The coronation of Charles III in long term historical perspective

Its extraordinary to think of what's transpired in British royal history in the last year - a Platinum Jubilee (the first ever in British history and quite possibly the last), the funeral of a Queen and now a Coronation (the first in 70 years). And so far I haven't said anything about them here. But now, as a historian who is very much into the history of monarchy, religion and elite ritual, I feel like I should say something. My interest in such things is not exclusively historical. I am a quiet royalist - I support the British monarchy, but I'm not ostentatious or obsessive about it. You certainly wouldn't have found me camped out on the Mall this morning. I don't even have a favourite royal, and there's plenty of members of the royal family I dislike. I don't think they're perfect or beyond criticism. But I see our constitutional monarchy as infinitely better for the UK than a republic. And even as an agnostic I have no objection to having a head of state that (notionally) appointed by God to rule over us, just like I have no objection to the Church of England existing. 

Bit boring I know, but I don't want any journalists suing me for copyright. So I had to pick this.

But personal opinions aside, I think the coronation is very interesting from a historical perspective. Like the present monarchy itself, its a mixture of old and new. There are many elements of Charles' coronation that are new. One of the things I noticed when I was watching it on TV was the multi-faith element. There was a small Greek Orthodox choir singing, no doubt a nod to King Charles' late father, the Duke of Edinburgh. Charles was attended on not just by Anglican bishops but also by a Catholic cardinal, a Greek Orthodox bishop and representatives of the Jewish, Muslim, Hindu and Sikh communities in the UK. This no doubt reflects two things. First is Charles' own desire to be seen not as Defender of the Faith but Defender of Faith. This is of course at odds with the very coronation oath he swore today, which has remained unchanged since 1689 when the Glorious Revolution made it a requirement for all future monarchs to uphold the Protestant faith. The second is the changing nature of British society has forced the monarchy to adapt with it. Its debatable how religious the British really were in the 1950s, and secularisation was undoubtedly already underway. About 3 million people out of a population of more than 41 million in England regularly took communion in an Anglican church, down by more than 500,000 from 1935. Other Protestant churches were also suffering decline, though Roman Catholics were more stable. But census data shows by far the majority of the population still identified as Christian when Queen Elizabeth II was crowned, even if most of them only attended church services irregularly. Cultural Anglican Christianity was very strong indeed i.e., in music Benjamin Britten, in art Graham Sutherland and Stanley Spencer, and in literature T.S Elliot and C.S Lewis. And though the first mosque in the UK had been built in Woking, Surrey, in 1889 there were no more than a few hundred Muslims, Hindus or Sikhs in the UK. Now, thanks to 70 years of post-imperial immigration and the changes that followed the cultural revolution of the 1960s, this is very different. Now, as of the 2021 census, only 46.2% of the population of England and Wales identify as Christian, a 13.1% drop from 2011. This makes it the first time in British history since the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons in the seventh century that less than 50% of the population has identified as Christian. And among those born after 1980, the percentage of Christians who are Roman Catholics in England and Wales is equal to or exceeds those who are Anglican Protestants, for the first time since the reign of Elizabeth I. And while Anglican church attendance has decline by 9% in the last decade, Pentecostal church attendance has gone up by 50% thanks, in large part, to Nigerian immigration. And now more than 37% of England and Wales' population have no religion, a rise of 12% from 2011. It has been for this third of population that the deeply religious nature of the coronation ceremony has been most controversial, indeed downright offensive to the sensibilities of some. And about 10% of the population of England and Wales identify as members of a non-Christian religion (approximately 6% Muslims, 2% Hindus and 2% Jews, Sikhs, Buddhists and other religions respectively). The remaining 6% of the UK population refused to say what their religious beliefs were. Having lived in southwest London all my life, I'm reminded of this religious diversity almost every day. So by including those multi-faith elements in Charles III's coronation, the monarchy was acknowledging that the UK in 2023 is not the Protestant Christian nation it still essentially was in 1953. 

The music likewise reflects change as well. I absolutely love Handel's Zadok the Priest, that's been a staple tune of all British royal coronations since the coronation of George II as king of Great Britain and Ireland in 1727. And I don't mind Elgar. But it was good to see Greek Orthodox acapella, a Gospel Choir and Andrew Lloyd Webber added to the mix for the first time ever. My mother also pointed out how a significant portion of the choristers in Westminster Abbey were female. This would not have been the case in 1953, as girls' choirs were not permitted by the Church of England until Salisbury Cathedral in 1991 took the progressive decision to allow them, allowing more opportunities for female musical talent to be recognised than had previously been available. 

Indeed, its fair to say that the monarchy, much as it tries to appear timeless and unchanging, really does change a lot both with each individual monarch, who has their own style of kingship/ queenship, and with the general direction of travel of British politics, society and culture. I won't go into every detail of the history of English/ British royal coronations in the last 1100 years. That would take forever, and the Church of England has produced a full historical  commentary on the coronation service. But what I will talk about is what I'm qualified to talk about as an early medievalist. Namely the aspects of English royal coronations that are still recognisable from how they were more than a thousand years ago.

Coronations haven't everywhere and always been a part of monarchy. While Egyptian pharaohs and the Biblical kings of Israel were crowned, coronations were never a part of "European" monarchical traditions until the later Roman Empire. In the late third century, after decades of constant mutinies in the legions, civil wars, assassinations and coups d'etat, the Roman emperors stopped pretending notion that the Republic was somehow still going, just under a different kind of management, were only princeps ("chief citizen"). It was from this point on they started to embrace a visibly royal style more similar to what had existed in the Near East for thousands of years, and indeed what we think of when we think of royalty today, and crowns were part of it. Emperor Aurelian (r.270 - 275) was the first to wear a diadem, and by the time of Constantine it had become part of the regalia - the symbolic objects a legitimate emperor needed to possess. The first Roman emperor to receive a "coronation" was Julian in 361 when, according to the soldier and historian Ammianus Marcellinus, the emperor was lifted by his troops up onto a shield and a diadem was set upon his head. After Christianity had become the state religion of the Roman Empire in 381, the ecclesiastical element started to feature, but only in the East - in the fifth century, Eastern Roman emperors began to be crowned by the patriarchs of Constantinople, but the pope did not do the same for their western counterparts. 

Coin of the Roman Emperor Aurelian, the first to possess a crown. Photo Credit: York Museums Trust Staff - This file has been provided by York Museums Trust as part of a GLAMwiki partnership.This tag does not indicate the copyright status of the attached work. A normal copyright tag is still required. See Commons:Licensing., CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47407397 

In the post-Roman kingdoms, it doesn't seem like coronations were much of a thing in the sixth and early seventh centuries. Kings were acclaimed and raised up onto a shield, just like Roman emperors had been before them, but they weren't crowned. Kings had other special markers of royalty. The Merovingian Frankish kings had their luxurious long hair and chariots drawn by oxen, and early Anglo-Saxon kings had royal helmets i.e., the helmet which may or may not have belonged to King Raedwald (d.628) of East Anglia at Sutton Hoo. But in Spain, the Visigoths started a new trend - the earliest Visigothic king who we know for sure was crowned was King Sisenand in 631. Then in 672, with the accession of King Wamba (r.672 - 680), the Visigoths started a new trend - the anointing of kings. This is a practice that was literally as old as the Bible. Indeed, Handel's Zadok the Priest we heard played today refers to none other than the anointing of Solomon as king of Israel. But after the fall of the ancient kingdom of Israel, anointing ceased to be a part of kingship anywhere in Europe or the Mediterranean until the Visigoths revived it. Or is that quite so. Around 700 AD, a monk called Adomnan of Iona described how St Columba had, back in the 560s, anointed a number of Irish kings. Anyway, whether we can call it a Visigothic or an Irish invention, anointing was a very new thing in the sixth and seventh century West, and other countries were slow to catch on. But it was highly significant all the same as it could be used to establish that a monarch's legitimacy, like that of Solomon as king of Israel, came directly from God. The origins of divine right begin here. Indeed in both 1953 and 2023, the anointing of Elizabeth II and Charles III respectively were deemed too sensitive to be shown on television.

