostles and martyrs, yea of prophets, too, and patriarchs fill and beautify the whole church
with their images. Of these, one (King David), though silent, cries out his sayings of yore,
“How amiable are they tabernacles, O Lord of hosts! My soul longeth, yea, even fainteth in
the courts of the Lord”; another (Jacob), “How wonderful is this place; this is none other
but the house of God” ’ (The Homilies of Photius, ed. Mango, p. 188; idem, The Art of the
| Byzantine Empire, p. 186).
 LITERACY DISPLAYED 217 |
wide selection of differing supports, some of which would have been quite
novel to a contemporary observer. The effect of this would have been to
arouse curiosity and interest and to focus attention sharply on the written
word.
The one thing that is missing 1n this manifold production of script 1s the
scriptorium and the manuscripts written by the monks. It is most
unfortunate that not a single eighth- or ninth-century manuscript can be
assigned with absolute certainty to San Vincenzo.°’ The community at this
time was a large one, and it is very likely that there was an active scriptorium
at the monastery.® Indeed, what we know of the life and work of one of its
most distinguished members, Ambrose Autpert, presupposes the avail-
ability, and probably also the production, of books. Autpert, who acted as
abbot for a brief spell in the late 770s, was a renowned theologian who had
composed a commentary on the Apocalypse and mariological homilies, as
well as an account of the foundation of the monastery and of the lives of the
three founders.® From his own testimony we know that he had spent his
adult life at San Vincenzo and had been educated there.”
One early book has been associated with San Vincenzo. This is a copy of
the Gospels, in the British Library (Add. 5463), known as the Codex
Beneventanus.’' The connection with San Vincenzo is based on two things:
on the name ‘patris Aton’, who is recorded in the colophon as having
commissioned the manuscript, and who has been identified with the Ato
who was abbot of San Vincenzo in the mid-eighth century (739-60) ; and on
the demonstrable presence of the book, in the tenth century, in a house
subject to San Vincenzo, the convent of San Pietro in Benevento. The

°’ It is not until the eleventh century that there is fairly conclusive evidence for book
production at the monastery. The Chronicle records that Abbot Ylarius (1011-45) had
books made for the newly restored church of San Vincenzo (Chron. Vult., III, pp. 77-8);
and there is a late eleventh-century manuscript, containing liturgical offices and prayers,
now in the Vatican Library, cod. Chig. D.V.77, which was made for use at San Vincenzo
(L. Duval-Arnould, ‘Les Manuscrits de San Vincenzo al Volturno’, in Una grande abbazia
altomedievale, ed. Avagliano, pp. 362-5); but compare McKitterick, below, p. 316.
68 For the size of the community at San Vincenzo in the late eighth and the ninth centuries, see
n. 1, above.
6? J. Winandy, Ambroise Autpert moine et théologien (Paris, 1953); C. Leonardi, ‘Spiritualita
di Ambrogio Autperto’, Stud: medieval: 3rd series 9 (1968), 1-131.
70 Winandy, Ambroise Autpert, pp. 14-16. For the significance of the Apocalypse in relation to
the display of script, see McKitterick, below, pp. 314-18.
1 E.A. Lowe, Scriptura Beneventana, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1929), I, no. iv; C. Nordenfalk, Vier
Kanonestafeln eines spatantiken Evangelienbuches (Goteborg, 1937), passim; idem, Die
spatanttken Kanontafeln (Goteborg, 1938), pp. 177-8, pls. 52-7; CLA II, 162; D.H.
Wright, ‘The canon tables of the Codex Beneventanus and related decoration’, DOP 33
(1979), pp. 133-55; Duval-Arnould, ‘Les Manuscrits de San Vincenzo al Volturno’, pp.
354—60.
218 Fohn Mitchell
manuscript is elegantly produced, with text in an expert uncial, colophons
in alternating lines of red and black capitals, and canon tables which are
either a reused sixth-century set, or else exact copies of a sixth-century
exemplar.” If the association with San Vincenzo is correct, the Codex
Beneventanus would provide clear evidence of a high level of scribal
practice at the monastery as early as the middle of the eighth century.
However, the scripts found in the manuscript, the uncial of the main text
and the capitals of the incipits and explicits have almost nothing in common
with the scripts used in the first half of the ninth century for painted,
carved, incised and cast metal inscriptions at the monastery.’? One explana-
tion for this could be that the scribes working in the scriptorium were
trained in completely different traditions from those followed by the
painters, masons, tilers and metalsmiths; another could be that a new type
of capital script was introduced in the late eighth century.”* A third
possibility, of course, is that the Ato named in the colophon is not the same
man as the Abbot Ato, and that the Codex Beneventanus was not written at
San Vincenzo.
The context for the display of script at San Vincenzo al Volturno in the
last decades of the eighth and the first half of the ninth centuries is to be
found in the great increase in the practice and use of writing, and the
enhanced status it attained, in western Europe, during this period. Begin-
ning in the last quarter of the eighth century, manuscripts were produced in
considerably greater numbers than had been the case in the preceding 200
years. A new ‘lower case’ script, caroline minuscule, was devised, and
quickly adopted by nearly all the major scriptoria of Continental northern
Europe; ancient scripts — Roman square capitals and rustic capitals — were
revived, redesigned and used in new contexts and new combinations; and
the old book-hands, uncials and half-uncials, were adapted to conform to
” According to current scholarly opinion, the canon tables, with their elegant marbled
columns, carefully depicted capitals and rich vocabulary of late antique ornament in the
arches, are not mediaeval but are a reused sixth-century set: H. Belting, ‘Probleme der
Kunstgeschichte Italiens im Friihmittelalter’, Frihmittelalterliche Studien 1 (1967), 104;
Wright, “The canon tables of the Codex Beneventanus’, passim. See Duval-Arnould, ‘Les
Manuscrits de San Vincenzo al Volturno’, pp. 358-9. However, the last word on this matter
has probably not yet been said.
73 Reproductions of script from the Codex Beneventanus have been published by Wright,
“The canon tables of the Codex Beneventanus’, ills. 1-5, 9, 10, 12-15.
% This explanation does not find support in the one example of eighth-century script that has
been found in the recent excavations at San Vincenzo, a tombstone with the epitaph of a
monk, Ermecausus. The bowed members of the letters of this inscription have the peculiar
exaggerated swellings which are occasionally found in ornamental display capitals in
manuscripts from both Italy and north of the Alps in the second half of the eighth century.
There is no trace of anything resembling this script in the Codex Beneventanus. Erme-
causus’ epitaph will be described and illustrated in the forthcoming Final Report on the
excavations.
 LITERACY DISPLAYED 219
new concepts of harmonious design. Scribes and illuminators tried out new
ways of laying out their texts, and experimented tirelessly with display
scripts and with the ornamented initial letter, a phenomenon which had its
origins in Roman scribal practice, but which had been developed in new
directions in the British Isles, and simultaneously also in scriptoria in
Merovingian Francia.”
It was the Carolingians who exploited script and the written word most
fully. Charlemagne was particularly concerned to promote correct usage 1n
speech and writing, and wanted schools to be established in monasteries and
episcopal seats throughout his realm, for the purpose of teaching the basic
skills of literacy, grammar, the study of literature, the rudiments of music
and computus .’° Writing was employed by the Carolingians for eminently
practical purposes. Under Charlemagne it came to be used in many areas of
the day-to-day administration of the realm, ’’ and the emperor made full use
of the church, with its educated and literate clergy and its network of
communications, in the governing, administration and defence of his far-
flung territories. In the monastic scriptoria the skills of reading and writing
were developed to facilitate the study and editing of scripture and the
copying and dissemination of texts. But writing also had strong symbolic
associations. First, the written word was closely identified with the
Christian faith. Christianity was preeminently the religion of the Word of
the Book, and Charlemagne was a devout Christian, concerned to streng-
then the church within his Empire. Second, literacy and the widespread use
of writing in all spheres of life had been among the most salient character-
istics of ancient Roman civilization. Carolingian scribes employed late
antique scripts and artists looked for example to late antique traditions of
ornamenting books, at the same time that scholars read ancient texts with
attention and writers imitated the Roman poets and historians, and while

® For a discussion of the varieties of display script employed in Carolingian scriptoria, see the
chapter by McKitterick in this volume, below, pp. 301-4; and for the early development of
the decorated initial letter: C. Nordenfalk, Die spatantiken Zierbuchstaben, 2 vols.
(Stockholm, 1970); J.J.G. Alexander, The Decorated Letter (London, 1978), pp. 8-11; O.
Pacht, Book Illumination of the Middle Ages (London and Oxford, 1986), pp. 45-54, 63-76.
7© See, in particular, the circular letter, De Litteris Colendis: H.R. Loyn and J. Percival, The
Reign of Charlemagne: Documents on Carolingian Government and Administration
(London, 1975), pp. 63-4; P.D. King, Charlemagne: Translated Sources (Kendal, 1987),
pp. 232-3; and paragraph 72 of the capitulary of 789, known as the Admonitio Generalis :
King, Charlemagne, p. 217, ed. MGH Cap. I, nos. 29 and 22, pp. 78—9 and 52-64, at pp.
59-60.
” FL. Ganshof, ‘Charlemagne et l’usage de l’écrit en matiére administrative’, Le Moyen Age
57 (1951), 1-25, reprinted in translation in his The Carolingians and the Frankish
Monarchy (London, 1971), pp. 125-42. Compare Nelson, below, pp. 258-96, and
McKitterick, Carolingians, pp. 23-75.
220 Fohn Mitchell
their ruler assumed the Roman imperial title and established a fixed
residence at Aachen in the manner of a Roman emperor. Third, literacy and
the use of writing were restricted to an elite, largely, but not exclusively,
made up of monks and clerics.’® Script, with its connotations of communi-
cation and administrative control, of access to religious truth and ancient
wisdom, of education and literary achievement, was an extremely potent
and visible symbol of political and cultural dominance. Anyone with
pretensions to power in the ninth century made sure he had the allegiance
and the service of subjects who practised the skills of literacy.
The revival of interest in literacy, the uses of writing and the study of
literature was not confined to northern Europe in this period. To a more
limited degree, a similar revival had taken place in the Lombard kingdom in
northern Italy, in the first half of the eighth century, and subsequently in
the duchy of Benevento in the south.” Significant developments in script
were also taking place in southern Italy during this period. It was in the
second half of the century, perhaps in the scriptorium at Montecassino, that
the characteristic and distinctive Beneventan script, the littera beneven-
tana, first made its appearance.”
Similarly, the prodigal display of painted imagery and decoration at San
Vincenzo in the late eighth and ninth centuries has to be understood in the
context of the rapidly increasing production and exploitation of visual
imagery in the Carolingian Empire during this period. The experiments
and inventions in Carolingian painting between the 790s and the middle of
the following century are among the most astounding developments 1n the
history of western art. Frankish artists, with only the most rudimentary
native tradition to draw on, established norms of naturalistic figurative
representation and canons of ornamentation, which determined some of the
broad paths painting and sculpture in northern Europe were to follow for
the following 400 years. ‘The most successful inventions came out of ateliers
associated with the royal court, or located in the great monasteries which
enjoyed royal patronage and were controlled by abbots or bishops who kept

8 This assertion should now be modified considerably in light of the evidence presented by
McKitterick, Carolingians, especially pp. 77-134, 211-70.
7 M. L. W. Laistner, Thought and Letters in Western Europe A.D. 500 to 900 (new edn, Ithaca,
New York, 1966), pp. 268-71; G. Cavallo, ‘La trasmissione dei testi nell’area benevento-
cassinese’, Settimane 12 (Spoleto, 1975), 360-8; zdem, ‘Aspetti della produzione libraria
nell’ Italia meridionale longobarda’, in Libr e lettori nel medtoevo: guida storica e critica,
ed. zdem (Bari, 1983), pp. 101-12; zdem, ‘Libri e continuita della cultura antica in eta
barbarica’, in Magistra Barbantas: I barbari in Italia, ed. G.P. Carratelli (Milan, 1984),
pp. 603-62, at pp. 635-51.
8° For the earliest phases of the Beneventan script, see E.A. Lowe. The Beneventan Script,
second edition revised and enlarged by V. Brown, Sussidi Eruditi 33, 2 vols. (Rome, 1980),
I, pp. 40, 93-121; and Belting, Studien, p. 4.
 LITERACY DISPLAYED 221
close ties with the emperor: the Court School,®*' and the small group of
contemporary artists who produced the Coronation Gospels of
Charlemagne now in Vienna, the scriptorium which flourished for twenty
years at Hautvillers under the episcopate of Ebbo of Rheims,® the scrip-
torium at Tours under the Abbots Adalhard and Vivian,*™ and that at Metz
under Bishop Drogo,” to name the most prominent centres. The produc-
tion of illuminated manuscripts increased enormously in this period, and to
judge both from documentary evidence and from the meagre and fragmen-
tary remains that survive, churches, palaces and other public buildings
received more extensive and magnificent schemes of painted decoration
than had been the case in the preceding centuries.*°
There was a revival of pictorial decoration also in Italy during the later
eighth and the first half of the ninth centuries. This occurred in various
parts of the country: in Rome, where, after a caesura of 200 years, churches
were once again sumptuously adorned with mosaics and paintings;*’ in the
old Lombard north, where there is considerable evidence of wall-paintings
of the highest quality, best preserved in Santa Maria in Valle at Cividale®
and in San Salvatore at Brescia;®? and in the south, at Benevento, in the
palace church of Santa Sophia.”
The reference to Roman imperial precedent so clearly expressed in the
monumental inscription in gilded metal letters on the facade of the main

31 W. Koehler, Die karolingischen Miniaturen, 5 vols. (Berlin, 1930-82), II: Die Hofschule
Karls des Grossen.
8 Koehler, Die karolingischen Miniaturen, III: Erster Teil: Die Gruppe des Wiener Kroénungs-
Evangeliar. Zweiter Teil: Metzer Handschniften.
83 J. Hubert, J. Porcher and W.F. Volbach, Carolingian Art (London, 1970), pp. 92-123;
C.R. Dodwell, Painting in Europe, 800 to 1200 (Harmondsworth, 1971), pp. 30-3.
$# Koehler, Die karolingischen Miniaturen, I: Die Schule von Tours.
85 Koehler, Die karolingischen Miniaturen, III.
86 See my article, ‘Excavated wall-paintings in Germany, England and Italy: a preliminary
survey, in Early Medieval Wall-Painting and Painted Sculpture in England, ed. S.
Cather, D. Park and P. Williamson, BAR, British Series 216 (Oxford, 1990), pp. 123-33.
87 Krautheimer, Rome: Profile of a City, pp. 109-42.
88 H. L’Orange and H. Torp, ‘I] Tempietto longobardo di Cividale’, in Acta ad archaeolo-
giam et histoniam artium pertinentia, Institutum Romanum Norvegiae 7, 3 vols. (Rome,
1977).
8° G. Panazza, ‘Gli scavi, l’architettura e gli affreschi della chiesa di S. Salvatore in Brescia’,
Atti dell’ottavo congresso di studi sull’arte dell’alto medioevo, 2 (1962); B.B. Anderson,
‘The frescoes of San Salvatore in Brescia’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of
California, Berkeley (Ann Arbor microfilms, 1976); A. Peroni, ‘Problemi della decorazione
pittorica del S.Salvatore di Brescia’, in Seminario internazionale sulla decorazione pit-
torica del San Salvatore di Brescia, Brescia 19-20 giugno 198] (Pavia, 1983), pp. 17-46.
°° Belting, Studien, pp. 44-53.
222 John Mitchell
church of San Vincenzo, and also apparent in some aspects of the pictorial
decoration of the monastery,”! is also in line with the cultural preoccupa-
tions of the age. Scribes and artists both north of the Alps and in Italy drew
extensively on Roman imperial and late antique early Christian models for
patterns and ideas. In part this phenomenon of cultural retrospection
stemmed from a politically and ideologically grounded concern with
antique, particularly early Christian, precedent, which was shared by the
Carolingian emperor, the pope and by other contemporary rulers, in their
different ways.” However, perhaps equally important was the continuing
existence, in the eighth and ninth centuries, of great numbers of ancient
monuments and artefacts, which, with their powerful associations with a
great imperial civilization of the past, would have provided early mediaeval
artists with a spectacular and enormously various exemplary range of
naturalistic imagery and ornament.
San Vincenzo was open to influence both from Lombard Benevento to
the south and from the Franks to the north, and in the later eighth century
there were strong Lombard and Frankish factions in the community.” The
monastery stood in Lombard territory, quite close to the border between
the Beneventan principality and the southern frontier of the Carolingian
Empire, which after 774 extended down to a point well south of Rome.
Throughout the first two centuries of its existence, San Vincenzo had close
connections with the Lombard court in Benevento, and with the Lombard
aristocracy of the region.”* It had been founded in the first decade of the
eighth century, by three Beneventan nobles; the majority of its abbots and a
considerable proportion of its monks were of Lombard origin, and
throughout the eighth and ninth centuries it continued to enjoy the support
and benevolence of the rulers of Benevento and of local Lombard land-
owners.” The monastery came to possess extensive property in Beneventan

*! The most prominent antique motif in the painted decoration is a pattern of overlapping
parti-coloured tiles used on some of the benches running round the walls of the assembly
room, which were constructed and decorated in the years around 800. This design had been
common and widespread in antiquity, but it appears to have been almost unknown in the
early middle ages. ‘The only other instance of its use in early mediaeval Italy is to be found at
Farfa, in the crypt at the western end of the first abbey church, and probably dates to the
830s, when Sicardus was abbot. See Mitchell, “The painted decoration’, pp. 143-4.
% P.E. Schramm, Kaiser, Rom und Renovatio (4th edn, Darmstadt, 1984), pp. 9-43;
Krautheimer, Rome: Profile of a City, pp. 109-42.
3 For the Lombard faction in the monastery, see M. del Treppo, ‘Longobardi Francie papato
in due secoli di storia vulturnese’, Archivio storico per le provincie napoletane NS 24 (1955),
SOff.

™ Belting, Studien, pp. 226-7.

> Chron. Vult., passim.
 LITERACY DISPLAYED 223
territory and in the city of Benevento itself, and Arichis II (758-87) had
placed two of his most prestigious foundations, San Salvatore in Alife, and
San Pietro, outside the walls of Benevento, both female houses, under the
jurisdiction of San Vincenzo.”°
However, the new Carolingian rulers of Italy also took an interest in San
Vincenzo. Charlemagne, in a diploma of 787, issued at the request of the
Abbot Paul, confirmed the possessions of the monastery, allowed it the
privilege of electing its own abbot, and granted it immunity from lay
interference.’ There was one occasion on which he intervened directly in
the affairs of the monastery. In 783 the abbot, Poto, a Lombard, was
accused by one of the Frankish faction of refusing to join the community in
chanting the customary psalm, Deus in nomine tuo saluum me fac, for the
safety and health of the Frankish king. When report of this was brought to
Charlemagne, he ordered that Poto be suspended, summoned to Rome, and
tried before a papal court of enquiry, to find out the truth of the allegation.
In the event, Poto was acquitted of the charge, but was required to take an
oath of allegiance to the king, and ten monks, drawn from both factions of
the community, were commanded to attest under oath to his innocence.
The monks requested leave from the pope to go to Charlemagne himself.
Whether they took the oaths, and what the outcome of the matter was, is not
recorded. However, this affair shows on the one hand, that Charlemagne
was concerned to preserve his name and honour at San Vincenzo, and, on
the other, that both Frankish and Lombard interests were strongly
represented in the monastery, and that relations between the two factions
were by no means always harmonious.”
The monk John, who composed the Chronicle of San Vincenzo in the
second quarter of the twelfth century, makes a lot of this Carolingian
connection and has much to say about the interest of Charlemagne and his
successors in the monastery and the love which they bore it. He tells how
Josue (792-817), the abbot responsible for the reconstruction of the main
abbey church of San Vincenzo, was of royal blood, and had been educated
at the royal (Carolingian) court, and goes on to claim that Iosue’s sister was
the first wife of Charlemagne’s son and successor as emperor, Louis.”

© Ibid., 1, pp. 135, 348-9, 170. See Belting, Studien, p. 227.

%” Chron. Vult., 1, pp. 212-15.
°° The evidence for the affair of Poto is contained in two letters from Pope Hadrian to
Charlemagne, preserved in the Codex Carolinus: MGH Epp. merov. et karol. |} (=MGH
Epp. III). 66 and 67, pp. 593-7. See del Treppo, ‘Longobardi Franci e papato’, 50-4; O.
Bertolini, ‘Carlomagno e Benevento’, in Kazl der Grosse, I: Persénlichkeitt und Geschichte
ed. H. Beumann (Diisseldorf, 1965), pp. 625-31; Belting, Studien, pp. 226-7.
Chron. Vult., 1, p. 219.
224 Fohn Mitchell
According to the chronicler, Louis, as Augustus and successor to
Charlemagne as emperor, together with his wife, visited San Vincenzo
twice, on the second occasion for the dedication of Iosue’s church, which 1s
recorded as having taken place in 808. The imperial couple are said to have
presented the monastery with many gifts, and at the request of the abbot
and the monks consigned to it an ancient temple in Capua with its great
columns, to provide a source of building-material for the new church.'”
The chronicler’s chronology is seriously awry. None of these claims can be
substantiated today, many seem unlikely, and some are demonstrably
untrue. One has to be extremely sceptical of everything the chronicler says
concerning Charlemagne’s and Louis’ involvement with San Vincenzo,
since it has been demonstrated that John forged a number of the diplomas
confirming possessions and granting privileges to the monastery, which
purport to have been issued by the two rulers.’’' Nevertheless, the
chronicler’s fabrications contain a nucleus of truth, and they may well have
been fanciful and disingenuous elaborations on a tradition, current among
the monks, of substantial Carolingian intervention in the affairs of the
monastery in the decades following Charlemagne’s annexation of Lombard
northern Italy in 774.
During the period in question, it was the Carolingians, above all others,
who exploited painting and script as two potent and visible symbols of their
authority, their power and their presence. The excavations at the monastery
of San Vincenzo al Volturno have provided a rare opportunity of observing
how a large and enterprising religious community, situated in a highly
sensitive location, in the border marches between Carolingian and Bene-
ventan territory, deployed these cultural symbols to its own advantage.
Painted decoration and prominent inscriptions not only gave the monastery
an air of splendour and superiority, but they also doubtless served to attract
the interest of benefactors from the region, whose support was vital to the
continued prosperity and success of the community. The paintings, which
were to be seen in almost every room at San Vincenzo, and the prodigal

100 Ibid., pp. 220-1.

10! Charlemagne did not die, and Louis did not succeed him as emperor, until 814. Federici, in
his edition of the Chronicle, draws attention to the difficulty of reconciling the chronicler’s
account of Louis’ visits to San Vincenzo with what is known of his itinerary and of events at
the monastery during the relevant years (zbid., p. 220 n. 2, and p. 221 n. 1, 225 n. 1). Of the
four diplomas in the Chronicle ostensibly issued by Charlemagne in favour of San
Vincenzo, Federici judges three to be later falsifications (see zbid., pp. 140 n. 1, 183 n. 3,
186-7 n. 3, 211 n. 3, 212-13 n. 3), and of the four issued by Louis, one is a forgery (zbid.,
pp. 223-4 n. 2, 233-4 n. 1, 289 n. 49, 309 n. 1). The interest allegedly shown by the
Carolingian rulers for San Vincenzo is a theme which recurs throughout the Chronicle, for
instance in the account of the eighth-century abbot and theologian, Ambrose Autpert
(ibid., pp. 177-92).
 LITERACY DISPLAYED 225
display of writing, in inscriptions of every kind in all parts of the complex,
reveal the abbot and the monks as masters of an apparatus of cultural
control, which was being developed and deployed by the most aggressive
and successful powers in the contemporary world.'””

Postscnpt
After this article was consigned to the editor, Professor Paolo Delogu drew
my attention to the dedicatory inscription from the facade of Arechis II’s
palace-chapel at Salerno, S. Pietro a Corte.'°’ This inscription, part of
which came to light during excavation in 1987, consisted of gilded bronze
letters, about 16 cm tall, which are very closely related, both in their design
and in the manner of their fixing, to the characters of Abbot Iosue’s great
gilded metal inscriptions at San Vincenzo. Arechis’ inscription must
antedate those at San Vincenzo by at least a quarter of acentury. There can
be little doubt that it was either this inscription at Salerno, or a similar one
on a contemporary structure elsewhere in the Lombard principality of
Benevento, which served both as the inspiration and as the direct model for
Iosue’s gilded metal tztuli. The origins and the cultural context of the
display of script at San Vincenzo al Volturno in the early ninth century will
have to be reconsidered 1n the light of this recent find at Salerno.
102 For information, comment and help of various kinds, I should like to thank David
Abulafia, Julian Brown, Guglielmo Cavallo, Cathy Coutts, Paolo Delogu, Eric Fernie,
Andrew Hanasz, Sandy Helsop, Richard Hodges, Ernst Kitzinger, Michael Lapidge,
Stephen Mitchell, Victoria Mitchell, James Mosley, Christopher Norton, Barry Singleton,
David Thomson, Paul Williamson and, of course, Rosamond McKitterick.
103 M.P. and P. Peduto, ‘Chiesa di San Pietro a Corte’, Passaggiate Salernitane, 3 (Salerno,
1988), 20-6, at 25-6; zdem., ‘Un accesso alla storia di Salerno: stratigrafie e materiali
dell’area palaziale longobarda. 1. La costituzione del documento archeologico e la sua
interpretazione stratigrafica’, Rassegna Storica Salernitana, 10 (1968), 9-28, at 13, fig. 1;
M. Galante, ‘Le epigrafi’, zbtd., 44-5, at 42-5; P. Peduto, ‘Nel mondo dei ‘Longobard1’,
Archeo, 57 (November, 1989), 116-19, at 119.
 9

Royal government and the

written word in
late Anglo-Saxon England
————
Simon Keynes

Whatever is transacted by men of this world to endure for ever

ought to be fortified securely with ranks of letters, because the
frail memory of men in dying forgets what the writing of letters
preserves and retains. !
Such statements extolling the advantages of the written record are quite
commonly found in the proems of Anglo-Saxon charters, from the seventh
century to the eleventh;* nor should the fact occasion any surprise, for it is
only to be expected that those responsible for drafting and writing the
charters themselves would wish to advertize the benefits of their own
labours. It is a different matter, however, whether this appreciation of the
value of the written word extended into any of the other routine procedures
of Anglo-Saxon royal government: one might ask, for example, whether
written documents had a part to play in the formulation and publication of
royal law, and more generally in the operation of legal processes; or whether
kings came to depend to some extent on written documents for conveying
messages and instructions to others, including their officials in the locali-
ties; or whether information was transmitted from one official to another, or
from any official back to the king, by the same means; or whether use was
made of the written word in such matters as the assessment and collection of
taxes, the performance of military services and the administration of royal
estates. In addressing some of these questions it might be useful to glance
initially across the Channel, before proceeding to survey the evidence which
A version of this paper was read at a symposium on Literacy and Society in Early North-
Western Europe 400-1200, held under the auspices of the University of Copenhagen in May
1987.

' Froma charter of King £thelred the Unready, dated 995: Sawyer no. 883 (=EHAD no. 118).
* Several examples happen to be included in EHD: Sawyer no. 1164 (=EAD no. 55); Sawyer
no. 88 (=EHAD no. 66); Sawyer no. 1257 (=EHD no. 77); Sawyer no. 362 (=EHD no. 100);
Sawyer no. 773 (=EHD no. 113); Sawyer no. 832 (= EHD no. 115); and Sawyer no. 951
(=EHD no. 131). Many others could be cited.

226
 ROYAL GOVERNMENT AND THE WRITTEN WORD (227
bears more directly on the use made of the written word in late Anglo-Saxon
royal government.
In his study of “The use of the written word in Charlemagne’s administra-
tion’, Ganshof provided a most effective demonstration of the extent to
which Charlemagne and his agents had recourse to written documents in
conducting the affairs of the Frankish realm.’ He made a basic distinction
between those documents which originated in the palace, and those which
were issued by the king’s agents: among the former, a further distinction is
made between those drawn up for the king’s own purposes and those issued
to the king’s agents for their purposes (whether handed directly to them or
despatched from the palace to the localities); among the latter, Ganshof
distinguished between those used by the agents themselves for their own
purposes and those which took the form of reports or returns addressed by
them to the king. Ganshof illustrates the distinctions by copious reference
to the corpus of Charlemagne’s capitularies, adducing examples of written
agenda for deliberations at general assemblies, minutes of these delibera-
tions, instructions arising from the deliberations for the guidance or
direction of the king’s agents, reports or returns sent to the king by his
agents in the localities, and so on. He also remarks on Charlemagne’s
attempts to codify and supplement the laws of the various peoples under his
sway, and on the king’s or emperor’s insistence that ‘tudices are to judge
justly in accordance with the written law, not at their discretion’.* Ganshof
was careful to emphasize that the use of the written word in Charlemagne’s
administration was not without its imperfections and failings, and that the
practices of the late eighth and ninth centuries were not maintained
thereafter; but while it would be plainly mistaken to think in terms of a
government articulated by all the paraphernalia of a modern bureaucracy,
we are left with a striking picture of what might be attempted and of what
could be achieved by royal government in the early middle ages.°
So how far does Anglo-Saxon royal government match up in this respect

> F.L. Ganshof, ‘The use of the written word in Charlemagne’s administration’, in his The
Carolingians and the Frankish Monarchy (London, 1971), pp. 125-42.
* Capitulare missorum generale (802), ch. 26, in MGH Cap. I, no. 33, p. 96, trans. P.D. King,
Charlemagne: Translated Sources (Kendal, 1987), pp. 233-42, at p. 239, and H.R. Loyn
and J. Percival, The Reign of Charlemagne: Documents on Carolingian Government and
Administration (London, 1975), no. 16, p. 76. Compare Annales Laureshamenses, s.a. 802
(trans. King, Charlemagne, p. 145).
> For more recent studies of this subject, see Rosamond McKitterick, ‘Some Carolingian law-
books and their function’, Authonty and Power: Studies on Medieval Law and Government
Presented to Walter Ullmann on his Seventieth Birthday, ed. Brian ‘Tierney and Peter
Linehan (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 13-27; R. McKitterick, The Frankish Kingdoms under the
Carolingians, 751-987 (London, 1983), pp. 98-103; and McKitterick, Carolingians, pp.
23-75. See also King, Charlemagne, pp. 33 and 35—6, and Nelson, below, pp. 258-96.
228 Simon Keynes
to Carolingian government? One might say that the organization of the
coinage in tenth-century England establishes the credentials of Anglo-
Saxon government as nothing if not capable of a high degree of administra-
tive ‘sophistication’,® but does it live up to what might therefore be our
expectations in the use of the written word? Pronouncements on this subject
in the past ten years or so have tended to push in different directions. Thus
Campbell has taken the line that the processes of late Anglo-Saxon govern-
ment generated various kinds of written record, particularly in the vernacu-
lar, and in this connection he cites examples of hidage lists, estate surveys,
records of services owed for specific purposes, and administrative letters.’
Wormald, on the other hand, has preferred to play down such evidence for a
degree of ‘pragmatic literacy’ in pre-Conquest England, and the level of lay
literacy which it might seem to imply. In particular, he has addressed
himself to the problem of later Anglo-Saxon legislation, with far-reaching
results. He does not, of course, deny that Anglo-Saxon laws existed in
written form, but he does question the status of the extant written texts in
relation to the process of law-making, and their function in relation to the
administration of justice. Thus, while King Alfred’s code was drawn up in
written form, it was exceptional in this respect, and represented more of an
attempt to express the king’s ideological aspirations than to provide his
judges with a practical work of reference.® As regards tenth- and eleventh-
century legislation, what counted was the king’s oral pronouncement of the
law, and many of the extant written texts were more in the nature of
‘minutes of what was orally decreed, rather than statute law in their own
right’ ;’ put another way, ‘it may have been the verbum regis rather than the
written text which gave it the force of law’,’° and ‘even in later Anglo-Saxon

© For an authoritative survey of the tenth-century coinage, see C.E. Blunt, B.H.I.H. Stewart
and C.5.8. Lyon, Coinage in Tenth-Century England from Edward the Elder to Edgar’s
Reform (Oxford, 1989).
’ James Campbell, ‘Observations on English government from the tenth to the twelfth
century’, in his Essays in Anglo-Saxon History (London, 1986), pp. 155-70, at pp. 157-8;
idem, “The significance of the Anglo-Norman state in the administrative history of western
Europe’, in ibid. pp. 171-89, at pp. 173-5 and 178; and zdem, ‘Some agents and agencies of
the late Anglo-Saxon state’, in Domesday Studies, ed. J.C. Holt (Woodbridge, 1987), pp.
201-18, at pp. 214-15.
® Patrick Wormald, ‘Lex Scripta and Verbum Regis: \egislation and Germanic kingship, from
Euric to Cnut’, Early Medieval Kingship, ed. P.H. Sawyer and I.N. Wood (Leeds, 1977),
pp. 105-38, at pp. 115-25, 132~3 and 135.
° Patrick Wormald, ‘@thelred the lawmaker’, Ethelred the Unready: Papers from the
Millenary Conference, ed. David Hill, British Archaeological Reports, British series 59
(Oxford, 1978), pp. 47-80, at p. 48.
0 Patrick Wormald, “The uses of literacy in Anglo-Saxon England and its neighbours’, TRHS
5th series 27 (1977), 95-114, at 111.
 ROYAL GOVERNMENT AND THE WRITTEN WORD 229
England, formal royal law-making may have remained oral, and our texts
may be more in the nature of ecclesiastical records of decisions taken than
legislative acts in themselves’.'' Thus (as I understand it), tenth- and
eleventh-century legislation was not formally promulgated by the king in
written form, and those who produced the texts were doing so on their own
initiative and for their own purposes, and might have felt free (because
there was no such thing as a ‘definitive’ written code) to vary their texts from
what originally had been orally decreed. Clanchy has demonstrated how
increasing use was made of written documents for various purposes in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, represented by the notion of the ‘take-off?
of literacy after 1066;'* but while he acknowledges that ‘administrative
documents were certainly used in late Anglo-Saxon England’, he does
question the extent of their use, and concludes that England seems unlikely
to have been ‘governed by a bureaucracy using documents in its routine
procedures before 1066’.'* The most recent pronouncements on the subject
are those of Loyn: he recognizes the existence of a royal secretariat or
writing-office capable of producing charters and writs in some significant
quantity, but he also remarks that ‘acts of government in the tenth century
tended to be oral’, instancing law-making as an activity in which ‘nine times
out of ten the actual recording in writing was left in a surprisingly casual way
to ecclesiastics and to individual or local enterprise’. '*
The contrast, in Clanchy’s terms, between the tenth century and the
thirteenth is certainly striking, and cannot simply be explained away as a
function of the presumed loss of hypothetical documents in greater number
from the earlier period; but aeroplanes must taxi before they take off, and it
remains an open question when the taxi-run began. For the purposes of this
paper I intend initially to consider the role of written documents in the
publication and enforcement of royal law in the tenth and eleventh
centuries; and thereafter I shall discuss the more general question of the
level of ‘pragmatic literacy’ during the same period, so that the evidence of
royal legislation may take its place in the wider context of the extent to

'! Ibid., 112. See aso Hanna Vollrath, ‘Gesetzgebung und Schriftlichkeit: das Beispiel der
angelsachsischen Gesetze’, Historisches Jahrbuch 99 (1979), 28-54; like Wormald, Voll-
rath plays down any connection between the promulgation of law and the written word, not
least because it presupposes some degree of lay literacy and the existence of a body of royal
scribes capable of producing the requisite number of copies of the law-codes (neither of
which she seems willing to accept).
'2M. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066-1307 (London, 1979).
'3 Ibid., pp. 16-17. Dr Clanchy tells me that this statement will be modified in the second
edition of From Memory to Written Record, which he has in hand.
4 H.R. Loyn, The Governance of Anglo-Saxon England 500-1087 (London, 1984), pp.
106-18.
230 Simon Keynes
which late Anglo-Saxon government and administration were dependent on
the use of the written word.”
The most natural point of departure for such an exercise 1s the concluding
chapter of Asser’s Life of King Alfred, in which Asser gives some account of
the king’s personal intervention in the legal affairs of his realm.'® Asser
describes how the people frequently disputed the judgements given by
ealdormen or reeves in their local assemblies, and how in such cases the
matter might be referred to the king for adjudication. He also describes how
the king was in the habit of investigating nearly all judgements made by
others, and how, if Alfred considered them to be unfair, he would ask the
judges (either directly, or through a trusted agent) to explain the reasons for
their judgement. If the judges claimed that they had not known any better
in the circumstances, the king would rebuke them for their dereliction of
duty, and would threaten to deprive them of their office unless they applied
themselves forthwith to the pursuit of wisdom. So it came about that ‘nearly
all the ealdormen and reeves and thegns (who were illiterate from child-
hood) applied themselves in an amazing way to learning how to read,
preferring rather to learn this unfamiliar discipline (no matter how
laboriously) than to relinquish their offices of power’; and if any one of them
was slow on the uptake, the king insisted that he find someone else to help
him by reading out books in English ‘by day and night, or whenever he had
the opportunity’.'” Asser’s remarks may create the impression that the king
was concerned that his officials should acquire divine wisdom in particular —
in other words, that the literacy which Alfred required of his officials was
intended to be more in their cultural than in his ‘pragmatic’ interests; as
Wormald remarks, the king’s conception of wisdom was ‘something moral
and religious, and had very little to do with administrative expertise’.'®
Knowledge of divine wisdom and the exercise of secular power were
certainly inseparable in Alfred’s eyes, whether in his own case as king or in
the case of his officials; but if Asser focusses on the one aspect of the scheme

'S Anglo-Saxon law-codes are cited from Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, ed. F. Liebermann, 3
vols. (Halle, 1903-16); see also The Laws of the Earliest English Kings, ed. F.L.
Attenborough (Cambridge, 1922), and The Laws of the Kings of England from Edmund to
Henry I, ed. A.J. Robertson (Cambridge, 1925). The following abbreviations are used in
references to chapters of particular codes: Alf. (Alfred), Edw. (Edward the Elder), As.
(4thelstan) and Edg. (Edgar).
'© Asser, ch. 106: see Asser’s Life of King Alfred, ed. William Henry Stevenson (Oxford,

(translation). ,
1904), pp. 92-5 (text), and Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge, Alfred the Great: Asser’s
‘Life of King Alfred’ and Other Contemporary Sources (Harmondsworth, 1983), pp. 109-10

'7 It is not entirely clear whether the idea was to help the person learn how to read for himself,
or whether it was to provide him with a permanent service.
18 Wormald, ‘Uses of literacy’, 107.
 ROYAL GOVERNMENT AND THE WRITTEN WORD 231
which would have been most dear to his own and to the king’s heart, the king
himself may have been conscious of other advantages as well.
Asser’s remarks clearly indicate that King Alfred regarded an ability to
read English as an essential requirement for all those of his subjects who
were in positions of authority, so that they might be the better qualified to
discharge the responsibilities of their respective offices, and the better able
to pass informed and appropriate judgements in legal proceedings. The
question remains: what were the vernacular texts which the ealdormen,
reeves and thegns were expected to read? Alfred was, of course, instrumen-
tal in the translation from Latin into English of certain books which he
considered ‘the most necessary for all men to know’, as part of his grand
design for the revival of learning in England.” The translations seem to
have been intended for use 1n the school which the king had established for
training the youth of his kingdom 1n reading and writing, for in the letter to
his bishops, which he circulated with copies of his translation of Pope
Gregory’s Pastoral Care, Alfred alluded to his provision of translations as 1f
it were specifically a part of the process by which ‘all the free-born young
men now in England’ would be educated until such time as they were able to
read English writings properly.“° Thus any practical benefits of King
Alfred’s educational programme would not be felt until the opening decades
of the tenth century and thereafter, when the youth of his day had become
the next generation of royal officials. One has to assume, however, that at
least some of King Alfred’s generation of officials would have studied the
translations in the course of their own pursuit of wisdom, whether by
reading them for themselves or hearing them read by others.
Another text which King Alfred’s officials must have been expected to
read was the king’s law-code, and indeed it is this text, more than any other,
which would have instilled in them the knowledge of that kind of wisdom
necessary for the proper discharging of their duties.*! One should
emphasize that the code was conceived as a written text, for the king
remarks in his preamble how he had ‘ordered to be written’ (awntan het)
many of the laws which his forefathers observed, and how he had not
presumed ‘to set down in writing’ (on gewnit settan) many of his own;” and
while there can be little doubt that a degree of political ideology lies behind
its production, it is difficult not to believe that it was intended to serve a

'? See Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred the Great, pp. 28-36.
20 Ibid., p. 126; for the school itself, see Asser, ch. 75 (Life of Alfred, ed. Stevenson, pp. 57-9
(text), and Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred the Great, pp. 90-1 (translation)).
“1 For the text of Alfred’s law-code, see Gesetze, ed. Liebermann, I, pp. 16-123; see also
Laws, ed. Attenborough, pp. 36-93 (with translation).
22 AIF Intr. 49.9.
232 Simon Keynes
practical purpose as well. Alfred’s ‘judges’ would certainly have had much
to gain from a perusal of the long opening section of the code, which
comprises extracts from the Book of Exodus (including the Ten Command-
ments), followed by material derived from the Acts of the Apostles,
showing how the Mosaic Law was modified for application to Christian
peoples; and whatever the code’s shortcomings as a work of practical
reference, one can but imagine that they would have found much 1n it to
their general advantage.”
The crucial question is whether copies of King Alfred’s law-code were
multiplied by the king’s scribes and then distributed to the ‘judges’
throughout his realm, in the same manner as copies of his translation of
Pope Gregory’s Pastoral Care were circulated to the bishops; and also,
whether the ‘judges’ were expected to have recourse to Alfred’s code when
deciding upon their judgement in a given case. It is impossible for the
Anglo-Saxonist to match the several examples of ninth-century Carolingian
manuscripts which contain collections of laws and capitularies, and which
appear actually to have belonged to royal officials responsible for the
administration of justice in a particular locality; but is this significant, or
merely unfortunate? In the case of King Alfred’s code, all one can say 1s that
it survives (in whole or in part) in six manuscripts, representing at least four
different routes of descent from a common archetype; and there is textual
evidence for other copies now lost.” The earliest of the surviving manu-
scripts dates from the second quarter of the tenth century, and the rest date
from the eleventh and twelfth centuries; and while none has the appearance
of a working copy, all attest in their different ways to an interest in Alfred’s
legislation which was sustained over many years. Nevertheless, one should
certainly not rule out the possibility that copies of Alfred’s code were quite
widely disseminated in the tenth century, and that the king’s ‘judges’ were
expected to be familiar with the wisdom and guidance which it contained.
King Edward the Elder issued an injunction to his reeves to the effect ‘that
you pronounce such judgements as you know to be most just and in
accordance with the law-book’ (det ge deman swa nhte domas swa ge
rihtoste cunnon, 7 hit on Oeere dombec stande).”° One might be tempted to

*3 For general comments on Alfred’s code, see H.G. Richardson and G.O. Sayles, Law and
Legislation from A:thelberht to Magna Carta (Edinburgh, 1966), pp. 15-16; J.M. Wallace-
Hadrill, Early Germanic Kingship in England and on the Continent (Oxford, 1971), pp.
148-9; and Allen J. Frantzen, King Alfred (Boston, Mass., 1986), pp. 11-21.
24 See McKitterick, ‘Some Carolingian law-books’, and idem, Carolingians, pp. 23-75.
*5 See Gesetze, ed. Liebermann, III, pp. 30-2, and Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred the Great,
pp. 303-4.
6 I Edw. Prol.
 ROYAL GOVERNMENT AND THE WRITTEN WORD 233
regard this as merely an echo of Charlemagne’s insistence that ‘1udices are to
judge justly in accordance with the written law, not at their discretion’, were
it not for the occurrence of several other references to the domboc in tenth-
century Anglo-Saxon legislation, in contexts which make it clear that the
reference 1s indeed to the composite law-code of King Alfred (composite in
the sense that it incorporates a copy of King Ine’s legislation, as well as
material culled from other sources). Thus Edward the Elder decreed that a
man who breaks the oath and pledge which the whole nation has given ‘is to
pay such compensation as the law-book prescribes’ (bete swa domboc
teece),*’ an apparent reference to A/f. 1, on the need for every man to keep
his oath and pledge; and he also decreed that one who harbours a fugitive ‘is
to pay such compensation as the law-book says’ (bete swa seo domboc
seecge),*8 with reference to Ine 30 or Alf. 4. King Aithelstan decreed that
anyone found guilty of breaking into a church ‘is to pay such compensation
for it as the law-book says’ (bete be bam pe sio domboc secge),”? with
reference to A/f. 6. And still later in the tenth century, King Edgar decreed
that all churchscot shall be rendered by Martinmas ‘under pain of the full
fine which the law-book prescribes’ (be bam fullan wite be seo domboc
teecd),*® with reference to Ine 4, and that Sunday shall be observed as a
festival from noon on Saturday until dawn on Monday ‘under pain of the
fine which the law-book prescribes’ (be bam wite be seo domboc tacd),*'
with reference to Ine 3. In short, we may not have the dog-eared copies of
King Alfred’s code which the judges actually used, but tenth-century kings
certainly issued laws which presupposed that copies of the code were widely
available and that their judges were able to refer to them.
King Alfred’s law-code was not the only legal document produced during
his reign. The treaty between Alfred and Guthrum is ostensibly a record of
oral agreements made between the two parties and confirmed on a particular
day by the swearing of oaths.** It is copied twice in a manuscript written c.
1100: one version occurs near the beginning of the manuscript and the other
near the end, and while both represent fundamentally the same text, their
separation, and the slight differences between them, imply that they were
derived by the copyist from quite different exemplars.*? The differences

