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. 

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).