The "Votive Crown" of King Recceswinth, made in Spain in the 650s. King Recceswinth wouldn't have worn it, it would have actually been used for decoration in a church. Photo credit: By Ángel M. Felicísimo from Mérida, España - Corona de, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51253204

But some votive crowns did end up being worn by kings. The "Iron Crown of Lombardy" was maxde as a votive crown sometime in the fourth of fifth centuries AD and was later donated by the Lombard Queen Theodelinda to Monza Cathedral in 628. But by the fourteenth century, it was being used to crown Holy Roman emperors as kings of Italy - the first documented one being Emperor Henry VII in 1311. It may well be the oldest surviving royal insignia in the entire history of European monarchy. Photo credit: By James Steakley - photographed in the Theodelinda Chapel of the cathedral of Monza, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5403306

Queen Bathsheba pleads with the elderly King David to have her son Solomon made his successor. Solomon is then promptly anointed by Zadok the Priest. From the Bible of Master Jean de Sy, made in 1372 for King Charles V of France. Now in the National Library of the Netherlands. Public Domain.

The people who really cemented anointing and coronations as a widespread feature of European monarchy that has endured to the present day are none other than my favourite people - the Carolingians. I've written here before about the coronation and anointing of Pippin the Short in 751 and his reanointing in 754, and I'm not going to do so again. Likewise, I won't revisit the coronation of Charlemagne. Indeed its generally thanks to the Carolingians that most of our western ideas of what king looks like really solidifed and became embedded - they pioneered the use of orbs and sceptres as well. While sadly we've got no film footage of Carolingian coronations, we have the second best alternative - detailed scripts and choreographies written by Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims (806 - 882). Hincmar wrote them for the West Frankish king Charles the Bald's coronation at Metz as king of Lotharingia in 869 following the death of nephew, King Lothar II. In total, Charles the Bald went through four coronations in his fifty-six years of life; that's one hell of a lot of coronations.

Hincmar describes how Charles the Bald was firstly blessed by the seven bishops present - Adventius of Metz, Arnuld of Toul, Hatto of Verdun, Franco of Tongeren, Hincmar of Laon (Hincmar's own nephew), Odo of Beauvais and Hincmar of Rheims himself. Then Hincmar said "May the Lord Crown you" and anointed Charles the Bald on his forehead with a chrism of holy oils. Then Hincmar gave more blessings before instructing his colleagues to set the crown of Lotharingia on Charles's head. After this Charles was given the sceptre before Hincmar gave the final blessing "May the Lord give you the will and power to do as He commands, so that going forward in the rule of the kingdom according to his will together with the palm of continuing victory you may attain the palm of eternal glory, by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ." Finally, there was a mass and King Charles the Bald took communion bread and wine from the bishops, before Hincmar ended the service with a prayer for God to protect the new king and give his soul a place in Heaven.

A clear visualisation of Hincmar's idea of sacred kingship in the Metz Sacramentary, made in 869 - the same year as Charles' coronation. Indeed the king being crowned by God in this image may well be intended to be Charles the Bald. Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Latin 1141 F2v, Public Domain.

In all of the basic outlines of the service, the coronation service that Hincmar organised and performed for King Charles the Bald in 869 is not at all different to that which Justin Welby did for King Charles III in 2023. The Carolingian legacy undoubtedly lives on in the modern British monarchy, not least in that we have kings called Charles.

After the collapse of the Carolingian Empire, we see further moves towards royal coronations as we know them today. Widukind of Corvey gives us a detailed description of Otto the Great's coronation as King of Germany in 936. He describes how Otto was presented with the sword "with which you may chase out all adversaries of Christ, barbarians and bad Christians, by the divine authority handed down to you and by the power of all the empire of the Franks for the lasting peace of all Christians." Then Otto was given the bracelets and cloak and was told "these points falling to the ground will remind you with what zeal for the faith you should burn and how you ought to endure a preserving peace to the end." Next he was given the sceptre and staff and reminded of his kingly duty to protect all the churches, widows and orphans in the kingdom and to be merciful to all his subjects. the bishops of Mainz, Cologne and Trier then anointed and crowned Otto the Great, and he sat on the throne of Charlemagne. The giving of the bracelets and the sword, which weren't part of Carolingian coronations and were thus fairly new to Otto the Great's coronation, are now part of British royal coronations, as we saw on television today. 

The last Ottonian king, Henry II (r.1002 - 1024), is presented with his sword and sceptre by two bishops whole being crowned by Christ in his personal sacramentary produced between 1002 and 1014. München BSB Clm 4456 Seite 33c. Public Domain.

How did these Continental ideas come to England. The answer is that Aethelstan, the first ruler of a united kingdom of England brought them over. Aethelstan had a lot of continental connections. His sister Eadgyth married none other than Otto the Great in 929. His other sister, Eadgifu, married King Charles III the Simple of West Francia, the grandson of Charles the Bald and namesake of our current king. And after Charles III was deposed and imprisoned following the battle of Soissons in 923, his son Louis IV went to live with his uncle, Aethelstan, in England. So Aethelstan knew a lot about continental kingship. Aethelstan therefore decided in 925 not to be acclaimed king and presented with the royal helmet but to be acclaimed, anointed and crowned as king, following continental practice. And this happened at Kingston-upon-Thames, bang in my local area. The first coronation we know about in detail, however, was that of his grandnephew Edgar the Peaceful at Bath in 973. It was Edgar's coronation that really set the ball rolling for later coronations, including that of our present king. The coronation thus really is the only aspect of the British monarchy where there's any meaningful continuity between its tenth century beginnings and the twenty-first century institution we know today. 

King Edgar on the frontispiece of the New Minster Charter, made in 966. 

And that is the end of my potted history of the early medieval origins of British royal coronations. I hope you've enjoyed it. 

From the sources 14: conquest, conversion and what it meant to be a Christian in the eighth century

One version of Carolingian Christianity. The obverse side of Harrach ditpych, made as an ivory book cover for a gospel book by the so-called "Court School of Charlemagne" c.800. At the top we can see the four evangelists, on the middle right the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary, the middle left the Nativity, the botton right the Crucifixion and the bottom left Mary and Mary Magdelene visiting Jesus' tomb and finding it empty. So very focused on the Bible and the core of the Christian story in the gospels, fitting the profoundly religious ethos of Charlemagne's court. The reverse side (below) was carved in Visigothic Spain or Lombard Italy sometime between 700 and 750. It shows the apostles Peter and Paul, important symbols of the Institutional church. Photo credit: yours truly.

A very different side of early medieval Christianity is shown in this stone carving from the Cologne region in Western Germany. We don't know the date of it - it could have been made any time between 600 and 1050. We have no idea who made it either, but they were certainly much lower in social standing and prestige than the court of Charlemagne, hence the much cruder artistry. It shows Christ as a charismatic, superhero-like figure, taming the beasts during his 40 days in the wilderness. 

One of Charlemagne's greatest and most controversial achievements has got to the conquest of Saxony. Some of you might be asking, where's that? 

Basically, if we were to divide modern Germany into quarters, Saxony in the eighth century would very roughly correspond to the top left quarter. Indeed, for those of you who know your Cold War history, eighth century Saxony almost (but not exactly) corresponds to the British Zone of Occupation from 8th May 1945 - 1st January 1947. It was also the ancestral homeland of the Angles and Saxons who came over to Britain in the fifth century. 

An early twentieth century map of Old Saxony. Credit: By Gustav Droysen - General Historical Hand Atlas, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2465783. Compare to the map of the British Occupation Zone in post-WW2 Germany (below).