7 TI Edw. 5. 8 Ibid., 5.2. 9 IT As. 5. 3° TI Edg. 3. | [bid., 5.

** For the text of the treaty, see Gesetze, ed. Liebermann, I, pp. 126-9; see also Laws, ed.
Attenborough, pp. 98-101, and Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred the Great, pp. 171-2 and
311-13.
33 CCCC 383, pp. 6 and 83-4: see N.R. Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-
Saxon (Oxford, 1957), no. 65, and Mary P. Richards, ‘The manuscript contexts of the Old
English laws: tradition and innovation’, Studies in Earlier Old English Prose, ed. Paul E.
Szarmach (Albany, NY, 1986), pp. 171-92, at pp. 181-4. The compiler of the collection of
law-codes now represented by CCCC 383 seems to have derived his copies of the treaty from
234 Simon Keynes
between the two surviving versions of the text should be capable of some
explanation. The (slightly fuller) version near the end of the manuscript
seems the more ‘official’ of the two, in the sense that it 1s closer to the issuing
authority; note, for example, the use of the first person, as in the reference
to ‘our’ boundaries and in the formula ‘we all declared’.** The (slightly
shorter) version near the beginning of the manuscript appears, on the other
hand, to have been intended for or copied by a party other than those
directly involved, if only to judge from the reference to ‘their’ boundaries
and from the formula ‘they all declared’. Moreover, in the ‘official’ version
the boundary is said to go ‘up the Thames’, whereas in the other version it is
said to go ‘along the Thames’, as if the latter version, while plainly derived
from the ‘official’ text, was re-cast from the point of view of someone already
on the Thames, perhaps in London.* Perhaps I press the evidence (such as
it is) too far, but it would appear that the surviving versions of the treaty
descend ultimately and independently from written texts presumably
drawn up at the time the oaths were sworn, and that these texts had been
made for the benefit of the various parties concerned. One should add in this
connection that further treaties were concluded with Scandinavian settlers
in the early tenth century, and that (though now lost) they were certainly
available to interested parties in written form: when King Edward the Elder
decreed that the compensation for harbouring a fugitive should be in
accordance with the domboc, if the offence were committed in his own
kingdom, he added that it should be in accordance with the ‘written treaties’
fridgewritu) if the offence were committed in the ‘east’ or in the ‘north’.°°
There is further evidence for the use of the written word in the routine
processes of law during the reign of King Edward the Elder. The ‘code’
known as I Edward 1s of special interest insomuch as it 1s an injunction
addressed by the king specifically to all his reeves, as opposed to a more
general record of legal pronouncements emanating from deliberations of the

a source or sources other than the early eleventh-century collection which lies behind much
of the material in CCCC 383 (and which also underlies the collection of law-codes in the
twelfth-century Textus Roffensis (Maidstone, Kent County Records Office DRc/R1; Ker,
Catalogue, no. 373)).
4 Alfred and Guthrum, | and 5. One should add that it is the more ‘official’ version which is
represented in the early twelfth-century compilation known as Quadmnpartitus, which
comprises Latin translations of a large number of Anglo-Saxon law-codes (see Leges Hennici
Pnmi, ed. L.J. Downer (Oxford, 1972), pp. 12-28).
3° A ‘London’ copy of the treaty would not be out of place in CCCC 383, which seems to have
come from St Paul’s. For further discussion of the treaty itself, see D.N. Dumville, “The
Treaty of Alfred and Guthrum’, in his Wessex and England from Alfred to Edgar
(Woodbridge, forthcoming).
© J] Edw. 5.2, probably referring to the peace established by King Edward with the East
Angles and the Northumbrians, at Tiddingford in 906.
 ROYAL GOVERNMENT AND THE WRITTEN WORD 235
king and his councillors; besides instructing the reeves to make judgements
in accordance with the ‘law-books’ (dombec), the king indicates in what
other respects he wishes legal procedures to be properly observed. There is
no internal evidence as to the form of its promulgation, and one might
assume that the surviving texts depend on an ‘unofficial’ record of an oral
pronouncement. But in the code known as J] Edward, which is a record of
the king’s pronouncements to his councillors at Exeter, we find a reiteration
of Edward’s injunctions on the proper treatment of repeated breaches of
another man’s rights (as in J Edw. 2.1): a man who thus misbehaves ‘is to
pay compensation as has been previously written’ (bete swa hit beforan
awriten is),°’ with the clear implication that King Edward’s injunction to
his reeves had been issued to them in written form.
It is the corpus of legislation associated with the name of King Aéthelstan
which provides the most remarkable evidence for the role of the written
word in the publication and enforcement of Anglo-Saxon law.*® Wormald
characterized this material as ‘so heterogeneous in form, that the king
appears in three codes in the first person, in two in the third person, and in
one in the second’,”’ and he suggested that ‘each of the codes owes its
survival in its extant form to the archives not of the king, but of Archbishop
Wulfhelm at Canterbury, who was clearly closely involved in their promul-
gation, and may even have been responsible for their written composi-
tion’.*? One has to say that the so-called ‘codes’ of King A:thelstan are only
heterogeneous insofar as they vary from a norm which 1s itself spurious:
modern editors, for the sake of convenience, have branded a group of
legislative texts from AXthelstan’s reign as (the Ordinance on Charities and)
I-VI Aithelstan, implying that they constitute a sequence of royal codes,
when in fact they are texts which differ substantially in origin, status and
nature; moreover, two of the ‘codes’ (// A'thelstan and VI Atthelstan) are
clearly composite in their received form, combining material derived from
texts of different type, and adding further to the semblance of heterogeneity.
I Atthelstan and the so-called Ordinance on Chanties are injunctions
addressed by the king specifically to his reeves; both are cast in the first

7 Ibid., 1.3, assuming that this is not merely a local reference to | Edward, which was
probably copied immediately before J] Edward in the manuscripts behind those which
survive (CCCC 383, the Textus Roffensis, and Quadnpartitus).
8 For Athelstan’s legislation, see Gesetze, ed. Liebermann, I, pp. 146-83, and Laws, ed.
Attenborough, pp. 122-69. See also Richardson and Sayles, Law and Legislation, pp. 18—
20, and H.R. Loyn, “The hundred in England in the tenth and early eleventh centuries’, in
Bntish Government and Administration, ed. H. Hearder and H.R. Loyn (Cardiff, 1974),
pp. 1-15, at pp. 4-7.
% ‘Wormald, ‘Lex Scripta and Verbum Regis’, pp. 118-19.
#9 Wormald, ‘Uses of literacy’, 112.
236 Simon Keynes
person, and in each the king declares himself to be acting with the advice of
Archbishop Wulfhelm and other bishops. In/ 4thelstan, the king requires
of his reeves that they render tithes from his own property, adding that the
bishops, ealdormen and reeves should do likewise in respect of their
property as well; the reeves are further instructed to ensure that church
dues are properly paid, and not to render to the king any more than what is
legally owed to him.*' In the Ordinance on Charities, the king instructs each
of his reeves, from two of the king’s rents, to supply a destitute Englishman
with provisions every month and with clothing every year, and to free one
penal slave per year, on pain of a fine of 30 shillings (which would itself be
shared among the poor on a given estate).** Both injunctions appear to
emanate from meetings of the king and his bishops, and it is not clear in
what form (oral or written) they were conveyed to the reeves themselves;
but if Edward the Elder issued a specific injunction to his reeves in writing,
there is no reason to doubt that King #thelstan was capable of doing the
same. Indeed, the composite V/ 4thelstan incorporates what appears to be
an injunction addressed by the king to the officials of the shire-courts,
threatening the reeves in particular with loss of office (and a fine) if they
failed to perform their appointed tasks ‘as I have commanded and as it
stands in our writings’ (swa ic beboden hebbe, 7 on urum gewritum stent).*
One cannot produce from Anglo-Saxon England anything quite as explicit
as the letter sent by Charlemagne’s mssz to the counts, admonishing them
to re-read their capitularies and to bear in mind what they have been orally
charged to do (ut capitularia vestra relegatis et quaeque vobts per verba
commendata sunt recolatis), urging them to seek guidance from the miss1
should they not understand any of the instructions which Charlemagne had
given them either in writing or orally (quod vobts domni nostn aut scribendo
aut dicendo commendatum est), and telling them to read the letter often and
to keep it safe (ut zstam epistolam et saeptus legatis et bene salvam faciatis),
‘that you and we may use it as evidence to see whether you have or have not

*! The vernacular text of /£thelstan is preserved in CCCC 201 (Ker, Catalogue, no. 49B) and
in BL Cotton Nero A. i (bid. no. 164), both of which are associated with Wulfstan,
archbishop of York; see Richards, ‘Manuscript contexts’, pp. 176-81. There is a Latin
translation of the code in Quadmnpartitus.
*2 The Ordinance on Charities is preserved only in Latin translation, in Quadnipartitus.
There may, incidentally, be some connection between the issuing of this ordinance and
specific terms in two of King Atthelstan’s charters: on 24 December 932, at Amesbury
(Wilts. ), the king granted an estate to his thegn Alfred, conditional upon the daily feeding of
120 poor (Sawyer no. 418), and on 11 January (933), at Wilton (Wilts.), he granted an estate
to his thegn Wulfgar, conditional upon the annual feeding of ten poor on 1 November
(Sawyer no. 379, spurious in its received form, but evidently based on an authentic text).
8 VI As. 11. If not a reference to such documents as J Aithelstan and the Ordinance on
Charities, this would presumably be a reference to full codes such as I] Athelstan.
 ROYAL GOVERNMENT AND THE WRITTEN WORD 237
acted in accordance with what is written in it’;** but the analogy suggests
that letters sent by the king to his reeves should not stretch the limits of
credibility.
I] Asthelstan and V A:thelstan are the only texts in the corpus associated
with King Athelstan which appear to be records of legislation enacted at
meetings of the king and his councillors, intended for general publication.*
According to its epilogue, // 4thelstan was promulgated in the great
meeting at Grately, in the presence of Archbishop Wulfhelm and all the
councillors whom the king had been able to assemble.*° It is an impressive
piece of legislation (though not comparable in conception or scale with King
Alfred’s law-book), and leaves one in no doubt as to King Athelstan’s
determination to confront the problems of maintaining social order: after
ranging over a variety of offences and procedures, it concludes with a firm
declaration to the effect that the king’s reeves must implement what has
been decreed, and with a statement of the escalating scale of penalties for
repeated breaches of the law.*’ It seems, however, that the king had some
difficulty in enforcing his will. For V £thelstan, promulgated in a sub-
sequent meeting at Exeter, was expressly framed in response to the
perceived disregard of all that had been done at Grately, and again one
senses the king’s determination to bring the people (and not least his own
reeves) to heel; this code ends with an order that God’s servants in every
minster shall sing fifty psalms every Friday ‘for the king, and for all who
desire what he desires’.*® Both I] 4:thelstan and V A:thelstan are cast in the

* Capitula a missis dominicis ad comites directa (806), Prol., and chs. 4 and 7, in MGH Cap.
I, no. 85, pp. 183-4, trans. King, Charlemagne, p. 259.
*S The two codes occurred together in the (burnt) Cotton Otho B. xi (Ker, Catalogue, no.
180); see Richards, ‘Manuscript contexts’, pp.174—-5. They may also have occurred together
in the early eleventh-century collection of laws which lies behind CCCC 383 and the Textus
Roffensis ; the text of 1] A'thelstan in CCCC 383 breaks off in J] As. 6, owing to loss of leaves,
and one can only assume that a text of V4'thelstan followed. Latin translations of both codes
occur in Quadnipartitus.
*© I] As. Epil. ; this epilogue occurs only in the Latin translation of the code in Quadnpartitus.
*7 TT As. 13-18 (which include Athelstan’s legislation on the coinage) seem to have been
interpolated into the code as originally conceived; but the section occurs in all of the
surviving versions, and was probably present in it as originally issued. /// As. 8 appears to
refer back to J] As. 15. IJ As. 26 (on swearing a false oath) seems to have been added to the
codes as an afterthought.
*8 There may, again, be some connection between the issuing of this order and specific terms
in two of King #thelstan’s charters: on 24 December 932, at Amesbury (Wilts.), the king
granted an estate to Shaftesbury Abbey, conditional upon daily prayers for the king (Sawyer
no. 419), and on 26 January 933, at Chippenham (Wilts.), he granted an estate to Sherborne
Abbey, conditional upon annual prayers for the king on 1 November (Sawyer no. 422; see
also Sawyer no. 423). Compare above, n. 42. The appearance of such clauses requiring
charitable acts (from lay beneficiaries) or prayers for the king (from religious houses)
238 Simon Keynes
first person, and are ostensibly records of oral pronouncements; we cannot
hope to know by whom they were drafted, and in themselves they afford no
clues as to the means of their.dissemination. It should be said, however, that
the references in tenth-century legislation to the ‘law-book’ (domboc) of
King Alfred need not be taken to imply that later laws were not issued in
written form; the distinction is between a code which deserved and enjoyed
a special status as a compilation of exceptional scope and enduring value,
and other texts which built on its foundation.”
Some light is thrown on the publication of texts such as // A'thelstan and
V 4thelstan by the code known (somewhat misleadingly) as [/] Atthel-
stan.°° This is not a royal code at all, but rather a report from the bishops
and other councillors in Kent back to the king (who is addressed in the
second person), thanking him for his guidance and informing him of the
measures which they have taken for the maintenance of the peace.°’ They
acknowledge the help ‘of the councillors whom you have sent to us’
(sapientum eorum quos ad nos misistt), and proceed to describe, in effect,
how they are implementing and supplementing the king’s decrees; there are
references to the king’s injunctions on tithes (presumably / 4thelstan), to
the Grately decrees (IJ A'thelstan), which are said also to have been
proclaimed at Faversham, and to what was declared in the west (presum-
ably V 4’'thelstan, issued at Exeter). But the crucial point in the present
connection is that the Grately decrees are referred to as a scriptum,™ and
that the Kentish report is itself described as a scrtptum.>* In other words, at
suggests that a special attempt was being made, in the winter of 932-3, to gain divine favour
(compare Capitulare episcoporum (793), in MGH Cap. I, no. 21, p. 52, trans. King,
Charlemagne, pp. 223-4); but it was perhaps no more than a manifestation of the king’s
normal frame of mind (compare Simon Keynes, ‘King Athelstan’s books’, in Learning and
Literature in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Michael Lapidge and Helmut Gneuss (Cam-
bridge, 1985), pp. 143-201), and besides, VA'theistan, though emanating from a meeting at
midwinter, could not have been issued during the winter of 932-3, since it is known to have
been promulgated at Exeter (which would not fit in with the king’s itinerary implied by the
charters).
9 In addition to // and V £thelstan, other codes were doubtless issued from time to time
during Aithelstan’s reign: for example, before [] 4thelstan (see IT As. 11 and 23.2); and
after V A'thelstan, at Faversham (see II] As. 2-3; IVAs. 1; VI As. 10), Thunderfield (see JV
Aithelstan, and VI As. 10), and Whittlebury (see V7 As. 12).
°° Preserved only in Latin translation, in Quadripartitus.
>! The report opens with the word Kartssime, presumably reflecting an initial greeting such as
Leof (as in Ealdorman Ordlaf’s letter to Edward the Elder, concerning the Fonthill dispute
(Sawyer no. 1445)).
°2 [II As. 5. Vollrath, ‘Gesetzgebung und Schriftlichkeit’, 43, regards the production of a
written text of I] A'thelstan for the Kentish authorities as something which proceeded from
special circumstances, and she is reluctant to infer that it represented the normal means of
publication.
53 IJ] As. Epil.
 ROYAL GOVERNMENT AND THE WRITTEN WORD 239
least one of the king’s ordinances — the Grately code — was available to the
officials of the shire-court in written form, and it was by means of a written
report that the officials then sent their assurances of good faith back to the
king.
[IV A:thelstan and VI A:thelstan seem also to have been drawn up
independently of royal authority, but unlike /// A:thelstan were not
intended for the king’s benefit.°* JV 4’thelstan is normally regarded as a
royal code (representing legislation promulgated in a meeting at Thunder-
field, in Surrey), and may be so, but it is arguable that it is in fact (a
translation of) a ‘private’ record of royal decrees, drawn up by another party
for special reasons and purposes; certainly, it differs from the two undoubt-
edly ‘royal’ codes (// and V 4:thelstan) in being cast in the third person, and
thus lacks their sense of proximity to the issuing authority.’ Moreover, it
should perhaps be distinguished from what might have been a set of
genuinely ‘royal’ decrees promulgated on the same occasion: for a short text
preserved only in the Textus Roffensis seems to be an extract from a slightly
different record of the Thunderfield legislation,’® which to judge from its
use of the formula we gecweedon (asin /] and V Athelstan) and from the fact
that it is appended to a copy of V 4thelstan may well have been a more
‘official’ version of the council’s proceedings. V/ 4thelstan is known not to
be royal: it runs in the name of the bishops and reeves of the ‘peace-guild’ of
London, and records for their own benefit how they were supplementing
the (king’s) decrees at Grately, Exeter and Thunderfield; the king is cast in
the third person, as in JV 4:thelstan; and interestingly enough, there is a
reference to the code itself as something which exists in written form (pe on
urum gewritum stent).°’
Four clauses at the end of VI 4thelstan seem to have no association with
the London document in its original form, and were presumably added at
later stages in its transmission; nor do they seem to have any original
association with each other, for each represents a very different kind of text.
VI As. 9 1s apparently a supplementary declaration by the London peace-
guild, concerning the liberation of thieves.°® VJ As. 10 records how all the

4 IV 4thelstan is preserved only in Latin translation, in Quadrpartitus. VI 4thelstan is

preserved in the Textus Roffensis (but not in CCCC 383), and there is a Latin translation of
it in Quadnipartitus.
>> The apparently retrospective reference to the meeting at Thunderfield, in/V As. 6, suggests
that the code may have been drawn up some time after the meeting itself.
© ‘It is, in effect, a shorter version of /V As. (Lat.) 6.1-3, but with an additional clause (JV As.
(OE) 6.2b) inserted. On the relationship between the Latin and Old English versions of /V
Asthelstan, see Gesetze, ed. Liebermann, III, pp. 112-13, and Laws, ed. Attenborough,
pp. 210-11.
7 VIAs. 8.5. 8 Cf. VI As. 1.4 and 12.1.
240 Simon Keynes
councillors (witan) made a pledge to the archbishop at Thunderfield, ‘when
fElfheah Stybb and Byrhtnoth, son of Odda, attended the meeting at the
king’s command’ (pa 4ilfeah Stybb 7 Brihtod Oddan sunu coman togeanes
bam gemote pces cinges worde): every reeve was to exact a pledge from his
own shire, that all would observe the peace as decreed by King ¢thelstan
and his councillors at Grately, Exeter, Faversham and Thunderfield. It is
possible to read this as a reference to a local assembly attended by two of the
king’s representatives who were charged with supervising the implemen-
tation of the law; but it seems more likely to be a reference to a general
meeting of the king’s councillors, to which Alfheah Stybb and Byrhtnoth,
son of Odda, had been summoned as local representatives, perhaps (given
the context of the text’s preservation) as reeves of the borough of London —
in which case V/ As. 10 might derive from their report back to the peace-
guild.°? VI As. 11 1s a record of an injunction addressed by the king ‘to his
bishops and his ealdormen and all his reeves’, throughout his realm; in
other words, it is a royal order directed to the officials of the shire-courts,
and again, given the context of its preservation, one imagines that it is
derived from a copy delivered to the borough of London. It obviously
complements V/ As. 10, for it is aimed particularly at the reeves, insisting
that they exact the pledge from those under their authority, and generally
exhorting them to do their appointed duty (‘as [ have commanded, and as it
stands in our writings’). VI As. 12 seems to bea record of a declaration made
by the king to at least some of his witan at Whittlebury, in mitigation of his
earlier decrees at Grately:© henceforth, young people who admit to theft
are not to be killed if under fifteen years old (formerly twelve), and any one
who admits to theft is not to be killed if the stolen property is worth less than
12 pence (formerly 8). The record is not, as it stands, a royal pronounce-
ment; it begins by saying that the king has sent word of his change of heart
to the archbishop, by Bishop Theodred, and it may be that the record
derives from what Theodred himself, as bishop of London, reported to his
own peace-guild.
The corpus of legal texts associated with the reign of King A‘thelstan thus
includes two injunctions addressed by the king specifically to his reeves
Atthelstan and the Ordinance on Chanties), two decrees made by the king

5? Attestations of a thegn or thegns called Zlfheah occur throughout thelstan’s reign, and
can probably be rationalized in terms of one prominent between 928 and 934 and another
less prominent between 934 and 938; but it is impossible to tell which, if indeed either, is
Elfheah Stybb. Attestations of a thegn called Byrhtnoth occur between 934 and 937; Odda,
father of the Byrhtnoth named in V/ As. 10, is presumably the Odda who dominates the lists
of thegns in charters throughout Athelstan’s reign (and thereafter until 943).
© Compare // As. 1.
 ROYAL GOVERNMENT AND THE WRITTEN WORD 241
and his councillors to a wider audience (// A:thelstan and V A:thelstan), a
report of the Kentish shire-court back to the king (//] A:thelstan) and two
records apparently drawn up independently of royal authority for the
benefit of other local bodies /V Athelstan and VI A:thelstan); moreover,
one of the latter records incorporates texts which appear to be derived from
an injunction addressed by the king to the officials of the shire-courts (V/As.
11), and from two reports to the peace-guild of London, one perhaps by the
two men who had represented the peace-guild in a royal gathering at
Thunderfield in Surrey (VJ As. 10), and the other perhaps by the bishop of
London himself, who had attended a gathering at Whittlebury in Nor-
thamptonshire (V/ As. 12). One could hardly wish for a better view of the
administration of justice during A&thelstan’s reign, or for a_ better
demonstration of the extent to which it depended on the use of the written
word: the king sent written instructions to his reeves, who were responsible
for the implementation of the law in the localities; written texts of royal
decrees were sent to the shire-courts, where they were duly published; the
officials of the shire-courts sent written reports back to the king, to assure
him that they were fulfilling his instructions; and local bodies drew up their
own written statements of their local practice, augmenting them with other
relevant records. The variety of the evidence from AZthelstan’s reign is thus
a sign not of any casual attitude towards the publication or recording of the
law, but quite the reverse: the king must have had scribes at court who
could produce the necessary documents, and the first generation of royal
officials who had had the benefit of an Alfredian education were clearly
literate enough to cope, and to respond.
There 1s nothing equal to the diverse material from Athelstan’s reign in
the corpus of later Anglo-Saxon legislation, and the possibility must
therefore exist that the feverish activity which seems to have characterized
that period was not maintained (or did not need to be maintained) in quite
the same way thereafter. Yet while the law-codes known to modern
scholarship as/ kdmund, I] Edmund, III Edmund and II-III Edgar contain
no obvious indication of the means of their promulgation, they do bear
comparison in general terms with codes such as /J and V A:'thelstan, and it
would be surprising if their status as records of royal acts of legislation was
significantly different. The code designated J Edgar, otherwise known as
the Hundred Ordinance, differs from the norm only insofar as it does not
run in the name of a particular king; but there can be no doubt that it
proceeded from a gathering of the king’s council, and one imagines that it
too was promulgated more widely in written form. The remaining legislat-
ive act of the central decades of the tenth century 1s JV Edgar, which stands
out from these other codes as an example of a legal text which was certainly
242. Simon Keynes
issued in written form: it begins ‘Here it is made known in this document
... (Herts geswutelod on Pisum gewrite . . .),°' and the penultimate clause
directs that ‘many documents are to be written concerning this, and sent
both to Ealdorman Aélfhere and to Ealdorman A‘thelwine, and they are to
send them in all directions, so that this measure may be known to both the
poor and the rich’ (7 wnte man manega gewrita be disum .. .). Other
things being equal, one could argue that this explicit statement of arrange-
ments for the publication of a law-code stands out because it is excep-
tional ;*’ but other things rarely are equal in Anglo-Saxon England, and in
my own judgement the incidental evidence which has been assembled above
from earlier tenth-century legislation should be allowed to speak with the
same voice.™
The legislation of King Athelred the Unready has been examined in
some detail by Wormald. Wormald does allow that ‘when A‘thelred and his
council pronounced law, a text was written on the spot’;® but in accordance
with his views on later Anglo-Saxon legislation in general, he would appear
to contend that the extant texts owe their existence more to initiatives taken
by others than to the king. I would express only one reservation.
Wormald’s exposition proceeds mainly from his analysis of legislation
drafted on King A*thelred’s behalf by Wulfstan, archbishop of York, and

1 IV Edg. Prol.
© IV Edg. 15.1; compare Charlemagne’s Capitulare missorum de exercitu promovendo (808),
ch. 8, MGH Cap. I, no. 50, p. 138, trans. King, Charlemagne, p. 263, and Loyn and
Percival, Reign of Charlemagne, no. 22, p. 97, for arrangements for the multiplication of
copies of a capitulary. More attention needs to be given to the significance of the differences
between the Old English versions of JV Edgar (in BL Cotton Nero E.i (Ker, Catalogue, no.
166), and in CCCC 265 (zd. no. 53)), on the one hand, and the Latin version (which
precedes the OE version in CCCC 265), on the other; for if the extant OE versions descend
from a text which seems to have been directed towards the Danelaw, the Latin version
appears to represent a text directed elsewhere. The specific reference to Ealdorman A!lfhere
(of Mercia) and Ealdorman A:thelwine (of East Anglia), to the apparent exclusion of any
other ealdormen, is most readily to be understood on the basis that the code was issued in the
early 970s (when these two dominated the scene: see Cyril Hart, ‘Athelstan “Half-King”
and his family’, ASE 2 (1973), 115-44, at 133 n. 6), and need not imply that the code’s
distribution was restricted to those areas with which they are known to have been
connected. Curiously enough, /V Edgar 1s conspicuous by its absence from Quadmpartitus.
° Thus Vollrath, ‘Gesetzgebung und Schriftlichkeit’, 43-7, is inclined to regard the provision
for the mutiplication of written copies of [V Edgar as something which proceeded from
special circumstances, namely that the ordinance in this form was intended for publication
in the Danelaw.
°* An investigation of the extent to which the surviving tenth-century codes were indebted to
(what might have been written texts of) earlier codes would be one way forward; see
Wormald, ‘Uses of literacy’, 112.
© Wormald, ‘4thelred the lawmaker’, p. 64.
© Ibid., pp. 56-7 and 64-5.
 ROYAL GOVERNMENT AND THE WRITTEN WORD 243
preserved in manuscripts associated with Wulfstan himself; and while one
cannot dispute that this legislation affords ‘a unique opportunity to examine
Anglo-Saxon written law in the making’,°’ one does wonder whether ‘it is
the most important indication of what Anglo-Saxon legislation was really
like’.°° That is to say, Wulfstan was for ever revising material of his own in
the course of his long career as a royal law-maker, first for Zithelred and
subsequently for Cnut; and while he might well have felt free to adapt for
his own purposes the legislation which he had himself drafted, it need not
follow that earlier law-codes had been made in the same way, or that what
certainly applies to Wulfstan’s codes is necessarily applicable to the rest.
Whatever the status of the extant codes as records of royal decrees,
Wormald must, however, be right to insist that it was the king’s (spoken)
word which counted, for it was in the king that the authority ultimately lay.
As A‘lfric remarks, in one of the homilies in his First Series (written c. 990):
‘One thing is the ordinance (seo gesetnys) which the king commands (bytt)
through his ealdormen and reeves; quite another is his own decree (his agen
gebann) in his own presence’.”” But if King Alfred has used the written
word to project his ideological aspirations, both he and his successors in the
tenth century were no less conscious of the advantages it could bring in the
more practical world of the publication and administration of royal law.
That is not to say, however, that they were trying to bring the people under
the rule of written law. The difficulty (as Wormald has observed) is to find a
connection between the world of the Anglo-Saxon law-codes, and the real
world of Anglo-Saxon crime and punishment.” It is perfectly true that
there is no recorded instance of a royal law-code cited by chapter and verse,
but should we necessarily expect there to be so? What counted, indeed, was
the king’s oral decree; and it was the function of the tenth-century law-codes
to assist in the process of bringing knowledge of the king’s decrees into the
localities, not to provide a permanent frame of reference. One might add

®” Ibid., p. 49. 8 Ibid., p. 58.

°? It should be noted that a fundamental distinction is to be made between the contexts in
which the ‘pre-Wulfstan’ codes (J-JV A:thelred) are preserved (variously the Textus
Roffensis, CCCC 383, and Quadnipartitus), and the contexts in which the ‘Wulfstan’ codes
are preserved (CCCC 201, BL Cotton Nero A.i, and BL Cotton Claudius A.in, all
associated in some way with Wulfstan himself; only V// A£thelred occurs also in
Quadnpartitus). The manuscript of [IX Athelred was lost in the Cotton fire (Ker,
Catalogue, no. 170); the fragment designated X 4£thelred was entered on a blank leaf of a
service-book (zb7d. no. 392), and it would be of great interest to know precisely when, where
and under what circumstances.

” Benjamin Thorpe, The Homilies of Ailfric, 2 vols. (London, 1843-6), I, p. 358; see also
EHD no. 239c. Malcolm Godden advises me that the image is likely to be Zlfric’s own.
“’ Wormald, ‘Uses of literacy’, 112-13; idem, ‘Lex Scripta and Verbum Regis’, p. 122; and
idem, ‘Aéthelred the lawmaker’, p. 48.
244 Simon Keynes
that it was one thing to have the laws circulated in writing to the shire-
courts, and to expect reeves to be able to refer to texts of King Alfred’s code;
but it would be another to imagine that the reeves themselves approximated
in any way to the modern conception of the professional lawyer. For the
‘judges’ of the tenth and eleventh centuries were certainly not men in bowler
hats with brief-cases and rolled-up umbrellas, and with access to shelves of
written law; rather, they were men like Athelric, bishop of Selsey, ‘a man of
great age and very wise in the law of the land, who, by the command of the
king [William I], was brought to the trial in a wagon in order that he might
expound the ancient practice of the laws’.’”* Perhaps a better analogy would
be with the sheriffs who kept the peace on the American western frontier in
the nineteenth century: they were expected to be able to enforce laws which
were written, but copies of the published codes were scarce, badly drawn
up, full of misleading misprints, out of date and as often as not written in
language which the sheriffs could not understand; much would always have
depended on the sheriff’s sense of natural justice, and on his susceptibility
to bribery and corruption.”
The evidence for the extensive use of written documents in the dis-
semination of law is complemented by indications that the written word
permeated other aspects of royal government and administration; but there
remains no mistaking that written documents never threatened to supplant
purely oral forms of conducting the affairs of the realm. We may consider,
for example, the agency of communication between the king at the centre
and those who exercised authority in the localities. In his translation of St
Augustine’s Soliloquies, King Alfred refers to a lord’s ‘written message and
his seal’ (wrendgewnt and hys insegel), as if it were commonplace in his
reign for the king (and perhaps any other lord) to make known his will by
means of a written document associated with the impression of a seal;’* but
we also know from Asser that the king had communicated with his ‘judges’
through his ‘trusted men’ (sos fideles).’” Both King Edward the Elder and
King Athelstan sent written injunctions to their reeves; but A:thelstan (for

7 From the report of the trial held on Pinnenden Heath (Kent) in the 1070s, trans. English
Estorical Documents 1042-1189, ed. David C. Douglas and George W. Greenaway (2nd
edn, London, 1981), no. 50. Compare the reference in the poem The Gifts of Men to the one
who ‘knows the laws, where men deliberate’ (Sum domas con, ber dryhtguman red
eahtiaO); see The Exeter Book, ed. George Philip Krapp and Elliott van Kirk Dobbie,
Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records 3 (Columbia, 1936), p. 139, and EHD no. 213.
3 See, for example, Philip D. Jordan, Frontier Law and Order (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1970),
pp. 155-74.
™ See Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred the Great, pp. 141 and 300.
*S Asser, ch. 106: see Life of Alfred, ed. Stevenson, p. 93 (text), and Keynes and Lapidge,
Alfred the Great, pp. 109-10 (translation).
 ROYAL GOVERNMENT AND THE WRITTEN WORD 245
one) seems also to have operated through personal representatives. For, as
we have seen, the officials of the Kentish shire-court, in reporting to the
king, acknowledged the help ‘of the councillors whom you have sent to us’,’”®
and the king sent word of his change of heart at Whittlebury to the
archbishop of Canterbury, by Theodred, bishop of London;’”’ one might be
inclined to regard Atlfheah Stybb and Byrhtnoth, son of Odda, who are
named 1n V/ As. 10 as attending an assembly at the king’s command, as the
king’s representatives at a local assembly, but it was suggested above that
they are more likely to have been local representatives summoned to a royal
assembly. Unfortunately, one can but guess whether such personal
representatives, like Charlemagne’s miss1 dominici,” carried the king’s
instructions with them in the form of written documents; but in view of
King Alfred’s remarks in the Soliloquzes , it seems likely that sometimes they
did. After all, much was to be gained by the simple expedient of putting
instructions down in writing: Bishop Wealdhere told a correspondent that
he had been “at pains to intimate this to you by letter (per littevas) so that it
may not be divulged and known to many’,”” and Charlemagne complained
to one of his mssi that he had given him instructions by his own mouth, ‘and
you have not understood it at all’.®°
In the later tenth and eleventh centuries, the nature of communication
between the centre and the localities is somewhat clearer, and it remains
apparent that kings depended as much on messages conveyed orally by their
trusted representatives as on letters conveyed by their agents.°! Two
vernacular charters from the reign of King Aithelred the Unready reveal
how royal government articulated with the shire-courts. Sometime between
990 and 992 a dispute arose between a certain Wynfled and a certain
Leofwine, over the possession of two estates in Berkshire.°* Wynfled had

7 TIT As. 1. 7 VI As. 12.1.

’8 See, for example, McKitterick, Frankish Kingdoms, pp. 93-7; compare Helen M. Cam,
Local Government in Francia and England (London, 1912), p. 53.
” EHD no. 164 (dated c. 705); see Pierre Chaplais, ‘The letter from Bishop Wealdhere of
London to Archbishop Brihtwold of Canterbury: the earliest original “letter close” extant in
the west’, in his Essays in Medieval Diplomacy and Administration (London, 1981), no.
XIV. On the greater security afforded by a written letter, see also The Exeter Book, ed.
Krapp and Dobbie, p. 225 (Riddle 60).
8° Responsa misso cuidam data (802X813), ch. 6, in MGH Cap. I, no. 58, p. 145, trans. King,
Charlemagne, p. 268.
8! Of course there may not always have been any such distinction. One should bear in mind
that news of King A‘thelstan’s achievements in 927 was transmitted back to court by a
certain Peter, and by means of an extraordinary (written) poem; see Michael Lapidge,
‘Some Latin poems as evidence for the reign of Athelstan’, ASE 9 (1981), 61-98, at 83-93.
82 Sawyer no. 1454: Anglo-Saxon Charters, ed. A.J. Robertson (2nd edn, Cambridge, 1956),
no. 66.
 246 Simon Keynes
produced witnesses in the king’s presence who swore that she had been
| given the estates by one #lfric (probably Leofwine’s father), whereupon
the king sent word of this to Leofwine, who insisted that the matter be
referred to the shire-court; so ‘the king sent his seal to the meeting at
Cuckamsley by Abbot Atlfhere [of Bath], and greeted all the councillors
who were assembled there’ (sende se cyning be A‘luere abbude his insegel to
bam gemote cet Cwicelmeshlawe 7 grette ealle ba witan pe baer gesomnode
weeron), commanding them to settle the case. It is possible that this was a
message conveyed orally by the abbot on the king’s behalf, supported by an
impression of the king’s seal, but it is also possible that zsegel in this
instance refers to a sealed writ. The second charter concerns a dispute
between Godwine, bishop of Rochester, and a certain Leofwine, about the
possession of Snodland in Kent.** On becoming bishop, Godwine found
some documents (szutelunga) in the church archives, and with them laid
claim to the estate; the suit came to the king’s attention, and ‘he sent a letter
and his seal to Archbishop 4£lfric’ (sende he gewrit 7 his insegl to pam
arcebisceope A:lfrice), commanding that it should be settled 1n the Kentish
shire-court. We may wonder in this instance whether the seal was physically
attached to the king’s letter, or whether it was separate; but whatever the
case, it is as clear an example of a reference to an administrative communica-
tion in writing as one could reasonably hope to get.®
It should be noted that laymen, and in particular the king’s thegns, were
among those employed by the king for conveying messages to the shire-
courts: we have not only the example of the ‘councillors’ sent by King
/Ethelstan to the Kentish shire-court, but also that of Tofi the Proud, a
thegn of Cnut’s who came to a meeting of the Herefordshire shire-court ‘on
the king’s business’ (on bees cinges cerende).*° Indeed, it is perhaps in this
context that we should bear in mind the three surviving seal-matrices which
depict men brandishing swords, and which are inscribed, respectively,

83 Compare F.E. Harmer, Anglo-Saxon Writs (Manchester, 1952), p. 545 (no. 21), where the
phrase sigillum regis E’. is used in reference to a sealed writ of Edward the Confessor.
4 Sawyer no. 1456: Charters, ed. Robertson, no. 69.
85 See Pierre Chaplais, ‘The Anglo-Saxon chancery: from the diploma to the writ’, in Prisca
Munimenta, ed. Felicity Ranger (London, 1973), pp. 43-62, at 56; and Simon Keynes, The
Diplomas of King A:thelred ‘the Unready’ 978-1016: A Study in their Use as Histoncal
Evidence (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 137-8. Perhaps the king’s seal was employed on its own
when the message was conveyed orally to the shire-court by one such as a trusted abbot; and
perhaps a letter and seal were employed when the message was directed to an individual, and
carried by a king’s messenger.
86 Sawyer no. 1462: Charters, ed. Robertson, no. 78, and EHD no. 135. The same phrase, on
bees cinges erende, is used in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in connection with Bishop

(MS. D, s.a. 1054).

Aldred’s expeditions to Rome (Anglo-Saxon Chronicle MS. C, s.a. 1049) and to Cologne
 ROYAL GOVERNMENT AND THE WRITTEN WORD 247
‘SIGILLUM GODWINI MINISTRI, SIGILLUM ALFRICI’ and ‘SIGILLUM
wuLFricl’.®’ The obvious similarities between them suggest that they
should be considered as a group, and furthermore that they might have been
issued to the thegns in question in connection with their performance of
‘official’ duties on behalf of the king: the matrices were presumably used in
some way to establish their holder’s credentials, whether in support of an
oral message or a written document.®
Nor should it be forgotten that it was apparently commonplace in the late
tenth century (and quite possibly long before that) for the king to convey
messages to his thegns by means of written documents. It is #lfric, again,
who envisages the following situation: ‘if the king sends his writ to any one
of his thegns, and he despises it so greatly that he will not hear it, nor look at
[any] of it, the king will not be very gracious to him when he learns how he
has scorned him’.® The implication seems to be that the thegn was not
expected to be able to read the writ himself; but A‘lfric was trying to alarm
those who might refuse to listen to God’s instruction, so it 1s possible that he
might have tailored his analogy to suit its purpose. Administrative letters of
the kind which A‘lfric probably had in mind might have served various
purposes, for example an order to a king’s reeve telling him to make ready
for a visit to a royal estate, or a summons to a meeting of the witan, or an
instruction to the local official that a certain man should be brought to
justice or that a dispute should be settled; but unfortunately such docu-
ments, being of merely passing interest to the parties concerned, would
effectively have had no chance of survival or preservation.

87 See Keynes, Diplomas, pp. 138-40, and references; see also T.A. Heslop, ‘English seals
from the mid-ninth century to 1100’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association 133
(1980), 1-16 and zdem, ‘A walrus ivory seal matrix from Lincoln’, Antiquanes Journal 66
(1986), 371-2 and 396-7.
88 That thegns had a role in King 2thelstan’s administration might be suggested by V/ As. 11,
which imposes a fine on those thegns who neglect to follow the king’s guidance; see also /V
As. 7. For King Athelred’s use of thegns on a diplomatic mission to Normandy, see EHD
no. 230. A thegn’s duties in the king’s service are implicit in Gebyncdo 3 (Gesetze, ed.
Liebermann, I, p. 456, trans. EHD no. 51). A particularly interesting allusion to the role of
thegns in ‘official’ (though in this instance not actually royal) business occurs in Sawyer no.
1462: the Herefordshire shire-court appointed three thegns to go to the mother of a certain
Edwin, to establish her position with respect to land which Edwin was claiming against her;
whereupon she made an oral declaration of her bequest of all her property to her kinswoman
Leoffizd, and said to the thegns ‘Act well like thegns, and announce my message to the
meeting before all good men, and inform them to whom I have granted my land and all my
possessions’ (‘dod pegnlice 7 wel - abeodaé mine zrende to dam gemote beforan eallon bam
godan mannum 7 cydab heom hwem ic mines landes geunnen hebbe’). For further
discussion of the role of thegns as the king’s messengers, see Campbell, ‘Some agents’, pp.
210-13.
89 Homilies of Afric: A Supplementary Collection, ed. J.C. Pope, 2 vols., Early English Text
Society OS 259-60 (London, 1967-8), II, p. 659; see Keynes, Diplomas, pp. 136-7.
248 Simon Keynes
The writs which do survive date from the reigns of Cnut and Edward the
Confessor, and owe their preservation to the care of certain religious houses
which valued them as evidence of title to land or privileges; there is a
danger, therefore, that writs will be regarded as a feature only of the last
phase of Anglo-Saxon royal government, and as having most to do with the
affairs of particular churches. Yet it is striking that even the surviving
examples attest to the great variety of purposes which a writ could be made
to serve, announcing to the suitors of the shire-court not only transfers of
land or grants of privileges, but also appointments to high office and much
else besides. Indeed, there seems no reason to dissent from Harmer’s belief
that the surviving writs are but the rump of a long tradition of administra-
tive letters stretching back at least as far as the reign of King Alfred the
Great, and that people other than the king were also accustomed to convey
messages in written form.”
I turn finally to a consideration of the place of written documents in late
Anglo-Saxon society, and in particular to the evidence provided by the
corpus of vernacular charters and wills. Besides affording some reassurance
that the world of the royal law-codes was not far removed from reality, these
sources certainly have to be understood in the context of a society in which
considerable respect was accorded to the written word. It must be
emphasized again that this does not represent a change from what can be
observed in the earlier Anglo-Saxon period, when disputes often turned on
the possession of written evidence of title to an estate (usually in the form of
a royal diploma, which would not necessarily have been in favour of any of
the disputing parties). For several of the later accounts of legal proceedings
attest in much the same way to the value attached to written evidence; while
the greater quantity of surviving wills adds new precision to our appreci-
ation of the penetration of the written word into at least the upper levels of
lay society.”!
A graphic illustration of the part played by the written word in routine
legal processes is afforded by one of the best-known cases in Anglo-Saxon
law. A single sheet of parchment preserved in the archives of Christ
© See Harmer, Writs, pp. 10-24 and 57-61 (and Chaplais, ‘Anglo-Saxon chancery’, pp. 50—
61); see further Simon Keynes, ‘Regenbald the Chancellor (szc)’, Anglo-Norman Studies,
10, ed. R. Allen Brown (Woodbridge, 1988), pp. 185-222, at pp. 214-17.
7! For the value attached to written documents, see Keynes, Diplomas, p. 34, and A.G.
Kennedy, ‘Disputes about bocland: the forum for their adjudication’, Anglo-Saxon
England 14 (1985), 175-95; see also Patrick Wormald, “Charters, law and the settlement of
disputes in Anglo-Saxon England’, in Settlement of Disputes, pp. 149-68, and idem, ‘A
handlist of Anglo-Saxon lawsuits’, ASE 17 (1988), 247-82. The charters, wills and other
documents which survive in their original form, on single sheets of parchment, have much
to reveal about the use of the written word; all such charters, etc., are listed, with general
discussion, in Simon Keynes, A Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Charters: Archives and single
sheets (forthcoming).
 ROYAL GOVERNMENT AND THE WRITTEN WORD 249
Church, Canterbury, is inscribed with an account of the history of an estate
at Fonthill in Wiltshire, written by Ealdorman Ordlaf and addressed to
King Edward the Elder.” The account recalls a sequence of events which
seems to have extended from the last year of Alfred’s reign (898-9) into the
first year of Edward’s (899-900), the purpose of which was to explain how
the estate in question had ended up in the hands of the bishop of
Winchester. The document is of some interest in showing how at one stage a
former owner of the estate had established his right to the land by producing
a relevant document, which was duly read and found to be in order. Its chief
interest, however, is as an example of a written document submitted by a
layman to the king in connection with a legal dispute, in support of the
defendant’s title to the disputed estate; it would be wishful thinking to
suppose that the document was actually written by Ealdorman Ordlaf
himself (since he might not have had the benefit of an Alfredian education),
but the script 1s certainly compatible with a date in Edward the Elder’s
reign, and a note on the dorse, to the effect that the claimant abandoned his
suit when the king was at Warminster, is added by a different scribe, which
tends to confirm the document’s status as an original. Incidentally, Ordlaf’s
submission was committed to writing not because he was unable to attend
the hearing, for he 1s named in the dorse as one of the witnesses present at
Warminster; one is reminded, therefore, of the provision in Charlemagne’s
general capitulary for the mzssz (802), that ‘if there be anything which they
themselves, together with the counts of the provinces, cannot correct or
bring to a just settlement, they should refer it without hesitation to the
emperor’s judgement along with their written reports’ (cum brebitanis
suis) .?°
Several of the disputes which took place in the later tenth century seem
similarly to have turned on the possession of diplomas or other forms of
written evidence of title to the disputed estate. Some of the records of such
disputes were (like the Fonthill letter) apparently prepared by one of the
parties involved for submission as evidence in the dispute itself, and others
seem to have been drawn up by or on behalf of the successful party as a
permanent record of a dispute’s outcome; but one should not forget that the
evidence of the written word took its place beside other forms of establish-
ing or maintaining one’s rights, whether by witnesses or oaths, and that
Anglo-Saxon legal procedure was never so cut and dried as to exclude the
more informal role of coercion, compromise and corruption. Thus the

% Sawyer no. 1445: Select English Historical Documents of the Ninth and Tenth Centuries,
ed. F.E. Harmer (Cambridge, 1914), no. 18, and EHD no. 102.
3 Capitulare missorum generale (802), ch. 1, in MGH Cap. I, no. 33, p. 92, trans. King,
Charlemagne, p. 234, and Loyn and Percival, Reign of Charlemagne, no. 16, p. 74.
250 Simon Keynes
dispute between Wynfled and Leofwine (which was cited above in another
context) began at a meeting in the king’s presence when Wynflzd produced
witnesses in support of her own claim to have received the land from At lfric;
when contested by Leofwine, the matter was referred to the shire-court,
and two of Wynflzd’s original witnesses (Archbishop Sigeric and Ordbriht,
bishop of Selsey) each sent a ‘declaration’ (swutelunge) to the meeting,
which in this context seems to mean a written statement in support of
Wynfled’s case; Wynflzed then produced the requisite number of support-
ers, but in the event a compromise was reached, and the settlement of the
dispute was committed to writing.” Similarly, in the dispute over Snodland
in Kent (also cited above) the bishop of Rochester produced his evidence
(swutelunge, presumably in the form of the written documents which he
had recently found in his church) at a meeting of the shire-court, and a
compromise was agreed whereby the other party gave up his own-
swutelunga relating to the land and in return received it on lease for the
duration of his life; again, a record of the settlement itself (incorporating the
names of all the witnesses) was duly committed to writing.”
Two other splendid examples of disputes which turned on the possession
of written evidence in the form of charters are provided by the Libellus
Atthelwoldi episcopi, an early twelfth-century Latin account of the
refoundation and endowment of Ely Abbey in the early 970s, based on a
(lost) vernacular record of the same process (which seems itself to have been
drawn up in the aftermath of the anti-monastic reaction precipitated by
King Edgar’s death in 975).° In the first, a dispute over land which had
been appropriated from Ely Abbey was decided in part on the principle that
‘the person who had the charter was nearer [to the oath] that he should have
the land, than the one who did not have it’.”’ In the second, we are told how

** Sawyer no. 1454: Charters, ed. Robertson, no. 66. One wonders how many (besides Dr
Chaplais, to whom I am grateful for the explanation) would have appreciated the cleverness
of the scribe who produced the chirograph: instead of separating the parts with the normal
word CyROGRAPHUM, he devised the legend CPILREOTGURMAEFSUTM, which produces
(when the letters are read alternately) the words CIROGRAFUM PLETUM EST.
°° Sawyer no. 1456: Charters, ed. Robertson, no. 69. See also Wormald, ‘Settlement of
disputes’, pp. 157-61.
© The material in the Libellus is well known by virtue of its incorporation in the Liber Eliensis
(see Liber Ehensis, ed. E.O. Blake, Camden 3rd series 92 (London, 1962), between p. 73
and p. 117, and pp. 395-9). For an edition of the Libellus itself (with translation and
commentary), see Simon Keynes and Alan Kennedy, Anglo-Saxon Ely: Records of Ely
Abbey and its Benefactors in the Tenth and Eleventh Centunes (Woodbridge,
forthcoming).
7 Libellus, ch. 35: Liber Eliensis, ed. Blake, pp. 98-9. The Fonthill letter (Sawyer no. 1445)
affords another example of the same principle in operation: on one occasion, Helmstan
produced written evidence in support of his title to the land, and (in Ealdorman Ordlaf’s
 ROYAL GOVERNMENT AND THE WRITTEN WORD 251
Bishop A:thelwold and the abbot of Ely had failed (through no fault of their
own) to get hold of the charters relating to a newly acquired property, and,
since the charters had fallen into the hands of the brother and kinsmen of a
previous owner, how they feared ‘that claims and trickeries could arise at
some time’; they turned first to Ealdorman Athelwine, promising him some
land elsewhere if he would intervene on their behalf to obtain the charters,
but the ealdorman did nothing, and kept the land; so in desperation they
turned to Ealdorman Byrhtnoth, asking him to buy the charters for the
abbey, which he duly did; and as their payment for the charters, they gave
30 mancuses and another charter which they knew the brother wanted.”
Needless to say, it may be doubted whether all the laymen who struggled
over the possession of royal diplomas in the late tenth century would have
been able to comprehend the Latin text of the documents they so earnestly
desired, though the vernacular endorsement and boundary-clause would
have told them all they needed to know.”
The corpus of surviving wills attests in a similar way to the recognition, in
at least some quarters of Anglo-Saxon society, of the value of the written
word. It seems to have been normal practice in the tenth and eleventh
centuries, as before, for any individual to determine the disposition of his
property after his death by means of a declaration made orally in the
presence of witnesses; the oral declaration generally sufficed, and it was not
a necessary part of the process to have the will recorded in writing.’ A
written record of the declaration was, however, sometimes made, and in
such cases one might ask whether the record was intended to serve a
particular purpose, and who was responsible for its production. The
existence of a written text of a will would obviously have been to the
advantage of a prospective beneficiary, as the record of an act which might
have involved provisions of some complexity, and which might not have
been expected to come into effect for some time. There may also have been
circumstances in which it was desirable from the testator’s own point of

words) ‘then it seemed to all of us who were at that arbitration that Helmstan was nearer to
the oath on that account’.
% Libellus, ch. 38: Liber Eliensis, ed. Blake, pp. 100-1.
% For the distinction between comprehension of Latin and the vernacular, see Kelly, above,
p. 52. In the school established by King Alfred, ‘books in both languages — that is to say, in
Latin and English — were carefully read’ (Asser, ch. 75: see Life of Alfred, ed. Stevenson, p.
58 (text), and Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred the Great, p. 40 (translation)); for attempts to
maintain this practice, see D.A. Bullough, “The educational tradition in England from
Alfred to Ailfric: teaching utriusque linguae’, Settrmane 19 (Spoleto, 1972), 453-94.
100 See H.D. Hazeltine, ‘Comments on the writings known as Anglo-Saxon wills’, in Anglo-
Saxon Wills, ed. Dorothy Whitelock (Cambridge, 1930), pp. vii—xl; see also Michael M.
Sheehan, The Will in Medieval England (Toronto, 1963), pp. 5-106.
252 Simon Keynes
view to have a written record made of his oral declaration, so that an
accurate account of his intentions could be conveyed to another party: for
example, the testator may have needed to convey his intentions to the king
or to a local official (perhaps in order to secure formal approval), or to some
other interested party, and chose to do so in writing because he was unable
to achieve his purpose more directly. A written record of a will might thus
have been made by an ‘interested’ ecclesiastic, acting in his capacity as a
prospective beneficiary ;'°' or the testator might have solicited the services
of a ‘local’ priest or scribe, acting disinterestedly on the testator’s behalf ;!°"
and one should perhaps not rule out the possibility that in one or two cases
the will might have been written by the testator himself.
The wills themselves rarely afford much indication of the specific
circumstances of their production in written form. It is apparent, however,
that whereas the oral declaration might constitute the operative act of
making a will, a written record was sometimes produced as a necessary part
of the no less important process of its formal ‘publication’. Thus in the 830s
the Kentish reeve Abba declared his wishes as to the disposal of his
property, and at the same time commanded that they be set down in
writing ;'°’ the text of his will, including Abba’s own attestation, was written
by a scribe known to have belonged to the community of Christ Church,
Canterbury,’ but the names of the other witnesses were added by a
different hand (presumably that of another Christ Church scribe), suggest-

101 The case of Badanoth Beatting is particularly instructive; see Sawyer no. 296 and Sawyer
no. 1510 (Charters, ed. Robertson, no. 6). Soon after purchasing an estate in Canterbury
from King A‘thelwulf in 845, Badanoth bequeathed it to the community of Christ
Church, subject to the life interest of his wife and children. ‘The documents recording these
acts were written by a scribe known to have belonged to the Christ Church community:
Nicholas Brooks, The Early History of the Church of Canterbury (Leicester, 1984), p. 361
(scribe 5). It was thus in effect the beneficiary who (at Badanoth’s command) drew up the
will, and it is apparent that this process extended to the formulation of the detailed terms of
Badanoth’s (ostensibly oral) declaration: see A. Campbell, ‘An Old English will’, Journal
of English and Germanic Philology 27 (1938), 133-52, at 134-5.
102 The will of Wulfgar (Sawyer no. 1533: Charters, ed. Robertson, no. 26), drawn up in the
930s during the reign of King A®thelstan, is a case in point. It was written by a scribe who
has been identified elsewhere among additions to a manuscript apparently kept at the royal
estate of Bedwyn (see M.B. Parkes, ‘A fragment of an early-tenth-century Anglo-Saxon
manuscript and its significance’, ASE 12 (1983), 129-40, at 137 n. 51), in the vicinity of
Wulfgar’s own property. Note, incidentally, that Wulfgar states at one point that he would
bequeath one of his estates verbally (on wordum), ‘to such of my young kinsmen as obey me
best’, as if sometime in the future he expected to make an oral declaration supplementing
his written will.
103 Sawyer no. 1482: Select English Historical Documents, ed. Harmer, no. 2.
'0* Brooks, Church of Canterbury, p. 360 (scribe 3).
 ROYAL GOVERNMENT AND THE WRITTEN WORD 253
ing that in this case it was the written document which had been read out
and witnessed by the assembled company. The will of King Athelwulf of
Wessex is known to have existed in written form, for at the beginning of
Alfred’s reign it was brought to an assembly at Langandene and was there
‘read before all the councillors of the West Saxons’;!™ its contents were also
known to Asser, and are summarized by him in his Life of King Alfred .'"°
Alfred himself made a written will at some stage during his reign, and
entrusted copies of it to many different people; but at a later stage he felt the
need to revise its detailed provisions, and accordingly had to recover and
destroy as many of the copies of the earlier will as he could find, to clear the
ground for the revised version.’ It was also during Alfred’s reign that
Ealdorman Alfred (of Surrey) had his will drawn up in writing expressly for
the purposes of giving notice of his intentions to the king and his council-
lors, and to his kinsmen and friends; the text itself was written by one scribe
on the face of a sheet of parchment, and the names of the witnesses
(presumably to a formal reading aloud of the written text) were added on
the dorse by a different scribe.’
Several of the later tenth- and eleventh-century wills were committed to
writing out of more than a basic respect for the written word, in the sense
that the purpose which the document was intended to serve was seemingly
to enable a record of the testator’s intentions to be conveyed to parties other
than those who were present when the oral declaration had been made. The
will of Ealdorman Athelmer, for example, is cast in the form of a written
document (gewnt), by means of which the ealdorman informed the king
and others ‘what his will was on his last day’, where the implication could be
that the testator was on his death-bed, and accordingly unable to make his
declaration in the presence of suitable witnesses.'”’ The will of Wulfgeat of
Donington, on the other hand, looks like the record of an oral declaration
made while the testator still had expectation of life; but the record contains a
concluding request to a certain Ethelsige that he make the will known ‘to
my lord and to all my friends’, as if for some reason Wulfgeat was unable to
do so himself, and perhaps explaining why in this case the will was produced

'5 See Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred the Great, p. 175 (from King Alfred’s will).
'8 Asser, ch. 16: see Life of Alfred, ed. Stevenson, pp. 14-16 (text), and Keynes and Lapidge,
Alfred the Great, pp. 72-3 (translation).
107 Sawyer no. 1507: Select English Historical Documents, ed. Harmer, no. 11, and EHD no.
96; see also Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred the Great, pp. 173-8.

108 Sawyer no. 1508: Select English Histoncal Documents, ed. Harmer, no. 10, and EHD no.

'!° Sawyer no. 1498: Wills, ed. Whitelock, no. 10.

254 Simon Keynes
in more than one copy (in the form of a chirograph).'!° The will of the
ztheling A‘thelstan, eldest son of King Aithelred the Unready, is especially
revealing. [t would appear to have been drawn up in written form on the day
that the ztheling received word from his father (via Alfgar, son of A‘ffa)
that he might make his will, and it seems that the ztheling died later that
same day (25 June 1014); it must have been obvious, in other words, that
the ztheling would be unable to make his declaration in what might have
been the proper way for one of his station, and indeed the etheling begs the
councillors ‘who may hear my will read’ (be minne cwyde gehyron reedan) to
help ensure that it be allowed to stand.'!! The confirmation of wills must
indeed have been part of the routine business of government, and it is easier
to understand how things worked in practice if it is assumed that the
‘publication’ of a testator’s oral declaration to the appropriate authority was
often accomplished by means of a written record which could be read to an
assembled company, in much the same way as the king’s oral pronounce-
ments on matters of legal import were committed to writing in order that
they might be conveyed to and published by his officials in the localities.
One should not overlook the detailed account of the making of a will
which occurs in the Labellus A'thelwoldi Episcop1. A layman called Siferth,
who was afflicted by gout, came on one occasion to Ely and made an oral
declaration of his bequest of two hides at Downham (in Cambridgeshire) to
the abbey; he came back to Ely on a subsequent occasion and repeated his
declaration, and on his return home made the declaration yet again, ‘in the
presence of the leading men of his region beyond Upware in the place which
is called Hyravicstouue’. But when the crunch finally came, recourse was
made to the written word:
Then when this same man Siferth of Downham felt that his sickness was overpower-
ing him and the hour of his death approached, and as he lay at Linden without hope
of recovering his health, he sent for Abbot Byrhtnoth [of Ely] and for the brothers of
the church. And present there were 4:lfric of Witcham, Ealdstan and his son Wine,
Leofric, Byrhthelm, 42lfhelm of Redeuuinclen and Eadric, one of the leading men of
Ealdorman AXthelwine, and the priest Oswald, and Sexferth with his son. Then
Abbot Byrhtnoth arranged for the will of Siferth to be written down in a tripartite
chirograph, in the presence of his wife and his daughter and all the people mentioned
above, and had it read out before them all. When it was read, he had it cut, and
Siferth kept one part of the chirograph, giving the second part to the abbot. The
third part he sent at once by the aforesaid Byrhthelm to Ealdorman A:thelwine, who

"8 Sawyer no. 1534: Wills, ed. Whitelock, no. 19. Similarly, perhaps, a certain Eadric the
Long sent a chirograph of his will to King Edgar: Libellus, ch. 38, Liber Ehensis, ed. Blake,
p. 100; see also Sawyer no. 1520, ibid. pp. 157-8, which is (a Latin translation of) an
(originally tripartite) chirographic will, cast in the form of a letter from the testator (a
daughter of Ealdorman Byrhtnoth) to King Cnut and his queen.
1) Sawyer no. 1503: Wills, ed. Whitelock, no. 20, and EHD no. 129.
 ROYAL GOVERNMENT AND THE WRITTEN WORD 255
at that time was dwelling at Ely, and asked him to allow his will to stand, just as the
abbot had written it and set it down at Linden in the witness of the aforementioned
men. And when Ealdorman 4:thelwine heard this and saw the chirograph, he sent
Wulfnoth of Stowe back there to him with Byrhthelm and asked him what it was he
wanted concerning his will. He [Siferth] soon reported back to him [Athelwine]
through them [Wulfnoth and Byrhthelm] just that he wanted his will to stand free
from challenge or alteration, just as the aforesaid abbot had set it down in the
chirograph. When Ealdorman thelwine heard this, he granted that it should stand
in its entirety, just as Siferth had made it.'"

This will, therefore, was evidently written on Siferth’s behalf by (an agent
of) the abbot of Ely, and while the story conveys an impression of a
somewhat cumbersome procedure (not helped by the fact that Ealdorman
/Ethelwine was apparently rather slow on the uptake), there can be no
mistaking the importance which was attached to the document, and its place
in the context of public administration.'!"°
It would seem reasonable to conclude that royal government in the tenth
and eleventh centuries depended to a very considerable extent on the use of
the written word, and that late Anglo-Saxon society was well accustomed to
such manifestations of ‘pragmatic literacy’.''* It is, of course, difficult to be
sure whether this can be regarded as a direct outcome of King Alfred’s
provisions for teaching the youth of his day how to read and write; but one
might well suppose that the effects of his programme on succeeding
generations would have been roughly equivalent to the effects which
current programmes for making children ‘computer-literate’ are likely to
have in our own years to come. But in thus maintaining that the taxi-run for
the ‘take-off’ of literacy began many years before 1066, one should be careful
not to imply that the extensive use of written documents in royal govern-
ment was necessarily a guarantee of effective government, or that late
Anglo-Saxon government was exclusively bureaucratic. Among the various
types of written document which would have been generated by kings in
conducting the affairs of their realm, I have dealt in particular with
documents connected with the publication of law and the administration of

"2 Libellus, ch. 12, Liber Eliensis, ed. Blake, pp. 86-7.
3 For a similar account of a will drawn up in multiple copies by an interested ecclesiastic on
behalf of an ailing testator, see Sawyer no. 1458 (Charters, ed. Robertson, no. 41).
'!4 The boundary-clauses incorporated in royal diplomas represent another aspect of prag-
matic literacy, and should not be overlooked. The surveys must have been made in the
localities, and submitted in written form to the agency responsible for producing the
diploma; in some cases a survey in an older title-deed for the same estate may have served
the purpose, but in other cases the survey presumably existed on a separate sheet of
parchment; see Sawyer nos. 255 and 1547; compare Sawyer no. 1862. The ‘unattached’
boundary-clauses which are copied in certain cartularies (e.g. BL Cotton Claudius C.ix,
from Abingdon) may reflect such procedures in some way.
256 Simon Keynes
justice, and with administrative communications of different kinds. One
thinks otherwise of a king’s general correspondence, such as the letters
(indicul) which King Alfred sent to Asser,’ or the letters which two
couriers took to Rome on Alfred’s behalf in 889,''° or of the two letters
which King Cnut sent to his people in England from abroad.!!” One thinks
of the written provisions which kings and other members of the royal family
made for the disposal of their property; of documents emanating from
meetings of the king and his councillors, such as that which must have been
produced to record Wulfbald’s come-uppance (subsequently used for the
account of Wulfbald’s crimes incorporated in a royal diploma);!'® of
administrative documents such as the Burghal Hidage, and of records
generated in connection with the performance of services due from the
holders of land, or in connection with the assessment and collection of
different kinds of tax (including heregeld, and tribute from Welsh
rulers).''? One thinks of treaties, whether with trading partners or with
Viking armies; and one might even think of royal diplomas.!“° There most
certainly was extensive use of the written word in the routine procedures of
late Anglo-Saxon royal government; but whether it all worked smoothly is
another matter, and that it should have precluded a role for oral processes of
communication is out of the question.
Needless to say (perhaps), such a degree of dependence on the written
word presupposes the existence of a body of scribes in the king’s service; for
while kings might on occasion have relied on others to produce the written
records of government,'*’ it is simply inconceivable that they could have
done so as a matter of normal course. Little 1s known of the actual

115 Asser, ch. 79: see Life of Alfred, ed. Stevenson, pp. 63-6 (text), and Keynes and Lapidge,
Alfred the Great, pp. 93-4 (translation). Asser replied in writing.
16 tegen hleaperas Alfred cyning sende mid gewritum: Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, s.a. 889.
7 Gesetze, ed. Liebermann, I, pp. 273-5 and 276-7 (=EHD nos. 48 and 53); see Simon
Keynes, “The additions in Old English’, The York Gospels, ed. Nicholas Barker (Rox-
burghe Club, 1986), pp. 81-99, at 95-6.
8 Sawyer no. 877: Charters, ed. Robertson, no. 63, and EHD no. 120. See also Simon
Keynes, ‘Crime and Punishment in the Reign of King #thelred the Unready’, in People
and Places in Northern Europe 500-1600, ed. 1.N. Wood and N. Lund (Woodbridge,
forthcoming).
'19 See Campbell, ‘Observations on English government’, pp. 157-8, and ‘The significance of
the Anglo-Norman state’, pp. 173-5.
'20 For the production of diplomas in the tenth and early eleventh centuries, see Keynes,
Diplomas, pp. 14-153, and idem, ‘Regenbald’, pp. 185-7.
'21 Thus the document recording King Aithelred’s confirmation of the will of Aéthelric of
Bocking (Sawyer no. 939: Wills, ed. Whitelock, no. 16.2, and EHD no. 121) was written
and read during the course of a meeting of the royal council; and to judge from its tone it
was drafted by a member of the community of Christ Church, Canterbury.
 ROYAL GOVERNMENT AND THE WRITTEN WORD 257
organization of the royal secretariat in the tenth and eleventh centuries,
beyond the likelihood that it was a permanent office attached to the king’s
household, staffed by some laymen as well as by priests of the royal chapel,
who accompanied the king on his peregrinations around the kingdom.'*
But one royal scribe who is known to us by name is the thegn Atlfwine, a
scniptor of King Aithelred’s who received a grant of land in Oxfordshire in
984;' and two others are Swithgar and Alfgeat, who are associated with
Regenbald the king’s chancellor in charters of King Edward the Con-
fessor.'** There would have been plenty of work to keep such men fully
occupied. !*

'22 See Keynes, Diplomas, pp. 134-53, and idem, ‘Regenbald’, pp. 187-95; but compare
Pierre Chaplais, “The royal Anglo-Saxon “chancery” of the tenth century revisited’, in
Studies in Medieval History Presented to R.H.C. Davis, ed. Henry Mayr-Harting and R.1.
Moore (London, 1985), pp. 41-51.
123 Sawyer no. 853: Charters of Burton Abbey, ed. P.H. Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters 2
(London, 1979), no. 24.
'*4 See Keynes, ‘Regenbald’, pp. 208-10.
‘2° Compare Chaplais, ‘The royal Anglo-Saxon “chancery” ’, pp. 43-4.
 IO

re
Literacy in Carolingian government

Fanet L. Nelson

I THE CONTEXT OF LITERACY

Nearly forty years ago, Ganshof published “The use of the written word in
Charlemagne’s administration’.' That paper, in only eighteen pages, pro-
vided a comprehensive survey, and a lucid classification, of the documen-
tary evidence, especially the capitularies, of Charlemagne’s reign.
Ganshof’s study remains fundamental. The limited aim of the present
paper is partly to supplement it, partly to set the material in a different
context. Literacy can be examined, not just in quantitative terms of
measurable ‘uses’, but in qualitative terms, as a form of ideology through
which power is constructed.” The adjective ‘written’ refers to things,
‘literate’ to persons. Hence in dealing with literacy rather than with
Ganshof’s ‘written word’, I hope to consider aspects of social practice with
which Ganshof was not concerned.
Ganshof’s definition of ‘administration’ rested on a sharp distinction
between ‘written records’ used ‘to furnish proof of individual rights’ and
‘documents which formed part of an administrative routine’.* Implicit here

' Originally published as ‘Charlemagne et l’usage de l’écrit en matiére administrative’, Le

Moyen Age 57 (1951), 1-25, trans. J. Sondheimer as “The use of the written word in
Charlemagne’s administration’, in F.L. Ganshof, The Carolingians and the Frankish
Monarchy (London, 1971), pp. 125-42.
* Social scientists have written much on literacy. I have found especially helpful: B.V. Street,
Literacy in Theory and Practice, Cambridge Studies in Oral and Literate Culture 9
(Cambridge, 1984); also J. Goody, The Logic of Wnting and the Orgamisation of Society
(Cambridge, 1986). Both these give extensive references. Among mediaeval historians, the
pathbreaker has been M. Clanchy, From Memory to Wniten Record: England 1066-1307
(London, 1979), This exemplary study shows what can be done with the evidence from
twelfth- and thirteenth-century England. B. Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written
Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centunes (Princeton,
1983), and D. Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order (Cambridge, 1982), are full of insights
on, respectively, the eleventh/twelfth and sixteenth/seventeenth centuries. See also H.J.
Graff, The Legacies of Literacy: Continuities and Contradictions in Western Culture and
Society (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1987). |
> Ganshof, ‘The use of the written word’, p. 125.
258
 LITERACY IN CAROLINGIAN GOVERNMENT — 259
is a further distinction between the private and public domains. Only the
latter came within Ganshof’s purview: for him, administration was the
sphere of the state. But what in the Carolingian period was the public
domain? Was there a Carolingian state at all? Such questions — and they are
important ones in the history of political ideas — have generated much
debate precisely because the categories they employ are hard to pin down to
early mediaeval realities.* The term ‘government’ directs attention to such
realities, and, specifically, to the operations of legitimate power. Here the
useful distinction to be made is not between private and public, but,
instead, between two levels: local and central. Basic types of governmental
activity — peacekeeping, the mobilizing of military force, the imposition of
generalized economic exactions — operated at one or the other level, or
involved interaction between the two. For Marculf, compiling a collection
of legal form-documents c. 700, praeceptiones regales (royal precepts) and
cartae pagenses (local charters) were complementary instruments.°
As far as peacekeeping was concerned, the Franks, as often happens,
recognized the workings of power more clearly abroad than at home.
Among the Saxons, disputes could be settled by pagenses infra patnam
(‘locals within their native region’, that 1s, in this case, Saxony itself) cum
proprus vicinantibus, more solito .. .1uxta consuetudinem (‘with their own
neighbourhood-dwellers, in the traditional way . . . according to custom’);
or in the same local courts in the presence of royal commissioners (mss7) ; or
in the palace in the presence of the king.° In those parts of the Empire that
had once been Roman and where counties were ancient territorial units, the
local courts were presided over by the count or his deputies, but with the co-
operation, still, of pagenses.’
To wield force, the ruler maintained a military household, whose
members had retinues of their own. Some individuals of both sorts of group
resided not with the ruler at the palace but on estates in the countryside,

* See especially J. Fried, ‘Der karolingische Herrschaftsverband im 9.Jh.’, Historische

Zeitschnft 235 (1982), 1-43; and, not least for a fine survey of the mainly German
historiography, H.-W. Goetz, ‘Regnum: Zum politischen Denken der Karolingerzeit’,
Zeitschnift der Savigny-Stiftung fur Rechtsgeschichte, 117, germanistische Abteilung, 104
(1987), 110-89. English-speaking students will find some relevant comments in J.L.
Nelson, ‘Kingship and empire’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought ed.
J.H. Burns (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 211-51, at pp. 224-9.
> Marculfi Formularum Libri Duo, ed. A. Uddholm (Uppsala 1962), p. 18.
© MGH Cap. I, no. 27, c. 4, p. 71.
’” See J.L. Nelson, ‘Dispute settlement in Carolingian West Francia’, and W. Davies, ‘People
and places in dispute in ninth-century Brittany’, in Settlement of Disputes, pp. 61-2, 73,
273. In taking pagenses to mean ‘local men with legal competence’, I do not share the view of
E. Magnou-Nortier, ‘Les pagenses, notables et fermiers du fisc durant le haut moyen Age’,
Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire 65 (1987), 237-56.
260 Janet L. Nelson
where their mobilization was the job of the local count, who himself had his
own retinue. If a region were attacked, all its inhabitants could be called out
to fight. Military obligation was multi-layered, and in each layer at once
‘public’ and ‘private’. Some pagenses were more equal than others: the less
equal preferred to deal directly with the ruler, or with his immediate agents
(missi, royal vassals) rather than via the count.® Like the maintenance of
internal order, Carolingian military organization involved complex interac-
tions and trade-offs between central and local power.
Some modern scholars have credited the Carolingian state with a realm-
wide tax system inherited from the later Roman Empire. But it seems
likelier that the only generalized land-tax imposed by ninth-century rulers
was a new imposition to pay off Danish intruders, not an ancient survival.
The texts that allegedly prove the persistence of a Roman tax-system seem
rather to show Carolingian rulers imposing exactions, like other landlords,
on the tenants of their own estates, and backing up similar exactions on the
estates of churches whose resources were in part at the rulers’ disposal.’ But
some generalized economic demands were made by Carolingian rulers: if
greater use of the written word accounts for the vast increase in the evidence
for economic activity in the Carolingian as compared with the Merovingian
period, increased economic activity may be partly responsible for the
increase in the extant records. Rulers who want to control and exploit
coinage and markets, and to protect merchants while taking a cut of their
profits, have obvious uses for written documents. The Carolingians,
especially in the ninth century, resumed these aspects of Roman imperial
practice for a mixture of motives, including fiscal ones.’° The issuing of
letters of protection for merchants, the maintenance of toll-stations, the
licensing of mints and markets, imposed considerable governmental

§ MGH Cap. I, no. 73, p. 165; cf. no. 50, pp. 137-8. On Carolingian military organization,
essential now are T. Reuter, ‘Plunder and tribute in the Carolingian Empire’, TRHS 35
(1985), 75-94, and the same author’s paper in Charlemagne’s Heir: New Perspectives on the
Reign of Louis the Pious, ed. Roger Collins and Peter Godman (Oxford 1990).
? Indispensable on the ninth-century evidence are recent papers by J.-P. Devroey, especially
‘Polyptyques et fiscalité a l’époque carolingienne: une nouvelle approche?’, Revue Belge de
Philologie et d’Histotre 63 (1985), 783-94; ‘Les Premiers Polyptyques rémois, VI le—-[Xe
siécles’, in Le Grand Domaine aux époques mérovingienne et carolingienne (Ghent, 1985),
pp. 78-97; and ‘Réflexions sur |’économie des premiers temps carolingiens (768-877)’,
Francia \3 (1986), 475-88.
10 See F.L. Ganshof, ‘The institutional framework of the Frankish monarchy’, in Ganshof,
The Carolingians and the Frankish Monarchy, pp. 86-110, at pp. 99-100; and especially
now the fine discussion of P. Johanek, ‘Der frankische Handel der Karolingerzeit im Spiegel
der Schriftquellen’, Untersuchungen zu Handel und Verkehr der vor- und fruhgeschicht-
lichen Zeit in Mittel- und Nordeuropa, Part IV: ‘Der Handel der Karolinger- und
Wikingerzeit’, Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Gdttingen, Philolo-
gisch-Historische Klasse, 3rd series, 156 (G6ttingen 1987), pp. 7-68, at pp. 20-32.
 LITERACY IN CAROLINGIAN GOVERNMENT — 261
requirements, and an ‘administrative routine’ of sorts to link centres and
localities.
How did that routine impinge on ‘individual rights’ in early mediaeval
practice? Landlords, lay as well as ecclesiastical, wielded jurisdictional and
fiscal powers on their own estates as holders of immunities. Originally, the
immunity consisted of powers granted by the ruler, hence not ‘private’, but
‘public’, in the sense that they remained in principle the ruler’s monopoly,
but could be delegated and exercised on his behalf. In some parts of Gaul,
until the seventh century, landlords when they acquired or transferred
property through gift or purchase, used a registry staffed by royal agents to
validate and lodge their titles.'' Over time, bundles of land and power
would be acquired 1n a variety of ways, and inherited as ‘individual rights’,
yet they retained an association with the ruler’s unique authority. Further,
while such powers were exercised locally, the centre could intrude, through
summons to judicial assemblies, or to war.
In the last few decades of the Merovingian period, up to c. 750, such
intrusions of central power became rare: not only had the links dwindled
between the two levels of government, but the higher level had all but
ceased to function. This is why Ganshof saw a decline of the written word in
administration immediately before the Carolingians’ advent.'* There were
no late Merovingian capitularies, nor after c. 700 any more Merovingian
royal judgements, and very few royal charters. There were, however,
plenty of non-royal charters and much activity in non-royal courts. In short,
there was government, but it was government in non-royal places, at the
level of the patna.
What the Carolingians did was to take up again the threads that linked
patna and palace. Ninth-century land-surveys are inconceivable without a
continuous sub-Roman tradition of record-using landlordship. Carolingian
notitiae of judgements in county courts are inconceivable without a
similarly continuous tradition of the use of documents 1n legal proceedings
all over the so-called ‘barbarian’ west. Continuities with the Merovingian
period are offset, on the other hand, by a huge increase in the coverage and
volume of the Carolingian evidence, especially from the reign of
Charlemagne onwards. The Carolingians operated ona different scale from
their predecessors. Of the capitularies printed in the standard MGH
edition, only some 25 pages relate to the Merovingian period, over 700
pages to the Carolingian.’? The Leges, and the formulae, survive virtually

'! See I. Wood, ‘Disputes in late fifth- and sixth-century Gaul: some problems’, in Settlement
of Disputes, pp. 7-22, at p. 13.
'2 Ganshof, ‘The use of the written word’, p. 125, and compare Wood above, pp. 63-8.
'S These figures are intended to be no more than impressionistic.
262 Fanet L. Nelson
exclusively in manuscripts of the Carolingian period, even if their contents
may be earlier; and charters, and notices of judgements in courts, survive
from many parts of the Carolingian Empire in vastly greater numbers for
the later eighth and ninth centuries than from the preceding period. '* There
was, it seems, an explosion in the volume of written documentation in
Carolingian government.
Why and how did this come about? Most historians, following Ganshof,
have tended to examine the phenomenon primarily 1n terms of the motives
of Charlemagne. Ganshof wrote of ‘use’, and in the singular. He, and others
in his wake, assumed that Charlemagne’s utilitarian, even bureaucratic, aim
was greater efficiency in communicating orders and information to his
agents, in ensuring those agents’ accountability and in securing compliance
with their directives. This is what Ganshof meant by the term administra-
tion, and it was by criteria of administrative efficiency that he judged
Charlemagne’s programme a failure.'> Werner, still using Ganshof’s
criteria, but with his chronological scope extended to cover the ninth
century, has recently come to the opposite conclusion: namely that
Carolingian government was surprisingly efficient.'® Later in this paper, I
shall have to join the game of assessing an early mediaeval regime’s
performance in terms of its use of written documents.
I want first to move the goalposts: to consider what was written, not only
as the outcome of a ruler’s aims but as the product of collaboration on the
part of some (at least) of the ruled; and not only as an object or means of
action in a pragmatic sense, but as a determinant of action in a sociological
sense. Literacy is a kind of technology: literacy is also a frame of mind, anda
framer of minds. For instance, no ‘individual right’ was more valued than
legal freedom: precisely here, the production and presentation of a written
carta of manumission continued throughout the period from the fifth to the
ninth centuries to be required by law courts as symbol, test and proof of
liberation. So crucial was the link between document and status that
freedmen were called cartularni: ‘charter-men’.'’ Further, the property of a
freedman who died without leaving a will was taken over by the royal fisc as

'* Nelson, ‘Dispute settlement’, pp. 45-6.

'S Ganshof, ‘The use of the written word’, pp. 133-5; compare also in Ganshof, Carolingians
and the Frankish Monarchy, chs. XII, “The last period of Charlemagne’s reign: a study in
decomposition’, and XIII, ‘Charlemagne’s failure’.
‘© K.F. Werner, ‘Missus-marchio-comes: entre administration centrale et l’administration
locale de Empire carolingien’, in Historie comparée de l’administration, ed. W. Paravicini
and K.F. Werner, Beiheft der Francia 9 (Munich, 1980), pp. 191-239.
'? See H. Mordek, ‘Unbekannte Texte zur karolingischen Gesetzgebung. Ludwig der
with further references. ,
Fromme, Einhard und die Capitula adhuc conferanda’, DA 42 (1986), 446-70, at 458-9,
 LITERACY IN CAROLINGIAN GOVERNMENT 263
heir.'® The free, whether landlords or tenants, were thus legally identified
as issuers, holders, users of documents. Rulers too found a symbolic
identity through their commitment to written rules: lex scripta was the
hallmark of both the biblical leader of Israel and the Christian Roman
emperor. But at the same time it became the collective possession of the new
Israel, the Christian people: the faithful Franks.'’ Whatever the
Carolingians did in promoting the written word, they did not act alone, nor
were the collective goals wholly utilitarian.
If literacy in government has to be understood in the context of its other
uses and effects, complex interactions need to be looked at over time. Where
Ganshof concentrated heavily on Charlemagne’s reign, I shall follow
Werner in looking also at the reigns of his successors. ‘The ninth-century
practice of literacy in government at central and local levels will show a
variety of uses, for the written word was not equally important for
government east and west of the Rhine, nor, within each composite
kingdom, in each region, while traditions in Italy were in some respects
distinctive.*° The ideological impact of literacy also varied and some rulers
showed themselves more aware of its potential than others: here the
evidence from the reigns of Louis the Pious (814-40) and Charles the Bald
(840-77) deserves special attention.
A crucial feature of the cultural context of Carolingian literacy was the
church’s commitment to the practice of the written word. Latin was the
unique medium of orthodoxy in the early mediaeval west. Carolingian
reformers did not choose to make it so: they received it as such from
Christian late antiquity. But though the medium had remained the same, its
function had changed.*' In the fourth and fifth centuries, despite some

'8 Formulae imperiales no. 38, ed. K. Zeumer, MGH Formulae, pp. 315-16.
'? For early mediaeval law in general, see P. Wormald, ‘Lex scripta and verbum regis:
legislation and germanic kingship, from Euric to Cnut’, in Early Medieval Kingship, ed.
P.H. Sawyer and I.N. Wood (Leeds, 1977), pp. 105-38; and for the Carolingian period,
J.L. Nelson, ‘Legislation and consensus in the reign of Charles the Bald’, in [deal and
Reality in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Society, ed. P. Wormald (Oxford, 1983), pp. 202-27
(reprinted in J.L. Nelson, Politics and Ritual in Early Medieval Europe (London, 1986).
2° C.J. Wickham, Early Medieval Italy: Central Power and Local Society 400-1000
(London, 1981), pp. 60-2; and idem, ‘Land disputes and their social framework in
Lombard-Carolingian Italy, 700-900’, in Settlement of Disputes, pp. 105-24, at pp. 112,
122-4.
*! See McKitterick, Carolingians, pp. 7-22. On the aims of Carolingian reformers, and the
constraints they worked under, I have also found the following helpful (though my own
conclusions sometimes differ from theirs): A. Guerreau-Jalabert, “La “renaissance
carolingienne”: modéles culturels, usages linguistiques et structures sociales’, Bibliotheque
de l’Ecole des Chartes 139 (1981), 5-35; M. Richter, ‘Die Sprachenpolitik Karls des
Grossen’, Sprachwissenschaft 7 (1982), 412-37; R. Wright, Late Latin and Early
Romance in Spain and Carolingian France (Liverpool, 1982); M. van Uytfanghe, ‘Histoire
264 Janet L. Nelson
diversity of literary forms and styles, the discourse of Latin Christendom
was democratized: those who could not read Cicero could read the Vulgate
Bible or Orosius, while those who could not read at all, but who spoke even
fairly basic Latin, could understand scripture or the liturgy when it was
read out. Between that world and the Carolingian world lay three centuries
of linguistic evolution and a notable expansion of Christendom itself:
spoken Latin had diverged from written Latin, while much of Christian
Europe was inhabited by speakers of non-Romance languages. Carolingian
reformers wanted to reassert uniformity of belief and practice, and to
impose uniform standards on lay people. By insisting on latinity, they
privileged Romance- over germanic-speakers; but by insisting on correct
latinity, they highlighted the gap between the written language and the
evolving vernaculars.
How far were these outcomes intended? The reformers were not only
interested in accessibility. Operating in an extremely inegalitarian world,
they assumed and exploited differentials in access to power. Latinity’s
potential for restrictiveness was thus a recommendation. Within the church
hierarchy itself, full control of Latin was not for the lower clergy: it was
enough that they be able to read, or use as aids to memory, a small number
of basic texts. A full command of Latin, active as well as passive, was
expected of the higher clergy, themselves potentes , members of the magnate
class. It took special pleading and a lot of utilitas, that is, political and
perhaps military capacity, to make up for a certain lack of evuditio in an
episcopal candidate.** Yet the phenomenal level of latinity acquired by
some aspirants to and holders of high ecclesiastical office was itself a
significant source and symbol of their authority, to be paraded in synodal
decrees and in letters and poems that also constituted a public discourse.”
The conditions under which these churchmen wielded their power imposed
a particular kind of widened access to latinity: namely, that lay magnates too
should be enlisted among the ranks of the actively literate — writers, and
connoisseurs of style, as well as readers. Handbooks of spirituality and
private prayers produced by ecclesiastical potentes for lay potentes signalled
an entente: the two wings of the Carolingian elite were to be united in

du latin, protohistoire des langues romanes et histoire de la communication’, Francia 11

(1983), 579-613; M. Banniard, “Théorie et pratique de la langue et du style chez Alcuin’,
Francia 13 (1985), 579-601.
2 Lupus of Ferriéres, Correspondance, ed. L. Levillain, 2 vols. (Paris 1927-35), II, no. 74, p.
16.

3 Letters: see G. Constable, Letters and Letter Collections, Typologie des sources du moyen
age occidental 17 (Turnhout 1976), pp. 11-16. Poetry: see P. Godman, Poetry of the
Carolingian Renaissance (London, 1985), and idem, Poets and Emperors (Oxford, 1986).
 LITERACY IN CAROLINGIAN GOVERNMENT — 265
their capacity to handle Latin as a written medium in private and in
public.
For Carolingian churchmen, the written mode always coexisted with the
oral mode. The Word was both medium and message. Whatever emphasis
the church put on writing, it always stressed, at the same time, that Truth
was revealed through speech. Preaching meant the oral explication of Holy
Writ. Hincmar (c. 805-82) preferred to argue and prescribe et verbo et
scripto. For Regino-of Priim (d. 910), things worth recording were to be
learned in chronicorum libris or ex relatione patrum.” If access to literacy
meant different things at different levels of the church’s own hierarchy, so
with the laity, while the church’s mission was universal, and all Christians
knew what holy books looked like from the outside, direct knowledge of
what was inside was hightly restricted. It was no part of the Carolingian
programme to provide, as it were, access courses for pauperes, even if some
pauperes might well benefit from having their names inscribed on a
church’s list of registered poor, or (along with nobles) in a Memorial
Book.*° Churches were decorated with tituli, dedicatory inscriptions, so
that the faithful, physically separated from the liturgical books beyond the
chancel rail, saw writing incised or painted on the walls above and about
them. These texts were explicated in sermons and pictures — so that, as Bede
put it, pictures could ‘offer those unable to read, a sort of live reading (viva
lectio) of the Lord’s story’.*’ But ‘without an accompanying text (imscrip-
tio), how could you know if a picture of a woman with a child on her knees
was the Virgin and Child or Venus with Aeneas?’.“* A minimal amount of
text was required as authentication. Only for the elite few was writing a
medium of private spirituality aimed at self-control. For the rest, the
written word was a public medium of control imposed externally. It was in

“4 Compare my comments in ‘Public Histories and private history in the work of Nithard’,
Specuum 60 (1985), 251-93, reprinted in idem, Politics and Ritual, pp. 195-237, at pp.