Credit: By User:52 Pickup - Based on map data of the IEG-Maps project (Andreas Kunz, B. Johnen and Joachim Robert Moeschl: University of Mainz) - www.ieg-maps.uni-mainz.de., CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4951565

This was a heavily forested region of Northern Germany that had never known Roman rule. It had no cities or roads. And it knew very little of "government." The Continental Saxons had no kings or written laws. They were basically lots of different independent tribes who, so far as we can tell, all spoke Old Low German. Each tribe was ruled by an ealdorman, who had the power to raze the villages of anyone who opposed his authority though we know little else about them. The Saxon social hierarchy was divided into three groups - the nobles (edhilingi), free peasants (frilingi) and slaves (lazzi).  In times of great external threat, they would all come together under the leadership of temporary war-leaders that are called duces in the Latin sources. The instinctive English translation of this word is "dukes", but that is misleading. Representatives from all the Saxon tribes and all three castes met in annual assemblies at a place called Marklo, where they confirmed their unwritten tribal customary laws, settled disputes and made decisions about whether or  to go to war. So while the Continental Saxons were generally quite primitive, they didn't lack political organisation altogether either. And most importantly of all, they were Germanic pagans, who worshipped Odin, Thor, Tyr, Frey, Freyja and a whole host of more local deities. 

Here are the Merseburg charms, a short list of spells and prayers written in Old High German verse from pre-Christian Saxony preserved on a flyleaf a ninth century sacramentary, inserted there by a monk of the monastery of Fulda sometime before 1000 AD. It was discovered at Merseburg Cathedral Library in 1841 by Georg Waitz, a titan of medieval academic history, and was studied extensively by Jakob Grimm of Brothers Grimm's Fairy Tales fame. This is one of the very few pieces of evidence, written or material, we have for what the religion of the Pagan Continental Saxons actually was like. It raises so many questions as well. Why would a Saxon monk include vernacular pagan charms, no doubt ones recited by his ancestors, in a book of hymns and rituals written in Latin for use in Christian church services? Credit: By Unknown scribe - https://archive.thulb.uni-jena.de/korax/rsc/viewer/Korax_derivate_00002549/VDS_Ms%20Cod%20I%20136_088.tif, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=78257477

Why was it such a big achievement for Charlemagne to conquer Saxony? Its not hard to see the answer. There was no central government to negotiate surrender with, no capital to lay siege to and no head of state to kill or take prisoner. The contrast here with Charlemagne's conquest of the Lombard kingdom in Italy in 774 or the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 couldn't be more obvious. Basically, as the primary sources make incredibly clear, the conquest couldn't succeed until every last Saxon tribe, indeed every last free Saxon male, submitted to Charlemagne. The lack of roads and cities it even more difficult, to the point the Franks had to try and create the infrastructure (fortified towns, canals etc) from scratch in order to conquer Saxony. 

What's more, it was totally unprecedented. The Romans had completely given up trying to conquer Germany in 17 AD, setting the frontier at the strategic chokepoints provided by the rivers Rhine and Danube. Contrary to German nationalist mythmaking, this was not because of Arminius (a.k.a Hermann the German) butchering Varus and the Roman legions at the Teutoburger Wald. Indeed, Augustus' grandson Germanicus Julius Caesar had led expeditions to avenge Varus and punish the Germanic tribes in 15 AD. However, the more time Germanicus spent in Germania, the more he realised that the conquest simply wasn't worth it. Compared to Gaul or even southern Britain, Germany was just too poor and underdeveloped and its people were just too resistant to the idea of Roman rule, so that it would be a lot of hassle for too little gain.

The Merovingians (481 - 751) had managed to bring much of central and southern Germany into their Frankish kingdom, and slowly Christianise it with the help of Irish and Anglo-Saxon missionaries. But with Saxony, the most they were ever able to do was, every couple of generations, defeat the Saxons decisively in battle, ravage as much of their territory as they could and force them to pay tribute in herds of cattle. Meanwhile, the Saxons regularly raided over the rivers Main and Rhine into Frankish territory and sometimes took sides in internal political struggles in the Frankish kingdom. Thus when the Carolingians took over, it seemed politically advisable to neutralise the Saxon threat. Moreover, an important part of the Carolingians' image as kings involved them being enthusiastic defenders and promoters of Christianity, and by the mid-eighth century peaceful attempts at converting northern Germany were getting nowhere. Charlemagne needed to take a different approach to the Saxons from his Merovingian predecessors, or even from his grandfather and father - namely wholesale systematic conquest. 

As I said earlier, and this was something that Charlemagne's biographer Einhard and every historian after him remarked on, the task wasn't easy. The conquest of Saxony took 32 years (772 - 804) as a result of constant rebellion, truce-breaking and resistance to Christianisation on the part of the Saxons. Charlemagne had to respond to this with severe brutality. The most infamous incident was at Verden in 782 where the Frankish sources say that 4,500 Saxon prisoners of war were slaughtered at Charlemagne's orders. Einhard also claims that Charlemagne deported ten thousand rebels from Saxony and forced them to live elsewhere in Gaul and Germany. Its perhaps no surprise that the Saxon wars have provoked a lot of unease in modern times. The massacre at Verden would definitely be considered a war crime today, and certainly reveals a dark, ruthless streak to Charlemagne's leadership. He had of course shown such a streak on a few other occasions. Let's not forget this was the very same Frankish king who divorced his first wife (the Lombard princess Desiderata) then waged war against her father, defeated and humiliated him. He also may or may not have murdered his nephews, Richard III style. Yet I think anyone who claims the conquest of Saxony amounts to a "genocide" is taking it too far. Much like with the comparable case of Oliver Cromwell at Drogheda and Wexford in 1649 (I recently taught this to my Year 8s), some perspective is needed. As Charlemagne saw it, he was punishing oath-breakers, not exterminating an inferior race. Indeed, much of the Saxon nobility converted and became part of the post-conquest ruling class, and the Carolingians allowed the Saxon language and tribal customary laws to survive. And the Merseburg Charms I showed you earlier show the process of Christianisation was in truth a lot more complex than conversion at the point of a sword (more about that later). 

It has also made German nationalists question whether they should see Charlemagne as a German national hero. Notably, the Nazi Party in their early days in the power condemned Charlemagne as a French imperialist under the influence of  who heartlessly slaughtered the racially pure Aryan Saxons. Indeed, at a Nazi rally in 1934, 4,500 torches were lit in memory of the Saxons slain in Verden, and 4,500 memorial stones were erected for them as well. The pro-Nazi playwright and pseudoarchaeologist Edmund Kiss imagined Charlemagne torturing the Saxon war-leader Widukind into converting to Christianity by having blonde haired, blue-eyed Saxon maidens raped by dusky Jews and Moors. As always, these sauerkraut-flavoured fascists with a passion for ancient Hindu symbols and goose-stepping made monstrous distortions of German history to further their own genocidal white supremacist ideology. 

The Sachsenhain: the Nazi memorial to the Saxons slain by Charlemagne in 782. Its truly disturbing to think that the massacre of 4,500 Germanic warriors more than a thousand years earlier was seen by Hitler's supporters as an act of inhuman cruelty, but when they went on to engage in the industrial mass-murder of millions of Jews, communists, homosexuals, disabled people, Slavs etc less than a decade later it was seen as the right course of actiom.

The consequences of the Conquest of Saxony were huge. Within three generations of the conquest, the Saxons had been completely converted to Christianity and a network of bishoprics and monasteries had been established all over the region. The Saxon aristocracy had become much wealthier and more powerful, and gained much more landowning rights vis a vis the free peasantry. Then in the tenth century, the Carolingians were replaced in the lands east of the Rhine by a new dynasty of kings and emperors who themselves hailed from Saxony and claimed descent in the maternal line from Widukind himself - the Ottonians (919 - 1024). And in the High and Late Middle Ages, Saxony was part of the heartlands of Western Christendom, producing missionaries, Teutonic crusader knights and Hanseatic merchants. Finally in the sixteenth century, it would give birth to Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation.

Other than through violence, how was this transformation achieved? Fortunately for us, like with a lot of other events in Carolingian history, the conquest and Christianisation of Saxony has generated quite a lot of primary sources by early medieval standards. The one that follows is a Capitulary (royal legislative directive) that Charlemagne issued for the Saxon territories. The date is uncertain. Traditionally it has been dated to 785, when Widukind submitted to Charlemagne and accepted baptism, resulting in a seven year lull in hostilities between Franks and Saxons. But recently, Yitzchak Hen, Robert Flierman and Ingrid Rembold have suggested that it was more likely written a decade later, in 794 or 795. 

The dating does make a significant difference. If it was written in 785, then it would have come from a victorious Frankish king, still in his prime, confidently asserting his authority over the conquered Saxons. But if it was written in 794 or 795, then it would have come from a stressed-out, middle-aged ruler who had just been through the fourth (and last) great crisis in his reign. In 792, Charlemagne's own eldest son, Pippin the Hunchback (768 - 811), had plotted with a group of Frankish nobles to assassinate him and usurp the throne. The conspiracy was foiled, and most of the conspirators were executed, though Charlemagne was merciful to his own son - he had him tonsured and imprisoned in a monastery instead. In the same year, the Saxons revolted, Gaul was hit by a devastating famine, Arabs and Slavs invaded the southern and eastern frontiers and war had begun with Avar Khaganate in Hungary. To add to this, a new heresy called Adoptionism was spreading into the Pyrenees from Spain. Charlemagne therefore needed to make a statement about his authority and what direction the regime was going to go now. This he did at the Council of Frankfurt in 794, where Charlemagne condemned both Adoptionism and the worship of images supported by the Greek Church as heresies, fixed grain prices and reformed the coinage. All of this basically showed that he was a good orthodox Christian king who cared for the physical and spiritual welfare of his people. He then embarked on his final military campaign in Saxony. 

Its in this context that I think Charlemagne's Capitulary for the Saxon Territories makes the most sense. It would made a good muscular statement of his power and authority as a Christian ruler in a time of crisis/ post-crisis. We've seen other examples of how Carolingian rulers used legislation to this effect, such as the Edict of Pitres (864) issued by Charlemagne's grandson, Charles the Bald. We might not have to go as far as the late Patrick Wormald in seeing most early medieval royal law-making as really being an exercise in propaganda. But there is some merit in this kind of view, considering that there's always a gap between what the law says and what society does. That gap was going to be even bigger in the Carolingian Empire, which possessed only a skeletal government bureaucracy and lacked standing armies, police forces or even professional lawyers and judges (north of the Alps anyway). And Wormald was undoubtedly right to think that laws, first and foremost, reflect the mindsets of the people who make them.

The Capitulary for the Saxon Territories basically lays out the laws by which Saxony will be governed once it is conquered. It prescribes the death penalty for 11 different crimes and transgressions, probably more than any other single legislative act in early medieval history, that some historians have called it the "Terror Capitulary." But what makes the Capitulary so interesting to me, is that it tells us so much about what being a Christian meant to Charlemagne and his advisers as they made one final push to convert the pagan Saxons. 

(All of the following source quotations are taken from Paul Edward Dutton, Carolingian Civilisation: A Reader (Second Edition), Toronto University Press (2009), pp 66 - 69)

Chapter 4: If anyone, out of contempt for Christianity, shall have despised the holy Lenten fast and shall have eaten flesh, let him be punished by death. But nevertheless, let it be taken into consideration by a priest, lest by chance anyone from necessity has been led to eat flesh. 

Chapter 6: If anyone deceived by the Devil shall have believed, after the manner of the pagans, that any man or woman is a witch and eats men, and on this account shall have burned the person, or shall have given the person's flesh for others to eat, or shall have eaten it himself, let him be punished by a capital sentence.

Chapter 8: If anyone of the race of Saxons hereafter concealed among them shall have wished to hide himself unbaptised, and shall have scorned to come to baptism and shall have wished to remain a pagan, let him be punished by death. 

Chapter 9: If anyone shall have sacrificed a man to the devil, and after the manner of the pagans shall have presented himself as a victim to the demons, let him be punished by death.

Chapter 15: Concerning the lesser chapters all have consented. To each church let the parishioners present a house and two mansi of land. And for each one hundred and twenty men, noble and free, and likewise liti, let them give to the same church a man-servant and a maid-servant.

Chapter 16: And this has been pleasing, Christ being propituous, that whencesoever any receipts shall have come into the treasury, either for the breach of peace or for any penalty of any kind, and in all income pertaining to the king, a tithe shall be rendered to the churches and priests.

Chapter 17: Likewise, in accordance with the mandate of God, we command that all shall give a tithe of their property and labour to the churches and priests; let the nobles as well as the free men, and likewise the liti, according to that which God shall have given to each Christian, return a part to God.

Chapter 18: That on the Lord's day no meetings and public judicial assemblages shall be held, unless perchance in a case of great necessity or when war compels it, but all shall go to church to hear the word of God, and shall be free for prayers and good works. Likewise, also on special festivals they shall devote themselves to God and to the services of the church and shall refrain from secular assemblies. 

Chapter 19: Likewise, it has been pleasing to insert in these decrees that all infants shall be baptised within a year; and we have decreed this, that if anyone shall have despised to bring his infant to baptism within the course of a year, without the advice or permission of the priest, if he is a noble he shall pay 120 solidi to the treasury, if a freeman 60, if a litus 30.

Chapter 21: If any man should have made a vow at springs or trees or groves, or shall have made any offering after the manner of the heathen and shall have taken a repast in honour of the demons, if he shall be a noble [he shall pay] 60 solidi, if a free man 30, if a litus 15. If, indeed, they have not the means of paying at once, they shall be given into the service of the church until the solidi are paid.

Chapter 22: We command that the bodies of Saxon Christians shall be carried to the church cemeteries and not to the mounds of the pagans.

Chapter 23: We have ordered that diviners and soothsayers shall be handed over to the churches and priests. 

From these chapters from the Capitulary I've shared with you we can see the following patterns in what made one a Christian, according to Carolingians:

1. Baptism is absolutely essential to making someone a Christian, and therefore everyone over the age of 1 year old must be baptised or face consequences.
2. Christians must fast during Lent, attend Church on Sundays and celebrate Christian holy days by not working or attending any kind of public meeting other than religious services. 
3. Christians do not make human sacrifices, pray in sacred groves or bodies of water, burn witches or consult fortune-tellers - these superstitions make you a relapsed pagan in need of punishment.
4. Christians must be buried in churchyards. 
5. Christians must live in a parish community and provide for their local priest, including by compulsory payment of the tithe.

All the ways in which it defines being a Christian are either through external acts i.e. getting baptised, going to Church on Sunday, fasting in Lent etc, or negative i.e. not making human sacrifices. Nowhere in the legislation does it talk about what Christian ideas and teachings the Saxons should know, other than they shouldn't be believing in certain pagan superstitions like polytheism, nature worship cannibalistic witches or fortune-telling. The bit about witches is worth re-iterating since it corrects the misconception that early medieval Christians burned witches - on the contrary, they saw witch-burning as a pagan superstition be outlawed! In these senses, being a Christian in eighth century Saxony was very different to being a Christian in twenty-first century Britain. If you asked someone nowadays what makes someone a Christian, the first things they would talk about would be believing that Jesus is God and following the teachings of the Bible. And its well known in the modern West that there are plenty of people who are baptised, have church weddings and funerals, attend the occasional Sunday service and celebrate Christmas and Easter, but do not consider themselves Christians because they don't "believe" in Christianity. 

A lot of this apparent weirdness can be attributed to the fact that this a piece of government legislation was issued in a region that was still in the process of being converted to Christianity. Certainly, no one in eighth century Gaul, Italy or Anglo-Saxon England, regions where everyone had "converted" to Christianity by 700, was concerned about human sacrifices. But there were lots of condemnations of "pagan" customs and superstitions i.e. the Anglo-Saxon monk and missionary Saint Boniface complained in the 740s that people were celebrating the New Year in the "pagan fashion" by singing, dancing and feasting outside St Peter's Basilica in Rome. We've also seen before how Agobard of Lyon condemned belief in weather magic, popular among the Burgundian peasantry, as unchristian. Boniface and Agobard were of course extreme puritans by the standards of the day and the people they were condemning would have likely seen nothing "pagan" about their own activities. But it does go to show that even in the areas that were already long since converted, Christianity was still being defined, and it was very much the Carolingian dynasty's mission to make sure everyone was following "correct" Christianity.