*> For Hincmar, see my ‘Kingship, law and liturgy’, EHR 92 (1977), 241-79, reprinted in
idem, Politics and Ritual, pp. 133-71, at p. 145; Regino, Chronicon, ed. F. Kurze, MGH
SS t.u.s. L, p. 73.
26 G. Constable, ‘The Liber Memorialis of Remiremont’, Speculum 47 (1971), 261-77.
27 Bedae Venerabilis Opera Pars III Opera Homiletica Pars [V/Opera Rhythmica, Homiliarum
Evangelt Libn Due, 1.13, ed. J. Fraipont, CCSL 122 (Turnhout, 1955), p. 93. Walafrid,
De exordits et increments, c. 8, ed. V. Krause, MGH Cap. II, p. 482, and De exoradits et
incrementis quarundam in observationibus ecclesiasticis rerum, ed. A. Knoepfler
(Munich, 1980), p. 24.
*8 Libri Carolini, IV, c. 16, ed. H. Bastgen, MGH Conc. II, Suppl., p. 204, and see
McKitterick, below, p. 309, for further comment.
266 Janet L. Nelson
the preface to a collection of t2tuli that the Frankish scholar Hrabanus (d.
856) set out the range of the church’s uses of the written word:
Since the benign Law of God rules the wide world in mastery,
how holy it is to write out the Law of God!...
No work arises which age, full of years, does not destroy, nor wicked
time overturn:
Only things written escape this fate, repel death,
Only things written in books renew what has been.
The finger of God carved things written on rock well fitted for them
When he gave the Law to his people.
These things written show in their record
Everything that is, has been, or is to come .. .””
In its own law-making, and in its institutional organization, the church
practised what it preached: documents were used, and appealed to as
authoritative. On this depended its bid to control a part of the lives of
laypeople. Uniformity of correct belief and practice was an overriding
imperative: Latin was its medium.
A Latin text could be read individually, privately. It could be
reconverted into speech, and read out to a public, collective, audience.
Correct writing, as Charlemagne knew, was indispensable to such correct
reading; and the deployment of a new script, Caroline minuscule, played its
part in creating a ‘grammar of legibility’ which could then be applied to
other than religious texts.*° But all that was only for those who understood
correct Latin, spoken if not written. In the eighth and ninth centuries,
correct Latin, the written lingua franca of the Frankish Empire, was no
one’s mother tongue. Those who read and wrote it had to learn a language
that was more or less new. Regrettably, we know virtually nothing about
how it was taught. But the proof that it was taught lies in both the vast
output surviving from ecclesiastical scriptoria and, as significantly, the few
remnants of labours in aristocratic ones.
Early mediaeval technology and Frankish tradition alike imposed a
consensual face-to-face style on political relationships within the aristocracy
of warriors and landholders. The key institution where decision-making
took place was the assembly, whether realm-wide or local. There the
medium was the spoken word: magnates and lesser men participated in
deliberations viva voce, and heard, literally, the ‘word of the king’ (verbum
regis) or his representative. Decisions might be set down under lists of
headings (capitula), but they were conveyed in adnuntiationes, oral

29 The text of Hrabanus’ prefatory poem is now conveniently accessible, with English
translation, in Godman, Poetry, pp. 248-9. My own translation here is less elegant, but
more literal, than Godman’s.
3° See D. Ganz, ‘The preconditions for caroline minuscule’, Viator 18 (1987), 23-44.
 LITERACY IN CAROLINGIAN GOVERNMENT — 267
statements to faithful men. Thus the written word, even when extensively
used, always coexisted with the spoken word.*' At no point during the
Carolingian period 1s it helpful to oppose ‘writtenness’ to orality — to regard
the one as excluding the other. Thus, for instance, the father of Odo of
Cluny, a Neustrian noble celebrated in the mid-ninth century (so Odo’s
biographer tells us) for his abilities as a judge, knew Justinian’s laws
memoniter (‘by heart’), presumably in Latin.** Additions to codified laws of
peoples (leges gentium) were spoken and heard: in Italy, c. 806, faithful
men claimed not to be bound by the additions made to Lex Salica by
Charlemagne in 803 ‘in his council’, on the grounds that they had not been
personally present to hear them announced by the ruler. Charlemagne,
reminding his son King Pippin of Italy ‘of when and how we spoke with you
about these capitula’, told him to ‘make the additional laws known’ to those
in his Italian realm and to order obedience to them.** The argument of the
faithful men was not challenged in principle: Charlemagne did not assert
that written instructions from Aachen could validly be substituted for
decisions made and heard at Pavia.
Seldom do capitularies or other texts mention translation into spoken
vernaculars. Hincmar in the De Ordine Palati, for instance, in the most
detailed extant account of assembly proceedings, says nothing about
translating capitularies before they were discussed by magnates or presen-
ted to the faithful men at large.** There are a few references in
Charlemagne’s capitularies to translation into the lingua teutisca, and it has
been suggested that the word intellegere in a number of capitularies means
‘understand in translation’. The absence of reference to translation into the
lingua romana has been taken to mean that the lingua romana was 1n fact
still Latin during Charlemagne’s reign.* Within a generation of
Charlemagne’s death, we have Nithard’s rendering of the Strasbourg oaths
in 842 to show that the lingua romana, when written down, looked quite far
removed from Latin.*° In 876, a germanic vernacular text of the oath by
which Louis the German’s sons swore the division of the East Frankish
realm was widely posted.*’ There may well have been others of whose

>! Compare Nelson, ‘Legislation and consensus’, passim.

2 John of Salerno, Vita Odonts, c. 5, PL 133, col. 46.
°3- MGH Cap. I, no. 103, p. 212; compare tbid., no. 39, p. 113.
*# Nelson, ‘Legislation and consensus’, pp. 103-9.
’5 Richter, ‘Sprachenpolitik’.
36 Nithard, Histoire des fils de Louts le Pieux , 111.5, ed. P. Lauer (Paris 1926), pp. 102-8. See
Wright, Late Latin, pp. 122-6.
37 Annales Fuldenses, s.a. 876, ed. F. Kurze, MGH SS 1.u.s. VIII, p. 89.
 268 Janet L. Nelson
existence no record survives. Nevertheless, the extant number of
capitularies in germanic vernacular is extremely small.** Otherwise, the
written language of government was Latin, and the fact that there 1s much
more ninth-century evidence of it, at both royal and local levels, in the West
Frankish and Italian kingdoms than in the East Frankish one must be at
least partly explicable in terms of Latin’s more ready accessibility to
Romance-speakers than to German-speakers.*? Yet similarity is not the
same thing as identity. Not least of the advantages offered by Latin,
whether spoken or written, to Charlemagne’s regime was that it
transcended the linguistic divide at the Empire’s heart, between East and
West Franks. Not Frankish, therefore, but Latin could serve both to unite
the Franks and to mark them out as a ruling gens, the chosen people of God
— who of course had also chosen Latin as His medium.
Both dualities, of mode and of language, are evident in a procedure
fundamental to the whole structure of political authority in the ninth
century, namely oath-swearing. In Francia, in 792, rebels had claimed not
to be bound to fidelity quod fidelitatem non jurassent (‘because they had not
sworn [an oath of] fidelity’) !*° Oath-swearing was the fundamental act of
obligation, and oaths were sworn by the spoken word, and in the vernacu-
lars. But the record thereof was kept, almost invariably, in Latin alone.
Churchmen, whose own organization rested on written authorities and
procedures, did not attempt to oust the oral mode on this territory. Just as
Charlemagne generalized and regularized the swearing of fidelity to him-
self, so, repeatedly, did Charles the Bald: his capitularies were drafted by
bishops who themselves swore fidelity orally while repeatedly invoking the
written texts of oaths as the basis of political relations.*! There is little
mileage left in the debate as to whether the oral or the literate mode was
‘constitutive’ in Carolingian legislation. The idea of alternative modes is
belied by the frequency of cross-referencing from one to the other. Some of
the detailed evidence to be discussed below shows that things written often
lacked formal precision or completeness precisely because they assumed the
complement of things spoken and remembered: some capitularies are very
obviously aids to memory or agendas for discussion.”

: 38 Werner, ‘Missus-marchio-comes’, p. 199 and n. 27, lists four instances.

, _ 39 The importance of this distinction is pointed out by McKitterick, Carolingians, pp. 21-2.
] *0 MGH Cap. I, no. 25, p. 66.
*! Compare Nelson, ‘Kingship, law and liturgy’.
* See H. Mordek, ‘Karolingische Kapitularien’, in Uberlieferung und Geltung normativer
Texte des frithen und hohen Mittelalters, ed. idem, Quellen und Forschungen zum Recht
im Mittelalter 4 (Sigmaringen, 1986), pp. 25-50, and below, pp. 280-2.
 LITERACY IN CAROLINGIAN GOVERNMENT — 269
Measuring the extent of lay literacy in the Carolingian world in any
strictly quantifiable sense is, of course, impossible. But that need not deter
efforts at more impressionistic assessments. Two kinds of distinction are
helpful here. First, we need to differentiate between, on the one hand,
members of the ruling elite, that is, the high aristocracy, occupying high
secular or ecclesiastical office, and, on the other hand, the broader class of
mediocres and even some pauperes, free persons of lesser status and
dependent on the political power of potentes. The former group may be
termed the actively literate, those fully in command of Latin, able to wield
public power by conveying their will through their own written words; the
latter group were those familiar with procedures involving documents, able
to find notaries to draw up documents when needed, and experienced in
witnessing the transactions of their fellows — in short, such ‘knowledgeable
neighbours’ as were referred to in acapitulary of 816: persons whose literacy
may be termed passive or pragmatic.”
Only a few members of the high aristocracy certainly wrote, as well as
read and used, written texts. Some offspring of landholders of ‘mediocre’
status may have acquired basic capacity to read and write, and the survey of
the tenants of St Victor, Marseilles, lists some half-dozen boys ‘at school’,
presumably in training for holy orders.** But not all schoolchildren were
destined for an ecclesiastical career: one set of episcopal statutes even
suggests that girls as well as boys received some instruction from parish
priests, possibly to prepare them for future godparental duties, for these
were taken very seriously by the Carolingian church.* The mass of free (or
freedmen) landholders, however, whether owners or tenants, were passive
participants in literacy: they were regular users of documents of specific
legal types in specific legal contexts, and though they could certainly not
themselves have written the documents, and probably could not even read
them in full, they could recognize standard formulae, and display remark-
able expertise on matters of formal correctness. In 857, for instance, at a
court held near Tours, 1n a case that turned on the validity of a title of sale,
‘nearly all the colon: [free peasants] gave witness that they had not seen [the
document] being corroborated, nor were the names written down there

43 MGH Cap. I, no. 134, c. 1, p. 268.

* Polyptych of St Victor, Marseilles, ed. B. Guérard, Cartulaire de l’abbaye de St. Victor de
Marseille, 2 vols. (Paris, 1857), Il, pp. 637, 639, 642, 647, 648. I am grateful to J.-P.
Devroey for drawing these references to my attention.
© Girls at school: Statuta of Bishop Riculf of Soissons, c. 16, PE 131, col. 21, forbid girls’
acceptance; godparental duties: see J. Lynch, Godparents and Kinship in Early Medieval
Europe (Princeton 1986), pp. 305-32.
 270 Janet L. Nelson
those of colonz of that villa of which the disputed property formed part, but
. they were from another villa which was not of the colon whose names were
recorded’.*® |
The second kind of distinction to be made is between Romance-speakers
and others. The bulk of our evidence for active lay literacy comes from
regions of Romance-speakers. But the survival of the two vast charter-
dossiers of St Gall and Redon, both sited in non-Romance-speaking
regions, shows that Romance-speaking was not a necessary condition for
widespread pragmatic lay literacy.*” Other variables were crucial: whether
or not the region had once been part of, or strongly influenced by, the
Roman Empire, and whether or not the Christian church had been
implanted in the region long enough before the Carolingian period for the
habit of Latin documentation to have become established. Where those
conditions were absent, as for instance in Saxony, little evidence survives
for either passive or active lay literacy; but where those conditions were
fulfilled, whatever the local spoken language, the charters and court records
indicate that most of the free population, and some of the unfree too, were
passively, pragmatically, literate: that is, landholders and tenants habitu-
ally used documents, and were even connoisseurs (as in the Tours case) of
their formal traits. This must mean (and the researches of McKitterick and
Davies have recently demonstrated for Alemannia, Rhaetia and Brittany)
that notaries were very widely available in many parts of the Carolingian
world. Though in regions north of the Alps these notaries seem, for the
most part, to have been clergy or monks, they could produce records for
transactions in which no church interest was involved. This must have
been, like moneylending, a significant (and, in a small way, lucrative)
service performed by clerics for local lay communities.** Only in Italy does
it seem certain that a lay notariat persisted.”
The two ways of participating in literacy can be associated with two
different classes of persons. For a count or missus who conveyed his will in
his own written words and used documents to wield, and be seen to wield,
public power, writing was a regularly used form of both self-expression
(which could obviously be used in other contexts too) and official action; for
the man who got a notary to draw up a legal document, the written word was

*° See Nelson, ‘Dispute settlement’, pp. 56-9.

*” See below, p. 276.
#8 W. Davies, “The role of the priest in the local community in ‘east Brittany in the ninth
century’, Etudes Celtiques 20 (1983), 177-96, at 191-2, and McKitterick, Carolingians, pp.
115-26.
49 Wickham, ‘Land disputes’, pp. 107, 112; dem, The Mountains and the City: The Tuscan
Apennines in the Early Middle Ages (Oxford, 1988), pp. 11-12, 18 and n. 5. ,
 LITERACY IN CAROLINGIAN GOVERNMENT 271
something less personal, less frequently used, associated with affirmation of
status rather than office. While the actively literate were not just involved in
government but were themselves governors and the direct agents of the
ruler, the passively literate, like Aristotle’s citizens, participated in ruling
only in a much looser sense, for instance, through serving on panels of
assessors or witnessing settlements of disputes.°”
Latin literacy, like all literacy, entailed grades of exclusiveness: to read
Latin as distinct from merely speaking it was one thing, while to write it
required a further skill. Most rarefied, most technically difficult of all, was
the capacity to understand Latin poetry: yet as early as the 790s, this was a
preferred medium of public communication and display at the Carolingian
court, and even in these early days of the renewal of learning, some laymen
as well as ecclesiastics were able to master it, even to the extent of writing it
themselves.°! This kind of Latin was very evidently the badge of an elite,
distinguished also by its possession of wisdom (sapientia). All judges were
to understand that ‘the wise (sapientes) framed the law for the people, so
that it should not stray from the path of truth’.°* Lex (law) was often used to
denote rights embodied in written documents such as polyptychs, or a
written code.°* Legislator could still mean ‘giver of judgement’, ‘speaker of
law’, but the model of legislation was increasingly that of written Roman
law.>* In the generation after Charlemagne, more members of the lay elite
absorbed the values of their ecclesiastical colleagues. The noblewoman
Dhuoda advised her son that ‘God is learned about through books.”
Bishop Jonas of Orleans pointed a moral for Count Matfrid: ‘if men make
such efforts, with the conduct of legal disputes in view, to learn so greedily
and to understand so precisely the prescriptions of secular laws which have
been issued by mortals, how much the more should they strive to learn

°° Aristotle, Politics III.1, trans. T.A. Sinclair, Aristotle, The Politics (Harmondsworth,
1962), pp. 102-3. Nevertheless, says Aristotle, ‘it would be ridiculous to deny their
participation in authority’.
>! Godman, Poetry, pp. 22-4, 49-53, 196-207, 262-5, 274-7, gives examples. An acrostic
poem was dedicated to William the Constable, count of Blois, ed. Ernst Dimmler: MGH
Poet. I, pp. 620-2.
** Admonitio generalis, c. 63, MGH Cap. I, no. 22, p. 58.
°3_ Compare Nelson, ‘Dispute settlement’, pp. 49-50, 247; 1dem, ‘Kingship and empire’, p.
225; and below, pp. 273-9.
** See J. Devisse, Hincmar et la loi (Dakar 1962) and J. L. Nelson, ‘Translating images of
authority: the Christian Roman Emperor in the Carolingian World’, in Jmages of Authority,
ed. M. M. McKenzie and C. Roueché (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 194-205, which differs from
my earlier paper. “On the limits of the Carolingian Renaissance’, Studies in Church History
14 (1977), pp. 51-67, reprinted in zdem, Politics and Ritual, pp. 49-67, at pp. 53-6.
°° Dhuoda, Manuel pour mon fils, ed. P. Riché, Sources Chrétiennes 225 (Paris, 1975), 1.7, p.
114.
272 Fanet L. Nelson
heavenly laws’.°° Odo of Cluny’s father, the wise judge, had Justinian’s laws
at his fingertips.°’ Only two wills of prominent laymen survive from the
ninth-century Carolingian world: both Eberhard and Eccard had law
books, including Roman law books, among the most valued personal
possessions which they bequeathed to their closest kin and friends.*®
The specific location of the written word in the Carolingian world is the
key to its function in the construction as well as in the deployment of power.
It was not just the means whereby a ruler issued commands or standardized
the conduct of legal business. It defined membership of the realm: the free,
the faithful men in the widest sense, were those capable of receiving and
using written documents in public courts. It also defined a ruling cadre:
those lay as well as ecclesiastical persons with direct command of Latin. The
routinization of government presupposed the legitimation of its agents.
Through active participation in literacy, that is, a capacity to write and read
as well as simply use documents, the elite of the Carolingian world declared
itself. Women shared its distinguishing trait: thus Eberhard left a law book
to his daughter, while his wife, in a charter she herself issued, declared the }
value of written documents in ‘making [a property division] binding,
according to law’.°? Though gender prevented them from exercising public
office,’ it did not deny them privilege: women as noble holders, or
transmitters, of property rights, claimed through literacy membership of
the governing class.
Il CAROLINGIAN GOVERNMENT

The foundation of power, whether that of ruler, lay aristocrat or great

church, was efficient landlordship. Since power had to be devolved to the
localities where the estates were, much turned on control of local agents: an
extremely difficult business, even for kings. The first qualification of a ‘good

°© Jonas, De Institutione laicali 1.20, PL 106, col. 161.

°7 See above, p. 267.
°8 P. Riché, ‘Les Bibliothéques de trois aristocrates laics carolingiens’, Le Moyen Age 69
(1963), 87-104, reprinted in zdem, Instruction et vie religieuse dans le Haut Moyen Age
(London, 1981), at pp. 99-100, 103.
°° Cartulaire de Cysoing, ed. 1.de Coussemaker (Lille, 1883), no. 1, p. 3, no. 3, p. 7.
°° For the exceptional case of a Breton tirannissa, see W. Davies, Small Worlds (Duckworth,
London, 1988), p. 78. Iam grateful to Professor Davies for letting me see part of her book in
page-proof. She rightly points out that the extensive powers over property which many
women exercised are a different matter from formal public powers or a role in public
decision-making. The same goes for queens in this period, though the case of the empress
Engelberga constitutes a partial exception: see P. Stafford, Queens, Concubines and
Dowagers (London, 1983), pp. 134—6, 138-9.
 LITERACY IN CAROLINGIAN GOVERNMENT = 273
bailiff’ was that he should ‘know how to render account to our missus’.°'
That this meant ‘written accounts’, and hence included literacy as well as
numeracy, is confirmed by the main prescriptive text dealing with royal
estate-management, the Caprtulare de Villis .°” The essential regular contact
between ruler and bailiffs was here envisaged as maintained through a
whole series of annual reports: first, a statement of yields was to accompany
the payment to the palace, on Palm Sunday, of cash raised from sales (c.
29); secondly, apparently at the beginning of Lent, when that two-thirds of
the total of available Lenten foodstuffs earmarked for the court’s consump-
tion was sent to the palace, it had to be accompanied by a list of the final one
third remaining at the estate ‘in a written document (per brevem), and
[bailiffs] are not to omit this, as they have hitherto been doing’ (c. 44);
thirdly, three separate lists had to be sent in (per brevem) of renders already
paid, renders still owing and produce remaining (c. 55); fourthly, every
Christmas, a complete annual report had to be submitted, of total yields
from parts of the estate in demesne and from dependent tenements, and of
all revenues and resources, from mills to mines (c. 66). Another capitulary
clause seems to envisage regular (?annual) assemblies of tenants on each
royal estate at which accounts were settled. “Each one is to make his own
return unless he is ill, or ignorant of [how to render] accounts’ (vationes
nescius), in which case the bailiff or some other reliable person was to make
the return on that tenant’s behalf.°’ This presupposes a fairly widespread
basic numeracy, if not literacy, among the peasant population. If bailiffs
themselves were not literate, they must have been expected to have access to
a notary.
None of this precluded oral instructions and face-to-face contact. [t was
the arrival of the ruler himself, or one of his great men, or the threat of being
haled to the palace, which backed the barrage of written requirements. C.
47 of the Capitulare de Villis offers a nice example of a dual mode of
communication: when royal huntsmen, falconers or other ministerales
serving in the palace were sent to royal estates, they were to be given every
assistance ‘according to what we or the queen have ordered in written
instructions, or according to what the seneschal or butler have told them

°! MGH Cap. I, no. 77, c. 19, p. 172.

° MGH Cap. I, no. 32, pp. 82-91. For comment and bibliography, see J. Martindale, ‘The
kingdom of Aquitaine and the “Dissolution of the Carolingian fisc”’, Francia 11 (1984),
131-91, at 160-1 with n. 152.
°3 MGH Cap. I, no. 33, c. 9, p. 93.
°* MGH Cap. I, no. 32, c. 12, p. 84, shows that some hostages were kept on royal estates. CO
Bailiffs could have been responsible for keeping lists of those -— though the listin MGH Cap. |
I, no. 115, pp. 233-4, was probably drawn up at the palace or by a commander in the field:
Ganshof, “The use of the written word’, p. 132.
 274 Fanet L. Nelson
following our oral instructions’.® The king and queen employed the written
mode in their own immediate communication with local agents, but
apparently used the oral mode when going through household officers.
Interestingly, the same duality, but also the same indication that even quite
low-level local agents were literate (or had access to literate persons) appears
in the correspondence of another great landlord, the archbishop of Rheims.
When Hincmar wanted to communicate with his bailiffs (whom he termed
‘plebeian persons’), he sent instructions et verbo et scnpto (‘through word
and through writing’).°°
Charlemagne expected his mzssz to know how to draw up surveys: he sent
them models to imitate: et stc cetera breviare debes (‘and this is how you
must write up your survey of the rest’).°” How far were such instructions
carried out in the case of royal estates? Though Ganshof himself was
sceptical in 1951, now, thanks to his own and others’ subsequent work, the
patchy evidence for the making of inventories of Carolingian royal estates, if
not in Charlemagne’s reign, then later in the ninth century, has become
cumulatively impressive.“ The production of such surveys makes historical
sense, too, in light of successive partitions of the royal lands between
Carolingian heirs, and, in the early 840s, fraternal conflicts that necessarily
involved hand-outs of royal lands to win noble support. That was why
Charles the Bald’s bishops advised him in 845 to send missz to ‘make surveys
recording everything that had been in the royal service or held by royal
vassals under your father and grandfather, and what now remains’, so that
the extent of recent losses could be gauged.” The contemporary author
Nithard, himself a lay magnate, explains that in October 842, the three-way
division of the zmperium between the sons of Louis the Pious had to be
postponed for lack of a complete (or up-to-date?) noticia, and that while
Lothar tried to push through a division, nonetheless, his brothers’ envoys
insisted that a thorough survey must be made first.’”? Contemporary
annalists confirm that during the following nine months, the realm was

° MGH Cap. I, no. 32, c. 16, p. 84.

6 Flodoard, Historia Remensis Ecclesiae Il, c. 28, ed. I. Heller and G. Waitz, MGH SS
XII, p. 553.
°” MGH Cap. I, no. 128, c. 16, p. 253.
8 See in addition to the articles of Devroey cited above, n. 9, R.H.C. Davis, ‘Domesday
Book: Continental parallels’, in Domesday Studies, ed. J.C. Holt (Woodbridge, 1987), pp.
15-39.
° MGH Cap. II, no. 292, c. 20, p. 403 =MGH Conc. III, no. 11 p. 95. The Council of
Soissons (853), MGH Cap. II, no. 259 c. 6, p. 268, shows Charles giving similar attention to
: church property.
® Nithard, Histoire, 1V.5, ed. Lauer, p. 136.
 LITERACY IN CAROLINGIAN GOVERNMENT — 275
‘described’, that is, detailed surveys were made of all royal assets. ‘The same
sources agree that those who made the survey were, or included, laymen.”
Nithard himself was evidently a connoisseur of such data. Subsequent
divisions, less directly documented, probably gave the spur to some
surviving surveys of ecclesiastical estates, which were, of course, given the
Carolingians’ control of the church’s material resources, also among major
royal assets.’
Each count in his county had a watching brief over royal estates. A
charter of 871 shows that persons receiving lands from the fisc were
expected to produce documentary evidence of the original grant: otherwise
they risked seeing their lands resumed into the fisc.”* If, on the other hand, a
lay potens could produce such documentary evidence, he might successfully
resist in a public court the counterclaims of even a very powerful ecclesiasti-
cal party.’* Records of peasant services and renders were accepted in royal
courts as proofs of landlords’ rights. The case studies we have relate,
unsurprisingly, to ecclesiastical landlords, like the monastery of Cormery
which in 828 before a royal tribunal successfully rebutted the counterclaims
of a group of peasant tenants by producing ‘a survey to be read out, wherein
was detailed how in the time of Alcuin’s abbacy the colonz of that estate . . .
had declared on oath what they owed’.” In 864, the Edict of Pitres enforced
peasants’ obligations to perform services of cartage and labouring szcut in
poltpticis continentur (‘as it says in the estate-surveys’).’° It seems likely that
lay landlords too availed themselves of such documents, for use both by
stewards on their estates to impose demands on peasants, and in courts to
back up those impositions. Walafrid seems to have more than his own
stamping ground of Alemannia in mind when, listing the servants which
any potens would have, he puts the couriers (veredari) first, and the

“ Annales Bertiniani, s.a. 842, ed. F. Grat, J. Vielliard and S. Clémencet (Paris 1964), p. 43:
‘missi strenui ... deligerentur, quorum industria diligentior discriptio fieret’; Annales
Fuldenses, s.a. 843, ed. Kurze, p. 34: ‘descripto regno a primoribus’.
” Compare J.L. Nelson, ‘Charles the Bald and the church in town and countryside’, Studies
in Church History 16 (1979), 103-18, reprinted in zdem, Politics and Ritual, pp. 75-90.
® G. Tessier, Recueil des Actes de Charles II le Chauve , 3 vols. (Paris, 1943-55), II, no. 347,
pp. 272-4. This case involved powerful noblemen. Martindale, “The kingdom of
Aquitaine’, 153-4, points out that benefices were often granted orally (verbo regis), and
cites evidence from the earlier Carolingian period; but she also observes that Tessier,
Recueil, IJ, no. 411, shows Charles the Bald creating a benefice by charter in 876. For
further cases see following note.
™ The case of Perrecy, disputed between Count Eccard of Macon and Archbishop Wulfad of
Bourges, shows two charters and a notice of judgement all concerning a benefice: Nelson,
‘Dispute settlement’, pp. 53-5. Eccard won the case.
’> Nelson, ‘Dispute settlement’, pp. 48-51.
7° MGH Cap. XI, no. 273, c. 29, p. 323.
 276 Janet L. Nelson
notaries (commentanienses) second.’’ The former could carry written as
well as oral orders, while the latter could produce, and keep copies of, the
documents required.
Coincidentally, Alemannia is the region where, thanks to the archive of
St Gall, we can see lay landholders using documents in a variety of
transactions and over the whole period from the mid-eighth to the late ninth
centuries. ’® Most of the documents preserved by the abbey naturally record
grants made to it; but in a few cases, records of transactions between
laypersons survive, presumably when the lands involved subsequently
came into St Gall’s possession. For instance, the settlement of a property
dispute between two brothers and two other men was recorded by a priest,
Prihectus.’? It would be interesting to know where this document was kept
before it entered the St Gall archive. Some laypersons who used the services
of a local priest as notary may have used their local church as a repository for
their documents. Persons powerful enough to have their own notaries
presumably had their own archives too. In 760, for instance, a noble grantor
of land to the abbey of St Gall specified that should some future abbot try to
grant this land away as a benefice, the pagenses should collectively enforce
its restitution to the abbey. In 817, another grantor provided that in such
circumstances, his grant should be recovered by his kinsman and trans-
ferred to another royal monastery.*? Though the only copies of these two
documents to have survived are the abbey’s own, their terms would make
most sense in the long run if the benefactors, and their descendants, also
kept copies themselves. When Count Eccard of Macon left landsto Fleury
in his will, he also bequeathed the records that established his rights to
them. Before 876, these documents presumably reposed in Eccard’s per-
sonal archive.”!
| If record keeping had long since been a normal part of Dark Age land-
lordly activity, there were some potential advantages here for kings. The
payment of tributes, or hire-fees, to Vikings, often viewed by modern
historians (and by some ninth-century critics) as a dereliction of royal duty,
had strikingly positive consequences from the standpoint of royal govern-
ment. Charles the Bald, to raise the payments required, notably in the 860s,

” Walafrid, De exordits, c. 32, ed. Krause, p. 516; De exordtis, ed. Knoepfler, p. 102.
78 See McKitterick, Carolingians, pp. 77-134.
” Michael Borgolte, ‘Kommentar zu Austellungsdaten, Actum- und Guterorten der 4lteren
St Galler Urkunden (Wartmann I and II mit Nachtragen in III und IV)’, in Subsidia
Sangallensia, 1: Materiahen und Untersuchungen zu den Verbriiderungsbichern und zu
den alteren Urkunden des Stiftsarchivs St Gallen, ed. Michael Borgolte, Dieter Geuenich
and Karl Schmid (St Gall, 1986), Kommentar no. 254, p. 388.
8° Ibid., Kommentar no. 36 (760), p. 338; no. 228 (817), p. 371.
8! Nelson, ‘Dispute settlement’, p. 54.
 LITERACY IN CAROLINGIAN GOVERNMENT — (277
tapped the resources of his realm more systematically than any of his
predecessors had had to. There was a snowball effect: only if the king and
his advisers had had some idea of how many free and unfree manses existed
could they have calculated the flat rates required to raise four thousand
pounds of silver in 866: 6 denarii per free manse, 3 denarii per unfree.
But, at the same time, a stimulus was given to the production of new surveys
to allow maximum assessments -of liability.8’ Charles the Bald exploited
landlords’ expertise for a further purpose when in 869 he ordered surveys
(breves) to be compiled and brought to the early summer assembly by
bishops, abbots, abbesses, counts and royal vassals, so that, on the basis of
this information, men and materials could be requisitioned to complete the
fortification at Pitres, whereby the key valleys of Seine and Oise were to be
rendered immune to Viking penetration.**
The production of surveys by landlords can be linked in these instances
with royal demands. But surveying was of direct benefit to landlords
themselves. It has recently been argued that many extant ninth-century
estate-surveys were products of ‘private’ rather than ‘public’ initiative.®
The difficulty of applying such categories becomes obvious when we
consider that the allegedly ‘private’ survey of the lands of the church of
Rheims in 845 was made precisely because of the intersection of royal with
episcopal interests in these estates.*° A crucial consequence of the
incorporation of the church into the Carolingian state was that kings could
demand the military services of men who held church lands as benefices.
The importance of benefice-holders to Charlemagne’s military capacity is
suggested in a capitulary, probably of 807, which instructs mzssz and, in
their localities, vicarii, the subordinates of counts, to make surveys of ‘all
benefices held by our men and by others’ men’, and to bring these lists to the
king. The maintenance of benefices was then to be compared with that of
allods, in order to prevent benefices from being ‘destroyed’ or assimilated to
allods, since only benefices kept ‘correctly’ were in a state to enable their
holders to perform military service at the king’s command.®’ Was
Charlemagne demanding access to the service of all benefice-holders, in

82 Annales Bertiniani, s.a. 866, ed. Grat, Vielliard and Clémencet, pp. 125-6. For full
explication of the meaning of this passage, I am indebted to S. Coupland, ‘Charles the Bald
and the defence of the West Frankish kingdom against the Viking invasions’, unpublished
PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1987, ch. 7, pp. 148-51.
83 The production of the Polyptych of St Bertin may belong in this context. See also following
note.
84 Annales Bertiniant, s.a. 869, ed. Grat, Vielliard and Clémencet, pp. 152-3.
5° Davis, ‘Domesday Book: Continental parallels’, pp. 20-1.
8° Nelson, Charles the Bald and the church’, in idem, Politics and Ritual, p. 78.
87 MGH Cap. I, no. 49, c. 4, p. 136; compare ibid., no. 48, c. 1, p. 134.
 218 : Janet L. Nelson
effect asking his missi to compile a Domesday Book? This capitulary should
be interpreted in the light of another clearly derivative from it, which
mentions only benefices of ‘bishops, abbots, abbesses, counts and royal
vassals’, thus excluding benefices created on the allods of lay landlords.*
Those were exactly the limits of the demands of Charles the Bald in 869.
The comparison with Domesday in fact highlights the limits of ‘normal’
royal government in the middle ages, that is, government in any kingdom
not recently acquired by a conquest that involved the wholesale displace-
ment of an indigenous elite. Under ‘normal’ circumstances, the resources of
lay landlords were not easy for rulers to tap directly. What is remarkable 1s
that a series of powerful Carolingian rulers were sometimes able to con-
fiscate the allodial lands of rebels or traitors: and it is significant that in such
cases Charles the Bald ordered surveys of the confiscated lands.” A survey,
in short, was a most effective sign, as well as instrument, of royal power,
even though that power intruded only fitfully into lay landlordship.
This combination of the symbolic and the political suggests how literacy
oiled the wheels of the Carolingian war-machine. Written orders played
only a limited part in maintaining a chain of command, with rapid
communications between ruler and local warlords. Here again, miss and
counts were the key agents, responsible for ensuring the appearance of
fideles capitanei with their men and equipment at a specified hosting-point.
But the memoratorium recording such arrangements in 807 assumed prior
orally-transmitted instructions (the captains were to come ‘to the said
[summer] placitum’, the place evidently having been announced at the
winter assembly) and specifically provided for mzssz to send oral instruc-
tions to royal vassals further down the chain.” It is hard to see how the use
of written orders in itself could have hastened mobilization, as Ganshof
suggested in explaining the speed with which Louis the Pious was able to
crush the revolt of Bernard of Italy.”' If Charlemagne sent letters to abbots
of royal monasteries listing the equipment their men were to bring with
them when presenting themselves for army service, there is no evidence that
he sent similar letters to individual laymen.” Only from ninth-century Italy

88 MGH Cap. I, no. 80, cc. 5-7, p. 177.

89 MGH Cap. II, no. 274, c. 5, p. 330. Compare also tbid., cc. 6 and 7, p. 330. This capitulary
relates to Burgundy.
°° MGH Cap. I, no. 48, c. 3, p. 135.
?! Ganshof, ‘The use of the written word’, p. 267. Compare Werner, ‘Missus-marchio-comes’,
p. 198, noting that Charlemagne too achieved rapid mobilization when necessary. Surviv-
ing written orders, of course, allow us to see some of the pressures brought to bear by Louis.
92 MGH Cap. I, no. 75, p. 168, asummons to Abbot Fulrad of St Quentin, survives ina single,
late, manuscript.
 LITERACY IN CAROLINGIAN GOVERNMENT — 279
are such generalized orders implied in Louis II’s requirement of 866 that all
those called up for service should bring precisely the personnel and
equipment specified in their written summons to the host.”? So much for
what Ganshof termed ‘efforts to infuse more regularity, more efficiency and
even, if I may use the word, something more rational’ into Carolingian
military organization: efforts which in Ganshof’s view, of course, ‘proved
vain’.
Other concerns than efficiency and rationality are implied in Carolingian
applications of the written word to military requirements. In 822, Louis the
Pious had royal monasteries listed under three categories: those owing host
service and gifts as well as prayers; those owing gifts and prayers; those
owing prayers.” Correct liturgical texts were indispensable to this particu-
lar type of military service performed by the church for the Carolingians.”
Alongside such religious concerns were political ones. In 829, Louis
ordered counts to produce written lists of those liable for service in their
counties.’ These orders were repeated by Charles the Bald in 864; and in
865, Charles demanded written reports from missi in Burgundy as to how
energetically ‘counts and royal vassals and other faithful men’ had complied
with mobilization orders.”® Such documentation could provide a basis both
for the distribution of royal grace and for its withholding.
Parallel to check-lists of this sort went the use of the written word in the
recording of those who owed fidelity to the king. The first appearance of
royal instructions for the compilation of lists is Charlemagne’s call for muissz
to present him with lists of faithful men or oath-swearers.”? Similar
instructions in 802 said nothing about lists, but stressed, instead, the public
circumstances of the oath-swearing: it was this publicity which was to bring
home to the swearers the magnitude of their commitment.’ But clearly the
public act and its recording could complement each other: in June 854 at

°3 MGH Cap. II, no. 218, c. 6, p. 96.

** F.L. Ganshof ‘Louis the Pious reconsidered’, History 42 (1957), 171-80, reprinted in
Ganshof, Carolingians and the Frankish Monarchy, pp. 261-72, at p. 267.
98 E. Lesne, ‘Les Ordonnances monastiques de Louis le Pieux et la Notitia de servitio
monasteriorum’, Revue de l’Histotre de l’Eglise de la France 6 (1920), 449-93.
© Compare Epistola de litteris colendis, MGH Cap. I, no. 29, pp. 78-9. See M. McCormick,
‘The liturgy of war in the early Middle Ages’, Viator 15 (1984), 1-23, and tdem, Eternal
Victory (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 347-62.
7 MGH Cap. I, no. 188, c. 5, p. 10.
°8 MGH Cap. II, no. 273, c. 27, p. 321; ibid., no. 274, c. 13, p. 331.
°° MGH Cap. 1, no. 25, c. 4, p. 67: ‘omnes iurent. Et nomina vel numerum de ipsis qui
luraverunt ipsi missi in brebem secum adportent.’
100 MGH Cap. I, no. 33, c. 2, p. 92.
280 Janet L. Nelson |
Attigny, Charles the Bald gave orders that all Franci in his realm who had
not yet done so should swear fidelity: though this capitulary says nothing
about recording the names of oath-swearers, it is in fact an aid to memory (it
is headed memorialia capitula) whose ‘hidden agenda’ evidently included
the compilation of such lists. '°! One list actually survives, dated 3 July 354
‘in the public court at Rheims’. It contains seventeen names of men ‘who
had sworn in the past’, and a further forty-seven names of new oath-
swearers. '°* In this case, Hincmar was clearly at work. He had been named
as a missus for the Remois in November 853.'°°
Missi were the crucial links between the ruler and his faithful men
throughout the realm; they participated in the assemblies at which the
decisions embodied in capitularies were reached. They were told to take
with them copies of the capitularies and make known the contents in the
areas for which they were appointed (missatica).'** They also had to ‘do
justice’, that is, preside in court over the settlement of disputes and the
punishment of malefactors. The expression annuntiare tustitiam suggests
judgements given orally, but, as noted above, written documents were also
integral to legal procedure.’ How was the task of publicizing assembly
decisions carried out? The capitularies themselves do not specify, but one
copy gives a revealing glimpse of a mussus in action:
The capitula were made and consigned to Count Stephen, so that he might make
these manifest in the city of Paris in the public assembly, and so that he might read
them out before the scabini. And this he did. And all consented together, saying that
they were willing to observe it at all times and forever. Further, all the scabinz,
bishops, abbots and counts confirmed these capitula by writing beneath in their own
hands.'°°

This was no ordinary capitulary, as the exceptionally high number of its

manuscript witnesses shows: it was a set of additions to Lex Salica, hence a
text with special connotations of collective ‘gentile’ solidarity."°’ But a
similar procedure is hinted at in another, humbler case where the record of
Charlemagne’s settlement of a dispute between peasants and lords over
services is ordered to be ‘publicly announced’, that is, read out, by the count

101 MGH Cap. I, no. 261, c. 13, p. 278.

102 MGH Cap. I, no. 261, p. 278. Compare Hincmar’s letter to Count Bertram of Tardenois
‘pro sacramento regi agendo’, ed. E. Perels, MGH Epp. merov. et karol. VI, no. 68, p. 36.
03 MGH Cap. I, no. 260, c. 1, p. 275.
104 See Werner, ‘Missus-marchio-comes’, pp. 196-205.
0S MGH Cap. I, no. 33, c. 31, p. 97; compare zbid., no. 34, c. 16, p. 101.
106 MGH Cap. I, no. 39, pp. 111-12; compare zbid., no. 40, c. 19, p. 116.
'07 See below, p. 291.
 LITERACY IN CAROLINGIAN GOVERNMENT _ 281
of the palace to those concerned.'*® Record and announcement represented
more than belt and braces. Faithful men wished to hear read out what had
been decided at the previous assembly before they appended their written
‘consent’, just as they wished to shout their assent to royal successions, as
well as subscribing a document to the same effect. In other words, what
determined the medium was not only the concern of rulers and missz for
compliance, but also the preference of the receivers. The result was, not a
duplication, but recourse to distinct yet complementary media. The
embodiment of the legislators’ word in a text confirmed its authenticity,
solemnized it, gave it permanence. The reading-out of the text was a further
guarantee of its correctness, which at the same time enabled those who
could not read it to ‘receive’ it and consent. The scabini who heard Count
Stephen presumably did not see themselves as mere passive objects of
others’ power but as active participants in the final stage of a process of
decision-making. They expressed this through hearing of the spoken word;
but they also put their hands to a written text.
Missi were ordered to use documents for a variety of purposes, including
the maintenance of communication both ways between centre and locali-
ties. So that all #2ssz might publicize them at local assemblies, those with
capitularies had to send copies on to those without them, ut nulla excusatio
de ignorantia fiat (‘that no excuse be made on grounds of ignorance’).'”
Miss: also had to bring written reports back to Charlemagne concerning the
implementation of the written instructions they had taken from his oral
pronouncements.!'° They were told to bring him lists of names: of all the
scabini, advocates and notaries whom they had appointed ;'"! of all strangers
who had immigrated into their mssatica, of their county of origin and of
who their lords were; and of all ‘bishops, abbots or others of our homines
who failed to attend the assembly’ summoned by the missus.''* Reports
were to be sent 1n about all who were unable to pay the army-fine for non-
appearance at the host.'’? If the mzssz together with the local counts could
not succeed 1n righting wrongs or bringing malefactors to justice, they were
to refer cases, with dossiers (cum brebitarnis suis) to Charlemagne him-
self.''* What was done with these documents when — if — they reached the
centre? There is no evidence of their preservation in a central archive.
Having been ‘brought’ to court and served as aids to memory in oral
exchanges between ruler and agent, the lists and records were perhaps then

'88 MGH Cap. I, no. 31, pp. 81-2. '°9 MGH Cap. I, no. 67, c. 6, p. 157.
‘0 MGH Cap. I, no. 40, c. 25, p. 116. '! MGH Cap. I, no. 40, c. 3, p. 115.
2 MGH Cap. I, no. 58, c. 2, p. 145. "3: MGH Cap. I, no. 64, c. 12, p. 153.
''4 MGH Cap. I, no. 33, c. 1, p. 92.
282 Janet L. Nelson
taken back to the archive of the mzssus who could have further use for them.
The list of oath-takers in the public court at Rheims in 854 seems to have
been kept in Hincmar’s archive."
Despite the proliferation of written instructions, it is doubtful if
standardization was ever aimed at: the written word so often cross-referred
to spoken words addressed to particular individuals. Charlemagne was
displeased when face-to-face telling had apparently failed to convey to a
missus the message that tolls could be taken wherever ‘ancient custom’
allowed: was a written answer more likely to sink in? Charlemagne’s
response was one of eight given to a list of queries sent in by a missus. But in
fact though all were on points of law, all were more or less obviously fraught
with political implications. Charlemagne’s written word might prove help-
ful to a beleaguered missus out in the provinces. What could be done, for
instance, about potentes, including bishops, who refused to attend when the
missus summoned an assembly? Charlemagne’s reply threatened them with
his ban, ‘and if they then disdain to attend, you must make a list of their
names and lay it before us at our general assembly’.!’© To be blacklisted thus
before the king was surely a greater threat to potentes than anything amussus
alone might threaten. So this testy document probably reveals more about
the local political problems one missus had run into than about the poor
understanding of both written and oral instructions on the part of mzssz in
general.
Evidently not all counts were in fact literate in Charlemagne’s time. The
missi quoted above hoped the counts would read the written orders they
were sent, but foreseeing that they might not be able to, ordered that any
count in doubt over his orders, whether written or oral instructions, should
send a deputy ‘who understands well’ for refresher instructions. ‘Read your
capitularies and you will recall what you were ordered to do through the
spoken word.”''” Each count was also told to ‘make a list of any persons who
are rebellious or disobedient towards you’, and either to send the list
immediately to the mzssus, or read it out to him when he came round on
circuit.'!® Constant interchange was envisaged by these missz: counts must
have needed their couriers. Some of Charlemagne’s successors seem to have
expected more literacy of their counts. Both Louis the Pious and Charles
the Bald bombarded their counts with capitularies. Louis asked them, like
the missz, to produce lists of those liable for military service;!’? Charles
issued his counts with the same instructions, and also told them to produce

''S Above, p. 280. — 6 MGH Cap. I, no. 58, c. 5, p. 145.