Its also in the period 700 - 900 that in Gaul, Italy and Anglo-Saxon England we get lots of legislation mandating infant baptism and observing Christian fasts and holy days. Carolingian Saxony was, however, unusual in making church attendance compulsory. The King of Mercia and his bishops at the Council of Clovesho in 747 simply said that all people should be allowed to attend church on Sundays. Likewise, the Capitulary for the Saxon Territories, is unusual in legally enforcing Christian burial for all. While most churches elsewhere in western Europe had graveyards by 900, there was no legal requirement that worshippers be buried in them. That was the decision of individuals and their families. Most Frankish and Anglo-Saxon bishops only required their flocks to receive communion bread and wine three times a year. Its also in this period that the practice of confessing your sins to a priest, originating in sixth century Ireland, became widespread and mandatory across Western Europe. Meanwhile, Frankish and Anglo-Saxon churchmen were prescribing religious penances for all kinds of crimes and misdemeanours, and were getting creative with all kinds of public religious rituas. Finally, it was in this period that a parish system was being established - most villages in Gaul and Italy had a local church, though Germany and Anglo-Saxon England lagged behind.

So in many ways the Capitulary for the Saxon Territories reflects the general flavour of eighth century Christianity for most ordinary lay people. It was all about what you did in public and how you belonged to and participated in a community through various festivals, rituals and obligations. But what you actually believed deep inside didn't come into it very much.

Oh, and as a final bonus, here is a link to Charlemagne's own verified descendant, Christopher Lee, singing in a death metal band about the massacre at Verden in 782.   

Most of you will know that Christopher Lee over the course of his very long theatrical career played a vampire, a Bond villain, a wizard, a Sith Lord and a dentist. But a blessed few know that he played Charlemagne too. 

References:

Paul Edward Dutton, Carolingian Civilisation: A Reader (Second Edition), Toronto University Press (2009), pp 66 - 69

Patrick Wormald, Legal Culture in the Early Medieval West, Hambledon Continuum (1998)

Paul Fouracre, Frankish Gaul to 814, in Rosamond McKitterick (ed), The New Cambridge Medieval History Volume 2: 700 - 900, Cambridge University Press (2008), pp 85 - 109

Julia Smith, Religion and Lay Society, in Rosamond McKitterick (ed), The New Cambridge Medieval History Volume 2: 700 - 900, Cambridge University Press (2008), pp 654 - 678

Ingrid Rembold, 'Quasi  una  gens: Saxony and the Frankish world,c. 772–888', History Compass 15 (2018), pp 1 - 14 

Einhard and Notker the Stammerer, Two Lives of Charlemagne, edited and translated by David Ganz, Penguin Classics (2008)

Controversies 2: the problem of early medieval literacy (the basics)

In this early tenth century manuscript illustration, thought to be based on a lost ninth century original, Charlemagne has a conversation with his son, Pippin of Italy. Meanwhile a scribe, not obviously a cleric (since he isn't tonsured), writes down the minutes of their meeting

You've almost certainly heard it said by someone, somewhere that only priests and monks were literate in the Middle Ages. Now I'm going to say this from the outset. Like so many other things that people think they know about the Middle Ages, from widespread belief in a flat earth and armoured knights being lifted onto their horses by cranes, to iron maidens, chastity belts and the droit de seigneur, this is a MYTH! But of course, the biggest myth about the Middle Ages is that for a whole millennium of history nothing much changed at all. In fact, I'd argue that the period 500 - 1500, give or take half a century on either side, makes absolutely no sense as a single historical epoch. So which segments of the Middle Ages are we talking about when we say that people other than clerics could read and write. 

As longtime readers of this blog will know, and as you might have figured from the title, I'm of course interested here in the early Middle Ages, by which I mean the period before the year 1000. Now while medievalists of all shapes and sizes can unite against ancient historians/ classicists, early modernists and modernists being ignorant or dismissive about the Middle Ages, that's where it ends. 

In the context of medieval literacy, a specialist on the high and late Middle Ages (1000 - 1500) could laugh at the assertion that only the clergy could read and write in the Middle Ages, and say "you what mate? Haven't you heard of Wolfram Von Eschenbach, Marco Polo, Dante Alighieri, Geoffrey Chaucer, Catherine of Siena, Christine de Pizan or Margaret Paston? Have you not considered the thousands of financial accounts, property deeds, tax records and other government documents, law books, books of hours, chivalric romances and other works vernacular literature that could hardly have been the preserve of a small clerical elite? Think before you speak again, you ignoramus!"  

But those same people might then say, "but for the period before the year 1000, you're probably right. I don't want to offend my early medievalist colleagues too much, but you might be right in calling those the real Dark Ages."

Indeed this is sort of the thrust of three classic studies of Medieval literacy (both of them now 40+ years old), namely Malcolm Parkes' "The Literacy of the Laity" (1973), Michael Clanchy's "From Memory to Written Record" (1979) and Brian Stock's "The Implications of Literacy" (1983). All three of them are rightly celebrated, as they essentially kickstarted the study of medieval literacy as a serious academic sub-field - they themselves took their cues from the pioneering anthropologically-inspired work of ancient historians and early modernists. While both of them argued that reading and writing had a huge level of importance to medieval government, society and culture, they were  focusing on the high and late middle ages. They saw all of this the product of a great transformation taking place in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. They had different views on what was at the root of this transformation. Malcolm Parkes thought it was Anglo-Norman barons, ladies and knights' growing appetite for fiction and historical romances written in the vernacular (King Arthur, chivalric adventures, you know what I mean) in the twelfth century that kickstarted the rise of lay literacy among the aristocracy. With the rise of commerce and towns and growing need for written financial accounts that came with it, the middle classes followed suit in the thirteenth century. Clanchy, on the other hand, argued it all started in 1066 with the distrust the Norman conquerors of England had for native oral testimony and their preference for written records and law, that began the shift from "memory to written record." Initially this mainly concerned churches and clerical functionaries in William the Conqueror's government. But by the reign of Edward I (1272 - 1307) written law, written instructions from the government, written property deeds and estate surveys, written financial accounts, written literature etc had become so important that the aristocracy and urban middle classes all had to receive at least elementary education in literacy in a bureaucratic world.

Meanwhile, all these authors argued that England and Western Europe in the pre-1000 period were essentially oral societies - laws, literature, history, property rights, customs, religion etc were all passed on by word of mouth with literacy only being used by a small, essentially clerical minority. For reasons that we'll soon see, that has provoked ire from early medievalists. Indeed, in the later editions of "From Memory to Written Record" published in 1997 and 2013, Clanchy was a lot more generous when it came to discussing literacy in Anglo-Saxon England in the opening chapters. And in terms of his central thesis, he's absolutely correct - literacy at a societal level did fundamentally change, quantitatively and qualitatively, in the Medieval West between 1066 and 1300. I wouldn't for one minute quibble with the argument that more people could read and write, and there was much greater use of documents for a much greater range of purposes, in Edward III's England than in Aethelred the Unready's England. But that great upsurge in literacy didn't come out of the blue either. So what was literacy really like before the eleventh century. 

So how do we determine early medieval literacy? Now that is a difficult question. I think there's two ways of looking at literacy, on a personal and a societal level. Personal level meaning who exactly could read and write. Societal level meaning the place of literacy in society. 

Personal literacy is probably the hardest to figure out. To state the most obvious, no one in the early middle ages was producing statistics about how many people could read or write. Indeed, prior to about 1850, all data on literacy in Western Europe has to be inferred from various kinds of evidence. For example, ancient historians have tried to infer a high degree of literacy in the Roman Empire, possibly as high as 30% of the adult male population, from things like the Pompeii graffiti, the Vindolanda tablets or the Egyptian papyri found in the Oxyrhynchus rubbish dumps. For historians of early modern Europe (1500 - 1800), the generally agreed baseline is how many people could sign their own names. Unfortunately, and this something I lament all the time, there's no early medieval Pompeii. Though the latter method could work for the early middle ages, its much less reliable than for the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries  given that much less survives by way of original documents, and not of the right type. 