117 MGH Cap. I, no. 85, preface and c. 4, p. 184. "8 MGH Cap. I, c. 3, p. 184.
9: MGH Cap. II, no. 188, c. 5, p. 10.
 LITERACY IN CAROLINGIAN GOVERNMENT 283
lists of markets operating in their counties so that unauthorized ones could
be suppressed.'*° Hincmar of Rheims sent to Count Theodoric a list of the
names of the men of the church of Rheims who were ‘hastening on the king’s
service’; he also sent the same count some capitulary-texts to supply models
for a projected division of the realm.'*' Nearly all the evidence of literacy at
this level is indirect. A dozen counts received letters from Hincmar, while
Lupus wrote to two others. A few counts are known to have owned books,
patronized writers and had books or poems dedicated to them. One
remarkable manuscript of gentile leges, and also containing the 819/20
capitulary of addenda to Lex Salica, was written out by ‘Autramnus the
unworthy lay advocate [of St Amand]’ sometime in the second half of the
ninth century.” Otherwise it seems impossible to say whether any particu-
lar manuscript of capitularies belonged to a lay missus as distinct from an
ecclesiastical one.'*? BN lat. 4995 may represent the collection of a lay
missus : it includes a copy of capitulary no. 39 whose exemplar certainly was
once in the hands of Count Stephen of Paris.'** BN lat. 4626 seems to reflect
the interests of a Burgundian missus: interestingly it partly overlaps in
content with BN lat. 4995.'% The yield is small for so large a body of
material. But many capitularies survive in tenth-century, or later,
collections. !7°
It has often been observed that no capitularies survive as ‘originals’. But
Mordek has recently addressed the key question: what would an ‘original’
have looked like? Mordek points to two significant survivals. First, there is a
manuscript roll preserved in Colmar which contains the names of partici-

120 MGH Cap. II, no. 273, c. 27, pp. 321-2, c. 19, pp. 317-18.
121 Flodoard, Historia Remensis Ecclesiae UI, c. 26, ed. Heller and Waitz, p. 545.
122 BN lat. 4632: see Mordek, ‘Karolingische Kapitularien’, p. 41 no. 88.
'23 The arguments of R. McKitterick, ‘Some Carolingian law-books and their function’, in
Authority and Power: Studies on Medieval Law and Government Presented to Walter
Ullmann on his Seventieth Birthday, ed. B. Tierney and P. Linehan (Cambridge, 1980),
pp. 13-27, are attractive, but I am not, in the end, convinced.
'24 This is a tenth-century manuscript. Mordek, ‘Karolingische Kapitularien’, pp. 39-40,
raises the question of whether such collections were made for clerical or lay office holders,
but seems to incline to the former.
‘25 BN lat. 4626, formerly at Macon, is a small collection made in the late tenth or early
eleventh centuries. It contains capitularies: nos. 20, 39, 40, 57, 138, 139, 140, 141, 260,
266, 267, 274. MGH Cap. II, no. 267, c. 8, p. 292: ‘that every priest make a list of all
malefactors in his parish’, points to an ecclesiastical missus as the transmitter of the original
form of this capitulary — an allocutio. BN lat. 4995 shares with 4626 the following: nos. 39,
40, 139, 140, of which 39 and 139 are addenda to gentile Leges.
126 As observed by R. McKitterick, The Frankish Church and the Carolingian Reforms, 789-
895 Royal Historical Society Studies in History 2 (London, 1977), pp. 1-44, the best
introduction in English to the capitularies’ form and function.
284 Fanet L. Nelson
pants at the Aachen Reform Synod of 816: a list which must have been
drawn up by one of the participants himself, and, as Mordek graphically
says, ‘carried home in his travelling-bag’.'*’ Then there is a comparable roll
containing extracts from the decrees of one of Charlemagne’s last great
synods of 813.'%8 Both these were written up at or immediately after the
assemblies that gave them birth, by individual participants, in provincial
hands rather than in chancery script: they were personal productions, made
without courtesy of any standardized central office, for local use in spread-
ing information orally as well as through the text itself. Content, not form,
was what mattered to these enterprising record makers. Rather than wait for
an ‘official’, approved text (if such ever appeared), they wrote up their own,
based on their memory of discussions that had been carried on in a language
often quite different from that of the written texts. Hence those texts’
‘stupendous variety of forms’!”? — which did nothing to vitiate their content,
provided that that was associated with the royal name, and gained wide
currency as such. It would follow from Mordek’s analysis, therefore, that
what gave a capitulary authority was not just its origin, but its reception: in
both, the written word played a crucial role — but a role symbolic rather than
strictly functional. ‘Writtenness’ lent credibility in the eyes of people
predisposed to believe; and the same frame of mind ensured the acceptance
of both genuine and forged capitularies.
A recent discovery by Mordek illustrates the interplay between written
and spoken in Carolingian government. A manuscript leaf dating from the
second quarter of the ninth century hasa list of eighteen questions on points
ranging from legal procedure to the conduct of royal agents. The list 1s
headed ‘capitula still to be deliberated on’ (adhuc conferenda); and c. 9
carries the further note: ‘to be deliberated on before it is written up’.'*°
What we have here is not then simply a matter of law being first orally
promulgated in an adnuntiatio, then consigned to a document; nor are
these questions being put by a mzssus to the ruler. Rather, the list is in the
nature of an agenda for discussion at an assembly, and it clearly emanates
from the agenda-setters, that is, from the court. In a fine piece of detective
work, Mordek shows that the author of the original list was probably
Einhard, and the date 819: conclusions which underline the small number
of personnel concerned, and the episodic timing of the capitularies’ produc-
tion in short bursts of activity.!5! Finally, the manuscript itself — a provincial

'27 Mordek, ‘Karolingische Kapitularien’, p. 32.

'28 Ibid., p. 33, with nn. 42, 43. 129 Ibid., p. 35.
'39 Mordek, ‘Unbekannte Texte’, 469. An English version of this paper is forthcoming in
Charlemagne’s Heir, ed. Godman and Collins.
'3! Mordek, ‘Unbekannte Texte’, 462—4.
 LITERACY IN CAROLINGIAN GOVERNMENT — 285
copy — points towards places other than the court as crucial in the
proliferation of capitulary texts. Like legal notitzae of dispute settlement,
capitularies show that Carolingian government, revealed in the play of
power through the application of law, was also local government.
Documents sent up to the court from the provinces are similarly rare.
One example is a report sent to Charlemagne from the missus, Vernarius,
sent to hear claims lodged in favour of the abbey of St Victor, Marseilles.
Ganshof called this document ‘muddled’ and ‘incomprehensible’.'** But
Vernarius’ findings are clear enough. He reported holding a local inquest in
which the written word was used alongside oral testimony: pagenses
reported what they knew, and also inspected a carta and pronounced it
acceptable. From the ninth century, a number of other records of court
hearings presided over by missi or counts illustrate the importance of
written as well as oral proofs, and their accounts are often no less ‘confused’
than that of Vernarius.!%°
Of the literacy of officers below comital level, we know next to nothing. If
viscounts were involved with the production of coinage,'** some use of
written material may well have been involved. Though the ‘law’ which
vicarll were supposed to ‘know’ need not have meant written law,'* they
were told to make reports of the state of all benefices 1n their official areas
and to bring these documents to Charlemagne. '*° They probably came from
the social echelon where more than passive literacy might be expected. A
formula survives for written instructions from count to vicantus on ‘the
basic rules for the exercise of their office’. Ganshof commented: ‘it is hard to
believe counts often made use of it’.!°’ But it is harder still to doubt that
counts and vicar often communicated with each other in writing. Even
centenaru, otherwise poorly documented, were told in 854 to supply mzssz
dominici with written lists of names of all Francz homines in their official
areas. '3°

'32 Ganshof, ‘The use of the written word’, pp. 130, 135.
'33 Vernarius’ report, ed. J.H. Albanes and U. Chevalier, Gallia Christiana Novissima, I
(Marseilles and Valence 1899), no. 41, cols. 33-4. Compare ibid., no. 42, cols. 34-5. Fora
comparable text, see Nelson, ‘Dispute settlement’, p. 53.
134 MGH Cap. Il, no. 273, c. 14, p. 315: an early reference to these officers.
‘35 MGH Cap. I, no. 57, c. 4., p. 144. Compare the story of Viscount Genesius told by
Adrevald of Fleury, Ex Miraculis Sancti Benedicti, c. 25, ed. O. Holder-Egger, MGH SS
XV.1, p. 490.
136 MGH Cap. I, no. 49, c. 4, p. 136.
‘37 Ganshof, “The use of the written word’, p. 129.
138 MGH Cap. II, no. 260, p. 274. The Franci homines were free men whose special military
roles attracted special royal protection: Werner, ‘Missus-marchto-comes’, pp. 212-13 and
n. 86. For centenari, see Nelson, ‘Dispute settlement’, p. 55.
286 Janet L. Nelson
Charlemagne expected notaries to be widely available: plaintiffs seeking
his justice were to come to the palace armed with /itterae, following ‘ancient
custom’.'?? Oath-helpers when needed at the palace had to present them-
selves with documents and seals.'* When gifts of horses were sent to
Charlemagne, each one had to arrive with a written note of its name.'*’ The
volume of local written documentation in the form of charters and legal
notitiae suggest that notaries were not hard to find.'** Charlemagne ordered
that each bishop, abbot and count was to have ‘his own notary’; he also told
missi to send him lists of the names of notaries they had ‘chosen throughout
the particular places’.'*? Whether this means that these were permanent
‘county notaries’ is another matter, however. The only region where there is
good evidence for those is Italy.'** Elsewhere, part-timers could be
recruited as necessary. Any potens, whether missus, count, bishop or abbot,
was likely to have at least one notary in his household. When a group of
peasants from Mitry sought judgement from Charles the Bald in 861, they
brought a notary with them.!*
Carolingian rulers ordered missi and counts to refer to capitularies. To
find how many capitulary texts were envisaged, it might seem sensible to ask
how many counts and missz were active at any one time in any Carolingian
realm: but we do not know the answer to that second question. ‘More than
200 counsellors’ of three kings were present at an assembly in 862;'*° forty-
three mzssi for Francia and Burgundy (but not Aquitaine) attended an
assembly of Charles the Bald’s in 853.'*” Could anything like such a number
of copies of capitularies have been produced? Not, surely, by the royal
notaries, of whom there were never more than three or four active at any one
time, even in the best-run chanceries.'*® Facilities for reproducing docu-
ments centrally seem to have been severely limited throughout the
Carolingian period. Charlemagne ordered tves breves to be made of one
capitulum dealing with Tassilo of Bavaria: ‘one to be kept in the palace, one

'89 MGH Cap. I, no. 44, c. 8, p. 124. 140 MGH Cap. I, no. 61, c. 14, p. 149.
‘4! MGH Cap. I, no. 57, c. 5, p. 144. '42 See above, p. 270.
143 MGH Cap. I, no. 43, c. 4, p. 121, with note ‘e’ for the significant expansion of the heading
‘De notariis’ in Wolfenbiittel, Herzog August Bibliothek Blankenburg 130, from northern
Italy (Mordek, ‘Karolingische Kapitularien’, p. 42 and nn. 100, 101); MGH Cap. I, no. 40,
c. 3, p. 115, where the ‘singula loca’ may be places where local court assemblies were
regularly held.
44 MGH Cap. I, no. 158, cc. 12, 15, p. 319.
‘4S Tessier, Recueil, 11, no. 228. See Nelson, ‘Dispute settlement’, p. 52.
46 MGH Cap. MI, no. 243, p. 165 n.*.
47 MGH Cap. II, no. 260, pp. 275-6.
8 Tessier, Recueil, 111, pp. 46-93, especially p. 91; Die Urkunden Lothars I und Lothars II,
ed. T’. Schieffer, MGH Diplomata Karolinorum 111, pp. 14-40. |
 LITERACY IN CAROLINGIAN GOVERNMENT 287
for Tassilo to have with him in his monastery, a third to be kept in the chapel
of the sacred palace’.'*? About the same period, Charlemagne ordered
copies of Paul the Deacon’s Sermon Collection to be sent to religiosi lectores
throughout his realm.’°” In 808, four copies of a capitulary about military
mobilization were demanded: one for the ordinary mzssz, the second for the
local count, the third for the special officers organizing the mobilization, the
fourth to be kept by ‘our chancellor’.'°' According to Ganshof, Louis the
Pious tried to ensure a ‘wider and more regular circulation for the
capitularies’, in one case ordering the chancellor ‘to have as many as...
thirty-four copies made, a great number for the time’.’** But the actual
figure is supplied, not by Louis, but by Ganshof, calculating from his
assessment of the number of archiepiscopal sees in the regnum Francorum:
what the capitulary actually says is that every archbishop, along with every
count based in the archiepiscopal city, 1s to receive a copy. Did Louis, or his
draftsman, tot up the numbers involved? Just one manuscript of this
particular capitulary survives.'* It is true that a great many manuscripts
survive, by contrast, of the Aachen Rule for canons and canonesses, of
which Louis likewise ordered multiple copies; but the manuscripts, mostly
considerably later than Louis’ reign, reveal not so much the ultimate
implementation of ‘central government policy’, as its conditioning under
the pressure of local vested interests, in this case, cathedral chapters. For
similar reasons, and over a similarly lengthy timespan, many manuscripts of
Paul the Deacon’s Sermon Collection were eventually copied.'**
Louis showed more general concern than his father over the reproducing
and preserving of capitulary texts, especially early in his reign. He ordered
‘archbishops and their counts [!] . . . to collect copies of capitularies from
our chancellor, and to have these copied for the bishops, abbots, counts and
other faithful men throughout their dioceses, and to read them out in their
counties before everyone, so that our orders and our wishes can be made
known to all’. Assembly decisions were to be carefully recorded in
capitularies and preserved ‘in the public archive’, to be used by ‘our
successors’.'>° A manuscript including a collection of capitularies issued

'® MGH Cap. I, no. 28, c. 3, p. 74. '°° MGH Cap. I, no. 30, pp. 80-1.
'S! MGH Cap. I, no. 50, c. 8, p. 138.
'°* Ganshof, ‘Louis the Pious reconsidered’, 266.
'°> MGH Cap. I, no. 150, c. 26, p. 307. For the manuscript, see above, n. 143. Compare the
will of King Alfred of Wessex, who after making various bequests, including ‘100 mancuses
to each of my ealdormen’, admitted: ‘I do not know for certain whether there is so much
money, but [ think so’: 5S. Keynes and M. Lapidge, Alfred the Great (Harmondsworth
1983), p. 177.
'S# Compare Mordek, ‘Karolingische Kapitularien’, pp. 42-3.
°° MGH Cap. I, no. 150, c. 26, p. 307; zbid., no. 137, p. 275.
288 Janet L. Nelson
between 817 and 821 survives. But it is unique.'’*° The one attempt at a more
comprehensive collection made during Louis’ reign, that of Abbot Ansegis
of St Wandrille, was a piece of ‘private enterprise’ conceived as an act of
piety. It was very far from complete.'*’
But Ansegis’ collection was used extensively by the drafter(s) of Charles
the Bald’s capitularies from 853 through to 873. Ansegis 1s cited by book and
chapter repeatedly and correctly.'°® The capitularies he ‘received’ in effect
set the agenda for Charles and his counsellors, imbuing them with, among
other things, a continuing concern with the reproduction of capitulary texts
certified as ‘correct’ because copied from the palace exemplar. A note
attached to one copy of the capitulary of Servais (853) suggests that
chancery staff, now as in Louis the Pious’s reign, found difficulty in having
capitularies copied on the scale required. First, Servais, c. 11, says that
muissi are to collect copies of the capitularies of Charlemagne and Louis from
the chancery — apparently copies of Ansegis’ collection are meant; but the
additional note shifts the responsibility for copying on to the mzssi them-
selves: “Send your missus, with a scribe and parchment, to the palace, and
there he can get a copy from our archive [literally: cupboard] and take a
copy.’ In 861, Charles issued an edict about the currency which he
ordered to be ‘read out in our palace, and in cities and in public assemblies
and courts’.'® Of the Edict of Pitres (864), Charles stated his will ‘that these
decisions be made known to you [faithful men] in writing, so that you can
hear them more fully, and also by constant reference back to the written text
may more firmly keep in mind what we have ordered to be given and read
out and kept in every county’.'°! ‘Kept’ could even imply a comital archive.
But the next sentence indicates, yet again, that churchmen are the vital
intermediaries: ‘It is our. will that [copies of] these decisions should be
transmitted in open speech by bishops and by their subordinates in every
county of their sees, so that those decisions may be understood by
everyone.”©* We have an example of this ‘system’ in practice: Hincmar

15° BN lat. 2718: see Mordek, ‘Karolingische Kapitularien’, p. 38. This collection contains
only nine capitularies. For two comparable collections, see Nelson, “Legislation and
consensus’, Appendix 1, pp. 112-14.
'S7 Mordek, ‘Karolingische Kapitularien’, p. 37, points out that Ansegis managed to find only
twenty-six out of the hundred capitularies we know to have been produced under
Charlemagne and Louis the Pious, but compare McKitterick, Carolingians, p. 35, on
Ansegis.
'58 See Nelson, ‘Legislation and consensus’, pp. 95, 98 and n. 36, 99.
'59- MGH Cap. I, no. 260, cc. 11, 13, n.*, p. 274. The additional note is in BN lat. 4626.
Compare above, n. 125.
109 MGH Cap. I, no. 271, p. 302. 161 MGH Cap. U, no. 273, adnuntiatio, c. 3, p. 311.
'6? Ibid., where aperto sermone seems to have the double connotation of the directness of oral
communication per se, and of using straightforward language.
 LITERACY IN CAROLINGIAN GOVERNMENT 289
received from Charles in Italy a copy of the capitulary of Pavia, which he
copied and sent on to his suffragan the bishop of Chalons with a request that
he have a further copy made for himself, and then send the text on to the
bishops of Toul and Verdun.’
Overenthusiastic use of Occam’s razor has led some scholars to credit
Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims with virtually sole responsibility for
writing and collecting capitulary texts in the kingdom of Charles the
Bald.'** But the continuing lack of formal standardization (as with
capitularies of earlier reigns) implies some diversity of locale, and of
interest, in their preservation. The 853 capitulary of Servais, for instance,
survives in four distinct forms, three of them pointing to different local
origins.'©> The sizeable manuscript family of the great Edict of Pitres
similarly suggests preservation in multiple forms.'° The unique question-
and-answer format of the capitulary of Quierzy of 877 suggests the activity
not of Hincmar, but perhaps of Abbot Gauzlin of St Germain.'°’ Nor was
Charles the Bald’s the only Carolingian successor-kingdom in the ninth
century to produce capitularies.'
Ganshof in his Recherches sur les Capitulaires paid scant attention to the

163 Flodoard, Historia Remensts Ecclesiae WII, c. 23, ed. Heller and Waitz, p. 532, referring to
MGH Cap. Il, no. 221, pp. 101-4.
164 See J. Devisse, ‘Essai sur l’histoire d’une expression qui a fait fortune: consilium et
auxilium’, Le Moyen Age 74 (1968), 179-205; and Nelson, ‘Legislation and consensus’. I
would now wish to revise my suggestion that MS Yale Beinecke 413 should be closely
associated with Hincmar: its capitulary texts, including that of the Edict of Pitres, contain a
number of errors and odd variants which tell against that view. Mordek, ‘Karolingische
Kapitularien’, p. 38 n. 68, rightly questions whether the contents of every manuscript in a
Rheims hand should be assigned a Rheims origin, let alone assigned to Hincmar’s
authorship.
165 MGH Cap. II, no. 260, pp. 270-6. Of Boretius’ eleven manuscripts, two (nos. 1 and 2) can
be linked with Rheims, three (nos. 3—5) seem to derive from an exemplar in the Sens area,
while another (no. 6) has Burgundian connections (see above, n. 125).
166 MGH Cap. Il, no. 272, pp. 310-28.
'©? MGH Cap. II, no. 281, pp. 355-61. The connection with Gauzlin has been inferred from
the preface to excerpts from this capitulary in no. 282, pp. 361-3, from a now-lost
manuscript used by Sirmond: ‘Et tunc iussit Gauzlenum cancellarium, ut haec sequentia
capitula in populum recitaret.’ See further K.F. Werner, ‘Gauzlin von Saint-Denis’, DA 35
(1979), 395-462, at 410-12; and R. Kemper, ‘Das Ludwigshed im Kontext zeitgenéss-
ischer Rechtsvorginge’, Deutsche Viertelsjahrsschnft 56 (1982), 161-73, at 172-3. I owe
this last reference to the kindness of David Yeandle.
168 An impressive run of Italian capitularies is printed in MGH Cap. II, nos. 201-25. For a
collection of letters and acta relating to the divorce project of Lothar I1, made by Bishop
Adventius of Metz, see N. Staubach, Das Herrscherbild Karls des Kahlen: Formen und
Funktionen monarchischer Reprasentation im friheren Mittelalter (Minster, 1982), pp.
153-214. The liveliness of the tradition of church legislation in the East Frankish kingdom
too has been demonstrated by W. Hartmann, ‘Vetera et nova’, Annuanum Historiae
Conciliorum 15 (1983), 79-95 (with references at 80 nn. 7 and 8 to the same author’s other
related studies).
290 Fanet L. Nelson
capitularies of Charlemagne’s successors. His few comments centred on the
increased number of references in these texts to the consensus of the
aristocracy: symptoms, according to Ganshof, of the ever-growing weak-
ness of royal power during the ninth century.'” But an alternative, and no
less plausible, diagnosis is of strengthened rulership. The number and
variety of extant capitularies certainly diminishes after Charlemagne’s
reign. For instance, some twenty sets of instructions from Charlemagne to
his missi survive, whereas we have only about half that number from Louis
the Pious’ reign; yet while many of Charlemagne’s instructions are in
summary form and clearly memory-aids to accompanying oral messages,
Louis’ instructions are much fuller and references to oral messages are
rarer. The distribution of capitularies through Louis’ reign is very uneven,
with the last years virtually bare. Subsequent reigns show a very varied
picture. Since the East Frankish kingdom of Louis the German has left
many fewer, and much less impressive, texts than Charles the Bald’s, there
is clearly no direct ratio between fewer capitularies and dwindling royal
power. But Mordek proposes a subtler correlation: observing that concern
for the production of ‘correct official exemplars’, and greater elaboration of
the capitularies’ form, were characteristic of the reigns of Louis the Pious
and Charles the Bald, Mordek suggests, perhaps a little paradoxically, that
‘the stronger the ruler was, the more formless were the capitularies’;
conversely the weaker the regime, ‘the more necessary it must have been to
coerce the capitularies within the corset of a formally-ensured written-
ness’.!”° But the argument here surely rests on a prior assumption that Louis
and Charles were weak rulers? Efforts to ensure the diffusion of official texts
hardly look like prima facie evidence for royal incapacity. It 1s from Louis’
reign that we have precious evidence proving that at least some capitularies
were being put into effect soon after they were issued: Adrevald describes a
dispute involving two monasteries in which rules prescribed a decade before
were actually applied.'”! A mandate of Charles’ shows him responding to a
case of clerical usury by applying current law via capitularies.'”
But the capitularies’ razson d’étre was frequently not the immediate

©? F.L. Ganshof, Recherches sur les Capitulaires (Paris, 1958), pp. 34-7, 88-9. For a
different view, see Nelson, ‘Legislation and consensus’. See further G. Schmitz, ‘Zur
Kapitulariengesetzgebung Ludwigs des Frommen’, DA 42 (1986), 471-516, at 474-5.
170 Mordek, ‘Karolingische Kapitularien’, p. 36.
171 FL. Ganshof, ‘Contribution 4 l’étude de l’application du droit romain et des capitulaires
dans la monarchie franque sous les Carolingiens’, in Studi in onore dt Eduardo Volterra,
III, Pubblicazioni della Facolta di Giurisprudenza dell’Universita di Roma 42 (Milan
1971), pp. 585-603, is the fundamental study. See also Mordek, ‘Karolingische
Kapitularien’, pp. 44-5; Nelson, ‘Dispute settlement’, pp. 47, 63.
172 G. Schmitz, ‘Wucher in Laon’, DA 37 (1981), 520-58, at 554.
 LITERACY IN CAROLINGIAN GOVERNMENT = 291
implementation sought by modern legislators. 'wo particular types of
capitulary show especially clearly the symbolic and normative, as well as the
more obviously practical, purposes to which these texts were put. First,
there are the gentile Leges and the Addenda thereto. Though case-law
evidence shows virtually no reference to these in regions north of the Alps,
they survive from those regions in strikingly large numbers of manuscripts.
Mordek’s recently discovered capitulary offers a clue to the Leges’ function,
for the very points against which is noted ‘to be deliberated on’ (con-
ferendum est) relate to substantive problems arising from Lex Ribuana.'"?
The Leges, then, were the collective possession of those who par excellence
used and applied them: the wise conferred on and interpreted, then
received, the written results. Their status as law-users and law-finders was
publicly and repeatedly declared in this series of acts. No wonder Counts
Eberhard and Eccard were so careful to enumerate their bequests of books
of Leges.
Secondly, there are capitularies prescribing relations between
Carolingian rulers: these could take the form of succession plans, or
(increasingly often after 843) records of arrangements made at meetings of
two or more fellow rulers and their faithful men. The 806 Divisio project
may or may not have been ‘the first Carolingian arrangement for the
succession ever recorded in writing’ but it was not a novelty for the Franks:
already in 587, the Treaty of Andelot spelled out the nature of fraternal
concord in terms of mutual behaviour as well as boundaries.'’* Such
documents, evoked by particular occasions, had relatively poor chances of
survival: but for Gregory of Tours we should have no text of Andelot, while
the 806 Divisio has survived only by the skin of its teeth. But Ganshof
rightly noted the solemnity of the 806 document. It was couched in quasi-
liturgical form, and a copy sent to the pope for his subscription.'”> Such
formal traits indicate substantial ones: these were not administrative
documents, but they were of prime governmental importance as statements
of the ideology that underpinned the regime: brotherly love and solidarity
between rulers, and promises not to poach each other’s faithful men,
remained, in the ninth century as in the sixth, fundamental norms, needing
especially solemn affirmation precisely because they were so often more
honoured in the breach than in the observance. No less significant were

'75 Mordek, ‘Unbekannte Texte’, 453-7. See also R. Kottje, ‘Die Lex Baiuvariorum — das
Recht der Baiern’, in Uberheferung und Geltung, ed. Mordek, pp. 9-23.
'“* Ganshof’s comment on the 806 Divisio is in ‘The use of the written word’, p. 126. The text
of Andelot is reproduced from Gregory of Tours’ Libri Histor.arum 1X.20, inMGH Cap. I,
no. 6, pp. 12-14.
77 MGH Cap. I, no. 45, pp. 126-30.
292 Janet L. Nelson
those capitularies in which the mutual obligations of Charles the Bald and
his faithful men were recorded.”
But capitularies of the most formal normative or legislative type were not
for every day: there might be no direct ratio between their volume or
survival-rate and other forms of documentation commonly used in central
or local government. From twelfth-century England, the constitutions of
Henry II are poorly preserved, and in ‘unofficial copies’, yet what survive in
large numbers are ‘administrative documents’, notably pipe rolls, relating
more or less directly to royal resources, and a wide variety of legal
records.!”” From the Carolingian world, too, the survival of diverse sorts of
written text, produced locally as well as centrally, shows the wide extent of
participation in governmental literacy, despite the relatively limited
amount of material that could be termed legislative. The less formal types of
documentation have suffered immense losses in subsequent centuries. The
scale of this loss seems especially clear in the case of the Carolingians’
interventions in economic affairs. For instance, the Praeceptum
“negotiatorum surviving in the imperial formulae of Louis the Pious’ reign
must surely have engendered numerous particular applications, but none is
extant.!”8 The toll-list from Raffelstett opens a unique window on the
spread of the use of such documents by the late ninth century.'”” Written
toll exemptions, written grants of market and mint rights, look like the tip of
an iceberg. Royal agents were authorized to requisition supplies and post-
horses through the presentation of special documents (tractoria) which
presumably were recognizable to local suppliers. '*° The most telling sign of
a system working effectively is the standardized minting of coins, and, most
significantly, an across-the-board revaluation of the coinage of Charles the
Bald’s kingdom in 864.'®' If that could be done — and the surviving coins
themselves show that it was done — then why doubt the feasibility of the
production by counts of lists of markets, or royal written authorization of

176 See Nelson, ‘Kingship and empire’, pp. 225-9.

77 Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, pp. 41-8, and compare pp. 212-13.
8 Formulae imperiales, no. 37, ed. Zeumer, MGH Formulae, pp. 314-15. Compare also
model privileges for Jewish merchants, zbid., nos. 30, 31, 52, pp. 309-11, 325. See
Johanek, ‘Der frankische Handel’, pp. 55-7.
'9 MGH Cap. I, no. 253, pp. 249-52. See P. Johanek, ‘Die Raffelstetter Zollordnung und
das Urkundenwesen der Karolingerzeit’, in Festschnft fur B. Schwinekoper, ed. H.
Maurer and H. Patze (Sigmaringen, 1982), pp. 87-103.
180 Formulae imperiales, no. 7, ed. Zeumer, MGH Formulae, p. 292. See Ganshof, “The use
of the written word’, pp. 127 and n. 20.
18! Edict of Pitres, MGH Cap. II, no. 273, cc. 8-24, pp. 314-18. See P. Grierson and M.
Blackburn, Medieval European Coinage, 1: The Early Middle Ages (5th-10th Centunes)
(Cambridge, 1986), pp. 230-3 and plates 38-41 (with further references).
 LITERACY IN CAROLINGIAN GOVERNMENT — 293
market-rights?!** Underlying such royal requirements, uniquely documen-
ted at Pitres (864) was a firm political will: markets meant profits and
Charles the Bald was intent on denying these to local lords unless they had
(and presumably paid for) his approval.
Icebergs, in the nature of things, remain largely submerged. But some
clues to this one’s scale can be observed, finally, in miscellaneous evidence
from Charles’ kingdom. There are several examples of what would later (in
Capetian times) be classified as mandates: royal instructions directly
addressed to individuals, or groups, in the second person. Some of these
documents were in the nature of manifestos, designed to form the basis of an
entente with political opponents: the precise wording of those sent to
‘Franks and Aquitainians’ in 856 shows a revealing responsiveness to the
nuances of the spoken language.'®’ Others ordered specific action in
particular cases: in instructions sent with royal officers responsible for
investigating the affairs of the Aquitainian monastery of Charroux, Charles
informed ‘all bishops, abbots, counts, mzssz on circuit and their deputies,
vicaru and centenarn, and all our faithful men’, of the appointment of these
officers, and told them to give whatever help might be required.'** Thanks
to Hincmar’s carefulness (and, more recently, the sharp eyes of Schmitz),
we have a mandate from Charles to the archbishop, ordering him to collect
capitulatim authoritative texts on the matter of usury, so that action could
be taken in the case of clerical moneylenders at Laon.'® The use of letters to
convey information to royal agents about governmental arrangements is
also well attested in Charles’ reign. A ‘letter close’ survives in the original,
written in an ordinary, non-chancery minuscule: Charles in 876 addresses
his ‘special people, the Barcelonans’, sending them thanks and ‘a suitable
reward’ for their fidelity reported to him by ‘our faithful man, the Jew
Judas’, together with orders to continue in their loyalty. A postscript (in
which Calmette wanted to see Charles’ own hand!) adds that the same
messenger is bringing ten pounds of silver from the king to the bishop of
Barcelona, to repair his church. '®* It is fairly obvious that such communica-

'82 See T. Endemann, Markturkunde und Markt in Frankenreich und Burgund vom 9. bis
11 fhdt. (Konstanz and Stuttgart, 1964), pp. 27-34, 40-8, 98-9, 210-11; Johanek, ‘Der
frankische Handel’, pp. 24-5.
'83, MGH Cap. II, nos. 263-5, pp. 282~5.
184 Tessier, Recueil, II, no. 375.
185 See Schmitz, ‘Wucher in Laon’.
'86 Tessier, Recueil, 11, no. 417, with Tessier’s comments at III, p. 37, apparently dissoci-
ating himself from the view of J. Calmette, ‘Une lettre close originale de Charles le
Chauve’, Ecole francaise de Rome. Mélanges d’Archéologie et d’Histoire 22 (1902), 135-6.
Compare also ‘Tessier, Recueil, 1, no. 224, and II, no. 329. An earlier example of the same
genre is MGH Cap. |. no. 111, p. 225 (Mordek, ‘Karolingische Kapitularien’, p. 32.
294 Fanet L. Nelson
tions depended on the personal services of a relatively small number of royal
clerks and couriers, some of whom were part-timers, or shared with other
lords. Charles arraigned one of his former notaries, Ragamfrid, a monk of
St Denis and client of Hincmar’s, before the Council of Soissons in 853 and
accused him of having forged royal diplomas.'®’ A decade later, Hincmar
told Pope Nicholas of a mishap to some correspondence, when a courier
entrusted by Louis the German with letters for the pope was stopped en
route and accused before King Charles of theft of some church property,
whereupon he fled, and, added Hincmar, ‘I never heard where he went with
the letters!’8> But the communications system survived such occasional
breakdowns. Hincmar’s correspondence preserves an example of the
amount of documentation that could arise from a single case. Hincmar
wrote to the abbot of Corvey over a property lease, and later wrote to
acknowledge receipt of the survey he had asked for. He then wrote to the
East Frankish king to inform him of these developments; to a Thuringian
magnate ‘to restrain him from disturbing those lands’; and finally to the
peasants residing on the estate in question ‘to tell them to be obedient
henceforth to the abbot of Corvey’.'®? It seems safe to assume that royal
business would have generated similar dossiers, though none has survived.
How long did such practices persist? Any attempt even to sketch an
answer to that question must distinguish between different regions of the
Carolingian world. Ottonian government, as Leyser has said, functioned
with ‘a modest array of institutions’, and made relatively little use of the
written word.'”? But then Saxony itself in the ninth century yields little
evidence for lay participation (whether active or passive) in literacy:
Hincmar’s assumptions about the literacy of Saxon peasants may have been
on the optimistic side, based as they probably were on conditions in his
home-diocese of Rheims. The picture is one of regional variation. In the
valleys of the Loire and Saéne/Rhéne, for instance, where continuities in
the functioning of court-assemblies have been seen as lasting through to c.
1000, the number of charters and legal notitiae increases in the tenth
century.'?! But the situation is often reminiscent of that in the late seventh

187 MGH Cap. II, no. 258, p. 265. Tessier, Recueil, III, p. 58 and n. 2, apparently hesitated to
make this identification.
188 MGH Epp. merov. et karol. V1, no. 169, pp. 158-9. (J. Devisse, Hincmar, archévéque de
Reims, 3 vols. (Geneva, 1975-6), II, p. 598 n. 201, mistranslates somewhat. )
189 Flodoard, Historia Remensis Ecclesiae 111, c. 24, ed. Heller and Waitz, p. 535.
19 Karl Leyser, Rule and Conflict in an Early Medieval Society: Ottonian Saxony (London
1979), p. 102. See further zdem, ‘Ottonian government’, EHR 96 (1981), 721-53, reprinted
in tdem, Medieval Germany and tts Neighbours (London, 1982), pp. 69-101.
'91 ‘This is true for most regions of Carolingian Europe north of the Alps. In France, the
pioneering work of G. Duby, La Société aux XIe et XIle siécles dans la région maconnaise
(2nd edn, Paris, 1971), exploited the increasing riches of the Cluny cartulary through the
 LITERACY IN CAROLINGIAN GOVERNMENT 295
and early eighth centuries, namely, the ‘top layer’ of royal activity dwindles,
while government, and the use of the written word, continues lively at local
level. Even this contrast misleads; for the continuing interest of ecclesiasti-
cal communities in the written word ensured that capitularies were copied
and kept, and that new synodal and canonical material was produced, in
places like Mainz, Trier and Metz. If in many parts of the tenth-century
Latin west (including some, like England, that had never belonged to the
Carolingian Empire), churchmen knew their capitularies and kept records
of property transactions, laymen did not forget what it meant to participate
in literacy.'”* In their legal procedures, they continued to preach, and
sometimes to practise, the message of Charlemagne.’”’ In that sense, the
post-Carolingian nobility maintained something of the substance of
Carolingian government.'”
Charlemagne’s Empire has been called the first Europe. One thing that
gave it unity was the use of the written word, sufficiently generalized to
extend ‘vertically’ through the free population, and ‘horizontally’
transcending regional boundaries: the same capitularies could circulate
north and south of the Alps, for instance. I have argued that the elite of the
Carolingian world actively participated in literacy as a means of group-
identification, for their own benefit: hence that the ‘effectiveness’ of literacy
in government should be appreciated as much for its symbolic as for its
pragmatic function. For Charlemagne, capitularies and decrees were
intimately linked to the precepts of God: all of them were to be observed by
all men as the condition of ‘having our grace’.'” In this sense the reception
of the written word was the litmus test of political loyalty. We should not be
surprised that the Admonitio generalis or the Addenda to Lex Salica were
relatively frequently copied, while what appear to us more ‘practical’

period. The charter-collections of St Gall and Redon are exceptional in being much fuller
for the ninth century than for the tenth.
'% Much of the northern Continental as well as the English evidence is assessed by P.
Wormald, ‘4Ethelwold and his continental counterparts’, in Bishop 4:thelwold: His Career
and Influence, ed. B. Yorke (Woodbridge, 1988), pp. 13-42. See also Wormald,
‘Charters, law and the settlement of disputes in Anglo-Saxon England’, in Settlement of
Disputes, pp. 149-68.
'93 This seems to me a plausible reading of the conventum between Count William of
Aquitaine and the Chiliarch Hugh, ed. J. Martindale, ‘Conventum inter Guillelmum
Aquitanorum comes et Hugonem Chiltarchum’, EHR 84 (1969), 528-48. As has often been
remarked, the world of the conventum was also that of Bishop Fulbert of Chartres, whose
advice to Count William was based in part on his reading of Carolingian capitularies.
194 This view has been put forward in a number of papers by K.F. Werner, notably ‘Kingdom
and principality in twelfth-century France’, in The Medieval Nobility, ed. T. Reuter
(Amsterdam 1978), pp. 243-90.
195 See Mordek, ‘Karolingische Kapitularien’, p. 49 n. 140, quoting a recently discovered
capitulary of Charlemagne, ed. Mordek ‘Unbekante Texte’.
296 Janet L. Nelson
capitularies have often survived only in a single manuscript.!”° The signifi-
cance of the written word, in a world in which texts proliferated, can be
gauged by attempts to distinguish between forbidden and prescribed texts,
and between authorized and forbidden uses of texts. No one was to dare to
use a psalter or gospel-book for divination.'?’ Charms and spells were
prohibited; pseudografia were denounced; ‘a most false letter’ alleged to
have dropped from heaven was ‘not to be read but burned, lest through such
written things (scripta) the people be put into error’.'”> Nuns were not to
write out love-songs (winileodas) and circulate them outside their con-
vents.'”? False charters of manumission were to be exposed and rejected .?”
Errors in written texts were dangerous (even if errors in the interpretation
of texts were still more so).””!
‘Bad’ writing was opposed by good writing, a prime function of which was
to identify the legitimate, the righteous. The naming and listing that were
fundamental uses of the written word in Carolingian government recall the
name-lists used for religious purposes in liturgical commemoration:
Memorial Books, also called Books of Life, contained the names of the
saved. God read them.*” The ruler too wanted name-lists, signifying his
power over those named, and their claims to his concern. Such lists were
inspired by the Old Testament. The Book of Numbers set out the work-
methods of Israel; the Books of Kings showed these methods in practice.”
In enjoining that surveys be made, that lists be drawn up and kept,
Carolingian rulers followed the path of Moses and Solomon. At the same
time, their agents, and those they ruled, inscribed themselves as their
collaborators: a new Israel.”
1% For instance, the Capitulare missorum of 802, MGH Cap. I, no. 33, pp. 91-9; the
Capitulare missorum de exercitu promovendo of 808, ibid., no. 50, pp. 136-8; the
Capitulare de Villis, above, p. 273.
197 MGH Cap. I, no. 23, c. 20, p. 64; compare also c. 34: ‘nec cartas per perticas appendant
propter grandinem’. For antecedents of such prohibitions, see R. Markus, ‘From Caesarius
of Arles to Boniface: Christianity and paganism in Gaul’, in The Seventh Century: Change
and Continuity, ed. J. Trapp, Proceedings of the Colloquium at the Warburg Institute, 8—
9 July 1988 (forthcoming).
98 MGH Cap. I, no. 22 (Admonitio generalis), c. 78, p. 60.
199 MGH Cap. I, no. 23, c. 19, p. 63.
200 MGH Cap. I, no. 58, c. 7, p. 145; tbid., no. 104, c. 7, p. 215.
201 MGH Cap. I, no. 29, p. 79.
202 Compare above, n. 26. See Memoria. Der geschichtliche Zeugnis Wert des liturgischen
Gedenkens im Mittelalter, ed. K. Schmid and J. Wollasch, Miinstersche Mittelalter-
Schriften 48 (Munich, 1984).
203 Amid numerous references in the Old Testament to enumerating and surveying, see Num.
1-4; 33.1-2 xxxin; 1-2 II Reg. 24.9; I Par 28.11-19; II Par. 35.4.
204 My thanks are due to Rosamond McKitterick for her editorial skill and patience, and also for
her kindness in allowing me to read parts of her book, Carolingians, in advance of publication.
 Il
Text and image
in the Carolingian world
—————

Rosamond McKittenck

The functions of writing and painting in early mediaeval western Europe

must be set in the context of the uses, levels and distribution of literacy in
the societies of the barbarian west, many of which have been discussed in
the preceding papers in this volume. It 1s clear from Nelson’s paper in
particular that there 1s a growing consensus concerning the wider possession
of, and resort to, literacy by the Franks at a number of different levels,
especially as far as Carolingian government 1s concerned, and it 1s on the
Franks in the eighth and ninth centuries that I concentrate in this paper.
The Franks (and others under Carolingian rule) increased their resort to
literate modes of legal, governmental and administrative transactions from
the end of the eighth century. Carolingian civilization, indeed, was one
largely dependent on the written word for its religion, its law, its govern-
ment, its learning and its recording of the past. Its members, lay and cleric,
attained widely divergent levels of both pragmatic and learned literacy that
in a few telling cases we can document with some precision. !
But it is not on this broader context I wish to dwell; I want rather to look
at some of the manifestations and consequences of the uses of the written
word, and to examine in particular the relationship between image and text
in Carolingian book painting; this relationship is both a visible manifes-
tation of the use of the written word and a consequence of literacy.
A starting point is to consider whether the Carolingians say anything
about the relative value of writing and pictures. One view is expressed by
Hraban Maur, a widely respected scholar and teacher, abbot of Fulda and
archbishop of Mainz, in a poetic epistle to Bonosus, dated c. 835.
Even if painting 1s dearer to you than all art, I ask you not to scorn the thankless
labour of writing, the effort of singing and the fervour and ardour of reading. For
writing is worth more than the vain shape of an image [or picture] and gives the soul
more beauty than the false painting which shows the form of things 1n an unfitting

' I have discussed these matters fully in my Carolingians.