There are individual lay people from the early Middle Ages who we know were literate. From the Carolingian Empire (751 - 888), we have some long-time friends of this blog like Einhard, Angilbert, Nithard and Dhuoda, all of whom wrote works in learned Latin whilst being lay nobles and courtiers. All Carolingian kings from Pippin the Short to Carloman II, we know were literate and had received a full education in Latin. Meanwhile, Margrave Eberhard of Friuli had a huge library of books he read and consulted, and showed an interest in theological debate, and Count Gerald of Aurillac read his psalter regularly. Most famously, Einhard says of Charlemagne that he could read and understand St Augustine's "City of God", a highly difficult theological text, though he never mastered learning to write, but not for want of trying.

From the Merovingian period before it we know that all the Merovingian kings from the generation of King Chilperic (r.561 - 584), whose Latin poems were dreadful according to Gregory of Tours, to that of  Childebert III (r.694 - 711), whose autograph survives on royal diplomas, were literate. We also know that various Merovingian saints like Desiderius of Cahors. Audoin of Rouen, Bonitus of Clermont and Leudegar of Autun had spent their earlier careers as lay civil servants at the Merovingian court and had received secular legal and literary educations. At a humbler level, we have the slave Andarchius who could read Virgil and the Theodosian Code. 

Signature of the Merovingian King Chlothar II (r.584 - 629) to the Edict of Paris in 614. People love to slag off Merovingian handwriting as clumsy and illegible, but this is a good deal more elegant than the signatures of modern politicians. See Donald Trump's signature below.

In Visigothic Spain, King Sisebut (r.612 - 629) and King Chinthila (r.636 - 639) are known to have written poems, and the former corresponded with the great Isidore of Seville on Classical Roman poetry and science. We also know from the letters of Isidore's pupil, Braulio of Zaragoza, that King Chindasuinth (r.642 - 653) and Count Laurentinus (otherwise undocumented) owned libraries in which all kinds of obscure texts that Braulio had difficulty obtaining were located. Another seventh century Visigothic nobleman, Count Bulgar, wrote letters to Frankish bishops in which he expressed anxiety about the Avar horde and their involvement in wars north of the Pyrenees.

For Anglo-Saxon England, we have King Sigeberht of East Anglia and King Aldfrith of Northumbria, who Bede informs us were able to read and write Latin. King Alfred the Great (most famously) translated the works of Gregory the Great and Boethius into Old English. And Ealdorman Aethelweard, a West Saxon aristocrat, wrote a Latin version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for his cousin, a German abbess. 

Early medieval lay literacy in action: Alfred the Great's translation of Gregory the Great's pastoral care

From post-900 Germany and France, we know that emperors Otto II and Otto III were literate in Latin and German (Otto III knew Greek as well from his mother, Empress Theophanu). Likewise, Otto III's contemporary King Robert the Pious (r.996 - 1031) of West Francia/ France was literate in Latin too and enjoyed debating theology. Duke William V of Aquitaine (d.1030), had a huge library and corresponded in letters with Bishop Fulbert of Chartres, who called him a second Maecenas (after Augustus' chief adviser and patron of Virgil and Horace) for his literary interests. 

This immediately confronts us with a problem. Can these people be considered at all representative, or just exceptions to the general rule? Some certainly look more like exceptions than others. King Aldfrith of Northumbria, for example, looks like a fairly obvious candidate for being exceptional. He was trained at a monastery in Ireland and would have almost certainly become a cleric had it not been for his brother, King Egcfrith, dying in battle against the Picts in 685, creating a dynastic crisis which it was up to Aldfrith to resolve by returning home to take up his brother's throne. King Sigeberht of East Anglia likewise spent his childhood in exile in a Frankish monastery. Alfred the Great definitely belongs in a category of his own as well. And for some of the other royal examples, there's an argument that kings belong in a category of their own. But the Visigothic kings we know were literate, Sisebut, Chinthila and Chindasuinth, acquired their thrones either by usurpation or military coup and had had careers as generals and military governors before becoming kings. So we can probably actually take their personal literacy as a sign that literate education was common among the Visigothic nobility in seventh century Spain.

Indeed I'm reminded of a comment I once heard in one of master's seminars from a fellow student. I can't recall exactly what she said, but it was along the lines of "if you have to give the names of powerful women in history, then that indicates they're not very common or significant." Precisely this kind of argument is what the minimalists and sceptics would say about lay literacy in the early medieval West. Of course, there are obvious fallacies with this kind of argument when applied to both, but especially so for early medieval literacy. For the vast majority (90% and upwards) of known individuals from the early Middle Ages, we have no surviving writings and we can say nothing about their education. And for those that we do know about, like all the names I've mentioned, its not because they were the only ones who left writings or received a literate education. Rather its because their writings survive to us today, either by accident or survival, or because we have anecdotal and other circumstantial evidence of them being able to read and write from histories, hagiographies, letters etc. 

But where this kind of argument gets us somewhere is that we need to be focusing on qualitative evidence rather than quantitative evidence. To put it another way, if we want to know whether these individuals were exceptions or not, it makes more sense to try and find what were the general expectations surrounding lay literacy and education, as well as the range of purposes for which writing was used in government and society. What really matters is not finding out how many people outside the clergy could read and write, but to what extent did you need to be able to read and write or at the very least be able to use documents through intermediaries to do well for yourself as an elite (or indeed non-elite) lay person in early medieval society. This is after all, how ancient historians and later medievalists have approached the subject, and its no surprise that this exactly how early medievalists have been approaching the problem since the 1980s. Literacy and education, literacy and government, literacy and society, all of these I'm going to explore here some time to show how lay literacy was much more common than people think in the early Middle Ages. But I'm too constrained by time and space to look at them now. 

Before I finish with this post, we need to consider two things. Firstly, whether or not learning Latin was a barrier to literacy in the early middle ages. Secondly, whether it ever makes sense to speak of early medieval societies as oral cultures. 

As is well-known, the language of the vast majority of early medieval texts (outside of Anglo-Saxon England) was Latin. Traditionally, scholars presumed that only priests and monks would have known how to read Latin in the sixth to tenth century West, and even then not all of them. Let it of course be known that the existence of poorly educated illiterate clerics was a consistent source of complaint from St Boniface and Alcuin in the eighth century to Erasmus and John Colet on the eve of the Protestant Reformation. The presumption was that Latin was a foreign language, albeit a highly important, indeed sacred one, and that only those given a rigorous education could read it in the post-Roman West. This would obviously hold true in areas like Anglo-Saxon England, where the local language was a Germanic one, but even in Gaul, Spain and Italy where scholars used to think that sometime in the seventh or eighth centuries the spoken vernacular had completely evolved into early forms of French, Spanish and Italian and that Latin was no longer intelligible. But Rosamond McKitterick in "The Carolingians and the Written Word" (1989) challenged this and has argued that the spoken vernacular in the Romance regions wasn't actually all that different to Latin, except that it was spelled and pronounced differently.

This is an argument that makes a huge amount of sense when you make the analogy between Standard Chinese and regional dialects (Mandarin, Wu, Gan, Xiang, Min, Yue and Guangxi), Modern Standard Arabic and regional dialects (Iraqi, Levantine, Egyptian, Maghrebi etc) and indeed English. English is an absolute nightmare for pronunciation, and I feel really sorry for my EAL (English as an Additional Language) pupils who have to go through their whole secondary schooling in it. This is also the reason why we had to do a short course on phonics as part of the PGCE. For example the grapheme (combination of written letters) -ough represents eight different phonemes (sounds) in spoken English i.e., borough, rough, cough, hiccough, lough, through, fought, dough and plough. Or the constant arguments between Northerners and Southerners in England over whether to pronounce a as a long vowel or a short vowel.