297
 298 Rosamond McKittenck
manner ... Writing reveals the truth by its countenance [appearance], its words
and its meaning. The picture sates the sight while it is still new but it palls once it is
old, quickly loses its truth, and does not arouse faith.*
Hraban Maur was undoubtedly influenced by the prevailing attitudes
towards pictures and images in the Frankish kingdoms in the aftermath of
the Iconoclasm dispute. Yet, in his attitude to letters and writing, and his
perception of their power, he was also drawing on his intellectual training.
He may, for example, have been impressed by Isidore of Seville’s Etymolo-
giae, and, in particular, Isidore’s discussion of the significance and power of
certain letters. Isidore was certainly available at Fulda’s library in Hraban’s
time.’ Although no discussion of letters as such is incorporated into
Hraban’s own encyclopaedia, De rerum natunis, his treatment of ‘grammar’
in the De institutione clericorum shows a preoccupation with words and
their meaning, and grammar’s importance for understanding texts. His odd
little tract, De inventione linguarum, moreover, is concerned exclusively
with different alphabets and letter forms.*
I shall return to the significance of Hraban Maur’s phrase that writing
reveals the truth by its appearance, words and meaning. For the moment,
however, let us compare Hraban’s suspicion of the potential moral short-
comings, not to say snares, of pictures. The assembled prelates and lay
magnates at the Reform Council of Tours in 813, for example, advised the
clergy to abstain from all that is temptation for the eyes and ears, that is,
painting and music, for when the eyes and ears are bewitched, numerous
faults penetrate.” Two decades earlier Theodulf of Orleans in his Libri
Carolint (c. 794) was more specific: ,
Pictures shaped by the art of artists always lead those who glorify them into error. . .
it 1s certain that they are the invention of artists and not the truth . . . A picture is
painted in order to convey to the onlookers the true memory of historical events and
to advance their minds from falseness to the fostering of truth. But sometimes —
quite the contrary — it inclines the mind to think falseness instead of truth.°

. * Hraban Maur, ed. Ernst Diimmler, Carmina No. 38, MGH Poet. II, lines 1-19, p. 196.
> Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum sive originum libri xx, ed. W.M. Lindsay (Oxford, 1911),
I.11i and iv, and compare Hraban Maur, De institutione clencorum 111.18, PL 107, cols 395—
6. For modern discussions, see Maria Rissel, Rezeption antitker und patnstischer Wissens-
chaft be: Hrabanus Maurus: Studien zur karolingischen Getstesgeschichte (Frankfurt,
1976), pp. 270-4, and Elisabeth Heyse, Hrabanus Maurus’ Enzyklopadie ‘de rerum
natunis’, Minchener Beitrage zur Mediavistik und Renaissance Forschung 4 (Munich,
1969), p. 44.
* Hraban Maur, De institutione clericorum 111.18, PL 107, cols. 395-6, and compare his
discussion of language 16.1-3, PL 111, cols. 435-51, and De inventione linguarum, PL 112,
cols. 1579-83. See the definition of pictures in De rerum naturis XXI.9, PL 111, col. 563.
> MGH Conc. 11.1, no. 38, c. 7, p. 287.
© Theodulf of Orleans, Libri Carolini, 1, c. 2, ed. H. Bastgen, MGH Conc. II, Suppl. pp. 12
14 and especially p. 13.
 TEXT AND IMAGE 299
While it was acknowledged by many Carolingian scholars that a picture was
a kind of literature for the uneducated man (pictura est quaedam litteratura
ulliterato), taking up Gregory the Great’s famous dictum to that effect, only
rarely is there some understanding that beauty in the form of an image or
picture could enhance rather than distract the faith.’
This estimation of words above images is in direct contrast to some ninth-
century Byzantine writers, who esteemed images above words. The
Patriarch Photios in his seventeenth homily, for example, and speaking of
the image in the main apse of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, dedicated in
his presence in 867, declared:
For even if the one introduces the other, yet the comparison that comes about
through sight 1s shown in every fact to be far superior to the learning that penetrates
through the ears. Has a man lent his ear to a story? Has his intelligence visualized
and drawn to itself what he has heard? Then, after judging it with sober attention, he
deposits it in his memory. No less— indeed much greater — is the power of sight. For,
surely, having somehow through the outpouring and effluence of the optical rays
touched and encompassed the object, it too sends the essence of the thing seen on to
the mind, letting it be conveyed from there to the memory for the concentration of
unfailing knowledge. Has the mind seen? Has it grasped? Has it visualized? Then it
has effortlessly transmitted the forms to the memory.°®

The early ninth-century Byzantine patriarch, Nicephorus, also thought

pictures were superior to words, because sight 1s more persuasive and
convincing than hearing. He declared that pictures brought deeds vividly
before one, without the intervention of words, transforming the auditor of
the text into an eye-witness of the deed.’ Both Photios and Nicephorus,
however, thought with reference to the spoken rather than the written
word. In that written texts were read aloud, however, their distinction is
indeed between word and image. Morrison has interpreted the perception
of pictures implied by these writers as ‘calculated, stylized misunderstand-
ing of the visual’. He stresses that ‘one characteristic of that way of
understanding [or misunderstanding] was the assumption that signs could

’ For Gregory the Great, see his Epistola ad Serenum, MGH Epp. II, 270.13 and 271.1, p.
195, though the Latin phrase cited 1s taken from Walafrid Strabo, De rebus ecclesiasticis, c.
8, De imaginibus et picturis, PL 114, col. 929, and also ed. A. Knoepfler, De exordits et
incrementis quarundam in observationibus ecclesiasticis rerum (Munich, 1890), p. 24.
Compare, however, the aesthetic ideas and philosophical interpretations of John Scotus
Eriugena, elucidated in Rosario Assunto, Die Theone des Schonen im Mittelalter (Cologne,
1963), particularly in his translation of Dionysius the Areopagite’s De divinis nominibus.
® The Homilies of Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople, English Translation, Introduction and
Commentary, ed. Cyril Mango, DOS 3 (Washington DC, 1958), p. 294.
” Nicephorus, Antirheticus III Adversus Constantinum Copronymum 3 and 5, PG 100, cols.
380D and 381D, cited by W.C. Loerke, “The monumental miniature’, in The Place of Book
Illumination in Byzantine Art, ed. K. Weitzmann (Princeton, 1975), pp. 61-97, at p. 96. I
am grateful to John Mitchell for telling me about these statements and directing me to these
references.
 300 Rosamond McKiattenck
actually mediate to an interpreter the thing signified, and not merely
communicate knowledge about it’.'°
It is within the wary acceptance of the didactic value of pictures and the
conviction that writing was more reliable, more truthful and unambiguous,
that Carolingian book painting has to be seen. Yet it is not so much with the
Carolingians’ attitude to pictures and painting, nor, following Camille’s
example, the degree to which Carolingian illuminations could or did
become text substitutes for the illiterate, that I wish to explore.!! These are
more purely visual perspectives. I wish to focus on the reasons for, and
possible consequences of, Hraban Maur’s conviction of the superiority of
writing to pictures, a conviction he shared with many others. Nowhere is it
more clearly expressed, for example, than by Theodulf of Orleans in his
Iabn Carolini:
Painters are thus able to commit events to the memory [that is, in pictorial form] but
things which are perceptible only to the mind and expressible only in words cannot
be grasped and shown by painters, but by writers. . . O glorifier of images, gaze then
at your pictures and let us devote our attention to the Holy Scripture. Be the
venerator of artificial colours and let us venerate and penetrate secret thought. Enjoy
your painted pictures and let us enjoy the word of God.”
Theodulf provides, in short, a clear statement of Christianity’s emphasis on
the revelation of Christ recorded in the written text of the Gospels. There is
not space here to explore the diverse implications of Theodulf’s statement,
particularly the idea that some things can only be expressed in words, so I
draw out only one or two. At one level it can be read as a simple and
pragmatic conviction of a literate scholar of the intrinsic superiority and
clarity of writing as opposed to pictures. But in the context of the
Carolingian reception and promotion of the Christian faith, a religion of the
book, as well as that of their resort to writing in every aspect of their
administration, drawing thereby on their Roman inheritance, the
Carolingian attitude towards texts and pictures is a crucial clue to the
impact of the written word on a warrior society and the response it evoked."
It does much to explain, moreover, the types of image we find in
Carolingian book painting. Quite apart from the close relationship between
pictures and the text they illustrate to be observed in Carolingian books,

'0 Karl Morrison, J Am You (Princeton, 1988), ch. 9 and especially ch. 10 on the ‘participatory
bonding through painting: the iconoclast dispute 726-843’. I am very grateful to Karl
Morrison for permitting me to read these chapters in advance of publication.
'! Michael Camille, ‘Seeing and reading: some visual implications of medieval literacy and
illiteracy’, Art History 8 (1985), 26-49.
'2 Theodulf of Orleans, Libri Carolini III, c. 23 and II, c. 30, ed. Bastgen, MGH Conc. II,
Suppl., pp. 153 and 98 respectively.
'3 For a fuller exposition of the impact of the written word on Frankish society in the eighth,
| ninth and tenth centuries see McKitterick, Carolingians.
 TEXT AND IMAGE 301
there 1s an extraordinary devotion to the decorated letter, and to the
elaboration of a hierarchy of scripts. This type of book painting, unparal-
leled anywhere else in western Europe, is surely what Hraban Maur had in
mind in his statement that writing ‘reveals the truth in its appearance, words
and meaning’. We can go further. Paintings were tolerated, even encour-
aged, when they were of letters or were visual translations of a text.
The Frankish conviction of the importance of the written word is in fact
elaborated in art. We can see this first in the hierarchy of scripts in
Carolingian books, and secondly in the role of the text itself as image.
HIERARCHY OF SCRIPTS
Scribes in Roman Gaul, as elsewhere in the western Roman Empire, had
employed the main script types of the Roman script system. Under
Frankish rule books and documents in Gaul continued to be written in these
script types, though we find the square capitals (capztalis quadrata) and
rustic capitals (capitalis rustica) used in due course for titles rather than for
whole texts, '* save in a handful of exceptions whose use of rustic capitals for
the text script appears to have been deliberate antiquarianism.’°
Books in early Frankish Gaul, to the end of the seventh century, were
written either in uncial or half-uncial, and very occasionally in late Roman
cursive (as in the Paris Avitus papyrus codex).'° For the most part cursive
hands were reserved for documents and non-literary texts, or used as an
annotating hand in books. The Frankish kings and their notaries evolved
their own distinctive charter cursive. '’
Choices of types of scripts for particular purposes had of course been
made in the Roman period as well. Surviving evidence, for example,
suggests a preference for capitals, whether square or rustic, for non-
Christian texts, and uncial for Christian writings in the fourth century, just
as the codex appears to have been the Christians’ preferred format for the
book.!® The lawyers and notaries, moreover, also wrote in tironian notes, a
form of shorthand, and we find these still being used by scribes in the

'* See Rosamond McKitterick, ‘The scriptoria of Merovingian Gaul: a survey of the evidence’
in Columbanus and Merovingian Monasticism, ed. Howard B. Clarke and Mary Brennan,
BAR, International Series 113 (Oxford, 1981), pp. 173-207.
'S For example, in the Utrecht Psalter in the ninth century: see below p. 311 and n. 55.
'© BN lat. 8913+8914 (CLA V, 573).
'7 See, for example, the facsimiles of Merovingian royal diplomata in Philippe Lauer and
Charles Samaran, Les Diplomes onginaux des Mérovingiens (Paris, 1908).
'8 The case for the codex is argued by C.H. Roberts and T.C. Skeat, The Birth of the Codex
(London and Oxford, 1983), and see my review in The Library (1985), 360-3. The new
perspective and context for the adoption of the codex form for the book by the Jews is
proposed by Stefan Reif, above, pp. 145-7.
302 Rosamond McKitterick ,
writing offices of the Frankish kings as late as the second half of the ninth
century.'? Different letter forms, therefore, were recognized as suitable or
appropriate for different purposes in the late Roman world. Such recog- __
nition is still evident in the documents and codices of Carolingian Europe.
Uncial script is used for the grander liturgical books, and the new caroline
minuscule which emerged 1n the mid-eighth century after a long process of
evolution was the standard book-hand.”° The Glazier Sacramentary, now in
New York, but written at St Amand c. 860, is a fine and elegant example of
caroline minuscule in its perfected form. It was given by Charles the Bald’s
first wife to the monastery for women at Chelles. Roman rustic capitals
provide an effective division of the text, and the first word of each prayer is
given an enlarged square capital letter. Rustic and square capitals, in other
words, are of higher rank than the minuscule: a hierarchy of scripts is
acknowledged. Such full acknowledgement is to be observed in all the
grander codices from the Carolingian period.”
‘Lhe use of a hierarchy of scripts was a well-established scribal technique
by the beginning of the eighth century in the Frankish kingdoms. Earlier
instances of a hierarchy of scripts can be observed in some manuscripts of
the first half of the seventh century, such as Lyons Bibliothéque de la Ville
602 or 604, written in half-uncial but with uncial employed for the chapter
headings, and capitals for the colophons.” In Luxeuil books of the late
seventh and early eighth centuries, the scribes used their peculiarly distinc-
tive calligraphic cursive minuscule, and drew on a hierarchy of scripts for
display purposes, just as Tours and many other Carolingian centres were to

'9 Still the best guide is E. Chatelain, Introduction a la lecture des notes tironiennes (Paris,
1900). On the use of tironian notes in the Carolingian chancery, see M. Jusselin, ‘La
Chancellerie de Charles le Chauve d’aprés les notes tironiennes’, Le Moyen Age 33 (1922),
1-89, and for their significance in the Merovingian period, see David Ganz, ‘Bureaucratic
shorthand and Merovingian learning’, in [deal and Reality in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon
Society, ed. Patrick Wormald (Oxford, 1983), pp. 58-75. |
20 See the masterly exposition by Bernhard Bischoff, Palaographie (Berlin, 1979), pp. 143-
51, transl. David Ganz and Daibhi O Croinin, Latin Palaeography: Antiquity and the
Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1990). On scripts differentiated by function, the two apparent
grades of runes are significant: the ‘normal’ or ‘Danish’ runes primarily used epigraphically
for inscriptions on stones and the ‘short branch’ or ‘Swedish—Norwegian’ runes used
particularly for everyday correspondence. The latter were quicker to write and so possibly
also the ones used by traders. See Else Roesdahl, Viking Age Denmark (London, 1982),
pp. 20-1.
21 New York Pierpont Morgan Library, G57. Compare, for example, the layout of such books
as the Moutier-Grandval Bible, BL Add. 10546, and the magnificent products of the Lothar
Court School: see Wilhelm Koehler, Die kavolingischen Miniaturen, 5 vols. (Berlin, 1930—
82), I: Die Schule von Tours, and IV: Die Hofschule Kaiser Lothars. Einzelhandschniften
aus Lothringen.
22 CLA VI, 782a and 782b, and 783. ,
 TEXT AND IMAGE 303
do from the late eighth century onwards.” A hierarchy of scripts was not
simply decorative in function. Both because it served to mark out important
parts of the text as a form of punctuation, and because the status of the script
used enhanced and reflected the status of particular sections of the text, the
elaboration of different grades of script according to degrees of formality or
rank was a significant development in western book illumination. In the
austere mid-ninth century Paris Sacramentary from St Amand, the large
capital V and T signal the beginnings of the two central prayers of the canon
of the mass — Vere dignum and Te igitur. Uncial is used for the two opening
lines and for the opening words of the sanctus. The letters of the words
in the abbreviated forms in the latter case SCS constitute a symbolic
invocation.** Alternatively, capitals or uncials could be reserved for title
pages, or the letters could be elaborated to form very large fancy capitals and
enlarged initials as in the eighth-century Chelles copy of Augustine’s De
Tnnitate (Oxford Laud misc. 126) where a whole page is made up of lines of
fancy display script, smaller capitals, uncial and half-uncial.”
Attitudes towards the written word, or particular texts, could be expres-
sed in the rank of the script used. The Anglo-Saxons south of the Humber,
for example, wrote their charters in uncial, a high-ranking book-hand also
used for the Word of God 1n gospel-books. This was to make a statement
about the power and associations of the written word itself.*° Use of book-
hand in Carolingian private charters is a reflection of a similar kind of
thinking. In the triumph of caroline minuscule — essentially an evolved,
disciplined, harmonious and orderly script — over the older Merovingian
book-hands, we may be observing an assertion of the appropriateness of one
kind of script as against another in the Carolingian world. But it 1s difficult
for us to interpret this assertion precisely, with our minds fogged as they are
by aesthetic considerations, response to the similarity between caroline
minuscule and modern Roman type faces to which we are accustomed, and
our own appreciation of its legibility.*” Of assistance 1s the emergence in the

23 On Luxeuil and the identification of its books by means of its display scripts, see E.A. Lowe,
‘The “script of Luxeuil”: a title vindicated’, in his Palaeographical Papers 1907-1965, ed.
Ludwig Bieler, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1972), II, pp. 389-98. On Tours, see E.K. Rand, A Survey
of the Manuscnpts of Tours (Cambridge, Mass., 1929), though many of his judgements on
Tours scripts and practice are now ripe for revision.
24 BN lat. 2291, fol. 21v.
2° CLA II, 252.
© Compare Kelly, above, pp. 39-44.
77 For discussions of the significance of particular types of script see M.B. Parkes, The
Scnptona of Wearmouth-Jarrow (Jarrow Lecture, 1982), and David Ganz, ‘The precondi-
tions for caroline minuscule’, Viator 18 (1987), 23-44. Some interesting Byzantine parallels
are commented on by Judith Herrin, The Formation of Chnstendom (Oxford, 1987),
304 Rosamond McKitterick
course of the ninth century of ‘house styles’ of script, that is of styles of
writing a deliberately designed, calligraphic script based on the standard
type produced 1n a particular atelier or scriptorium, and confined to grander
books, side by side with local or regional styles used for the commoner
library books and administrative texts needed in the Carolingian world.” In
other words, even within the category of caroline minuscule itself there is a
hierarchy of grades of formality according to function. It is primarily to the
usefulness and functional nature of caroline minuscule and how in its time it
lent itself to the efficient reproduction of texts in an orderly and disciplined
manner that its phenomenal success and influence as a script type can be
attributed.
TEXT AS IMAGE
As well as the understanding derived from reading the words on pages such
as these, the letters have visual impact. Letters themselves can be images.
Letters rarely have a meaning apart from the words they construct, but the
obvious exceptions are the Greek letters alpha and omega (never, inciden-
tally, transliterated into A and Z in the west) which acquired a symbolic
value, signifying Christ as the beginning and the end. The famous eighth-
century Gelasian Sacramentary, now Vat. reg. lat. 316, fol. 3v, uses the
alpha and omega letters as the central motif in its frontispiece.”? It is also
used for the frontispiece to Augustine’s Quaestiones on the Heptateuch,
now BN lat. 12168.°° Indeed, a great many Frankish manuscripts, particu-
larly those from the north of the Seine in the eighth century, make these two
letters the centre-piece of their illumination and the only portion of the
decoration with a meaning and significance in addition to the celebratory
and aesthetic. Yet once letters acquired meaning when grouped to form
words they did not lose their symbolic value. When one thinks of the Drogo
Sacramentary, for example, made at Metz for its archbishop 1n about 830
(BN lat. 9428), this is manifest. The illustration for the mass for Easter
Sunday 1s appropriately illustrated with an historiated initial D containing

pp. 404-7. But all make comparative assumptions about legibility, ease and discipline of
writing a particular kind of script which are open to question.
“8 T address some of these problems in R. McKitterick, ‘Manuscripts and scriptoria in the
reign of Charles the Bald, 840-877’, in Giovanni Scoto nel suo tempo: l’organizzaztone del
sapere in eta carolingia’, ed. C. Leonardi and E. Menesto (Perugia, 1989), pp. 271-302.
29 Tilustrated in Jean Hubert, Jean Porcher and W.F. Volbach, Europe in the Dark Ages
(London, 1969), pl. 175, p. 164, and see the facing page in the manuscript, fol. 4r, zbzd., pl.
189, p. 180.
°° Tllustrated in zbid., pl. 188, p. 179.
 TEXT AND IMAGE 305
three events from Easter morning.*! The dominant effect, however, is of
the letters DS, the standard abbreviation for DEUS. The letters are the
picture, and the symbol. It enhances the understanding and rams home by
sheer visual impact the overwhelming import of the empty tomb and
Christ’s Resurrection: Jesus est Chnstus Filius Det (John 20.30).
Because of the inevitable discrepancy between graphic representation
and the sound of words, even in the apparently most phonetically trans-
cribed of languages, letters can be defined, in part, as mnemonic devices.
They form a written code, similar in function, as far as the reader is
concerned, to musical notation, for they record and preserve oral delivery.**
However decoratively writing may have been deployed by Carolingian
artists, and whatever the tensions between the opposed requirements of
legibility and regularity for letters, and the variation and ambiguity of
decoration, letters never lost their value as symbols, and the meaning is thus
not obscured. Alexander has described the decorated letter as ‘an illogical
combination of opposed requirements’ but it 1s this apparent ilogicality
which gives Carolingian painting its strength, and in which the potentially
different functions of writing and painting were combined.*? Meaning is
enhanced, for a number of different levels of understanding are appealed to
simultaneously.
In many cases, pictures are added to texts to spell out the meaning and
associations. Pictures are literally bound into the text. In the pages
containing Jerome’s preface to the Pentateuch in Charles the Bald’s First
Bible, for example, square capitals on purple parchment are used for
opening words, and thereafter gold uncials on purple. The large initial
letter D contains eleven signs of the zodiac around the edge of the letter.
Personifications of Sol and Luna drive their chariots in the bowl of the
letter. Some reference to the creation of the sun, moon and stars in Genesis
1.6 is therewith intended.** Further decorated initials from the Bible are
also assisted by pictures to reinforce their meaning. The initial at the
beginning of the text of Judith, for example, contains the head of Holo-
fernes, the Q at the beginning of St Luke’s Gospel has within it the

3! Tilustrated in Jean Hubert, Jean Porcher and W.F. Volbach, Carolingian Art (London,
1970), pl. 147, p. 160, and in colour in Florentine Miitherich and Joachim Gaehde,
Carolingian Painting (London, 1977), pl. 29, p. 91.
52 See the pertinent observations of Susan Rankin on the function of early musical notation:
‘From memory to record: musical notations in manuscripts from Exeter’, ASE 13 (1984),
97-112.
33 J.J.G. Alexander, The Decorated Letter (London, 1978), p. 8.
34 BN lat. 1, fol. 8r, illustrated zbid., pl. 7, p. 53.
306 Rosamond McKitterick
evangelist’s symbol. Similarly in the Drogo Sacramentary, the central
prayer of the canon of the mass, beginning Te zgztur, is enhanced by pictures
of the high priest Melchisedech offering up sacrifices, and sacrificial
animals, from the Old Testament, with the obvious associations with the
offering up of bread and wine and the sacrifice of Christ. The T itself
assumes the form of the cross of the crucified Christ.*°° We find this
iconography adopted in many Carolingian mass books, from the Sacramen-
tary of Gellone, written at Meaux in the early eighth century, onwards; and
it is a striking instance of the use to which Isidore’s statement of the
significance of the letter ‘T’, pointing to precisely this image, was put by the
Carolingian book painters.*’
In many Carolingian manuscripts, however, letters form pictures or
images on their own, without any assistance from illustrations; meaning
and sense are conveyed by the words they form. They are potent symbols of
the power of the written word. Examples may be invoked at random among
the many possible. The explicit of the Bible of Theodulf with its address to
the reader, is the most marvellous image in the clarity of its design.** The
Quoniam Quidem page from the beginning of St Luke’s Gospel in the
Morgan Gospels, produced at Tours between 857 and 862, has a wonder-
fully clever positioning of the letters guoniam and quidem, there 1s a delicate
imitation of the tail of the Q in the word ordinare, and a notable elegance
and balance in the composition as a whole.*? The Rheims school of painting
can be invoked for examples too. The Douce Psalter (Oxford Douce 59) was
produced at Hautvillers under the patronage of Ebbo, archbishop of

35 See the illustrations in La Neustnie: les pays au nord de la Loire, de Dagobert a Charles le
Chauve vie-ixe stécle, ed. Patrick Perin and Laure-Charlotte Feffer, exhibition catalogue,
Musées et Monuments départementaux de Seine-Maritime (Rouen, 1985), pl. 109 (BN lat.
1, fols. 301, 347), p. 240.
36 BN lat. 9428, illustrated in Mitherich and Gaehde, Carolingian Painting, pl. 28, p. 90.
Compare the “T’ in the Sacramentary of Gellone, BN lat. 12048, fol. 143, illustrated in
Hubert, Porcher and Volbach, Carolingian Art, pl. 203, p. 193, and the discussion by B.
Teyssedre, Le Sacrementaire de Gellone et la figure humaine dans les manuscrnits francs du
vine siécle (Toulouse, 1959). BN lat. 1141, fol. 6v, painted by the palace school of Charles
the Bald, is illustrated in Mitherich and Gaehde, Carolingian Painting, pl. 34, p. 100.
37 Isidore, Etymologiae 1.ii1.9: Tertia T figuram demonstrans Dominicae crucis unde et
Hebraice signum tnterpretatur. On the Te igitur initials generally, see Rudolf Suntrup, ‘Te
igitur Initialen und Kanonbilder in mittelalterlichen Sakramentarschriften’, in Text und
Bild: Aspekte des Zusammenuirkens Zweier Kunste tn Mittelalter und friher Neuzeit, ed.
C. Meier and U. Ruberg (Wiesbaden, 1980), pp. 278-382.
33 BN lat. 9380, fol. 347. Illustrated in La Neustrie, ed. Perin and Feffer, and see the
comments by Florentine Mitherich, zbid., pp. 257-9, at p. 258.
39 New York Pierpont Morgan Library, Morgan 860, fol. 96r, illustrated in Alexander,
Decorated Letter, pl. 8, p. 55. For a different treatment compare BN lat. 261 (Gospels du
Mans) fol. 76, illustrated in La Neustrie, ed. Perin and Feffer, p. 231.
 TEXT AND IMAGE 307
Rheims, for an unknown but wealthy, and possibly royal, client. The initial
words of Psalm 101 (2) Domine exaudi orationem meam, or those of Psalm
26 (27): Dominus tlluminatio mea et salus mea quem timebo, achieve their
effect not simply by delicate decoration and the gold letters on purple
parchment, but also by the sensitive deployment of capital and minuscule
letters. The words of the Lord were directed by the scribe to illuminate the
heart and mind of the reader.*” In the Rheims manuscripts the impact of the
written word is enhanced by the lavish use of gold and pigments. At St
Amand in the ninth century, a monastery under the patronage of the west
Frankish king Charles the Bald, on the other hand, the letter in such
manuscripts as Laon 199 is an image embellished with delicate and
restrained abstract and zoomorphic ornament.*' In the Laon Origen we
have a fine example of St Amand work, with a particularly effective layout of
initial, uncial and minuscule. Similarly in the Second Bible of Charles the
Bald, another St Amand product, meaning and letter are combined in the
design for the beginning of Genesis; a superb instance of the scribe’s sense
of pattern and harmony 1s the zzcipit page from the book of Joshua on fol. 80
in the same manuscript.*”
All these examples are of letters which can be understood as images
because of their visual appeal to the senses. But there are a number of
Carolingian manuscripts which actually use letters to make pictures. These
are the copies of carmina figurata, poems, in other words, like the story of
the mouse’s tale in Alice through the Looking Glass or George Herbert’s
Wings, or acrostic poems such as those of the late antique author Optatianus
Porphyrius which were very popular as models for the verse experiments of
the Carolingian poets.** Hraban Maur’s De laudibus sanctae crucis, for
example, is such an imitation. Sets of letters are enclosed by the contours of
patterns or figures to form separate phrases or verses in addition to the main
text. The representation is of the emperor Louis the Pious, and the
dedication poem reinforces the image of him as the Christian warrior.
Within the halo or nimbus the letters form the inscription Tu Hludouuicum
christe corona (You Christ crown Louis) and on the cross staff is proclaimed

40 Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce 59, fols. 101r and 25v. See also the Ebbo Gospels,
Epernay, Bibliothéque Municipale 1, especially fol. 19r illustrated in Mitherich and
Gaehde, Carolingian Painting, pl. 15, p. 61.
1 Laon, Bibliothéque Municipale 199 (Origen) especially fol. 4r, the initial ‘P’.
42 BN lat. 2 (Second Bible of Charles the Bald), fols. 11r and 80r, illustrated in Miitherich and
Gahde, Carolingian Painting, p|. 48, p. 126, and Alexander, Decorated Letter, p\.9, p. 57,
respectively.
43 See Berne Burgerbibliothek 212, associated with the royal court: Bernhard Bischoff, ‘Die
Hofbibliothek Karls des Grossen’ in idem, Mittelalterliche Studien, III (Stuttgart, 1981),
pp. 149-69, at p. 155.
 308 Rosamond McKitterick
‘The true victory and salvation of the king are all rightly in your cross, O
Christ’.** Another example from this same Vatican manuscript depicts
Christ himself with, again, different verses within the pictorial elements. In
Christ’s nimbus, for example, are the words Rex regum et dominus
dominorum (King of kings and Lord of lords) and Alpha et Omega.*
A similar conceit but an entirely different context is provided by the
Harley Aratus.*° The text is the Phaenomena of Aratus, a non-mathemat-
ical exposition of the chief features of the celestial globe, in the translation
made by Cicero. It was copied in an atelier in Lotharingia between 820 and
850, and produced for a patron with some connections with the royal palace
of Lothar. The text is the section in caroline minuscule under the picture
whereas the pictures of each constellation are made up of the text of the
scholia from Hyginus’ De Astronomia which dealt with the myths of the
stars and provided a catalogue of stars in each constellation. It is an
intriguing layout for a commentary on a text. The letters form the image
which is the subject of the commentary the letters form, and are further
differentiated from the main Aratus text by the use of rustic capitals.
Typical of the layout in this manuscript are Centaurus and Eridanus, with
, the rustic capitals in red, and only the head, hands and feet painted in.
Note, too, the estimate of the number of stars in the constellation, sunt
stella XLII, and the positioning of the stars in the case of Centaurus to build
the framework of the picture formed by the letters. *’
At a much more basic level of relationship between text and picture there
are captions explaining particular images. The Sacramentary of
Marmoutier, for example, provides an illustration for the clerical grades.
The meaning, however, would not be clear without the labels accorded each

* Vat. reg. lat. 124, fol. 4v, illustrated in Miitherich and Gaehde, Carolingian Painting, pl.
12, p. 54. See also the Vienna copy of this work, Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek 652, of
the first half of the ninth century. For a lucid exposition of the significance of these pictures
see Elizabeth Sears’ contribution to Charlemagne’s Heir: New Perspectives on the Reign of
Louts the Pious, ed. Roger Collins and Peter Godman (Oxford, 1990), and P. Bloch, ‘Zum
Dedikationsbild im Lob des Kreuzes des Rabanus Maurus’ in Das erste Jahrtausend, ed.
Viktor Elbern, 3 vols. (Diisseldorf, 1962), I, pp. 471-94.
Vat. reg. lat. 124, fol. 8v.
© BL Harley 647, illustrated in G. Cavallo, ‘Libri e continuita della cultura antica in eta
barbarica’, in Magistra Barbantas: I barban in Italia, ed. Giovanni Pugliese Carratelli
(Milan, 1984), pp. 603-62, at pl. 528 and pl. 529, pp. 616-17, and see the discussion by
Patrick McGurk, ‘Carolingian astrological manuscripts’, in Charles the Bald: Court and
Kingdom, ed. Margaret Gibson and Janet Nelson, British Archaeological Reports Interna-
tional Series 101 (Oxford, 1981), pp. 317-32.
*” BL Harley 647, fol. 12r (Centaurus), illustrated in Cavallo, ‘Libri e continuita’, pl. 529
(with Eridanus from fol. 10v in pl. 528).
 TEXT AND IMAGE 309
figure.*® A notorious instance of the caption alone supplying a picture with
its identity is the story related in the Libri Carolini by Theodulf of Orleans
about the man who venerated pictures and who was shown two pictures of
beautiful women without any captions. “The painter supplied’, he wrote,
‘one picture with the caption “Virgin Mary”, and the other with the caption
“Venus”. The picture with the caption “Mother of God” was elevated,
venerated and kissed, and the other, because it had the caption “Venus”,
was maligned, scorned and cursed, although both were equal in shape and
colour, and made of identical material, and differed only in caption.”*”
Theodulf was making a point about the images, but we can note that it is the
written word which gives the picture in this case its identity, and its power.
In a portrayal of the evangelist St John in the Gospels of Francis II (BN
lat. 257, fol. 147v), on the other hand, the essential identification of this
figure on this page is not provided by an evangelist symbol. Instead the first
words of his Gospel: /n principio erat verbum are supplied in the picture.
That is, words provide a telling substitute for an image.°°
Wholesale conversions of an image into words are provided in a great
many Carolingian poems and prose extracts. The recently identified

*8 Sacramentary of Marmoutier, Autun, Bibliotheque Municipale 19 bis, fol. 1, though

assistance is rendered the illiterate by the addition of symbolic objects denoting office; thus
the osttarius or gatekeeper holds two keys, the subdeacon brandishes a chalice and ewer, the
lector holds a jewelled book and so forth. But the manuscript is provided with instructive
captions throughout. Fol. 1 is illustrated (with the wrong modern caption) in La Neustrie,
ed. Perin and Feffer, pl. 19, p. 86. Compare St Gall, 64 fol. 12 (illustrated in Hubert,
Porcher and Volbach, Carolingian Art, pl. 161, p. 175), where, in the picture of Paul being
reviled by the Jews from the Epistles of Paul, the figures are labelled in order to identify
them (‘Paulus’, ‘Judei et gentes’) with the Terence plays in BN lat. 7899, where all the
characters are neatly identified with labels (an example 1s zbid., pl. 172, p. 187). One can
think too of the many dedication pictures (Hraban Maur in Vat. reg. lat. 124, fol. 2, or
Vienna 652, fol. 2v, Boethius and Symmachus in the De Anthmetica from Tours which
belonged to Charles the Bald, now Bamberg Staatsbibliothek HJ.1V.12, fol. 2v (illustrated
in Cavallo, ‘Libri e continuita’, pl. 534, p. 620), or the copy of Isidore of Seville’s De fide
catholica contra Iudaeos in BN lat. 13396 (illustrated in La Neustne, ed. Perin and Feffer,
pl. 113, p. 278) depicting Isidore presenting his tract to his sister Florentina. In all these
books it is only the captions which identify the figures or explain what is happening in the
picture.
) Theodulf of Orleans, Librie Carolin IV, c. 16, ed. Bastgen, MGH Conc. II, Suppl., p. 204.
°° There are many other Carolingian manuscripts about which the same point could be made,
but in this case, BN lat. 257, fols. 147v and 148r, the point is somewhat vitiated by the fact
that the opposite page has the evangelist symbol. But in terms of the reader’s apprehension
of the picture on the left hand page (fol. 147v) it is still the words which provide
identification and context that it is the Gospel of John. The symbol on fol. 148r itself bears a
scroll with what appear to be intended to represent tironian notes, and it is surrounded by a
roundel bearing the inscription evoking the power of John’s words and the potent symbolic
meaning of the eagle. The visual image, in other words, is reinforced and strengthened by
the inscription — each complements the other. For further comments on inscriptions
compare Mitchell, above, pp. 193-4.
310 Rosamond McKittenck
description of the basilica of St Denis has to be read for the image to be
invoked.*! Theodulf describes with admiring clarity the beautiful cup he
was offered as a bribe.°* Ermold the Black describes the wall paintings at
Louis the Pious’ palace and church at Ingelheim.>’ John Scotus Eriugena
describes the glories of Charles the Bald’s new palace chapel at Com-
piégne.** In all such descriptions the meaning of the words provides the
pictures for the imagination’s eye.
From the few examples I have cited it can be seen how many different
uses of writing there are in Carolingian painting. At the very least,
decorated letters or carefully arranged letters and words arrest and direct
the attention to particular texts. But generally, more is demanded of the
reader than his understanding of the words on the page: religious sen-
sibility, faith and knowledge, the understanding of language, the emotions,
aesthetic sense, material appraisal and appreciation of the media and skills
employed are all involved.
A further dimension of the relationship between image and text needs to
be considered. Because most of our extant Carolingian painting is in the
form of book illumination, it follows that the illustrations, as distinct from
the ornament, therein will be dependent on, or at least related to, the text.
That, indeed, is a fundamental principle of book painting. Yet the degree of
dependence can vary considerably; Carolingian illustrations often supply
an independent comment on the text, though this comment itself springs
from a textual source. The relationship between image and text may best be
demonstrated by looking briefly at the Stuttgart and Utrecht Psalters.
Most of the extant Carolingian psalter illustrations, for example, are
either simply decorative, as in the Corbie Psalter (though there are many
exceptions even in this manuscript) or literal illustrations of the text, as in

°! Descriptio Basilicae Sancti Dionysti, ed. Alain Stoclet, ‘La Descriptio basilicae sancti
Dionysii: premiers commentaires’, Journal des Savants (1980), 103-17, and compare
Bernhard Bischoff, ‘Eine Beschreibung der Basilika von Saint-Denis aus dem Jahre 799’,
Kunstchrontk 34 (1981), 97-103, and Werner Jacobsen, ‘Saint-Denis in neuem Licht:
Konsequenzen der neuentdeckten Baubeschreibung aus dem Jahre 799’, Kunstchrontk 36
(1983), 301-8.
* Theodulf of Orleans, ‘Versus contra iudices’, lines 163-204, ed. Ernst Diimmler, MGH
Poet. I, pp. 493-517, at pp. 506-7, trans. Peter Godman, Poetry of the Carolingian
Renaissance (London, 1985), pp. 162-4.
°3 Ermold the Black, In honorem Hludowict, ed. and trans. Edmond Faral, Evmold le Noir:
Poéme sur Louts le Pieux et épitres au roi Pépin (Paris, 1964), pp. 156-64.
4 John Scotus Eriugena, CCCC 223, pp. 342-4. See M. Foussard, ‘Aulae sidereae, vers de
Jean Scot au roi Charles’, Cahiers Archéologiques 21 (1971), 78-89; M. Viellard-
Troiekouroff, ‘La Chapelle du palais de Charles le Chauve’, zbid., 69-109; and Yves
Christe, ‘Saint-Marie de Compiégne et le temple d’Hezechiel’, in Jean Scot Engéne et
V’histoire de la philosophie (Paris, 1977), pp. 477-81.
 TEXT AND IMAGE 311
the Utrecht Psalter. In the Utrecht Psalter it is not one simple image
suggested by the text that is chosen. Instead there is a masterly amalga-
mation of a set of literal visual translations of particular verses in a Psalm to
form convincingly coherent composite pictures.’ In the illustration to
Psalm 23, for example, the individual elements are suggested by each
phrase in the Psalm. There are the green pastures in which are the still
waters by which the Psalmist is led. Herds of sheep and cows graze. “Thy
rod and thy staff they comfort me’ 1s illustrated with the Psalmist, a little to
the right of a table, holding a rod, the other end of which 1s held by an angel.
The table itself, and the little group of aggressive archers in the bottom right
hand corner of the picture, together illustrate the verse “Thou preparest a
table before me in the presence of mine enemies’. The angel pours oil on the
Psalmist’s head and the Psalmist holds a chalice according to the verse
‘Thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over’. To complete the
picture is the little church to portray ‘And I will dwell in the house of the
Lord for ever’.*°
From a practical point of view we have in this picture a series of unrelated
representations put together to form a composition dependent for its unity
and coherence asa picture on the juxtaposition of images and its aesthetic. It
is a composite picture and it has, as it were, a semantic structure of its own.
One can read it, but only if one knows the words of the Psalm. It is the text
which gives the illustration its meaning. The separate elements of the
picture are a mnemonic device for recalling the verses of the Psalm.
The book itself, produced at Hautvillers near Rheims in the 820s, under
the patronage of Archbishop Ebbo of Rheims, may have been given by
Ebbo to his patroness Judith, wife of the emperor Louis the Pious. It was
certainly available to her son Charles the Bald by the early 860s, or at least,
to artists working for him, for the ivory carvings of the book covers of
Charles the Bald’s Psalter, BN lat. 1152, illustrating Psalms 50 and 51,
appear to have been modelled on the Utrecht Psalter drawings for the same
Psalms.°’ The psalter text was the one best known by Carolingian

°° Utrecht Psalter, Utrecht Bibliothek der Rijksuniversiteit, script. eccl. 484, facs. ed. K. van
der Horst and Jacobus H.A. Engelbregt, Utrecht-Psalter, Codices Selecti phototypice
impressi 75, 2 vols. (Graz, 1982 and 1984), and also the older E.T. de Wald, The
Illustrations of the Utrecht Psalter (Princeton, 1932). Useful studies are Francis Wormald,
The Utrecht Psalter (Utrecht, 1953), and Suzy Dufrenne, Les Illustrations du Psautier
a’Utrecht: sources et apport carolingten (Paris, 1978), and her references.
°© Utrecht Psalter, fol. 13r. illustrated in de Wald, Illustrations, pl. XX.
>? Danielle Gaborit-Chopin, Ivoires du Moyen Age (Fribourg, 1978), pp. 188-9, and pls. 74+
6, pp. 62-3. See also A. Goldschmidt, Die Elfenbeinskulpturen aus der Zeit der karolingis-
chen und sachsischen Kaiser, 4 vols. (Berlin 1914-26), I, no. 40; H. Fillitz,
‘Elfenbeinreliefs vom Hofe Kaiser Karls des Kahlens’, in Bettrage zur Kunst des Mit-
telalters: Festschrift fur H. Wentzel zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. R. Becksmann, U.-D. Korn
 312 Rosamond McKitterick
Christians, and formed an essential part of the early education of both
, Carolingian clerics and aristocratic laymen and women. Judith was
acclaimed for her learning. If she did own this extraordinary book she
would have fully appreciated and been able to understand what phrases

to read the text.*° |

| these illustrations expressed, and she would also have known and been able
Yet even in the Utrecht Psalter there are instances of illustrations which
provide a commentary on portions of the text. The illustration to Psalm 11
(12) is one such. To illustrate the phrase zm circuitu impu ambulant (the
ungodly walk in a circle) there is a banal literal rendering, with the impious
shown walking round a circular object. To their left, however, is a group of ,
seven men pushing a wheel or turnstile. ‘The explanation for this picture
was suggested by Panofsky. She thought that this odd little scene could be a
pictorial reference to St Augustine’s comment on this verse: ‘the ungodly
walk in a circle, that is, in the desire of temporal things as a cycle of seven
days, which revolves as a wheel’.*?
More straightforward are the prophetic illustrations. Many Psalms were
interpreted by patristic and early mediaeval commentators as foretelling
the coming of Christ or as events in his Life and Passion. The illustration
to the third verse of Psalm 115 (116), for example: “The snares of death
compassed me round about . . . I shall find trouble and heaviness and will
call upon the name of the Lord’ is a representation of the Crucifixion of
Christ.” Generally, however, the artist of the Utrecht Psalter preferred
illustrations which were in direct rather than symbolic relation to his
text, and visual transliteration rather than the juxtaposition of associated
images.
The artist of the Stuttgart Psalter, on the other hand, working at St
Germain-des-Prés in Paris for an unknown patron, provided learned visual
| commentary rather than literal illustration for many of the Psalms in his

and J. Zahlten (Berlin, 1975), pp. 41-51; and Peter Lasko, Ars Sacra 800-1200 (Harmond-
sworth, 1972), pp. 35-7. The covers are illustrated in Hubert, Porcher and Volbach,
Carolingian Art, pls. 230-2, pp. 251-3.
58 On Judith, see Elizabeth Ward, ‘The Empress Judith’, in Charlemagne’s Heir, ed. Collins
33 Jodman, and on the education of women generally, see McKitterick, Carolingians, pp.

°° Utrecht Psalter, fol. 6v, illustrated in Hubert, Porcher and Volbach, Carolingian Art, pl.
85, p. 200, and see the discussion by Dora Panofsky, “The textual basis of the Utrecht
Psalter illustrations’, The Art Bulletin 25 (1943), 50-8. Compare D. Tselos, The Sources of
the Utrecht Psalter Miniatures (2nd edn, Minneapolis, 1960).
© Utrecht Psalter, fol. 67r, illustrated in de Wald, Illustrations, pl. CV.
 TEXT AND IMAGE 313
book.°! It is not possible here to do justice to the richness of the imaginative
and intellectual response to the text revealed in the pictures in this
marvellous book.” A few examples must suffice. The text of Psalm 18 (19)
includes the verses: ‘In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun, which
cometh forth as a bridegroom out of his chamber and rejoiceth as a giant to
run his course. It goeth forth from the uttermost part of heaven and runneth
about unto the end of it again, and there is nothing hidden from the heat
thereof.’ This is a perplexing set of images to illustrate. Eusebuus,
Athanasius and pseudo-Jerome, however, all interpreted these verses as a
reference to the Ascension of Christ, and this is what the artist portrays in
the upper right-hand corner of fol. 23r. Another example is provided by
Psalm 37 (38), vv. 12 and 14. The verses illustrated are:
My kinsmen stood afar off
As for me, I was like a deaf man and heard not.
The first of these verses, ‘My kinsmen stood afar off’, was associated with
Christ’s trial before Pilate by Jerome and Rufinus. Although the exegetical
association with Christ’s trial is preserved by the artist, he does not illustrate
the text of John: 19, v. 10 Jerome had in mind when writing his commen-
tary, where Christ 1s brought before Pilate, but the account in Matthew: 26,
v. 62. On fol. 49r Christ is depicted before the High Priest and two
bodyguards (though the latter may have been intended to represent, more
tellingly, the two false witnesses). The second verse illustrated, ‘As for me,
I was like a deaf man and heard not’, was interpreted as an allusion to Peter’s
denial of Christ by both Jerome and Augustine. Again the artist was
sensitive to differences between the Gospel texts. Peter is portrayed
warming himself beside a brazier of coals asin John: 18, v. 18 and Luke: 23,
v. 56, where he is beside a fire, whereas in Matthew: 27, v. 69, Peter is simply
sitting “without the palace’. It appears to be Luke’s account the artist is
following here. It is these interpretations which form the subject of the
artist's picture. He added clues for the reader in the form of captions. The
young woman in the depiction of Peter’s denial has the caption ancilla.

®! Stuttgart Psalter, Stuttgart, Wiirttemburgische Landesbibliothek Biblia fol. 23, ed. in

facsimile, Der Stuttgarter Bilderpsalter Bibl. fol. 23 Wurttemburgische Landesbibliothek
Stuttgart, 2 vols. (Stuttgart, 1965), and see the discussion of the scriptorium of Saint
Germain-des-Prés by Bernhard Bischoff, ‘Die Handschrift, Palaographische Unter-
suchung’, in zbid., II, pp. 15-30.
2 See the commentary by Jakob Eschweiler, Bonifatius Fischer, Hermann Josef Frede and
Florentine Mitherich, ‘Der Inhalt der Bilder’, in zbid., II, pp. 55-150, and compare the
older but still valuable page by page commentary by E.T. de Wald, The Stuttgart Psalter.
Biblia folio 23 Wurttemburgische Landesbibhothek Stuttgart (Princeton, 1930), with half-
tone facsimile.
 314 Rosamond McKitterick
Round Peter’s head are the words of Christ’s warning from St Luke’s
Gospel 23, v. 61: non cantabit hodie gallus donec ter me negabis (‘the cock
shall not crow this day, before thou shalt thrice deny that thou knowest
me’). A literate reader of the Psalm is assumed therefore. Without a
knowledge of the text, of patristic commentary on it, and of the Gospel texts
invoked by the exegetes, the picture is meaningless.
A caption 1s also felt necessary to explain a want of inspiration on the
artist’s part in the illustration to Psalm 42 (43), vv. 4-5: ‘Why are thou so
cast down O my soul, and why art thou so disquieted within me?’ The image
on fol. 55r 1s simply that of the Psalmist addressing a glum man sitting upon
a hilltop who is helpfully labelled Anima.
An evocative image is provided, on the other hand, by one of the pictures
for Psalm 90 (91) on fo. 107r, with a set of personifications of the words in
verses 5—6: ‘His faithfulness and truth shall be thy shield and buckler. Thou
shalt not be afraid for any terror by night, nor for the arrow that flieth by
day; for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the sickness that
destroyeth in the noon day.’ Here Christ is portrayed as man’s ‘shield and
buckler’, placed in the middle of a shield and attacked by six serpents.
The artist of the Stuttgart Psalter was clearly familiar with the commen-
taries and interpretations of the Psalms, or parts of them, by Augustine,
Jerome, Rufinus, Bede, Cassiodorus and Isidore of Seville. On the basis of
_ his knowledge he painted a commentary on the text to expound it to the
reader and remind him by visual means of the additional hidden purport of
the words. It is possible that this artist was not the first to do this. It is
certain that he was not the only one, but it is nevertheless remarkable to find
sO many patristic associations and extrapolations, possibly well known to
those who had received instruction in the school, translated into painted
images.®’ The pictures are eloquent witnesses of the words they illustrate;
text and picture are interdependent for their meaning, but it is the
underlying exegetical texts, not the actual text of the Psalms, which provide
this meaning. Still other illustrations in the Stuttgart Psalter are visual
translations of the metaphors in the text. Again, without the text, the
pictures are incomprehensible.”
Only rarely do we find instances of an artist providing an independent
iconographic commentary on a particular text which goes further than any
known exposition. Such an instance is provided by a group of apocalyptic

6 Florentine Miitherich, ‘Die Stellung der Bilder in der friihmittelalterlichen Psalter Ilustra-
tion’, Stuttgarter Bilderpsalter, I1, pp. 151-222.
* Heinz Meyer, ‘Die Metaphern des Psaltertextes in den Illustrationen des Stuttgarter
Bilderpsalters, in Text und Bild, ed. Meier and Ruberg, pp. 175-208.
 TEXT AND IMAGE 315
illustrations. Consideration of these serves to demonstrate an assertion of
image over text, but in terms which reinforce the written word, and the
book, as a symbol of power and the key to all mysteries, and the gift of
writing bestowed by the Christian faith and the law of God.
The crucial verses of the Book of Revelation are those at the beginning of
chapters 5 and 10: ‘And I saw in the right hand of him that sat on the throne
a book written within and on the back side, and sealed with seven seals’ (5 v.
1); ‘And he had in his hand a little book, open (bellum apertum)’ (10 v. 2).
The association of the Lamb on the throne with Christ was made by the
earliest patristic commentators. Christ in Majesty, holding a book, often
with the four beasts — calf, lion, eagle and man — representing the four
evangelists, and the twenty-four elders grouped in adoration round Him,
moreover, was portrayed many times in both eastern and western art in the
early middle ages.* Some Carolingian examples are the famous Christ in
Majesty page from the Lorsch Gospels, the ceiling mosaic in the royal
palace at Aachen, the Christ in Majesty in the Metz Sacramentary (BN lat.
1141) written to mark Charles the Bald’s coronation as king of Lotharingia
in 869, and the Lamb adored by the twenty-four elders in the Codex Aureus
in Munich (Clm 14000), also written for Charles the Bald.®° The Lamb in
this last named picture holds a roll rather than a codex. Significantly, the
page facing the Codex Aureus Lamb is the famous portrait of King Charles
the Bald himself, joining the twenty-four elders in their adoration of the
Lamb and the Book. It was painted in about 870, and provides a record for
the brief period when Charles the Bald seemed likely to repossess Aachen,
sit on his grandfather’s throne and so contemplate the significance of the
magnificent apocalyptic mosaic above him.®’

5 See the survey by F. van der Meer, Apocalypse: Visions from the Book of Revelation in
Western Art (London, 1978), and idem, Matestas domint. théophanie de l’apocalypse dans
Vart chrétien, Studi di antichita cristiana 13 (Vatican, 1938) and the still useful Henri
Omont, ‘Manuscrits illustrés de l’apocalypse aux ixe et xe siécles’, Bulletin de la Société
francaise de réproduction de manuscrits a peintures 6 (1922), 62-95.
66 Lorsch Gospels, Vat. pal. lat. 50+Bucharest Alba Julia library s.n., fol. 18v, facs. ed.
Wolfgang Braunfels, The Lorsch Gospels (New York, 1967) and the fol. 18v also illustrated
in E.G. Grimme, Die Geschichte der abendlandischen Buchmalerei (Cologne, 1980), pi.
14, p. 41. The Aachen mosaic is illustrated in Hubert, Porcher and Volbach, Carolingian
Art, pls. 35 and 36, pp. 40-1. BN lat. 1141, fol. 2v, illustrated zbid., pl. 140, p. 152, and Clm
14000 (Codex Aureus), fols. 5v and 6r, illustrated in Mitherich and Gaehde, Carolingian
Painting, pls. 37 and 38, pp. 106-7.
67 Felix Kreusch, ‘Kirche, Atrium und Porticus der Aachener Pfalz’, in Karl der Grosse,
Lebenswerk und Nachleben, ed. Wolfgang Braunfels, 4 vols. (Dtisseldorf, 1965), IIT: Die
Kunst, pp. 463-533, and the discussion by H. Schnitzler, ‘Das Kuppelmosaik der Aachener
Pfalzkapelle’, Aachener Kunstblatter 29 (1964), 17-44, responded to by H. Schrade, ‘Zum
Kuppelmosaik der Pfalzkapelle und zum Theoderich-Denkmal in Aachen’, zbid. 30 (1965),
25-37.
 316 Rosamond McKitterick
The Carolingians were, of course, not alone in their appreciation of the
meaning of the visions of St John the Divine.® But they do seem to have
elevated the Book of the Apocalypse as a potent symbol of the power of the
written word and of the Christian faith. Carolingian exegetes were clear that
the phrases librum scriptum intus et foris and libellum apertum were
references to the Old and New Testaments. Haimo of Auxerre, for
example, writing in the mid-ninth century, stated that the book with the
seven seals signified the Old and New Testaments, though in his commen-
tary on chapter 10.2 he asserted that the book with the seven seals was the
_ Old Testament and the little open book (bellum apertum) was the New
Testament.” In their association of the Lamb’s Book with the seven seals
with the Old and/or New Testaments the Carolingians were following the
allegorical tradition of western apocalyptic commentary from Victorinus of
Pettau (in Jerome’s revision), Tyconius, Primasius, Bede and Ambrose
Autpert.” The latter in particular, a verbose eighth-century Italian writer,
was drawn on most heavily by Haimo of Auxerre in spelling out the sign of
Redemption symbolized by the little open book.” It is significant,
moreover, that the manuscript tradition of Ambrose Autpert’s commen-
tary, with early ninth-century copies associated with the leading centres of
Corbie and St Denis, indicates that his work was known in the Frankish
kingdoms.”
Not only do the exegetes stress the crucial significance of the apocalyptic
book; illustrations of the Apocalypse of which we have the first extant

_ 8 See, for example, Gerald Bonner, Saint Bede in the Tradition of Western Apocalypse
Commentary (Jarrow Lecture, 1966).
6° Haimo of Auxerre (attributed to Haimo of Halberstadt), Enarratio in Apocalypsin, PL 117,
cols. 1013-14 and 1062.
” The commentary to ch. 5 in Tyconius does not survive and that on ch. 10 is laconic: see
Tyconius, ed. F. Loe Bue and G.G. Willis, The Turin Fragments of Tyconius’ Commentary
on Revelation, Texts and Studies NS 7 (Cambridge, 1963). See also Primasius, Commen-
taria in Apocalypsim, PL 68, cols. 820-1 and 863; Bede, Explanatio Apocalypsis, PL 93,
cols. 145 and 160.
7’ Ambrose Autpert, Expositionis in apocalypsin libri I-V, ed. Robert Weber, Ambrosi
Autperti Opera, CCSL Continuatio Medievalis 27 (Turnhout, 1975), pp. 230 and 390.
Compare to Beatus of Liebana, In Apocalipsin libri duodecim 111.4 and V.10, ed. H.A.
Sanders, Beatus of Liebana, In Apocalipsin hbn duodecitm, Papers and Monographs of the
American Academy in Rome 7 (Rome, 1930), pp. 305-6 and 438.
% On the manuscript tradition of Ambrose Autpert see Ambrosti Autperti Opera, ed. Weber,
p. xiii, discussing BN lat. 12287—8 (Corbie) and Vat. reg. lat. 96 (St Denis c. 850) and
Oxford, Bodleian Library Laud misc. 464 (767), CLA II, 253 (written in early caroline
minuscule probably in Central Italy but at a very early date at St Denis). It is tempting to see
in this last named manuscript the surviving remnant of the scriptorium of San Vincenzo,
Ambrose Autpert’s own monastery, of which otherwise we have little extant evidence; see
Mitchell, above, pp. 217-19.
 TEXT AND IMAGE 317
examples in western book painting in the ninth century make this apprehen-
sion of the divine gift of the written word, the law of God and the means of
Redemption in the book with the seven seals the central symbol in their
picture cycles. The earliest of them, the Trier Apocalypse, for example,
stresses visually on almost every page, and especially in the illustration for
chapter 10 verse 2, the gift of the book.” It also insists on the importance of
writing. On page after page there is the image of John writing. On fol. 4v in
particular John is told scribe ergo quae vidisti (‘write what you have seen’),
and the artist provides the eloquent image of the scribe John. It expresses
succinctly the Carolingian understanding of the relation between the visual
image and the text. The whole manuscript 1s an attempt to present what
John saw and what he wrote down. The text 1s thus as potent an image of
John’s vision as the pictures which accompany it. The picture cycle itself is
transformed from a text translated into a set of images into a triumphant
visual confirmation of the gift of the written word through Christ.
In three related Bible manuscripts this was expressed ina different way in
the remarkable and original frontispieces to the Book of Revelation. In the
Moutier Grandval Bible and the Vivian Bible from Tours (BL Add. 10546
and BN lat. 1), the Lamb on the throne and the book with the seven seals
form the upper half of the picture.’* The bottom half of the page contains
the figure of an old man holding on to a scarf, or veil, held also by the four
evangelist symbols. An inscription explains the top picture of the Lamb,
and follows standard Carolingian interpretations: “The innocent lamb
wonderfully opens his father’s law sealed with seven seals; a new law out of
the womb of the old, behold, is made clear for enlightened hearts, bringing
light to a multitude of nations.’ Only in the third manuscript in this group,
the Bible of San Paolo fuori le Mura, or Third Bible of Charles the Bald, is
there a partial explanation of the curious iconography of the bottom half of
the frontispiece in each of the three Bibles. It reads as follows: “The
innocent Lamb, slain for our sake but trrumphantly risen, has torn away the
veil from the law. He is worthy to loose the seven seals of that book.’ Christ
the Lamb and the Four Gospels thus represent the New Law which unveils

3 Trier Stadtbibliothek 31, facs. ed. Richard Laufner and Peter K. Klein, Trier Apokalypse
(Graz, 1975), fol. 32r, and compare fol. 29r.
™ BN lat. 1, fol. 415 v; BL Add. 10546, fol. 449 r, illustrated in Hubert, Porcher and Volbach,
Carolingian Art, pl. 125, p. 136, and Herbert L. Kessler, The Illustrated Bibles from Tours,
Studies in Manuscript [Illumination 7 (Princeton, 1977), no. 107 (BL Add. 10546), and
ibid., no. 108 (BN lat. 1). See also the discussion by van der Meer, Apocalypse, pp. 77-80,
and Kessler, Bibles, pp. 69-83, and compare the stimulating exposition by Yves Christe,
“Trois images carolingiennes en forme de commentaires sur |’Apocalypse’, Cahiers Arch-
éologiques 25 (1976), 77-92, and J. Croquison, ‘Une vision eschatologique carolingienne’,
Cahiers Archéologiques 4 (1949), 105-29.
318 Rosamond McKittenck
the Old Law, personified as the ancient Moses, and inaugurates the new
church.” Did Ingobertus, the scribe of the San Paolo Bible, and the artists
of the other two Bibles, wish to identify the newly reformed and expanding
Frankish church with this new church? [t would seem, indeed, that armed
with the gift of the New Law and in the possession and use of writing, the
means to faith, knowledge and power, the Carolingians were confident that
they were living at the dawn of a new era. The power bestowed by the
written law and its relevance for the exercise of royal government 1s
expressed in other illustrations in the Vivian Bible, presented to Charles the
Bald in about 846. In the presentation portrait of the king, the monks of
Tours are depicted giving their magnificent Bible to Charles. It symbolizes
the belief that the written word, the Christian faith and the law were the
means to effective rule. It is no accident that in this same manuscript Moses
was depicted teaching the word and law of God to a king and his nobles.”
These paintings have, above all, one clear message. It is the same as that
expressed in the opinions on the relative values and function of writing and
painting I cited at the beginning of this chapter in the elaboration of the
hierarchy of scripts, the role of letter as image and the close relationship
between illustrations and their texts in Carolingian illuminated manu-
scripts. [tis, quite simply, the paramount importance of the written word in
the Carolingian world.

’S Bible of San Paolo fuori le Mura, fol. 331v, illustrated in Kessler, Bibles, no. 109. For
discussion see Joachim Gaehde, “The Turonian sources of the San Paolo Bible’, Frithmit-
telalterliche Studien 5 (1971), 359-400, at 392-4. A facsimile edition of this manuscript is
being prepared by Florentine Miitherich and Girolamo Arnaldi.
7° BN lat. 1, fols. 423r (Charles the Bald enthroned) and 27v (Exodus frontispiece). Very
similar to it is BL Add. 10546, fol. 25v, and the frontispiece to Leviticus in the San Paolo
Bible, fol. 31v: see Kessler, Bibles, nos. 88, 87 and 89 respectively.
 Conclusion

Rosamond McKitterick

It will be clear from the essays in this book that there were many uses of
literacy in the early middle ages. ‘There are, of course, more questions that
need to be raised, arising 1n part out of the topics addressed in this book, as
well as relating to the obvious areas left unexplored which we outlined in the
introduction. We have tried to demonstrate how literacy, because it covers
both the content of the written tradition and the levels of individual or
collective achievement in it, must be discussed in terms of its diverse
historical contexts if it is to be understood. It is, moreover, only on a
selection of possible historical contexts that we have concentrated. Whether
any general conclusions may be drawn from our particular examples has still
to be considered. It may be useful here, therefore, to pull together some of
the various threads unravelled in the course of our investigations in the
foregoing chapters.
Two common themes have emerged, and these are relevant for any
understanding of literacy in society generally. First, there 1s the intertwin-
ing of the symbolic function and practical uses of writing. Consideration of
this theme underlines the importance of the second, namely, the possibili-
ties of a complex interrelationship between writing and other elements of
social and cultural practice.
Some papers, notably those of Kelly, Keynes, Nelson and Noble,
focussed largely on the practical uses of writing. Others, particularly those
of McKitterick, Mitchell and Mullett, placed greater emphasis on the
various manifestations of the symbolic function of writing. The papers by
Stevenson, Reif, Wood and Collins, in the context of particular Irish,
Jewish, Frankish, Visigothic and Islamic communities in the early middle
ages, set out primarily to heighten our perceptions of the broader social and
cultural practices within which the uses of literacy are to be understood. It
proved impossible, however, to focus exclusively on one theme or element
of literacy at the expense of another in any of the essays in this book. Each
study, implicitly or explicitly, has stressed the complexities and inter-
dependence of the issues involved and the need for further debate; a great
319
 320 Rosamond McKittenck
variety of assumptions and convictions about the written word in early
mediaeval Europe has been exposed.
How does one define literacy on the basis of the studies in this book? Our
common conviction, expressed in the introduction and reiterated here, is
that literacy is not just a matter of who could read or write but one of how
reading and writing skills functioned, of the adjustments — mental, emo-
tional, intellectual, physical and technological — necessary to accommodate
them, and the degree to which special skills and knowledge were involved.
Clearly, whether one considers Byzantium, Anglo-Saxon England or
Carolingian Francia, or any of the other regions we have discussed, it is
necessary to distinguish between literary or intellectual and functional
literacy, with, on the one hand, authoritative texts in the religious and
secular spheres, literature of all kinds, learned treatises and expositions,
and, on the other, institutional and personal administration, management
and record keeping, and official and private communication. Literacy,
therefore, could involve the composition of literature and the spread of a
written tradition amongst a substantial proportion of the population. For
the most part, the studies in this book have concentrated on functional
literacy rather than intellectual or learned literacy, but we nevertheless saw,
in the diversity of both the Christian and the Jewish societies examined in
the foregoing chapters, how crucial a role authoritative texts, especially
legal and religious ones, could play in shaping the lives and ideals of a
community. To the extent that societies developed the kinds and range of
literacy they needed, literacy can be approached from an entirely function-
alist standpoint, and one could see this well illustrated with the papacy’s
exploitation of literacy in the early middle ages. But literacy 1n the early
middle ages was not only a quantitative matter of who could read and write,
and a kind of technology. It was also a mentality, a form of ideology through
which power could be constructed and influence exerted, a frame of mind
and a framer of minds; it was both the consequence of, and had as a
consequence, particular kinds of social practice.
Orality, with literacy, nevertheless retained its centrality in early
mediaeval societies. This was most manifest in the many discussions of
charters. At whatever other levels they need to be appreciated, one essential
function of the charter was to serve as a written record of an oral transaction.
The social role of a document 1s also clear; one need only recall Nelson’s
emphasis, with reference to a charter of manumission, on the crucial link
between document and social status. When methods of reading and writing,
and the technical skills necessary for literacy, were examined, it was striking
how often oral forms of instruction and teaching, especially perhaps in
Jewish education, but also just as evident in Merovingian Gaul, Ireland and
elsewhere, were maintained. In the societies in which the roles of writing,
 CONCLUSION 321
pictures and speech were considered, moreover, especially in Byzantium
and in Carolingian Francia, it can be seen that each had its place. In other
words, literacy is not a social or cultural phenomenon that can be isolated
from other media; it interacts with and complements other forms of human
discourse, expression and communication.
A common preoccupation of our essays was the interpretation of particu-
lar kinds of evidence, and the exploitation, furthermore, of categories of
extant material that had not hitherto received much exposure in relation to
literacy. In questions about lay literacy, for example, book-ownership and
donations of books to individuals or institutions loomed large. What is one
to make of the ownership of books by Jews in Egypt, Arabs and Christians
in Umayyad Spain or counts in Carolingian Francia, or the lavish gifts of
books to monasteries such as those supplied by Mummadona to the
monastery she founded at Guimaraes? They may not necessarily provide
incontrovertible evidence of the possession of reading skills on the part of
the owner, but they are highly significant for what they reveal of attitudes to
the written word and the book, of the knowledge of how to acquire them,
and what texts to acquire, of the recognition of the necessity of particular
texts to carry out religious devotion and observance, and of the appropriate-
ness of a gift of books, and thus of the written word, in particular contexts. '
Letters, too, proved to be fruitful indicators of literacy, and especially lay
literacy, in both the functionalist and symbolic senses, for as Mullett
explained, the writing and receiving of letters was both a means of
communication and a ‘multi-media experience’ — oral, material and visual —
and had its own rituals. Not only did a remarkable proportion of represen-
tations of literacy in Byzantium involve people reading, presenting, writing
and receiving letters, but individual members of the Cairo Jewish com-
munity, of the Merovingian and Carolingian aristocracy, of the upper and
educated classes in Al-Andalus and the Christian kingdoms of northern
Spain, also exchanged friendship letters.
Pictures have also been shown to be central to considerations of literacy,
especially in the Byzantine and Carolingian contexts discussed by Mullett
and McKitterick, for they are linked with the symbolic, as opposed to the
practical, functions of writing. Both the Byzantines and Carolingians
commented on the relative value of pictures and writing, and came to
opposite conclusions, but the examination of the relations between words
and pictures in a number of key manuscripts from both the west and the
east, with the role of text as image discussed by McKitterick, the remark-
able display of literacy at San Vincenzo described by Mitchell and the

| J have discussed the implications of the ownership and possession of books in the Carolingian
world in McKitterick, Carolingians, pp. 135-64, 244-66.
322 Rosamond McKittenck
representation of literacy expounded by Mullett, revealed societies where
books, the written word and communication in writing were not only taken
for granted but accorded a supreme position in political and ideological
terms.
The very survival of evidence enabling one to assess literate practices in
the early middle ages, however, was a common preoccupation for all the
contributors. All commented how in the very early period mere shreds of
evidence survive in contrast to the greater volume of material from later
centuries. This presents special problems of interpretation in determining
how typical or representative one tiny morsel of information might be. Even
when charters were being considered, many that might have revealed much
in the original document in terms of the handwriting, or the names of
witnesses recorded, survive only in later copies which lack such essential
and helpful information. We also exposed areas where enough work has
simply not been done to uncover possible caches of evidence; this is
particularly the case with the Jews but also for many other local, and
sometimes quite isolated, communities, such as the different regions in
northern Italy or Graubiinden in the Alps (old Roman Rhaetia) in western
Europe. In the examination of the technology of writing itself the cultural
and technical implications of the coincidental change from uncial to
minuscule scripts in both Carolingian Europe and Byzantium still needs a
convincing interpreter.
The uses of literacy in the early middle ages were most clearly manifest in
the context of government and administration. We saw the workings of the
papal bureaucracy, and the support provided by regional deacons and
subdeacons, notaries and defensors in posts designed to serve the papal
administration. The popes kept archives. That and the great wealth and
range of documents produced, with a Register of papal letters, indicate the
papacy’s commitment to the use of writing, the degree to which knowledge
of the written word was assumed and depended upon in papal transactions
at every level, and also the extent to which the papal officials were direct
continuators of Roman administrative practices. Literacy was necessary for
the proper functioning of the papal system. Both the form of the papal
letters and the structure and arrangement of the Register itself follow
Roman methods. The financial administration of the papacy probably gave
rise, as Noble suggests, to the devising of many different kinds of record.
Noble also notes a shift, certainly within the papal administration, in the
nature and use of documents and in the accessibility of the archive, which
involved a change in the probative value from the public document in the
archives to the private copy in the hands of the recipient. That is, there is a
privatization of the modes of documentary proof which to some extent is
 CONCLUSION 323
also mirrored in the other successor states of western Europe and which
deserves fuller scrutiny.
In the continuity of forms and purposes of administration, then, there 1s
manifest a clear instance of the strength of the Roman Empire’s heritage for
the papacy at least; but such following of administrative forms, and their
gradual adaptation to particular circumstances, is to be observed in the
barbarian successor states as a whole. The different scales and degrees of
adaptation, and the other influences at work in each context, account for the
lack of homogeneity in the societies considered in this book. The Visigoths,
for example, certainly preserved several of the administrative practices of
Roman Spain in all of which writing played a key role. Even in the later
Christian kingdoms of northern Spain, as Collins observed, such practices,
in an etiolated form, are still recognizable, and in Islamic Spain it 1s
arguable that existing practices at the time of the Arab takeover in 711/12
may have provided some kind of model for administrative routines
established thereafter. Byzantine government and bureaucracy also
certainly needed literacy, though there 1s remarkably little surviving
evidence to document the precise ways in which it was exploited.
Anglo-Saxon government exploited the written word for the formulation
and publication of royal law, in the operation of legal processes, in
communication, in assessment, in the administration of estates and in
military matters. The evidence provided by Marculf’s Formulary, the laws,
and instructions emanating from the royal courts, discussed by Wood,
suggests that Merovingian royal government should also be considered as
tied firmly to the written word. The Christian kingdoms of northern Spain
used the written word for their day-to-day administration, too, and for a
time at least, under Ramiro III of Le6én, there was a royal chancery in that
the episcopal scriptorium of Ledén appears to have served the purposes of a
royal chancery, a situation which should be compared with that prevailing
in Anglo-Saxon England at the same time; only from the tenth century is
there clear enough evidence to posit the existence of an Anglo-Saxon royal
chancery. Written documents played a vital role in publishing and enforc-
ing royal law in both Francia and in Anglo-Saxon England. It was the
function of the late Anglo-Saxon king’s law-codes, for example, to assist in
bringing knowledge of the king’s decrees into the localities, rather than to
provide a permanent frame of reference. In other words, the written word
played an essentially active role in administration, and was not just a system
of recording past decisions and actions for symbolic effect.
The Carolingian evidence for the use of literacy in government and
administration represents a huge explosion in the volume of written
documentation and was the outcome of collaboration between the ruler and
324 Rosamond McKittentck
the ruled. Effective exploitation of literate modes, was, as is abundantly
clear in the case of the Carolingians, a means of exercising power. Rulers
like the Frankish kings, who wanted to control and exploit comage and
markets, to protect merchants while taking a cut of their profits, to keep
track of their landed possessions, to keep in touch with their local agents, to
lay down guidelines for particular courses of action and to provide a frame of
reference for future action, as well as to promote their prestige 1n relation to
the present and to posterity, had obvious uses for written documents,
providing their potential for such purposes was known. With the Franks,
the Roman heritage, and the example provided by the Christian church,
were again of the utmost importance. Literacy was perceived as a practical
and useful tool and as a potent instrument of power. The use of the written
word gave the Carolingian Empire unity: the elite of the Carolingian world
actively participated in literacy as a means of group identification, for their
own benefit; hence, as Nelson pointed out, the ‘effectiveness’ of literacy in
government should be appreciated as much for its symbolic as for its
pragmatic function. A government that depended to a considerable extent
on the written word was in any case not necessarily an effective government,
nor a bureaucratic one, but its assumption of the value of literacy and
exploitation of literate modes has much to tell us of the literate mentalities of
that society as a whole.
Side by side with the exploitation of literate modes in government are
royal initiatives for the promotion of literacy. Alfred of Wessex, for
example, attempted to enlarge the scope of books available in English in
order to promote learning and philosophy and to improve the calibre of the
nobility. In Merovingian Gaul, the royal court had a role to play in the
education of the nobility; it acted as a clearing house for the placing of the
sons of officials and magnates in appropriate households for their upbring-
ing, and asa focus of talent. The court also transcended, to some extent, the
tendency for culture in Merovingian Gaul to be of a regional character and
modified the old distinction between Romanized southern Gaul and the
barbarized north. Similarly, the learned and cultured court of the caliphs of
Umayyad Al-Andalus served as a focus for the entire country — Arabs, Jews
and Christians served there and there also existed a learned class from which
the caliphal bureaucracy was drawn. In northern Spain, the royal court
appears to have played a similar role to that in Merovingian Gaul, in that it
acted as a place where training in basic pragmatic skills could be provided.
Royal authors are not unknown — one need only think of the extensive
writing and translating activity of King Alfred, or the Chronicle of
Alphonso III, king of the Asturias. In Mitchell’s view, indeed, the
Carolingian rulers are the rulers who, above all others, made themselves
‘masters of an apparatus of social control’ and exploited both painting
 CONCLUSION 325
and script as two potent and visible symbols of their authority, their power
and their presence.
It is clear when considering the use of literate modes in the various
successor kingdoms of early mediaeval Europe that while writing may have
been exploited for legal transactions between institutions, particularly
ecclesiastical ones, and between individuals, appreciation of the value of the
written word need not necessarily have extended into any of the other
routine procedures of royal government. [n other words, if we are to make a
distinction between local and central levels of administration, and between
private and official uses of literacy, as we must, do the various private and
public uses of literacy have to be recognized, in theory at least, as potentially
separate and self-contained phenomena? As Kelly, Keynes, Nelson and
Wood have demonstrated, the private and the public domain interlocked
and were certainly influential upon one another as far as the functional use
of literacy was concerned. Many of the methods and forms of admuinistra-
tion in the early mediaeval kingdoms, moreover, are inconceivable without
a continuous sub-Roman tradition of record keeping, use of documents in
legal proceedings and resort to written means to exert governmental control
enduring from the Roman period.
In the exploitation of literacy for the purposes of government and
administration, there appears to be a clear link between strong central
government and an extensive use of literacy in most of the kingdoms
considered in this book. But when faced with a lack of central government,
there is not a concomitant decline in the use of the written word. With a
weakening of central power there is still a local exercise of power to be
reckoned with, in non-royal places, and there is much written documen-
tation emanating from small local power bases and from individuals in local
communities, above all in relation to legal transactions, which could, with
justice, be regarded as the most telling witness to the role of literacy in early
mediaeval societies. Nearly every chapter in this book discussed the
workings of law and the degree to which written records were required and
desired by those involved in the transactions, whether by a slave receiving
his charter of manumission, a church insisting on a record of a rich gift or a
family disputing the grant of a piece of property away from the family. It is
the extensive private, or at least non-governmental, resort to the written
word which is so remarkable a feature of early mediaeval societies, and does
much to counter the old beliefs in restricted clerical literacy.
Formularies for charters provide an indication of the special importance
attached to the written word and its correct application, though studies
elsewhere have also suggested that those societies which displayed the
greatest interest in the production of formal records were also those most
suspicious of and best able to take steps to counter the existence of forged
326 Rosamond McKitterick
documents.* The greater emphasis there is on written records, then, the
more determined could be the efforts to circumvent or manipulate their use.
On this reading, which needs to be tested more widely, a society which can
produce a ‘forgery’ — whether a charter, a text such as the Donation of
Constantine,’ a tour de force like the Le Mans forgeries,* the clever
propagandistic fabrications of the Patrick dossier by the church of Armagh
in the seventh and eighth centuries, analysed by Stevenson in this volume,
or the many instances provided of blatant and subtle forgeries in a great
variety of contexts in the studies produced for the anniversary celebrations
of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica — is one essentially appreciative of
literacy and the power of the written word.’ Forgeries, indeed, are a
remarkable treasure trove of evidence for the uses of literacy which is only
beginning to be exploited, and it is a wonder that more has not been made of
them in this context long since.
The role of the church and of Christianity, or, in the case of Islamic Al-
Andalus and the Jewish communities of the eastern Mediterranean, of a
religion of the book, as a mediator of literacy has figured in every chapter in
this volume. The initiative in introducing the use of written documents was
undoubtedly taken by the church in many instances. Certainly in Anglo-
Saxon England the anxiety on the part of the church to hold written title-
deeds to property, and the need of clerics to persuade lay Anglo-Saxons of
the validity of written documents, appears to have been the principal factor
in the introduction of literate modes for legal transactions. Thus the success
of literacy is most fruitfully assessed by considering the extent to which the
use of the written word superseded, or was accommodated within, the
established procedures of society. As runic inscriptions show, the pagan
Anglo-Saxons (like the pagan Irish) were not entirely ignorant of writing,
but Latin and the Roman alphabet were introduced by foreign missionaries
from the end of the sixth century onwards.
Yet in the case of Anglo-Saxon England, the introduction of the written
word was effected by Christian missionaries from Ireland and from Rome.
This must prompt one to reflect, first, on what had made the literate
character of the Christian church quite as it was, and, secondly, the

Roger Collins, “The role of writing in the resolution and recording of disputes’, in Settlement
of Disputes, p. 211.
3 See Das Constitutum Constantini (Konstantinische Schenkung), ed. Horst Furhmann,
MGH Fontes X.
* Actus pontificum Cenomannis in urbe degentium, ed. G. Busson and A. Ledru (Le Mans,
1901), and see Walter Goffart, The Le Mans Forgeries: A Chapter from the History of Church
Property in the Ninth Century (Cambridge Mass., 1966).
> Falschungen im Mittelalter, MGH Schriften 33, 5 vols. (Hanover, 1988).
 CONCLUSION 327
response and strength of native and indigenous culture. In the case of
Ireland, Stevenson showed that, while some seventh-century accounts
make a link between Christianity, the arrival of St Patrick and literacy,
Christianity gave impetus to the use of writing but did not introduce it, nor
did it overwhelm native culture, whether oral or written, in the vernacular.
In the case of Rome, and bearing in mind St Augustine of Canterbury’s
known connections with Pope Gregory, Noble has demonstrated the
enormous extent to which the written word had an established function in
administration and social intercourse, and how in its turn, that owed much
to its Roman past. Consideration of the role of Christianity at least, in other
words, also involved the Roman heritage: it is this pair of twins in the
ancestry of the germanic successor states of western Europe considered in
this book which are of such fundamental importance when assessing the
subsequent, and consequent, uses of literacy. It was, for example, particu-
larly evident in Wood’s discussion of Merovingian Gaul as well as in Collins’
on Visigothic Spain. Further, we know from the clear evidence in early
Kentish sources of links between the Franks and the south-east Anglo-
Saxons. The exact political relations are still disputed, with much to
recommend the attractive, if extreme, position adopted by Wood that the
Merovingians were the overlords of the early Kentish kings,® but there
seems little doubt that in religious and ecclesiastical terms communication
with Frankish Gaul, with its own distinctive Romano-Christian-Frankish
literate culture, was a further contributory factor in the adoption of the
written word in Anglo-Saxon society and its adaptation to Anglo-Saxon
needs.
Cross-cultural interchange of this kind, with elements of the Roman past
as mediated through different germanic and non-germanic cultural tradi-
tions, however elusive, as well as the influence exerted by the Christian
church, was a recurrent theme in all the early mediaeval societies discussed
above. The extent to which there was such exchange should not be
underestimated, difficult though it might be to chart. Look how absorption
into the Arab world opened up the Spanish Christians to new currents, not
only from Arab culture, but also from Christian communities in the east, as
well as the links forged between southern Arabic Spain and northern
Christian Spain. Remember Collins’ suggestion that the evident literacy of
the Arabs in Umayyad Al-Andalus might have been influenced by the
survival of an educated laity from the Visigothic period onwards. We saw,
too, how Jewish communities under Islam emulated Islamic centralization
of authority and standards in their own communal, religious and literary

© Ian Wood, The Merovingian North Sea, Occasional Papers on Mediaeval Topics 1
(Alingsas, 1983).
328 Rosamond McKittenck
requirements. In the technical spheres, who can tell what influences might
have been operating? When we consider, for example, the Jewish religious
tradition, with education based on the text of the Pentateuch in Hebrew
expounded by arvabbi, and possessed of an almost cultic function, in strong
contrast to the liturgical rituals of western Christian priests, how are we to
account for the change 1n the medium of transmission among the Jews in the
ninth century, with a sudden explosion of activity in the copying of scrolls
on to codices, with oral traditions committed to manuscript and a wide
dissemination of texts, so that we witness the creation of a corpus of written
sources of instruction and inspiration, very similar to that we encounter in
the Christian kingdoms of the Franks, Anglo-Saxons, Lombards, Visigoths
and Greeks? Are we observing a fundamentally western and Christian
model being adapted and exploited by eastern and non-Christian communi-
ties? Certainly the emphasis on philosophical study in early mediaeval
Jewish communities appears to have been the result of observation of the
practices within Christian and Muslim theological circles. Developments
within the Christian or Islamic communities of Spain, Italy and the
Frankish regions may even have had some impact on mediaeval western
European Jewish literacy, though the foundations for these are seen, at
present at least, as eastern. Whatever the different influences at work in
later centuries, certainly Judaism has always been a fundamentally literate
religion, with, from the earliest times 1n ancient Israel, textualization for the
permanence of knowledge, guidance and edification of the faithful. The
earliest Christian literate traditions were, after all, founded in part on this
very same Jewish literate tradition, so it is hardly surprising if different
streams of cultural practice seem occasionally to flow together before once
more making a separate course. Such cultural interchange, and the changes
effected by different environments and the contact with native cultures,
were no doubt greatly enhanced by the social and political transformations
of the early mediaeval world between the end of the fourth century and the
end of the ninth.
The weakness of the divide between lay and cleric, and the overlapping of
lay and ecclesiastical interests and practices were evident in a number of the
chapters in this book. The overlapping structure of lay and ecclesiastical
magnates in Merovingian Gaul, for example, suggests a remarkably literate
aristocracy and the evidence for education certainly diminishes any assump-
tions of a divide between secular and ecclesiastical education. In relation to
early Anglo-Saxon England, too, Kelly countered the traditional view of
literacy as an ecclesiastical preserve and looked at the ways in which the lay
Anglo-Saxons used the written word and the extent to which writing
superseded speech and memory as the standard method of conveying and
storing information. Unlike Ireland, for example, written documentation
 CONCLUSION 329
came to occupy an important place in secular Anglo-Saxon society and was
used in ways which could imply a degree of literacy among certain sections
of the laity. Although at first, in the seventh and early eighth centuries, the
rituals associated with the written document were probably more important
to laymen, in time the production of chirographs on a regular basis and the
great range of different types of vernacular document covering aspects of
land tenure and property ownership indicate that secular society took a
strong interest 1n and placed great reliance on written documentation.
Keynes shows how the initiatives regarding secular uses of literacy in the
earlier Anglo-Saxon period were reinforced in the tenth and eleventh
centuries: laymen, and in particular king’s thegns, were among those
employed by the king to convey messages to the shire-courts and to whom
the king sent written messages, and people other than the king were
accustomed to conveying messages in written form. The evidence of
vernacular charters and wills, the routine confirmation of wills, and such
famous issues as the Fonthill dispute, add a new precision to our general
appreciation of the penetration of the written word into at least the upper
levels of lay society throughout the Anglo-Saxon period.
In both Ireland and England, of course, the vernacular language was very
different from that of the Christian church’s literary language, and Latin
had to be learnt as a foreign tongue. In both England and Ireland, therefore,
one might expect, and we find, links between the vernacular literary
tradition and lay literacy, with, above all, the production of laws in the non-
Latinate vernacular. There is also in Ireland the existence of the learned
class or filid and in England a clear sense that the written word had been
securely accommodated within secular society for literature and legal
transactions, as well as religious expression by the ninth century, together
with the foundations laid for the outstanding literary activity of the later
Anglo-Saxon period. Vernacular literacy in England was encouraged as a
substitute for latinity. In this King Alfred played a key role, but he was able
to build on the moves already made for translation from Latin, composition
of literary texts in the vernacular and the strong tradition of vernacular
documentation in the ninth century. There is thus far more to this than
simply a weak command of Latin on the part of Christian clerics. Neverthe-
less, both Stevenson and Kelly stressed how important Latin literacy was to
the church, and how in the sixth and seventh centuries there was a
substantial technical and economic investment 1n the creation and storage of
permanent written documents in Latin within the Christian centres of
Ireland and England. Despite this substantial commitment to Latin
literacy, in Ireland at least the church was unable to influence secular ways
of transacting legal business, whereas in Anglo-Saxon England it was. In
other words, the case of early Christian Ireland, perhaps because the Irish
330 Rosamond McKitterick
church lacked the substructure of Roman imperial administration to
support it, counters the notion that literacy necessarily effects social
change. It also reinforces the suggestion made earlier that there may have
been more of a surviving substructure of the old Roman imperial
administration surviving in Britain, or alternatively that the links between
England and the Romanized and Christian Continent in the fifth and sixth
centuries in the secular as well as the religious spheres were far closer and
stronger than we can now detect precisely in the extant evidence.
Lay literacy in Merovingian Gaul was not confined to the highest stratum
of society, even though most of the prominent people were members of a
secular and ecclesiastical elite. Signatures on charters, for example, indicate
that officials and other members of lay society and the royal court could
write, and knowledge of law was common among those royal servants about
whom we have information. The resort to written records on the part of
members of Merovingian lay society, moreover, demonstrates the great
extent to which Merovingian society needed and demanded documents; all
sorts of transactions had to be set down in writing and registered in the local
archives. It is to be noted that most of the literate figures of Merovingian
Gaul attested to in surviving legal documents and letters were also adminis-
trators. Wood also demonstrated how a sense of style and awareness of
Latin literary forms were preserved in Merovingian Gaul; there, at least,
continuity in both language and cultural forms is preserved, and it is
arguable that this linguistic continuity also prevailed far longer, that is, well
into the Carolingian period, than is commonly maintained.’ In other words,
the emergence of lay and vernacular culture in the former Roman provinces
of the Continent was expressed in the same language, namely Latin, as that
of religion and the administration. Latin was the vernacular. Thus the issue
of language, whether written or spoken, the status of the vernacular
languages and the role of oral communication in relation to written texts
present a different set of problems on the Continent from those we
encounter in the British Isles. Latin undoubtedly played a distinct cultural
role on the Continent, and promoted unity, ina very different way from that
on the western side of the North Sea. The blend of social and governmental
literacy in the administrative classes of sixth- and seventh-century Francia
was a continuation of the traditions of their Gallo-Roman predecessors and
was handed on to the Carolingians. The ample use the Carolingians made of

7 | have reviewed the linguistic situation prevailing in Carolingian Francia, with reference to
recent philological research, in McKitterick, Carolingians, pp. 7-22, and argued the case for
Latin being the vernacular not only before c. 800 but for much of the ninth century as well, in
the Romance regions of Gaul, while it was the accepted language of administration and the
church as a second language in the germanic regions.
 CONCLUSION 331
their Latin heritage was fully revealed by Nelson in her chapter, especially
the degree to which Carolingian government assumed a functioning and
literate class of administrators.* Latin also continued in use in the Christian
communities of late Umayyad Spain, and is evident in the liturgy and
inscriptions. This is not to say that there is not a divide between written
Latin and spoken Latin/Romance, and that it may have been as large a
divide as between rhetorical Greek and the common Greek of the eastern
Empire; but this divide did not constitute such an obstacle to the attainment
of literate skills as used to be thought.’ Indeed, aristocratic and lay literacy
is not a problem in Byzantium: it was widespread. What 1s a problem,
however, 1s the level of clerical literacy, for there was, as Mullett pointed
out, an element of the monastic tradition which regarded books as luxury
objects (as indeed they were) and which scorned book-learning.
In the Islamic society of Umayyad Spain, a distinction between lay and
ecclesiastical literacy makes little sense for no separate priestly class existed.
There was a learned class, drawn on for the bureaucracies of the caliphate,
and it comprised Christians and Jews as well as Arabs. There is evidence of
book buying and book reading and the existence of a fairly substantial urban
market for books as well as the considerable output of new works in a variety
of genres in the tenth century. Collins suggests, however, that though there
is a rough correlation between the adoption of Islam and an increasingly
Arabized intellectual and material culture in Spain, the ground for these
developments had already been prepared in the preceding Catholic and
Visigothic period. Better evidence of lay literacy can be found in southern
Spain in the Arab period rather than in the Visigothic period and comes
from the activities of such men as Paul Alvar. Within the Christian Latin
community in the Visigothic Christian kingdoms of northern Spain one can
also find many instances of literate members of the upper ranks of society,
with aristocratic and royal libraries and lay aristocrats exchanging letters.
Inscriptions and a substantial body of charters from the north of Spain in
the ninth and tenth centuries also witness to laymen employing written
documents for their legal business, though there is no certain evidence of a
lay notariat such as one can find, for example, in the diocese of Milan in the
eighth and ninth centuries.’ Despite the evidence for some lay literacy in
northern Spain, it should be noted that Collins observed an ecclesiastical

Carolingians, pp. 211-70.