McKitterick also points out that the standard textbooks used for teaching Latin grammar, syntax, spelling and pronunciation in Carolingian monasteries in Gaul and Italy were ones written in the fourth century Roman Empire, and would not have made sense unless the students reading them already spoke Latin. Its revealing how Latin-vernacular interlinear glosses and dictionaries from the eighth and ninth centuries only appear in Germany, Ireland and Anglo-Saxon England, where Latin really was being learned as a foreign language. A lot of this is going against what I wrote in my post on the Oaths of Strasbourg, but McKitterick's (and by that token, Roger Wright's) arguments are actually quite convincing. And besides the oaths of Strasbourg and the martyrdom of St Eulalia, which could be considered to be just the Latin dialects native to Gaul written phonetically. Its worth noting, as I did in that post, that besides those possible exceptions, we don't have any vernacular texts written in Romance languages until after 950. Its in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries that we start getting inscriptions, charters, short poems and documents of a practical nature (like a list of cheeses from a monastery in Northern Spain from 959) written in Old Italian and Old Castilian. Thus McKitterick, and before her Banniard and Wright, would argue that the real shift from Latin dialects to Romance languages happened around 900 rather than around 700 as per the traditional view. This is by no means settled scholarly consensus though. 

The geographic divide between regions where Latin/ Romance and Germanic languages were predominantly spoken speakers in 750 (green line) and 1914 (red line). Interestingly, the line hasn't changed much since the early Middle Ages, except in regions like the Pas de Calais in France or Tyrol in Italy. You can also see the origins of the Flemish-Walloon divide in Belgium. By Resnjari - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=93789268

Thus, there's good reason to think that Latin was not a barrier to literacy in Gaul, Spain and Italy before the late ninth and early tenth centuries at the earliest. In the Germanic and Celtic-speaking lands it would have been more of one, though in those regions you also had vernacular texts. Can we really consider Anglo-Saxon noblemen who couldn't read Latin poems illiterate if they could read Old English poems like the Wanderer, Beowulf or the Battle of Maldon. Furthermore, we should take into account that there were many different levels to Latin literacy, especially how much the Latin language had evolved since Classical times and the range of different registers in which it was written. Virgil and Horace would have been difficult texts to the Carolingians, just like Chaucer and Shakespeare are difficult texts for people in the US and UK today.

As for the whole question of oral culture, I don't think it makes sense to call early medieval cultures oral even if we took the clerical monopoly view of early medieval literacy. The definition of oral culture used by experts like Walter Ong is a culture whose knowledge and worldviews have not been shaped by writing and texts at all. If we go by that definition, then early medieval Western societies cannot be considered to be true oral cultures because they were, after all, Christian.  Christianity, like Judaism and Islam, is a religion based around the written word, specifically its sacred text the Bible - indeed from as early as the seventh century, Muslim writers identified all three Abrahamic faiths as "peoples of the book." Likewise the very existence of written law codes, charters, histories, poems and treatises from Western Europe in the period 500 - 1000 show that writing was important to creating and preserving society's knowledge. And if only a minority could directly access it, even more would be affected by it i.e., as I've shown in previous texts, regardless of whether or not Carolingian peasants were literate, they were affected by the information recorded in the polyptychs and other documents drawn up by landlords. Sufficeth to say that while not everyone in the early middle ages was literate, virtually no one was insulated from the effects of the written word in society. 

On a final note, this blog has, as of a few weeks ago, been around for a year and half. Thank you everyone for reading my posts, whether you're a veteran reader or a first-timer, and to those who have given praise and constructive criticism - it means a great deal to me!

Let;s finish with one of my favourite early medieval artworks, St Matthew from the Ebbo Gospels (first quarter of the ninth century).

From the sources 13: Happy Valentines in Old French and Old High German

 

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone. Now I’m not going to write a post about the history of Valentine’s Day itself, though I’d like to say that yes it does have a medieval history but later than the kind of medieval I write about here. A lot of very significant historical events happened on this day: the Abbasid Revolution in Iraq in 748, the Papal Schism of 1130, the coronation of Akbar as the ruler of the Mughal Empire in 1556, Captain Cook being killed by Natives in Hawaii in 1779, Ruhollah Khomeini issuing a Fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989 and the launching of YouTube in 2005, to name just six. But of course, this blog bearing the name that it does, we’re going to be focusing on an event in Carolingian history that happened on 14^th February, in the year 842 no less.

Ninth Century Frankish cavalry in the Golden Psalter of St Gall, nicely sets the tone for this

842 of course was in the middle of the Carolingian civil war of 840 – 843, between the three sons of Emperor Louis the Pious. I’ve talked about this a fair few times before, but at the root of it were the same forces that meant that ninth century Carolingians could not have nice things – the failure to equitably share power among the dynasty’s members, aristocratic factionalism at court and opportunistic foreign powers (above all, the Vikings) deciding to get involved. Lothar was trying to hold the empire together with his nephew Pippin of Aquitaine, while his younger brothers Louis and Charles thought they deserved their own piece of the pie.

By this point, it seemed like the civil war wasn’t going great for Lothar, as in June 841 he and Pippin had suffered a catastrophic defeat at Fontenoy. The next 8 months of the civil war saw very little actual fighting. Instead, the rival Carolingian kings sent envoys between each other, trying to negotiate a peace. They try and win over supporters from amongst the Frankish nobles who were either trying to stay neutral, or were on the opposing side. Meanwhile, opposing armies marched around the countryside of Northern France and the Benelux countries, garrisoning citadels here, forcing enemy strongholds to surrender there, blocking off routes where the enemy might approach elsewhere, and so on. Contrary to what some people might think, battles weren’t all important in ninth century warfare and were often indecisive. Indeed, its revealing how our sources tell us so much about the campaigning side of Carolingian warfare, yet provide us with barely any description of how the battles were fought, instead focusing on their aftermath and consequences.

And there are a lot of sources for this section of Carolingian history. Indeed, the 35-year period 828 to 863 is quite possibly the best documented generation in Western political history between the fall of the Roman Republic (66 – 31 BC let’s say) and the age of Richard the Lionheart, John Lackland, Philip Augustus and Pope Innocent III (1188 – 1223). We know so much about the intricacies of Carolingian politics at this time, and the full range of partisan perspectives.

One of these sources is the historian Nithard (795 – 844). Nithard is a very interesting chap, indeed quite a remarkable one. He was the illegitimate son of Bertha, the third daughter of Charlemagne, and the court poet Angilbert. I don’t want to go too much into this now, but Charlemagne seems to have allowed his daughters an unusual degree of sexual freedom, which their brother Louis the Pious thoroughly disapproved of. The emperor’s sisters were among the first to be targeted in his attempt to “drain the swamp” at Aachen. Nithard seems to have been educated at Charlemagne’s palace school at Aachen and thus was thoroughly literate, proficient in the Latin language and very knowledgeable of the ancient Roman Classics, especially the works of the historian Sallust and the poet Lucan (both of whom wrote about civil war). He had of course also learned how to ride, hunt, fight with weapons and conduct himself around court. Indeed, one might say his education was fairly typical of a high-ranking Carolingian aristocrat. Before the civil war, Nithard had been a courtier, soldier and lay abbot of Saint Riquier.

Thus Nithard’s Histories provide us, along with the works of Einhard, Angilbert, Eberhard of Friuli and Dhuoda, with valuable insights into the attitudes of lay aristocrats in the Carolingian Empire and how they saw the workings of politics. Nithard wrote his history as the events themselves unfolded, and like Xenophon, Julius Caesar and Ammianus Marcellinus before him, he wrote as a soldier and politician with first hand experience of it all. Of course, as your average 16-year-old in a GCSE exam might say, crudely, that means he’s “biased” – Nithard fought for Charles the Bald and portrays his king in a positive light, and the enemy Lothar in a very negative one. Above all, he saw the civil war as a tragedy tearing the Carolingian state (res publica in the original Latin) apart and highly damaging to the welfare of the Frankish people, yet kept faith that everything that unfolded was God’s judgement. Let us see what he has to say about what went down on 14^th February 842.