8 For a fuller treatment of other aspects of Carolingian lay literacy see McKitterick,

? For full discussion of the linguistic situation in Spain see Roger Wright, Late Latin and
Early Romance in Spain and Carolingian France (Liverpool, 1982), pp. 145-207.
10 See, for example, samples of their activity in J placiti del ‘Regnum Italiae’, ed. C. Manaresi,
3 vols. (Rome, 1955-60), and the discussion by Chris Wickham, ‘Land disputes and their
332 Rosamond McKitterick
monopoly of the production of governmental and private documents which
is not found to the same extent elsewhere in western Europe at the time, and
especially not in the Carolingian world.'! Collins suggested that such an
ecclesiastical monopoly of the written word indicated a more limited
dissemination, but not a lack, of literacy in the upper levels of secular
society and that there is sufficient indication in the extant material that
literacy was becoming increasingly necessary, especially for judges and the
administration of the law.!? In other words, manifestations of lay literacy in
Christian Spain are essentially those of pragmatic literacy: Pamplona, Leén
and the kingdom of the Asturias did not entirely lose sight of their
Visigothic heritage.
In the Jewish context, the evidence is largely concerned with those we
would call the laity, though again, the distinction between lay and cleric 1s
hardly appropriate. Jews were ‘a people of the book’ and the huge variety of
material in the Cairo Genizah with its practical emphasis and wealth of
information about social and business communications witnesses to the
thorough permeation of literate modes throughout Jewish society. Literacy
in the communities studied by Reif is in any case closely allied with the
language question, for it does not necessarily entail an acquaintance with
literature but an ability to read and write a language or more than one
language. Trilingualism — in Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic — was quite
normal, and it led to a variety of choice in the language written in particular
contexts. Just as we observed above, to different extents, in relation to
Ireland, England and Frankish Gaul, how language became a way to
proclaim an adherence to a particular tradition, so among the Jews,
veneration of older traditions could continue in one language while new
ones went into the vernacular. This is a fascinating, and instructive,
congruence of cultural response in relation to the reception of religious and
legal traditions.
For all considerations of lay literacy, whether for the selection of societies
considered in this book, or for the others that could have been included,
education is of prime importance, and remains a subject meriting further
investigation, building, of course, on the foundations laid down by Riché
three decades ago.'? Some educational provision has to be understood from

social framework in Lombard-Carolingian Italy, 700-900’, in Settlement of Disputes, pp.

104-24, especially p. 112.
'' See McKitterick, Carolingians, pp. 77-134, for a full discussion of the process of the
production of charters and the personnel involved, especially in the private and local sphere.
'2 Compare Roger Collins, ‘Sicut lex Gothorum continet : law and charters in ninth- and tenth-
century Leén and Catalonia’, EHR 100 (1985), 489-512.
‘3 Pierre Riché, Education et culture dans l’occident barbare, vie-vitie siécles (3rd edn, Paris,
 CONCLUSION 333
indirect evidence, that is, by implication, whereas in Gaul there is more
reference to school and schooling throughout the early mediaeval period.
Generally, however, broader and more secular elements in education not
specifically directed towards clerical training are still being guessed at, or, at
best, merely sketched in; 1t may be that this unsatisfactory state of affairs
will have to continue, given the lacunae in our evidence. Nevertheless, the
wealth and variety of material unearthed and discussed in the chapters in
this book suggests a much more widely based effort at education and
training in at least pragmatic literacy than has hitherto been acknowledged.
As we stated in our introduction, we set out to provide some early
mediaeval contexts in which to observe and consider the implications of the
uses, levels and distribution of literacy in Europe. We have provided for
each of the societies selected, whether Irish, Anglo-Saxon, Frankish,
Visigothic, Greek, Italian or Jewish, a factual basis from which assessments
of the significance of literacy in the early middle ages can be made by those
reading the relevant chapters. We have ourselves offered some suggestions
of what that significance might be.
In the diverse uses, both functional and symbolic, of literacy in the early
middle ages, much of importance has been revealed about both practical
ways of conducting business and administration, and observing religion,
and about attitudes of mind, mentalités, of leading groups in the early
middle ages. It would be idle to pretend that what we have uncovered
necessarily permeated unchanged to the lowest levels of society in any one of
the various communities we have studied, or even that it did so in similar
ways. Nevertheless, we do maintain that no person in society remained
unaffected by the activities of those groups able to make the most of the
opportunities afforded them by acquisition of the technical skills of reading
and writing associated with literacy and of knowledge of the written word
and all that that implied. Early mediaeval society as a whole, in whatever
historical context one chooses to see it, was one in which literacy mattered,
and where literacy had repercussions right down the social scale, from the
king issuing directives, and the nobleman endowing a monastery with
books, to the freed slave clinging to his new social status by means of a
written charter. Literacy’s importance and relevance throughout the early
middle ages 1s, on the evidence presented in our essays, as a major force in
the most crucial and formative period in the development of European
civilization.

1962), English trans. John J. Contreni, Education and Culture in the Barbarian West,
Sixth through Eighth Centunes (Columbia, South Carolina, 1976), with updated biblio-
graphy, and Pierre Riché, Ecoles et enseignement dans le haut moyen age (Paris, 1979).
 Index
Manuscripts are listed under their modern locations

A-Hakam II, caliph, library of, 110 Aldhelm, 57; letters of, 69
Abba, Kentish reeve, will of, 47-8, Alexander, Jonathan, 305
252 Alexander of Nicaea, 177, 180
Abeliare, books given to, 132 Alfonso I (739-56), 123
Abu el-Hassan, Jewish schoolboy, 152 Alfonso II (791-842), 124
acrostic poems, 307 Alfonso III (866-910), Chronicle of,
Adalhard, abbot, 221 123, 128
administration, 163, 202, 229, 322-3; Alfred, ealdorman, 55; will of, 253
Carolingian, 227; definition of, Alfred, king, 4, 8, 230-1, 244, 245,
258-9; financial, in Rome, 95; 256, 324; education of, 61; Latin
Frankish, 41-2; Umayyad in Al knowledge of, 60; laws of, 228,
Andalus, 112-14; use of writing 231-4, 237; literary interests of,
in, 244-57 60; promotion of English by, 52,
Admonitio generals, 295 62, 231, 329; treaty of Guthrum,
Adrevald, 290 233; will of, 253
Aélfgeat, 257 alphabet, Roman, 4, 22, 37, 38, 73
Atltheah Stybb, 240, 245 Alvar, Paul, 121, 122
Atlfhere, ealdorman, 242 Ambrose Autpert, 217, 316
AElfric, archbishop, 243, 246 Amiens, Bibliothéque Municipale 18
Elfwine, thegn and scnptor, 257 (Corbie Psalter), 310
Aemilian, abbot in Toledo, 115 Angers, Formulary of, 64
fEthelbald, king of Mercia (c. 716— Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 61
57), 37, 45 Anglo-Saxon contact with Franks, 58
Aélthelberht, laws of, 58 Ansegis, 288
Aéthelmzr, ealdorman, will of, 253 Antiphonary, 100
/Ethelred, king (the ‘Unready’) (979— — Apocalypse, illustrations of, 314-17
1013), 242-3, 245, 254, 257 Apringtus of Beja, Commentary on the
Aéthelric, bishop of Selsey, 244 Apocalypse of, 115
ethelstan, king (925-39), 233, 240, Arab conquest of Spain, 119; focus of
244; legislation of, 235-41 rule of, 120
Ethelstan, ztheling, will of, 254 Arab texts in Andalus, 114
Aéthelwine, ealdorman, 242, 251 Arabic: dominance of, 113; role of in
fEthelwold of Winchester, 51 Spain, 120; use of, 148
will of, 253 146... . "
Ethelwulf, king of Wessex (839-55), Aramaic: role of, 136-7; use of, 140,
agents, royal, 227 Aratus, 308
Agnellus of Ravenna, 97 arcarius, 95
Aidan, 16 archdeacon, 84
Al Maqgari on libraries in Cordoba, archives, papal, 85, 90-1, 322;
109, 111 consultation of, 90—1
Alberti, Leone Battista, 214 Arethas, 179
Albertini Tablets, 118 Aristotle, 271
 Index 335
Armagh, 7, 12, 25; Book of charters Boniface, archbishop of Mainz, 78,
in, 32; see also under Dublin 91; letters of, 69
art, role of, 166 Bonitus, bishop of Clermont, 67
asapheia, 178 book ownership, 36, 157-8, 321
Asclepiodotus, drafter of legislation, ~ books: in Al Andalus, 109;
68 apocalyptic symbol of, 316-18; of
assembly, local, 240 aristocracy in Leén, 125; attitude
Asser, 52-3, 59, 244, 256; Life of towards, 157; Cordoban, 132;
King Alfred by, 230-1, 253 cost of, 158; gifts of, 158; gifts
Athos acts, 163 of, 126-7, 132, 321; Hebrew,
Ato, abbot of San Vincenzo (739-60), 145-7; lists of, 154; portrayal of,
187, 217 163 171, 316-18; use of in
Audoin, bishop of Rouen, 76; teaching, 152
education of, 76; letters to; 70; Borrell, count, letter to, 112-13
life of, 78; style of, 73 boundary clause, 46, 56, 251, 255 n.
Augustine of Canterbury, 15, 58 114
autograph, 42; royal, 67 Braulio, bishop of Saragossa, 90, 115;
Autramnus, lay advocate, 283 letters of, 116-17
Autun, Bibliothéque Municipale 19 breves, 277
bis (Sacramentary of Brigit, saint, 25, 26
Marmoutier), 308~9 Brooks, Nicholas, 3
Avitus, bishop of Vienne, 71; letters Brown, T. S., 10, 104
of, 69 Burghal Hidage, 256
Bury St Edmunds, memorandum of,
Badanoth Beotting, will of, 252 n. 101 51
bailiffs, 273 Byrhtnoth, son of Odda, 240, 245, 251
Balzoretti, Ross, 10
Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek, HJ.I'V.12, Caesarius of Arles, 71
309 n. 48 Cairo, literacy in, 151-4
Basil, 189 Cairo Genizah, 146, 150-4
Beatus, Commentary on the Cambridge, Corpus Christi College
Apocalypse, 121, 122, 123 201, 236 n. 41, 243 n. 69; 265,
Bede, 90; Historia Ecclesiastica, 61; 242 n. 62; 383, 233-4 nn. 33, 35,
letter to Egbert, 59 237 n. 45, 239 n. 54, 243 n. 69
Ben Ezra Synagogue, Cairo, 150 Camille, Michael, 30
Ben Sasson, 147 Campbell, James, 228
Benedict, Rule of, in Old English, 52 canon law, 18, 74, 101-2;
benefice, 277; by charter, 275 incorporation of into papal
beneficiary production, 118 letters, 87
Beneventan minuscule, 220 canon, scriptural, 82
Benevento, dukes of, 189 Canterbury, charters of, 53
Berhtwulf, 55 capitals: rustic, 301, 308; square, 301
Berne, Burgerbibliothek, 212, 307 Capitulare de Villis, 273
Bertha, daughter of Charlemagne, 236 Capztulare evangeliorum, 100
Bertram of Le Mans, 76; will of, 65 Capitulare missorum (802), 249
Bible: charter in, 117; Hebrew, 139, capitularies, 227, 258, 261, 282, 283:
147; role of, in education, 135-6 function of, 291; Mervingian,
bibliothecarius, 85 261; ‘original’ versions of, 283-5;
bocland, 45 production of, 242 n. 62; as
Boniface I, pope (418-22), 90 treaties, 291-2
336 Index
captions, 163, 309, 313-14 51; annual renders for, 55; scribe
caroline minuscule, 218, 266, 302, of, 47
303, 308; emergence of, 303—4 Christian church, role of, 326-7
cartularies, 125 Christian culture in Arab Spain, 119
cartularn (charter men), 262 Christians, in Arab Spain, 111;
case law, 162 British, 14-15; see also under
Cassiodorus, /nstitutiones, 105 doctors
Dublin Alfonso III
Catch of St Columba, see under Chronicle of Alfonso III, see under
Cenwulf of Mercia, 45 Chronicle of San Vincenzo, 208
Ceolred, bishop of Leicester, 56 Chrotildis, charter of, 66
Ceolwulf, king of Northumbria, 61 church and land tenure, 31
chancery, royal see under writing Cipolla, Carlo, 2
office Cividale, Santa Maria in Valle, 221
Chaplais, Pierre, 40 Cixila of Leon, gift of books, 132
Charlemagne, 245, 258, 285, 295; Clanchy, Michael, 4, 5, 229
additions to Lex Salica, 267; Clofesho, Synod of (747), 57
administration of, 227, 262; Cnut, king, 243, 246; letter of, 256
annexes Lombard kingdom, 224; —_ codex, 301 and n. 18; adoption of,
on judges, 233; letter to counts 145-7, 328
236; military capacity of, 277; Codex Beneventanus, see under
orders compilation of Codex London
Carolinus, 87; and San Vincenzo Codex Carolinus, 87
al Volturno, 223 codicology, Hebrew, 146-7
Charles the Bald, 276-7, 290, 307, Cogitosus, 25
310, 315, 318; capitularies of, coinage: Anglo-Saxon, 228;
268; coinage of, 292; use of Carolingian, 260, 285
writing by, 293-4; wife of, 302; Collectio Avellana, 87 ,
writing office of, 288 Collectio Canonum Hibernensis, 18,
charters, 325, 329; Anglo-Saxon, 8, 30, 31
39-47; Asturian, 123, 124; Collectio Dionysiana, 102
Byzantine, 162; Carolingian, 262, coloni, 270
294; cartulary copies of, 45 n. Columba, saint, 26
33; Celtic, 30; foundation, 163; Columbanus, saint, 18
Galician, 126; introduction into communication, 180-2, 226, 2446,
England of, 40—2; Irish, 27; 273-4, 278-9, 322
local, 259, 286; Merovingian, 41, Compiégne, 310
66-7; proems to, 226; purchase _ Confessio of St Patrick, 13, 16-17
of, 251; script of, 303; survival of | Constantine Porphyrogennetos, 167,
in England, 38; vernacular 183
English, 55-6, 61, 245-6, 246- conversion (of the Irish), 14-15
51; Visigothic, 117-18 Cookham, monastery at, 45
Chelsea, Synod of (816), 49 Corbie Psalter, see under Amiens
Chilperic I, king of the Franks (561- | Cormery, tenants of, 275
84), 73 Coronation Gospels, see under Vienna
Chintila, king of the Visigoths (636— Corvey, Westwerk at, 211

255 286-7
9), 115 counts, Carolingian: duties of, 275;
chirograph, 49-50, 250 n. 94, 254, literacy of, 282-3; number of,
Christ Church, Canterbury, 45, 47, couriers, 275
 Index 337
court, legal, 118, 261 Edgar, king (959-75), 50, 52, 233,
court, royal, 79-80; Carolingian, 80; 250; legislation of, 241-2
cultural role of, 74-6, 324—5; in Edict of Pitres (864), see under Pitres
northern Spain, 127 Edictus Chilperici, 66
court school of artists, 221 Edmund, king (939-46), legislation
cultural continuity, 79 of, 241
cultural interchange, 119, 327-8 education, 73-4, 153-4, 161, 289,
cursive script, 301 332-3; in Anglo-Saxon England,
Cynewulf, 37 59-60; of boys, 154; in Cordoba,
Cynewulf, king of the west Saxons, 45 122; of girls, 153; Jewish
tradition of, 137, 151-2; in
Davies, Wendy, 30, 270 Merovingian Gaul, 74-8;
deacon, regional, 84 methods of oral, 141-2; of
defensores, 84, 93-4 nobility, 116; of popes, 103;
Desiderius, abbot, church of, 201 provision of, in monasteries, 122;
Desiderius of Cahors, bishop (629- in Visigothic Spain, 116
54), 69, 70; education of, 67; Edward the Confessor, king (1042-
letters of, 68 66), charters of, 257 °
Dhuoda, 271 Edward the Elder, king (899-925),
Dido, bishop of Poitiers (655-73), 67 232, 233, 234, 236, 244, 249,
Dionysio-Hadnana, 102 laws of, 234-5
Dionysius Exiguus, 102 Einhard, 284
disputes, legal, 45, 51, 245-6, 247, Eligius, bishop of Noyon (640/6—659/
248-51; in English, 54; near 65), 70
Tours, 269 Ely abbey, 250
divination, use of texts for, 296 encyclopaedism, 165
Divisio regnorum (806), 291 Engelberga, empress, 272
doctors: British Christian, 14-15; English: promotion of, 52-8, 230; see
Christian at caliph’s court, 112 also under Alfred, king
documents, production of, 286-7, 323. Epernay, Bibliothéque Municipale 1,
Doherty, Charles, 27 307 n. 40
domboc, 232, 233, 234, 236, 238 epigraphic evidence, 162 n. 44
Domesday Book, 51 Epistulae Austrasiacae, 68-9, 73, 74
Domnolus, 75 Epyphanius, abbot (824-42), 187,
Drogo, archbishop of Metz (826-55), 189; portrait of, 192
221 Ermold the Black, 320
Drory, R., 149 estate administration, 63, 226, 273—4
Dublin, Royal Irish Academy s.n. Eugenius of Toledo, versification of
(Cathach of St Columba), 18 Isidore’s Etymologiae, 116
Dublin, Trinity College: MS 52 Eulogius of Toledo, writings of, 120
(Book of Armagh), 12-13, 32-3, evidence, survival of, 322
34, 35; MS 55 (A.4.15) (Codex
Usserianus Primus), 17 Fabian, pope (236-50), 84
Dumville, David, 15 Farfa, epitaph at, 212
Ebbo, archbishop of Rheims (816-35; Felix, senator, 63
840-5), 221, 306-7, 311 Ferdomnach, 12, 13
Eberhard, count of Friuli, 272, 291 fidelity, 279-80; oath of, 268
Ebroin, 80 filid, 12, 16, 26
Eccard, count of Macon, 272, 291; Finnian, 18
archive of, 276 Fleury, 276
—6.3338 Index
folcland, 45 Gregory II, pope (715-31), education
Folkestone, monastery of, 47 of, 103
Fonthill dispute, 248-9, 329 Gregory, bishop of Tours (573-95),
forgery, 294, 325-6 63, 67; style of, 71, 72
formulae, 42, 43; in Liber Diurnus, 96 Guillou, André, 104
Formularies, 64-6 Guimaraes, gift of books to, 126-7,

58 233
Forum Tudicum, 118, 126, 129, 130; 132, 321
copies of, 130 Gundovald, education of, 67
Franks, contact with Anglo-Saxons, Guthrum, treaty with King Alfred,
Franks Casket (Auzon), 37
Fredegar, education of, 77 Hadrian, missionary, 40, 57
friendship, 70-1, 321 Hadrian I, pope (772-95), 85;
friendship letters, 121 education of, 103; letter of (788),
Froila, abbot and judge, 130 41, 86
Fulda, library of, 298 hagiography, 164
funerary calligraphy, 1938-9 Haimo of Auxerre, 316
funerary inscription, 216 half uncial, 301
Harmer, Florence, 248
Gaius, Institutes, 117 Harvey, Anthony, 34
Ganshof, Francois-Louis, 227, 258, Hasdai ibn Shaprut, 112
261-3, 274, 285, 287, 289, 290 Hautvillers, 221
Gelasian Sacramentary, 99 Havelock, Eric, 5
Germanus, bishop of Paris (555-76), Hebrew language: status of, 136-7;
73 teaching of, 152; use of, 147-8
gesta municipalia, 64, 65 Herchenafreda, letters of, 70
gifts, 182, 183 heregeld, 256
Godmar, bishop of Gerona (987-93), Hermenegildo, count, books of, 126
111 Hincmar, archbishop of Rheims (845—
Godwine, Kentish nobleman, 50 82), 265, 274, 280, 288-9, 294;
Gogo, tutor to Childebert II, 68, 69, De Ordine Palatiu, 267
71, 74 - Historia Wambae, 116
Goitein, 5. D., 150 historiography, 164
Goody, Jack, 5 history: purpose of, 110; study of, 61
Gospels, 17 46
Gospel Book, charters in, 44, 117 Hlothere, king of Kent, (673-85), 41,
government: Carolingian, 258-96; Hraban Maur, 266, 307; on painting,
Ottonian, 294 297-8
Grado Chair Group, 196 hymns, 24
Grado, pavements at, 204
Graptoi, 156, 171, 185 Ibn Khaldin, 109
Greek, 136-7, 165; knowledge of, in Ibn Sa’ id, 109
Rome, 105 inconoclasm, 105, 166, 298
Gregorian Sacramentary, 99-100 Ilduara Eriz, books of, 126
Gregory I the Great, pope (590-604), illiteracy, 6, 35, 42, 66
28, 58, 68, 103, 107, 299, n. 7; illustration of texts, 310-17
contribution to liturgy of, 99- images, 297-8
100; letters of, 87, 90-1; immunity, 261
organizes defensores, 93; Pastoral Ine, king of Wessex (688-726), laws
Care, 231, 232; works of, 127 of, 233
 Index 339
Ingelheim, 310 culture of, in Merovingian Gaul,
Ingoald, abbot, epitaph of, 212 77-8; instruction of, 54; learning
Innocent I, pope (410-17), 90 of, 121-2; literacy of, 61-2; see
inscriptions, 192-3; on buildings, also under literacy
214-15; on graves at St Martin of _ land exchange, 50
Tours, 212; painted on land grant, 43
gravestones, 198-9; painted on land law (Irish), 29-31
walls, 196-8; Roman, 213; on land ownership, 44-5
tombstones, 162; in Umayyad land purchase, 56
Spain, 113-14 land surveys, 261
inventories of estates, 274-5, 277-8 land tenure, 45
Iosue, abbot of San Vincenzo (792- land transaction, 27-9
817), 187, 189, 212, 223; abbey landlords, 272
church of, 210, 213, 224; Laon, Bibliotheque Municipale 199,
inscription of, 206-10 and Figs 307
12 and 13 Lateran, legal staff of, 94
Irish, influence in England, 38-9 Lateran Council (649), 194
Isaac ben Barukh, letter of, 153 Latin, 3, 6, 9, 33, 272; development
Isidore of Seville: Etymologiae, on of, 71; and English, 251; reading
letter “T’, 306 of, 266; status of, 57-60, 329,
330-1; style of, 72; survival of,
Jerome, 90 264-5; understanding of, 267-8;
Jews, in West, 144; literary activity use of, in Arab Spain, 113-14
of, 111; status of, 138-9 Latin poetry, 271
John Geometres, 182 Latinity, 7, 112-13
John Mauropous, 179, 181 Laurentius, count, library of, 115
John of Seville, 121 law, 38, 162, 227, 263; citation of,
John Scotus Eriugena, 299, 310 243; consultation of, by judges,
John Skylitzes, 169 130
John the Divine, 317 copies of, 130; knowledge of, 67—
Jonas, bishop of Orleans, 271 8; English, 57; production of, in
Jonas of Bobbio, 18, 72 England, 242 nn. 62-4, 243 n.
Judaeo-Arabic, 140, 148 69; publication of, 226; royal
judges, 277, 228, 230, 232, 244; role (English), 48, 229-46, 323; use
of, 129-30; training of, 131 of 291; written, 285
Judith, empress, 311-12 law-books: Carolingian, 232; Roman,
Julian, bishop of Toledo (680-90), see under canon law
116 law-making, 266
Julian, count of Ceuta, 16 laymen, see under laity
Julian, emperor, 181 laywomen, see under literacy
justice, administration of, 240-1 learning, in England, 53
Justinian, laws of, 267, 272 leases, 48-9, 50
legal sources, 27-9
Karaites, 148, 149 legal transactions, 325
Karlin-Hayter, P., 175 leges, see under law
Kildare, 25 legislation, 66, 228
komistes, 172, 184 Leo I, pope (440-61), 86; Tome of,
Koran, 110, 139 107
Leo III, pope (795-816), education
laity, 36; in administration, 246-7; of, 103
340 Index
Leo Choirosphaktes, 177 Add. 10546 (Moutier Grandville
Leodegar, 67; education of, 74, 76 Bible), 302 n. 21, 317, 318 n. 76;
Leofwine, dispute of, 245, 246, 250 Cotton Claudius A. iii, 243 n.
Leonine Sacramentary, 99 69; Cotton Claudius C.ix, 255
letter-bearers, 163 n. 114; Cotton Nero A.1i, 236 n.
letter-exchange, 172 41, 243 n. 69; Cotton Nero E.i,
letter-writers, 174-5, 180 242 n. 62; Cotton Otho B.xi, .
letters (of alphabet): as images, 304— 237, n. 45; Harley 647 (Harley
10; symbolic value of, 304-5; see Aratus), 308
also under metal letters London peace-guild, 239, 240
letters (epistles), 237, 321; Barcelona Louis the Pious, emperor, 263, 274,
fragments of, 112-13; Byzantine, 279, 287, 307-8; capitularies of,
172-84; from Cairo Genizah, 290; and San Vincenzo al
153—4; loss of, 294; papal, 86~91, Volturno, 223-4; writing office
91-2; royal, 256; subjects of, of, 288
176-8; Visigothic, 116—17 Louis II, emperor, 279
Lex Aquilia, 117 Loyn, Henry, 229
Lex Ribuaria, 66 lugs, 206
Lex Salica, 267, 280, 282, 295 Luxeuil monastery, 79, 302
Leyser, Karl, 294 Lyons, Bibliothéque de la Ville: MS
Libellus A'thelwold: episcopi, 250, 602, 302; MS 604, 302
254-5
Liber Angel, 13 McKitterick, R., 270
Liber comitis, 100 Madrid, Bibliotheca Nacional: Cod.
Liber Diurnus , 95-6, 103 5-3, n. 2 (Madrid Stylitzes),
Liber Histonae Francorum, 78 169-74, 179, 181, 182, 183, 184;
Liber Hymnorum, 24 MS 18387 (‘Cartulario de
Liber Pontificalis, 84, 94, 96-8, 103, Samos’), 131 n. 110; Vitr. 14-15,
106, 107; audience of, 97-8; use 130 n. 106
of, in education, 104 Maidstone, Kent County Records
libraries, Jewish, 147 Office DRe-R1, olim Rochester
library, papal, 85, 86, 105; royal Cathedral Library MS A. 3. 5
(Visigothic), 115-16 (Textus Roffensis), 234 n. 33,
Libr memoriales , 256 235, n. 37, 239, 243, n. 69
literacy, definition of, 2—4, 83, 147, Mango, Cyril, 167
158-9, 320; lay, 70-1, 78 n. 108, manumission, 50-1, 262, 325; see also
120-3 (Spanish), 127 (Asturian), cartulari
157 (Byzantine), 269, 328-9, manuscripts, production of, 142-3
330-2; pragmatic, 248-57; royal Marculf, Formulary of, 64, 65—6, 259,
promotion of, 324; vernacular, 323
51-2; of women, 70-1, 153-4, market rights, 293
156-7, 272 markets, 260
literature, composition, 146 marriage agreement, 51
Littlewood, A, 175 Martin I, pope, 194
liturgical books, 163, 279, 285 Martyrs of Spain, 120
liturgy, 98-100, 142; rabbinic, 136~7; Masoretes, 139
Roman, 101 Massekheth Soferim, 146
Liutpertus, 201, 202, 203, Fig. 7 mastara (ruling-board), 147
London, British Library Add. 5643 Matfrid, count, 271
(Codex Beneventanus), 217-18; Medina Azahara, sack of, 110
 Index 341
Meletios, Life of, 159 notaries, 42, 92-3, 270, 276, 286,
merchants, 260 301; access to, 273; Asturian,
Merovingian overlordship, 41 124; lay, 118, 270; papal schola
metal letters: Carolingian, 211; at of, 92; Roman, 84; Visigothic,
Farfa, 212; French, 211 n. 48; 118
gilded, 205-16; Roman, 206, Nothelm, 90-1
210-11, 213; at St Martin of notitiae, 261, 285, 286, 294
Tours, 212; at San Vincenzo, 206
Meyer, Elizabeth, xi, 6, 7 oath records, 279-80; of Rheims, 280
maasinm, 140 ti 260 oath-swearing, 268
wvilitary eevee, 236. 977 Odo of Cluny, father of, 267, 272
Mil 38 9 AN Offa, king of Mercia (757-96), 61
ninvscule ‘61 officials of fisc, 163
Miro, count, letter to, 112-13 Opus a 2°? drinum. 199
missronaries, 38, 38 oral decrees, 243
missus dominicus, 245, 259, 270, 277, oral delivery. 305
279, 285; use of the written word oral images, 1 30)
by , 280-2 oral instruction, 273—4
mobilization orders, 278—9 oral mode. 265
Monte Cassino, 208; tiles at, 201-3 oral procedures 57
Mordek, Hubert, 283, 284, 290 orality, 137, 159, 160, 168, 228, 267,
Morgan Gospels, see under New York 320-1: represented. 170-1
Morrison, Karl, 299-300
Mosaic Law, 232rdinanceOrdi ne235, 236
, ordines, 100
on Charities,
Moutier Grandval Bible, see under Ordlaf. eald 249
London O. oy A velatic, f 111
Muircht moccu Machthéni, 13, 14, rostus, frans’ation of,
17. 22. 23. 34 orthography, 32-4, 138
Mumma dona Diaz 321: books of Osorio Gutiérrez, books of, 126
126-7 Oswald, bishop of Worcester (960/1—
Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Ovied. ° nt at. 123-4
on 14000 (Codex Aureus), 314 Oxford, Bodleian Library: Douce 59,
musical notation. 305 307; Laud misc. 126, 303; Laud
mysticism, Jewish, 143 misc. 464, 316 n. 72
Natronai ben Hilai, 150 Pactus legis Salicae, 66
New Haven, Yale University Bienecke Pactus pro tenore pacis, 66
Library, MS 413, 289 n. 164 pagenses, 259 n. 7
New York, Pierpont Morgan Library: palace school, 116
G57 (Glazier Sacramentary), Paldo, abbot of San Vincenzo (703—
302; M860 (Morgan Gospels), 20), 187
306 Palladio, A., 214
Nicholas I, pope (858-67), education Palladius, 15
of, 103 Pamplona, kingdom of, 127
Nicholas Mystikos, 172 Pangbourne, charter of, 56
Nikephoros Patriarch, 167, 299 Panofsky, E., 312
Niketas Magistros, 177 Pantoni, Angelo, 205, 206
Nithard, 267, 275 papyrus, 41, 42, 90, 146, 158
 342 Index
Parastaseis Syntomoi Chrontkaz, 160, Pitres, Edict of (864), 275, 288, 289
164 plastered walls, 191
Paris, Bibliothéque Nationale: lat. 1 polyptychs, 271
(Vivian Bible), 305, 306, n. 35, popes, education of, 103
317, 318 n. 76; lat. 2 (Second Poto, abbot of San Vincenzo (fl. 803),
Bible of Charles the Bald), 307; accusations against, 223
lat. 257 (Gospels of Francis IT), praeceptum negotiatorum, 292
309 and n. 50; lat. 261 (Gospels prayer, 142-3
du Mans), 306; lat. 1141 (Metz preaching, 265
Sacramentary), 306 n. 36, 315 n. _— precepts, royal, 259
66; lat. 2291, 303 n. 24; lat. Prihectus, priest and scribe, 276
2718, 287-8 and n. 156; lat. primicertus, 85
4626, 283, 288 n. 159; lat. 4632, Prophets, 216; decorative schemes
283 n. 122; lat. 4995, 283; lat. with, 195-6
7899, 309 n. 48; lat. 9380, 306 n. Prosper of Aquitaine, 15
38; lat. 9428, 304, 306; lat. protoscriniarius , 92.
12048 (Sacramentary of Gellone) Psalter, 17; commentaries on, 314;
306; lat. 12168, 304; lat. 12287— role of, in education, 311-12
8, 316 n. 72; lat. 13396, 309, n.
48 OQuadnpartitus, 236 nn. 41, 42, 238,
Parthenius, 67-8 n. 50, 239, n. 54
Paschal I, pope, Letter of, 87 Quesneliana, 87
Passio Leudegari, 73
passus, length, of, 208 rabbi, function of, 145
Paterna, books of, 126 Rabbanites, 150
Patrician dossier, 7—8 Ramiro II, king of Leén (931-51),
Patrick, saint, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16-17, 127
18, 31 125
19; First and Second Synods of, Ramiro III, king of Leén (966-84),
Pattison, R., 5 reading public, 158

287 8
Paul, abbot of San Vincenzo (783— Reccimund, bishop of Elvira (c. 958),
92), 189, 223 113
- Paul Alvar, 331 records: financial, 63; private, of royal
Paul the Deacon, 80; Homiliary of, decrees, 239; production of, 286—
Pauline Epistles, 17 reeves, 234, 236, 240, 244, 247
pauperes, 265 reform, Carolingian, 263 n. 21
Petra, 162 Regenbald, king’s chancellor, 257
Pentateuch, 145 Regino of Priim, 265
performance, 159-60 Remigius, archbishop of Rheims
Peterborough archive, 51 (459-533), letter of, 69
Philetos Synadenos, 178 Renaissance, Byzantine, 165
philology, 149 report by bishops (III Aéthelstan),
philosophy, Hebrew, 143 238-9
Photios, 164, 167, 299; letters of, 174 |= Rheims, archive of, 282; oath-takers
pictures, 299, 321-2; Carolingian, records of, 282
220; function of, 168-9; 297; and rhetoric, 159, 162, 168, 179
writing, 9, 167 rivet holes, 210
Pippin of Italy, 267 rivets, 206, 209
Pirenne, Henri, 41 Robert Guiscard, 215
 Index 343
Roderic, king of the Visigoths, 116 Santa Sophia, Benevento, 221
Roman administration, 35, 57, 117 Santifaller, Leo, 95
Roman law, 67, 117, 272; influence scabin1, 281
of, 271 sceattas, 37
Roman models, 222 Schechter, Solomon, 150
Roman ornamental capitals, 206 schools: court, 131-2; ecclesiastical,
Roman patterns of literacy, 5-6 74; local, 73; monastic, 131:
Roman practices, revival of, 212, 216 papal, 104; Visigothic, 116
Roman script system, 218, 301 Schulung, Hermann, 259
Romance language, 264, 270 scribal practices, 147
Romanos, hymns of, 159 scribes: in Brittany, 130; of Christ
Romanus, correspondent of Paul Church Canterbury, 252; local,
Alvar, 121 252; royal, 257
Rome, Bible of San Paolo fuori le script: Carolingian exploitation of,
mura (Third Bible of Charles the 219; choice of; 301; display of at
Bald), 317-18 San Vincenzo, 192-219;
Rome: imperial administrative hierarchy of, 301-4; ‘house style’
practices of, 87; legacy of, 11, of, 304
323, 324, 325, 329-30 scriptorium, 54; episcopal, 42, 125,
rune sticks, 37 132; of San Vincenzo, 217-19
runes, 36-8, 302 n. 20, 326 scripture, canon of, 136—7
Ruthwell Cross, 37 scrolls, 328; Hebrew, 146; with texts,
194; see also under St George
saccelanus, 95 and Santa Maria
Sacramentaries, Roman, 99-100 seal matrices, 246-7
St Catherine’s monastery, Sinai: seals, 68, 157, 162, 183, 185 n. 215,
images in, 196; manuscripts 244, 246
from, 119 secretariat, royal, see under writing
St Denis, 211; description of, 310 office
St Gall, monastery, 276; archive of, Sedulius Scotus, 18
276 Sergius II, pope (844-7), 103
St George, Thessaloniki, images with Servais, capitulary of (856), 288, 289
scrolls in, 196 Sharpe, Richard, 25
St Germain des Prés, 313 sheriffs, American, 244
St Martin, Tours, 212 shire-courts, 240-1, 244, 246, 329
St Victor, Marseilles, 269 Sidonius Apollinaris, 71; letters of, 68
Salerno, cathedral, inscriptions at, 94~- _—_Siferth, layman, will of, 254-5
5 signatures, 125; autograph, 6;
San Salvatore in Brescia, 221 peasant, 162
San Vincenzo, 10; abbey church of, Sigy, 249, 261
187; Chronicle of, 180 n. 1, 188, Simeon of Bulgaria, 173
223-4; early mediaeval monastery _Sisebut, king of the Visigoths (612—
of, 188-90; Frankish influence at, 21), 77, 115
222-4; Lombard connections Snodland dispute, 246, 250
with, 222-3; Romanesque church __ god, 44, 46
of, 205, 210 Speraindeus, abbot, 122
Sankt Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, MS ‘Springmount Bog tablets, 18, 20
64, 309 n. 48 Staab, F., 119
Santa Maria Antiqua, Rome, images state, Carolingian, 259 n. 4
in, 194 Stephen, court of Paris, 283
344 Index
Stephen III, pope (768-72), Theodore Prodromos, 159°
education of, 103 Theodosian Code, 63, 67, 101
Stock, Brian, 2, 4 Theodred, bishop of London, 240,
Strasbourg, oaths of, 267 245 |
Street, Brian, 5 Theodulf, bishop of Orleans, 298,
Stuttgart, Wiirttemburgische 300, 309, 310
Landesbibliothek, Biblia fol. 23 Theodore and Theophanes, see under
(Stuttgart Psalter), 313-14 Graptoi
style, 158; awareness of, 71; in Theophilos, 156 | |
Byzantine letters, 178 Thunderfield legislation, 239, 240
subscriptions, 42 tiles, 216; floor, 199-205; inscribed,
Suger, abbot of St Denis (1122-51), 199; late Roman, 201; makers of,
211 204-5; roof, 199-205
Sulpicius Severus, 12 Timarion, 159
sureties, 51 Tirechan, 13, 17, 19-22, 27, 32
surveys of estates, 255 n. 114, 277-8 tironian notes, 301-2
Swithgar, royal scribe, 257 title deed, 44, 46, 56, 326
Symeon Metaphrastes, 179, 182 tituli, 192—3, 194, 216, 265
Synesios, 181 Tofi the Proud, 246
Synod of St Patrick, see under Patrick Toledo: fate of, 120; palace school of,
Synopsis Istorion, 169 116
toll list, 292 ,
tabelliones, 84, 92, 104 tolls, 260
Taio, of Saragossa, 90 Torah, 137
Talmud, 148; 150; Babylonian Torbach (807-8), 12
influence on, 140-1; exposition Tours, 221, 302; court at, 269;
of, 141; tradition of, 141 reform council (813), 298
Tamfrid, epitaph of, 201 tractoria, 292
Taso, abbot of San Vincenzo (729- translations from Latin, 231
39), 187 treaty, see under Alfred, king
Tassilo, capitulum on, 286-7 tribute, 256, 276
tax collection, treatise on, 162 Trier Stadtbibliothek 31, 317
taxes, 226, 260 trilingualism, 147-9
Tempietto sul Clitunno, 214 Tryphon, patriarch (923-31), 185
tenure, 31 tuatha, 10 n. 4
Teodemar, abbot of Monte Cassino, |
201 Ullmann, Walter, 86
Termoli, Molise church, 212 Ultan, bishop of Dal Conchobuir, 23,
text as image, 304-10 34
texts, legible in pairitings, 193 Ummayyad Al Andalus,
texts on scrolls, 193 administrative documents of, 112
textual form, 137 uncial, 161, 218, 301, 302
textual community, 106 unity due to the written word, 295
Textus Roffensis, see under Maidstone _ Utrécht, Bibliotheek der
thegris, 246-7; on business, 247 n. 88 Rijksuniversiteit, script. eccl. 484
Theodore of Kyzikos, 177 (Utrecht Psalter), 301 n. 15,
Theodore of Nicaea, 279 311-12
Theodore of Studios, 167, 177; letters
of, 173 Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica
Theodore of Tarsus, 40, 53, 57 Vaticana: cod. Chig. D.V. 77,
 Index 345
217; pal. lat. 50 + Bucharest will: earliest surviving Anglo-Saxon,
Alba Juha library s.n. (Lorsch 54; of Eccard, count of Macon,
Gospels), 315 n. 66; reg. lat. 276
124, 307-8, 309 n. 48; reg. lat. Willibrord, 91
316, 99, 304 wills, 47-9, 65, 162, 251-6, 329;
vellum, 146-7 confirmation of, 254-5; making
Venantius Fortunatus, 69, 70, 74 of, 254—5
Venus, depiction of, 265, 309 Wilson, Nigel, 164
verbum regis, 228 witan 240, 247
vernacular, 3, 8, 13, 39, 264, 329, witness list, 28-9, 43, 44, 253
330-1, 332; charters in, 46-7; witness, 47, 130, 249, 269; use of,
germanic; 267; Irish, 12; poetry, 250
60; records, 228; texts, 231 women, literacy of, see under literacy
verse composition, 120 Wormald, Patrick, 228, 230, 235, 242,
versification, quality of, 157 243
vestaranus, 94 Wotton Underwood, charter of, 55-6
Vetus Latina, 17 writing, 33, 168; function of, 297;
Vienna: Osterreichische learning, 3—4; of oral traditions,
Nationalbibliothek, 652, 308, 309 142; representation of, in
n. 48; Weltliche Schatzkammer pictures, 169~72; symbolic
s.n. (Coronation Gospels), 221 associations of, 219
Vindolanda tablets, 21 writing office: Anglo-Saxon, 124, 229,
Virgin Mary, depiction of, 265, 309 256-7; Arab, 113; Asturian, 124—
Visigothic law, 124 5; Carolingian, 288; royal, 323;
Visigothic heritage, 132-3 Visigothic, 118
Visigoths, royal library of, 115-16 writs, royal, 46, 246-7
Vita Boniti, 73 written documents, 248-57; value of,
Vita Columban, 72, 77 248 n. 91; survival of, 292-4
Vita Desideru, 70, 115 written word, church’s commitment
Vita Patnicu, 13 to, 263-4
Vivian Bible, see under Paris Wulfbald, 256
Wulfgar, will of, 252 n. 102
Walafrid Strabo, 299 n. 7 Wulfgeat, will of, 253
war, preparation for, 278-9 Wulfhelm, archbishop, 236
wax tablets, 20 Wulfstan, archbishop of York, 237,
Wealdhere, bishop, 245 242, 243
Werner, Karl-Ferdinand, 262, 263 Wynflaed, dispute of, 250
Whitby, Synod of (664), 38
Wickham, Chris, 10 Yale Beinecke 413, see under New
Wihtred, king of Kent, 43 Haven