On the fourteenth of February Louis and Charles met in the city which was once called Argentaria but is now commonly called Strasbourg. There they swore the oaths recorded below; Louis in the Romance language and Charles in the German. Before the oath one addressed the assembled people in German and the other in Romance. Louis being the elder, spoke first …

The basic sum of what Charles and Louis says next is thus: Lothar is an absolute rotter, and the civil war is all his fault. We’ve tried to offer peace on the most reasonable terms, yet he refuses. But at least us two look out for each other as siblings, so we’re going to swear these oaths to show you what good loyal bros we are, and that we’ll work together to heal the body politic.

Nithard then records the oath Louis swore in front of Charles the Bald’s soldiers in Romance thus:

Pro Deo amur et pro Christian poblo et nostro commun salvament, d’ist di in avant, in quant Deus savir et podir me dunat, si salvarai eo cist meon fradre Karlo et in aiudha et in cadhuna cosa, si cum om per dreit son fradra salva dift, in o quid il mi atresi fazet et ab Ludher nul plaid numquam prindrai, qui, meon vol, cist meon fradre Karle in damno sit.

The English translation goes thus:

For the love of God and our Christian people’s salvation and our own, from this day on, as far as God grants knowledge and power to me, I shall treat my brother with regard to aid and everything else a man should rightfully treat his brother, on condition that he do the same to me. And I shall not enter into any dealings with Lothar which might with my consent injure this my brother Charles.

Charles then swore the same oath to Louis’ troops in Old High German:

In Godes minna ind in thes christianes folches ind unser bedhero gehaltnissi, fon thesemo dage frammordes, fram so mir Got geuuizci indi mahd furgibit, so haldih thesan minan bruodher, soso man mit rehtu sinan bruher scal, in thiu thaz er mig so sama duo, indi mit Ludheren in nohheiniu thing ne gegango, the minan, uuillon, imo ce scadhen uuerdhen.

Then Charles’ soldiers swore this oath in their own Romance language:

Si Lodhuuigs sagrament que son fradre Karlo jurat conservat et Karlus, meos sendra, de suo part non l’ostantit, si returnar non l’int pois, ne io ne neuls cui eo returnar int pois, nulla aiudha contra Lodhuuuig nun li iu er.

Which in English is:

If Louis swore the oath which he swore to his brother Charles, and my Lord Charles does not keep it on his part, and if I am unable to restrain him, I shall not give him any aid against Louis nor will anyone whom I can keep from doing so.

Louis’ troops then did so in their own language:

Oba Karl then eid then er sinemo bruodher Ludhuuuige gesuor geleistit, indi Ludhuuuig, min herro, then er imo gesuor forbrihchit, ob ih inan es iruuenden ne mag, noh ih noh thero nonhhein, then ih es irruenden mag, uuidhar Karle imo ce follusti ne uuirdhit.

In English:

If Charles swore the oath which he swore to his brother Louis, and my Lord Louis does not keep it on his part, and if I am unable to restrain him, I shall not give him any aid against Charles nor will anyone whom I can keep from doing so.

The oaths as they appear in Nithard's histories 

Besides political significance, what makes the oaths so interesting is from the standpoint of written language. Here we are dealing with some of the very earliest examples of written Continental European vernaculars. In the case of what Nithard calls the “Roman” or “Romance” language, which is very clearly Old French, the Oaths of Strasbourg as recorded by Nithard are the very first text ever to have been written in that or any other Romance language. In the case of Old High German, a few texts had been written earlier in the Carolingian period, such as the Latin-Old High German glossary called the Abrogans (c.770), or the Merseburg Charms (the only surviving pre-Christian Germanic religious text). The oaths thus offer us lots of insight into what these languages were like at this point in time, and how they would later evolve.

As I’m not a philologist, I’ll keep the discussion of linguistics brief. For the Old French you can very clearly see the languages’ Latin roots. Some words are still in their Latin forms i.e. Deus (God), jurat (he swore – historic present), conservat (he keeps), numquam (never) and nulla (not any). But there’s clearly a lot of evolution i.e., amor (love) in Latin has moved closer to the French amour with amur; avant is recognisably the French word for before, as opposed to the Latin ante; and sendra, soon to evolve into the Modern French seigneur (lord). auxilia has evolved into aiudha, which is actually closer in spelling and pronounciation to the Spanish than the French word for help; likewise, podir, which has evolved from the Latin potere is cloiser to the Spanish poder than the French pouvoir. The verb tenses also appear to be closer to French i.e., for the conditional/ future words like salvarai and prindrai have endings recognisably like how they would be in Modern French.

For the Old High German, I really can’t claim much expertise – one term in year 7 is the only time I’ve ever formally studied any German, which I know is problematic given how much important Carolingianist scholarship is written in German. Still, you can see recognisable forms of German words in this text i.e., folches (clearly related to volk – people), bruodher (clearly related to bruder – brother), herro (clearly related to herr – lord or master), dage (clearly related to tag – day) and Got (God). And uuillon is clearly related to willa in Old English and will in modern German and English.

Thus, the Oaths of Strasbourg are a moment of huge historical significance in the history of Western European languages. Indeed, from the Romance side of things, it basically marks the terminus ante quem for when the Vulgar Latin dialects spoken in Gaul evolved into Old French – when exactly one became the other is highly debated, but it was certainly before 842. Other Romance languages appear fully in written documents slightly later – Italian is the next to come, in the 960s, followed by Spanish and Portuguese; Romanian is the last, first appearing in 1521 (in Cyrillic letters, no less).

What was the attitude of the Carolingians to vernacular languages. Well, its safe to say that in order to successfully navigate high society in the ninth century Carolingian Empire, you had to be trilingual. Louis the Pious had his sons Lothar, Pippin, Louis and Charles educated in Latin, Old French and Old High German, of which the Oaths of Strasbourg are themselves evidence, and pretty much all of the high nobility (the reiksaristokratie) would have been educated the same, especially since many of them like Eberhard of Friuli owned lots of estates in both Romance and Germanic speaking areas. How much bilingualism, let alone trilingualism, spread down the social hierarchy is much less certain. Charles and Louis’ soldiers, who we can reasonably assume to have been drawn from amongst the middling landowners and well-to-do free peasants, could only speak their native vernaculars, and so said their oaths in them, unlike Charles and Louis who said their oaths in German and Old French respectively so the other side’s troops would understand. At the Council of Tours in 813, Charlemagne decreed that priests, depending on where they were, should preach either in the Lingua Romana (Old French) or Theodisc (Old High German) so the common folk could understand.

A ninetenth century artist imagines the scene of the Oaths of Strasbourg

As written vernaculars go, we have only one other example of written Old French from the Carolingian era, a short late-ninth century poem on the martyrdom of Saint Eulalia. After that, the next examples of written Old French appear in the twelfth century with the birth of the chansons de geste and other early chivalric fiction. For Old High German, there’s quite a bit more from the Carolingian period. For example, the monk Otfrid of Wissembourg (a monastery now in Alsace, France) produced the Evangelienbuch, an Old High German verse translation of the Gospels, for King Louis of East Francia. There are also some poems like Muspilli (a poem about Hell), the Hildebrandslied (a fragmentary epic), the Georgslied (about St George) and the Ludwigslied (about a Frankish victory over the Vikings). Still, the amount of Old High German literature that survives pales in comparison to the amount of Old English literature surviving from 685 to c.1100. Yet when you factor in the surviving Latin literature, far more poems, treatises and histories survive from Carolingian Francia in the ninth century than from the whole Anglo-Saxon period. Its because they’ve got an unusually high proportion of vernacular texts, that Anglo-Saxonists (or as some would now prefer to be called, Early MedievalEnglishists) are able to justify obsessively fixating on so few texts, to thepoint that Beowulf and the Battle of Maldon have been sucked dry and done todeath. Meanwhile, a great deal of medieval Germanist scholarship focuses on reconstructinghypothetical texts that may have never existed, rather than the Old High German texts that are actually there. The Carolingians, however, had different priorities to us and preferred Latin literature by far.